The elections of members of the House of Representatives will take
place in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, the principal States in
the Union, next October and November. Although the members then
returned will not take their seats until the session which begins
in December, 1835, yet great importance is attached to the results
of these elections, even in respect to the approaching session of
Congress. On both sides preparations are making with the greatest
activity; both parties have chosen their text. As the harangues against
an aristocracy of money have aroused the prejudices of the labouring
classes, who form the majority of electors, against the Bank, the
watchword of the Opposition is no longer ostensibly the Bank. But it
says to the electors, referring to the late acts of the President
directed against the Bank, and the doctrines which on this occasion
he has put forth in his messages; "The executive power is guilty of
gross usurpation; hasten to the rescue of the constitution from its
monstrous encroachments. It is no longer a question about the bank; but
our liberties, bought by the blood of our fathers, are at stake, and
an audacious soldier, surrounded by a train of servile place-men, has
dared to trifle with our dearest rights." This is certainly the best
ground for the Opposition to take; for General Jackson, in the affair
of the Bank, as in most other circumstances of his life, has cared
little for forms. He has gone straight forward to his object, without
stopping to consider where he was placing his foot.
The Administration party, which well knows how unpopular the Bank
is with the multitude, since this unpopularity is chiefly its own
work, talks Bank and nothing but Bank. "The Opposition," they say,
"is mocking you, when it calls upon you to save the Constitution and
the laws. What do they care for the Constitution and the laws? It is
the Bank that they wish to save. Down with the Bank! General Jackson,
_the Hero of two Wars_, who pushed back the English bayonets from the
Union at the peril of his life, wishes to free the soil of the country
from this prop of tyranny and corruption. The Bank is nothing but
English influence which seeks to enslave you. It is now to be seen,
whether you will be freemen or worshippers of the Golden Calf. In
spite of the hypocritical protestations of the parasites of the Bank,
remember, at the polls, that the question, the only question, the whole
question, is Bank or no Bank." At bottom, what the Administration party
says, is true; the Opposition do not give up the cause of the Bank.
The question, which is at issue, and which is to be settled by the
elections, is, in fact, the question of the Bank.
But whose fault is it, if the Opposition has a rightful cause to call
the citizens to the defence of the Constitution? Besides, the leaders
of the Democratic party felt that their policy, which consisted in
setting up the local banks in opposition to to the National Bank, would
necessarily fail, and that the financial and commercial interests of
the country, comprising the local banks themselves, must, in the long
run, rally round the Bank of the United States. The abuse which they
had heaped upon the latter, would, therefore, fall directly upon the
local banks. It was impossible that the democratic multitude, which
had much more just grounds of complaint against the local banks, than
against the Bank of the United States, by which nobody had ever lost a
dollar, should not perceive this. Accordingly, after having hesitated
a long time, the heads of the party seem ready to take the bold stand
of openly denouncing all banks. Bank-bills, they say, are nothing but
wretched rag-money; the eulogies of the metals, gold and silver, are
now become the order of the day. Gold is called _Jackson money_; the
United States mint has been actively employed in striking gold coins,
half-eagles and quarter-eagles. The principal journals of the Jackson
party pay the daily wages of their journeymen printers in gold; the
warm friends of the Administration affect to carry gold pieces in
their pockets, and as paper only is generally used here in business
transactions, even of the most trifling amount, you may be certain
that a man who is seen with gold in his hands, is a Jackson-man. The
President lately made a visit to his seat in Tennessee, and paid his
expenses all along the road in gold, and the Globe, his official organ,
took care to inform the public of it. At a dinner, given in honour of
him, by the citizens of Nashville, he proposed this toast: "_Gold and
silver, the only currency recognised by the constitution!_"
This apotheosis of gold and silver, abstractly considered, is all
very well; hitherto the metals have made too small a proportion of
the currency of the United States; gold, particularly, was never
met with. At its last session Congress removed one of the obstacles
to gold remaining in the country and taking the place of small bank
notes, by raising its legal value. How far this act will effect its
object of keeping a certain quantity of gold in the country, I know
not; but I am persuaded, that the only prompt and effectual means of
sweeping away the small bills, will be a National Bank. The prudent and
experienced men of the party will certainly resist a formal declaration
of war against all banks; but it is hardly to be avoided, that in the
democratic party, the most rash and the most violent should give the
law to the men of moderation and experience. In this event, Mr Van
Buren will have need of all his address to preserve discipline in the
ranks. He is too well acquainted with the commercial situation of the
United States, to allow himself to dwell one moment on such a project
as the destruction of the banks. His creed is the overthrow of the Bank
of the United States, not because it is a bank, but because, in his
view, its existence is contrary to the constitution.
