The day following Duane’s dismissal, written by Taney, Cass and McLane consulted Jackson as to the desirability of their resignations. This was almost too much for the old warrior’s patience, and he irritably reminded them that they had been released from responsibility, and could remain unless they preferred to join the Opposition. The fire of battle was now in his blood, and he had no intention of parleying with the timid in his official household. Three days later, Taney issued his famous order, McLane and Cass tendered their resignations, and Jackson, in replying, followed Van Buren’s suggestion, and they remained.
On the publication of the Paper in the “Globe,” the Bank summoned a meeting of the directors and a committee was appointed to take action. Writing from Boston to Biddle, Webster made the suggestion, which was adopted, of a memorial to Congress.[659]This memorial, which referred to the President of the United States as “Andrew Jackson,” indicated a disposition to consider the approaching struggle as between “Andrew Jackson” and Nicholas Biddle, between the Bank and the Administration, and the ill-advised arrogance of thepaper showed all too clearly that the financiers felt that in such a contest the power and the victory would be on the side of the Bank. And such was the prestige of that powerful corporation that not a few Democrats, including friends and supporters of Jackson, shared in the feeling. When Van Buren was authorized by Jackson to offer the attorney-generalship to Daniel of Virginia, that timid lawyer admitted that his fears of Jackson’s rashness and situation dissuaded him.[660]It was not until early in November that Benjamin F. Butler, yielding to the personal persuasion of Van Buren, accepted the post. And to obtain his consent it was necessary to appeal to personal friendship, private interest, pecuniary benefit, and the allurements of fame.[661]
And almost immediately the storm broke.
“The times will be hard, and the struggle a great one,” wrote Van Buren to Hamilton, “but the patriotism and fortitude of the people will triumph.”[662]And Nicholas Biddle did not propose that the inconvenience should be slight. He was delighted with the order for the removal. He was convinced that out of the distress in business circles would come an irresistible demand, not only for the restoration of the deposits, but for the rechartering of the Bank. This last act of Jackson’s was the golden opportunity. The advantage would be followed. The public, which had sustained Jackson at the polls, was to be punished, or “disciplined,” as Webster mildly described the process. “This discipline,” wrote the orator to Biddle, who was his client as well as his party colleague, “it appears to me, must have very greateffects on the general question of the rechartering of the Bank.”
The “disciplining” of the people began with the Bank’s first curtailments on August 13, 1833, and practically ended on July 11, 1834, although it continued to some extent until September. The first move—a proper one—was to issue an order that the amount of money loaned on discounts was not to be increased, and that bills of exchange should be drawn only at short dates and on the Eastern offices. These orders meant inevitable contraction, but of the sort that could be justified. But immediately after Taney had issued his order, the Bank adopted additional measures—the reduction of discounts, the application of the order of restriction on the drawing of bills to all the offices of the Bank, the collection of the balances against the State banks, and the restriction of the receipt of State bank notes. The historian of the Bank truly says that “on the whole, nothing but peril to the Bank could excuse such measures.”[663]But even this second step seemed all too mild to the officers and directors in the marble front building on Chestnut Street, and three weeks later a third step was taken. The branch banks in the West were ordered to persevere in “the course of measures already prescribed,” and instructed that an extraordinary effort should be made to keep down circulation, and to avoid drafts on the northern Atlantic offices.[664]One month later, Philip Hone, the New York banker and business man, was recording in his diary that the “ill-advised and arbitrary step of the President” was “producing an awful scarcity of money, with immediate distress and melancholy forebodings to the merchants and others who require credit to sustain them”; and that “stocks of every description have fallen—Delaware and Hudson from one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred and fourteen, Boston and Providence from one hundred and fifteen to one hundred and three,” and that“money cannot be had on bond and mortgage at 7 per cent, and I am told that good notes will hardly be discounted at 9 per cent.”[665]
Just about the time Hone was recording these conditions, Biddle was offering the notorious Samuel Swartwout, the Jacksonian Collector in New York, whose irregularities in office were to be unmercifully exploited by the Whigs, a directorship in the Bank, and the latter, declining because of the onerous duties of his office, advised that since “the Bank’s power has been shown” in the distress, it might be well now to manifest mercy.[666]Where Niles had found money scarce in September and October without being able to conceive a reason, he wrote in November of “a most severe pressure for money” and the prospect of a “collapse of business.” That month State bank notes began to depreciate and loans were at eighteen per cent per annum. With the convening of Congress and the President’s uncompromising Message in December, Biddle increased the pressure for the purposes of “discipline.” Business men were unable to get credit. Factories were shutting down because of the inability of manufacturers to get loans, and laborers were thrown out into the street. The Christmas season found New York “gloomy” with “times bad,” stocks still falling, and a panic prevailing “which will result in bankruptcies and ruin in many quarters where, a few short weeks ago, the sun of prosperity shone with unusual brightness.”[667]And three days later the Lord Holland of the American Whigs, in his misery and apprehension, was beginning to suspect that politics and the Bank, as well as Jackson’s “ill-advised and arbitrary step,” might be playing a part, and concluding that “between them both the community groans under the distress which these misunderstandings have created.” “A plague on both your houses,” he wrote, his impartial castigation springing, perhaps, from the fact that he had lost $20,000.[668]
In January the crash came. Business houses began to fail in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, and by the end of the month loans could not be had in New York and Baltimore at less than one and a half per cent discount per month. Wages decreased, along with prices, with laborers out of employment and the real estate values on the slump. And at this time, with the Opposition in Congress working in hearty coöperation with the Bank to create the fear that fed the panic, Jackson sat in the White House one Sunday morning writing to Hamilton: “There is no real distress. It is only with those who live by borrowing, trade on loans, and gamblers in stocks. It would be a godsend to society if all such were put down.... I must stop. The church bells are ringing and I must attend.”[669]This theory that it would be a “godsend” to rid the country of the men who live on borrowing was to be used with considerable effect against Jackson by his congressional enemies.
