mention of General Jackson for the Presidency seems to be in a letter
from Aaron Burr to his son-in-law, Alston of South Carolina, in
1815. An effort was being made to form a party against the Virginia
oligarchy. Those who were engaged in it sought a candidate who might
be strong enough to secure success. Burr justified his reputation
as a politician by pointing out the man, but it was yet too soon.
The standard of what a Federal officer ought to be was yet too high.
The Albany Argus said of the nomination, in 1824: “He [Jackson] is
respected as a gallant soldier, but he stands in the minds of the
people of this state at an immeasurable distance from the executive
chair.” The name of Jackson was used, however, in connection with the
Presidency, by various local conventions, during 1822 and 1823; and,
although the nomination was generally met with indifference or contempt
in the North and East, it soon became apparent that he was the most
dangerous rival in the field. The nominations had hitherto been made by
caucuses of the members of Congress of either party. Until Jefferson’s
second nomination, these had been held under a decent veil of secrecy.
Since that time they had exerted more and more complete and recognized
control. Crawford was marked for the succession, although he was under
some discipline for having allowed his name to be used in the caucus of
1816 against Monroe. The opposing candidates now discovered that caucus
nominations were evil, and joined forces in a movement to put an end
to them. This movement gained popular approval on general principles.
When the caucus was called, naturally only the friends of Crawford
attended--sixty-six out of two hundred and sixteen Republican members.
The nomination probably hurt him. It was proudly said that King Caucus
was now dethroned, but never was there a greater mistake. He had only
just come of age and escaped from tutelage. He was about to enter on
his inheritance.
General Jackson obtained the greatest number of votes in the electoral
college; and when the election came into the House, a claim was loudly
put forward which had been feebly heard in 1801, that the House
ought simply to carry out the “will of the people” by electing him.
This claim distinctly raised the issue which has been described, of
democracy against the Constitution. Does the Constitution give the
election to the House in certain contingencies, or does it simply
charge it with the duty of changing a plurality vote into an election?
No one had a majority, but the House was asked really to give to a
major vote the authority which, even on the democratic theory, belongs
to a majority.
The election could not but result in the discontent of three
candidates and their adherents, but the Jackson party was by far the
most discontented and most clamorous. They proceeded to organize and
labor for the next campaign. They were shrewd, active men, who knew
well the arena and the science of the game. They offered to Adams’s
administration a ruthless and relentless opposition. There were no
great party issues; indeed, the country was going through a period
of profound peace and prosperity which offered little material
for history and little occasion for active political combat. The
administration was simple and businesslike and conducted the affairs
of the government with that smoothness and quiet success which belong
to the system in times of peace and prosperity. Mr. Adams was urged to
consolidate his party by using the patronage of the executive, and the
opinion has been expressed that, if he had done so, he could have won
his reëlection. He steadfastly refused to do this.
The truth was that a new spirit had come over the country, and that the
candidacy of Jackson was the form in which it was seeking admission
into the Federal administration. Here we meet with one of the great
difficulties in the study of American political history. The forces
which we find in action on the Federal arena have their origin in the
political struggles and personal jealousies of local politicians, now
in one state and now in another; and the doctrines which are propounded
at Washington, and come before us in their maturity, have really grown
up in the states. Rotation in office began to be practiced in New York
and Pennsylvania at the beginning of the century. The Federalists then
lost power in those states, and their political history consists of the
struggles of factions in the Republican party. Jefferson and Madison
taught Democracy in Virginia, but it never entered their heads that
the “low-down whites” were really to meddle in the formative stage of
politics. They expected that gentlemen planters would meet and agree
upon a distribution of offices, and that then the masses should have
the privilege of electing the men they proposed. The Clintons and
Livingstones in New York were Democrats, but they likewise understood
that, in practice, they were to distribute offices around their
dinner-tables.
In the meantime men like Duane were writing essays for farmers and
mechanics, which were read from one end of the Union to the other, in
which they were preaching hostility to banks and the “money power,”
hostility to the judiciary and to the introduction of the common law
of England, the election of judicial officers, rotation in office, and
all the dogmas which we generally ascribe to a much later origin. These
notions even found some practical applications, as in the political
impeachment of judges in Pennsylvania in 1804--acts which fortunately
did not become precedents. The new constitutions which were adopted
from time to time during the first quarter of this century show the
slow working of this leaven, together with the gradual adoption of
improvements far less questionable.
After 1810 began also the series of great inventions which have really
opened this continent to mankind. The steamboat was priceless to a
country which had grand rivers but scarcely any roads. In 1817 De Witt
Clinton persuaded New York to commence the Erie Canal, and before it
was finished scores of others were projected or begun. Politically and
financially the system of internal improvements has proved disastrous,
but those enterprises helped on the events which we are now pursuing,
for they assisted in opening the resources of the continent to the
reach of those who had nothing. The great mass of the population
found themselves steadily gaining in property and comfort. Their
independence and self-reliance expanded. They developed new traits of
national character, and intensified some of the old ones. They had full
confidence in their own powers, feared no difficulties, made light
of experience, were ready to deal offhand with any problems, laughed
at their own mistakes, despised science and study, overestimated the
practical man, and overesteemed material good. To such a class the
doctrines of democracy seemed axiomatic, and they ascribed to democracy
the benefits which accrued to them as the first-comers in a new
country. They generally believed that the political system created
their prosperity; and they never perceived that the very bountifulness
of the new country, the simplicity of life, and the general looseness
of the social organism, allowed their blunders to pass without the evil
results which would have followed in an older and denser community. The
same causes have produced similar results ever since.
Political machinery also underwent great development during the first
quarter of the century. In New York there was perhaps the greatest
amount of talent and skill employed in this work, and the first engine
used was the appointing power. The opposing parties were only personal
and family factions, but they rigorously used power, when they got
it, to absorb honors and places. That conception of office arose,
under which it is regarded as a favor conferred on the holder, not a
position in which work is to be done for the public service. Hence the
office-holder sat down to enjoy, instead of going to work to serve.
If some zealous man who took the latter view got into office, he soon
found that he could count upon being blamed for all that went amiss,
but would get little recognition or reward while things went well, and
that the safest policy was to do nothing. The public was the worst
paymaster and the most exacting and unjust employer in the country, and
it got the worst service. The consequence was that the early political
history of New York is little more than a story of the combinations
and quarrels of factions, annual elections, and lists of changes in
the office-holders. The Clintons and Livingstones united against Burr,
who was the center of an eager and active and ambitious coterie of
young men, who already threatened to apply democratic doctrines with
a consistency for which the aristocratic families were not prepared.
Then they began to struggle with each other until the Livingstones were
broken up. Then the “Martling men” and the Clintonians, the Madisonians
and the Clintonians, the “Bucktails” and the Clintonians, with various
subdivisions, kept up the conflict until the Constitution of 1821
altered the conditions of the fight, and Regency and Anti-regency, or
Regency and People’s Party, or Regency and Workingmen’s Party became
the party headings. The net result of all this for national politics
was the production of a class of finished “politicians,” skilled in
all the work of “organization” which in any wide democracy must be
the first consideration. Some of these gentlemen entered the national
arena in 1824. The Regency was then supporting Crawford as the regular
successor. On its own terms it could have been won for Adams, but this
arrangement was not brought about. It did not require the astuteness
of these men to see on reflection, that Jackson was the coming man.
He was in and of the rising power. He represented a newer and more
rigorous application of the Jeffersonian dogmas. His manners, tastes,
and education, had nothing cold or aristocratic about them. He had
never been trained to aim at anything high, elegant, and refined, and
had not been spoiled by contact with those who had developed the art
of life. He had, moreover, the great advantage of military glory. He
had bullied a judge, but he had won the battle of New Orleans. He had
hung a man against the verdict of a court-martial, but the man was a
British emissary. It was clear that a tide was rising which would carry
him into the Presidential chair, and it behooved other ambitious men to
cling to his skirts and be carried up with him.
It is in and around the tariff of 1828 that the conflict centers in
which these various forces were combined or neutralized to accomplish
the result. The student of our economic or political history cannot
pay too close study to that crisis. For the next fifteen years the
financial and political questions are inextricably interwoven.
The election of Jackson marks a new era in our political history. A
new order of men appeared in the Federal administration. The whole
force of local adherents of the new administration, who had worked for
it and therefore had claims upon it, streamed to Washington to get
their reward. It seems that Jackson was forced by the rapacity of this
crowd into the “reformation” of the government. The political customs
which had grown up in New York and Pennsylvania were transferred to
Washington. Mr. Marcy, in a speech in the Senate, January 24, 1832,
on Van Buren’s nomination as minister to England, boldly stated the
doctrine that to the victors belong the spoils, avowing it as a
doctrine which did not seem to him to call for any delicacy on the
part of politicians. In fact, to men who had grown up as Mr. Marcy
had, habit in this respect must have made that doctrine seem natural
and necessary to the political system. The New York politicians
had developed an entire code of political morals for all branches
and members of the political party machine. They had studied the
passions, prejudices, and whims of bodies of men. They had built up
an organization in which all the parts were adjusted to support and
help one another. The subordinate officers looked up to and sustained
the party leaders while carrying the party machinery into every nook
and corner of the state, and the party leaders in turn cared for and
protected their subordinates. Organization and discipline were insisted
upon throughout the party as the first political duty. There is
scarcely a phenomenon more interesting to the social philosopher than
to observe, under a political system remarkable for its looseness and
lack of organization, the social bond returning and vindicating itself
in the form of party tyranny, and to observe under a political system
where loyalty and allegiance to the Commonwealth are only names, how
loyalty and allegiance to party are intensified. It is one of the forms
under which the constant peril of the system presents itself, namely,
that a part may organize to use the whole for narrow and selfish ends.
The idea of the commonwealth is lost and the public arena seems only a
scrambling-ground for selfish cliques. In the especial case of the New
York factions, this was all intensified by the fact that there were
no dignified issues, no real questions of public policy at stake, but
only factions of the ins and the outs, struggling for the spoils of
office. Naturally enough, the contestants thought that to the victors
belong the spoils--otherwise the contest had no sense at all. In this
system, now, fidelity to a caucus was professed and enforced. Bolting,
or running against a regular nomination, were high crimes which were
rarely condoned. On the other hand, the leaders professed the doctrine
that a man who surrendered his claims for the good of the party, or
who stood by the party, must never be allowed to suffer for it. The
same doctrines had been accepted more or less at Washington, but in a
feeble and timid way. From this time they grew into firm recognition.
Under their operation politics became a trade. The public officer was,
of necessity, a politician, and the work by which he lived was not
service in his official duty, but political party labor. The tenure of
office was so insecure and the pay so meager, that few men of suitable
ability could be found who did not think that they could earn their
living more easily, pleasantly, and honorably in some other career.
Public service gravitated downwards to the hands of those who, under
the circumstances, were willing to take it. It presented some great
prizes in the form of collectorships, etc., the remuneration for which
was in glaring contrast with the salaries of some of the highest and
most responsible officers in the government; but, for the most part,
the public service fell into the hands of men who were exposed to the
temptation to make it pay.
After the general onslaught on the caucus, in 1824, it fell into disuse
as a means of nominating state officers, and conventions took its
place. At first sight this seemed to be a more complete fulfillment
of the democratic idea. The people were to meet and act on their own
motion. It was soon found, however, that the only change was in the
necessity for higher organization. In the thirties there was indeed a
fulfillment of the theory which seems now to have passed away; there
was a spontaneity and readiness in assembling and organizing common
action which no longer exists; there was a public interest and activity
far beyond what is now observable. One is astonished at the slight
occasion on which meetings were held, high excitement developed, and
energetic action inaugurated. The anti-Masonic movement, from 1826 to
1832, is a good instance. The “Liberty party” (Abolitionists), the
“Native Americans,” the “Anti-renters,” all bear witness to a facility
of association which certainly does not now exist. It is, however, an
indispensable prerequisite to the pure operation of the machinery of
caucus and convention. The effort to combine all good men has been
talked about from the beginning, but it has always failed on account of
the lack of a bond between them as strong as the bond of interest which
unites the factions.
During the decade from 1830 to 1840 a whole new set of machinery was
created to fit the new arrangements. This consisted in committees,
caucuses, and conventions, ramifying down finally into the wards of
great cities, and guided and handled by astute and experienced men.
