THE UNITED STATES BANK AND THE PRESIDENTIAL CONTEST OF 1832
Jackson and the Bank in his First Annual Message--Jackson's Relations
to the Portsmouth Branch of the Bank--Jackson's Opposition in
Principle to the Bank--The Political Science of the Constitution of
1787--Western Democracy--The West and the "Money Power" of the
East--"States' rights" and the Bank--The Case of Brown and
Maryland--Democracy and Socialism--Benton's Attack on the Bank--Benton
Repulsed--Jackson and Benton--The Bank and the People--The Existence
of the Bank made a Political Issue--Jackson's Second Attack on the
Bank--Jackson's Plan for a Bank--Benton's Resolution against the
Re-charter of the Bank--Jackson's Challenge to make the Continued
Existence of the Bank the Issue in the Campaign of 1832--The Challenge
Accepted--The Bank's Petition for Re-charter--Benton's Charge of
Illegal Practices--Passage of the Bill for Re-charter--The Veto of the
Bank Bill--The Bank and Foreign Powers--The Bank and the West--The
Bank and the Rich--Structure and Powers of the Bank--Jackson on
Executive Independence--Von Holst's Criticism of the Veto Message--The
President's Real Meaning.
[Sidenote: Jackson and the Bank in his first annual message.]
In his first annual message, that of December 8th, 1829, President
Jackson began his war upon the United States Bank. He declared in it
that the constitutionality and expediency of the law creating the Bank
were well questioned by a large portion of the people, and that its
failure to establish a sound and uniform currency, the great end of
its existence, must be admitted by all.
{191} [Sidenote: Jackson's relations to the Portsmouth branch of the
Bank.]
Basing themselves chiefly upon an individual report made by Mr. John
Quincy Adams on May 14th, 1832, in regard to the condition of the
Bank, and upon documents referred to in that report, recent historians
attribute President Jackson's first attack upon the United States Bank
to a personal feud between his friends in New Hampshire and Mr.
Webster's friends there.
Senator Levi Woodbury, of New Hampshire, the leader of the Jackson
party in New Hampshire, endeavored, in the summer of 1829, to have
Jeremiah Mason, Mr. Webster's great friend, removed from the
presidency of the branch of the United States Bank at Portsmouth, N.
H., and Isaac Hill, another New Hampshire friend of the President,
attempted at the same time to have the United States pension agency,
connected with the Portsmouth branch of the United States Bank,
removed to Concord, and connected with a little bank there of which
Hill had been president, and in which he was still interested.
Jackson's Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Ingham, asked Mr. Biddle, the
president of the United States Bank, to have Mason removed, and his
Secretary of War, Mr. Eaton, ordered Mason to transfer the pension
agency to Hill's bank in Concord. Mr. Biddle looked into the matter,
and being convinced that the whole thing was a political scheme,
refused to have Mason removed from office, and prevented the execution
of Eaton's order in regard to the transfer of the pension agency.
These are, very briefly stated, the facts upon which some of the
American historians found the theory that Jackson, entertaining no
opposition in principle to the Bank at the beginning of his
Administration, became so enraged at its managers, because of their
success in these petty bouts with his Cabinet officers, that he {192}
resolved upon its destruction. The treatment which Adams and Clay had
received at the hands of Jackson and his friends from 1824 onward had
led them to feel that Jackson's whole nature was full of personal
rancor, and that he could see nothing except from a personal point of
view. There is little doubt that this feeling largely determined
Adams' ideas of Jackson's attitude in the Bank question, and that the
historians have written the account of the Bank controversy under the
influence of Adams' representations.
[Sidenote: Jackson's opposition in principle to the Bank.]
There is undoubtedly some truth in this view of the matter, but it is
far from being the whole truth. It is not even that part of the truth
which is most valuable to the student of American history. There was
an opposition in principle to the United States Bank, as well as a
personal conflict between leaders in regard to it. That opposition in
principle was the opposition of "States' rights" democracy to
centralized privilege.
In all political systems there is a political science as well as a
public, or constitutional, law. The political science of a state is
based chiefly upon the actual social conditions and relations of its
population, and its public or constitutional law ought to be based
upon its political science. In fact, however, we seldom see social
conditions, political theory, and public law in a state of perfect
harmony. It is the prime problem of political and legal progress to
work out this great result.
