The Senate referred Mr. Clay's resolution, together with an amendment to it, proposed by Colonel Hayne, for a general reduction of duties, to its committee on Manufactures. The committee reported a bill based on Mr. Clay's principle. The Constitution does not, however, allow the Senate to originate a bill for raising revenue, and the majority of the Senators voted to lay the bill on the table, and await the movements in the House.
On June 29th the House bill appeared in the Senate, and was referred by that body to its committee on Manufactures. On July 2nd Mr. Dickerson reported from this committee the House bill, with a series of amendments to it, proposed by the committee. These amendments were all in the direction of Mr. Clay's idea, and were adopted by the Senate. The bill as thus amended passed the Senate on July 9th, the Senators from every Northern Commonwealth voting for it, and those from every Southern Commonwealth, except Kentucky, Missouri, and Louisiana, voting against it. Missouri was hardly to be then classed as a Southern Commonwealth. Louisiana was won by an increase of the duty on sugar. And only one of the Senators from Kentucky voted against the measure.
The House of Representatives refused to concur in some of the amendments, and the measure was sent to a Conference committee. This committee patched up a compromise, and the bill became a law on July 14th.
On the whole, it was doubtful if the bill, with the changes imposed upon it by the Senate, would prove to be any relief to the South. Many of the Southerners claimed that it would increase the burden upon that section, while none of them appeared to think it would lighten it.
What now were the planters to do? They had waited for the extinguishment of the debt, and for the period when the Treasury would no longer require the sixteen millions of dollars per annum applied to its cancellation, hoping for a general reduction of duties by something like this sum as the necessary result; but instead of this they were now offered, as a final solution of the tariff question, a slight reduction of duties on articles coming into competition with home products, a practical abolition of the duties on those which did not come into competition with home products, and an increase in the expenses of the Government to the amount of the receipts whatever they might be. This was to be the permanent policy of the country, the "American System."
They were indeed wofully disappointed, not to say deceived. There seemed now no further hope of aid to them, from either Congress, the President, or the courts. They must yield unconditionally and hopelessly, or resist the execution of the law. The former course was too much to expect from the proud barons of South Carolina. The only question was whether some legal basis for the resistance could be found, or whether it must take on the form of rebellion. We have already considered Calhoun's doctrine of nullification, and his claim that it was a constitutional remedy; it now remains for us to trace briefly the history of the attempt to apply it. Before, however, we can do this intelligently, we must consider the other political developments of the year 1832, occasioned chiefly by the presidential election of that year, but affecting directly or indirectly the attitude of the Administration toward events in South Carolina, and the attitude of Congress toward the President in dealing with nullification.
THE UNITED STATES BANK AND THE PRESIDENTIAL CONTEST OF 1832
THE UNITED STATES BANK AND THE PRESIDENTIAL CONTEST OF 1832
Jackson and the Bank in his First Annual Message—Jackson's Relations to the Portsmouth Branch of the Bank—Jackson's Opposition in Principle to the Bank—The Political Science of the Constitution of 1787—Western Democracy—The West and the "Money Power" of the East—"States' rights" and the Bank—The Case of Brown and Maryland—Democracy and Socialism—Benton's Attack on the Bank—Benton Repulsed—Jackson and Benton—The Bank and the People—The Existence of the Bank made a Political Issue—Jackson's Second Attack on the Bank—Jackson's Plan for a Bank—Benton's Resolution against the Re-charter of the Bank—Jackson's Challenge to make the Continued Existence of the Bank the Issue in the Campaign of 1832—The Challenge Accepted—The Bank's Petition for Re-charter—Benton's Charge of Illegal Practices—Passage of the Bill for Re-charter—The Veto of the Bank Bill—The Bank and Foreign Powers—The Bank and the West—The Bank and the Rich—Structure and Powers of the Bank—Jackson on Executive Independence—Von Holst's Criticism of the Veto Message—The President's Real Meaning.
In his first annual message, that of December 8th, 1829, President Jackson began his war upon the United States Bank. He declared in it that the constitutionality and expediency of the law creating the Bank were well questioned by a large portion of the people, and that its failure to establish a sound and uniform currency, the great end of its existence, must be admitted by all.
