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Philadelphia, as we have already observed, was chosen to be the residence of the federal government for ten years; and there, in the courthouse, on the first Monday in December, 1790, the first Congress assembled to hold their third session.

The removal of the seat of government from New York had caused much dissatisfaction in that quarter, while many Philadelphians experienced equal dissatisfaction, but for different reasons. Rents, prices of provisions, and other necessaries of life, greatly advanced. “Some of the blessings anticipated from the removal of Congress to this city are already beginning to be apparent,” wrote a Philadelphian. “Rents of houses have risen, and I fear will continue to rise shamefully; even in the outskirts they have lately been increased from fourteen, sixteen, and eighteen pounds, to twenty-five, twenty-eight, and thirty. This is oppression. Our markets, it is expected, will also be dearer than heretofore.”

Washington was subjected to considerable personal annoyance by the change. During the recess of Congress, he commissioned Mr. Lear, his private secretary, to rent a house for his use in Philadelphia. One owned by Robert Morris appeared to be the most eligible of all; but, for a long time, Washington could not procure an answer to his prudent question, “What will be the rent?” Both the state and city authorities, through committees, had offered to provide at their own expense a home for the president; but Washington declined the generous offer. He preferred the independence of a resident in his own hired house; and he was also convinced that the offer was made because of a desire to have Philadelphia become the permanent residence of the government. The erection of a presidential mansion would be an argument in favor of the scheme. Washington preferred a more southern location. He was to choose the spot. He wished to have his views unbiassed; so he refused all offers to lessen his expenses at the cost of the city of Philadelphia, or of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Time after time Washington wrote to Lear about the rent of Morris's house. “He has most assuredly,” he said, “formed an idea of what ought to be the rent of the tenement in the condition he left it; and with this aid, the committee ought, I conceive, to be as little at a loss in determining what it should rent for, with the additions and alterations which are about to be made, and which ought to be done in a plain and neat, and not by any means extravagant, style.” He was satisfied that the committee were delaying with the intention of having the rent paid by the public; and he foresaw that he might be subjected to heavy bills of expense in fixing and furnishing the house in an extravagant manner.

“Let us for a moment suppose,” he said, “that the rooms (the new ones, I mean) were to be hung with tapestry, or a very rich and costly paper, neither of which would suit my present furniture; that costly ornaments for the bow-windows, extravagant chimney-pieces and the like, were to be provided; that workmen, from extravagance of the times, for every twenty shillings' worth of work would charge forty shillings; and that advantage would be taken of the occasion to newly paint every part of the house and buildings; would there be any propriety in adding ten or twelve-and-a-half per cent. for all this to the rent of the house in its original state, for the two years that I am to hold it? If the solution of these questions is in the negative, wherein lies the difficulty of determining that the houses and lots, when finished according to the proposed plan, ought to rent for so much? When all is done that can be done,” he added, “the residence will not be so commodious as that I left in New York, for there (and the want of it will be found a real inconvenience at Mr. Morris's) my office was in the front room below, where persons on business immediately entered; whereas, in the present case, they will have to ascend two pairs of stairs, and to pass by the public rooms as well as the private chambers, to get to it.”[29]

It must be remembered that Washington refused to receive a salary for his services as president of the United States, but stipulated that the amount of his expenses should be paid by the government. In regulating these expenses, he was as careful to avoid extravagance as if his private purse had to be drawn upon to pay. In New York he lived frugally,[30] and he resolved to continue, in Philadelphia, the same unostentatious way of living, not only on his own account, but for the benefit of those connected with the government who could not afford to spend more than their salaries. His example had a most salutary effect. An illustrative case may be cited. When Oliver Wolcott, of Connecticut, was appointed first auditor of the treasury, he, like a prudent man, would not accept the office until he could visit New York, and ascertain whether he could live upon the salary of fifteen hundred dollars a year. He came to the conclusion that he could live upon one thousand, and he wrote to his wife, saying: “The example of the president and his family will render parade and expense improper and disreputable.” What a significant commentary!The rent of Morris's house was at last fixed at three thousand dollars a year; and on the twenty-second of November Washington set out for Philadelphia, accompanied by his family, in a chariot drawn by four horses. They were allowed to travel without parade, and on reaching Philadelphia, on the twenty-eighth, they found their house ready for their reception. Yet it was nearly a month before they were prepared to receive company. Mrs. Washington's first levee or reception in Philadelphia was on Friday, the twenty-fifth of December, where, according to eye-witnesses, there was an assemblage of “the most brilliant, beautiful, well-dressed, and well educated women that had ever been seen in America.”

