Thomas Willing, who had been president of the Bank of North America, accepted the job as the new national bank’s president. The bank was overseen by a board of twenty-five directors. Branches opened in Boston, New York, Charleston, and Baltimore in 1792, followed by branches in Norfolk (1800), Savannah (1802), Washington, D.C. The Bank of the United States, now commonly referred to as the first Bank of the United States, opened for business in Philadelphia on December 12, 1791, with a twenty-year charter. President Washington signed the bill into law in February 1791. Despite the opposing voices, Hamilton’s bill cleared both the House and the Senate after much debate. Jefferson also argued that the Constitution did not grant the government the authority to establish corporations, including a national bank. Such an institution clashed with Jefferson’s vision of the United States as a chiefly agrarian society, not one based on banking, commerce, and industry. Thomas Jefferson was afraid that a national bank would create a financial monopoly that might undermine state banks and adopt policies that favored financiers and merchants, who tended to be creditors, over plantation owners and family farmers, who tended to be debtors. Not everyone agreed with Hamilton’s plan. He argued that an American version of this institution could issue paper money (also called banknotes or currency), provide a safe place to keep public funds, offer banking facilities for commercial transactions, and act as the government’s fiscal agent, including collecting the government’s tax revenues and paying the government’s debts.
Hamilton used the charter of the Bank of England as the basis for his plan. In December 1790, Hamilton submitted a report to Congress in which he outlined his proposal. One of those was creating a national bank.
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One prominent architect of the fledgling country - Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury under the new Constitution - had ambitious ideas about how to solve some of these problems. The new nation’s leaders had their work cut out for them: reestablishing commerce and industry, repaying war debt, restoring the value of the currency, and lowering inflation. The 1780s saw widespread economic disruption. The United States of America, a name the new country had adopted under the Articles of Confederation, was beset with problems. The War for Independence was over, but all was not well.
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