Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (26 page)

T
HE DEADLOCK WAS EVENTUALLY BROKEN
by a remarkable compromise. Congressman Richard Bland Lee of Virginia had previously hinted that assumption might be linked to the permanent location of the national capital.
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From the beginning the location of the federal government had been a problem. In 1776 no one had conceived that the Confederation Congress should have its own territory for its capital. During the Revolutionary War Congress had been forced repeatedly to migrate from place to place; in the 1780s it was still on the move, from Philadelphia to Princeton to Annapolis to Trenton and finally to New York. The Constitution had attempted to end the peripatetic existence of the new federal government by providing for the states to cede a district “not exceeding ten miles square” to be the permanent seat of the new national government. In this district Congress would have exclusive jurisdiction. Beyond that nothing else was specified.

The Southern states wanted the capital located on the Potomac; Washington was especially keen on having it near Alexandria and his plantation at Mount Vernon. The New England states and New York wanted to retain the capital in New York or someplace close by. Pennsylvania and the other middle states wanted it near Philadelphia or at least near the Susquehanna.

By June 1790 the Virginians were willing to support a temporary capital in Philadelphia in return for a permanent site being established on the Potomac. At the same time, Madison was becoming more fearful of the consequences of disunion and seemed reluctantly willing to accept the federal assumption of state debts. At a dinner arranged by Jefferson in late June 1790, Hamilton and Madison clinched a deal in which Southerners would accept the national assumption of state debts in return for having the permanent capital on the Potomac, the midpoint between Maine and Georgia. For ten years while that federal city was being built, Philadelphia was to be the temporary residence of the government.

The choice of a temporary residence was not surprising. After all, Philadelphia had been the meeting place of the First and Second Continental Congresses and the Constitutional Convention. It was also the largest city in the country, although not the fastest growing. (By 1810 New York would surpass it.) Prior to the Revolution it had been the major American entry port for thousands of European immigrants, mostly German, Scotch-Irish, and Irish, and would continue to be so in the 1790s, including such immigrants as French planters and blacks fleeing the revolution in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), French refugees from the
revolution in France, and British and Irish refugees from Britain’s counter-revolutionary crackdown.

In 1790 Philadelphia’s forty-five thousand diverse peoples lived in a giant triangle running two and a half miles along the Delaware River with the western tip of the triangle extending back about a mile on the High Street (renamed Market Street in 1790), which divided the city in two. In addition to being the site where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written, Philadelphia was the commercial and cultural center of the United States. It housed the Bank of North America, the first bank in the country, and the American Philosophical Society and the Library Company, both of which had been established under Benjamin Franklin’s leadership. It also contained Charles Willson Peale’s Museum, which was the first popular museum of natural science and art in the nation. Philadelphia’s Quaker heritage was everywhere, especially in making the city the national center for humanitarian reform, including the first society in the country promoting the abolition of slavery.

So fitting was Philadelphia as the nation’s capital that some believed the government’s temporary residence might be a lot longer than ten years. George Mason figured that it might take at least a half century for Congress to escape from the “Whirlpool of Philadelphia.” Others thought the sectional cooperation expressed in the Compromise of 1790 could not last. “Southern and northern will often be the division of Congress,” noted one observer. “The thought is disagreeable, but the distinction is founded in nature, and will last as long as the Union.”
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T
HE COMPROMISE OF
1790—the location of the national capital in return for the federal assumption of state debts—showed that most congressmen were still willing to bargain for the sake of union. Nevertheless, some Southerners like James Monroe still had serious reservations about the compromise, believing that assumption would reduce “the necessity for State taxation” and thus would “undoubtedly leave the national government more at liberty to exercise its powers and increase the subjects on which it will act.” One of those subjects might be slavery.
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The compromise was no sooner worked out than a new controversy arose over Hamilton’s proposal in December 1790 to charter the Bank of the United States. With the Bank, opposition to the Federalist program
assumed a more strident and ideological character. Not only did the provision that the Bank was to reside in Philadelphia for its twenty-year life appear to threaten the promised move of the capital to the Potomac in 1800, but, more important, the creation of a national bank seemed to suggest that the United States was becoming a different kind of place from what many Americans wanted. Many Southerners in particular saw no need for banks. In their agricultural world banks seemed to create an unreal kind of money that benefited only Northern speculators. Even Northerners like Senator William Maclay regarded the Bank as “an Aristocratic engine” that could easily become “a Machine for the Mischievous purposes of bad Ministers.”
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Everywhere there was a sense that the Bank represented a new and frightening step toward centralizing national authority and Anglicizing America’s government.

In the House of Representatives Madison launched a passionate attack against the bank proposal. He argued that the bank bill was a misguided imitation of England’s monarchical practice of concentrating wealth and influence in the metropolitan capital, and, more important, that it was an unconstitutional assertion of federal power. The Constitution, he claimed, did not expressly grant the federal government the authority to charter a bank. But in February 1791 the bank bill passed over the objections of Madison and other Southerners, and Washington was faced with the problem of signing or vetoing it.

The president respected Madison’s judgment and was deeply perplexed by the issue of constitutionality. He thus sought the advice of his fellow Virginians, Attorney General Edmund Randolph and Secretary of State Jefferson. Randolph offered a rambling argument against the bank bill’s constitutionality, contending that the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution left all powers not specifically delegated to the Congress to the states or the people. Jefferson in his brief response took a similar position. Faced with such advice, Washington considered vetoing the bank bill and even went so far as to ask Madison to prepare a veto message. But first he wanted the opinion of his secretary of the treasury, who had devised the Bank.

