"Hamilton wasn’t messing around. Empowered by the new government
to do what he and [Robert] Morris had long been frustrated in
trying to do, the young, charismatic, brilliant, diligent
Secretary worked up a full-blown plan for connecting national
wealth, and even more importantly national credit, to ambitious
national aims. Like Morris, though to a far more sophisticated
degree, Hamilton wanted the United States to become an economic
powerhouse and financial empire to compete with England. And
he’d been tireless in figuring out how to do it. "The key, as
Morris had always suggested, was to combine a big public debt
with vigorously enforced taxes earmarked for funding that debt.
That is: sell U.S. bonds to the small, rich merchant lending
class and, as Morris had put it, “open the purses of the
people,” collecting taxes from the American people, in metal,
not paper, and earmarking revenues for paying the bondholders
their 6% interest in hard, cold cash — 6% untaxed interest, that
is. Federal power would thus s