Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (17 page)

The consequences of such a close vote were immense: on it turned the future nature of the presidency. Indeed, as Madison noted in the House, the Congress’s decisions on this issue of removal “will become the permanent exposition of the Constitution; and on a permanent exposition of the Constitution will depend the genius and character of the whole government.”
¹²¹
If the Senate had been able to claim the right of approving the removal of presidential appointees, executive officials would have become dependent on the will of the Senate, and the United States would have created something similar to the English system of cabinet responsibility to Parliament.
¹²²

No one was more keenly aware of the importance of precedents being set than Washington. “Many things which appear of little importance in themselves and at the beginning, may have great and durable consequences for their having been established at the commencement of a new general Government,” he warned. Better to get things right at the start, he said, than to try to alter them later “after they shall have been confirmed by habit.”
¹²³

He was especially concerned with the relations between the president and the Senate. He envisioned the Senate’s role in advising and consenting to appointments and treaties as that of a council, similar to what he had been used to as commander-in-chief, and thus he assumed that much of the advice and consent would be oral. The Senate was more uncertain about dealing with the president in person, for fear of being overawed. President Washington was willing to concede that appointments might be handled in writing, but he believed that in matters of treaties oral communications between the Senate and the president were “indispensably necessary.”
¹²⁴

In August 1789 the president went to the Senate to get its advice and consent to a treaty he was negotiating with Southern Indian tribes. Adams, who presided, hastily read each section of the treaty and then asked the senators for their opinion. Because of noise from the streets, some of the senators could not hear what was read, and they requested to have the treaty read again. Then the senators began debating each section of the treaty, with Washington impatiently glaring at them. Some of them felt intimidated. Finally one senator moved that the treaty and all the accompanying documents that the president had brought with him be submitted to a committee for study. Washington started up in what Senator Maclay called “a Violent fret.” In exasperation, the president cried, “This defeats every purpose of my coming here.” He calmed down, but when he finally left the Senate chamber, he was overheard to say he would “be damned if he ever went there again.” He did try two days later, but neither the president nor the Senate enjoyed this personal confrontation. The advice part of the Senate’s role in treaty making was dropped.
¹²⁵
When the president issued his Proclamation of Neutrality in 1793, he did not bother to ask for the consent of the Senate, and he thus further established the executive as the dominant authority in the conduct of foreign affairs.

T
HE MOST IMPORTANT MINISTER
in the new administration was the secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton.

Hamilton, aged thirty-four in 1789, impressed everyone he met.
¹²⁶
Although he was only about five feet seven in height and slight in build, he had a commanding air, and men and women alike were readily attracted to him. In many respects he was a natural republican: born in the West Indies as the illegitimate son of a Scottish merchant (“the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar,” sneered John Adams), he had no interest in the monarchical claims of blood and family. He was rather more of a natural aristocrat than even Thomas Jefferson: at the beginning he had no estate or family to support him; his genius was all he had. And what genius it was! The worldly French politician and diplomat Talleyrand who knew kings and emperors ranked Hamilton as one of the two or three great men of the age.

At age sixteen Hamilton was employed as a clerk in a merchant’s firm in St. Croix. But he yearned to escape from his “grov’ling” position—ideally by a war in which he could risk his life and win honor. Merchants
and friends in St. Croix recognized the boy’s remarkable abilities and in 1772 sponsored his education in a preparatory school in New Jersey and then at King’s College (later Columbia). He wrote some brilliant Revolutionary pamphlets while still a college student and soon was in the midst of the war he had longed for. He took part in the retreat of Washington’s army across New Jersey and so impressed Washington that the commander-in-chief invited the young captain to join his staff as an aide-de-camp with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He had what one of his West Indian sponsors called a “laudable Ambition to Excell,” and more than most young men of the age he wanted the glory and fame that came from military heroism.
¹²⁷
More than once he courted death on the battle-field and took risks that left other officers shaking their heads at his foolhardy valor. In 1781 he told Washington he would resign his commission unless he was given a command. Under this pressure, Washington yielded and made him a battalion and eventually a brigade commander at York-town in October 1781. Hamilton talked his way into leading a major bayonet assault on the British redoubts, and he made the most of his opportunity for gallantry, being first over the redoubt. The attack was successful, and though seven French and American soldiers were killed and fifteen wounded, Hamilton emerged unscathed.
¹²⁸

Because he was raised in the West Indies and came to the North American continent as a teenager, Hamilton had little of the emotional attachment to a particular colony or state that most of the other Founders had. He naturally thought nationally, and from the outset of the Revolution he focused his attention on the government of the United States. In 1781–1782 he wrote an extraordinary series of papers on ways of strengthening the Confederation. In 1782 New York elected him, at age twentyseven, one of its representatives in Congress. There he met James Madison, and a fruitful collaboration for the strengthening of the national government was begun. This partnership led from the stymied efforts to add to the powers of the Confederation in the early 1780s to the Annapolis Convention in 1786, then to the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, and finally to the production of the
Federalist
papers on behalf of the Constitution. When Hamilton became secretary of the treasury, he had every reason to believe that this cooperation between himself and Madison, the Federalist leader in the House of Representatives, would continue.

