Washington [424]
Everything about the new government still had an improvised feel, and Washington’s advent occasioned some last-minute scurrying in the Senate chamber. Maclay referred to “nothing but bustle about the Senate Chamber in hauling chairs and removing tables” for his arrival.1 Once at Broad and Wall, Washington entered the hall—on later occasions, constables held back the crowd with long white rods—and mounted to the second-floor hall. Everyone clung nervously to protocol, and the president went through an awkward comedy of manners with the legislators. When he entered, they rose; when he was seated, they sat. Still dressed in shades of mourning for his mother, he was garbed in a suit of midnight blue, verging on black, that he had brought back from the Hartford factory.
In a hopeful speech, Washington anticipated Hamilton’s financial program by endorsing the need to establish public credit and promote manufacturing, agriculture, and commerce. He sounded a theme already resonant in his wartime letters: the need to ensure a strong national defense: “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.”2 He also advocated the advancement of science, literature, and learning through the formation of a national university. The speech was composed in the didactic style of a wise parent, patiently lecturing his children, that characterized Washington’s public pronouncements and defined his political rhetoric. When it ended, the legislators stood, Washington bowed, and then he descended to the street. William Maclay did not fault Washington’s speaking style, but ever watchful for monarchical tendencies, he carped that Washington had fallen into “the British mode of business” by asking department heads to lay certain documents before Congress.3
When Washington delivered his speech, he had little sense that a furor was about to erupt over Hamilton’s funding system or that American politics would become fractious and nasty. Even before Hamilton took office, Congress had enacted legislation to create a string of lighthouses, beacons, and buoys along the eastern seaboard for the customs service, placing Hamilton in charge of a vast public works project. He also had enormous patronage powers, as he named customs inspectors and other revenue officials. During the colonial era, the evasion of customs duties had become a time-honored practice, and Hamilton had to seek Washington’s approval for constructing ten boats called revenue cutters to police the waterways and intercept smugglers, giving birth to what later became the Coast Guard. For political harmony, Washington and Hamilton distributed the construction work and skipper jobs to different parts of the country, but for a nation already wary of bureaucracy, the program represented a significant, and for some ominous, expansion of government power.
As the office handling money matters, the Treasury Department was bound to be a flash point for controversy. When Congress debated its shape in 1789, republican purists wanted it headed by a three-member board as a safeguard against concentrated power. When a single secretary was chosen instead, Congress tried to hem in his power by requiring that, unlike the other cabinet secretaries, he should file periodic reports directly with them. Instead of subordinating Hamilton to the legislature, however, this approach enmeshed him in its workings. The treasury secretary’s aggressive style guaranteed that the executive branch, not Congress, would oversee