The season opened gayly. “I should spend a very dissipated winter,” wrote the vice-president's wife to a friend, “if I were to accept one half the invitations I receive, particularly to the routs, or tea-and-cards.” The city, for a few weeks after the assembling of Congress, appeared to be intoxicated. But Washington and his wife were proof against the song of the syren. They could not be seduced from their temperate habits in eating, drinking, and sleeping, by the scenes of immoderate pleasure around them. They held their respective levees on Tuesdays and Fridays, as in New York, without the least ostentation; and Congressional and official dinners were served in a plain way, without any extravagant displays of plate, ornament, or variety of dishes. Mrs. Washington's levees always closed at nine o'clock. When the great clock in the hall struck that hour, she would say to those present, with a complacent smile, “The general always retires at nine, and I usually precede him.” In a few minutes the drawing-room would be closed, the lights extinguished, and the presidential mansion would be as dark and quiet before ten o'clock as the house of any private citizen.

Washington entered upon his public duties with great energy on his arrival in Philadelphia. His health was almost perfectly restored, and subjects of profound interest demanded the attention of Congress. That body assembled on the sixth of December, and on the eighth, in the presence of both houses sitting in the senate-chamber, the president delivered, in person, his second annual message. He opened by congratulating Congress on the financial prosperity of the country, the import duties having produced, in a little more than thirteen months, the sum of one million, nine hundred thousand dollars. He had without difficulty obtained a loan in Holland for the partial liquidation of the foreign debt; and, in consequence of the increasing confidence in the government, certificates of the domestic debt had greatly increased in value. He informed them that Kentucky was about to ask for admission into the Union as a sovereign state. He called their attention to the Indian war commenced in the northwestern territory; and after some allusion to the disturbed state of Europe, growing out of recent events in France, he suggested measures for the protection of American commerce in the Mediterranean sea, where it was continually exposed to the depredations of corsairs of the Barbary powers.

He called their attention to regulations concerning the consular system that had been proposed and partially established; to the creation of a mint, the right of coinage being delegated to the federal government alone; to a uniform system of weights and measures; to a reorganization of the post-office system, and a uniform militia.

The two most important measures brought forward at the beginning of the session were, a plan for a national bank, and a tax on ardent spirits distilled within the United States. In a former communication to Congress, the secretary of the treasury recommended the establishment of a national bank, as a useful instrument in the management of the finances of the country; and now, at the opening of a new session, he presented a special report, in which the policy of such a measure was urged with Hamilton's usual strength and acuteness of logic. He argued upon premises resting on the alleged facilities afforded to trade by banks, and the great benefits to be expected from a national one in a commercial point of view. He chiefly dwelt upon the topic of the convenience to the government of a paper medium in which to conduct its monetary transactions, and especially as a ready resource for such temporary loans as might from time to time be required.

Such reasons, utterly without force in the light of subsequent experience, were wise and important at that time, and commended themselves to the people of the United States, because they had not forgotten the convenience afforded by the bank of North America, established by Robert Morris in 1781, chiefly for the purpose of assistance to himself in the difficult office of superintendent of finance. That was the first experiment in America in the issue of a currency redeemable at sight—a promissory note payable on demand—which had been the practice of the bank of England for nearly a hundred years. It was a system so much superior to the colonial loan-office plans, and the scheme upon which the continental paper-money had been issued during the earlier years of the war for independence, that the people generally received Hamilton's recommendation with favor. But it met with determined opposition in Congress. The anti-federal feeling which from the close of 1789 had manifested itself, principally in criticisms upon the federal constitution, now assumed the shape of a party opposed to the financial policy of the administration. At the head of this opposition was Mr. Jefferson, the secretary of state; and the herald's trumpet for the tilt was sounded by the Virginia assembly, in the adoption of a resolution, declaring so much of the late act of Congress as provided for the assumption of the state debts “repugnant to the constitution of the United States,” and “the exercise of a power not expressly granted to the general government.” That clause of the act for funding the continental debt, which restrained the government from redeeming at pleasure any part of that debt, was denounced as “dangerous to the rights, and subversive of the interests, of the people.”

