I love the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. While generally a newspaper dedicated to the elucidation of the financial markets, the opinion pages and the Personal Journal sections offer a wealth of information that will add breadth to your own personal understanding of how the world works.

In today’s edition, Fergus Bordewich, author of Washington: The Making of the American Capital, illuminates the difficult decision Alexander Hamilton makes to secure America’s financial footing.  On June 20th, 1790, Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison met to discuss the location of America’s capital.  The national debt weighed heavily on our infant nation, the current-day equivilent of more than $2 trillion.

While squabbling continued over the two large issues of abolition and where to place our nation’s capital, Hamilton focused on consolidating our debt and establishing a credit market to shore up the confidence of the foreign lenders to which America owed it’s future.  Two camps vied for establishing our capital in either Philadelphia in the north, a location that would offer a more peaceful transition away from slavery, or somewhere in Virgina, a location guaranteeing slavery’s existence for some amount of time.  In the end, Hamilton cut a deal to gain the Southern vote to back his financial plan in exchange for locating our capital along the Potomac, a deal Bordewich describes as revulsive and convulsive to the Virginians as they stomached the financial pain.

The issue of slavery would not get serious debate for another 70 years.  While difficult to digest, this deal ensured the financial stability of our nation and secured its future existence.

- Andy