Basing themselves chiefly upon an individual report made by Mr. John Quincy Adams on May 14th, 1832, in regard to the condition of the Bank, and upon documents referred to in that report, recent historians attribute President Jackson's first attack upon the United States Bank to a personal feud between his friends in New Hampshire and Mr. Webster's friends there.
Senator Levi Woodbury, of New Hampshire, the leader of the Jackson party in New Hampshire, endeavored, in the summer of 1829, to have Jeremiah Mason, Mr. Webster's great friend, removed from the presidency of the branch of the United States Bank at Portsmouth, N. H., and Isaac Hill, another New Hampshire friend of the President, attempted at the same time to have the United States pension agency, connected with the Portsmouth branch of the United States Bank, removed to Concord, and connected with a little bank there of which Hill had been president, and in which he was still interested. Jackson's Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Ingham, asked Mr. Biddle, the president of the United States Bank, to have Mason removed, and his Secretary of War, Mr. Eaton, ordered Mason to transfer the pension agency to Hill's bank in Concord. Mr. Biddle looked into the matter, and being convinced that the whole thing was a political scheme, refused to have Mason removed from office, and prevented the execution of Eaton's order in regard to the transfer of the pension agency.
These are, very briefly stated, the facts upon which some of the American historians found the theory that Jackson, entertaining no opposition in principle to the Bank at the beginning of his Administration, became so enraged at its managers, because of their success in these petty bouts with his Cabinet officers, that heresolved upon its destruction. The treatment which Adams and Clay had received at the hands of Jackson and his friends from 1824 onward had led them to feel that Jackson's whole nature was full of personal rancor, and that he could see nothing except from a personal point of view. There is little doubt that this feeling largely determined Adams' ideas of Jackson's attitude in the Bank question, and that the historians have written the account of the Bank controversy under the influence of Adams' representations.
There is undoubtedly some truth in this view of the matter, but it is far from being the whole truth. It is not even that part of the truth which is most valuable to the student of American history. There was an opposition in principle to the United States Bank, as well as a personal conflict between leaders in regard to it. That opposition in principle was the opposition of "States' rights" democracy to centralized privilege.
In all political systems there is a political science as well as a public, or constitutional, law. The political science of a state is based chiefly upon the actual social conditions and relations of its population, and its public or constitutional law ought to be based upon its political science. In fact, however, we seldom see social conditions, political theory, and public law in a state of perfect harmony. It is the prime problem of political and legal progress to work out this great result.
The political science or theory upon which the Constitution of 1787 was founded was thoroughly English. It recognized social distinctions, and its most fundamental principle was compromise between conflicting interests. It was substantially in harmony with social conditions, on the one side,and was fairly expressed through the Constitution of 1787, on the other. Without the interposition of other forces it would have made out of the United States a new England. But French political science had already gained a foothold in the country. It was contained in the Declaration of Independence, and its prime postulate was "the equality of all men." It did not then comport with the social condition of the country, and the Constitution did not make its principle into positive law. It was, therefore, at the beginning, abstract, and theoretical. The man who taught it, however, became President, and the party which embraced it became the governing party. But their practice was not made consistent with their theory, and could not be, so long as the social conditions of the country contradicted their theory. It was the settlement of the country west of the Alleghanies which first created social conditions in harmony with their theory. The distinction between master and slave was not permitted to enter the larger portion of it; the distinction between the rich and the poor could not at first exist, or be, for many years, developed; and the distinction between the cultivated and the ignorant was likewise obliged to remain long in abeyance; while the dangers and the hardships of frontier life developed, speedily, a strong sense of self-reliance and self-esteem. General equality and practical self-help were the first social results of the levelling experiences of the camp, the wilderness, and the prairie. With such influences operating upon such characters as undertook the making of the West, the most adventurous part of the population of the East, that bold and boastful Democracy was produced, which began after 1820 to make itself powerfully felt in modifying the original conservative principles of the institutions of the country. Connect with these new social conditions, and thepolitical principles evolved out of them, the fact that the West, like all new countries, had little money or capital, and was a constant borrower from the East, in order to furnish itself with roads, implements, means of transportation, and manufactured articles, and we have the forces and the interests which were bound, under the first general financial pressure, to make an onslaught upon the "money power and privilege" of the East, as embodied in the United States Bank.