Under their control the initiative of “the people” died out. The public
saw men elected whom they had never chosen, and measures adopted which
they had never desired, and themselves, in short, made the sport of a
system which cajoled and flattered while it cheated them. If a governor
had been elected by some political trickery a little more flagrant than
usual, he was very apt, in his inaugural, to draw a dark picture of the
effete monarchies of the Old World, and to congratulate the people on
the blessings they enjoyed in being able to choose their own rulers.
This period was full of new energy and turbulent life. Railroads
were just beginning to carry on the extension of production which
steamboats and canals had begun. Immigration was rapidly increasing.
The application of anthracite coal to the arts was working a revolution
in them. On every side reigned the greatest activity. Literature and
science, which before had had but a meager existence, were coming into
life. The public journals, which had formerly been organs of persons
and factions, or substitutes for books, now began to be transformed
into the modern newspaper. The difficulties and problems presented by
all this new life were indeed great, and the tasks of government, as
well to discriminate between what belonged to it and what did not, as
to do what did belong to it, were great. On the general principles
of the Democratic party of the day in regard to the province of
government, history has already passed the verdict that they were sound
and correct. On the main questions which divided the administration and
the opposition, it must pass a verdict in favor of the administration.
These issues were not indeed clear and the parties did not, as is
generally supposed, take sides upon them definitely. Free trade, so
far as it was represented by the compromise tariff, was the result
of a coalition between Clay and Calhoun against the administration,
after Calhoun’s quarrel with Jackson had led the latter to revoke the
understanding in accordance with which Calhoun retired from the contest
of 1824 and took the second place. The South was now in the position
in which the northeastern states had found themselves at the beginning
of the century. The Southerners considered that the tariff of 1828 had
subjected their interests to those of another section which held a
majority in the general government, and that the Union was being used
only as a means of so subjecting them. They seized upon the Kentucky
and Virginia resolutions of 1798, which Jefferson and Madison had
drawn when in opposition, as furnishing them a ground of resistance,
and threw into the tariff question no less a stake than civil war and
disunion. On this issue there were no parties. South Carolina stood
alone.
Banks had been political questions in the states and in the general
government from the outset. The history of Pennsylvania and New York
furnishes some great scandals under this head. From time to time,
the methods of banking employed had called down the condemnation of
the most conservative and sensible men, and had aroused some less
well-balanced of judgment to indiscriminate hostility. Jackson’s attack
on the Bank of the United States sprang from a political motive, and
he proposed instead of it a bank on the “credit and revenues of the
government”--a proposition too vague to be understood, but which
suggested a grand paper-machine, at a time when the Bank of the United
States was at its best. This attack rallied to itself at once all the
local banks; the great victory of 1832 was not a victory for hard money
so much as it was a victory of the state banks over the national bank.
The removal of the deposits was a reckless financial step, and the
crash of 1837 was its direct result.
The traditional position of the Democratic party on hard money has
another source. In 1835 a party sprang up in New York City, as a
faction of Tammany, which took the name of the “Equal Rights party,”
but which soon received the name of the “Locofoco party” from an
incident which occurred at Tammany Hall, and which is significant of
the sharpness of party tactics at the time. This party was a radical
movement inside of the administration party. It claimed, and justly
enough, that it had returned to the Jeffersonian fountain and drawn
deeper and purer waters than the Jacksonian Democrats. It demanded
equality with a new energy, and in its denunciations of monopolies
and banks went very close to the rights of property. It demanded
that all charters should be repealable, urgently favored a metallic
currency, resisted the application of English precedents in law courts
and legislatures, and desired an elective judiciary. It lasted as a
separate party only five or six years, and then was cajoled out of
existence by superior political tactics; but it was not without reason
that the name spread to the whole party, for, laying aside certain
extravagances, two or three of its chief features soon came to be
adopted by the Democrats.
On the great measures of public policy, therefore, the position of the
administration was not clear and thorough, but the tendency was in
the right direction, especially when contrasted with the policy urged
by the Whigs. In regard to internal improvements, the administration
early took up a position which the result fully justified, and in its
opposition to the distribution of the surplus revenue its position was
unassailable. In its practical administration of the government there
is less ground for satisfaction in the retrospect. Besides the general
lowering of tone which has been mentioned, there were scandals and
abuses which it is not necessary to specify. General Jackson’s first
cabinet fell to pieces suddenly, under the effect of a private scandal
and of the President’s attempt to coerce the private social tastes
of his cabinet, or rather of their wives. He held to the doctrine of
popularity, and its natural effect upon a man of his temper, without
the sobriety of training and culture, was to stimulate him to lawless
self-will. He regarded himself as the chosen representative of the
whole people, charged, as such, with peculiar duties over against
Congress. The “will of the people” here received a new extension. He
found it in himself, and what he found there he did not hesitate to
set in opposition to the will of the people as this found expression
through their constitutional organs. At the same time the practice of
“instructions” marked an extension, on another side, of the general
tendency to bring public action closer under the control of changing
majorities.
Van Buren’s election was a triumph of the caucus and convention, which
had now been reduced to scarcely less exactitude of action than the old
congressional caucus. Van Buren, however, showed more principle than
had been expected from his reputation. He had to bear all the blame
for the evil fruits resulting from the mistakes made during the last
eight years. Moving with the radical or Locofoco tendency, he attempted
to sever bank and state by the independent treasury, and in so doing
he lost the support of the “Bank Democrats.” This, together with the
natural political revulsion after a financial crisis, lost him his
re-election.
The Whig party was rich in able men, which makes it the more
astonishing that one cannot find, in their political doctrines, a sound
policy of government. The national bank may still be regarded as an
open question, and favoring the bank was not favoring inconvertible
paper money; but their policy of high tariff for protection, of
internal improvements, and of distribution of the surplus revenue,
has been calamitous so far as it has been tried. They also present
the same lack of political sagacity which we have remarked in the
Federalists, whose successors in general they were. They oscillated
between principle and expediency in such a way as to get the advantages
of neither; and they abandoned their best men for available men at just
such times as to throw away all their advantages. The campaign of 1840
presents a pitiful story. There are features in it which are almost
tragic. An opportunity for success offering, a man was chosen who had
no marks of eminence and no ability for the position. His selection
bears witness to an anxious search for a military hero. It resulted in
finding one whose glory had to be exhumed from the doubtful tradition
of a border Indian war. The campaign was marked by the introduction
of mass meetings and systematic stump-speaking, and by the erection
of “log-cabins,” which generally served as barrooms for the assembled
crowd, so that many a man who went to a drunkard’s grave twenty or
thirty years ago dated his ruin from the “hard-cider campaign.” After
the election it proved that hungry Whigs could imitate the Democrats
of 1829 in their clamor for office, and, if anything, better the
instruction. The President’s death was charged partly to worry and
fatigue. It left Mr. Tyler President, and the question then arose
what Mr. Tyler was--a question to which the convention at Harrisburg,
fatigued with the choice between Clay and Harrison, had not given much
attention. It was found that he was such that the Whig victory turned
to ashes. No bank was possible, no distribution was possible, and only
a tariff which was lame and feeble from the Whig point of view. The
cabinet resigned, leaving Mr. Webster alone at his post. In vain, like
a true statesman, he urged the Whigs to rule with Mr. Tyler, since
they had got him and could not get rid of him or get anybody else.
Like a true statesman, again, he remained at his post, in spite of
misrepresentation, until he could finish the English treaty, and it
was another feature of the story that he lost position with his party
by so doing. The system did not allow Mr. Webster the highest reward
of a statesman, to plan and mold measures so as to impress himself on
the history of his country. It allowed him only the work of reducing
to a minimum the harm which other people’s measures were likely to do.
In the circumstances of the time war with England was imminent, and
there was good reason for fear if the negotiation were to fall into
the hands of the men whom Mr. Tyler was gathering about him. The Whigs
were broken and discouraged, and as their discipline had always been
far looser than that of their adversaries, they seemed threatened with
disintegration. The other party, however, was divided by local issues
and broken into factions. Its discipline had suffered injury, and its
old leaders had lost their fire while new ones had not arisen to take
their places. The western states were growing into a size and influence
in the confederation which made it impossible for two or three of the
old states to control national politics any longer.
In this state of things the southern leaders came forward to give
impetus and direction to the national administration. They had, what
the southern politicians always had, leisure for conference. They had
also character and social position, and a code of honor which enabled
them to rely on one another without any especial bond of interest other
than the general one. They had such a bond, common and complete, in
their stake in slavery. They could count, without doubt or danger, on
support throughout their entire section. They had a fixed program also,
which was an immense advantage for entering on the control of a mass
of men under no especial impetus. They had besides their traditional
alliance with the Democrats of the North--an alliance which always was
unnatural and illogical, and which now turned to the perversion of that
party. They prepared their principles, doctrines, and constitutional
theories to fit their plans.
Difficulties with Mexico in regard to Texas had arisen during Jackson’s
administration. These difficulties seemed to be gratuitous and unjust
on the part of the United States, and they seemed to be nursed by
the same power. The diplomatic correspondence on this affair is not
pleasant reading to one who would see his country honorable and
upright, as unwilling to bully as to be bullied. Such was not the
position of the United States in this matter.
It was determined by the southern leaders to annex Texas to the United
States, and to this end they seized upon the political machinery and
proceeded to employ it.
The election of Polk is another of the points to which the student of
American politics should give careful attention. The intrigues which
surrounded it have never been more than partially laid bare, but, if
fairly studied, they give deep insight into the nature of the forces
which operate in the name of the will of the people. The slavery issue
was here introduced into American politics; and when that question was
once raised, it “could not be settled until it was settled right.” For
ten years efforts were made to keep the issue out of politics and to
prevent parties from dividing upon it. What was desired was that the
old parties should stand in name and organization, in order that they
might be used, while the actual purposes were obtained by subordinate
means. A party with an organization and discipline, and a history such
as the Democratic party had in 1844, is a valuable property. It is like
a well-trained and docile animal which will go through the appointed
tasks at the given signal. It disturbs the discipline to introduce
new watchwords and to depart from the routine, in order to use reason
instead of habit. Hence the effort is to reduce the new and important
issues to subordinate places, to carry them incidentally, while the
old commonplaces hold together the organization. It is safe to say,
however, that, in the long run, the true issues are sure to become the
actual issues, and that delay and deceit only intensify the conflict.
Upon Polk’s election the independent treasury and comparative free
trade were fixed in the policy of the government for fifteen years,
with such beneficial results as to render them the proudest traditions
of the party which adopted them.
Mr. Calhoun had abandoned the opposition during Van Buren’s
administration, and had begun to form and lead the southern movement.
His own mind moved too rapidly for his adherents, and he could not
bring them to support him up to the positions which he considered
it necessary to take; but, even as it was, the steps of the southern
program came out with a rapidity, and were of a character, to shock the
imperfectly prepared northern allies. The Democratic party of the North
was not a proslavery party. Whigs and Democrats at the North united in
frowning down Abolition excitements, and in maintaining the compromises
of the Constitution. Old-line Whigs and hunker Democrats agreed in the
conservatism which resisted the introduction of this question; but
when, in 1844, Van Buren was asked, as a test question to a candidate,
whether he would favor the annexation of Texas, the subject of slavery
in the territories was thrown into the political arena from the
southern side. It was not then a question of abolishing slavery in the
southern states, which could not have obtained discussion except in
irresponsible newspapers and on irresponsible platforms. It was not
a question of spreading slavery into the old territories, for Texas
and the Indian Territory barred the way to all which the Missouri
Compromise left open. It was now a question of taking or buying or
conquering new territory for slavery, and every one knew well that the
chief reason for the revolt of Texas was that Mexico had abolished
slavery. The South indeed claimed to have suffered aggressions and
encroachments in regard to slavery ever since the adoption of the
Constitution, and the attempt was now to be made to secure recompense.
In the form in which the proposition came up it was no slight shock
to those who had always been in alliance with the South. Party men
like Van Buren and Benton drew back. Southerners like Clay resisted.
The actual clash of arms, fraudulently brought about and speciously
misrepresented, put an end to discussion, and aroused a war fever under
the pernicious motto, “Our country, right or wrong.” If we are a free
people and govern ourselves, our country is ourselves, and we have no
guaranty of right and injustice if we throw those standards behind us
the moment we have done wrong enough to find ourselves at war. The war
ended, moreover, in an acquisition of territory, which, of course, was
popular; and it proved that this territory was rich in precious metals,
which added to the popular estimate of it. The antecedents of the war
were forgotten.