[Sidenote: The political science of the Constitution of 1787.]
[Sidenote: Western Democracy.]
[Sidenote: The West and the "money power" of the East.]
The political science or theory upon which the Constitution of 1787
was founded was thoroughly English. It recognized social distinctions,
and its most fundamental principle was compromise between conflicting
interests. It was substantially in harmony with social conditions, on
the one side, {193} and was fairly expressed through the Constitution
of 1787, on the other. Without the interposition of other forces it
would have made out of the United States a new England. But French
political science had already gained a foothold in the country. It was
contained in the Declaration of Independence, and its prime postulate
was "the equality of all men." It did not then comport with the social
condition of the country, and the Constitution did not make its
principle into positive law. It was, therefore, at the beginning,
abstract, and theoretical. The man who taught it, however, became
President, and the party which embraced it became the governing party.
But their practice was not made consistent with their theory, and
could not be, so long as the social conditions of the country
contradicted their theory. It was the settlement of the country west
of the Alleghanies which first created social conditions in harmony
with their theory. The distinction between master and slave was not
permitted to enter the larger portion of it; the distinction between
the rich and the poor could not at first exist, or be, for many years,
developed; and the distinction between the cultivated and the ignorant
was likewise obliged to remain long in abeyance; while the dangers and
the hardships of frontier life developed, speedily, a strong sense of
self-reliance and self-esteem. General equality and practical
self-help were the first social results of the levelling experiences
of the camp, the wilderness, and the prairie. With such influences
operating upon such characters as undertook the making of the West,
the most adventurous part of the population of the East, that bold and
boastful Democracy was produced, which began after 1820 to make itself
powerfully felt in modifying the original conservative principles of
the institutions of the country. Connect with these new social
conditions, and the {194} political principles evolved out of them,
the fact that the West, like all new countries, had little money or
capital, and was a constant borrower from the East, in order to
furnish itself with roads, implements, means of transportation, and
manufactured articles, and we have the forces and the interests which
were bound, under the first general financial pressure, to make an
onslaught upon the "money power and privilege" of the East, as
embodied in the United States Bank.
[Sidenote: "States' rights" and the Bank.]
The "States' rights" opposition to the Bank had been aroused more than
a decade before Jackson's message of 1829. The Bank and its branches
were the sole depositories of the funds of the Government. By refusing
to accept on deposit the bills of Commonwealth banks which did not
redeem their bills in specie on demand, the Bank could prevent the
officers of the Government from accepting such bills for dues to the
Government. The Bank used this power to force the Commonwealth banks
to specie payment. It was one of the purposes for which Congress
created the Bank. It made the Bank, however, very unpopular with the
officers and stockholders of the banks chartered by the Commonwealths.
These persons were, as a rule, men of influence in their respective
communities, and they succeeded in persuading many of the people that
the United States Bank was a centralized monopoly, and was using its
powers and privileges to oppress the institutions of the
Commonwealths.
In 1818 the legislatures of Ohio and Maryland imposed a heavy tax on
the branches of the Bank located within their respective
jurisdictions. The purpose was to drive them out. The Bank resisted
payment, and was sustained by the United States courts.
{195} [Sidenote: The case of Brown and Maryland.]
In the February term of 1819 the Supreme Court of the United States
decided the famous case of McCulloch and Maryland, declaring the act
of Congress creating the Bank constitutional, and the act of the
Maryland legislature undertaking to tax it unconstitutional. Maryland
submitted at once, but the officers of the government of Ohio forced
their way into the branch of the Bank in that State, at Chillicothe,
and took one hundred thousand dollars out of the vault, and that too
in the face of an injunction issued by the United States Circuit
Court. The directors sued the officers of the Commonwealth for
trespass, and the Commonwealth refused the use of its jails to confine
the persons arrested. At the same time the Commonwealth reduced the
tax to ten thousand dollars, and refunded ninety thousand, and finally
receded entirely from its unlawful demand.
This defeat of the "States' rights" attack, and the excellent
management of the Bank by Langdon Cheves, and then by Nicholas Biddle,
seem to have silenced the complaints against the Bank from 1823 to
1828.
