"So immense a power in the affairs of war": Alexander Hamilton and the restoration of public credit

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 64, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 287-326

  Edling, Max M ^a  

^a UPPSALA UNIVERSITY   (Sweden)

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EID: 51849122490     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
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References (192)

1. On the visions of Hamilton and Jefferson, compare Dumas Malone, Jefferson and the Rights of Man, vol. 2, Jefferson and His Time (Boston, 1951), 286
2. with Forrest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton: A Biography (New York, 1979), 361-62
3. Calvin H. Johnson and I have argued that an important reason for the framing and adoption of the Constitution was the need to restore public credit so the Union could borrow money in times of crisis (see Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State [New York, 2003]
4. Johnson, Righteous Anger at the Wicked States: The Meaning of the Founders' Constitution [New York, 2005])
5. "Report Relative to a Provision for the Support of Public Credit," in Harold C. Syrett et al., eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1962), 6: 66 n. 99 (quotation)
6. Historians who have claimed that Hamilton wished to perpetuate the debt include Curtis P. Nettles, The Emergence of a National Economy, 1785-1815 (New York, 1962), 116-17
7. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (New York, 1993), 112-13
8. Lance Banning, Jefferson and Madison: Three Conversations from the Founding (Madison, Wis., 1995), 44
9. Cathy Matson, "The Revolution, the Constitution, and the New Nation," in The Colonial Era, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, vol. 1, The Cambridge Economic History of the United States (New York, 1996), 390
10. Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (Charlottesville, Va., 2001), 126
11. Authoritative accounts of the funding and assumption proposals include E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776-1790 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961), 289-343
12. McDonald, Alexander Hamilton, 163-88
13. Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 114-23
14. Edwin J. Perkins, American Public Finance and Financial Services, 1700-1815 (Columbus, Ohio, 1994), 199-234
15. Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999), 174 (quotation)
16. On Madison's opposition, see Irving Brant, James Madison: Father of the Constitution, 1787-1800 (Indianapolis, Ind., 1950), 290-305
17. Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Ithaca, N. Y., 1995), 309-25
18. Historians who have argued that funding and assumption created undeserved profits for speculators include John M. Murrin, "The Great Inversion; Or, Court versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolutionary Settlements in England (1688-1721) and America (1776-1816)," in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Princeton, N.J., 1980), 407
19. Banning, Jefferson and Madison, 41-43. This view is challenged by Edwin J. Perkins, "Madison's Debt Discrimination Proposal Revisited: The Application of Present Value Financial Analysis" (unpublished paper available from Perkins at perkinsej@aol.com)
20. Madison's proposal was to give the present holders the equivalent of the highest market price for securities and to give the difference between the market price and the par value to the original holder. Contemporaries debated to what extent it was even possible to determine who the original owners were. Whereas this would most likely have been feasible, it would no doubt have been a time-consuming process (see Brant, James Madison, 293-99
21. Perkins, American Public Finance and Financial Services, 222-23)
22. Malone, Jefferson and the Rights of Man, 286-306
23. Jacob E. Cooke, "The Compromise of 1790," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 27, no. 4 (October 1970): 523-45
24. Kenneth R. Bowling with a rebuttal by Jacob E. Cooke, "Dinner at Jefferson's: A Note on Jacob E. Cooke's 'The Compromise of 1790,'" WMQ 28, no. 4 (October 1971): 629-48
25. Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York, 2002), 48-80. Jefferson's own account is found in the opening preface to the Anas
26. See Franklin B. Sawvel, ed., The Complete Anas of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1903), 30-34
27. Sloan, Principle and Interest, 44-48, 132, 148-49, 182-83
28. For the Virginia protest, see American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States . . . Selected and Edited, under the Authority of Congress . . . , 3, Finance (Washington, D.C., 1832), 5: 90-91
29. The principal works on the role and influence of the Country Whig tradition in America are Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967)
30. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969)
31. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975)
32. Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, N.Y., 1978)
33. Malone, Jefferson and the Rights of Man, 305 ("dictator")
34. Paul Douglas Newman, "The Federalists' Cold War: The Fries Rebellion, National Security, and the State, 1787-1800," Pennsylvania History 67, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 64 ("true Machiavellian")
35. The idea that Hamilton aimed to use the debt to interest the elite in the government's fate can be found in Brant, James Madison, 291-92
36. Banning, Jeffersonian Persuasion, 134-40
37. Murrin, "Great Inversion," 407
38. E. James Ferguson, "Political Economy, Public Liberty, and the Formation of the Constitution," WMQ 40, no. 3 (July 1983): 389-412
39. Richard K. Mathews, The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson: A Revisionist View (Lawrence, Kans., 1984), 114
40. John R. Nelson, Liberty and Property: Political Economy and Policymaking in the New Nation, 1789-1812 (Baltimore, 1987), 28-32
41. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992), 262-64
42. James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, Conn., 1993), 40
43. Banning, Sacred Fire of Liberty, 311
44. Hamilton's reputation is traced in Stephen F. Knott, Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth (Lawrence, Kans., 2002)
45. "The Defence of the Funding System," in Syrett et al., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 19: 40-42 (quotations)
46. Hamilton apparently shared the view of Malachy Postlethwayt, a British writer with whom he was familiar, that "the throne of that prince, in a free nation, must be most firmly established, whose affairs will permit him to ask, and who desires to collect, the fewest taxes from his people" (see Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, 4th ed. [London, 1774], 1: s.v. "funds")
47. John C. Miller, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1959), 229-37, 2.52.-55
48. Nettles, Emergence of a National Economy, 113
49. McDonald, Alexander Hamilton, 165-66
50. Richard Sylla, "Shaping the US Financial System, 1690-1913: The Dominant Role of Public Finance," in The State, the Financial System and Economic Modernization, ed. Sylla, Richard Tilly, and Gabriel Tortella (New York, 1999), 262
51. Ellis, Founding Brothers, 64
52. Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2005), 43-45
53. Sylla, "Shaping the US Financial System," 258 ("few of the techniques")
54. "Defence of the Funding System," in Syrett et al., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 19: 60 ("immense importance"), 57 ("so immense a power")
55. Hamilton's early thoughts on public credit before his appointment as Treasury secretary can be traced in Hamilton's letter to Morris; "The Continentalist No. IV"
56. "The Federalist No. 30," in Jacob E. Cooke, ed., The Federalist (Cleveland, Ohio, 1961), 187-93
57. Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000 (New York, 2005), xiii ("imperial ambitions"). Gordon S. Wood's Radicalism of the American Revolution and Sean Wilentz's Rise of American Democracy are two grand syntheses of the early Republic's political development that hardly make any mention of international affairs. An important attempt to give greater weight to external factors in early American political history comes from the discipline of political science
58. See Ira Katznelson, "Rewriting the Epic of America," in Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development, ed. Katznelson and Martin Shefter (Princeton, N.J., 2002), 3-23
59. For a study of the American Revolution's effect on political debates in France, see Philipp Ziesche, "Exporting American Revolutions: Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Jefferson, and the National Struggle for Universal Rights in Revolutionary France," Journal of the Early Republic 26, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 419-47
60. On Atlantic history, see Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass., 2005)
61. On world history, see Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America's Place in World History (New York, 2006)
62. On the United States as the heir of Britain's imperial ambitions, see Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York, 2001), xv-xvii, 477
63. Linda Colley, "The Difficulties of Empire: Present, Past and Future," Historical Research 79, no. 205 (August 2006): 367-82
64. Peter S. Onuf and Nicholas G. Onuf, Federal Union, Modern World: The Law of Nations in an Age of Revolutions, 1776-1814 (Madison, Wis., 1993)
65. James R. Sofka, "The Jeffersonian Idea of National Security: Commerce, the Atlantic Balance of Power, and the Barbary War, 1786-1805," Diplomatic History 21, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 519-44
