by Ron Chernow
Madison urged Washington, who was still undecided on the measure, to snuff out the bank with a veto. Washington’s slow, deliberate handling of this matter proved a model of the way he resolved complex disputes. First he impartially canvassed his cabinet officers to assemble the widest spectrum of opinion, making sure that, whatever he did, he could answer all critics. He kept his cabinet in suspense, forcing them to vie for his approval through the strength of their arguments. At the same time, one senses that he already tilted toward signing the bill, for he subtly stacked the deck in favor of approval by first asking Edmund Randolph and Thomas Jefferson for their views, which he then relayed to Hamilton. This gave Hamilton an edge, since he could see his predecessors’ objections and register the last word on the subject.
Attorney General Randolph submitted an unimpressive memorandum that branded the bank as unconstitutional. Succinct but more trenchant was Jefferson’s brief memorandum arguing for “strict construction” of the Constitution. For Jefferson, state-sponsored monopolies and central banks were oppressive tools of executive power associated with British royalty. He scorned Hamilton’s bank as the symbol of a Yankee world of commerce that would subvert his fond vision of America as a rural Eden. In the last analysis, the debate hinged on the interpretation of three words in Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution—that Congress had all powers “necessary and proper” to carry into law its enumerated responsibilities. Taking a cramped view of this clause, Jefferson contended that it limited Congress to legislation that was strictly necessary to its assigned duties, not merely convenient or useful. Though not queried for an opinion, John Adams was also steaming about the bank. “This system of banks begotten, hatched, and brooded by . . . Hamilton and Washington, I have always considered as a system of national injustice,” he spluttered years later, calling it a “sacrifice of public and private interest to a few aristocratical friends and favorites.”24
Though he had sat through every session of the Constitutional Convention, Washington did not pretend to any expertise in constitutional nuances—he once wrote that he had “had as little to do with lawyers as any man of my age”—and engaged in much hand-wringing over the bank bill.25 He would be forced to issue a black-and-white opinion that would alienate some, gratify others, and irrevocably shape the future government. He called in Madison, supremely well versed in the Constitution, for a series of quiet, confidential talks. “The constitutionality of the national bank was a question on which his mind was greatly perplexed,” Madison would recall, noting that Washington was already biased in favor of a national bank and “a liberal construction of the national powers.”26 On the other hand, Washington was shaken by the uncompromising verdicts from Randolph and Jefferson and asked Madison, as a precaution, to draft a veto message for the bank bill.
When Washington turned to Hamilton, he made plain that, unless he could vanquish the arguments of Randolph and Jefferson, he planned to veto the bank bill, telling him that he wished to “be fully possessed of the arguments for and against the measure before I express any opinion of my own.”27 By this point Washington knew the vigor of Hamilton’s mind and his extraordinary knack for legal argument. In little more than a week, Hamilton, in a superhuman burst of energy, produced more than thirteen thousand words that buried his opponents beneath an avalanche of arguments. His exegesis of the “necessary and proper” clause not only made way for a central bank but would enable the federal government to respond to emergencies throughout American history. Hamilton interpreted the “necessary and proper” clause to mean that “every power vested in a government is in its nature sovereign and includes, by force of the term, a right to employ all the means requisite and fairly applicable to the ends of such power.”28 In other words, the Constitution gave the federal government not only the powers explicitly enumerated but also a series of unstated or “implied powers” indispensable to attain those ends.
Washington had ten days to sign or veto the bank bill and stalled in making up his mind. Perhaps by design, Hamilton delivered, and Washington accepted, the argument in favor of the bill right before that deadline expired, leaving no time for an appeal inside the cabinet. When Washington signed the bill on February 25, 1791, it was a courageous act, for he defied the legal acumen of Madison, Jefferson, and Randolph. Unlike his fellow planters, who tended to regard banks and stock exchanges as sinister devices, Washington grasped the need for these instruments of modern finance. It was also a decisive moment legally for Washington, who had felt more bound than Hamilton by the literal words of the Constitution. With this stroke, he endorsed an expansive view of the presidency and made the Constitution a living, open-ended document. The importance of his decision is hard to overstate, for had Washington rigidly adhered to the letter of the Constitution, the federal government might have been stillborn. Chief Justice John Marshall later seized upon the doctrine of “implied powers” and incorporated it into seminal Supreme Court cases that upheld the power of the federal government.
In approving the bank bill, Washington again championed Hamilton as an agent of modernity, a man who represented the thriving commerce of the seaport cities rather than the Virginia gentry from which he himself had emerged. Washington agreed with Hamilton’s defense of the bank, not simply from its superlative reasoning but because the two men subscribed to a common view of economic nationalism. Contrary to his critics, who thought him a credulous tool of Hamilton, Washington was a proud and knowing sponsor of the Hamiltonian program .29 That July he insisted to David Humphreys, “Our public credit stands on that ground which, three years ago, it would have been considered as a species of madness to have foretold.”30
THE UPROAR OVER THE HAMILTONIAN SYSTEM made it all the more imperative that Washington undertake a tour of the southern states, much as he had done with New England. At the time when the Quaker petitions to abolish the slave trade had awakened southern fears of northern interference, David Stuart had warned Washington, “It is represented that the northern phalanx is so firmly united as to bear down all opposition, while Virginia is unsupported.”31 The region also feared that the northeastern states would pay less heed to frontier communities, which were mostly peopled with settlers from the southern states. Faced with reported discontent, Washington wanted to see for himself whether the South was really so disenchanted with his programs. Also, as the country grew—by the spring of 1792, Congress had approved the admission of Kentucky and Vermont as new states—Washington wanted to maintain a sense of national cohesion amid pellmell expansion.