[Sidenote: Democracy and Socialism.]
It was during this period, however, that the "State socialistic"
characteristic of radical democracy received a strong development in
the Commonwealth of Kentucky, through the relief measures for debtors;
which measures threatened to destroy the constitutional guarantees of
private property. The "relief party" secured the legislature and the
executive of the Commonwealth. The judiciary, however, stood out
against them, and they did not have the necessary two-thirds majority
in the legislature to remove the judges. The legislature, however,
passed a new judiciary act, and created another supreme court of the
Commonwealth. This scandal of judicial anarchy existed for nearly two
years, when, at last, in 1826, the {196} "anti-relief" party elected a
majority of the legislative members, and the new legislature repealed
the act establishing the new court.
Jackson's friends in Kentucky belonged almost exclusively to the
"relief party," and it is hardly fanciful to attribute to this
movement in Kentucky some influence in the formation of Jackson's
ideas in regard to the United States Bank, and in regard to his plan
for a Government bank, responsible to the people and managed for the
benefit of the people.
[Sidenote: Benton's attack on the Bank.]
On March 3rd, 1828, Senator Benton began his warfare upon the Bank. He
attacked its privilege of being the depository of Government money. He
claimed that there were two or three millions of dollars of Government
money used in loans by the Bank, which earned about one hundred and
fifty thousand dollars a year of interest, all of which went to the
stockholders of the Bank and none of it to the Government, while the
Government was all the time paying interest on the public debt and
taxing the people for the purpose. He wanted to take the surplus
deposits out of the Bank and pay a part of the public debt with them.
This was the first charge of the Western Democracy upon privilege, as
being opposed to the principle of universal equality.
[Sidenote: Benton repulsed.]
There were, however, enough practical men in the Senate who considered
this privilege as only a fair compensation for the service rendered by
the Bank to the Government in transporting the Government funds
without any specific return therefor, and who knew that it is not good
banking to pay interest on deposits, to reject Mr. Benton's
resolution. Benton repeated his motion on January 1st, 1829, but with
no greater success.
[Sidenote: Jackson and Benton.]
After March 4th, 1829, the leadership of the party was {197} in the
hands of the President, and Benton became Jackson's lieutenant in the
Senate. There had been personal feuds between the two men, but they
now harmonized politically, and in no point did that harmony become
more complete than in the war against the Bank.
It is probable that at the moment of his accession to power Jackson
had not thought out the relation of the democratic principle to the
Bank, but he undoubtedly felt it, and the feeling guided him to the
position which he assumed, first toward the questions of detail in the
Bank's policy and management, and then toward the general question of
its existence. The controversy between his Secretaries and the Bank's
officers, upon which Mr. Adams laid so much stress, probably
precipitated matters, but the crisis would have developed under other
circumstances had not these existed. The social and political forces
at play were bound to bring it about under one issue or another. It
may have astonished the politicians and statesmen of the East then,
and it may astonish the casual reader of American history now, that
Jackson attacked the question of the future existence of the Bank in
his first annual message, but there is nothing surprising in it to the
careful student of American history, who comprehends the development
of the democratic spirit of the West during the third decade of the
century.
[Sidenote: The Bank and the people.]
It is doubtful whether the President was correct in saying, as he did
in his message of 1829, that a large portion of the people questioned
the constitutionality and expediency of the law creating the Bank, and
it is certain that the Bank was not considered by all to have failed
in the establishment of a sound and uniform currency. It is far more
probable that the people generally acquiesced in {198} the decision of
the Court pronouncing the Bank law constitutional, and that the
majority of the people, at that moment, regarded it as good policy,
and believed that the Bank had fairly fulfilled the purpose of its
creation. The President was simply assuming that the people thought as
he did, as democratic leaders usually do. Taken in that sense there
was nothing extraordinary in what he said. He had a right to disagree
in opinion with the Court, and to say so, and to make any
recommendation to Congress which seemed wise to him, in regard to the
re-charter of the Bank. That an expiring law is constitutional is not
always a convincing argument for its re-enactment.
[Sidenote: The existence of the Bank made a political issue.]
