We have to unravel a bit of your question, here.

The constitution was ratified not by legislatures but by a convention within each state. You might be both a delegate to the convention as well as a member of the legislature, or even both of them and the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, but maybe not. In Connecticut, for example, the legislature decreed there would be delegates elected at town meetings. Among the delegates elected to the CT convention were Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth, who had been key in the Philadelphia convention. Before then, Sherman had been a delegate to the Continental Congress, Ellsworth had been a judge. It was in those state conventions that the debates - sometimes fierce- really happened, because there were a lot of delegates who were either Anti-Federalists and didn’t want the new constitution, or at least had plenty of reservations about it.

Some states were indeed very much crippled by debt. Massachusetts' Boston merchants had been dependent on foreign trade, and the debt had made it almost impossible for them to access foreign credit. When it attempted to wring hard currency for taxes from its farmers in 1786 to pay it, Massachusetts got a revolt, Shays' Rebellion. But however important the debt was, it did not feature in the ratification debates. There, the primary arguments were over how much the proposed Federal government would be taking away powers from the states, how much it might restrict or abolish slavery and how much large states might be able to oppress smaller ones. And also how much the new Federal government would be able to provide security: the Continental Congress had not been able to tax, to raise revenue, and had not been able to create a national army and navy, either, and there were powerful nations who had territory adjoining the new US. But facing the debates was a simple fact- the choice was to have the new Constitution, or reject it and so go back and start over again. Even delegates who were not Federalists, with reservations, doubts, often ended up choosing the Constitution over having to put together another Constitutional Convention.

It was after ratification, and the creation of a federal government that had a real executive branch under George Washington, that there was any attempt to deal with all the debt. One reason was because until then, no one had really calculated it. Alexander Hamilton, the new Treasury Secretary, was given an assistant secretary, comptroller and thirty clerks. He worked non-stop through the fall of 1789, and found the debt amounted to over $76,000,000, and the interest was running about $5,000,000 a year. And that debt was complex. The Continental Congress had borrowed abroad- mostly from France, Spain and Holland. But it had also borrowed extensively at home, among other things issuing the paper Continental currency that had sat, worthless, in the hands of War veterans and a host of contractors and speculators in the 1780’s. The states themselves had borrowed at home; but also abroad ( when John Adams came into Holland looking for loans for the Continental Congress in 17776, he discovered that Massachusetts had already been there, asking the same thing).

Some states- Virginia, Maryland and Georgia- had managed to pay down their debts (though less than they thought) in the 1780’s. Massachusetts, South Carolina and Connecticut had not. Hamilton argued for the Federal government to assume all of the war debt. Madison ( and in the background, Jefferson) were against it assuming the state debts. There was a lot of wrangling, managed pretty well by Madison, and a deal was reached in 1790. The northern states got most, but not all, of the state debts assumed by the federal government. In return, Virginia got $500,000 more of its own debt assumed, the southern states got to avoid the issue of the abolition of slavery ( which had just been put forward and strongly advocated by Ben Franklin, his very last political effort), and they got the new national capitol.

The Compromise of 1790 was a mix of good, bad. On one hand, bundling the war debt into one package and having the new federal government pay it was critical to getting the new country up and running, with a stable currency and foreign trade. But it didn't deal with the issue of slavery, pushed it into the future- and that was a missed opportunity, because we know now in the future that problem became much, much harder, not easier to solve. It also created a real split between the small-government politicians like Jefferson and the large-government politicians like Hamilton. That split would also create the first parties, the large-government Federalists and small-government Democratic Republicans.