The southern tour was a hugely ambitious adventure. Washington would once again have to hazard nonstop socializing. As Tobias Lear noted, he found these occasions “fatiguing and often times painful,” sticking him with a dreadful conflict. “He wishes not to exclude himself from the sight or conversation of his fellow citizens, but their eagerness to show their affection frequently imposes a heavy tax upon him.”32 The projected itinerary of 1,816 miles was an enormous distance to traverse by horse and carriage. At a time of poor roads, Washington would have to withstand dust, mud, and assorted indignities. And in an era of primitive communications, he would be absent from Philadelphia for three months, making it hard to settle major policy disputes. Washington had never gone farther south than the northern part of North Carolina, and the Carolina and Georgia roads were terra incognita. Leaving nothing to chance, he consulted southern congressmen and even a Supreme Court justice about precise distances en route, which he referred to as his “line of march.”33 The whole trip was plotted out like a military campaign, with each day mapped out in advance, complete with arrival and departure times and the name of each inn.
On March 20, 1791, Washington departed from Philadelphia in his carriage with a train of servants. A big, rough-hewn Hessian named John Fagan drove the coach, with James Hurley as the postilion. Major William Jackson, presidential porter John Mauld, and valet William Osborne trotted alongside on horseback. Washington’s slave Giles drove the baggage wagon with t
wo horses, while his other slave in the rear, Paris, rode the white parade horse, Prescott, that Washington would ride into towns. In a playful touch, Washington included his greyhound, which he had named Cornwallis. In New York and Philadelphia, Giles and Paris had served as coachman and postilion, and their demotion to the back of the presidential procession may have been designed to placate southern sensibilities. It may also have reflected Washington’s displeasure with the two men. By the end of the tour, Washington would drop Paris from his presidential household, describing him as “lazy, self-willed, and impudent,” while Giles developed an injury that made it impossible for him to ride a horse.34
Washington’s diaries for the early stages of his southern trip sometimes read like a disaster chronicle. The succession of horrors started with the sail down Severn River in Maryland. Washington had borrowed a large boat manned by an incompetent crew, and in the course of a dark, stormy night, with “constant lightning and tremendous thunder,” the boat ran aground twice. The befuddled crew had no notion where they were. All the while the president lay curled up in a bunk below-decks, so cramped he could not fully stretch out. The nightmare ended with the boat’s arrival at Annapolis, where Washington was installed in the familiar comfort of George Mann’s Tavern.
At this point Washington paused for an important piece of public business: he officiated at a meeting of property owners in Georgetown and Carrollsburg who were competing to have government buildings for the new federal district erected on their land. In a pleasant surprise to the two warring groups, Washington informed them that the ten-mile-square district would encompass land in both their domains. In his usual tactful style, he urged the landowner groups to cooperate rather than compete and also pored over a survey of the new federal district prepared by Andrew Ellicott, as well as preliminary plans drawn up by Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, the French engineer tapped to design the federal city.
Washington gave himself a week’s respite at Mount Vernon and made the daily rounds of his five farms for the first time since the previous fall. On April 7, with the horses “well refreshed and in good spirits,” his entourage resumed the journey, and as they boarded the Colchester ferry, Washington hoped things would go smoothly. During this crossing he decided to keep the four horses harnessed to his coach. But one horse got skittish and dashed off the side of the boat, pulling the other startled horses with it. Fortunately the boat had drifted close enough to shallow water that the horses could be saved and the coach prevented from plunging in.