Its political results, however, were far more important. Calhoun now
came forward to ward off a long conflict in regard to slavery in these
territories, by the new doctrine that the Constitution extended to all
the national domain, and carried slavery with it--a doctrine which
his followers did not, for ten years afterwards, dare to take up and
rigorously apply, and which divided the Democratic party of the North.
The repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the enactment of the Fugitive
Slave Law were only steps in the conflict which was as yet confused,
but which was clearing itself for a crisis. The South, like every
clamorous suitor, reckless of consequences, obtained wide concessions
from an adversary who sought peace and contentment, and who saw clearly
the dangers of a struggle outside the limits of constitution and law.
* * * * *
The Abolitionists, from their first organization, pursued an
“irreconcilable” course. They refused to vote for any slaveholder, or
for any one who would vote for a slaveholder, and refused all alliances
which involved any concession whatever. They more than once, by this
course, aided the party most hostile to them, and, in the view of the
ordinary politician, were guilty of great folly. They showed, however,
what is the power of a body which has a principle and has no ambition,
and is content to remain in a minority. Probably if the South had been
more moderate, the Abolitionists would have attracted little more
notice than a fanatical religious sect; but, as events marched on,
they came to stand as the leaders in the greatest political movement
of our history. The refusal of the Whig Convention of 1848 to adopt an
antislavery resolution, and the great acts above mentioned, together
with the popular reaction against a party which, if it had had its way,
would never have won the grand territories on the Pacific, destroyed
the Whig party. The party managers, enraged at the immense foreign
element which they saw added year by year to their adversaries, forming
a cohort, as it appeared, especially amenable to party discipline and
the dictation of party managers, took up the Native American movement,
which had had some existence ever since the great tide of immigration
set in. The effort was wrecked on the obvious economic follies
involved in it. How could a new country set hindrances against the
immigration of labor? Politically, the effect was great in confirming
the allegiance of naturalized voters, as a mass, to the Democratic
party as the party which would protect their political privileges
against malicious attacks. The formation of the Free-Soil party or
its development into the Republican party, brought the extension of
slavery into the territories, and the extension of its influence in the
administration of the government, distinctly forward as the controlling
political issue.
On this issue the Democratic party, as a political organization, made
up traditionally of the southern element which has been described,
of so much of the old northern Democratic party as had not been
repelled by the recent advances in Southern demands, and of the
large body of immigrants who regarded that party as the poor man’s
and the immigrant’s friend, fell out of the place it had occupied as
the representative of the great democratic tide which flows through
and forms our political history. This movement has been in favor of
equality. It has borne down and obliterated all the traditions and
prejudices which were inherited from the Old World. It has eliminated
from our history almost all recollection of the old Federal party,
with its ideas of social and political leadership. It has crushed out
the prestige of wealth and education in politics. It has, by narrow
tenures, and by cutting away all terms of language and ceremonial
observances tending to mark official rank, restrained the respect and
authority due to office. The Northern hatred of slavery in the later
days was due more to the feeling that it was undemocratic than to
the feeling that it was immoral. It was always an anomaly that the
Virginians should be democrats _par excellence_, and should regard the
yeomen farmers of New England as aristocrats, when, on any correct
definitions or standards, the New England States were certainly the
most democratic commonwealths in the world. Slavery was an obvious bar
to any such classification; and when slavery became a political issue,
the parties found their consistent and logical position. The rise and
victory of the Republican party was only a continuation of the same
grand movement for equality. The old disputes between Federalists and
Jeffersonians had ended in such a complete victory for the latter,
that the rising generation would have enumerated the Jeffersonian
doctrines as axioms or definitions of American institutions. Every
schoolboy could dogmatize about natural and inalienable rights, about
the conditions under which men are created, about the rights of the
majority, and about liberty. The same doctrines are so held to-day
by the mass of the people, and they are held so implicitly that
corollaries are deduced from them with a more fearless logic than is
employed upon political questions anywhere else in the world. Even
scholars and philosophers who reflect upon them and doubt them are
slow to express their dissent, so jealous and quick is the popular
judgment of an attempt upon them. The Democratic party of the fifties
was, therefore, false to its fundamental principle of equality when it
followed its alliance with the South and allowed itself to be carried
against equality for negroes. Whether there were not subtle principles
of human nature at work is a question too far-reaching to be followed
here.
With the rise of the Republican party there came new elements into
American politics. The question at stake was moral in form. It enlisted
unselfish and moral and religious motives. It reached outside the
proper domain of politics--the expedient measures to be adopted for
ends recognized as desirable--and involved justice and right in regard
to the ends. It enlisted, therefore, heroic elements: sacrifice for
moral good, and devotion to right in spite of expediency. At the
same time, the issue was clear, simple, single, and distinct. The
organization upon it was close and harmonious, not on account of party
discipline, but on account of actual concord in motive and purpose.
The American system was here seen in many respects at its best, and
it worked more nearly up to its theoretical results in the election
of Lincoln, a thoroughly representative man out of the heart of the
majority, than in any other election in our history. It is probably
the recollection and the standard of this state of things which leads
men now on the stage to believe that corruption is spreading and that
the political system is degenerating. It is one of the peculiarities
of the government of the United States, that it has little historical
continuity. If it had more, or if people had more knowledge of their
own political history, the above-mentioned opinion would find little
ground. The student of history who goes back searching for the golden
age does not find it.
All the heroic elements in the political issue of 1860 were, of course,
intensified by the war. There was the consciousness of patriotic
sacrifice in submitting to loss, bloodshed, and taxation for the
sake of an idea, for the further extension of political blessings
long enjoyed and highly esteemed. After the war, national pride and
consciousness of power expanded naturally, but the questions which
then arose were of a different order. They were properly political
questions. They concerned taxation, finance, the reconstruction of
the South, the status of the freedmen. The war fervor, or the moral
fervor of the political contest, could not remain at the former high
pitch. There followed a natural reaction. Questions which touched the
results of the war brought a quick and eager response. It would not
be in human nature that that response should not be tinged by hatred
of rebels and by the worse passions which war arouses. For war is at
best but a barbarous makeshift for deciding political questions. Let
them be never so high and pure in their moral aspects, war drags them
down into contact with the lowest and basest passions--with cruelty,
rapacity, and revenge. Moreover, it was natural that people should
want rest and quiet after the anxiety and excitement of war. Every
householder desired to enjoy in peace the political system which he
had defended and established by war; he did not care to renew the
excitement on the political arena. The questions which arose were no
longer such as could be decided by reference to a general political
dogma or a moral principle or a text of Scripture. They were such as
to perplex and baffle the wisest constitutional lawyer or the ablest
financier or the wisest statesman. The indifference and apathy which
ensued were remarkable, and they probably had still other causes. The
last twenty-five years have seen immense additions to the number and
variety of subjects which claim a share of the interest and attention
of intelligent men. Literature has taken an entirely new extension and
form. Newspapers bring daily information of the political and social
events of a half-dozen civilized countries. New sciences appeal to
the interest of the entire community. Educational, ecclesiastical,
sanitary, and economic undertakings, in which the public welfare is
involved, demand a part of the time and effort of every citizen. At
the same time trade and industry have undergone such changes in form
and method that success in them demands far closer and more exclusive
application than formerly. The social organization is becoming more
complex, the division of labor is necessarily more refined, and the
value of expert ability is rapidly rising.
It follows from all this that, while public interests are becoming
broader and weightier, the ability of the average voter to cope with
them is declining. It is no wonder that we have not the political
activity of the first half of this century. Instead of grasping at the
right to a share in deciding, we shrink from the responsibility. We are
more inclined to do here what we should do in any other affair--seek
for competently trained hands into which to commit the charge. The
frequent elections, instead of affording a pleasurable interest to
the ordinary voter, appear to be tiresome interruptions. What he
wants is good government, honorable and efficient administration,
businesslike permanence, and exactitude. He recognizes in the short
terms and continual elections, not an opportunity for him to control
the government, but an opportunity for professional hangers-on of
parties to make a living, and a continually recurring opportunity for
schemers of various grades to enter and carry out their plans when
people are too busy to watch them. The opinion seems to be gaining
ground that, for fear of power, we have eliminated both efficiency and
responsibility; that if power is united with responsibility, it will
be timid and reluctant enough; and that the voter needs only reserve
the right of supervision and interference from time to time. The later
state constitutions show a reaction from those of the first half of
the century in the length of terms of office, and in the general
tendency of the people to take guaranties against themselves or their
representatives. There seems also to be a tendency to investigate the
theory of appointments or elections to office as a means of devising
measures more satisfactory to that end. No system will ever give a
self-governing people a government which is better than they can
appreciate; but the very belief, to which we have before referred,
that the government is degenerating, is the best proof that the public
standards as to the _personnel_ and the methods of the government are
rising. It seems to be perceived that the plan of popular selection is
applicable to executive and legislative officers, but that it is not
applicable to the judiciary or to administrative officers. In the one
case, broad questions of policy control the choice; in the other case,
personal qualifications and technical training, in regard to which the
mass of voters cannot be informed and cannot judge. In some quarters,
an unfortunate effort has been made to charge the duty of making
certain appointments upon the judges, because, as a class, they retain
the greatest popular confidence and because the restraints of their
position are the weightiest. This, however, seems to be using up our
last reserves. There has been abundant criticism of political movements
and circumstances of late years. At first sight, it does not appear to
be very fruitful. People seem to pay as little heed to it as devout
Catholics do to the asserted corruptions of the Church; but other and
deeper signs point to a conservative movement, slow, as all popular
movements must be, but nevertheless real.
The political party system which had been developed previous to the
war underwent no change during the heroic period. The doctrines of
spoils and of rotation in office were indeed condemned, but it appeared
(as it must appear to any new party coming into office) that the
interests at stake were too great to be risked by leaving any part
of the administration in the hands of disaffected men, and, with
some apologies, the changes were made. It is the fate of the party in
power to draw to itself all the unprincipled men who seek to live by
politics, and to lose its principled adherents as, on one question
after another, they disapprove of its action. The moral and heroic
doctrines or sentiments of the Republican party were just the political
principles which offered the best chance to the unprincipled. A man
of corrupt character could “hate slavery” when that was the line of
popularity and success, and could be “loyal” when only loyal men could
get offices. The political machinery whose growth has been traced was
adopted by the new party as a practical necessity, and the men “inside
politics” still teach the old code wrought out by Tammany Hall and the
Albany Regency, not only as the only rules of success for the ambitious
politician, but also as the only sound theories on which the Republic
can be governed. In those quarters where hitherto the refinements
of the system have all been invented, a new and ominous development
has recently appeared in the shape of the “Boss.” He is the last and
perfect flower of the long development at which hundreds of skilful
and crafty men have labored, and into which the American people have
put by far the greatest part of their political energy. It has been
observed that the discipline or coercion which we dread for national
purposes and under constitutional forms appears with the vigor of a
military despotism in party; and that the conception of loyalty, for
which we can find no proper object in our system, is fully developed
in the party. Under this last development, also, we find leadership,
aristocratic authority of the ablest, nay, even the monarchical control
of the party king. He is a dictator out of office. He has power,
without the annoyance or restraints of office. He is the product of
a long process of natural selection. He has arisen from the ranks,
has been tried by various tests, has been trained in subordinate
positions, and has come up by steady promotions--all the processes
which, when we try to get them into the public service, we are told are
visionary and aristocratic. With the now elaborate system of committees
rising in a hierarchy from the ward to the nation, with the elaborate
system of primaries, nominating committees, caucuses, and conventions,
not one citizen in a thousand could tell the process by which a city
clerk is elected. It becomes a special trade to watch over and manage
these things, and the power which rules is not the “will of the
people,” but the address with which “slates” are made up. Organization
is the secret by which the branches of the political machinery are
manipulated, when they are not, by various devices, reduced, as in the
larger cities, to mere forms. In these cases the ring and the “Boss”
are the natural outcome. Any one who gets control of the machine can
run it to produce what he desires, with the exception, perhaps, that if
he should try to make it produce good, he might find that this involved
a reverse action of the entire mechanism, under which it would break
to pieces. These developments are as yet local, for the plunder of a
great city is a prize not to be abandoned for any temptation which the
general government can offer. In some cases they are hostile to the
power of the Federal office-holders where that is greatest and most
dangerous, so that they neutralize each other. At the same time some of
the Federal legislation in the way of “protection” and subsidies offers
high inducements and abundant opportunities for debauching the public
service. There are afforded by the system in great abundance means of
rewarding adherents, distributing largess, collecting campaign funds,
and performing favors; and it tends to bind men together in cliques up
and down through the service, on the basis of mutual assistance and
support and protection. Suppose that the ring and the “Boss” should
ever be ingrafted upon this system!
