“As members of the Virginia plantation world, Jefferson and Madison had a nearly visceral contempt for market values and tended to denigrate commerce as grubby, parasitic, and degrading. Like landed aristocrats throughout history, they betrayed a snobbish disdain for commerce and financial speculation. Jefferson perpetuated a fantasy of America as an agrarian paradise with limited household manufacturing. For Jefferson, banks were devices to fleece the poor, oppress farmers, and induce a taste for luxury that would subvert republican simplicity. Strangely enough for a large slaveholder, he thought that agriculture was egalitarian while manufacturing would produce a class-conscious society. As a representative of New England’s mercantile community, John Adams might have seemed a more likely candidate to sympathize with Hamilton’s economic system, yet his views, too, harked back to simpler times. In later years, Adams told Jefferson that “an aristocracy of bank paper is as bad as the nobility of France or England.” For Adams, a banking system was a confidence trick by which the rich exploited the poor. “Every bank in America is an enormous tax upon the people for the profit of individuals,” he remarked, dismissing bankers as “swindlers and thieves.”7 “Our whole banking system I ever abhorred,” he declared another time. “I continue to abhor and shall die abhorring . . . every bank by which interest is to be paid or profit of any kind made by the deponent.”8 Adams was too shrewd to think banks could be dispensed with altogether. Instead, he wanted a central bank with state branches but no private banks. Both Jefferson and Adams detested people who earned a living shuffling financial paper, and when Adams launched a bitter tirade in later years against the iniquitous banking system, Jefferson agreed that the business was “an infinity of successive felonious larcenies.”9 19 Even if this were true, Hamilton had to reckon with the fact that farmers were debtors by nature and hence contemptuous of bankers and other creditors. Southern planters especially hated bankers. “Holding banking to be no more than the prostitution of money for illicit gain,” historian John C. Miller has written, “one Virginia planter swore that he would no more be caught going into a bank than into a house of ill fame.”20 Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton (pp. 351-352). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton (p. 348). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton (p. 348). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton (p. 348). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton (p. 348). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. ”