As the presidential cavalcade approached Fredericksburg on April 8, the townsfolk were taken aback to see Washington—he had concealed his arrival to avoid any fuss. One paper noted that the citizens, “not being apprised of his approach, were disappointed in the opportunity of evincing their respect . . . by meeting him previous to his arrival.”35 After a festive welcome in Richmond, Washington proceeded to Petersburg, where several thousand people greeted him and threw up clouds of dust that irritated his throat. To avoid a repetition of this problem, Washington let it be known that he would leave town at eight the next morning, “but I did it a little after five,” he confessed in his diary, perhaps with a guilty thrill, “by which means I avoided the inconveniences” of the dust.36
When he spent the night at Emporia, Virginia, in Greensville County, the rain had settled the dust hanging in the air. The next morning the rain resumed, but the president decided he would rather brave the elements than the admiring crowds: “Although raining moderately . . . I continued my journey, induced to it by the crowds which were coming into a general muster at the Courthouse of Greensville, who would, I presumed, soon have made the [house] I was in too noisy to be agreeable. ”37 When the dust-choked roads turned muddy, Washington wrote that “my passage was through water.”38
As the presidential cavalcade rattled along bumpy roads down the eastern seaboard, the slapstick comedy persisted. In Craven County, North Carolina, Washington stayed with a Colonel John Allen in the belief that his house was a roadside tavern. When the error was discovered, Washington concluded that “it was too late to rectify the mistake.”39 He then pushed on to New Bern, where the townsfolk threw him a public dinner, and he resumed his favorite pastime of counting the female attendees. These visits were elaborately prepared; the local citizenry presented welcoming addresses to Washington, who delivered replies composed by Major Jackson. Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, blasted this innocuous protocol in his Philadelphia newspaper, finding incriminating evidence of royalist tendencies: “We find by the southern papers that the president on his journey is still perfumed with the incense of addresses. However highly we may consider the character of the chief magistrate of the union, yet we cannot but think the fashionable mode of expressing our attachment to the defender of the liberty of his country favors too much of monarchy to be used by republicans.”40
Bache would have been appalled by the acclaim Washington received in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he mounted his white horse and threaded his way through town amid a fanfare of trumpets and “an astonishing concourse of people.” Ladies waved to him from windows and balconies, while ships in the harbor ran up streaming colors. He counted sixty-two ladies at the Wilmington ball; one newspaper observed that the president “appeared to be equally surprised and delighted at the very large and brilliant assembly of ladies whom admiration and respect for him had collected together.”41 In Georgetown, South Carolina, fifty ladies hosted him at a tea party. Here and elsewhere on his tour, Washington made a point of addressing local Freemasons, telling General Mordecai Gist, the grand master in South Carolina, “Your sentiments on the establishment and exercise of our equal government are worthy of an association whose principles lead to purity of morals and are beneficial of action . . . I shall be happy on every occasion to evince my regard for the fraternity.”42
Perhaps the most elegant reception Washington received came in Charleston, where twelve formally dressed ship captains, manning a barge with twelve oars, ferried him into town. About forty boats brimming with gentlemen and ladies bobbed around him, while others freighted with musicians sailed alongside to serenade him. One floating chorus sang, “He comes! he comes! The hero comes./Sound, sound your trumpets, beat your drums.”43 As Washington walked the streets, he submitted to hero worship such as no other American president has perhaps ever experienced. One observer said the crowds “look up to him as the savior of the country, all respect him as the founder of our states and cherish him as a father who would come to see for himself if his children are happy.”44 In the afternoon he was visited by “a great number of the most respectable ladies of Charleston,” but they paled beside the female contingent that evening.45 In his diary, Washington wrote that he had gone “to a concert at the exchange at w[hi]ch there were at least 400 lad[ie]s—the number and appearances of w[hi]ch exceeded anything of the kind I had ever seen.”46 To further his delight, the women wore bandeaux upon which his image had been sketched or that were stamped with the words “Long life to the President” or “Welcome to the hero” in golden letters.47
The southern tour turned into a marathon as the cavalcade crossed the Georgia pine barrens. The “abominably sandy and heavy” roads wore down the horses, including Prescott.48 The journey was a heroic labor for Washington, who had to deal with the hazards of the road coupled with the tiring social demands. From Georgia, he wrote to Tobias Lear that he was so busy in each town that it “scarcely allowed me a moment I could call my own.”49 He pushed on to Augusta, where the local newspaper stated that the presidential ball was attended by “the largest number of ladies ever collected at this place.”50 The presidential connoisseur estimated the female turnout at between “60 and 70 well dressed ladies.”51 While there, Washington also engaged in more serious business, meeting with Governor Edward Telfair and handing him dispatches for the Spanish governor of East Florida, warning him to stop providing a safe haven for runaway American slaves.
In late May Washington b
egan the journey northward and used the opportunity to tour scenes from the Revolutionary War that he had watched from afar, including Camden and Guilford Court House. He exhibited mounting irritation with the attention bestowed on him—only between towns did he have some modicum of privacy. To his annoyance, the North Carolina governor sent an escort for him. “On my approach to this place [Guilford],” he wrote, “I was met by a party of light horse, which I prevailed on the governor to dismiss and to countermand his orders for others to attend me through the state.”52
In undertaking this lengthy trip, Washington had wanted to learn the state of public opinion directly rather than by hearsay. Most of all, he hoped to ascertain whether the South was as discontented as legend claimed. In his diary, he professed pleasure with what he saw, convinced that the people “appeared to be happy, contented and satisfied with the gen[era]l government under which they were placed. Where the case was otherwise, it was not difficult to trace the cause to some demagogue or speculating character.”53 Contrary to reports that the South would resist the whiskey tax, Washington found general approval for it. In writing to Catharine Macaulay Graham, he cited the “prosperity and tranquillity under the new government” and added that “while you in Europe are troubled with war and rumors of war, everyone here may sit under his own vine and none to molest or make him afraid.”54 Clearly Washington’s picture of the southern mood was overly rosy; perhaps local politicians didn’t care to deliver upsetting news to a heroic president on a jubilant tour. Within a year the country would be hopelessly divided over Washington’s policies, and the primary locus of discontent would be centered in the southern states.