The "States' rights" opposition to the Bank had been aroused more than a decade before Jackson's message of 1829. The Bank and its branches were the sole depositories of the funds of the Government. By refusing to accept on deposit the bills of Commonwealth banks which did not redeem their bills in specie on demand, the Bank could prevent the officers of the Government from accepting such bills for dues to the Government. The Bank used this power to force the Commonwealth banks to specie payment. It was one of the purposes for which Congress created the Bank. It made the Bank, however, very unpopular with the officers and stockholders of the banks chartered by the Commonwealths. These persons were, as a rule, men of influence in their respective communities, and they succeeded in persuading many of the people that the United States Bank was a centralized monopoly, and was using its powers and privileges to oppress the institutions of the Commonwealths.
In 1818 the legislatures of Ohio and Maryland imposed a heavy tax on the branches of the Bank located within their respective jurisdictions. The purpose was to drive them out. The Bank resisted payment, and was sustained by the United States courts.
In the February term of 1819 the Supreme Court of the United States decided the famous case of McCulloch and Maryland, declaring the act of Congress creating the Bank constitutional, and the act of the Maryland legislature undertaking to tax it unconstitutional. Maryland submitted at once, but the officers of the government of Ohio forced their way into the branch of the Bank in that State, at Chillicothe, and took one hundred thousand dollars out of the vault, and that too in the face of an injunction issued by the United States Circuit Court. The directors sued the officers of the Commonwealth for trespass, and the Commonwealth refused the use of its jails to confine the persons arrested. At the same time the Commonwealth reduced the tax to ten thousand dollars, and refunded ninety thousand, and finally receded entirely from its unlawful demand.
This defeat of the "States' rights" attack, and the excellent management of the Bank by Langdon Cheves, and then by Nicholas Biddle, seem to have silenced the complaints against the Bank from 1823 to 1828.
It was during this period, however, that the "State socialistic" characteristic of radical democracy received a strong development in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, through the relief measures for debtors; which measures threatened to destroy the constitutional guarantees of private property. The "relief party" secured the legislature and the executive of the Commonwealth. The judiciary, however, stood out against them, and they did not have the necessary two-thirds majority in the legislature to remove the judges. The legislature, however, passed a new judiciary act, and created another supreme court of the Commonwealth. This scandal of judicial anarchy existed for nearly two years, when, at last, in 1826, the"anti-relief" party elected a majority of the legislative members, and the new legislature repealed the act establishing the new court.
Jackson's friends in Kentucky belonged almost exclusively to the "relief party," and it is hardly fanciful to attribute to this movement in Kentucky some influence in the formation of Jackson's ideas in regard to the United States Bank, and in regard to his plan for a Government bank, responsible to the people and managed for the benefit of the people.
On March 3rd, 1828, Senator Benton began his warfare upon the Bank. He attacked its privilege of being the depository of Government money. He claimed that there were two or three millions of dollars of Government money used in loans by the Bank, which earned about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year of interest, all of which went to the stockholders of the Bank and none of it to the Government, while the Government was all the time paying interest on the public debt and taxing the people for the purpose. He wanted to take the surplus deposits out of the Bank and pay a part of the public debt with them. This was the first charge of the Western Democracy upon privilege, as being opposed to the principle of universal equality.
There were, however, enough practical men in the Senate who considered this privilege as only a fair compensation for the service rendered by the Bank to the Government in transporting the Government funds without any specific return therefor, and who knew that it is not good banking to pay interest on deposits, to reject Mr. Benton's resolution. Benton repeated his motion on January 1st, 1829, but with no greater success.
After March 4th, 1829, the leadership of the party wasin the hands of the President, and Benton became Jackson's lieutenant in the Senate. There had been personal feuds between the two men, but they now harmonized politically, and in no point did that harmony become more complete than in the war against the Bank.
