in every State, town, and country neighborhood, and this paper was bought up at five shillings, and even as low as two shillings in the pound, before the holder knew that Congress had already provided for its redemption at par.  Immense sums were thus filched from the poor and ignorant, and fortunes accumulated by those who had themselves been poor enough before.  Men thus enriched by the dexterity of a leader, would follow of course the chief who was leading them to fortune, and become the zealous instruments of all his enterprises.

This game was over, and another was on the carpet at the moment of my arrival; and to this I was most ignorantly and innocently made to hold the candle.  This fiscal manoeuvre is well known by the name of the Assumption.  Independently of the debts of Congress, the States had, during the war, contracted separate and heavy debts; and Massachusetts particularly, in an absurd attempt, absurdly conducted, on the British post of Penobscot:  and the more debt Hamilton could rake up, the more plunder for his mercenaries.  This money, whether wisely or foolishly spent, was pretended to have been spent for general purposes, and ought, therefore, to be paid from the general purse.  But it was objected, that nobody knew what these debts were, what their amount, or what their proofs.  No matter; we will guess them to be twenty millions.  But of these twenty millions, we do not know how much should be reimbursed to one State, or how much to another.  No matter; we will guess.  And so another scramble was set on foot among the several States, and some got much, some little, some nothing.  But the main object was obtained, the phalanx of the Treasury was reinforced by additional recruits.  This measure produced the most bitter and angry contests ever known in Congress, before or since the Union of the States.  I arrived in the midst of it.  But a stranger to the ground, a stranger to the actors on it, so long absent as to have lost all familiarity with the subject, and as yet unaware of its object, I took no concern in it.  The great and trying question, however, was lost in the House of Representatives.  So high were the feuds excited by this subject, that on its rejection business was suspended.  Congress met and adjourned from day to day without doing any thing, the parties being too much out of temper to do business together.  The eastern members particularly, who, with Smith from South Carolina, were the principal gamblers in these scenes, threatened a secession and dissolution.  Hamilton was in despair.  As I was going to the President’s one day, I met him in the street.  He walked me backwards and forwards before the President’s door for half an hour.  He painted pathetically the temper into which the legislature had been wrought; the disgust of those who were called the creditor States; the danger of the secession of their members, and the separation of the States.  He observed that the members of the administration ought to act in concert; that though