Hamilton, with Randolph’s and Jefferson’s opinions before him, spent a week working out what became one of his most masterful state papers. He carefully refuted the arguments of Randolph and Jefferson and made a powerful case for a broad construction of the Constitution that resounded through subsequent decades of American history. He argued that Congress’s authority to charter a bank was implied by the clause in Article I,
Section 8 of the Constitution that gave Congress the right to make all laws “necessary and proper” to carry out its delegated powers. Without such implied powers, Hamilton wrote, “the United States would furnish the singular spectacle of a
political society
without
sovereignty
, or of a people
governed
without
government
.” That may have been Jefferson’s ideal, but it was not Washington’s. On February 25, 1791, the president signed the bank bill into law.
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This turn of events alarmed Madison and Jefferson. The Virginia legislature had already issued a series of resolutions protesting the federal assumption of state debts—protests that foreshadowed the state’s later historic resolutions of 1798 against the Alien and Sedition Acts. In declaring the assumption law unconstitutional, the state noted the “striking resemblance” between Hamilton’s financial system and the one that had been introduced in England in the early part of the eighteenth century. That English system, the Virginians declared, not only had “perpetuated upon the nation an enormous debt” but also had concentrated “in the hands of the executive, an unbounded influence, which pervading every branch of the government, bears down all opposition and daily threatens the destruction of everything that appertains to English liberty.” The lesson for Americans was obvious: “The same causes produce the same effects.” By creating “a large monied interest,” the assumption law threatened to prostrate agriculture at the feet of commerce and to change the form of the federal government in a manner “fatal to the existence of American liberty.”
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Hamilton saw at once the implications of these Virginia resolutions. He privately warned that they were “the first symptom of a spirit which must either be killed or will kill the constitution of the United States.”
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But his Federalist colleagues were confident that the prosperity the national government was bringing to the country would conquer all opposition.

YET OPPOSITION CONTINUED TO MOUNT
. Indeed, Virginia’s stand at the end of 1790 became the first major step in the development of an organized opposition designed to protect Southern agricultural interests
(including slavery) from Eastern commercial dominance. By early 1791 Jefferson was worried about the “heresies” that were being set forth in the press and began urging friends to support the agricultural interest and pure “republicanism” against the “stock-jobbers” in Congress. Soon Madison was describing the supporters of Hamilton’s program not only as “speculators” but also as “Tories,” a loaded term that evoked the opponents of the Revolution and the promoters of monarchy.
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Madison’s and Jefferson’s comments were private, but by early 1791 the press boiled with talk of the dangers of monarchy and monocrats—talk that resonated well beyond the world of the Southern planters concerned with slavery: many Northern middling sorts were also anxious about the dangers of monarchy and the kind of aristocratic society that accompanied it.

Because Vice-President John Adams had pushed for titles in the Senate in 1789, some had labeled him a monarchist. Adams laid new claim to the title, as did his editor, John Fenno, by publishing in the
Gazette of the United States
in 1790 a series of essays called “Discourses on Davila.” In these curious essays, ostensibly a commentary on the work of the seventeenth-century Italian historian Enrico Caterino Davila, Adams tried to justify his belief in the need for forms, titles, and distinctions in all societies, including republics.

Under these circumstances, with monarchy very much on people’s minds, Jefferson suddenly and inadvertently found himself thrust into public prominence as a controversial defender of republicanism. In April 1791 he passed on an English copy of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet
The Rights of Man
to a Philadelphia printer. Jefferson made the mistake, however, of including a covering note privately expressing his pleasure that “something is at length to be publickly said against the political heresies which have sprung up among us,” by which he meant mainly Adams’s “Discourses on Davila.”
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When Jefferson’s note was widely quoted in newspapers throughout the nation, he was embarrassed. Whether he wanted it or not, Jefferson was being associated in the public mind with resistance to the Hamiltonian system and perceived as a friend of the rights of man. His holiday trip with Madison in late May and June 1791 up the Hudson Valley in New York certainly convinced Hamilton and other Federalists that
Jefferson and Madison were concocting an organized opposition to the government. At the same time, Jefferson noted that Hamilton was trying to qualify, but not repudiate, remarks in which he said that “the present government is not that which will answer the ends of society, . . . and that it will probably be found expedient to go into the British form.”
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Both Jefferson and Madison were coming to realize that Hamilton and the Federalists had an image quite different from their own of what the United States ought to become.

J
EFFERSON AND
M
ADISON
had been good friends since 1779. Their shared passion for religious freedom had brought them together, and in the 1780s they had collaborated in pushing a number of bills through the Virginia assembly. When Jefferson was minister to France, they had kept up a regular correspondence, often in code. Now, however, their friendship deepened, grew more intensely political, and became more consequential for the history of the early Republic.
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As John Quincy Adams once observed, “The mutual influence of these two mighty minds upon each other is a phenomenon, like the invisible and mysterious movements of the magnet in the physical world, and in which the sagacity of the future historian may discover the solution of much of our national history not otherwise easily accountable.”
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It is not immediately obvious why the relationship was so intimate and long-lasting. The two men had markedly different temperaments. Jefferson was high-minded, optimistic, visionary, and often quick to grab hold of new and sometimes bizarre ideas. Although he could be a superb politician at times—acutely sensitive to what was possible and workable—he was also a radical utopian; he often dreamed of the future and was inspired by how things might be. Madison, by contrast, had a conservative strain that mingled with his own utopian thinking; he valued legitimacy and stability and was usually more willing than Jefferson to accept things as they were. He was often prudent and cold-eyed, if not pessimistic, analytical, and skeptical of radical schemes, especially if they might unleash popular passions. He never embraced an idea without questioning it, and he never possessed the kind of uncritical faith in the people that Jefferson had.