The President's criticism occasioned an investigation into the
principle and status of the Bank, and brought the Bank question into
the politics of the day.
The committee on Finance of the Senate, and the committee on Ways and
Means of the House, made reports, in March and April of 1830,
vigorously defending the constitutionality, the expediency, and the
management of the Bank, and demonstrating the great political and
financial dangers of such a Government bank as the President
suggested. The chairman of the committee on Ways and Means was, it
will be remembered, Mr. McDuffie, the political economist of the
slavery interest. To his mind the Bank question had evidently little
connection with the slavery question.
[Sidenote: Jackson's second attack on the Bank.]
The President, however, returned to the attack in his message of
December 10th, 1830. He also presented, in this message, an
elaboration of his idea of a Government bank. His proposition was for
a bank as a branch of the Treasury Department, based on the deposits
of the funds of the Government and also on those made by individuals,
but {199} having no power to issue notes or make loans or purchase
property. Its chief purpose would be to do the business of the
Government, and its expenses might be met by selling exchange to
private persons at a small rate.
[Sidenote: Jackson's plan for a bank.]
The President thought that this scheme avoided all the objections to
the existing Bank, and yet preserved all of the latter's advantages.
It would require no charter of incorporation, would have neither
stockholders, nor debtors, nor property, would require few officers,
and would leave to the Commonwealths the creation of their own local
paper currency through their own banks, while the new Government bank
would be able to check the issues of the Commonwealth banks through
its power to refuse to take their bills on deposit or for exchange,
unless they redeemed them with specie. In a sentence, his doctrine now
was that banking must be left as far as possible to Commonwealth law,
and that such powers as the general Government had received from the
Constitution over the subject should be exercised by the Government,
if at all, through its own officials, for the benefit of the people,
and not be conferred as privileges upon a corporation of private
persons, to be exercised for their private gain. This will be at once
recognized as a democratic, "States' rights," socialistic scheme in
the essential elements of its composition.
[Sidenote: Benton's resolution against the re-charter of the Bank.]
Before the report of the Finance committee of the Senate upon this
part of the message was presented Senator Benton offered a resolution,
on February 2nd, 1831, which provided that the charter of the Bank
ought not to be renewed. In his speech supporting the resolution the
senator developed the whole "States' rights," socialistic, democratic
argument against the Bank with great elaboration, both in principle
and in detail.
{200} It is true that Benton did not go so far as Jackson in the
socialistic direction. He said that he was willing to vote for the
President's Government bank scheme, since it would substitute for the
existing Bank an institution which would be divested of the essential
features of a bank, the power to make loans and discounts, but that he
would prefer to see the charter of the Bank expire without any
substitute being created for it.
The Senate was not, however, convinced by Mr. Benton's argument, and
refused to allow him to introduce his resolution.
[Sidenote: Jackson's challenge to make the continued existence of the
Bank the issue in the campaign of 1832.]
In his message of December 6th, 1831, President Jackson referred to
what he had said in former messages concerning the Bank, and closed
his allusion with the following significant words: "Having thus
conscientiously discharged a constitutional duty, I deem it proper, on
this occasion, without a more particular reference to the views of the
subject then expressed, to leave it for the present to the
investigation of an enlightened people and their representatives."
[Sidenote: The challenge accepted.]
This language certainly seemed to imply that the President would, so
far as he was able, make the question of the re-charter of the Bank
one of the issues of the election campaign of 1832. His opponents so
interpreted him, and they gladly accepted the challenge, for they
believed the Bank to be popular with the voters. They thought that the
Senators and Representatives in Congress, a majority of whom favored
the Bank, truly represented the views of their constituencies, and
they calculated to be able to split the Democratic party itself on the
issue.
The president and directors of the Bank, however, were most reluctant
to have the existence of the Bank made a party question. The leaders
of the National {201} Republicans, on the other hand, insisted upon
it. Clay, who, six days after the appearance of the President's
message, had been nominated by a national convention at Baltimore as
the candidate of the National Republicans for the presidency, was
certain that under the issue of the renewal of the Bank's charter
Jackson would be signally defeated. The Bank's officers yielded to his
advice, enforced by that of Mr. Webster, and on January 9th, 1832,
sent in the memorial for a re-charter.