It cannot be regarded as a healthful sign that such a state of things
creates only a laugh or a groan of disgust or at best a critical essay.
It seems sometimes as if the prophecy of Calhoun had turned into
history: “When it comes to be once understood that politics is a game,
that those who are engaged in it but act a part, and that they make
this or that profession, not from honest conviction or an intent to
fulfil them, but as a means of deluding the people, and, through that
delusion, acquiring power,--when such professions are to be entirely
forgotten, the people will lose all confidence in public men. All will
be regarded as mere jugglers, the honest and patriotic as well as the
cunning and profligate, and the people will become indifferent and
passive to the grossest abuses of power, on the ground that those whom
they may elevate, under whatever pledges, instead of reforming, will
but imitate the example of those whom they have expelled.”
In the final extension of the conception of the “will of the people,”
and of the position of Congress in relation to it, Congress has come
to be timid and faltering in the face of difficult tasks. It knows how
to go when the people have spoken, and not otherwise. The politician
gets his opinions from the elections, and the legislature wants to
be pushed, even in reference to matters which demand promptitude and
energy. Statesmanship has no positive field and has greatly declined.
The number of able men who formerly gave their services to mold,
correct, and hinder legislation, and upon whom the responsibility
for leading on doubtful and difficult measures could be thrown, has
greatly decreased. The absence of “leaders” has often been noticed.
The fact seems to be that able men have observed that such statesmen
as have been described bore the brunt of the hard work, and were held
responsible for what they had done their best to hinder; that they
cherished a vain hope and ambition their whole lives long, and saw
inferior men without talent or industry preferred before them. It is a
sad thing to observe the tone adopted towards a mere member of Congress
as such. When one reflects that he is a member of the grand legislature
of the nation, it is no gratifying sign of the times that he should
be regarded without respect, that a slur upon his honor should be met
as presumptively just, and that boys should turn flippant jests upon
the office, as if it involved a dubious reputation. If the Republic
possesses the power to meet and conquer its own tasks, it cannot too
soon take measures to secure a representative body which shall respect
itself and be respected, without doubt or question, both at home and
abroad; for the times have changed and the questions have changed,
and we can no longer afford to govern ourselves by means of the small
men. The interests are now too vast and complex, and the greatest
question now impending, the currency, contains too vast possibilities
of mischief to this entire generation to be left the sport of
incompetents. The democratic Republic exults in the fact that it has,
against the expectations of its enemies, conducted a great civil war
to a successful result. A far heavier strain on democratic-republican
self-government lies in the questions now impending: can we ward
off subsidy-schemers? can we correct administrative abuses? can we
purify the machinery of elections? can we revise erroneous financial
systems and construct sound ones? The war appealed to the simplest
and commonest instincts of human nature, especially as human nature
is developed under democratic institutions. The questions before us
demand for their solution high intellectual power and training, great
moderation and self-control, and perhaps no less disposition to endure
sacrifices than did the war itself.
Such a review as has here been given of the century of American
politics must raise the question as to whether the course has been
upward or downward, and whether the experiment is a success or not. On
such questions opinions might fairly differ, and I prefer to express
upon them only an individual opinion.
The Federal political system, such as it is historically in the
intention and act of its framers, seems to me open to no objection
whatever, and to be the only one consistent with the circumstances
of the case. I have pursued here a severe and exact criticism of its
history, as the only course consistent with the task before me, and the
picture may seem dark and ungratifying. I know of no political history
which, if treated in the same unsparing way, would appear much better.
I find nothing in our history to throw doubt upon the feasibility and
practical advantage of a constitutional Republic. That system, however,
assumes and imperatively requires high intelligence, great political
sense, self-sacrificing activity, moderation, and self-control on the
part of the citizens. It is emphatically a system for sober-minded men.
It demands that manliness and breadth of view which consider all the
factors in a question, submit to no sophistry, never cling to a detail
or an objection or a side issue to the loss of the main point, and,
above all, which can measure a present advantage against a future loss,
and individual interest against the common good. These requirements
need only be mentioned to show that they are so high that it is no
wonder we should have fallen short of them in our history. The task
of history is to show us wherein and why, so that we may do better in
future.
If the above sketch of our political history has been presented with
any success, it shows the judgment which has been impressed upon my
mind by the study of it, namely, that the tenor of the Constitution
has undergone a steady remolding in history in the direction of
democracy. If a written constitution were hedged about by all the
interpretations conceivable, until it were as large as the Talmud, it
could not be protected from the historical process which makes it a
different thing to one generation from what it is to another, according
to the uses and needs of each. I have mentioned the forces which seem
to me to produce democracy here. They are material and physical, and
there is no fighting against them. It is, however, in my judgment, a
corruption of democracy to set up the dogma that all men are equally
competent to give judgment on political questions; and it is a still
worse perversion of it to adopt the practical rule that they must be
called upon to exercise this ability on all questions as the regular
process for getting those questions solved. The dogma is false, and the
practical rule is absurd. Caucus and wire-pulling and all the other
abuses are only parasites which grow upon these errors.
Reform does not seem to me to lie in restricting the suffrage or
in other arbitrary measures of a revolutionary nature. They are
impossible, if they were desirable. Experience is the only teacher
whose authority is admitted in this school, and I look to experience
to teach us all that the power of election must be used to select
competent men to deal with questions, and not to indirectly decide
the questions themselves. I expect that this experience will be very
painful, and I expect it very soon.
On the question whether we are degenerating or not, I have already
suggested my opinion that we are not degenerating. The lamentations
on that subject have never been silent. It seems to me that, taking
the whole community through, the tone is rising and the standard is
advancing, and that this is one great reason why the system seems to
be degenerating. Existing legislation nourishes and produces some
startling scandals, which have great effect on people’s minds. The
same legislation has demoralized the people, and perverted their
ideas of the functions of government even in the details of town and
ward interests. The political machinery also has been refined and
perfected until it totally defeats the popular will, and has produced
a kind of despair in regard to any effort to recover that of which
the people have been robbed; but I think that it would be a great
mistake to suppose that there are not, behind all this, quite as high
political standards and as sound a public will as ever before. An
obvious distinction must be made here between the administration of the
government, or the methods of party politics, and the general political
morale of the people. Great scandals are quickly forgotten, and there
are only too many of them throughout our history. Party methods have
certainly become worse and worse. The public service has certainly
deteriorated; but I should judge that the political will of the nation
never was purer than it is to-day. That will needs instruction and
guidance. It is instructed only slowly and by great effort, especially
through literary efforts, because it has learned distrust. It lacks
organization, and its efforts are spasmodic and clumsy. The proofs
of its existence are not very definite or specific, and any one in
expressing a judgment must be influenced by the circle with which he
is most familiar; but there are some public signs of it, which are the
best encouragement we have to-day.
THE ADMINISTRATION OF ANDREW JACKSON[49]
[1880]
You must have observed that the social sciences, including politics
and political economy, are the favorite arena of those who would like
to engage in learned discussion without overmuch trouble in the way of
preparation. I doubt not that you have also been struck by the fact
that these sciences are now the refuge of the conceited dogmatism
which has been expelled from the physical sciences. It follows that
the discussions in social science are the widest, the most vague, the
most imperative in form of statement, the most satisfactory to the
writers, the least convincing to everybody else; and that the social
sciences make very little progress. The harm does not all come from
the amateurs and volunteers who meddle in these subjects. It comes
also from false methods and want of training on the part of those of
higher pretensions. If, however, the methods which have hitherto been
pursued are correct, if any one is able without previous care or study
to strike out the solution of a difficult social problem, for which
solution, however, he can give no guarantee to anybody else, then the
social sciences are given over to endless and contemptible wrangling,
and are unworthy of the time and attention of sober men. Such, however,
is not the case. The Science of Life, which teaches us how to live
together in human society, and has more to do with our happiness here
than any other science, is not a mere structure of _a priori_ whims. It
is not a mass of guesses which the guesser tries to render plausible.
It is not a tangle of dogmas which are incapable of verification. It
is not a bundle of sentiments and enthusiasms and soft-hearted wishes
bound together either by religious or by irreligious prejudices. It is
not a heap of statistical matter without logic. Whether you regard the
social science under the form of law, politics, political economy, or
social science in its narrower application, these negatives all apply.
It is only under some application of scientific methods and scientific
tests that, in this department as in others, any results worth our
notice can be won.
Now the materials, the facts, and the phenomena of social science
are presented to us under two forms: first, as a successive series,
_viz._, in history, in which we see social forces at work and the
social evolution in progress; secondly, in statistics, in which the
contemporaneous phenomena are presented in groups.[50] Under this view
social science has promise, at least, of issuing from its present
condition and taking on a steady progress, while it also becomes
evident what history ought to be and how we ought to use it.
I have thought it necessary to preface the present lecture with this
bare suggestion of the standpoint from which I take up my subject. For
the study of politics, some questions in political economy, and some
social problems, the history of the United States has greater value
than that of any other country. All the greater is the pity that its
history is as yet unwritten, or all the greater is the humiliation
that the only attempts in that direction which are worth mentioning
have been made by foreign scholars, and are not even in the English
language. In American history also, for the study of politics and
finance, no period equals in interest the administration of Andrew
Jackson. I propose, therefore, in the limited time I can now command,
to point out to you the reasons why this period of our history is
worthy of the most attentive study. I may say here that Professor
Von Holst of Freiburg has perceived the importance and interest of
this period and published a lecture in regard to it which I regard
as thoroughly sound and correct in its standpoint and criticism. His
views coincide with those which I have been accustomed to present in my
lectures on the History of American Politics, and I have profited, for
my present purpose, by some suggestions of his.
Mr. Monroe was the last of the public men of the first generation
of the republic who succeeded to the presidential chair by virtue
of a certain standing before the public. During his administration
the old parties died out or were merged in a new party, a compromise
between the two. There followed during his second administration
what was called the “era of good feeling,” during which there were
no party divisions and no strong party feeling. This period was very
instructive, however, for any one who is disposed to see the evils
of party in an exaggerated light, for there sprang up no less than
five aspirants to the succession, whose interests were pushed by
personal arguments solely. These arguments took the form also, not of
enumerating the services of the candidate favored, but of spreading
scandals about his rivals. The newspapers were loaded down with weary
“correspondence” about “charges and countercharges” against each of the
candidates.
Mr. Crawford of Georgia obtained the nomination of the democratic
congressional caucus in 1824, but loud complaints were raised against
this method of nominating candidates. It was demanded that the people
should be free from the dominion of King Caucus, and should nominate
and elect freely. No machinery for accomplishing this was yet at hand,
and none was proposed, but the outcry which was partly justified by
the evils of the congressional caucus system and partly consisted of
phrases which were sure of great popular effect, greatly injured Mr.
Crawford. He had been Secretary of the Treasury during the financial
troubles of the years following the war, and had managed that thankless
office on the whole very well, but he had not performed the impossible.
He had not brought the finances of the country into a sound condition
while allowing the banks to do as they chose. He had not kept up the
revenue while trade was prostrated, and he had not crushed the United
States Bank while preserving the business interest of the country. He
had many enemies amongst those who, on the one side and on the other,
thought that he ought to have done each of these things. Hostility to
the Bank was not as great in 1824 as in 1820, but there was a large
party which was determined in this hostility. Mr. Crawford was also
said to be broken in health, and this came to be believed so firmly
that it has generally passed into history as one of the chief causes of
his defeat. It is so accepted by Von Holst. Mr. Crawford was disabled
from September, 1823, to September, 1824, but he lived until 1834,
spending the last years of his life as a circuit judge, and he was well
enough in 1830 to ruin John C. Calhoun’s chances of succeeding General
Jackson.
The next candidate was Mr. Adams, Secretary of State under Mr.
Monroe. He enjoyed the support of New England. There was no question
of Mr. Adams’s abilities, or of his great public services, or of his
character; but he was not popular. I do not, of course, think this at
all derogatory to him, but you observe that it is hard for a man to
despise popularity and at the same time have enough of it to be elected
to office in a democracy. Mr. Adams really liked popularity and wanted
it, and there was a continual strife within him between the aristocrat
who sought independent and isolated activity to please himself and the
politician who must please others. It is the explanation of much in
his conduct which seemed erratic and inconsistent to his contemporaries.
