Answer:
Hamilton's primary political rival while serving in Washington's cabinet was Thomas Jefferson.
Explanation:
The Founding Fathers did not have a unique vision of the functions of the government. Starting in the last two decades of the 18th century, federalists and antifederalists clashed vigorously in all the tribunes in a debate that continues to this day and that then had two of the most brilliant leaders of the time: Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.
Hamilton developed an urban and sophisticated worldview, and was appointed Secretary of the Treasury by George Washington, of whom he was an assistant during the War of Independence, and who had him as the most prominent intellectual in his cabinet. Hamilton defended the need for a strong central government that would stimulate commerce and industry. It set up a federal central bank to spread credit, given that the Constitution did not prohibit it, and proposed protectionist tariffs to develop the national productive apparatus by making foreign imports more expensive. From our contemporary perspective, Hamilton was a brilliant interventionist who could be declared patron saint of the current Democratic Party.
Jefferson, on the other hand, distrusted a strong central government, while postulating the idea of a virtuous republic, subject to the control of society and supported by small farmers. He thought it was better to distribute power among states and local entities to protect individual rights from the risk of tyranny, his greatest terror. Apart from its explicit rejection of indebtedness that future generations would have to pay by means of taxes, its argument against the great federal bank dismantled and reversed Hamilton's reasoning: as the 1787 Constitution did not expressly authorize the creation of that credit institution, the government should not found it. For Jefferson, the limits of legality were very clear: the government could only do what the law ordered; society, on the other hand, could do everything that the law did not prohibit. Jefferson, in all fairness, could be the guardian angel of the Republicans of our day.