And at the same time, Biddle was writing to the president of his Boston branch[670]that “the ties of party allegiance can only be broken by the actual conviction of existing distress,” and that “nothing but the evidence of suffering abroad will produce any effect in Congress”; and to Major Jack Downing in New York that “if the bank were to suffer itself to be misled into the measure of making money plentiful, it will only give to its enemies the triumph of having robbed it with impunity.”[671]Thus the evidence is abundant that the Bank exerted its power to the utmost to bring the country to the verge of ruin, and so compel it to consent to a recharter. The fact that the majority of its victims were among its most zealous supporters did not interest Mr. Biddle.[672]Two daysafter writing the letter to Downing, Biddle determined upon a further contraction in discounts to the amount of $3,320,000, with orders that this should be made within thirty or sixty days, and the largest reductions were to be made in the Western and Southwestern banks. Not content with this, he made another increase in the rates of exchange, and here again discriminated frankly against the West. Thus, in eight months the Bank planned a reduction in discounts to the amount of $13,300,000, which Catterall describes truly as “a preposterously large sum.”[673]When to this is added the further restrictions of as much as $5,000,000 through the breaking up of the exchange dealings of the Bank, the contraction in eight months amounted to at least $18,300,000.
Had the Bank acted honorably, there would have been an inevitable depression for the time because of the removal order, but the panic was the Bank’s panic, deliberately conceived, and cruelly produced, with the frankly avowed purpose of blackmailing the American people into granting another charter. In his letter to the president of the Boston branch, Biddle had bluntly confessed his purpose. “I have no doubt,” he wrote, “that such a course will ultimately lead to a restoration of the currency, and the recharter of the Bank.”[674]
During this time there were certain unscrupulous speculators, the buzzards of the panic, whispering commendation into Biddle’s ear while feathering their own nests through the distress of the people.[675]But Webster, alarmed at the havoc, had urged Biddle, through Horace Binney, “that the Bank ought to reduce as slowly and moderately as they can—and occasionally to ease off—where it is requisite to prevent extreme suffering.”[676]This advice aroused the banker’s ire and resulted in no good. It was Biddle’s idea that theBank’s senatorial champions, instead of suggesting a policy of moderation, should be using the distress as an argument for a new charter. “The relief,” he wrote Joseph Hopkinson, the distinguished lawyer and jurist, “to be useful or permanent, must come from Congress, and from Congress alone. If that body will do its duty, relief will come—if not, the Bank feels no vocation to redress the wrongs of these miserable people. Rely upon that. This worthy President thinks that because he has scalped Indians and imprisoned Judges, he is to have his way with the Bank. He is mistaken.”[677]
Meanwhilethe Bank was encouraging, inspiring, arranging indignation meetings of the people, where Jackson was arraigned for bringing ruin upon the community, and petitions were drawn asking for the restoration of the deposits. Clay, eager to lash the people into fury, had suggested the plan. “It would be well,” he wrote, “to have a general meeting of the people to memorialize Congress in favor of a restoration of the deposits. Such an example [in Philadelphia] might be followed elsewhere; and it would be more influential as it might be more general.”[678]The artificial nature of many of the petitions was well understood by the Jackson leaders, and the usually elegant John Forsyth had referred to them in the Senate as “these pot-house memorials,” much to the astonishment of Adams.[679]These petitions, according to the plan, were, in many instances, taken to Washington by committees that waited upon the President before presenting them to Congress. Here they were presented in lugubrious speeches calculatingly designed further to fan the fears of the people and keep the panic going. When the New York merchants adopted a memorial and secured the signatures of threethousand people, Tammany Hall ordered meetings in every ward in the city to approve of Jackson’s actions.[680]A few days later, between twelve and fifteen thousand friends of “sound currency by means of a national bank” met at noon in the park. When Hone, selected to preside, reached the park, he found an “immense crowd” composed in large part “of the most respectable mechanics and others of the city—men of character, respectability, and personal worth, with a few miscreants who went, perhaps, of their own accord, but were probably sent there to excite disturbances.” In truth, “the rabble had gotten possession of the chair,” and it required “some hard thumps” from the men of character, respectability, and personal worth to clear the way sufficiently for the presiding genius of the Whig dinner table to reach the platform. When he attempted to speak, the “yells of the mob” rendered all the chairman’s efforts “unavailing”; so he “put the question upon the resolutions which were carried by an immense majority,” and the meeting adjourned. Unhappily the “mob” did not disperse for some time afterwards.[681]
When these committees, composed of bitter enemies of the President, began to pour into the capital and knock at the White House door, they were received, at first, with urbanity and heard with patience. The committeemen, however, carried back “grossly colored” stories of the interviews, and Jackson thereafter decided to hear and dismiss them without discussion.[682]In these stories Jackson is pictured as raving and ranting, spluttering and spouting imprecations and profanity. McMaster, however, accepts as true that he received these committees “with that stately courtesy for which he was so justly distinguished,” and concludes from the evidence that he “soon began to lecture them.”[683]In these lectures Jackson is reported to have told the committees to “goto the Bank” or to “go to Biddle” for relief. No less an authority than Catterall has concluded that he was not far wrong. On one occasion he did use extreme language to a committee which implied the threat of rebellion. “If that be your game,” he exclaimed, “come with your armed Bank mercenaries, and, by the Eternal, I will hang you around the Capitol on gallows higher than Haman.”[684]There is no doubt that he did harangue the committees with bitter denunciations of “The Monster” and properly ascribed a large part of the distress to the deliberate purpose of the Bank to “discipline” the Nation. Some historians have suggested that these outbursts were staged, and it is recorded as a fact by Henry A. Wise, the brilliant Virginia Whig. “When a Bank committee would come ...” he writes, “he would lay down his pipe, rise to the full height of his stature and voice, and seem to foam at the mouth whilst declaiming vehemently against the dangers of money monopoly. The committee would retire in disgust, thinking they were leaving a mad man, and as soon as they were gone, he would resume his pipe, and, chuckling, say, ‘They thought I was mad,’ and coolly comment on the policy of never never compromising a vital issue.”[685]This interpretation of Jackson’s tempests and whirlwinds of passion, coming from a severe critic of his Bank policy, is the most dependable of all the opinions that have been expressed by friend or foe.
