Washington: A Life (127 page)

For all the loose talk of a Republican Court, those who had actually haunted the royal courts of Europe were utterly disarmed by the quaint simplicity of the executive residence. When the French writer Chateaubriand stopped in Philadelphia, he was startled by the absence of pretension, and his description is a salutary corrective to contemporary critics who saw Washington as aping European royalty:

One wonders whether Chateaubriand also noticed that a hairdressing shop stood next door to the presidential “palace.”

The president hobnobbed with the city’s commercial elite, especially the two wealthy couples he had befriended during earlier stays in Philadelphia: William and Anne Willing Bingham and Samuel and Elizabeth Willing Powel. Washington was chivalrous with both wives. When he sent Anne Bingham a watercolor version of the portrait of him by the Marquise de Bréhan, he appended this stylish note: “In presenting the enclosed (with compliments to Mrs. Bingham), the President fulfills a promise. Not for the representation—not for the value—but as the production of a fair hand, the offering is made and the acceptan[ce] of it requested.”
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With Elizabeth Powel, Washington continued to permit himself social liberties that he took with no other woman. In an age when subtle social signals counted a great deal, Washington boldly signed his letters to her, “With the greatest respect and affection”—extremely unusual for Washington.
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She, in turn, addressed her letters to “My dear Sir” and signed them, “Your sincere affectionate friend.”
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We know from Washington’s letters that he met with Elizabeth Powel many times but often failed to note their meetings in his diaries. At the very least he was beguiled by this social and political confidante. On the other hand, Powel was also a good friend of Martha, and George consulted her before buying gifts for his wife. In a sign that the Washingtons were slightly awed by this rich bluestocking, George would draft letters for Martha to send to Eliza Powel, and Martha would then rewrite them in her own hand.

On Sundays the president attended church and afterward was enveloped by throngs of admirers. One observer recalled him leaving Old Christ Church, wrapped in his blue cloak, with organ music bellowing behind him. Instead of touching people, he nodded to the hushed crowd that instinctively parted before him, so that there was something vaguely ecclesiastical about his presence: “His noble height and commanding air … his patient demeanor in the crowd … his gentle bendings of the neck, to the right and to the left, parentally, and expressive of delighted feelings on his part; these, with the appearance of the awed and charmed and silent crowd of spectators, gently falling back on each side, as he approached, unequivocally announced to the gazing stranger …
behold the man!
”
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Even as president, Washington’s interests were wider, his curiosity more far-ranging, than is commonly supposed. Confident in his own taste, he personally selected the paintings that adorned the presidential mansion—“fancy pieces of my own choosing,” he called them.
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He had an occasional sense of fun that belied his grave air. In April 1793 he led a party of eight to see the first American circus, staged by an English equestrian acrobat, John Bill Ricketts, who had set up a Philadelphia riding school. And he remained a keen theatergoer, absorbing a steady diet of history plays, farces, and satires. He patronized the South Street Theater so frequently that he had his own private box, complete with cushioned seats and plush red drapery. With a soldier stationed at each stage door and four distributed in the gallery, Washington probably enjoyed better security than did Lincoln the night of his assassination at Ford’s Theater.

However bowed down by presidential tasks, Washington always found time for family and for the many waifs and wards who sheltered under his roof. Harriot Washington, the daughter of his deceased brother Samuel, had lived at Mount Vernon since 1785. A wayward girl, slovenly and lazy, she clashed with Fanny Bassett Washington. Nonetheless, Washington still hoped to make a lady out of Harriot and in the fall of 1790 tried to install her at a proper boarding school in Philadelphia. Harriot stayed at Mount Vernon until 1792, when she moved to Fredericksburg and lived with Washington’s sister, Betty, before marrying Andrew Parks in 1795. When Harriot committed the faux pas of not consulting Washington about the marriage, the paterfamilias was miffed. When he belatedly congratulated her, he hinted that she would have to subdue her headstrong nature and that success in marriage would depend upon her subordinating her views to her husband’s.

In the fall of 1790 he brought to Philadelphia Harriot’s two unruly brothers, George Steptoe and Lawrence Augustine, who entered the College of Philadelphia (afterward the University of Pennsylvania). The status-conscious president wrote the boys long-winded letters about being clean and presentable and shying away from bad company—suggesting that his ungovernable nephews did neither. Although he footed the bill for their education, he did not invite them to stay in the presidential mansion, either from a shortage of space or because the mischievous boys lacked proper decorum. In writing to Betty, he revealed how financially strapped he felt in caring for Samuel’s three children: “I shall continue to do for [Harriot] what I have already done for seven years past and that is to furnish her with such reasonable and proper necessaries as she may stand in need of, notwithstanding I have had both her brothers upon my hands, and I have been obliged to pay several hundred pounds out of my own pocket for their boards, schooling, clothing etc.”
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Washington’s family munificence was all the more commendable in view of his financial difficulties. The two brothers must have matured in Philadelphia and outgrown their youthful indiscretions, for Washington later rewarded them handsomely in his will.

ON DECEMBER 14, 1790, Alexander Hamilton issued another electrifying state paper, this time on the need to charter the first central bank in American history. Capitalized at $10 million, the Bank of the United States would blend public and private ownership; the government would take a 20 percent stake and private investors the remaining 80 percent. This versatile institution would lend money to the government, issue notes that could serve as a national currency, and act as a repository for tax payments. The bank was patterned after the Bank of England—Hamilton kept its charter on his desk as he wrote—and coming on the heels of his report on public credit and excise taxes, it unsettled opponents with the insidious specter of a British-style executive branch.

Five weeks later the bank bill passed the Senate with deceptive ease, prompting Madison to marshal stiff opposition in the House. Once again the southern states feared that Hamilton’s system would consolidate northern financial hegemony over agrarian southern interests. Madison responded boldly to the views of his dismayed constituents. Where he had articulated a broad view of federal power as coauthor of
The Federalist,
he now balked at what he deemed a dangerous extension of that power. In the Constitution he could find no specific license for a central bank—in his evocative phrase, the bank bill “was condemned by the silence of the Constitution.”
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In defiance of his determined efforts, the bill passed the House on February 8 by a margin of 39 to 20. In an omen of future strife, the vote again divided sharply along geographic lines: the northern states were almost solidly for the bank, and the southern states were largely lined up against it. To skittish southerners, the treasury secretary seemed triumphant and unstoppable in his quest for centralized power, rolling out programs in rapid succession, each one meshing with the next in a seamless system of interlocking parts.

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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.