Radical Hamilton by Christian Parenti

Author:Christian Parenti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

11

Public Debt as Central Power

By early 1789 the Constitution had finally been ratified and Washington elected president. On September 11, Hamilton took up his post as secretary of the Treasury and began rolling out his developmentalist agenda. His plans came forth as a series of reports covering public credit, a national bank, a national mint, coastal revenue collection, the disposal of vacant lands, and finally, in 1791, the Report on the Subject of Manufactures.1

Each report was an effort to educate and persuade those who held the proverbial power of the purse. The reports built upon one another and together offered a blueprint for state-guided industrialization. Before he addressed manufacturing, Hamilton dealt with finance and, briefly, public lands. In his two financial reports, Hamilton engaged the leading political economists of his day, namely, Jacques Necker, David Hume, Malachy Postlethwayt, Adam Smith, and Sir James Steuart. But in the strange style of the eighteenth century, these thinkers were almost never named, even when they were directly quoted.2

It was in his Report on the Public Credit and Report on a National Bank that Hamilton proposed federal assumption of state debts and the creation of a central bank, both of which were indispensable prerequisites for the industrial plan laid out in The Report on Manufactures. Because Hamilton’s efforts to create a national financial system have received far more attention than his efforts to develop manufacturing, this chapter and the next explores the financial reports only to the extent of providing context for The Report on Manufactures.

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