66. P. Onuf, "A Declaration of Independence for Diplomatic Historians," Diplomatic History 22, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 71-83
67. P. Onuf, Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville, Va., 2000)
68. P. Onuf and Leonard J. Sadosky, Jeffersonian America (Maiden, Mass., 2002), 172-221
69. David C. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence, Kans., 2003)
70. Leonard Joseph Sadosky, "Revolutionary Negotiations: A History of American Diplomacy with Europe and Native Americans in the Age of Jefferson" (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2003)
71. Eliga H. Gould, "The Making of an Atlantic State System: Britain and the United States, 1795-1825," in Britain and America Go to War: The Impact of War and Warfare in Anglo-America, 1754-1815, ed. Julie Flavell and Stephen Conway (Gainesville, Fla., 2004), 241-65
72. P. Onuf, "Nations, Revolutions, and the End of History," in Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World, ed. Michael A. Morrison and Melinda Zook (Lanham, Md., 2004), 173-88
73. Anderson and Cayton, Dominion of War
74. Sofka, "'A Commerce Which Must Be Protected': Thomas Jefferson and the Atlantic International System," paper presented at The Old World and the New: Exchanges between America and Europe in the Age of Jefferson, international conference arranged by the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, at Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, Austria, Oct. 12-16, 2005
75. On new directions in the study of the early Republic, see the special forum in the Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 2 (Summer 2004)
76. Anderson and Cayton, Dominion of War, xv ("long-term pattern")
77. On the comparative success of the American empire, see Colley, Historical Research 79: 371 (citing a lecture by Dominic Lieven)
78. C. A. Bayly points out that in the life span of only one generation the newly independent United States seized more land on the American continent than had been occupied during the entire imperial period (Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons [Malden, Mass., 2004], 115)
79. Similarly, Alan Taylor argues that "Americans proved worthy heirs to the British as the predominant colonizers of North America" (Taylor, American Colonies, 477)
80. New institutionalist history should be distinguished from old institutionalist history as practiced by the first generation of professional American historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The latter analyzed institutions in a narrowly legalistic way and did not always pay attention to how they worked in practice. In contrast new institutionalist history is concerned with the function and above all the effects of political institutions on social, economic, and political practice. It also pays attention to social and cultural themes that did not concern old institutionalist history. Richard R. John presents the case for institutional history in John, "Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787-1835," Studies in American Political Development 11 (Fall 1997): 347-80
81. John, "Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America," in Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. John (University Park, Pa., 2006), 1-20 (quotation, 6). Studies in American Political Development and Journal of Policy History are the major journals publishing institutional history. In general institutional historians and so-called APD (American political development) scholars tend to work on twentieth-century topics, but some historians are applying the perspective to the early Republic
82. See John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass., 1995)
83. William J. Novak, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996)
84. Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago, 2006)
85. John, Ruling Passions
86. Sofka, Diplomatic History 21: 519-44
87. Onuf and Sadosky, Jeffersonian America, 172-221
88. Sadosky, "Revolutionary Negotiations"
89. Sofka, "'Commerce Which Must Be Protected.'"
90. "Report Relative to a Provision for the Support of Public Credit," in Syrett et al., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 6: 67 (quotations)
91. For Hamilton's ideas about international relations and foreign policy, see Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Representative Government (Stanford, Calif., 1970)
92. Karl-Friedrich Walling, Republican Empire: Alexander Hamilton on War and Free Government (Lawrence, Kans., 1999)
93. Lawrence S. Kaplan, Alexander Hamilton: Ambivalent Anglophile (Wilmington, Del., 2002)
94. For the Jeffersonians, see Onuf and Sadosky, Jeffersonian America, 172-221, 253-61