Andwhile the committees may have hooted the idea that the Bank was responsible for the severity and continuance of the panic, it very slowly began to dawn upon the New York merchants that possibly the “Emperor Nicholas” might be able to alleviate conditions without in the least compromising the safety of the Bank. Some of his champions were slow to realize or loath to concede this declining popularity. InFebruary the bankers and merchants of New York appointed a committee to wait upon him and urge a suspension of the contraction, and Albert Gallatin, former Secretary of the Treasury, pointedly warned him that the committee was satisfied of his ability to grant relief, and would so report to the New York merchants. Thus cornered and threatened with the desertion of its friends, the Bank finally agreed that up to May 1st there should be no further contraction. This was a fatal concession in that it was a confession that relief had been previously deliberately denied.[686]Even such champions of the Bank as James Watson Webb found real cause for melancholy complaint in heavy losses in Bank stock, and we find him whining that he had lost all except his paper, and that other speculators, including Alexander Hamilton, Jr., had been among the victims.
Thus the drift against the Bank, which began when Governor Wolf of Pennsylvania denounced its actions in his Message to the Legislature, increased alarmingly. The fact that the Governor had been a firm supporter gave tremendous weight to his act. The friends of the institution were stunned, and, as we shall see a little later, the Governor was bitterly denounced and warmly defended in the Senate. Thus the advice of Jackson to “see Biddle,” so mirthfully related by the committees at the time, and so much ridiculed by some historians since, was demonstrating its wisdom. One month after Wolf acted, Governor Marcy of New York imitated his example with the recommendation of a State plan of relief. His proposal to issue $6,000,000 of five per cent State stock to be loaned to State banks was adopted.
The Bank, in its game of “disciplining” the people, had vastly overplayed its hand, and, by its cruel, implacable policy of ruining friends as well as foes, had begun to lose ground in the late winter and early spring. Even among the ultra-conservatives of business, the feeling was germinatingthat Jackson was not far wrong in the conclusion that a moneyed institution possessing the power to precipitate panics to influence governmental action, was dangerous to the peace, prosperity, and liberty of the people.
Butthe politicians in the Congress were the last to see the drift. Long after the bankers and merchants had lost interest in the fate of Biddle’s Bank, they continued their fight in its behalf throughout the most bitter congressional session the Republic had ever known. The actions of the Bank, the tumult of the market-places, the proceedings of the merchants, are all intimately interwoven with the activities of the Bank’s champions in House and Senate. There the last stand was taken, there the battle was definitely lost. And there the most dramatic feature of the fight was staged. It was at this juncture that three important figures, not hitherto intimately identified with or against the Administration, moved to the firing line. Thomas H. Benton assumed the leadership of the Jacksonian forces, and Clay’s fighters were brilliantly augmented by the advent of two Senators, William Campbell Preston of South Carolina, and Benjamin Watkins Leigh of Virginia.
The complete harmony between Benton’s views and Jackson’s actions in the Bank controversy has given an overshadowing prominence to his leadership. For thirty years he was a constructive force in legislation, associating his name with more important measures written into law than Clay, Webster, and Calhoun combined. In the Senate his faults of mannerism, his arrogance, and stupendous conceit, together with the interminable length of his speeches and his diffusive tendencies, served to overshadow his very substantial contributions to the discussions. The fact that the Chamber emptied and the galleries cleared when he arose did not disturb him in the least. He spoke from the Chamber to thecountry, and his carefully prepared speeches, especially during the Bank fight, were treatises intended for the education of the people. His personal life was above reproach. His austerity, his imposing dignity, discouraged attempts at intimacy in a day when men loved conviviality and were a trifle lax in their morals. He was one of the colossal figures of American politics and he never loomed larger than in his fight for Jackson.
William C. Preston, fresh from oratorical triumphs in the Nullification contest, entered the Senate at the age of thirty-eight. Few have made a more favorable début in that body. His fame as an orator had preceded him, and Clay’s plans had dedicated the panic session to perfervid oratory. It is impossible to understand, from his speeches in the “Congressional Globe,” the extravagant enthusiasm of so stern a critic as Adams. But we cannot discount the common verdict of his contemporaries who considered him one of the most consummate of orators, and “one of the greatest rhetoricians and declaimers of his generation.”[687]From another we learn that “many thought him the most finished orator the South had produced,” and that he “could arouse his audiences to enthusiasm, and then move them to tears.”[688]Not least among the truimphs of his art was his power to sway a mob in the street as well as move the case-hardened critics of the Senate house. Poet and painter, as he was, it is not surprising that in the heat of advocacy his feelings often predominated over his judgment, and his superheated imagination sometimes led him beyond the realms of reality, but these very weaknesses were to delight the enemies of the Jackson Administration, led to the daily assault by Clay. Thus, in his first year in the Senate, he took his place, far in advance of most of his colleagues, and side by side with Clay, Webster, Calhoun, and Clayton.
In addition to Preston, the Opposition was to be furtherstrengthened by the arrival with the panic session of Leigh. Intellectually, he was one of the strongest men in a State of strong men, and at the bar he was recognized as a great constitutional and civil lawyer. As an orator, he was fluent, fiery, intense, impressive. Wise, who was himself no mean master of English, has described him as “a purist in his Anglo-Saxon,” and as having a style “equal to that of the Elizabethan age of English literature.”[689]Like Prentiss, he was a small man who loomed large when speaking, and, like him, too, he had one short leg and wore a cork on the sole of his shoe. Unlike Prentiss, he capitalized his infirmity oratorically. Wise found that, while his mannerisms were not graceful, they “always excited sympathy for his infirmity.” His voice, which was no small part of his oratorical equipment, has been described as “clear, soft, flute-like, not loud, but like murmuring music.”[690]His manner, his speaking method, his very appearance, fitted in well with Clay’s programme of dramatic, lugubrious oratory, and he at once moved to his place beside the panic orators, and played a conspicuous and theatrical part.
Thus, with the panic at its flood, with Benton moving to the front of the Administration forces, and with Clay’s oratorical battery strengthened, it is time to look in upon the Senate.
