Given the nom de plume “Cincinnatus,” the broadside’s author was probably Alexander McDougall. His plea, however, met with fierce dissent. One reply authored by “a battered soldier” shouted that, of all the groups in the city, merchants were the least patriotic or fit for office. Candidates “who profess themselves to be your Friends” and were “of good natured Dispositions” were plainly too ambitious to be trusted. Moreover, merchants had shown themselves to be too forgiving of Loyalists’ misdeeds. “From their natural Timidity, Want of Firmness, and [the] intimate Connexions, by the Ties of Consanguinity, or Marriage” to Tories, the writer warned, merchants would naturally “feel disposed to pardon the most obnoxious Tories.” “If you [mechanics] fail” to elect candidates who will firmly punish Tories, he predicted that “you may depend on it that you and your Children will soon become Hewers of Wood, and Drawers of Water, to the Tories in this State.” In other words, either the Tories had to be defeated or the state’s patriots would once again find themselves under British domination.47
Consolidating Forces
Alexander Hamilton did not attend the first meeting to organize the Bank of New-York. In steering Manhattan merchants away from the land bank, he had hoped to drive them into the arms of a Church–Wadsworth bank, but they showed little desire to trade one form of financial domination for another. Hamilton knew, moreover, that it would become harder to establish a bank for Church and Wadsworth once the Bank of New-York was organized. The shares, he explained to John Church, had “been taken up by the broad footing of the whole body of the Merchants” in the city. Under those circumstances, he continued, “it never would be your interest to persue a distinct project in opposition to theirs.” Though it “embarrassed” him, Hamilton therefore “concluded it best to fall in with” the Bank of New-York before it was too late. By “employ[ing] [Church and Wadsworth’s] money” to make them “purchaser[s] in the general bank,” Hamilton hoped “to induce” the bank promoters “to put the business upon … a footing” that would “enable” Church and Wadsworth “[to combine] interests with theirs.”48
The bank’s promoters were more than willing to accept Hamilton’s involvement in their institution. Even though he had no fortune of his own and would never own more than one symbolic share of the bank’s stock, Hamilton’s name was added to the would-be board of directors.49 In conversations with the bank’s “most influential characters,” Hamilton set about convincing them to relax their restrictions on shareholder voting. Originally, he explained, “no stockholder” of “whatever amount” could cast “more than seven votes.” But Hamilton convinced them to allow shareholders one additional vote for every five shares they owned in excess of ten. This, he reported to Church, was as far as the Bank of New-York’s promoters would “depart” from their original limits. The change, however, gave Church and Wadsworth a greater voice within the institution and how it distributed credit. Therefore, even before the “Constitution for the said Bank” was drafted, Hamilton had made substantive changes to the institution’s design.
Although Hamilton is often credited with being the bank constitution’s author, the true extent of his contributions is unclear; the copy of the document found in his files was not in his own hand. It does, however, bear his intellectual fingerprints: subtle but substantial alterations to strengthen shareholder governance and security beyond what was outlined in the bank’s original plan. These changes included adding one more seat to the board of directors to make it a tie-proof cabinet of thirteen, which would, in future elections, directly choose bank officers by majority votes. The new compact empowered directors to expand the bank’s capital and required them to take oaths of office before a city magistrate. And perhaps most important, a provision in the constitution’s nineteenth article mandated that the president and directors apply to the New York legislature for a charter of incorporation and file separate petitions seeking laws that would make “Fraud or Embezzlement” a crime and “punish the Counterfeiters of Bank Notes and Checks” as they thought “necessary and proper for the Security of the Stockholders and the Public.”50 This was not to be a bank that existed separately from the state. Rather, it depended on government for corporate privileges and statutory regulations that would allow it to function more effectively in the marketplace. The bank was asking the state for recognition and inviting it to expand its involvement in the local and regional economy by regulating transactions and banking activities.
Similarly, Robert Livingston’s outline for the Bank of the State of New York had called for state “officers of the government” to “inspect [the bank’s] books” and “examine their mortgages,” in exchange for the bank serving as the “receptacle of public money” and having its “notes taken in taxes.” In other words, the bank would welcome the intrusion of inspection if it was granted the privilege of being the official state bank and the repository of public funds.51 New York’s bank promoters therefore not only knew that the state legislature would be involved in their institution if they were granted a charter, they were counting on it; state-imposed regulations would be a necessity, as would the drafting of new laws to define and protect the bank’s operations. These expansions of state power were explicitly sought by bank promoters.52
The Bank of New-York’s petition was submitted to New York lawmakers on 12 March—three days before a shareholder meeting “officially” ordered them sent. Nearly a month had passed since Robert Livingston and the landbank proprietors had submitted a petition for the exclusive incorporation of their institution. A state assembly committee had already drafted legislation to charter the land bank and give it exclusive privileges for two years, a law that would have prevented any rival banks from opening in the state during that time. The Bank of New-York’s promoters therefore not only had to win a privilege for themselves; they also had to defeat a legislative process already underway.53
Former Sons of Liberty leader and merchant Jacobus Van Zandt—an advocate of specie-based money and a speculator in Tory-forfeited lands—was the first signer of record on the bank’s petition. Conveniently, his nephew Peter P. Van Zandt was a newly elected member of the state assembly from New York City.54 There were other connections, too, as Alexander McDougall was a leader in the Bank of New-York and a state senator, and Isaac Roosevelt was a city merchant and one of the bank’s newly chosen directors. With the exception of Alexander Hamilton, the new board of directors was composed entirely of merchants. Bank president Alexander McDougall, more than any merchant in the state, had unassailable patriotic credentials. Two other directors—Thomas Randall and Comfort Sands—were merchants who had tried to run for political office in the recent past and had been opposed by the city’s more working-class mechanics.
Yet these figures were far less controversial than three other men in the group: onetime Loyalists Joshua Waddington and Daniel McCormack, both of whom were bank directors, and William Seton, another Loyalist who was to be the new bank’s cashier, conducting its day-to-day affairs. The new bank seemed to have become a vehicle for urban coalition building among Whigs and Tories, garnering its support from former Loyalists, subtle varietals of “hotheaded” and moderate Whigs, established merchants and ambitious upstarts, onetime land-bank supporters, and even some of the city’s mechanics.55
The capacity to create common interests among onetime enemies and potential rivals