The bank project encountered very little opposition in the senate, where the bill originated; but in the house it was assailed vehemently, chiefly on the ground of its being unconstitutional. Its policy was questioned, and the utility of banking systems stoutly denied. The arguments on both sides, in relation to the constitutionality of the measure (the constitution being utterly silent on the subject), assumed on frequent occasions an extremely metaphysical tone. It was argued, in favor of a bank, that the power to establish one was implied in the powers delegated to Congress by the constitution to collect a revenue, and to pay the debts of the United States, and in the authority expressly granted to make all laws necessary and proper for carrying those powers into execution.

1791

On the twentieth of January 1791, the bank bill passed the senate without a division, and on the eighth of February it passed the house of representatives by a vote of thirty-nine to twenty. Before signing it, the president requested the written opinion of each member of his cabinet as to its constitutionality, and his reasons for such opinion. They promptly complied. The cabinet was divided. Hamilton and Knox strongly maintained that it was constitutional: Jefferson and Randolph (the attorney-general) as strongly contended that it was unconstitutional. Washington examined the whole subject with great deliberation, and then put his signature to the act. That act gave a charter to the institution limited to twenty years, and for that period Congress renounced the power of establishing any other bank. The capital was to be ten millions of dollars, divided into twenty-five thousand shares of four hundred dollars each; eight millions to be subscribed by individuals, and the other two millions by the United States. It was to be managed by twenty-five directors, chosen annually by the stockholders, and its headquarters were to be at Philadelphia.

The opponents of the bank, and especially Mr. Jefferson, presumed to censure the president because, in the conscientious exercise of his power, he made the act a law by affixing his signature. The secretary of state had other than constitutional grounds for his opposition to the measure. He had conceived an irrepressible distrust of Hamilton. It seemed almost like a monomania. He considered the bank as one of the engines in a scheme intended by Hamilton to make the national legislature subservient to, and under the direction of, the treasury, for the purpose of promoting his monarchical schemes. He afterward affirmed that Washington was deceived by Hamilton, and that he did not perceive the drift or effect of his financial schemes; and ungenerously and unfairly remarked, that, “unversed in financial projects and calculations and budgets, his approbation of them was bottomed on his confidence in the man.”

No person knew better than Mr. Jefferson the unfairness of this assertion. None knew better than he how little Washington was prone to be swayed in his judgment by partiality either toward a man or a measure. He always weighed everything with the greatest care and most profound wisdom, and the opinions of friends and foes were always submitted to the alembic of his keen penetration, and the tests of his almost unfailing sagacity, before they were acted upon. “Hamilton and myself,” wrote Jefferson, “were daily pitted in the cabinet like two cocks.” The personal resentments and consequent prejudices of the secretary of state appear to have frequently warped his judgment and fettered his generosity.

An increase of duties on imported spirits, and an excise tax on those produced at home, in order to increase the revenue required by the charges growing out of the assumption of the state debts, recommended by the secretary of the treasury and submitted to the consideration of Congress in the form of an act, excited warm discussion. An attempt was made to strike out the excise, but failed; and after animated and sometimes violent debates, it was carried by a vote in the house of thirty-five to twenty-one.[31] The portion of the act relating to excise was received with indignation in some parts of the country, and led, as we shall hereafter observe, to actual insurrection in western Pennsylvania.The establishment of a national mint also occupied the attention of Congress at this session. At the conclusion of the war for independence, the continental Congress requested Robert Morris, the minister of finance, to lay before them his views upon the subject of coins and currency. The labor of preparing a report upon the subject was assigned to the able assistant financier, Gouverneur Morris. It was prepared with great care, and presented in 1782. Morris's first effort was to harmonize the currency of all the states. He ascertained that the one thousand, four hundred and fortieth part of a Spanish dollar was a common divisor for the various currencies. Starting with that fraction as a unit, he proposed the following table of moneys:—

• Ten units to be equal to one penny.
• Ten pence to one bill.
• Ten bills, one dollar (about seventy-five cents of our present currency).
• Ten dollars one crown.

