Hamilton was one of the few great jurists and administrators whom America has ever produced, and it is inconceivable that he did not understand what he was doing.  He knew perfectly well that, other things being equal, the simplest administrative mechanism is the best, and he knew also that he was helping to make an extremely complicated mechanism.  Not only so, but at the heart of this complexity lay the gigantic cog of the judiciary, which was obviously devised to stop movement.  He must have had a reason, beyond the reason he gave, for not only insisting on clothing the judiciary with these unusual political and legislative attributes, but for giving the judiciary an unprecedented fixity of tenure.  I suspect that he was actuated by some such considerations as these: 

The Federalists, having pretty good cause to suppose themselves in a popular minority, purposed to consolidate the thirteen states under a new sovereign.  There were but two methods by which they could prevail; they could use force, or, to secure assent, they could propose some system of arbitration.  To escape war the Federalists convened the constitutional convention, and by so doing pledged themselves to arbitration.  But if their plan of consolidation were to succeed, it was plain that the arbitrator must arbitrate in their favor, for if he arbitrated as Mr. Jefferson would have wished, the United States under the Constitution would have differed little from the United States under the Confederation.  The Federalists, therefore, must control the arbitrator.  If the Constitution were to be adopted, Hamilton and every one else knew that Washington would be the first President, and Washington could be relied on to appoint a strong Federalist bench.  Hence, whatever might happen subsequently, when the new plan first should go into operation, and when the danger from insubordination among the states would probably be most acute, the judiciary would be made to throw its weight in favor of consolidation, and against disintegration, and, if it did so, it was essential that it should be protected against anything short of a revolutionary attack.

In the convention, indeed, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina suggested that Congress should be empowered to negative state legislation, but such an alternative, for obvious reasons, would have been less palatable to Hamilton, since Congress would be only too likely to fall under the control of the Jeffersonian party, while a bench of judges, if once well chosen, might prove to be for many years an “excellent barrier to the encroachments and oppressions of the representative body."[9]

I infer that Hamilton and many other Federalists reasoned somewhat thus, not only from what they wrote, but from the temper of their minds, and, if they did, events largely justified them.  John Jay, Oliver Ellsworth, and John Marshall were successively appointed to the office of Chief Justice, nor did the complexion of the Supreme Court change until after 1830.