Mr. Clay was the candidate of the West, and Mr. Calhoun of a portion of
the South.
These men were all in prominent positions, three of them in the
Cabinet, and one speaker of the House. On the 20th of August, 1822,
the House of Representatives of Tennessee presented another candidate
in the person of General Jackson. This gentleman had been educated for
a lawyer and had been on the bench of Tennessee. He was in Congress
during the administration of Washington and voted against a clause
in the address of Congress to Washington on his retirement, in which
a hope was expressed that Washington’s example might be imitated by
his successors.[51] As a member of Congress he had been noticeable
only for violence of speech and action. At New Orleans he had won a
creditable military success at the close of a war which had brought
little glory on land. While there he came into collision with the civil
court on refusing to obey a writ of habeas corpus. Some incidents of
this event are especially characteristic of the man. He came into court
March 31, 1815, surrounded by the populace, and refused to answer
interrogatories. Then, pointing to the crowd, he said to the judge,
alluding to the previous judicial inquiry: “I was then with these brave
fellows in arms; you were not, sir!” He interrupted the judge while
he was reading his decision, saying: “Sir, state facts and confine
yourself to them, since my defence is and has been precluded; let not
censure constitute a part of this sought-for punishment.” The judge
replied: “It is with delicacy, general, that I speak of your name or
character. I consider you the savior of the country, but for your
contempt of court authority, or to that effect, you will pay a fine of
$1000.” The general drew his check for the sum and retired. The crowd
dragged his carriage to the French coffee-house, with acclamations and
waving flags. He there made a speech.[52] The fine, amounting with
interest to $2,700, was refunded by Congress in 1844.
In 1818 he had violated the territory of Florida, then a province of
Spain, with whom we were at peace. He claimed, in 1830, that he had
done this with the connivance of Mr. Monroe. During the same campaign
against the Seminoles he captured two men who were aiding the enemy and
were said to be British subjects. A court-martial condemned one of them
to death and the other to less punishment. He ordered both executed,
thus overruling the verdict on the side of severity.
The people might have been divided into two great classes according to
the opinion of Jackson which was entertained in 1822. The more sober
and intelligent considered him a violent, self-willed, ignorant, and
untrained man. They thought that he had perhaps the soldier’s virtues
and that he had done the country good service as a soldier but they
doubted if he had the first qualification of a ruler, _viz._, to know
how to obey. They thought him quarrelsome, vain, untutored in the forms
of civilized life which teach men to ignore much, to endure more, and
to reserve the stake of personal feeling and personal struggle for
the last and highest emergencies. They perceived, on the contrary,
that he never distinguished great things from small, especially where
his own pride was involved, and that he had no reserve at all about
throwing his personality into unseemly controversies, which he never
shunned but seemed to like. I have already said that these personal
criminations and recriminations were common at the time; Mr. Webster
is the only prominent public man of the time who succeeded in avoiding
newspaper controversies, and he did not altogether escape altercations
in the Senate. Public men were continually scenting attacks on their
character and setting vigorously to work to vindicate the same, not
perceiving that such vindications always derogate from the man who
makes them. This much ought to be said in excuse for General Jackson
if this fault was especially prominent in him. You may imagine how
incredible it seemed to persons who formed this estimate of Jackson
that any one could soberly propose him for the chair which had hitherto
been filled by Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. The
Federalists of New England had had little affection or admiration for
the last three Presidents, but they had never been ashamed of them as
public men.
The other of the two great classes to which I have referred held a very
opposite opinion of General Jackson. To them he was a military hero and
a popular idol. They liked him better for taking Pensacola in defiance
of international law. They liked him for bearding the judge who wanted
to enforce the habeas corpus. They thought it spirited in him to hang
two Englishmen to solve a doubt. I do not mean that they reasoned much
about it, for they did not; at bottom they were actuated by an instinct
of fellowship. They recognized a man with the same range of ideas and
feelings, the same contempt for history, law, Old-World forms, and
traditions by which they themselves were actuated. His bluntness, his
rollicking, untamed manner, his hit-or-miss arguments, his respect
for the popular whim or emotion as the only control he would admit,
his plump ignorance which exceeded omniscience in its boldness,
all flattered the populace and won its favor. Here was a hero from
amongst themselves, using their methods, despising the restrictions
of the cultivated and the learned, a virtuoso in negligence and
carelessness of manner, aiming at rudeness and bluntness as things
worth cultivating, and elevating want of culture into a qualification
for greatness and a title to honor.
In order to understand the full importance of this you must look at
some facts in social and political development which had immediately
preceded. At the adoption of the Constitution property qualifications
limiting the suffrage were general, but they had been removed steadily
and gradually until by 1820 the suffrage was universal throughout
almost all the states. The Jeffersonian ideas of government and
policy had also spread steadily and rapidly and had received more
and more extended interpretation. They were fallacious and only half
true at best, that is to say, they were of the most mischievous
order of propositions possible in politics; but in popular use and
interpretation they had become worn into a kind of political cant, in
which the moiety of truth had disappeared and the residuum of falsehood
had become the highest political truth and the badge of political
orthodoxy. To use the ballot was held synonymous with freedom; the rule
of the numerical majority was made equivalent to the republic; the
“will of the people” was held paramount to the Constitution--which is
nothing more than saying that to do as you choose is superior to doing
as you have agreed. And it had become a political dogma that, if there
are only enough of you together, when you do as you have a mind to, you
are sure to do right.
I use the past sense here, but you will at once perceive that I am
describing what is still strong amongst us.
Of course there was, outside of these two classes, a large body of
persons, scattered, as to their political opinions, all the way between
the two extremes; but the second class was large and was growing very
rapidly from social and industrial causes which are yet to be specified.
During the European wars the people of the New England states made
great gains from commerce. In the middle states manufactures began
under the protection of embargo and war. In the South there was less
wealth, but the possession of land and slaves created an aristocracy
of large political influence over poorer neighbors. In New York
something of the same kind existed, two or three of the great families
struggling with one another for the political control of the state.
These were all democrats of a peculiar type well worthy of study.
They professed popular principles while they scorned the populace and
led cohorts of uneducated men whom they handled and disposed of as
they chose. After the war the commerce and industry of the country
suffered a heavy reverse from which it did not recover until 1820 or
1821; but then came the influence of steam navigation, as the first of
the great inventions, together with the factory system and some great
improvements in machinery, and the position of the artisan, in spite
of the protective policy to which the result was generally attributed
as a cause, underwent a steady and very great improvement. In 1825
the Erie Canal was opened and, together with the application of steam
to lake and river navigation, led to an unparalleled development west
of the Alleghanies. In the southwestern states the immense profits of
cotton culture led to rapid settlement and development. As early as
1816 the tide of immigration had become marked. It was interrupted
during the hard times but went on again increasing steadily. Thus you
see that the material prosperity of this country was just taking its
great start at the beginning of the twenties. The natural consequence
was that there was a great body of persons here who had been used to
straitened circumstances, but who now found themselves prosperous,
every year improving their condition. Such a state of things is of
course eminently desirable. Economists and statesmen are continually
trying to bring it about. Observe, however, some of the inevitable
social, political, and moral effects. This class expanded under the sun
of prosperity both its virtues and its vices. It became self-reliant
and independent. It feared no mishap. It took reckless risks. It
laughed at prudence. It had overcome so many difficulties that it took
no forethought for any yet to come. It loved dash and bravado and high
spirit. It admired energy and enterprise as amongst the highest human
virtues. It scorned especially theory, or philosophy, and professed
exaggerated faith in the practical man. It never estimated science
very highly until science began to lead to patent mixtures for various
purposes and to mining engineering. Then it took to business colleges
and technical schools for the dissemination of the same. Especially did
this class despise any historical or scientific doctrines which came
from the other side of the water. It was a general premise that the new
country needed new systems throughout the whole social and political
fabric, and that what was enforced by European experience was surely
inapplicable here. As against England this assumption was considered
especially strong. In the writings of some of the men who greatly
influenced public opinion from 1820 to 1830 this amounted almost to
fanaticism. “Home industry,” and “Internal Improvements,” owed much of
their success over the mind of the nation to the industrious use of
this prejudice. These subjects were not political issues until 1830.
Of course I have nothing to do with the question which to many would
seem to be here the only important one, _viz._, whether these traits
are not noble and praiseworthy and do not constitute the Americans
the first nation in the world. Those are idle questions. Political
institutions are not framed to produce noble and praiseworthy men.
If any are planned to that end they always fail. But political
institutions follow the social and industrial conditions, if the people
adapt themselves to the facts of the case. So it has been here; and,
although I have used the past tense in this description of the effects
of rapid prosperity, you observe that the features are those which
still mark our American society as a whole. I have simply to take
cognizance of these effects as facts inseparable from the conditions of
that society.
Here, then, I come to the assertion to which I desire especially to
call your attention under my present subject: that is, that General
Jackson’s personal popularity and his political influence were not
created by him at all, but were simply the results of the fact that he
exactly fitted in as a leader into the rising class of persons of small
property, low education, and crude notions of politics and finance. Of
this class he was the leader as long as he lived. You will recognize
here an illustration of the wider historical generalization, that the
prominent man and his surroundings always act and react on one another
and the old question as to which “causes” the other is idle.
Such being the circumstances in 1822, when Jackson’s name was first
mentioned in connection with the Presidency, the class of persons
whom I first described as considering this a bad joke soon discovered
their mistake. In the following year the people of Blount County,
Tennessee held a meeting at which they passed strong resolutions in his
support,[53] and it was soon evident to the aspirants at Washington
that he was the most dangerous competitor of all. Calhoun hastened to
retire into the second place, with the understanding that he was to
succeed in four years, Jackson having pronounced for one term only.
Pending the contest, in 1823, Jackson was elected United States Senator
from Tennessee. The result of the election of 1824 was that Jackson got
99 votes in the electoral college, Adams 84, Crawford 41, and Clay 37.
Clay was thus excluded from the contest in the House. His friends voted
for Adams, who got 13 states, Jackson 7, and Crawford 4. The states
which voted for Jackson were New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina,
Tennessee, Indiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. This election was in
many respects important for the history of politics in the country. I
leave aside all but the relation to Jackson and the political movement
which he represented. His friends were by no means content, and they
were not quiet in their discontent. They accused Clay of carrying his
votes over to Adams by a corrupt bargain, according to which he was to
be Secretary of State in the new Cabinet. There was less ground for
this accusation than for almost any other personal calumny to be found
in our political history, but it clung to Mr. Clay as long as he lived.
The most significant feature, however, for the political movement of
the time was this: General Jackson’s supporters claimed that, as he
had a plurality of the votes of the Electoral College, it was shown to
be the will of the people that he should be President, and that the
House of Representatives ought simply to have carried out the popular
will, thus expressed, to fulfillment. You observe the full significance
of the doctrine thus affirmed. The Constitution provides that the
House shall elect a President when the Electoral College fails to give
any candidate a majority. It confers an independent choice between
the three highest candidates upon the House. Already the independent
choice which the Constitution intended to give to the Electoral College
had been abrogated by Congressional caucus nominations and pledged
elections. It was now claimed that the House should simply elevate the
plurality of the highest candidate in the College to a majority in the
House. Thus the antagonism between the permanent specification of the
Constitution and the momentary will of the people was sharply defined.
It was the antagonism between the general law and the momentary
impulse, between sober dispassionate judgment as to what is generally
wise and a special inconvenience or disappointment. I strive to put
it into everyday language because it is a phenomenon of human life
which is the same whether it is seen in the character of an individual
striving to control his wayward impulses by general principles, or in
the political history of a great democratic republic seeking to obtain
dignity, stability, and imperial majesty by binding the swaying wishes
of the hour under broad and sacred constitutional provisions. It was
the opening of that issue which is vital to this republican issue
which cleaves down through our entire political and social fabric,
the issue to which parties must ever return and about which they will
always form so long as this experiment lasts--the issue, namely, of
constitutionalism _versus_ democracy, of law _versus_ self-will; the
question whether we are a constitutional republic whose ultimate bond
is the loyalty of the individual citizen to the Constitution and the
laws or a democracy in which at any time the laws and the Constitution
may give way to what shall seem, although not constitutionally
expressed, to be the will of the people. General Jackson was from the
time of this election the exponent of the latter theory.