The tactics of the Opposition have already given it success in some
partial and unimportant elections, but even if they should have the
majority in the next Congress, it would be but an incomplete victory,
for the Bank would not be preserved. Many persons who have joined the
Opposition because its watchword was the Constitution and the laws,
would have kept aloof, had they seen the name of the Bank joined with
them, so rooted is the jealousy of this useful institution. Admitting,
then, that the Opposition triumphs in the coming elections, it will be
necessary to set some new springs in motion in order to save the Bank.
It is easy to refer at present to one on which the friends of the Bank
will not fail to rely.
The Union, homogeneous as it is in regard to language and general
character, is subdivided, as I have already said, into three groups,
daily becoming more and more strongly marked. North of the Potomac, the
States are poor in soil, but enriched by commerce[AI] and manufactures;
there are the great commercial towns, Boston, New York, Philadelphia,
and Baltimore, and the secondary ports of Salem, Portland, New Bedford,
Nantucket, and Providence; there, also, are almost all the manufactures
of the Union. These States do not admit slavery, with the exception
of Maryland, where the slaves are on the decrease, and the Lilliputian
State of Delaware, where slavery has, in fact, almost disappeared.
South of the Potomac, between the Atlantic and the Mississippi, are the
slave-holding States, wholly agricultural, and the only part of the
country in which cultivation is conducted on a great scale, producing
cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco, without mechanical industry, and
having but little commerce, except the coasting trade, the foreign
trade being in the hands of the North. In the West, reaching from the
great lakes southwards, and lying on the Ohio and the Mississippi, is
a tract of the highest fertility, in which, since the peace of 1783,
have grown up the new States of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, besides
Michigan, which is now on the point of becoming a State. These are also
agricultural States, producing corn and cattle of all kinds, yielding
whiskey and salted provisions, cultivated by free hands, and in which
property is so far subdivided, that each family has its own farm.
Of these three groups, the North is most interested in the existence of
a Central Bank; it is there, also, that the financial machinery of the
Union is most thoroughly understood, and it is most fully perceived,
that such a Bank is one of its most indispensable wheels. But the North
alone, even with the support of some commercial towns in the South and
West, such as New Orleans and Cincinnati, does not make up a majority,
and in the North itself, in the rural districts back of New York and
Philadelphia, a jealousy of the commerce of the cities prevails,
which is worse than injustice, for it is ingratitude, and which
displays itself by a blind hostility to the Bank. In a word, although
the question of a National Bank is considered almost a question of
existence by the great commercial capitals of the North, without whose
enterprise that region would be still little better than a wilderness,
yet the North is far from being unanimous in favour of such an
institution, and were it so, would not alone be able to save it. The
North, then, must seek allies in the South or the West; there are some
symptoms of the increase of the Opposition in the West, but this is
only because the question of the Bank has been temporarily left out of
view. The West does not favour the Bank nor the banks. The hatred of
these eminently democratic States to the banking system is formally
proclaimed in the constitutions of Indiana and Illinois, by which banks
are expressly prohibited, unless the State think proper to establish
one itself, with its own funds; a measure which each has already made
preparations to adopt. It is to the South, then, that the North must
look for help.
