Jefferson and most other founders viewed the Constitution as a set of constraints on the powers of government. Hamilton thought of it in exactly the opposite way – as a grant of powers rather than as a set of limitations – a potential rubber stamp on anything and everything the federal government ever wanted to do. He and his fellow nationalists (the Federalists) set about to use the lawyerly manipulation of words to "amend" the Constitution without utilizing the formal amendment process. "Having failed to persuade his colleagues at Philadelphia of the beauties of a truly national plan of government," Rossiter wrote, "and having thereafter recognized the futility of persuading the legislatures of three-fourths of the states to surrender even a jot of their privileges, he set out to remold the Constitution into an instrument of national supremacy."
And how did he "remold" the Constitution? He began by inventing a number of myths (i.e., lies) about the American founding. On June 29, 1787, before the Constitution was even ratified, he said that the sovereign states were merely "artificial beings" that had nothing to do with creating the union – despite the fact that the Constitution itself (in Article 7) declared that the document would be ratified (if it was to be ratified) by the citizens of at least nine of the thirteen states. He told the New York State Assembly in that same year that the "nation," and not the states, had "full power of sovereignty," clearly contradicting the written Constitution and actual history. This lie would be repeated by nationalist politicians from Clay, Webster and Story, to Lincoln. It is still repeated to this day by various apologists for the American empire.
The bloating of government as well as our sticking our noses in other countries' business were indeed part of Mr. Hamilton's disastrous legacy.
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