I do not mean to say that the issue was clearly defined at the time, or
that the parties ranged themselves upon it with logical consistency.
Any student of history knows that political parties never do that.
Still less do I mean to say that parties since that time have kept
strictly to the position on one side or the other of this issue which
their traditions would require. Political history and political
tradition have little continuity with us, and the fact has been that
the Jacksonian doctrine has permeated our whole community far too
deeply. We have had some who merely grubbed in a mole-eyed way in the
letter of the Constitution, as indeed Jackson and his fellows did, and
we have had others who were and are restive under any invocation of the
Constitution. True constitutionalism, however, the grand conception
of law, of liberty under law, of the free obedience of intelligent
citizens, is what now needs explaining and enforcing as the key to
any true solution of the great problems which, as we are told on every
side, beset the republic.
I cannot now follow the history in detail to show the movements of
parties during the next four years. Mr. Adams’s administration was
unfortunate in its attempts to settle the old misunderstanding with
England about the West India trade. It got that question into one of
those awkward corners, out of which neither party can first seek exit,
which the diplomatist ought to avoid as the worst form of diplomatic
failure. In its home policy it favored internal improvements and
protection to the most exaggerated degree. But the administration was
dignified, simple, and businesslike. It was a model in these respects
of what an administration under our system ought to be. It presented no
heroics whatever, neither achievements nor scandals, and approached,
therefore, that millenial form of society in which time passes in peace
and prosperity without anything to show that there is either government
or history.
Nevertheless this administration did not receive justice from its
contemporaries. Mr. Adams seemed always to feel a certain timidity,
which he expressed in his letter to the House of Representatives on his
election, because he had gone into office without a popular majority.
In Congress he had to deal with an opposition which was factious,
disappointed, and malignant, determined to make the worst of everything
he did and to make capital at every step for General Jackson. It
was a campaign four years long, and it was conducted by a new class
of politicians who made light of principle and gloried in finesse.
The end of the old system of family leadership in New York and the
certainty that there would never be another congressional caucus, led
to new forms of machinery for manipulating the popular power. These
were set up under loud denunciations of dynasties, aristocracies,
families, dictation, and so on. The most remarkable and most powerful
of these new organs was the Albany Regency, which shaped our political
history for the next ten or fifteen years. The intrigues of the period
culminated in the tariff act of 1828, in which Pennsylvania and
the South were brought into a strange coalition to support Jackson
and a high tariff, leaving New England out of the golden shower of
tariff-created wealth, as she held aloof from the support of the
popular idol. I regret that I cannot now stop to analyze and expose
this prime specimen of legislation in which tariff and politics were
scientifically intermingled.
As for political principles, there were none at stake and none argued
in the contest. The struggle was ruthlessly personal. A month before
the election an editorial in _Niles’s Register_ used the following
language: “We had much to do with the two great struggles of parties
from 1797 to 1804 and 1808 to 1815, and we are glad that we are not so
engaged in this, more severe and ruthless than either of the others,
and, we must say, derogatory to our country, and detrimental to its
free institutions and the rights of suffrage, with a more general
grossness of assault upon distinguished individuals than we ever before
witnessed.”
Jackson was elected by 178 votes to 83 for Adams. The criticisms which
had been made upon Adams’s administration were now all used as a basis
for representing the entire government as needing reform. This reform
took the form of removing all persons in office and replacing them by
friends of the new President. Up to this time the tenure of office
in the public service had been during efficiency or good behavior,
although instances of removals for political reasons had not been
wanting and there had been many changes when Jefferson went into
office. I will only say in passing that the complaints of inefficiency
in office and of corruption during Jackson’s administration steadily
and justly increased. According to a report by Secretary Ewing, in
1841, there were lost, to the government between 1829 and 1841, over
two millions and a half of dollars by defalcations of public officials.
The Cabinet selected by Jackson at the outset consisted of obscure
men remarkable only for their loyalty to the person of the President.
It may be said in general of the new appointments to inferior offices
that they constituted a deterioration of the public service. Two
doctrines were now affirmed as democratic principles which, if they
should be accepted as such, would be the condemnation of democracy to
all sober-minded men. The first was that of rotation in office, which,
if it is a democratic principle, raises inefficiency and venality to
permanent features of the public service. You will observe that its
effect has been, as a matter of history, to make thousands of people
believe despairingly that these things are inseparable from the public
service and that elections only determine which set shall enjoy the
opportunity. The other doctrine or democratic principle was that to the
victors belong the spoils. This was distinctly enunciated by William
L. Marcy on the floor of the Senate. He said that he did not hesitate
to avow the principle as a principle. By this principle corruption in
the public service is made a matter of course. I think that these two
“principles” are rotten, and by virtue of their own intrinsic baseness.
If any one is inclined to despair of the republic now, he ought to
remember that there was a time when men shamelessly professed these
doctrines as principles. I doubt if any one would be bold enough to do
it to-day.
Whether General Jackson went into office intending to make war on
the United States Bank, is a question which has never yet found a
solution, but the drift of the evidence is for the negative. During
the summer of 1829 some of the New Hampshire politicians of the new
school endeavored to obtain the removal of Mr. Jeremiah Mason from the
Presidency of the Portsmouth Branch of the United States Bank. They
brought no charge whatever against him save that he was a friend of Mr.
Webster, and they urged that some friend of the administration might
make the Branch useful in its service. The Secretary of the Treasury
(Ingham) endeavored to induce the President of the Bank (Biddle) to
remove Mr. Mason. Biddle refused to do this. In this controversy the
administration men were in the position of striving to bring the
Bank into politics on their side and the Bank was in the position of
striving to remain neutral in politics. From this, however, dates
the great conflict of Jackson’s administration. You will greatly err
in trying to form any judgment in this matter if you doubt the _bona
fides_ of General Jackson. Where his personal value was not at stake
he was genial, good-natured, and generous. In questions of policy he
was easily led up to the point at which he formed an opinion. His
opinion might be crystallized, however, suddenly, by the most whimsical
consideratives, or under the most erratic motives. When he had formed
what for him was an opinion, he clung to it with astonishing obstinacy.
It rose before his mind as a fact of the most undeniable certainty. The
echo of it, which came back to him by virtue of his popularity, seemed
to him to sanction it with the highest authority. One who denied it was
shameless and unpardonable, one who resisted it deserved any punishment
which the fashions of the age allowed. You recognize the description of
a strong and originally powerful mind destitute of training.
At the outset the Bank was guilty only of neutrality where he demanded
support. At this time it had lived down much of the hatred it had
justly incurred at the outset, but there was no difficulty in reviving
it. The Bank was never in a stronger or sounder condition than in 1829,
and it enjoyed high credit both at home and abroad. The word went out,
however, that the Bank was a monopoly, the possession of the moneyed
aristocracy, undemocratic, and hostile to liberty. The first blow fell,
in spite of some vague premonitory rumors, with great suddenness. In
the annual message of December, 1829, Jackson incorporated a short
paragraph questioning the constitutionality of the Bank and proposing
a Bank on the credit and revenues of the government. The alarm thus
created was twofold, first on account of the Bank which was threatened,
and second on account of the new institution which sounded like a
government paper money bank. Parties did not as yet divide on this
issue. The strongest partisans of Jackson took up the cry against the
Bank, but not yet with vigor; the more intelligent supporters of the
administration still favored it. In 1830 the message was much milder in
regard to the Bank, and the Treasury Report was even favorable to it.
In 1831, however, the message was once more strongly hostile.
In the meantime the President had vetoed an internal improvement bill
and taken up a position of hostility to the policy of improvements.
The tariff of 1828 had provoked the South to more and more energetic
protests until South Carolina adopted the doctrine and policy of
nullification. There never was a greater political error, for she
alienated the vast body of the nation, even in the South, which
might have been brought to oppose protection but would not favor
nullification as a means of destroying it. It was in this connection
that Jackson’s traits availed to procure him, in his own day, the
approval of men like Webster and has availed to give him a place
amongst our political heroes and in the hearts of people who to-day
know little more about him than that he prevented nullification. He
certainly acted with very commendable firmness in giving it to be
understood that nullification meant rebellion and war. His attitude
and, far more, the legislation of the session of 1832–1833 including
the compromise tariff of March 2, 1833, averted civil war. What part
in all this drama was played by his hostility to Mr. Calhoun it is
difficult to say. They were now sworn enemies, General Jackson having
been informed (by Mr. Crawford) that Mr. Calhoun, instead of being
his friend in the cabinet of Mr. Monroe, had been one of those who
disapproved of his acts in the Seminole war in 1878. General Jackson
upon this diverted the succession from Mr. Calhoun and, after taking a
second term himself, gave the succession to Martin Van Buren, a weak
and unpopular candidate, who had, by virtue of his position in the
Albany Regency, given New York to Jackson. Mr. Van Buren was Secretary
of State in Jackson’s first cabinet, which suddenly exploded in 1831 on
a question of social etiquette. He was next nominated to the English
mission and went out, but failed of confirmation, an incident only
worth mentioning because the hotter partisans of Jackson proposed to
abolish the Senate for rejecting one of his nominations.
All these and other personalities which it is impossible to group in
any way, and which I cannot follow into detail, played their part
in the great drama which was opening. The popular democratic party
was gaining ground every day. A consciousness of power, a desire to
assume public duties from which they had hitherto held aloof, was
taking stronger possession of them. On the other hand, an opposition
was forming under the name of the National Republican party which had
a certain vague legitimacy of descent from the old Federal party.
It adopted as its principles protection, internal improvements,
distribution of the public lands, and the National Bank. This party
first began to be called Whigs in Connecticut, in 1834.[54] It always
seemed strangely lacking in political sagacity. It offered to its
enemies the very strongest arguments against itself. It had managed to
get on the side, which will pass into history as the wrong side, of at
least three great questions and perhaps also of the fourth. It forced
the administration into an impregnable position in regard to free
trade, hard money, and an opposition to the distribution of land or
revenue; and it managed in the end to put itself unequivocally in the
wrong and the opposite party in the right on the sub-treasury and the
public finances.
It commenced its career as a party by a great blunder--an act which
was recognized as such immediately afterwards--and that was the effort
to re-charter the Bank in 1832. It had been the strongest answer of
the Bank to Jackson’s early attacks that its charter did not expire
until March 3, 1836, that he had forced the issue of a re-charter on
the country six and a half years before the time, and that he had
nothing to do with the re-charter unless he assumed that he was to be
reëlected. The National Republican convention was held at Baltimore on
December 12, 1831. Mr. Clay was nominated for President. The petition
for a re-charter was presented January 9, 1832, as a manœuvre in the
campaign. Forthwith the charge of anticipating an exciting question
was turned against the opposition. They were charged with bringing the
Bank into politics, and the Bank was forced into the political campaign
to defend its existence. The re-charter was passed July 4, 1832, and
vetoed July 10. Up to this time there had been plenty of administration
men who favored the Bank. This issue, thus forced by the opposition on
the eve of election, and thus accepted by the President for his own
person, raised Bank on Anti-Bank to a test of political orthodoxy,
and, in the political language of the time, many were forced to “turn
a sharp corner.” The issue was now also Jackson _versus_ the Bank, and
then first did it become apparent to what extent the Jackson party had
gained and how thorough was its devotion. The current party names were
Jackson and Anti-Jackson, and candidates were so designated down to the
lowest town officers. The Whigs protested in vain against the folly of
this. They argued with men who would not argue, and assumed the force
of motives the powerlessness of which was proved by the fact that men
could profess such personal political allegiance. They did not truly
appreciate the democracy in which they lived. They suffered themselves
to be isolated as a body and they lost the proper conservative power
of an opposition by failing to go with the sentiment of the vast
energetic, growing (if you choose to call it so), vulgar democracy.
It is a danger which always besets the conservative party here, whose
members will always be a minority, and will always find much to offend
their refinement in a new community like this. They will always be
tempted to withdraw from contact with it and to gratify their vanity at
the expense of all public influence.
The consequence of the issue as it was made in 1832 was that Jackson
got 219 and Clay 49 votes in the Electoral College.[55] Things
now entered on a new stage. The lower class which I have hitherto
endeavored to characterize fairly, but without timidity, now took
on the character of a genuine proletariat. It has been only at few
periods that any development of the lowest sections of our population
has produced what could properly be called by that name. The period
of Jackson’s second administration was the most marked of these. In
the large cities trades-unions arose, and in certain sections agrarian
doctrines were advocated, while there was a general dissemination
of socialistic notions. In 1836 there were formal riots and public
disturbances of lesser grade. Partly this was due to the arrogance
of class success, partly to the flattery of demagogues, and partly
to industrial changes and to currency disturbances which are to be
mentioned in a moment.
