by H. W. Brands
Biddle understood the stakes. “The present is a crisis for General Jackson and for the Bank,” he said as the renewal bill hit the floor of the Senate. But the strength of his support caused him to expect that Jackson, rather than the bank, would be overthrown. Biddle’s informational campaign appeared—to him—to have persuaded the country of the wrongheadedness of the bank’s opponents. “We set to work to disenchant the country of their foolery, and we have so well succeeded that I will venture to say that there is no man, no woman, and no child in the United States who does not understand that the worthy President was in a great error.” Biddle was confident the renewal bill would win congressional approval. What happened then would be up to Jackson. “If the bill passes and the President negatives it, I will not say that it will destroy him, but I certainly think it will, and moreover I think it ought to.”
The debate began in the Senate, where it quickly assumed proportions that made clear that much more than a bank was at stake. As Biddle himself had admitted to Tocqueville, democracy had swept the field of American political philosophy; no one could credibly speak against it. But as Tocqueville countered (in his book), the old convictions died hard, and there were plenty of individuals in America who thought the ordinary people too ignorant to manage the affairs of the country, certainly on matters as technical as the operation of a national bank. For both sides, the bank became a proxy for popular rule.
Daniel Webster led off for the bank. His outspoken support surprised those many who recalled him as a staunch opponent of the bank’s original charter in 1816, but not those fewer who knew him as an attorney who held to the philosophy that the rich deserved the best defense money could buy and who, not incidentally, had been on the bank’s payroll for years. “I believe my retainer has not been renewed or refreshed as usual,” he wrote to Biddle at a critical moment for the bank. “If it be wished that my relation to the Bank should be continued, it may be well to send me the usual retainers.” Webster discovered the merits of sound money and of the bank in making it so. “A disordered currency is one of the greatest of political evils,” he told the Senate. “It wars against industry, frugality, and economy; and it fosters the evil spirits of extravagance and speculation. Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effectual than that which deludes them with paper money.” Not for nothing had Webster become one of the best-paid lawyers in America; he now displayed his ingenuity by arguing the democratic case for Biddle’s bank. Flimsy money, he said, hurt ordinary people more than anyone else. “This is the most effectual of inventions to fertilize the rich man’s field by the sweat of the poor man’s brow. Ordinary tyranny, oppression, excessive taxation: these bear lightly the happiness of the mass of the community, compared with fraudulent currencies and the robberies committed by depreciated paper.” Webster deemed especially pernicious the wide use of paper notes in small denominations. The effect of such issues was to drive hard money—gold and silver coins—out of circulation. He told a story from English history. “When Mr. Pitt, in the year 1797, proposed in Parliament to authorize the Bank of England to issue one pound notes, Mr. Burke lay sick at Bath of an illness from which he never recovered. And he is said to have written to the late Mr. Canning, ‘Tell Mr. Pitt that if he consents to the issuing of one pound notes, he must never expect to see a guinea again.’”
The odd thing about Webster’s argument was that it might have been made, almost word for word, by the opponents of the bank. Webster’s point was that the Bank of the United States was the surest bulwark against state banks, which issued notes that served as money and did so with no coordination—indeed, often in destructive, inflationary competition. This was true enough. And if paper money there must be, then the Bank of the United States could help keep inflation in check. Yet some Jacksonians took Webster’s argument and pushed it further: toward the elimination of all banks, or at least those authorized to issue paper currency or its equivalent. Hard money was the only honest money, they contended. Everything else was, as Webster said, a plot against honesty, thrift, and personal industry.
The strongest opponent of the bank in Congress, or at any event the one who spoke the longest and loudest, was Thomas Benton. The senator from Missouri condemned the bank as the unconstitutional offspring of selfish private interest: wrong in law, wrong in policy, wrong in politics, wrong in morals. Where in the Constitution, he asked, was the article enabling Congress to create a national bank? His copy of the Constitution contained no such article. The policies of the bank were pernicious in favoring the East at the expense of the South and West. The bank was headquartered in Philadelphia; its lending policies drew hard currency from the rest of the country to the marble temple on Chestnut Street. “They lead to the abduction of its gold and silver,” Benton declaimed. “Every body in the South and West knows that the hard money of the country is constantly disappearing; but those only who have observed the working of the machinery of the Bank of the United States can tell where all this hard money is gone.” The directors of the bank and their minions were draining the very life from the West and South. “They gorge to repletion, then vomit their load into the vast receptacles of the Northeast, and gorge again.” The West and South, deprived of money, were filled with farmers and merchants unable to pay even the interest on their debts. The day of reckoning for these honest folks was fast approaching. “When that dread day comes . . . the towns and cities of the South and West—the fairest farms and goodliest mansions—will be set up at auction, to be knocked down to the bank agent, at the mock prices fixed in the compting room of the bank itself.” And from this would spring what had been implicit in the bank from the start.