The inhabitants of the South and the North are very different from
each other in many points (See _Letter X._), and in a certain degree
there are the same analogies and the same contrasts between the North
and the South, as between England and France.[AJ] The South, like,
France, is most distinguished for the brilliant qualities; the North,
like England, for the solid; great ideas have their origin rather
in the South; good execution belongs rather to the North. The North
is gifted with the English perseverance, at once the pledge and the
condition of success; the South, like us, is easily moved, but easily
discouraged; all ardour at the outset, but disconcerted by a check from
any unforeseen obstacle. It was a matter of general surprise through
the Union last year, that the South Carolinians had completed, and
completed in a good style of execution, a railroad from Charleston to
Augusta; the distance is equal to that from Havre to Paris. From the
intermixture of northern with southern men in Congress, we find in that
body a spirit of calculation and a practical good sense combined with
a lively imagination and large views; the well balanced combination
of these opposite qualities explains the union of boldness and wisdom
which generally characterises the acts of that body. Until recently,
when the West has suddenly loomed up, and taken its stand by the
side of these two rivals, the domestic politics of the United States
have consisted in maintaining the balance between the North and the
South.[AK]
There are important differences in the political views of the North
and the South. The North has more respect for the Federal bond, and
is disposed to tighten rather than to relax it. The South has the
opposite tendency. The South is opposed to the tariff, to the system
of internal improvements by the Federal government, to whatever tends
to enlarge the influence of the Federal authority. "The lighter is
the Federal yoke," says the South, "the more easily it will be borne,
the less cause there will be to fear, that any of the members of the
confederation will be tempted to shake it off." "By relaxing too much
the Federal bond," says the North, "you destroy it. If you go on
thus, even for a short time, the Union will be dissolved indeed, and
will exist only in name; the slightest accident will then be enough to
abolish even the name." In all these quarrels, however, even in that of
Nullification, when a part of the South threatened to break the Federal
compact, they have hitherto come to an understanding. Concessions have
been made by both sides, but more often by the North than by the South,
and as they have so long continued to preserve a Union, there is room
to hope, that they will still be able to live together for a long time
to come.
The general leaning of the South to an interpretation of the
constitution most favourable to the sovereignty of the States, has
led many of the southern politicians to maintain the doctrine of the
unconstitutionality of the Bank; although in opposition to a formal
decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, the chief-justice
of which, Judge Marshall, is more revered throughout the Union, than
any other southern man, and even more so in the South than elsewhere.
The Constitution, say the States' rights puritans, does not give
Congress power to establish a Bank of the United States. On the other
side, if they are ticklish as to what they call the encroachments of
one branch of the national government, the Congress, they are not less
so as to those of which the Opposition accuses another branch, that
is, the President. Thus at the same moment that they combat the Bank,
they combat the President also, on account of his measures against
the Bank. This third party is numerous in Virginia. Now allowing
the conclusions of the States' right party relative to the Bank to
be founded on a strict interpretation of the law, they are none the
less inadmissible in practice. And as it is impossible in the United
States to give currency to the maxim, _push the colonies rather than
principle_, the North entertains the hope that the States' rights
party, after the example of some of its leaders, such as Mr Calhoun
and Mr McDuffie, will relax a little of the rigour of their theories.
The Administration, on the other hand, is doing its utmost to preserve
the theoretical notions of Virginia on the Bank question in all
their original purity on their native soil, and Mr Van Buren, who is
far-sighted, lately sent the following toast to a 4th of July dinner in
that State: "_Unqualified war on the Bank of the United States_."
The North, fortunately for itself, has a means of acting upon the
South, by slavery. This requires some explanation. At the time of the
declaration of Independence (1776), slavery existed in all the States.
During the war of the Revolution, Pennsylvania, in 1780, adopted a
plan which soon exterminated it within her limits; Massachusetts, in
1781, proclaimed slavery to be incompatible with the laws already
existing; the other States of New England, and finally New York, and
the other States north of the Potomac, with the exception of Delaware
and Maryland, adopted measures similar to those of Pennsylvania.[AL]
This was an easy matter for these States, their slaves not forming more
than one twentieth or one fifteenth of the whole population. But it was
a very different affair in the South, where the proportion of slaves
was six or seven times greater, and where all the rural labour and
menial services were performed by slaves; the institution of slavery
was, therefore, permitted to stand, in the South. The acquisition of
Louisiana and Florida has enlarged the number of slave States, and
by an oversight, which will one day be bitterly rued, slavery has
been authorised in some of the new States, such as Missouri, where
it would be easy to do without the blacks.[AM] In 1790, there were
660,000 slaves[AN] distributed in six States, one Territory, and the
Federal District; in 1830 there were 2,000,000, in twelve States, two
Territories, and the Federal District. The white population of the
slave section, in 1790, was 1,250,000, or as 190 to 100; in 1830, it
was 3,760,000, or as 186 to 100. The proportional increase of the slave
population would appear still greater if we added the free blacks, and
struck out the States of Delaware and Maryland. In 1830, the number of
slaves in Louisiana and South Carolina was greater than that of the
whites.