Fromthe moment Congress convened, it was evident that the session was to witness the most bitter party battle ever waged. This was inevitable because of the realignments of the previous session, and the spirit of the Bank. The coalition between Clay and Calhoun gave the Opposition a clear majority in the Senate. It was common gossip four days after Congress was called to order that “the understanding between Mr. Clay and Mr. Calhoun” gave the Opposition all the numerical advantage.[691]This was thoroughly understood by Jackson, Taney, Kendall, and Blair, and all public papers regarding the removal of the deposits were accordingly framed as appeals to the people, rather than to the bodies to which they were addressed. The Presidential Message, in touching upon this topic, was a campaign document and a challenge. Taney’s forceful report submitting reasons for the removal was a defiance, and a clarion call to the people in the corn rows, the villages, and the factories. Thus Jackson and his friends forced the fighting from the beginning.
Clay led the onslaught with a resolution calling upon Taney for a report on the new depositories. “I want to inquire where the Treasury of the United States is,” he explained ironically. The bristling Benton instantly moved a reference to committee. The Secretary of the Treasury had “charged the Bank distinctly with interfering with the purity of elections, with corrupting and subsidizing the press, with dishonoring its own paper and that of its branches,” and these “charges of great criminality” should be investigated. Affecting to ignore Benton, Clay followed with another resolution calling upon the President to say whether the Paper, “alleged” to have been read to the Cabinet, was genuine, and if so, to lay a copy before the Senate. This was a stupid tactical blunder, and John Forsyth, with his suave courtesy, which was not always as innocent as it seemed, inquired the purpose of the “unusual” call. Clay’s reply was a quibble. The Paper had been published as having been read by the President, and even promulgated through the press, and he, for one, refused to assume that it was genuine.
“If I understand the gentleman from Kentucky,” pressed the courtly Forsyth, “he admits that with the intercourse between the President and his Cabinet we have nothing to do.”
“I make no admission,” snapped Clay.
It was then that Forsyth revealed the theory on which the Administration forces were to proceed. Why could not Clay indicate the purpose which impelled him? he asked. Was it for the purpose of impeachment? Then the call should have originated in the House, not the Senate. “When the President should be brought to our bar, and put on trial for his violation of the Constitution, that paper would be produced in support of the charge,” he continued. But why should the Senate call for it? It was accessible for all purposes of argument. He could understand the resolution only “as a desire to prompt the other House to proceedings by impeachment, and to condemn the President in advance.” But after Clay had reiterated the absurd explanation that he merely sought authentic verification of the genuineness of the Paper, the resolution was adopted.[692]The response of Jackson was immediately made in a dignified and unanswerable note of refusal. “As well might I be required to detail to the Senate the free and private conversations I have held with those officers on any subject relating to theirduties,” he said.[693]It was a sharp rebuke, richly merited, and left Clay in an unenviable position.
The next brush came in the prompt rejection by the Senate of the nominations of the Government directors who had furnished the report on which Jackson had based his charge of wrongdoing. The moment their names were sent to the Senate, Biddle began to deluge his senatorial friends with demands for their rejection. “They are unfit to be there [on the board],” he wrote Webster; “unfit to associate with the other members.”[694]In the Bank circles they were denounced as “spies,” and thus, in response to the demand of Biddle, they were rejected. Such was the intimacy of the relation between the party of the Opposition and the Bank of the United States. The sinister nature of this relationship is painfully illustrated in the case of Daniel Webster, who, two weeks after the opening of the session, had written Biddle of his rejection of a professional employment against the Bank, with the bald suggestion that “I believe my retainer has not been renewed or refreshed as usual,” and that “if it be wished that my relation to the Bank should be continued, it may be well to send me the usual retainers.”[695]
Thus the first days of the session were passed in maneuvering for position, with frequent incidents of a petty nature indicative of the rancorous party spirit of the times. Having observed the unobtrusive figure of Major Lewis, that most consummate of politicians and presidential reporters, moving about the floor of the House, Richard Henry Wilde, poet and politician, Nullifier and Whig, framed a resolution to exclude him, but it was defeated.[696]Meanwhile Clay was busy mapping his campaign, preparing the resolutions on which he proposed to make the issue. The Opposition leaders were clearly embarrassed in determining their course of action.Webster appealed to Justice Story, the scholarly associate of John Marshall, for an opinion on the legal phases; and writing from Cambridge that great jurist would not advise that the deposits could not be legally withdrawn unless danger to their security was involved, but he advanced the theory on which the Bank champions acted—that the Secretary of the Treasury did not become custodian of the funds by virtue of his position in the Cabinet, but held them as a “personal trust, and as much so as if confided to the Chief Justice of the United States.” Thus he furnished the Opposition with the opinion it required. The President had no right to interfere; more—if he did interfere, and the Secretary submitted against his own judgment, he violated his trust; and the State banks had no proper authority to take over the deposits.[697]Unhappily, the learned jurist failed to take the next necessary step, and conclude that the President had no power to remove a Secretary of the Treasury.
And it was just this queer opinion that Clay was zealously seeking. About the time Webster was appealing to Story for the elucidation of legal points, Clay was writing to former Senator Tazewell at Norfolk, a great constitutional lawyer, inquiring as to whether or not Jackson had transcended his power in dismissing Duane. It must have been with some embarrassment that he read the Virginian’s reply, that to him it was “manifestly absurd to regard the President as responsible for the acts of subordinate agents, and yet to deny him the uncontrolled power of supervising them, and removing them from office whenever they had lost his confidence.”[698]This opinion, however, did not deter some statesmen from advancing the idea that Tazewell had contemptuously rejected.
But the position of Story was accepted, and Clay submitted his resolutions censuring the President, and holdingthe reasons given by Taney for the removal “unsatisfactory and insufficient.” Thus the decks were cleared for action. The real fight began in the debate that day upon these resolutions, and upon these, and others growing out of them, the verbal battle, which at times threatened to be other than bloodless, raged with intemperate fury for seven months.