It is probable that at the moment of his accession to power Jackson had not thought out the relation of the democratic principle to the Bank, but he undoubtedly felt it, and the feeling guided him to the position which he assumed, first toward the questions of detail in the Bank's policy and management, and then toward the general question of its existence. The controversy between his Secretaries and the Bank's officers, upon which Mr. Adams laid so much stress, probably precipitated matters, but the crisis would have developed under other circumstances had not these existed. The social and political forces at play were bound to bring it about under one issue or another. It may have astonished the politicians and statesmen of the East then, and it may astonish the casual reader of American history now, that Jackson attacked the question of the future existence of the Bank in his first annual message, but there is nothing surprising in it to the careful student of American history, who comprehends the development of the democratic spirit of the West during the third decade of the century.
It is doubtful whether the President was correct in saying, as he did in his message of 1829, that a large portion of the people questioned the constitutionality and expediency of the law creating the Bank, and it is certain that the Bank was not considered by all to have failed in the establishment of a sound and uniform currency. It is far more probable that the people generally acquiesced inthe decision of the Court pronouncing the Bank law constitutional, and that the majority of the people, at that moment, regarded it as good policy, and believed that the Bank had fairly fulfilled the purpose of its creation. The President was simply assuming that the people thought as he did, as democratic leaders usually do. Taken in that sense there was nothing extraordinary in what he said. He had a right to disagree in opinion with the Court, and to say so, and to make any recommendation to Congress which seemed wise to him, in regard to the re-charter of the Bank. That an expiring law is constitutional is not always a convincing argument for its re-enactment.
The President's criticism occasioned an investigation into the principle and status of the Bank, and brought the Bank question into the politics of the day.
The committee on Finance of the Senate, and the committee on Ways and Means of the House, made reports, in March and April of 1830, vigorously defending the constitutionality, the expediency, and the management of the Bank, and demonstrating the great political and financial dangers of such a Government bank as the President suggested. The chairman of the committee on Ways and Means was, it will be remembered, Mr. McDuffie, the political economist of the slavery interest. To his mind the Bank question had evidently little connection with the slavery question.
The President, however, returned to the attack in his message of December 10th, 1830. He also presented, in this message, an elaboration of his idea of a Government bank. His proposition was for a bank as a branch of the Treasury Department, based on the deposits of the funds of the Government and also on those made by individuals, buthaving no power to issue notes or make loans or purchase property. Its chief purpose would be to do the business of the Government, and its expenses might be met by selling exchange to private persons at a small rate.
The President thought that this scheme avoided all the objections to the existing Bank, and yet preserved all of the latter's advantages. It would require no charter of incorporation, would have neither stockholders, nor debtors, nor property, would require few officers, and would leave to the Commonwealths the creation of their own local paper currency through their own banks, while the new Government bank would be able to check the issues of the Commonwealth banks through its power to refuse to take their bills on deposit or for exchange, unless they redeemed them with specie. In a sentence, his doctrine now was that banking must be left as far as possible to Commonwealth law, and that such powers as the general Government had received from the Constitution over the subject should be exercised by the Government, if at all, through its own officials, for the benefit of the people, and not be conferred as privileges upon a corporation of private persons, to be exercised for their private gain. This will be at once recognized as a democratic, "States' rights," socialistic scheme in the essential elements of its composition.
Before the report of the Finance committee of the Senate upon this part of the message was presented Senator Benton offered a resolution, on February 2nd, 1831, which provided that the charter of the Bank ought not to be renewed. In his speech supporting the resolution the senator developed the whole "States' rights," socialistic, democratic argument against the Bank with great elaboration, both in principle and in detail.
It is true that Benton did not go so far as Jackson in the socialistic direction. He said that he was willing to vote for the President's Government bank scheme, since it would substitute for the existing Bank an institution which would be divested of the essential features of a bank, the power to make loans and discounts, but that he would prefer to see the charter of the Bank expire without any substitute being created for it.
The Senate was not, however, convinced by Mr. Benton's argument, and refused to allow him to introduce his resolution.