95. "Defence of the Funding System," in Syrett et al., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 19: 55 ("ought to aim"), 54 ("a mean surrender")
96. Michael Jenifer Stone, in Veit et al., Debates in the House of Representatives, 12: 262 ("monuments of the folly")
97. Hamilton mentioned the importance of credit to frontier defense and the expedition against the Whiskey Rebellion in "Report on a Plan for the Further Support of Public Credit," in Syrett et al., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 18: 125
98. Jasper Wilson, A Letter, Commercial and Political, Addressed to the Rt. Honble. William Pitt, In Which the Real Interests of Britain, in the Present Crisis are Considered, and Some Observations are Offered on the General State of Europe, 3d ed. (London, 1793), 2 ("prevalence and extension")
99. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford, Eng., 1976), 2: 919-20 ("By means of borrowing")
100. The concerns of another prominent critic of Britain's public debt, David Hume, are treated at length in Istvan Hont, "The Rhapsody of Public Debt: David Hume and Voluntary State Bankruptcy," in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1993), 321-48
101. Gabriel Ardant, "Financial Policy and Economic Infrastructure of Modern States and Nations," in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton, N.J., 1975), 164-242
102. James C. Riley, International Government Finance and the Amsterdam Capital Market, 1740-1815 (Cambridge, 1980), 101-8, 195-216
103. Patrick K. O'Brien, "The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660-1815," Economic Historical Review, 2d ser., 41, no. 1 (February 1988): 1-32
104. P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688-1756 (London, 1967)
105. Riley, International Government Finance
106. Henry Roseveare, The Financial Revolution, 1660-1760 (London, 1991)
107. Dickson, Financial Revolution in England, 457-520
108. Robert E. Wright, Wealth of Nations Rediscovered: Integration and Expansion in American Financial Markets, 1780-1850 (New York, 2002), 10-16
109. Fisher Ames, in Veit et al., Debates in the House of Representatives, 12: 220 (quotation)
110. Intellectual influences on Hamilton's thoughts on public credit are discussed in the introductory note to "Report Relative to a Provision for the Support of Public Credit," in Syrett et al., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 6: 51-65
111. Pelatiah Webster, "An Essay on Credit," in Jennifer J. Baker, Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America (Baltimore, 2005), 105
112. Elias Boudinot, in Veit et al., Debates in the House of Representatives, 12: 398
113. "Report on a Plan for the Further Support of Public Credit," in Syrett et al., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 18: 118 ("property subsisting")
114. Ferguson, WMQ 40: 389-412
115. Frederick Arthur Dalzell, "Taxation with Representation: Federal Revenue in the Early Republic" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1993)
116. Max M. Edling and Mark D. Kaplanoff, "Alexander Hamilton's Fiscal Reform: Transforming the Structure of Taxation in the Early Republic," WMQ 61, no. 4 (October 2004): 713-44
117. Edling, Revolution in Favor of Government, 149-218
118. Hugh Williamson, in Veit et al., Debates in the House of Representatives, 13: 960
119. Alexander Hamilton to James Madison, New York, Oct. 12, 1789, in Syrett et al., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 5: 439 ("in the want")
120. On the fiscal history of the 1780s, see Roger H. Brown, Redeeming the Republic: Federalists, Taxation, and the Origins of the Constitution (Baltimore, 1993)
121. Woody Holton, "'From the Labour of Others': The War Bonds Controversy and the Origins of the Constitution in New England," WMQ 61, no. 2 (April 2004): 271-316
122. Edling and Kaplanoff, WMQ 61
123. In the debate on funding and assumption, it was rare for delegates to argue in favor of high taxes. One who did was James Jackson. See Veit et al., Debates in the House of Representatives, 12: 206, 261
124. Hamilton's argument was often repeated in Congress. See John Laurance, in Veit et al., Debates in the House of Representatives, 12: 504-6, 901
125. Elbridge Gerry, in Veit et al., Debates in the House of Representatives, 13: 951 ("well known"; "confidence in"), 1117 ("in cases of emergency")
126. Not much work has been done on fiscal administration at the ground level. See Frederick Dalzell, "Prudence and the Golden Egg: Establishing the Federal Government in Providence, Rhode Island," New England Quarterly 65, no. 3 (September 1992): 355-88
127. Dalzell, "Taxation with Representation," 140-281
128. The 1790s tax rebellions are treated by Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York, 1986)
129. Paul Douglas Newman, Fries's Rebellion: The Enduring Struggle for the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 2004)
