On the twentieth of January 1791, the bank bill passed the senate without a division, and on the eighth of February it passed the house of representatives by a vote of thirty-nine to twenty. Before signing it, the president requested the written opinion of each member of his cabinet as to its constitutionality, and his reasons for such opinion. They promptly complied. The cabinet was divided. Hamilton and Knox strongly maintained that it was constitutional: Jefferson and Randolph (the attorney-general) as strongly contended that it was unconstitutional. Washington examined the whole subject with great deliberation, and then put his signature to the act. That act gave a charter to the institution limited to twenty years, and for that period Congress renounced the power of establishing any other bank. The capital was to be ten millions of dollars, divided into twenty-five thousand shares of four hundred dollars each; eight millions to be subscribed by individuals, and the other two millions by the United States. It was to be managed by twenty-five directors, chosen annually by the stockholders, and its headquarters were to be at Philadelphia.

The opponents of the bank, and especially Mr. Jefferson, presumed to censure the president because, in the conscientious exercise of his power, he made the act a law by affixing his signature. The secretary of state had other than constitutional grounds for his opposition to the measure. He had conceived an irrepressible distrust of Hamilton. It seemed almost like a monomania. He considered the bank as one of the engines in a scheme intended by Hamilton to make the national legislature subservient to, and under the direction of, the treasury, for the purpose of promoting his monarchical schemes. He afterward affirmed that Washington was deceived by Hamilton, and that he did not perceive the drift or effect of his financial schemes; and ungenerously and unfairly remarked, that, “unversed in financial projects and calculations and budgets, his approbation of them was bottomed on his confidence in the man.”

No person knew better than Mr. Jefferson the unfairness of this assertion. None knew better than he how little Washington was prone to be swayed in his judgment by partiality either toward a man or a measure. He always weighed everything with the greatest care and most profound wisdom, and the opinions of friends and foes were always submitted to the alembic of his keen penetration, and the tests of his almost unfailing sagacity, before they were acted upon. “Hamilton and myself,” wrote Jefferson, “were daily pitted in the cabinet like two cocks.” The personal resentments and consequent prejudices of the secretary of state appear to have frequently warped his judgment and fettered his generosity.

An increase of duties on imported spirits, and an excise tax on those produced at home, in order to increase the revenue required by the charges growing out of the assumption of the state debts, recommended by the secretary of the treasury and submitted to the consideration of Congress in the form of an act, excited warm discussion. An attempt was made to strike out the excise, but failed; and after animated and sometimes violent debates, it was carried by a vote in the house of thirty-five to twenty-one.[31] The portion of the act relating to excise was received with indignation in some parts of the country, and led, as we shall hereafter observe, to actual insurrection in western Pennsylvania.

The establishment of a national mint also occupied the attention of Congress at this session. At the conclusion of the war for independence, the continental Congress requested Robert Morris, the minister of finance, to lay before them his views upon the subject of coins and currency. The labor of preparing a report upon the subject was assigned to the able assistant financier, Gouverneur Morris. It was prepared with great care, and presented in 1782. Morris's first effort was to harmonize the currency of all the states. He ascertained that the one thousand, four hundred and fortieth part of a Spanish dollar was a common divisor for the various currencies. Starting with that fraction as a unit, he proposed the following table of moneys:—

Congress debated the subject from time to time until 1784, when Mr. Jefferson proposed a different scheme. He recommended four coins upon the basis of the Spanish dollar, as follows:—

In 1785 Congress adopted Mr. Jefferson's scheme, and in 1786 made provision for coinage upon that basis. This was the origin of our decimal currency—the copper cent, the silver dime and dollar, and the golden eagle. Since then, several other coins of different values, having the decimal basis, have been made of gold and silver; and a smaller cent, made of metallic composition, has been coined.

Mr. Jefferson, soon after he came into the cabinet, urged the necessity of a uniform and national coinage, “to banish the discordant pounds, shillings, pence, and farthings of the different states, and to establish in their stead the new denominations.” The subject received some attention during that session, and was agitated in the next (the one we are now considering); but it was not until the second of April, 1792, that laws were enacted for the establishment and regulation of a mint. Thereafter there was much delay, and the mint was not in full operation until January, 1795. During that interval its performances were chiefly experimental, and the variety of silver and copper coins, now so much sought after by collectors, were struck. The most noted of these is the “Washington cent,” so called because it bore the head of Washington on one side. It was a long time before Congress decided upon a proper device for the coins, and the debates that occurred upon the subject were interesting and sometimes amusing.