In his message of December 6th, 1831, President Jackson referred to what he had said in former messages concerning the Bank, and closed his allusion with the following significant words: "Having thus conscientiously discharged a constitutional duty, I deem it proper, on this occasion, without a more particular reference to the views of the subject then expressed, to leave it for the present to the investigation of an enlightened people and their representatives."
This language certainly seemed to imply that the President would, so far as he was able, make the question of the re-charter of the Bank one of the issues of the election campaign of 1832. His opponents so interpreted him, and they gladly accepted the challenge, for they believed the Bank to be popular with the voters. They thought that the Senators and Representatives in Congress, a majority of whom favored the Bank, truly represented the views of their constituencies, and they calculated to be able to split the Democratic party itself on the issue.
The president and directors of the Bank, however, were most reluctant to have the existence of the Bank made a party question. The leaders of the NationalRepublicans, on the other hand, insisted upon it. Clay, who, six days after the appearance of the President's message, had been nominated by a national convention at Baltimore as the candidate of the National Republicans for the presidency, was certain that under the issue of the renewal of the Bank's charter Jackson would be signally defeated. The Bank's officers yielded to his advice, enforced by that of Mr. Webster, and on January 9th, 1832, sent in the memorial for a re-charter.
Senator Dallas presented the memorial, but said that he personally had discouraged its presentation at that juncture out of apprehension that the question of the re-charter of the Bank might, at the moment, be drawn into real or imagined conflict with "some higher, some more favorite, some more immediate wish or purpose of the American people." Senator Dallas was a Bank Democrat. The more favorite wish to which he referred was the re-election of Jackson, and the inference to be drawn from his words was that the Bank Democrats did not want to be obliged to choose between the Bank and Jackson at the next election.
The Senate referred the petition for re-charter to a committee composed of Mr. Dallas, Mr. Webster, Mr. Ewing, Mr. Hayne, and Mr. Johnston.
Before the committee made its report Mr. Benton made another attack upon the Bank. This time he charged it with illegal practices in issuing drafts which passed as currency. The Senate, however, repelled the attack and refused to allow Mr. Benton to introduce his resolution declaring such drafts illegal.
On March 13th Mr. Dallas brought in the bill from his committee for the re-charter of the Bank for fifteen years from the expiration of its existing charter in 1836.
While the bill was passing through the Senate a demonstration against the Bank was in progress in the House. Mr. Clayton, of Georgia, an enemy of the Bank, secured the appointment of a committee by the Speaker of the House, Mr. Stevenson, another enemy of the Bank, to inquire into the affairs of the Bank, and make report thereof to the House. A majority report was offered by Mr. Clayton severely criticising the Bank, and a minority report by Mr. McDuffie defending the Bank most ably and vigorously, and, if we may judge from the vote of the House upon the Senate bill for re-charter, which had passed the Senate, and appeared at this moment in the House for concurrence, most successfully. The House passed the Senate bill, with a few immaterial changes, by a vote of one hundred and seven to eighty-five.
The National Republicans felt sure that they had driven Jackson into a blind alley. But the "Old Hero" stood his ground and hurled a veto at the bill, which both killed it and conquered the National Republican party in the election of 1832 with its own chosen weapon.
The veto message was a curiouspot-pourriof strength and weakness, of sound statesmanship and cheap demagogism, of shrewd politics and silly commonplaces. We may arrange its score of points under five principal heads, or rather ends in view. The first was the attempt to rouse the national spirit against the Bank, on account of the fact that some eight millions of dollars' worth of the stock was in the hands of foreigners. The President made out that this was a great danger to the United States, both in war and peace. In war, he said, the Bank would be an internal enemy, more terrible than the army and navy of the external foe. Just how the possession of the certificates of stock by foreigners, whose money, which had been paid forthem, was in the United States, and therefore under the control of the United States Government, could endanger the United States in case of a war between the United States and the country or countries to which these foreign stockholders belonged, the President failed to explain. It would seem to the ordinary mind that this would be an advantage to the United States, in that the Government of the United States would have within its grasp a part of the money power of the enemy. Moreover, the Bank law prevented the foreign stockholders from voting in the election of the directors of the Bank. How these stockholders could possibly exercise any hostile influence then, except by selling their stock to citizens of the United States, and taking the money which they might receive for it out of the country, was not only not explained but is inexplicable.
