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Hello, and thank you for joining the American Revolution. This week, episode 369, the first bank of the United States.

In our last regular episode, we covered some of the final events of the second session of the first Congress

and the midterm elections that were held mostly in the fall of

1790. Congress did return to a third session in December of 1790 after these elections,

which met back in Philadelphia. Before I get into the third session of Congress, I do want to

touch on one more event that happened back in the second session when we

were still back in New York. I talked before in earlier episodes that Congress had created a

tariff package and began raising revenue. The problem with import tariffs, as the leaders well knew

from the colonial era, was smuggling. It was pretty easy for merchant vessels to avoid tariffs

by simply offloading their goods away from the main ports and avoiding the customs officials.

To enforce tariffs on the recommendation of Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton,

Congress authorized the creation of the Revenue Marine. Ten ships would be built

to control the coast and enforce federal tariffs. Two ships were made for New England, two for

New York, one for Delaware Bay, two for the Chesapeake, and two more for the Carolinas and Georgia.

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