[Sidenote: The Bank's petition for re-charter.]
Senator Dallas presented the memorial, but said that he personally had
discouraged its presentation at that juncture out of apprehension that
the question of the re-charter of the Bank might, at the moment, be
drawn into real or imagined conflict with "some higher, some more
favorite, some more immediate wish or purpose of the American people."
Senator Dallas was a Bank Democrat. The more favorite wish to which he
referred was the re-election of Jackson, and the inference to be drawn
from his words was that the Bank Democrats did not want to be obliged
to choose between the Bank and Jackson at the next election.
The Senate referred the petition for re-charter to a committee
composed of Mr. Dallas, Mr. Webster, Mr. Ewing, Mr. Hayne, and Mr.
Johnston.
[Sidenote: Benton's charge of illegal practices.]
Before the committee made its report Mr. Benton made another attack
upon the Bank. This time he charged it with illegal practices in
issuing drafts which passed as currency. The Senate, however, repelled
the attack and refused to allow Mr. Benton to introduce his resolution
declaring such drafts illegal.
[Sidenote: Passage of the bill for re-charter.]
On March 13th Mr. Dallas brought in the bill from his committee for
the re-charter of the Bank for fifteen years from the expiration of
its existing charter in 1836.
{202} While the bill was passing through the Senate a demonstration
against the Bank was in progress in the House. Mr. Clayton, of
Georgia, an enemy of the Bank, secured the appointment of a committee
by the Speaker of the House, Mr. Stevenson, another enemy of the Bank,
to inquire into the affairs of the Bank, and make report thereof to
the House. A majority report was offered by Mr. Clayton severely
criticising the Bank, and a minority report by Mr. McDuffie defending
the Bank most ably and vigorously, and, if we may judge from the vote
of the House upon the Senate bill for re-charter, which had passed the
Senate, and appeared at this moment in the House for concurrence, most
successfully. The House passed the Senate bill, with a few immaterial
changes, by a vote of one hundred and seven to eighty-five.
The National Republicans felt sure that they had driven Jackson into a
blind alley. But the "Old Hero" stood his ground and hurled a veto at
the bill, which both killed it and conquered the National Republican
party in the election of 1832 with its own chosen weapon.
[Sidenote: The veto of the Bank Bill.]
[Sidenote: The Bank and foreign powers.]
The veto message was a curious _pot-pourri_ of strength and weakness,
of sound statesmanship and cheap demagogism, of shrewd politics and
silly commonplaces. We may arrange its score of points under five
principal heads, or rather ends in view. The first was the attempt to
rouse the national spirit against the Bank, on account of the fact
that some eight millions of dollars' worth of the stock was in the
hands of foreigners. The President made out that this was a great
danger to the United States, both in war and peace. In war, he said,
the Bank would be an internal enemy, more terrible than the army and
navy of the external foe. Just how the possession of the certificates
of stock by foreigners, whose money, which had been paid for {203}
them, was in the United States, and therefore under the control of the
United States Government, could endanger the United States in case of
a war between the United States and the country or countries to which
these foreign stockholders belonged, the President failed to explain.
It would seem to the ordinary mind that this would be an advantage to
the United States, in that the Government of the United States would
have within its grasp a part of the money power of the enemy.
Moreover, the Bank law prevented the foreign stockholders from voting
in the election of the directors of the Bank. How these stockholders
could possibly exercise any hostile influence then, except by selling
their stock to citizens of the United States, and taking the money
which they might receive for it out of the country, was not only not
explained but is inexplicable.
[Sidenote: The Bank and the West.]