In these mock sales of towns and cities may be laid the foundation for the titles and estates of our future nobility—Duke of Cincinnati! Earl of Lexington! Marquis of Nashville! Count of St. Louis! Prince of New Orleans! Such may be the titles of the bank nobility to whom the next generation of American farmers must “crook the pregnant hinges of the knee.” Yes, sir! When the renewed charter is brought in for us to vote upon, I shall consider myself as voting upon a bill for the establishment of lords and commons in this America, and for the eventual establishment of a King; for when the lords and commons are established, the King will come of himself!
It was demagoguery, of course, revealing little about the actual workings of the bank but much about the passions the bank provoked. If Webster wanted to have things both ways—hard currency but a bank that issued paper currency—so did Benton. Everyone knew that the chronic problem of the western economy—as it had been since the frontier days—was a shortage of money. There simply wasn’t enough gold and silver to go around, and never had been. And everyone knew that the West and South suffered more from the discounting of banknotes for distance from the issuing bank than the North and East and therefore benefited more from the comparatively uniform currency the notes the Bank of the United States provided. Nor were Webster and the bank’s backers the only ones who disguised their personal interest in the affair. Benton and the opponents of the bank found allies in the state banks that had seen the national bank steal their customers and suppress their profits; these state banks discovered ways of rewarding their often unacknowledged spokesmen in Congress.
Yet if economics cut both ways on the bank issue, emotion was all on the side of the opponents. No one warms to bankers. At best they gain a grudging respect for making money without seeming to work very hard. And the bigger the bank and the more powerful the bankers, the more grudging the respect. Biddle thought Jackson’s suspicions of banks foolishly idiosyncratic. They may or may not have been foolish, but they certainly weren’t idiosyncratic.
For all the suspicions of the populists and the thunderbolts of Benton, the renewal bill passed the Senate in a close vote, and the House by a somewhat larger margin. Opponents alleged bribery but couldn’t prove it, most likely because it wasn’t more blatant than the back scratching and palm greasing that pass
ed for daily life in the legislature. Roger Taney, who had replaced John Berrien as attorney general and would become Jackson’s strong right arm in the bank fight, made this point regarding one congressman who reconsidered his initial opposition after receiving a large loan on easy terms from Biddle. “Now I do not mean to say that he was directly bribed to give this vote. From the character he sustained and from what I knew of him, I think he would have resented any thing that he regarded as an attempt to corrupt him. But he wanted the money, and felt grateful for the favor. And perhaps he thought that an institution which was so useful to him, and had behaved with so much kindness, could not be injurious or dangerous to the public, and that it would be as well to continue it.”
Jackson hadn’t intended to fight the 1832 election on the bank issue. In his annual message of December 1831 he had barely mentioned the subject. But when Clay, Webster, and Biddle insisted on making a contest over the bank, he couldn’t resist such a tempting prospect. Better than any of them, Jackson understood the symbolism of the bank and what it meant for popular government in America. He received the renewal bill from Congress on July 4, which seemed fitting to those friends of capital who hoped the measure would secure their independence from ignorant democrats and provocatively ironic to those same democrats, who felt it fastened an aristocracy of finance upon the country. Jackson stood decisively with the democrats, returning the bill to Congress a week later, with a resounding message explaining his veto.
“A bank of the United States is in many respects convenient for the Government and useful to the people,” he acknowledged. It managed government finances and expedited many transactions. For this reason he hadn’t chosen to challenge the bank’s existence in the declining years of its charter, despite his reservations about several aspects of its creation and continuance. The bill before him, however, would perpetuate the bank: both its conveniences and its much larger deficiencies. The latter were what required his veto.
The basic problem with the bank, Jackson said, was that it was unconstitutional. The bank’s defenders cited political precedent and Supreme Court decisions as providing constitutional sanction. “To this conclusion I can not assent,” he rejoined. “Mere precedent is a dangerous source of authority, and should not be regarded as deciding questions of constitutional power except where the acquiescence of the people and the States can be considered as well settled.” If anything, the history of the Bank of the United States showed that the question was far from settled. Congress had approved a bank in 1791 and disapproved it in 1811. It had debated long before reapproving it in 1816. As for the states, Jackson reckoned that the sum of legislative, executive, and judicial opinions from the states ran against the bank by as much as four to one.