Ultimately, however, Hamilton’s image of what the federal government should be differed from Madison’s. Instead of Madison’s disinterested
adjudicatory state, Hamilton envisioned the United States becoming a great powerful nation like Great Britain and the other states of modern Europe, led by an energetic government and designed, as he said, “for the accomplishment of great purposes.”
¹²⁹
As secretary of the treasury Hamilton was in a perfect position to realize his idea of what the United States should become. As if in emulation of Britain’s famous prime minster and First Lord of the Treasury Sir Robert Walpole, who had successfully built up the British state in the early decades of the eighteenth century, Hamilton saw himself as a kind of prime minister to Washington’s monarchical presidency. He sometimes even talked about “my administration.” Because he believed that “most of the important measures of every government are connected with the treasury,” he felt justified in meddling in the affairs of the other departments and in taking the lead in organizing and administering the government.
¹³⁰

Unlike Jefferson as head of the State Department and Knox as head of the War Department, Hamilton as secretary of the treasury had an extraordinary degree of authority and independence. Washington treated Jefferson and Knox as advisors only and often directly involved himself in the conduct of foreign affairs and military matters. But he treated Hamilton differently—essentially because he believed the Treasury Department was constitutionally different from the other departments. When Congress created the Departments of State and War in 1789, it simply declared that the secretaries were to perform such duties as the president required. When it created the Treasury Department, however, it made no mention of the president and instead required the secretary to report directly to the Congress. Unwilling to encroach on the authority of Congress, Washington thus gave Hamilton a much freer hand in running the treasury than he gave the other secretaries.
¹³¹

Emboldened in this way, Hamilton even began interfering in the legislative business of Congress. Indeed, one of the reasons the House of Representatives in the early congresses dispensed with standing committees was because it soon came to rely on the heads of the executive departments, in particular, the secretary of the treasury, to draft most of its bills. At the end of July 1789 the House of Representatives set up a Committee of Ways and Means to advise it on financial matters, but on September 2, 1789, the Treasury Department was created. On September 11 Alexander
Hamilton was appointed secretary of the treasury, and six days later the House discharged its Committee of Ways and Means, stating that it would rely on Hamilton instead for its financial knowledge. Congress might as well go home, complained the dyspeptic William Maclay in 1791; “Mr. Hamilton is all powerful and fails in nothing which he attempts.”
¹³²
Not until 1795, after Hamilton’s resignation from the Treasury Department, did the House reestablish its Ways and Means Committee.

Since opposition groups in Britain had traditionally considered the treasury as an important source of political corruption, some members of the First Congress regarded the new secretary of the treasury with suspicion—and with good reason: his opportunities for the abuse of patronage and influence were immense. The treasury was by far the largest department, with several dozen staff members in the treasury office and well over two thousand customs officials, revenue agents, and postmasters scattered around the country.
¹³³
The secretary of the treasury began in 1789 with thirty-nine members in the central office, including six chief officers, thirty-one clerks, and two messengers; by 1792 this number had grown to ninety. By comparison, the other departments were tiny: at the outset the secretary of state had four clerks and a messenger, the secretary of war had only three clerks, and the attorney general had none, there being as yet no Department of Justice.

Yet by contemporary European standards the treasury headquarters staff was minuscule and marked by republican simplicity. A French visitor to the treasury office in 1794 was startled to find the secretary attended by only a single crudely dressed servant, seated at a plain pine table covered with a green cloth, his records laid on makeshift plank shelves, in a “ministerial office” whose furnishings could not have cost more than ten dollars—”Spartan customs” everywhere.
¹³⁴

As secretary of the treasury, Hamilton set out to do for American finances what the early eighteenth-century English monarchical government had done in laying the basis for England’s stability and commercial supremacy. Although Hamilton denied being a monarchist, Gouverneur Morris later recalled that Hamilton was “on Principle opposed to republican and attached to monarchical Government.”
¹³⁵
During his five-hour speech in the Constitutional Convention Hamilton had declared that the British government was “the best in the world” and that “he doubted much whether any thing short of it would do in America.”
¹³⁶
However
much his sentiments shifted between monarchy and republicanism, the monarchical government of England was certainly the model for his financial program in the 1790 s. More than any other American, he saw England’s eighteenth-century experience as an object lesson for the United States, and he deliberately set out to duplicate England’s great achievements in political economy and public policy.

By the eighteenth century England had emerged from the chaos and civil wars of the seventeenth century, which had killed one king and deposed another, to become the dominant political and commercial power in the world. That this small island on the northern edge of Europe with a third of the population of continental France was able to build the greatest and richest empire since the fall of Rome was the miracle of the age. The eighteenth-century English “fiscal-military” state, in historian John Brewer’s apt term, could mobilize wealth and wage war as no other state in history ever had. Its centralized administration rested on its bureaucratic ability to acquire and use knowledge, and it had developed an extraordinary capacity to tax and to borrow from its subjects without impoverishing them.
¹³⁷

Hamilton saw that the secret of England’s success was its system of funded debt together with its banking structure and its market in public securities. By attempting to duplicate the English experience, Hamilton was flying in the face of several generations of bitter intellectual opposition to the commercialization of British society and the corruption of British politics. Most English writers of the century—whether famous Tory satirists like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift or little-remembered radical Whig publicists like John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon—had expressed a deep hostility to the great social, economic, and political changes taking place in eighteenth-century England. These critics thought that the general commercialization of English life, including the rise of trading companies, banks, stock markets, speculators, and new moneyed men, had undermined traditional values and threatened England with ruin. The monarchy and its minions had used patronage, the national debt, and the Bank of England to corrupt the society, including the House of Commons, and to build up the executive bureaucracy at the expense of the people’s liberties, usually for the purpose of waging war. In the face of these frightening developments, both radical Whigs and estranged Tories alike had championed a so-called “country” opposition to the deceit and luxury of the “court” that surrounded the monarch. Some of these reformers were so radical that they were accused of
harboring republican sentiments. The radical Whigs called for expansion of the suffrage, more liberty for the press, greater freedom of religion, more representation in Parliament, and a substantial reduction in the crown’s inflated power, including its standing army. These country-Whigs, in other words, were opposed to the very fiscal-military institutions and programs that had made Great Britain the most powerful nation in the world.