The National Bank being doomed if Jackson should be reëlected, a large
moneyed class had been drawn into the administration party, _viz._,
those who wanted to found local banks. The administration party,
therefore, included these two branches, to the former or lower of which
the nickname Locofoco was given.
General Jackson regarded his reëlection as a sanction of all that he
had done or proposed. According to his principles the question of
wisdom in banking and currency did not come from history or science,
but from a majority vote of the people. What is to be noticed, however,
is that the people simply assented to whatever he proposed and ratified
whatever he did, because it was he that did it. There resulted a state
of things paralleled in our history only in the case of Mr. Jefferson,
that is, an action and reaction between the executive and a popular
majority in which each stimulated the other by ready sympathy and
mutual support. The President pursued his way without a misgiving,
and the opposition in Congress while they saw their members dwindling
and the majority becoming more and more overwhelming, could only
express their astonishment at the sudden acts and irregular methods
of procedure of the executive. The subservient majority, consisting
largely of professional politicians of the new type, recognized that
for the time being their occupation of plotting and controling was
gone. Their hopes lay in no independent action, but in loyalty to the
chief.
I feel here how much I am saying which under other circumstances would
require proof, but the proof lies before any one who will throw aside
Benton and Parton and look into the Congressional debates and the
newspapers of the time.
The President now pushed on his hostility to the Bank, being
doubly enraged by the efforts it had made to fight its own battle
in contending against him during the campaign. He avowed his
determination to make the “experiment” of using local banks as fiscal
agents of the government. Naturally enough, the banking and commercial
world was frightened at experiments, carried on without skill or
knowledge and running athwart the financial and business interests of
the country. Up to this time, you must remember, the administration had
not pronounced for specie currency at all, but it was supposed that the
President favored a government paper bank. In his Bank veto message
he had said that a charter for a Bank which would have been free from
objection might have been obtained by coming to him beforehand. In his
first message after his reëlection he raised the question whether the
public deposits were safe in the Bank and whether the government shares
in the Bank ought not to be sold. In spite of all that had gone before
these were startling questions. A majority of the Committee of Ways
and Means found the deposits safe. The minority made some strong and
undeniable points against the Bank.
During the summer of 1833 Amos Kendall was appointed agent to see
what banks could be engaged to take the public deposits. On August
19 of that year the five government directors of the Bank made a
report showing the amount expended by the Bank in printing during the
campaign, and on September 18, 1833, the President read to his cabinet
a paper setting forth the reasons why the public deposits should be
removed from the United States Bank. The Secretary of the Treasury, Mr.
Duane, refused to give the order for removal and was dismissed. Mr.
Taney was made Secretary and he ordered that no further sums should
be deposited in the Bank by collectors or others. December 3, 1833,
he reported to Congress his reasons for doing this. On December 9,
the government directors sent in a memorial to Congress saying that
they had been shut out from a knowledge of the affairs of the Bank. On
March 28, 1834, the Senate, after having tried in vain to pass a more
specific censure, resolved that the President had “assumed upon himself
authority and power not conferred by the Constitution and the laws.”
On April 15, the President sent in a protest against this resolution,
saying that if he had been guilty of violating the Constitution he
ought to be impeached, not censured by resolution. This protest the
Senate refused to register. They could not impeach him, and the House
was far from thinking of such a thing. In fact, the question of status
of the Secretary of the Treasury is a delicate one. Some independent
responsibility is laid upon him, according to the laws of 1789 and
1800, but, as he is liable to be dismissed by the President, he
cannot have an independent responsibility. The resolution of censure
was “expunged” on January 16, 1837. In the House of Representatives,
on April 4, 1834, it was resolved that the Bank ought not to be
re-chartered, that the deposits ought not to be restored, that the
state banks ought to be made depositories of the public funds, and that
a select committee on the Bank should be raised. The majority of this
committee reported, on May 22, that the Bank had refused to submit to
investigation, while the minority (Everett and Ellsworth) reported that
the majority had made unreasonable demands. On February 4, 1834 the
Senate had referred to the Finance Committee an inquiry in regard to
the Bank; and at the next session, on December 18, 1834, the Committee
reported, by John Tyler, favorably to the Bank in every respect. In the
message of December, 1834, the President reviewed the whole war against
the Bank and summed up the charges against it. Therewith the political
and congressional war over the old Bank came to an end with a full
victory for the administration.
The earliest announcement of the policy of the administration in favor
of a metallic currency was in a reply made by the President[56] in
February, 1834, to a deputation from Philadelphia who came to complain
of the hard times. According to the report they gave, the President was
very rude and violent. He ascribed all the trouble to the “monster,”
as he called the Bank over and over again. He declared that he would
introduce a specie currency and that the government should use no
other. He evidently knew little of the laws of money and finance, and,
although much which he and his supporters afterwards urged in support
of this policy was as true and sound as any propositions in physical
science, yet it was mixed up with fallacies which neutralized it, and
it degenerated into a kind of fanaticism about the precious metals.
The measure of distributing the deposits amongst local banks, and
thereby stimulating bank credits, was destructive to the other measure
of introducing a specie currency. The distribution of the surplus
revenue, which had accumulated in the banks amongst the states, was an
opposition measure that was passed on account of the foolish belief,
which so often leads our politicians astray, that there was political
capital in it. Jackson signed the bill, but he criticized it in his
next message, giving plain and statesmanlike reasons against it.
I must mention one other institution which took its rise in this
period, and that is the national convention. I have already mentioned
the Convention of the National Republicans at Baltimore in 1831. The
Jackson men held one at Baltimore on May 21, 1832. With this invention
our political institutions entered on a new phase, and “politician”
acquired a new meaning. The power of party, the binding force of
caucus agreements, the conception of bolting a regular nomination as
the highest political crime, were developed first in the ranks of the
Jackson party, but speedily followed to the best of their ability by
the opposition. The Tammany Club of New York was the school in which
these political arts were cultivated to the highest pitch, to be
imitated elsewhere. There had been loud shouts over the downfall of
“King Caucus” when, in 1824, the candidate of the congressional caucus
was defeated, but the fact was that King Caucus had only just come
of age and was entering into his inheritance. Behind the convention
speedily arose the class of politicians vulgarly known as wire-pullers
who spent their time between elections in intriguing and plotting and
distributing. The Albany Regency found that its power slipped away into
the hands of these more secret operators. There sprang up men who did
not care for office, who lived no one knew how, or who took offices
which to them were sinecures while they wielded the real political
power. The convention proved to be an engine well adapted to the
purposes of this class. It had all the forms of freedom, publicity, and
popular initiative, while the real manipulation was astonishingly easy
for two or three shrewd and experienced men. I am using the past tense
here again for decency’s sake. I wish that I could do so because the
things I describe were really matters of history.
You see now that I have spared nothing whatever here, neither national
pride, nor party prejudice, nor hereditary family feeling. My business
is simply with the truth of history so far as it is attainable, and so
far as I am able faithfully to state it. It would be very easy now to
say that Andrew Jackson demoralized American politics, and to throw
upon his memory the blame for all the political troubles, shames, and
problems of which we are every day reminded. Such, however, would be
very far from the inference I want to draw. I have tried to emphasize
the fact that Jackson himself was only a typical and representative man
in and of his time, that it is often difficult to say whether he led or
was carried forward. His administration, in the view I have tried to
present, was only the time at which a certain tendency came to victory.
It was only a case of the conflict which constitutes great political
parties under all governments, the conflict between the radical and
conservative tendencies. The radical tendency had won one victory
under Jefferson, and, coming into office, had become conservative.
In Jackson’s elevation a new radical tendency, more excessive than
the first, came to victory. I have shown also in my criticism on the
Whig party how it fell out of sympathy with the great movement which
was going on and which was inevitably conditioned in the social and
economic circumstances of the country.
This tendency has still pursued its way down to our own times. The
party which organized under Jackson became involved in the slavery
question by combinations which it would be most interesting to study;
but this will be only a passing phase, a temporary issue in our
political life, and only a feature of the history of the concrete
Democratic party, not of the great democratic tendency. The doctrines
of the Jacksonian democracy have permeated nearly the whole country.
They have come to be popularly regarded as postulates or axioms of
civil liberty. Those who deny them are the scholars, the historians,
the philosophers, the book-men of every grade; and they deny them
under their breath, at the penalty of sacrificing all share in public
life. It is certain, however, that the issue must come back to its
permanent form and that the political strife must be waged between the
conservative and the radical theories of politics--between those who
lay the greater stress on law and those who lay the greater stress on
liberty, between those who see political health chiefly in the social
principle and those who see it chiefly in the individual, between
constitutionalism and democracy.
This will not come about by any critical reflections of mine or by
those of any other political philosopher. It will come about by
experience, and by instinct rather than by reflection. For the evils
and corruptions of which we daily complain arise from democratic
theories of politics, developed and applied without reference to the
actual circumstances of the case, and under assumptions which are
false. Experience has convinced nearly all of us who are willing to
think about the matter that rotation in office is mischievous to the
public interest and demoralizing to the men who enter the public
service. Experience has long since brought home to us the shame of the
doctrine that to the victors belong the spoils. Experience has shown
us the evils of frequent elections and short terms of office, and it
is continually opening the eyes of more and more of us to the evils
of electing a large number of administrative officers and making them
independent of each other. Experience has shown us the inapplicability
of the principle of election to the selection of judges. Experience
is showing that the notion of the responsibility of a party is a
delusion and that the notion of responsibility to the people is only a
jingle of words; and as new constitutions are formed we find that they
continually take more guarantees from the people against themselves.
On the contrary the path of reform lies in the direction of stronger
constitutional guarantees and greater reverence for law as law.
Any conservative party which fulfills its function in this country
will have to take its stand on that platform. Its reforms must be
historical, not speculative. They must be founded in the genius and
history of the country. The democracy here, in the sense of the widest
popular participation in public affairs, is inevitable until the land
is taken up and the population begins to press upon the means of
subsistence, that is to say, for a future far beyond what we need take
into consideration. Our whole history shows this, and the part which
I have discussed shows conclusively what we may also all see in our
own daily observation--that the men, the parties, the theories which
oppose themselves to this tendency are swept down like seeds before
a flood. It is idle to ask whether is it a good tendency. It is a
fact--a fact whose causes arise from the deepest and broadest social
and economic circumstances of the country. But there is a foundation
for true constitutionalism in the traditions of our race and in our
inherited institutions--in our inherited reverence for law, which is
all that keeps us from going the way of Mexico and Peru.
The philosophers and book-men have no great rôle offered them in a new
country. They will always be a minority, they will always be holding
back in the interest of law, order, tradition, history, and they will
rarely be entrusted with the conduct of affairs; but, since their
lot is cast here, if they withdraw from the functions which fall to
them in this society, such as it is, they do it at the sacrifice not
only of duty but also of everything which makes a fatherland worth
having, to them or to their posterity. The fault which they commit is
the complement of that committed by their opponents. For the notion
which underlies democracy is that of rights, tenacity in regard to
rights, the brutal struggle for room for one’s self, and, still more
specifically, for _equal_ rights, the root principle of which is envy.
This was abundantly illustrated in Jackson’s day. The opposition of
his supporters to bank and tariff had no deeper root than this, and
the name they chose for themselves as descriptive of their aims was
“The Equal Rights Party.” But the principle of political life lies
not in rights but in duties. The struggle for rights is at best war.
The subjection to duty reaches the same end, reaches it far better,
and reaches it through peace. Still less is there any principle of
political health in the idea of _equality_ of rights, much as some
people seem to believe the opposite. In political history it has been
the melancholy province of France to show us that if you emphasize
equality you reduce all to a dead level of slavery, with a succession
of revolutions to bring about a change of masters.
If, then, the classes which are by education and position conservative
withdraw from public activity, pride themselves on their cleanness from
political mire, and satisfy themselves at most with a negative and
destructive interference at the polls from time to time, the conception
of political duty with them must be as low as with their opponents;
and I will add that they will at best turn from one set of masters to
another, under a general and steady deterioration in the political tone
of the country. If we have to-day a society in which we go our ways
in peace, freedom, and security, a society from the height of which
we look back upon the life of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
with a shudder, we owe it to no class of men who wrote satirical essays
on contemporary politics and said to one another: “What is the use?”
