A History of the American People

whereby the Southerners, in exchange for their votes got the federal capital located on the
Potomac. But, he would reply, there was no personal gain in this.
The first shocked awareness of personal corruption is reflected in the diaries of Senator
William Maclay of Pennsylvania, who recorded the earliest instances of deliberate leaking of
sensitive government information to favored individuals on the day the Report on the Debt' was published, January 14, 1790:This day the "Budget" as it was called was opened in the House of
Representatives. An extraordinary rise of certificates has been remarked for some time past. This
could not be accounted for, neither in Philadelphia nor elsewhere. But the report from the
Treasury [proposing that certificates be repaid at par] reveals all.' The next week he noted:
'Hawkins of North Carolina said as he came up he passed two expresses with very large sums of
money on their way to North Carolina for purposes of speculation in certificates. Wadsworth has
sent off two small vessels for the Southern states on the errand of buying up certificates. I really
fear that members of Congress are deeper in this business than any others.' To members of the
American political class, especially Southerners, this was the first real proof of the existence and
unscrupulousness of the money power,' the huge, occult, octopus-like inhuman creature associated with banks-especially the central bank-New York, Boston, the North, England and the City of London, and unrepublican, unAmerican attitudes of every kind. This nightmare conspiracy would haunt generations of Democratic politicians in years to come, and it was in the 1790s that it made its first appearance. Thus Washington's first administration, the earliest true government in America's history, was an incompatible coalition. Washington saw nothing wrong in this, at first. He was head of state as well as head of government and felt that his administration should reflect all the great interests in the nation, North and South, agriculture, commerce, and manufactures-should be in fact a geographical amalgam of the new nation. Of course there would be conflicts: how could it be otherwise with such a vast country? Washington agreed with South Carolina's William Loughton on the new state:We took each other with our mutual bad habits and respective evils, for better
for worse. The northern state adopted us with our slaves, and we adopted them with their
Quakers.' The United States was like a marriage. It was better, in Washington's view, to have
interests reconciled and disputes mediated in Cabinet, than to have open warfare between parties,
and government and opposition, as in England. Besides, the American system was different.
Because of the separation of powers, members of the administration were not also members of
Congress, answerable to it in person, as in the House of Commons. Washington found, in
practice, that the more separate the powers were, the better. One aspect of government he
handled personally was the making of treaties. When he was in the process of negotiating his
Indian Treaty he agreed to appear before the Senate. This was a goodwill gesture because he did
not need to under the Constitution. He was mortally offended when his explanations of what he
was doing, instead of being accepted, were greeted by a decision to refer it all to a select
committee, before which he was expected to appear again. He started up in a violent fret,' exclaimingThis defeats every purpose of my coming here.' And he refused to do so, ever again.
In future he referred treaties to Congress only when they were completed-as the Constitution
provided.
With the powers separated, then, Washington judged it better to contain all the main factions
within his administration. In practice, with Adams, as vice-president, speaking for New England,
this meant he balanced Hamilton (New York) and the War Secretary Henry Knox (1750-1806), a
vast, happy, fat man who had started out as a Boston bookseller but had become Washington's
most reliable and trustworthy general-both of them ardent federalists-against Jefferson, Secretary