The second object was apparently the excitement of the West against the East. The President declared that the West was being made financially tributary to the East by the Bank. He presented the statistics of stockholding and interest-paying throughout the different sections of the country in proof of this statement. He affirmed that thirteen millions five hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars' worth of the stock was owned in the Northeastern and Middle Commonwealths, that five millions six hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars' worth of it was held in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, and that only one hundred and forty thousand and two hundred dollars' worth of it was held in the nine Western Commonwealths; while one million six hundred and forty thousand and forty-eight dollars of the profits of the Bank came from these Western Commonwealths, one million four hundred and sixty-three thousand and forty-one dollars of themfrom the Northeastern and Middle Commonwealths, and three hundred and fifty-two thousand and five hundred and seven dollars of them from the Southern Commonwealths. This seems to ordinary intelligence to prove that the Bank was accommodating Western borrowers with Eastern money; and as the Bank was limited by its charter to a maximum of six per centum interest on its loans, it seems that the accommodation was being rendered upon quite moderate consideration. But the President said it proved that the "Eastern money power" was oppressing the West, and the West was quite willing to believe anything against the persons or institutions to whom or to which it owed money.
The third object to which the President addressed himself in the message was to call the attention of the poor to the proposition that the Government was favoring the rich through the Bank. The President called the Bank a monopoly, which means privilege conferred by Government on a few at the expense of the many. He calculated that the privilege to be granted to the existing stockholders by the re-charter of the Bank was worth seventeen millions of dollars, while the bonus which they would be required to pay was but three millions. Fourteen millions of dollars would thus be presented by the Government to the Bank, which sum the Government must take by taxation from the people. He arrived at these statistics and results by assuming that the Bank stock, after the re-charter and in consequence of it, would be worth about one hundred and fifty dollars for one hundred par, that some other body of stockholders could be found who would pay seventeen millions for the charter, and that the money thus acquired from the supposed stockholders by the Government would effect the remission of just so much taxation upon the people. The President saw also,with Senator Benton, that the use of the Government deposits by the Bank was a source of income to the stockholders at the popular expense. And he denounced the feature in the new bill, which allowed the Commonwealth banks to pay their indebtedness to any branch of the United States Bank with the notes of any other branch, but did not accord the same privilege to individuals, as favoring the rich and powerful against the poor and weak.
The entire argumentation in this part of the message seems extravagant and exaggerated, to say the least, but it sounded convincing and sympathetic to the masses. It was something which brought the question home to each one of them, and made it appear related to each one's personal interest. The statement was a powerful vote-catcher. It took wonderfully.
The fourth proposition, as we have arranged them, was the criticism on the structure and powers of the Bank provided in the new bill. The President objected to the unnecessarily large amount of the capital stock, to the right to be given the Bank to locate its own branches, to the power of the Government, as a stockholder, to own real estate for general purposes, and to the power of the Bank to coin money, as he called the power to issue its notes.
The final division of the message, according to our arrangement, contains the disquisition upon the relation of the departments of the Government to each other in operating the Constitution, and the relation of the general Government to the Commonwealths in regard to jurisdiction over the business of banking. The President held, upon the first of these points, that "if the opinion of the Supreme Court," in the case of McCulloch and Maryland, "covered the whole ground of this act, it ought not to control theco-ordinate authorities of the Government." "The Congress, the Executive, and the Court," he said, "must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President, to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them for passage or approval, as it is of the Supreme Judges when it may be brought before them for decision. The opinion of the Judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the Judges; and, on that point, the President is independent of both. The authority of the Supreme Court must not, therefore, be permitted to control the Congress or the Executive when acting in their legislative capacities, but to have only such influence as the force of their reasoning may deserve."