Regarding the Supreme Court, Jackson didn’t think it had spoken in anything like a definitive tone on the bank. But more to the point, Jackson didn’t believe the executive was bound by Supreme Court decisions. Nor, for that matter, was the legislature. To a later generation such a position might appear radical, even anarchic. But in the 1830s decisions of the Supreme Court had yet to acquire the finality they would eventually win, and Jackson saw no reason to defer to an unelected tribunal.
The Congress, the Executive, and the Court 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 judicial 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.
Regardless, therefore, of what John Marshall had written in the McCulloch case or any other, it was for the president to render his own judgment on the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States. Like many other issues involving federal authority, the bank question turned on the “elastic” clause of the Constitution, the one endowing Congress with authority to enact measures “necessary and proper” to the accomplishment of the enumerated responsibilities. Jackson thought Congress had overstepped in establishing the bank. “It can not be ‘necessary’ or ‘proper’ for Congress to barter away or divest themselves of any of the powers vested in them by the Constitution to be exercised for the public good”—which it had done in giving the bank de facto control of the currency. The Constitution did give Congress the authority to legislate for the District of Columbia; within the federal square, Jackson acknowledged, a federally chartered bank could be constitutional. But in the states, no.
There was much more to Jackson’s opposition than strict construction. Like Benton and other anti-bankers, the president feared the emergence of a monopoly of money. He didn’t oppose monopolies per se. Patents and copyrights were monopolies that were both constitutional and conducive to the general welfare. But a monopoly of money was inherently dangerous. Of the bank’s twenty-five directors, only five were chosen by the government, the rest by the stockholders of the bank. Thus the public interest was always outweighed by the interests of the bank’s private owners, who must have been saints not to be tempted by the power they held over the nation’s economy. “It is easy to conceive that great evils to our country and its institutions might flow from such a concentration of power in the hands of a few men irresponsible to the people,” Jackson said. Nor was the economy the sum of what was at risk from the bank’s excessive power. “Is there no danger to our liberty and independence? . . . Will there not be cause to tremble for the purity of our elections in peace and for the independence of our country in war?”
Jackson already feared for equality in America. “It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” Jackson was no leveler. “Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions.” Yet those institutions should not magnify natural inequalities. “When the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages . . . to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustices of their Government.” In a sweeping affirmation of the democratic promise, Jackson perorated:
There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.
The bank renewal bill did just the opposite and therefore had to be rejected.
Vetoes were rare in the days before Jackson; his six predecessors had turned back but ten bills total. Jackson exceeded that number by himself, starting with a veto of a measure to build a road from Maysville, Kentucky, to Lexington. His objection was precisely the one articulated in his first annual message, that internal improvements were best and most constitutionally left to the states. The many supporters of the Maysville Road remarked the irony of Jackson, the self-proclaimed champion of popular government, defying the will of the people as expressed by their duly elected representatives.
But the response to Jackson’s bank veto made the earlier complaints sound like quibbles. Henry Clay called the veto a vestige of royalty and Jackson a would-be tyrant. Daniel Webster decried the “fearful and appalling aspect” of the power Jackson claimed for himself, and accused the president of trying to set “the poor against the rich.” Pro-bank papers gnashed their type. “A more deranging, radical, law-upsetting document was never promulgated by the wildest Roman fanatic,” one New England editor declared of the veto message. “The re
volutionists of France went but little further.” Niles’ Register reported that the veto had brought business to a standstill around the country. In Philadelphia angry anti-Jacksonians gathered before the bank’s headquarters to assert that Jackson had “wantonly trampled upon the interests of his fellow citizens and upon the constitution of his country.” Should the veto stand, the result would be a “national calamity.”
Jackson let his rivals rage. The veto cost him support in certain states, including Kentucky, where the Jacksonian candidate for governor won narrowly rather than by the comfortable margin he had enjoyed before the veto. But on the whole the veto served to consolidate Jackson’s reputation as the defender of the common man against the moneyed interests. “It diffuses universal joy among your friends and dismay among your enemies,” John Randolph wrote from Virginia. Jackson himself was pleased. “The veto works well everywhere,” he wrote William Lewis. “It has put down the Bank instead of prostrating me.”
And so it appeared as Americans moved toward the polls in the autumn of 1832. The threat and reality of the cholera epidemic that summer diminished the excitement that often surrounded politics in the age of democracy, yet enough remained to astonish certain foreign observers. Though Tocqueville had gone home by now, another French visitor, intrigued by the same phenomena, produced an account of the campaign. A pro-Jackson parade, held at night in New York, convinced him that democracy wasn’t simply the reigning political philosophy but the American civic religion.