130. Sloan, Principle and Interest, 183 (quotation)
131. For British indebtedness and tax income, see Brian R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1988), 600-601
132. O'Brien, Economic History Review 41: table 2. I have set the sterling and dollar exchange rate to 0.225 (4s. 6d. equals $1)
133. See John J. McCusker, How Much Is That in Real Money? A Commodity Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States, 2d ed. (Worcester, Mass., 2001), 84
134. In this transaction government is to accommodate its proposals to the ideas which experience has established in other countries" (Ames, in Veit, et al., Debates in the House of Representatives, 12: 685, 690 [quotations])
135. David Hume, "Of Public Credit," in Hume, Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonsen (Cambridge, 1994), 168 ("public securities")
136. He has no occasion to desire the public to pay off the loan, as he can get his money more conveniently at the time, and in the place he may chuse by selling at market" (Ames, in Veit et al., Debates in the House of Representatives, 12: 683)
137. "An Act for Making Provision for the [Payment of the] Debt of the United States," Aug. 4, 1790, in The Public Statutes at Large of the United States . . . (Washington, D.C., 1850), 1: 138-44
138. "Report Relative to a Provision for the Support of Public Credit," in Syrett et al., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 6: 88 (quotation). In the House debates, this message was often repeated
139. See Elias Boudinot, in Veit et al., Debates in the House of Representatives, 12: 216, 228
140. For some critical arguments, see "Public Creditors," in American State Papers, 3, Finance, 5: 76-81
141. Ferguson, Power of the Purse, 303-4
142. Alexander White, in Veit et al., Debates in the House of Representatives, 12: 365
143. "An Act for Making Provision for the [Payment of the] Debt of the United States," Aug. 4, 1790, in Public Statutes at Large, 1: 140 ("principal and interest")
144. Securities of the new emission are illustrated in William G. Anderson, The Price of Liberty: The Public Debt of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, Va., 1983), 104-5
145. "Address to the Public Creditors," in Syrett et al., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 7: 2 ("intire uncertainty")
146. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the British State, 1688-1783 (New York, 1989)
147. Roseveare, Financial Revolution, 1660-1760
148. The remark made in Congress is a summary reported by the Gazette of the United States of speeches made by Theodore Sedgwick, Elias Boudinot, Michael Jenifer Stone, and Elbridge Gerry, in Veit et al., Debates in the House of Representatives, 13: 1359 ("no exigencies")
149. "Address to the Public Creditors," in Syrett et al., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 7: 2 ("far more difficult")
150. George Washington, "Sixth Annual Address," in James D. Richardson, comp., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1902 (Washington, D.C., 1905), 1: 167 (quotation)
151. Fisher Ames, in Annals of Congress, 3d Cong., 2d sess., 1106 (quotation)
152. On the growth of the money stock, see Peter L. Rousseau and Richard Sylla, "Emerging Financial Markets and Early US Growth," Explorations in Economic History 42, no. 1 (January 2005): 1-26
153. For a positive comment from 1790 on the debt's ability to benefit the economy, see William Smith (S.C.), in Veit et al., Debates in the House of Representatives, 12: 263
154. William Playfair, For the Use of the Enemies of England. A Real Statement of the Finances and Resources of Great Britain . . . (London, 1796), 23 ("national music"), 6-8
155. Thomas Paine, The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance (London, 1796), 1
156. Reflections on the Present State of the Resources of the Country (London, 1796), 22, 6-7 ("The situation of that country," 7)
157. Ralph Broome, Observations on Mr. Paine's Pamphlet, Entitled the Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance; in a Letter to a Friend, June 4, 1796 (London, [1796]), 36-37, 48
158. Nicholas Vansittart, An Inquiry into the State of the Finances of Great Britain; in Answer to Mr Morgan's Facts (London, 1796), 58-75
159. On the reaction of Playfair and like-minded Scottish writers to the French Revolution and its British defenders, see Paul Tonks, "Scottish Historical Discourse and Arguments for Metropolitan Authority in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic Empire" (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2004), chap. 5
160. For Blackstone's, Hume's, and Smith's views on the British debt, see William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 7th ed. (Oxford, Eng., 1775). 1: 335
161. Hume, "Of Public Credit," 173-77
162. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2: 928
163. Playfair, For the Use of the Enemies, 5, 32 (quotations)
164. Broome, Observations on Mr. Paine's Pamphlet, 41
165. [Baron Auckland, William Eden], The Substance of a Speech made by Lord Auckland on Monday the Second Day of May, 1796, on the Occasion of a Motion Made by the Marquis of Lansdown (London, 1796), 34-35
166. Vansittart, Inquiry into the State of Finances, 36-40. Part of the debate on Pitt's sinking fund concerned his failure to credit Price as the source of his proposal
167. See for instance William Morgan, A Review of Dr. Price's Writings on the Finances of Great Britain. To Which are Added, the Three Plans, Communicated by Him to Mr Pitt in the Year 1786, for Redeeming the National Debt . . . , 2d ed. (London, 1795), 16-48
168. Morgan, Additional Facts, Addressed to the Serious Attention of the People of Great Britain, Respecting the Expences of the War, and the State of the National Debt (London, 1796), 32-37
169. Vanisttart, Inquiry into the State of Finances, 27-30
170. Robert Goodloe Harper, in Annals of Congress, 4th Cong., 1st sess., 851 (quotations)
171. Hamilton took credit for the economic development in "Defence of the Funding System," in Syrett et al., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 19: 65
172. Hume, "Of Public Credit," 176
173. "An Act making further provision for the support of Public Credit, and for the redemption of the Public Debt," Mar. 3, 1795, in Public Statutes at Large, 1: 433-38
174. Oliver Wolcott, "Public Debt," in American State Papers, 3, Finance, 5: 371-83
175. Hamilton's biographers generally review the "Report on a Plan for the Further Support of Public Credit" but pay only limited attention to it. Broadus Mitchell, Forrest McDonald, Jacob E. Cooke, and Ron Chernow mention that the report led to legislation yet none of them investigate whether the report and the legislation led to any debt redemption. See Mitchell, Alexander Hamilton: The National Adventure, 1788-1804 (New York, 1962), 360-65
176. Cooke, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1982), 154-55
177. Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 2004), 480
178. John C. Miller implies that the report did not do so (Miller, Hamilton and Growth of New Nation, 438-39)
179. Donald F. Swanson and Andrew P. Trout analyze the original amortization plan in the "Report Relative to a Provision for the Support of Public Credit." They also note that Hamilton proposed the realization of this plan in the "Report on a Plan for the Further Support of Public Credit" in 1795 but make no specific statement about actual debt redemption. The effect of compound interest on the debt is explained by tables supplied by Oliver Wolcott in his report to Congress (see "Public Debt," in American State Papers, 3, Finance, 5: 383)
180. See also Swanson and Trout, "Alexander Hamilton's Hidden Sinking Fund," WMQ 49, no. 1 (January 1992): 113, table 1
181. Wolcott, "Public Debt," in American State Papers, 3, Finance, 5: 381
182. See Gallatin, "A Sketch of the Finances of the United States" (1796), in Henry Adams, ed., The Writings of Albert Gallatin (Philadelphia, 1879), 3: 69-206
183. Rafael A. Bayley, "History of the National Loans of the United States from July 4, 1776, to June 30, 1880," in Report on Valuation, Taxation, and Public Indebtedness in the United States, as Returned at the Tenth Census (June 1, 1880), comp. Robert P. Porter (Washington, D.C., 1884), 469-70
184. See for instance Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York, 1984), 103
185. Swanson and Trout, WMQ 49: 116
186. Banning, Jefferson and Madison, 46
187. More than five decades ago, Leonard D. White pointed to the great degree of continuity between the administrations of the Federalists and the Republicans in White, The Jeffersonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1801-1829 (New York, 1951), 546-47. 558-59
188. Thomas Jefferson, "First Inaugural Address," in Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 323
189. Hamilton to Gouverneur Morris, New York, Dec. 24, 1800, in Syrett et al., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 25: 273 ("Other matters")
190. Perkins, "Jeffersonian Principles and the Shaping of American Financial Services, 1790-1815" (unpublished paper available from Perkins at petkinsej@aol.com)
191. For the War of 1812, see Max M. Edling, "The Modernization of American War Finance: Funding the War for Independence and the War of 1812," paper presented at the twelfth annual meeting of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Quebec City, Canada, June 9-11, 2006
192. Thomas Jefferson to L. H. Girardin, Mar. 27, 1815, in Albert E. Bergh, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson . . . (Washington, D.C., 1907), 14: 295