But the clever Ames had no intention of making such a frank admission on the floor. He was a practical man and he defended the Hamiltonian doctrine with eloquence and vigor.[300] With these two speeches, the debate might as well have closed, but it continued long enough to permit the Hamiltonian Old Guard to say their pieces. Giles argued and Jackson raved in opposition, and the measure passed with a margin of nineteen votes.
It is significant that nineteen of the twenty votes in opposition were those of Southern members, the only Northerner in the list being Jonathan Grout of Massachusetts, a Democrat, who did not return to the next Congress. Like preceding Hamiltonian measures, this meant the concentration of the financial resources of the country in the commercial North to the disadvantage of the agricultural South. But this was not the only reason. With the Southerners, among whom banks were a rarity, and the Westerners, to whom they were as meaningless as the canals on Mars, the advantage of such an institution was not felt. In both sections anything that hinted of monopoly was abhorrent. Thus, in addition to the constitutional difference, there was an economic conflict that was sectional in its nature.
IV
But the battle was not yet won. The conflict was transferred to the Cabinet, for Washington was not at all convinced that there was no constitutional prohibition. Not only did he withhold his signature till the last minute, but there are reasons to believe that he had a veto in mind almost to the end. For Madison, with whose part in the framing of the Constitution he was familiar, he had a profound respect. Having discussed the bill with Jefferson informally, Washington requested written opinions from both Jefferson and Randolph, the Attorney-General. Both were in complete accord with the conclusions of Madison. The opinion of Jefferson, expressed with all his force of reasoning, was a powerful challenge to the doctrine of implied powers.[301]
It was at about this time that Washington summoned Madison to the Morris house, which served as the Executive Mansion in Philadelphia, to invite a fuller expression of his views. The great man listened in silence, and Madison thought with sympathy, while the little giant of the Constitutional Convention, out of the wealth of his learning and experience, poured forth his reasons for opposition. Not once, but several times, the little figure of Madison must have been seen entering the Morris house in those days of suppressed excitement, for there were numerous conferences. As the ten-day period followed for the affixing of the presidential signature was drawing to an end, and Washington requested his friend to reduce his objections to writing, Madison assumed that it was a veto message he was asked to frame. Nor was it a far-fetched assumption, for on more than one occasion the President had made use of Madison’s pen.[302]
Meanwhile the Hamiltonians, at first puzzled, became alarmed. From the temper of their talk in Philadelphia, Madison was convinced that in the event of a veto they were ready for open opposition to Washington, backed by the wealth and influence of the powerful.[303] Ugly, silly stories, reflecting upon the great personage on whom the Hamiltonians found it profitable to claim a monopoly, were set afloat. Fisher Ames gave currency in Boston to the theory that Washington was influenced by the fear that the establishment of a financial capital in Philadelphia would prevent the removal of the political capital to the banks of the stream that washed the boundary of Mount Vernon.[304] If some discretion was used in Philadelphia, where the grumbling was confined to the fashionable drawing-rooms, no such circumspection was observed in New York, where the meanest motives were ascribed to the President, and among the speculators and Tory sympathizers open threats were made. Madison heard, while there a little later, that ‘the licentiousness of [these] tongues exceeded anything that was conceived.’[305] This struggle marked a definitive break in the relations of Hamilton and Jefferson. The dictatorial disposition of the former would brook no opposition, and he was temperamentally incapable of a differentiation between political opposition and personal hostility. The fact that Jefferson, in response to a command from Washington, had written an opinion against the Bank could bear only one interpretation—‘asperity and ill humor toward me.’[306] The fact that Washington accepted Hamilton’s view, did not, however, shake Jefferson’s faith in the President, and in defeat nothing so ill-tempered escaped him as flowed in a stream from the Federalists when threatened with defeat. Within a month after Hamilton had won his fight, Jefferson, in commenting to a friend on what he conceived to be a dangerous trend, wrote that ‘it is fortunate that our first executive magistrate is purely and zealously republican’—the highest praise he could bestow.[307]
The press was not verbose in its comments on the bill, albeit Freneau fought it in the ‘Federal Gazette.’[308] The ‘Pennsylvania Gazette’ was ungraceful in defeat. Denouncing the Bank as ‘a proposition made to the moneyed interest,’ it commented on its ‘preparations to subscribe,’ and found ‘the terms ... so advantageous that no equal object of speculation is perhaps presented in any quarter of the globe.’[309] Fenno offered his best in a verse:
‘The States as one agree that this is right
Let pigmy politicians rave and write.’[310]
Thus the First Congress closed its labors with no little rhapsodizing in the press over the results. A New York paper offered an epitaph of glorification,[311] which a Boston paper condensed into the simple comment that it had ‘established public confidence and credit, reconciled the jarring interests of discontented States, and cemented the people in the bonds of harmony, peace and love.’[312]
One man, at least, had cause for jubilation. In two years Hamilton had risen to a position of commanding power, proved his genius in constructive statesmanship, accomplished everything he had set out to do, made himself the idol of the wealthy and the powerful, the recognized leader of the influential commercial class, the acknowledged head of a brilliant and militant party. His friends were comparing him to Pitt, then in the heyday of his power—and he was only on the threshold. So great was the enthusiasm in commercial circles that he made a special trip to New York to accept the homage of the Chamber of Commerce at a reception, to linger a week among his worshipers, and to return to Philadelphia reinvigorated by the wine of idolatry pressed to his lips.[313] At that moment he was on the top of the world.