The second object was apparently the excitement of the West against
the East. The President declared that the West was being made
financially tributary to the East by the Bank. He presented the
statistics of stockholding and interest-paying throughout the
different sections of the country in proof of this statement. He
affirmed that thirteen millions five hundred and twenty-two thousand
dollars' worth of the stock was owned in the Northeastern and Middle
Commonwealths, that five millions six hundred and twenty-three
thousand dollars' worth of it was held in Virginia, the Carolinas, and
Georgia, and that only one hundred and forty thousand and two hundred
dollars' worth of it was held in the nine Western Commonwealths; while
one million six hundred and forty thousand and forty-eight dollars of
the profits of the Bank came from these Western Commonwealths, one
million four hundred and sixty-three thousand and forty-one dollars of
them {204} from the Northeastern and Middle Commonwealths, and three
hundred and fifty-two thousand and five hundred and seven dollars of
them from the Southern Commonwealths. This seems to ordinary
intelligence to prove that the Bank was accommodating Western
borrowers with Eastern money; and as the Bank was limited by its
charter to a maximum of six per centum interest on its loans, it seems
that the accommodation was being rendered upon quite moderate
consideration. But the President said it proved that the "Eastern
money power" was oppressing the West, and the West was quite willing
to believe anything against the persons or institutions to whom or to
which it owed money.
[Sidenote: The Bank and the rich.]
The third object to which the President addressed himself in the
message was to call the attention of the poor to the proposition that
the Government was favoring the rich through the Bank. The President
called the Bank a monopoly, which means privilege conferred by
Government on a few at the expense of the many. He calculated that the
privilege to be granted to the existing stockholders by the re-charter
of the Bank was worth seventeen millions of dollars, while the bonus
which they would be required to pay was but three millions. Fourteen
millions of dollars would thus be presented by the Government to the
Bank, which sum the Government must take by taxation from the people.
He arrived at these statistics and results by assuming that the Bank
stock, after the re-charter and in consequence of it, would be worth
about one hundred and fifty dollars for one hundred par, that some
other body of stockholders could be found who would pay seventeen
millions for the charter, and that the money thus acquired from the
supposed stockholders by the Government would effect the remission of
just so much taxation upon the people. The President saw also, {205}
with Senator Benton, that the use of the Government deposits by the
Bank was a source of income to the stockholders at the popular
expense. And he denounced the feature in the new bill, which allowed
the Commonwealth banks to pay their indebtedness to any branch of the
United States Bank with the notes of any other branch, but did not
accord the same privilege to individuals, as favoring the rich and
powerful against the poor and weak.
The entire argumentation in this part of the message seems extravagant
and exaggerated, to say the least, but it sounded convincing and
sympathetic to the masses. It was something which brought the question
home to each one of them, and made it appear related to each one's
personal interest. The statement was a powerful vote-catcher. It took
wonderfully.
[Sidenote: Structure and powers of the Bank.]
The fourth proposition, as we have arranged them, was the criticism on
the structure and powers of the Bank provided in the new bill. The
President objected to the unnecessarily large amount of the capital
stock, to the right to be given the Bank to locate its own branches,
to the power of the Government, as a stockholder, to own real estate
for general purposes, and to the power of the Bank to coin money, as
he called the power to issue its notes.
[Sidenote: Jackson on executive independence.]
The final division of the message, according to our arrangement,
contains the disquisition upon the relation of the departments of the
Government to each other in operating the Constitution, and the
relation of the general Government to the Commonwealths in regard to
jurisdiction over the business of banking. The President held, upon
the first of these points, that "if the opinion of the Supreme Court,"
in the case of McCulloch and Maryland, "covered the whole ground of
this act, it ought not to control the {206} co-ordinate authorities of
the Government." "The Congress, the Executive, and the Court," he
said, "must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the
Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the
Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and
not as it is understood by others. It is as much the duty of the House
of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President, to decide
upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be
presented to them for passage or approval, as it is of the Supreme
Judges when it may be brought before them for decision. The opinion of
the Judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of
Congress has over the Judges; and, on that point, the President is
independent of both. The authority of the Supreme Court must not,
therefore, be permitted to control the Congress or the Executive when
acting in their legislative capacities, but to have only such
influence as the force of their reasoning may deserve."
The President also said that he could have furnished a plan for a
bank, had it been requested of him, which would have been equal to all
the duties required by the Government, a plan which might have been
enacted by Congress without straining or overstepping its powers, and
without infringing the powers of the Commonwealths; and he complained
that the Bank, as an agent of the Executive Department, should be
thrust upon the Department without the Department being consulted as
to whether it needed or wanted any such agent.
[Sidenote: Von Holst's criticism of the veto message.]