Congress debated the subject from time to time until 1784, when Mr. Jefferson proposed a different scheme. He recommended four coins upon the basis of the Spanish dollar, as follows:—

• A golden piece of the value of ten dollars.
• A dollar in silver.
• A tenth of a dollar in silver.
• A hundredth of a dollar in copper.

In 1785 Congress adopted Mr. Jefferson's scheme, and in 1786 made provision for coinage upon that basis. This was the origin of our decimal currency—the copper cent, the silver dime and dollar, and the golden eagle. Since then, several other coins of different values, having the decimal basis, have been made of gold and silver; and a smaller cent, made of metallic composition, has been coined.

Mr. Jefferson, soon after he came into the cabinet, urged the necessity of a uniform and national coinage, “to banish the discordant pounds, shillings, pence, and farthings of the different states, and to establish in their stead the new denominations.” The subject received some attention during that session, and was agitated in the next (the one we are now considering); but it was not until the second of April, 1792, that laws were enacted for the establishment and regulation of a mint. Thereafter there was much delay, and the mint was not in full operation until January, 1795. During that interval its performances were chiefly experimental, and the variety of silver and copper coins, now so much sought after by collectors, were struck. The most noted of these is the “Washington cent,” so called because it bore the head of Washington on one side. It was a long time before Congress decided upon a proper device for the coins, and the debates that occurred upon the subject were interesting and sometimes amusing.

During this short session, full official reports of Harmer's expedition were laid before Congress; and his repulse, and the increasing danger to the western settlements from the Indians on the frontier, caused that body to authorize an addition to the standing military force of a second regiment of infantry, nine hundred strong. By the same act the president was authorised to appoint, for such term as he should think proper, a major-general and a brigadier-general, and to call into service, in addition to the militia, a corps of two thousand six months' levies, and a body of mounted volunteers.

The conduct of the troops under Harmer was stigmatized as disgraceful. It was thought proper to place the new expedition about to be organized under the command of another officer. St. Clair was then at the seat of government. He was governor of the Northwestern territory, and well acquainted with the country and the movements of the Indians; and Washington, having confidence in his old friend and companion-in-arms, conferred upon him the general command. Yet suffering chagrin and mortification because of the disasters to Harmer's expedition on account of Indian ambuscades, the president, when he took leave of St. Clair, warned him against them in a most solemn manner, saying: “You have your instructions from the secretary of war. I had a strict eye to them, and will add but one word—beware of surprise! You know how the Indians fight. I repeat it—beware of a surprise!”

At that time, three famous Seneca chiefs from western New York—Corn-Planter, Half Town, and Big Tree—were at the seat of government, and offered to visit their dusky brethren in the Ohio region, and try to persuade them to bury the hatchet. Washington, who had a most earnest desire for peace with the savages, accepted their offer, saying: “By this humane measure you will render these mistaken people a great service, and probably prevent their being swept off the face of the earth. The United States require that these people should only demean themselves peaceably.” He concluded his remarks with the following words, which were indicative of a scheme for civilizing the Indians which had occupied his mind for a long time: “When you return to your country, tell your nation that it is my desire to promote their prosperity, by teaching them the use of domestic animals, and the manner that the white people plough and raise so much corn; and if, upon consideration, it would be agreeable to the nation at large to learn those arts, I will find some means of teaching them, at such places within their country as shall be agreed upon.”

With the admission of Kentucky and Vermont into the Union as sovereign states, and providing for the increase and pay of the army, the first Congress closed its labors. They had, within two years, performed a great work; and no body of men, except those who composed the continental Congress during the earlier years of the Revolution, so fairly deserve our sincere gratitude as they. Within that time, with Washington at their head, they had set in motion the machinery of the federal government, laid the foundations of its policy, and placed the United States firmly in the position of a leading nation among the states of the world.

The term of service of the first Congress expired on the third of March, 1791; but Washington did not leave Philadelphia for Mount Vernon until late in the month.