Neverup to that time, nor again for more than a generation, did Congress so completely hold the interest of the country. The great orators of the Opposition never shone with greater luster, and by their impassioned eloquence, and not a little of consummate histrionics, they persuaded their followers, if not themselves, that they were actually fighting the battle of liberty against despotism. The Democrats contended, on the defensive, that Jackson had the right to dismiss Duane, and that Taney had the legal right to order the removal.
It is not surprising that the little city of Washington, with all its interests revolving about the performances at the Capitol, should have poured forth its people daily to pack the galleries and crowd the lobbies. The Senate Chamber became the peacock alley of fashion—they who met at the dinner or the dance the night before mingled there in the day-time. The debate drew many from other sections, and the belles of country places and remote towns helped to crowd the Chamber to suffocation.[699]In the fashionable character of the gallery audiences we catch the hostility of the aristocracy to the President and his party. The distress committees with their petitions were wont to pack the galleries “applauding the speakers against the President—saluting with noise and confusion those who spoke on his side.”[700]Confirmation of such scenes are to be found in the officialreport of the proceedings.[701]It has been the fashion to refer to the Jacksonians as the “rabble” and the “mob,” and as partaking of the nature of the Jacobins, but throughout the Bank fight the “mob” in the galleries, resorting to the Jacobin methods of hissing and cheering the proceedings on the floor, were largely confined to the enemies of the President.
The debate on the Clay resolutions had scarcely begun when the daily arrival of distress petitions furnished a diversion in the Senate. The memorials were lugubrious recitals of wreck and ruin, and pathetic appeals for the restoration of the deposits. Frequently presented by committees, the bearers repaired to the gallery to give sympathetic ear to the mournful speeches of the Senators to whom their petitions had been entrusted. There was a marked similarity in the petitions, and an even more striking resemblance in the speeches. The burden of both was that the happiness of a prosperous community had been struck down by a tyrant, and that nothing but the restoration of the deposits could end the agony. That the action of such men as Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, in picturing in lurid and exaggerated colors the distress of the moment, and predicting even greater calamities, was calculated to frighten the timid and create panic must have been understood by them. At any rate, these petitions were part of the leaders’ plan.[702]This phase of the fight developed with the presentation of Clay’s resolution to “inquire into the expediency of affording temporary relief to the community from the present pecuniary embarrassments by prolonging the payment of revenue bonds as they fall due.” This resolution opened the way for Clay’s first “distress speech.” And Forsyth, who was something of a cynic in his way, saw no objection to the resolution, provided it were amended by instructing the committee “to inquire into the extent and causes of the alleged distress of thecommunity, and into the propriety of legislative interference to relieve them.” The proposal of the amendment gave Forsyth the opportunity to present the Administration’s opinion of the panic. He had no doubt that there was distress, but it had been greatly exaggerated. “Whence does it arise?” he asked. “From the conflict—the war that the Bank is waging to get the deposits back. The deposits have been removed. The Bank stands still to see what will follow, and it stands still, too, that its power may be felt in every nerve and fiber of the community—and every man shall feel the necessity of the institution.”[703]
Thus the panic speeches began. “There sits Mr. Biddle,” rather stupidly exclaimed one Senator, presenting a petition, “in the presidency of the Bank, as calm as a summer’s morning, with his directors around him, receiving his salary, with everything moving on harmoniously; and has this strike reached him? No, sir. The blow has fallen on the friends of the President and the country.”[704]Thus did one Opposition leader rejoice in the serenity of the Bank and its president in the midst of the distress of his country.
Very early the friends of the Administration took their cue from its enemies, and began to flood the Senate with memorials against the Bank. Thus day by day the proceedings were opened by the reading of petitions, followed by speeches on the “distress,” and replies belittling the panic. Mr. Clay’s heart was wrung by news of the distress in Savannah and Augusta; whereupon Mr. Forsyth rose to deny that there was distress in those cities. “I know the individuals,” he said. “They are highly respectable men—merchants and members of the Bar. They are friends of the Bank of the United States.”[705]A New Jersey Senator, opposed to the Administration, presented conflicting petitions from his State, with the Jackson petitions numerically thestronger. Ah, laughed Forsyth, “from the State of New Jersey we have three cheers for one groan.”[706]When an Opposition Senator presented a petition from Portsmouth with a doleful tale, Senator Isaac Hill killed the effect by explaining the dubious manner in which the signatures had been obtained. And when, a little later, Hill undertook to present a petition of the New Hampshire Legislature against the Bank, Webster moved to lay it on the table. In truth the actions of legislatures were beginning to annoy the panic-breeders. Maine, New York, New Hampshire, and other States had spoken in support of Jackson’s policy. It became necessary to devote more attention to that end of the petition business. “What is doing in your legislature about the deposits?” Clay wrote to his friend, Judge Brooke of Virginia. “We want all aid here on that subject which can be given us from Richmond.”[707]And when the Legislature acted, John Tyler lost all patience with the Governor for not sending the petition on at once. “The resolutions of the legislature have not yet reached me,” he wrote impatiently to Mrs. Tyler, “nor can I conceive what Floyd is after that he does not forward them.”[708]They arrived in time, and Webster did not move to lay them on the table.