The President also said that he could have furnished a plan for a bank, had it been requested of him, which would have been equal to all the duties required by the Government, a plan which might have been enacted by Congress without straining or overstepping its powers, and without infringing the powers of the Commonwealths; and he complained that the Bank, as an agent of the Executive Department, should be thrust upon the Department without the Department being consulted as to whether it needed or wanted any such agent.
One of the most celebrated historians of American politics has indulged in a very severe criticism upon this part of the message, claiming that President Jackson virtually asserted therein the power to initiate legislation, full co-ordination with the Houses of Congress in legislation, and anindependence of Congress, and especially of the Judiciary, which, in practice, would render constitutional law an impossibility. An impartial examination of the text of the message in all its parts will hardly warrant any such conclusions. It is quite clear, from such examination, that the President meant that in the formation of administrative measures by the Congressional committees in charge of the same, the views of the Administration ought to be obtained; that the President is not limited by the Constitution to any class of subjects in the use of his veto power upon proposed legislation; and that when the Congress and the President are legislating they are not obliged to re-enact a law simply because the Judiciary have declared it constitutional, nor even prevented from repealing a law, simply because the Judiciary have declared it constitutional, and certainly not prohibited from differing in opinion with the Judiciary in regard to the constitutionality of any law already on the statute book, or any proposed measure. Conservative American lawyers, jurists, and publicists approve all of this as not only the letter but also the spirit of the Constitution.
Instead of destroying the Constitution in theory by the doctrine of this veto, it looks more as if the President did something to rescue the "check and balance" system of government, provided in the Constitution, from the threatened domination of a single department over the others in it. The fact is, Congress had succeeded, during the régime of the old Republican party in American politics, in winning a power over the President which the Constitution did not authorize. The members of Congress had selected all of the Presidents, from Jefferson to Jackson, either by nomination or by actual election.The machinery constructed by the Constitution for the election of the President was wanting in its most necessary part. It contained no means of connection between the electoral colleges in the several Commonwealths in voting for the President and Vice-President, at the same time that it required a majority of all the electoral votes to elect. The members of Congress being the only national assembly of persons in the country, and being the chosen political leaders from the different Commonwealths, naturally glided into the habit of constituting themselves, in caucus, the connecting link between the electoral colleges in the several Commonwealths, and thus the Congressional caucus, or caucuses, as the case might be, became the nominating body or bodies to the electoral colleges. If the caucus nominated anybody, it left to the electors the alternative of ratifying the nomination, or of so scattering their votes as to give no person a majority, in which latter case the election of the President passed into the hands of the members of the House of Representatives. If, on the other hand, the caucus did not nominate anybody, the electors were nearly sure to fail to unite a majority of their votes upon the same person, in which case again the House of Representatives obtained possession of the election. With such an increasing control over the tenure of the President, it is not astonishing that the Congress, and even the individual members of Congress, exercised an ever increasing control over his acts and his policy. The encroaching legislature was fast developing the principle of parliamentary government as the principle of the American system, while the Constitution provides the principle of executive independence and presidential administration.
Again, the judicial department had appeared to assume the position that it possessed the supremeinterpreting power of the Constitution upon every point. It had not then, as it has now, clearly confined itself to questions immediately involving questions of private rights. It appeared to be claiming jurisdiction in regard to questions primarily of political science, public law, and even public policy.
The President's Bank veto called a halt in these tendencies, and exerted an influence for the restoration of executive independence, and of the "check and balance" system, provided in the Constitution; and it called the people into a closer and more immediate relation to the President than they had before occupied, in that the President now appealed to them to decide the question between him and the Congress, in the election which was then about to take place.
These were the political principles contained in the Bank veto, and whether they, or the more democratic principle of anti-monopoly, or the more socialistic principle of government banking, moved the masses, certainly they were profoundly moved. Had the popular vote been taken, the day before the appearance of the veto, upon the question of the Bank's re-charter, it is altogether probable that an overwhelming majority would have been found in its favor. Against the veto, however, no sufficient majority could be united in Congress, and when the results of the presidential election became known, it was found that Jackson had carried the country with him in the unequal contest, and that the people had made the principles of the Jacksonian democracy the ruling spirit of the Constitution.