[Sidenote: The President's real meaning.]
One of the most celebrated historians of American politics has
indulged in a very severe criticism upon this part of the message,
claiming that President Jackson virtually asserted therein the power
to initiate legislation, full co-ordination with the Houses of
Congress in legislation, and an {207} independence of Congress, and
especially of the Judiciary, which, in practice, would render
constitutional law an impossibility. An impartial examination of the
text of the message in all its parts will hardly warrant any such
conclusions. It is quite clear, from such examination, that the
President meant that in the formation of administrative measures by
the Congressional committees in charge of the same, the views of the
Administration ought to be obtained; that the President is not limited
by the Constitution to any class of subjects in the use of his veto
power upon proposed legislation; and that when the Congress and the
President are legislating they are not obliged to re-enact a law
simply because the Judiciary have declared it constitutional, nor even
prevented from repealing a law, simply because the Judiciary have
declared it constitutional, and certainly not prohibited from
differing in opinion with the Judiciary in regard to the
constitutionality of any law already on the statute book, or any
proposed measure. Conservative American lawyers, jurists, and
publicists approve all of this as not only the letter but also the
spirit of the Constitution.
[Sidenote: Jackson's vindication of executive independence.]
Instead of destroying the Constitution in theory by the doctrine of
this veto, it looks more as if the President did something to rescue
the "check and balance" system of government, provided in the
Constitution, from the threatened domination of a single department
over the others in it. The fact is, Congress had succeeded, during the
regime of the old Republican party in American politics, in winning a
power over the President which the Constitution did not authorize. The
members of Congress had selected all of the Presidents, from Jefferson
to Jackson, either by nomination or by actual election. {208} The
machinery constructed by the Constitution for the election of the
President was wanting in its most necessary part. It contained no
means of connection between the electoral colleges in the several
Commonwealths in voting for the President and Vice-President, at the
same time that it required a majority of all the electoral votes to
elect. The members of Congress being the only national assembly of
persons in the country, and being the chosen political leaders from
the different Commonwealths, naturally glided into the habit of
constituting themselves, in caucus, the connecting link between the
electoral colleges in the several Commonwealths, and thus the
Congressional caucus, or caucuses, as the case might be, became the
nominating body or bodies to the electoral colleges. If the caucus
nominated anybody, it left to the electors the alternative of
ratifying the nomination, or of so scattering their votes as to give
no person a majority, in which latter case the election of the
President passed into the hands of the members of the House of
Representatives. If, on the other hand, the caucus did not nominate
anybody, the electors were nearly sure to fail to unite a majority of
their votes upon the same person, in which case again the House of
Representatives obtained possession of the election. With such an
increasing control over the tenure of the President, it is not
astonishing that the Congress, and even the individual members of
Congress, exercised an ever increasing control over his acts and his
policy. The encroaching legislature was fast developing the principle
of parliamentary government as the principle of the American system,
while the Constitution provides the principle of executive
independence and presidential administration.
Again, the judicial department had appeared to assume the position
that it possessed the supreme {209} interpreting power of the
Constitution upon every point. It had not then, as it has now, clearly
confined itself to questions immediately involving questions of
private rights. It appeared to be claiming jurisdiction in regard to
questions primarily of political science, public law, and even public
policy.
The President's Bank veto called a halt in these tendencies, and
exerted an influence for the restoration of executive independence,
and of the "check and balance" system, provided in the Constitution;
and it called the people into a closer and more immediate relation to
the President than they had before occupied, in that the President now
appealed to them to decide the question between him and the Congress,
in the election which was then about to take place.
These were the political principles contained in the Bank veto, and
whether they, or the more democratic principle of anti-monopoly, or
the more socialistic principle of government banking, moved the
masses, certainly they were profoundly moved. Had the popular vote
been taken, the day before the appearance of the veto, upon the
question of the Bank's re-charter, it is altogether probable that an
overwhelming majority would have been found in its favor. Against the
veto, however, no sufficient majority could be united in Congress, and
when the results of the presidential election became known, it was
found that Jackson had carried the country with him in the unequal
contest, and that the people had made the principles of the Jacksonian
democracy the ruling spirit of the Constitution.
{210}