Then, with the effect of a bomb exploding among the Bank champions, came the message of Governor Wolf of Pennsylvania, denouncing the Bank for responsibility for the depression. Clay lost no time in denouncing him as a man worshiper, albeit the Governor had previously favored the Bank. Another Bank Senator rushed forward with a resolution “disapproving the vacillating or time-serving policy of the Governor of Pennsylvania,” while Forsyth and others criticized the taste of the proceedings.[709]
Thus the battle of the petitions went merrily on, some spontaneous, most inspired by the Bank agents, while theconflicting memorials were conceived to offset the intended effect. As the weeks extended into months, and the depression began to lift, extraordinary efforts were made to reawaken the country against the “tyrant in the White House.” Webster harangued a crowd in New York City; but the major part of the platform propaganda work was assigned to McDuffie, who better than most men knew how to “ride on the whirlwind and direct the storm”; to Preston, who could arouse men to frenzy or move them to tears; and to Poindexter, who was a veritable fire-eater. These three consummate mob-baiters set forth on a journey that took them to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. The orators reached Baltimore on Sunday. But no matter; as a minister of the Gospel piously said, “in revolutionary times there were no Sabbaths,” and the meeting was held. It was on this occasion that McDuffie, with the true spirit of the demagogue, solemnly discussed the “rumor” that Jackson, the tyrant, might attempt to dismiss Congress at the point of the bayonet, and promised that “ten days after the entrance of the soldiers into the Senate Chamber, to send the Senators home, 200,000 volunteers would be in Washington.”[710]
Meanwhile the Kitchen Cabinet was capitalizing all the intemperate attacks upon Jackson, and Blair was publishing letters in the “Globe” threatening the life of the President if he did not restore the deposits. One of these recited that three young men in New York had been selected to “proceed in the course of the present month to the capital, there to put in execution the design entrusted to their hands.”[711]
Such, however, were the side issues of the session. The real fight was waged on Clay’s resolutions to censure, and later on the President’s Protest. Clay opened the debate on the censure resolutions in a three-days speech bristling withextravagant invective—a tremendous philippic, not only against Jackson’s Bank policy, but against his entire presidential career. Intended to serve outside the Senate Chamber in alarming the people, his appeal was to the passions and the fears of the multitude. The central idea of it all was that all power was being concentrated in one man. The constitutional rights of the Senate had been outraged. The public domain was threatened with sacrifice. The Indian tribes had been miserably wronged. Even the tariff was in danger. An “elective monarchy” was all but established. On every hand was depression, suffering, gloom. The power over the purse had been lodged with that over the sword—a combination fatal to free government. The President’s conduct had been lawless. Such, in brief, was the tone and temper of one of the greatest philippics that ever poured from the lips of Clay.[712]As he sank into his seat, Benton instantly began his three-days reply, meeting the attack with a counter-offensive. “Who are these Goths?” he demanded—referring to Clay’s call upon the people to drive the Goths from the Capitol. “They are President Jackson and the Democratic Party—he just elected President over the Senator himself, and the party just been made a majority in the House—all by the votes of the people. It is their act which has placed these Goths in possession of the Capitol to the discomfiture of the Senator and his friends.”
Calhoun followed in a speech of an hour and a half in support of the resolutions, proclaiming the coalition. “The Senator from Kentucky anticipates with confidence,” he said, “that the small party who were denounced at the last session as traitors and disunionists will be found on this trying occasion in the front rank, and manfully resisting the advance of despotic power.” But Calhoun’s intellectual self-respect deterred him from contending that the removal of Duane was an act of Executive usurpation.
Then followed Rives in a manly defense of the Administration which he well knew would force his retirement from the Senate under the instructions of the Virginia Legislature. And then the new orator of the Opposition, William Campbell Preston, entered the lists, attacking Government directors for furnishing the President with a report of the Bank’s activities. The President had no right to ask information, and the directors no right to comply. The galleries were moved to applause, and the Carolinian took his place among the popular orators of the day.[713]Forsyth followed Preston, to be succeeded by Grundy, who was trailed by Frelinghuysen for the resolutions.
Meanwhile Webster was impressively silent. Unwilling longer to make the Bank the football of party politics, he looked disapprovingly upon the war of personalities. He knew that no constructive measure had been proposed, and that Biddle’s frenzied pressure on the people was driving supporters from the institution. He had no heart at this time for an attack on Jackson—recalling the “reciprocal kindnesses” of the last few months.[714]He realized that a senatorial censure and exterior pressure would never drive Jackson to such a recharter measure as had been proposed. And yet, in January, Calhoun was positive that the Administration had been mortally wounded.[715]Preston was exuberantly proclaiming that the removal of the deposits would force a recharter on the Bank’s terms.[716]In February, when the Bank was losing ground with the people and making no congressional converts, Clay was writing to Brooke that “we are gaining, both in public opinion and in number in the House of Representatives.”[717]That Clay was supremely selfish in his relations with the Bank is generally conceded by historians now,[718]and was keenly felt even by Biddle, who preferred ajoint resolution ordering the restoration to wasting months in wrangling over a vote of censure. This plan he urged upon Webster, through Horace Binney of the House. But Clay scoffed at the idea. He was more interested in making Jackson obnoxious for party reasons than in serving his friends in Philadelphia, and he actually felt that he was succeeding in his purpose.
At length Webster determined to strike out for himself.
Earlyin March he came forward with his compromise recharter measure providing a renewal for six years only; for an abandonment of the monopoly features to the end that Congress might, in the meantime, if it saw fit, grant a charter to another company; for the restoration of the deposits only after July 1st; and for the issuance of no note under the $20 denomination. This compromise had been discussed with friends of the Administration, who were ready to support it provided the friends of the Bank would unite upon it. Three days later Webster addressed the Senate on the virtues and purposes of the measure, carefully refraining from personalities or denunciation of the President. The most militant of Jackson’s friends could have found no fault with the orator’s treatment of their idol. Nor did he imitate his party colleagues in an intemperate discussion of the removal. He traced the origin of the distress to Taney’s order; showed the relation between commerce and credit, and between credit and banking, and effectively disposed of Jackson’s fallacy that men who operate on credit are undeserving of consideration. It was only in his affectation of indignation over the charge that the Bank was deliberately contributing to the distress that he departed from the high ground of statesmanship, and played the hypocritical politician. But the Senators listening eagerly to his words did not know of the letter he had written to Biddle predicting that the “disciplining” ofthe people would result in a renewal of the charter, or that he had urged upon Biddle, through Binney, that he ought to “occasionally ease off, where it is requisite to prevent extreme distress.” No one knew better than he that the Bank not only possessed, but exerted, the power charged by the Administration. This aside, Webster’s was the most dignified, impersonal, and statesmanlike speech of the session.
