Washington [445]
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.”24
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.25 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.”26 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.”27 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