ilton's policy came mainly from the North;
the opposition to it from the South. It so happened that coincidentally
North and South were divided on another question, the position of the
projected Capital of the Federation. The Southerners wanted it to be on
the Potomac between Virginia and Maryland; the Northerners would have
preferred it further north. At Jefferson's house Hamilton met some of
the leading Southern politicians, and a bargain was struck. The
Secretary's proposal as to the State debts was accepted, and the South
had its way in regard to the Capital. Hamilton probably felt that he
had bought a solid advantage in return for a purely sentimental
concession. Neither he nor anyone else could foresee the day of peril
when the position of Washington between the two Southern States would
become one of the gravest of the strategic embarrassments of the Federal
Government.

Later, when Hamilton's policy and personality had become odious to him,
Jefferson expressed remorse for his conduct of the occasion, and blamed
his colleague for taking advantage of his ignorance of the question. His
sincerity cannot be doubted, but it will appear to the impartial
observer that his earlier judgment was the wiser of the two. The
assumption of State debts had really nothing "monocratic" or
anti-popular about it--nothing even tending to infringe the rights and
liberties of the several States--while it was clearly a statesmanlike
measure from the national standpoint, tending at once to restore the
public credit and cement the Union. But Jefferson read backwards into
this innocuous and beneficent stroke of policy the spirit which he
justly perceived to inform the later and more dubious measures which
proceeded from the same author.

Of these the most important was the creation of the first United States
Bank. Here Hamilton was quite certainly inspired by the example of the
English Whigs. He knew how much the stability of the settlement made in
1689 had owed to the skill and foresight with which Montague, through
the creation of the Bank of England, had attached to it the great
moneyed interests of the City. He wished, through the United States
Bank, to attach the powerful moneyed interests of the Eastern and Middle
States in the same fashion to the Federal Government. This is how he and
his supporters would have expressed it. Jefferson said that he wished to
fill Congress with a crowd of mercenaries bound by pecuniary ties to the
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