But the moment he resumed his seat, the schism among the leaders of the Opposition was emphasized when Leigh arose to announce that the Virginia view of the unconstitutionality of the Bank would make it impossible for him to support the bill. Three days later Calhoun criticized the measure as only a temporary expedient, and proposed, instead, a bill of his own providing a recharter for twelve years. The only extensive attack on the Webster compromise, however, was that of the “Cato of the Senate,” Hugh Lawson White, who had not up to that time wholly broken with his old friend in the White House. Respected as a financier, he was always heard with profound respect. He vigorously defended the removal of the deposits on the grounds set forth in Jackson’s Message. His speech was all the more impressive because he had advised against the removal and his letter had been read to the Cabinet. The day before taking the floor, he wrote of his embarrassment, but later developments having changed his opinion, he felt it would be censurable to remain silent.[719]
But in the end it was not the opposition of Democratic Senators that suddenly terminated the consideration of the Webster compromise. It was soon found that the friends of the Bank were hopelessly divided on any constructive programme. Even in the inner Bank circles there were clashing views. Biddle favored the Webster plan; Sergeant, the chief counsel, and Binney, leading spokesman in the House, preferred the Calhoun measure. Even these differences mighthave been reconciled but for the selfishness of Clay, who persisted in his determination to use the Bank for party purposes. “If Mr. C [Clay] and Mr. C [Calhoun] would go along with us,” Webster wrote Biddle, “we could carry the compromise bill through the Senate by a strong two thirds majority. Can you write through anybody to talk with Mr. Calhoun?”[720]In the meanwhile Calhoun was attempting the conversion of such Administration Senators as Benton and Silas Wright, without success.
While these negotiations were in progress, the fury of Clay over the independence of Webster increased in intensity, culminating in the threat that, if the New Englander failed to move to lay his own motion on the table, he would make the motion himself. Thus, one week after the delivery of his speech, Webster killed his own measure. When, with the explanation that he had been disappointed in his hopes, he made the motion to table, John Forsyth demanded the yeas and nays to show that Webster’s bill had not been killed by the Administration Senators, but by his own party friends. The roll-call showed practically all the Bank Senators voting to table, with Benton, Forsyth, White, Hill, Wright, and Grundy voting against the motion. Thus the only practical and constructive attempt made by the friends of the Bank to save the institution was slaughtered in the house of its friends.[721]
Withthe accumulating evidence of impatience in the country, Clay at length determined to bring to a vote the resolutions, submitted merely to irritate and provoke a debate that would give the panic time to act. So firmly was Clay convinced that the “disciplining” of the people was working the destruction of Jackson’s popularity, that he sought to transfer a portion of his fancied resentment to Van Buren,who was all but certain to be the Democratic nominee in 1836.[722]There has probably never been a more transparent bit of histrionics perpetrated upon a deliberative body than that of Clay in his pathetic appeal to Van Buren, seated in the chair, and with a padlock on his lips, to hasten to Jackson with a plea for the suffering people.
“To you, sir, in no unfriendly spirit, but with feelings softened and subdued by the deep distress which pervades every class of our countrymen, I make this appeal,” he exclaimed, his eyes moist with tears. “...Depict to him, if you can find language to portray, the heartrending wretchedness of thousands of the working classes cast out of employment. Tell him of the tears of helpless widows, no longer able to earn their bread, and of unclad and unfed orphans, who have been driven by this policy, out of the busy pursuits, in which, but yesterday, they were gaining an honest livelihood.... Tell him that he has been abused, deceived, betrayed by the wicked counsels of unprincipled men around him. Inform him that all efforts in Congress to alleviate or terminate the public distress are paralyzed and likely to prove totally unavailing, from his influence upon a large portion of its members who are unwilling to withdraw their support, or to take a course repugnant to his wishes and feelings. Tell him that in his bosom alone, under actual circumstances, does the power reside to relieve the country; and that unless he opens it to conviction, and corrects the errors of his Administration, no human imagination can conceive, and no human tongue can express the awful consequences which may follow.”
With this piece of play-acting, Clay, looking as much distressed as one of his petitioners, sank exhausted in his seat. Throughout the ludicrous scene, Van Buren “maintained the utmost decorum of countenance, looking respectfully andeven innocently at the speaker all the while as if treasuring up every word he said to be repeated to the President.”[723]But all the while the more astute Red Fox was thinking that the speech “would tend to strengthen greatly the attachment of his friends; would warm up their sympathies in his behalf and concentrate their regard.”[724]With the eyes of all upon him—and the Senate had been really affected by Clay’s voice and manner—Van Buren called a Senator to the chair, placidly descended to the floor as though he were not the object of interest, deliberately walked to Clay’s seat, and, in his most courtly manner, and with his most courtly bow, asked for a pinch of his snuff. The startled orator gave him his snuffbox. Van Buren took a pinch, applied it to his nostrils, returned the box, bowed again, and resumed the chair as though nothing had happened. And the Senate smiled. Clay’s appeal had hovered dangerously near the ridiculous, and Van Buren pushed it over. No single incident so well illustrates the political purpose of Clay’s activities on the removal of the deposits.
But even panics and politics cannot go on forever, and the discussion on the Clay resolutions had covered “the longest period which had been occupied in a single debate in either House of Congress since the organization of the Government.”[725]Thus, on March 27th the Senate, by a vote of 26 to 20, placed the stigma of a censure upon the action of the President.
Jackson was now to have his inning.
Withmass meetings being organized against him in all sections, with the capital crowded with hostile delegations, and with the Senators thundering their extravagant philippicsat the tyrant responsible for the widows’ and the orphans’ woes, Jackson remained serene and unafraid.[726]But with the adoption of the resolutions of censure, he determined to strike back in such a way as effectively to reach the people. There were men in those days who thought that a senatorial censure would wreck any reputation. They had not yet sensed the spirit of the times. Three weeks after the Senate acted, Major Donelson appeared in the Chamber with the famous Protest. Nothing could have been more merciless than the cold logic with which the iron man pounded the resolutions of condemnation; nothing more biting than his reference to those Senators supporting them, who had thus “deliberately disregarded the recorded opinion of their States.” He solemnly protested “against the proceedings ... as unauthorized by the Constitution, contrary to the spirit and to several of its express provisions, subversive of that distribution of powers of government which it has ordained and established, destructive of the checks and safeguards by which those powers were intended on the one hand to be controlled and on the other to be protected, and calculated, by their immediate and collateral effects, by their character and tendency, to concentrate in the hands of a body, not directly amenable to the people, a degree of influence and power dangerous to their liberties and fatal to the Constitution of their choice.”
