The violence of party feeling engendered once more by the debates over Hamilton’s Report spread over the country like a prairie fire, and raged until, in the North at least, it was met by the back fire of increasing prosperity.  As the summer waned farmers and merchants beheld the prices of public securities going up, heard that in Holland the foreign loan had gone above par, and that two hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars of the domestic debt had been purchased and cancelled at a cost of one hundred and fifty thousand, saw trade reviving, felt their own burdens lighten with the banishment of the State debt.  To sing the praises of the Assumption Bill was but a natural sequence, and from thence to a constant panegyric of Hamilton.  The anti-Federalist press was drowned in the North by the jubilance of the Federal and its increasing recruits, but in the South everything connected with the Government in general and Hamilton in particular was unholy, and the language in which the sentiment was expressed was unholier.

Meanwhile, Hamilton was established in a little house in Philadelphia, at work upon his second Report on the Public Credit, and elaborating his argument in favour of a National Bank.  Betsey had been more fortunate than many in getting her house in order within a reasonable time, for others were camping in two rooms while the carpenters hammered over the rest of the neglected mansions.  Washington arrived in November and took possession of the stately home of Robert Morris, although he grumbled that the stables would hold but twelve horses.  It was a splendid mansion, however, and filled not only with the fine collections of the rich merchant, but with many beautiful works of art that the President brought from Mount Vernon.  Congress opened on the 6th of December.

If Hamilton had given only an occasional half-amused, half-irritated attention to the journalistic and pamphlet warfare in which he had been the target, he now found a domestic engagement confronting him which commanded his attentions and roused all the fighting Scotch blood in his composition.  Jefferson had done much and distressful thinking during the summer recess.  In the leisure of his extensive, not to say magnificent, Virginia estates, and while entertaining the neighbouring aristocracy, he had moved slowly to the conclusion that he approved of nothing in the Administration, and that Hamilton was a danger to the Nation and a colossus in his path.  Assumption he held to be a measure of the very devil, and fumed whenever he reflected upon his part in its accomplishment.  “I was made to hold a candle!” he would explain apologetically.  “He hoodwinked me, made a fool of me.”