586. ASSUMPTION OF STATE DEBTS, Mutual sacrifices.—
The impossibility
that certain States could ever pay the
debts they had contracted, the acknowledgment
that nine-tenths of these debts were contracted
for the general defence as much as those contracted
by Congress directly, the clamors of the
creditors within those States, and the possibility
that they might defeat the funding of any
part of the public debt, if theirs also were not
assumed, were motives not to be neglected. I
saw the first proposition for their assumption
with as much aversion as any man, but the development
of circumstances have convinced me
that if it is obdurately rejected, something
much worse will happen. Considering it, therefore,
as one of the cases in which mutual sacrifice
and accommodation are necessary, I shall
see it pass with acquiescence.—
To John Harvie.
Ford ed., v, 214.
(N.Y.,
July. 1790)