Not only had his public character been assailed, but imputations had been cast upon his private character. “In vain do I bear upon my person,” he continued in a passage of no little eloquence, “enduring memorials of that contest in which American liberty was purchased; in vain have I since periled property, fame, and life in defense of the rights and privileges so dearly bought; in vain am I now, without a personal aspiration or the hope of individual advantage, encountering responsibilities and dangers from which by mereinactivity in relation to a single point I might have been exempt, if any serious doubts can be entertained as to the purity of my purpose and motives. If I had been ambitious, I should have sought an alliance with that powerful institution which even now aspires to no divided empire. If I had been venal, I should have sold myself to its designs. Had I preferred personal comfort and official ease to the performance of my arduous duty, I should have ceased to molest it. In the history of conquerors and usurpers, never in the fire of youth nor in the vigor of manhood could I find an attraction to lure me from the path of duty, and now I shall scarcely find an inducement to commence the career of ambition when gray hairs and a decaying frame, instead of inviting to toil and battle, call me to the contemplation of other worlds where conquerors cease to be honored and usurpers expiate their crimes.” And he closed with the request that the Protest be entered upon the journals of the Senate.[727]
Whatever else may be said of this remarkable document, its effect upon the masses of the people, idolizing Jackson as they never had another American, was certain to be tremendous. The ideas were largely Jackson’s. Attorney-General Butler, a brilliant lawyer, worked out the legal end, while Amos Kendall devoted his genius to those portions intended for political effect. The Protest appeared immediately in Blair’s “Globe,” and was soon published in all the Administration papers of the country.
Theeffect on the Senate may be better imagined than described. Poindexter, whose private grudge was the inspiration of his renegadism, could not “express the feeling of indignation” the paper had excited in his bosom, and he would “spurn it from the Senate”—“that body which stands as a barrier between the people and the encroachments of executive power.” It was not a Message—merely “a paper, signed ‘Andrew Jackson,’”and “nothing else.”[728]Sprague of Maine, who had been pilloried, spoke “more in grief than in anger,” and while the President had referred to “his Secretary” and felt that this was “his Government,” he, the Senator, “never bowed the knee to Baal.” And while the tyrant was appealing to the people, look about. “Behold your green fields withered; listen to the cries of distress of the widows and orphans, rising almost in execration of the exercise of that power which has blasted their hopes and reduced them to despair.”[729]Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, another pilloried statesman, next arose to discuss “this most extraordinary proceeding—one which would form an era in American history.” What a spectacle! “When the busy hum of industry was silenced, when the laborer was in want of employment, when banks were breaking in every direction, and the cries for relief from the unrelenting hand of power were heard everywhere around us,” the Senate had listened to a lecture of an hour and a half. And why refer to the New Jersey Legislature? He had “dared to meet the frowns of his constituents” because of his zeal for his country.[730]Southard of New Jersey, also pilloried by Jackson, hoped that he might “school himself into that degree of moderation necessary for the occasion.” He could find no excuse for Jackson’s indignation. And yet “we have received, not from Charles I, Cromwell, or Napoleon Bonaparte, but from a man combining the characters of the whole of them, a warning to cease our further proceedings.”[731]And Leigh closed the day’s events by declaring “before God that upon the fate of these resolutions, and the disposition of this question, depends the permanency of the Constitution, handed down to us by our fathers.”[732]
To get the right perspective upon these speeches, it should be borne in mind that at the time of their delivery the business men were openly charging Biddle with responsibility for the panic. Niles’s “Register” had admitted that the Bank’s power was too great, and the “St. Louis Republican,” a stanch supporter of the Bank, had turned upon it with a bitter denunciation of its course.[733]Thus, however, the debate began, and in this spirit was it continued for a month—a month of fierce invective. On the second day, following the philippic of Leigh, the crowds in the packed galleries clashed with cheers and hisses. Especially pleased were the galleries when, apropos of Jackson’s reference to his gray hairs, the fiery cripple compared him to Mount Ætna, “whose summit was capped with eternal snow, but which was always vomiting forth its liquid fire.”[734]The discussion finally revolved around the Poindexter resolutions not to receive. A few days later Calhoun attacked the Protest with great bitterness, and amendments were offered by both Calhoun and Forsyth. That of the Carolinian declared the President had no right to send, and the Senate no right to receive, such a document. Then the Administration disclosed its hand in the Forsyth resolution providing that “an authenticated copy of the original resolution [Clay’s] with a list of the ayes and nays, of the President’s Message and the pending resolution be prepared ... and transmitted to the Governor of each State of the Union to be laid before their legislature at the next session, as the only authority authorized to decide upon the opinions and conduct of the Senators.”[735]Here was a declaration, by indirection, from the leader of the Administration that the President was not authorized to pass upon the opinions and conduct of Senators. Had the resolution stopped there, it would not have differed materially from those of Poindexter or the resolution of Calhoun. But it declared that there was an authority to pass upon the conduct of Senators—the people who elected them to the Senate; and that, with the facts before them, they should pass uponthe conduct of the public servants. This was an impressive proclamation that the Jacksonian Senators were convinced that the people sustained them; and the fact that the Forsyth resolution was defeated by a party vote was an admission from the Opposition that it lacked such faith.
When in early May the Poindexter resolutions were called up for final consideration, the debate was closed by Webster in a constitutional argument pitched upon a higher plane than that of personalities, and interspersed with passages of eloquence seldom equaled even by him.[736]Nothing reveals the inability of the senatorial oligarchy to understand the altered spirit of the people so well as his contention that the Senate was expected to stand between the people and the tyranny of Executive power. The fact that the peaceful revolution of 1828 was a rising of the people against the aristocracy of the old congressional clique does not appear to have occurred to Webster or his party friends at any time during the Jacksonian period.
When Webster concluded, the last word for the Administration was spoken by its most eloquent spokesman, who, better than any other, was temperamentally fitted to meet the New England orator upon the high plane he had chosen, John Forsyth. Webster rejoined, briefly, the vote was taken, and the resolutions passed with a margin of eleven votes.