In our days, slavery is a scourge to all the countries in which it
exists; of this the people of the United States, in the South as
well as in the North, are convinced; but how to put an end to it?
The bloody experiment of St. Domingo and its fatal consequences to
the majority of the blacks themselves, offer no encouragement to
immediate emancipation. The great experiment just making by the English
government in its colonies,[AO] is not yet advanced enough to afford
any light. Besides, the English colonies contain only about one third
of the number of slaves now in the United States. And supposing the
slaves once emancipated, what shall be done with them? This question
is the most embarrassing of all, to one who is acquainted with the
wretched condition of the free blacks in the United States. (See _Note
16_.) On the other hand, the difficulties increase with the progress of
time, and the Southern States are, or think they are, obliged to adopt
measures in regard to the black population, which may be defended by
the plea of necessity, but which are nevertheless excessively harsh.[AP]
In spite of all the precautions against an insurrection of the blacks,
the solicitude of the Southern States continually increases; from the
first of this month the blacks in the English West Indies, which are
within three days' sail of the United States, are partially free.
Between those islands and the southern and northern ports, there
is an active commerce, and the communication is frequent. Finally,
religious proselytism, which has carried the measure of emancipation
in England, has its organs in the United States. There are not wanting
philanthropists in Boston, Philadelphia, and Ohio, who are always ready
to facilitate the escape of runaway slaves. Last winter, while I was
at Richmond, 40 or 50 slaves disappeared, and there is no doubt that
the fanatics of Philadelphia or New England furnished them the means
of flight. The question of slavery, then, is, of all others, the most
deeply interesting and alarming to the Southern States. Whenever it
has been raised, even indirectly and secondarily, they have vehemently
remonstrated; the moment it is touched, their voice is heard; this is
their weak side; here the North has a hold upon them.
In regard to slavery, the Northern States have never departed from the
policy of concession. This conduct of the North may even appear like
culpable connivance, to Europeans not aware that the most precious
treasure of North America, that is to say, the Union, has been at
stake. The Northern States have written in their laws all that the
South has demanded; they have granted to the southern master the
right to claim his runaway slave before their own courts, so that the
republican soil of the North does not enjoy the privilege which belongs
to some of the monarchical countries of Europe, that of giving liberty
to whoever sets his foot upon it. The North has permitted slavery to be
maintained in the Federal District, in Washington, at the foot of the
Capitol steps. The North, seeing the South in a flame on the Missouri
question, stifled its just repugnance to her admission. The North,
which has an interest in the recognition of Hayti, has yielded that
point, because the South declares that it would be an encouragement to
the slaves to revolt. Thus to maintain harmony in the Union, the North
has pushed its concessions even to silencing its religious feelings,
its principles of liberty, its commercial interests. As the Union
promotes the good of all, all ought to be ready to make sacrifices to
preserve it, and it would be just, that the South should renounce its
theories about the constitutionality of a National Bank, theories which
are belied by long practice, and which have been formally condemned by
judges, of whom the South itself is proud.
Some months ago the public clamour imposed silence on the Abolition
Societies in the North, whose object is the abolition of slavery in the
South. The newspapers contain details of the devastation and pillage
committed by a handful of people on the poor, inoffensive blacks,
during three consecutive nights of July, in New York, and during the
same number in Philadelphia, about a week ago. Far be it from me to
accuse the Opposition, which has the majority in these two cities, of
having been an accomplice of these wretches! Yet I believe I state a
fact when I say, that those terrible riots, in which houses, schools,
and churches were plundered and pulled down every evening by the dozen,
and in which peaceable persons of colour were robbed and personally
abused, would have been more promptly repressed, had not the North,
above all things else, been eager to punish the Abolitionists, and
to show to the South that it had nothing in common with them. The
North, in a word, has given and continues to give to the South every
conceivable guarantee on the subject of slavery. The South, which may
one day need, not merely the passive forbearance, but the active aid of
the North against insurrection, should consider if the North exacts too
much in return, in asking toleration for an institution indispensable
to the North, and from which the South itself has received nothing but
favours.