For Hamilton, as for Jefferson, great matters were at stake in the dispute over the national bank. At issue for both men was not only the bank itself but the very nature of American constitutionalism and the possibility of good government. As we have seen, Jefferson feared that the arguments by which the bank could be justified would open the door to unlimited federal power. Hamilton saw an equally grave, if opposite, danger in Jefferson's arguments. As he began his Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank, Hamilton noted that the “solicitude” he felt in defending the bank arose not only from his role as the originator of the measure, or from his conviction that the bank was essential to the “successful administration of the Treasury,” but also and chiefly from his “firm persuasion” that “principles of construction like those espoused” by its opponents “would be fatal to the just and indispensable authority of the United States.” Accordingly, Hamilton devoted the majority of his argument not to a direct defense of the bank's constitutionality, to which he turned only near the end of the Opinion, but to an extended critique of Jefferson's principles of constitutional interpretation.

Hamilton's Appeal to General Principles

Jefferson's objections to the bank, Hamilton observed, rested on a “general denial of the authority of the United States to erect corporations.” Hamilton began his response with an appeal to what he regarded as a “great and fundamental rule” of politics. It is, he said, a “general principle” that is “inherent in the very definition of Government” that

This principle, Hamilton contended, is necessary to sound political theory and practice. In the realm of theory, it is an “axiom” that “would be admitted” in its “application to government in general.” In the realm of practice, it is “in the general system of things…essential to the preservation of social order.”