“…Reconciling Hamilton's very active argumentation and pursuit of a national bank both before and after the Convention with his silence during the Convention is hard to do without regarding Hamilton as being strategically cunning and deceptive (Ferguson 1983, 404-405;Grubb 2003Grubb , 1791. 31 Ferguson (1969Ferguson ( , 1983 emphasizes the federal debt as the driving force behind the constitutional agenda of the nationalists. The debt problem, however, was solved by giving the federal government the independent power to tax and by the transfer of state lands claimed in the west to the federal government-moving the federal government toward a solvent position asset-wise.…”