Elliott and Hampden and Sydney and these revolutionary heroes whose
praise we are just now chanting did not win for us all the political
good we owe them by any such policy as that. There was no use, as
far as any one could see, in their cases. They risked persecution,
imprisonment, the axe, and the scaffold, and their puny efforts seemed
ridiculous in the face of the task they undertook; but they never
stopped to think of that. They saw that it was the right thing to do
then to speak or to resist, and they did it and let the end take care
of itself.
Now we Americans of to-day have no heroic deeds to perform. We have
no fear of the stake or the axe for political causes. We are not
called upon to do any grand deeds. Perhaps it would be easier if we
were. If we had a Cæsar at Washington I would warrant him his Brutus
within a fortnight. But we have need of the same sense of duty which
has animated all the heroes of constitutional government and civil
liberty, and I am not sure but we need some of their courage also,
for it demands at least as much moral courage to beard King Majority
as it ever did to beard King Cæsar. Nothing less than the experiment
of self-government is at stake in the question whether thousands of
citizens are capable of that form of duty which makes a man work on
without results and without reward, even, it may be, in the face of
misrepresentation and abuse, simply because he sees a certain direction
in which his efforts ought to be expended.
Such, however, I conceive to be the calling of the conservative classes
of this country, at least for this generation. We have undertaken to
govern ourselves, and we are just finding, now that the country is
filling up and its cities growing large, that it is a great task,
that it takes time and thought, that we need any and all resources
of science and experience which we can call to our aid; and we are
finding especially that the forms of law and of the Constitution are
every year more essential, and the untamed forces of society more
dangerous. No supernatural interference will come to our assistance.
No man, no committee, no party, no centralized organization of the
general government, can rid us of our difficulties and yet leave us
self-government. Nor can we invent any machinery of elections or of
government which will do the work for us. We have got to face the
problems like men, animated by patriotism, acting with business-like
energy, standing together for the common weal. Whenever we do that we
cannot fail of success in getting what we want; so long as we do not do
that, our complaints of political corruption are the idlest and most
contemptible expressions which grown men can utter.
THE COMMERCIAL CRISIS OF 1837
[1877–1878]
The decade from 1830 to 1840 is the most important and interesting in
the history of the United States. The political, social, and industrial
forces which were in action were grand, and their interaction produced
such complicated results, that it is difficult to obtain a just and
comprehensive view of their relations and influences. In the first
place, the United States advanced between the second war with England
and 1830 to a position of full and high standing in the family of
nations. The security and stability of the government were accepted
as established. England and France, on the other hand, just before
and after 1830, were involved in social and political troubles of
an alarming kind. By contrast, the United States, with a rapidly
increasing population, expanding production and trade, a contented
people, and a surplus revenue offered great attractions to both
laborers and capital. At the same time the pride of the Americans in
their country produced self-reliance, energy, and enterprise which
laughed at difficulties. New means of transportation by steamboats
and canals were opening up the country and assuring to the population
the advantages of a new and unbounded continent. Production therefore
offered high returns to both labor and capital.
The advantages of a new country were credited to the political
institutions of democracy, and increasing prosperity, due to the fresh
resources brought within reach, was held to be proof of the truth of
the political dogmas entertained by the workers. A sort of boyish
exuberance, compounded of inexperience, ignorance, and fearless
enterprise, marked politics as well as industry. Jackson’s election
in 1828 brought to power a party which had been produced by these
circumstances.
The war debt of 1812 became payable in the years after 1824 and was
distributed over the period down to 1835. With growth and increasing
prosperity, the revenue increased with such rapidity that the debt
could be paid almost as fast as it became payable. The chief purposes
for which the Bank of the United States had been founded in 1816
were to provide a sound and uniform paper currency convertible with
specie, of uniform value throughout the Union, and to act as fiscal
agent for the government, holding the revenue wherever collected and
disbursing the expenditures wherever they were to be made. The interest
of the government and the people was the motive, and the bank charter
was a contract with the Bank to perform the services for specified
considerations. One of the considerations was the right of the Bank
to use the deposits as loanable capital. The government was not bound
to keep any balance over expenditure, but the revenue was so large
that the Bank came to hold annually increasing average deposits of
from five to eight or nine millions of public money, which it used for
profit. From this vicious arrangement two consequences followed: first,
public attention was directed to the deposits, not as existing for the
public service, but for the profit of the Bank; and, second, the public
considered itself entitled to claim something of the Bank besides true
business credit, in the matter of discounts.
Jackson opened the war on the Bank publicly in his first message.
Sharp correspondence had been going on already between the Secretary
of the Treasury and the Bank, which had reached such a point that the
Secretary had referred to the removal of the deposits as a power in his
hands to coerce the Bank. Generally speaking, the state of the Bank
and the state of the currency were satisfactory in 1830, but the Bank
had begun in 1827 to issue branch drafts which stimulated credit and
soon produced mischief. Of the war on the Bank it is not necessary to
speak in detail. In December, 1831, Clay was nominated for President by
the National Republicans, and he and his friends determined to bring
on the question of the re-charter of the Bank as a campaign issue.
The re-charter was passed by Congress and vetoed by the President in
1832. The issue in the campaign was thus made up between the personal
popularity of Jackson and of the Bank. The former won an overwhelming
victory which he construed to mean that the people had weighed the
question of re-chartering the Bank and had decided against it.
In September, 1833, he removed the deposits from the National Bank
on his own responsibility, and placed them in selected state banks
which would agree to keep one-third of their note circulation in coin,
redeem all notes on demand, and issue no notes under a five-dollar
denomination. This was to be an experiment. In the meantime the
administration was eagerly pressing on the extinction of the public
debt. The consequences were such as to prove that, however popular
such a policy may be, it may easily be carried too far. The public
deposits were loaned by the Bank to merchants, then recalled and paid
to the public creditors, and then reinvested by them, so that the money
market was subjected to recurrent and sudden shocks. The withdrawal and
transfer of the deposits constituted another and more violent operation
of the same kind, so that there was a crisis and panic in the spring of
1834. The eight or nine millions of public deposits were a continual
source of mischief to the money market. By the contraction of the Bank
of the United States to pay the deposits, and the contraction of the
state banks to put themselves within the rule for receiving the same,
the currency, in the summer of 1834, was perhaps better than ever
before. The coinage act of June, 1834, turned the standard over from
silver to gold.
The deposit banks were urged to discount freely so as to satisfy the
public with the change. Banks were organized in great numbers all over
the country to take the place of the great Bank and to get a share in
the profits of handling the public money. On January 1, 1835, the debt
was all paid and the government had no further use for its surplus
revenue. There was but one correct and straightforward course to pursue
in such a case and that was to lower taxes so as not to collect any
surplus, but this the Compromise Act forbade. The surplus revenue was
the greatest annoyance to the protectionists who wanted to keep duties
high for “incidental protection,” and they proposed scheme after scheme
for distributing the lands, or the proceeds of the lands, or, finally,
the surplus revenue itself, so as to cut down the revenue without
reducing the import duties.
With the increase of banks and bank issues speculation began. It became
marked in the spring of 1835 and went on increasing for two years.
Cotton was rising in price, for the new machinery, and new means of
transportation in England, together with the extension of joint stock
banks there, had given a great stimulus to the cotton manufacturer.
There was an increasing demand for the raw material. It followed that
the cities in which the exchange and banking of all this industry were
carried on also enjoyed great prosperity. Railroads were just being
introduced and ships were needed to transport the products. Thus from
natural causes the period was one of immense industrial development.
The great need for carrying it on was capital, and the political
incidents which brought about or encouraged the bank expansion may be
regarded as accidental. The combination of the two in fact, however,
produced a wild speculation. The banks furnished credit, not capital,
and being restrained by usury laws from exerting through the rate of
discount the proper check upon an inflated or speculative market they
embarked with the business community on a course where all landmarks
were soon lost.
No sooner, however, was this condition of the commercial and banking
community well established than a new shock was given by another
political interference. The administration had now advanced to the
point of desiring to establish a specie currency for the country. The
object was laudable and the means taken were proper, but, following as
they did in the train of the events already mentioned, they produced
new confusion. In 1836 various acts were passed to bring about a specie
currency, and in July of that year the Secretary of the Treasury
ordered the receivers of public money to take only gold and silver
for lands. The circumstances warranted this order. The sales of lands
had risen from two or three to twenty-four million dollars in a year,
and the amount was paid in the notes of “banks”[57] which deserved
no credit. If the nation was not to be swindled out of the lands the
measure was necessary. It then became necessary for the purchasers of
land to carry specie to the West and vast amounts of it accumulated
in the offices of the receivers, or were transferred at great trouble
and expense to deposit banks. The specie was obtained from the
eastern banks, and inasmuch as the whole existing system had pushed
them to the utmost limit of expansion, these demands for specie were
embarrassing. Two points here deserve notice. It is strange to see what
a superstition about “specie” had taken possession of the public mind.
It was regarded as a good thing to have, but too good to use. A specie
dollar was regarded as an excuse for its owner to print and circulate
from three to twenty paper ones, but it was not regarded as having any
other use. The withdrawal of the specie basis from an inflated paper
was no doubt a serious blow to the whole fabric, but, if the paper had
not been redundant the transfer of specie to the West could only have
forced an importation of so much more. This superstition about specie
also prevented any demand upon the banks for specie for any purpose.
Such a demand was regarded as a kind of social or business crime. Hence
the “convertibility” of the notes was a polite fiction. The second
point worth noticing is that the bank advocates continually talked
about “the credit system” when they meant the system of issuing credit
bank notes; and they grew eloquent about the advantages of credit, as
if those advantages could only be won by using worthless bank notes and
not by lending gold or silver or capital in any form.
We are not yet, however, at the end of the political acts which threw
the money market into convulsions. The opposition succeeded, in the
summer of the presidential election year, 1836, in passing an act to
_deposit_ with the states the surplus over a balance of five millions
in the Treasury on January 1, 1837. The amount was thirty-seven
millions. This sum was scattered in eighty-nine deposit banks all over
the country. Its distribution was, therefore, controlled by local
pressure and political favoritism, not by the needs of the government
(for it did not need the money at all) or by the demand and supply
of capital. The banks had regarded it as a permanent deposit and had
loaned it in aid of the various public and private enterprises which
were being pushed on every hand at such a rate that labor was said to
be drawn away from agriculture so that the country was importing bread
stuffs. It was now to be withdrawn and transferred once more, and this
time it was said that, if these “deposits” were such an advantage,
the states ought to have it, and could then, as well as the banks,
be called on to give back the money whenever it might be needed. The
deposit took place in 1837, in three installments, January, April, and
July, and amounted to twenty-eight millions. The fourth installment was
never paid. The money was all squandered or worse.
The charter of the Bank of the United States was to expire on the
3d of March, 1836. One year before that time the directors ordered
the “exchange committee” to loan the capital, as fast as it should
be released, on stocks, so as to prepare for winding up. From this
resolution dates the subsequent history of the Bank, for the exchange
committee consisted of the President and two directors selected by him,
to whose hands the whole business of the Bank was hereby entrusted. The
branches were sold and the capital gradually released throughout 1835,
but in February, 1836, an act was suddenly passed by the Pennsylvania
legislature to charter the United States Bank of Pennsylvania,
continuing the old Bank. The act was said to have been obtained by
bribery, but investigation failed to prove it. The most open bribery
was on the face of it, for it provided for several pet local schemes of
public improvement, for a bonus and loans to the state by the Bank, and
for abolishing taxes--provisions which secured the necessary support to
carry it.
During the year 1836 the money market was very stringent. The
enterprises, speculations, and internal improvements demanded continual
new supplies of capital. The amount of securities exported grew
greater and greater and kept the foreign exchanges depressed. American
importing houses contracted larger and longer debts to foreign agents.
The money market in England became very stringent likewise, and these
long credits became harder and harder to carry. Three English houses,
Willson, Wildes, and Wiggins, had become especially engaged in these
American credits which they found it necessary to curtail. The winter
was one of continual stringency, aggravated by popular discontent,
riots, and trades-union disturbances, arising from high prices and high
rents. The failures commenced on the fourth of March, 1837, the day
that Van Buren was inaugurated, in Mississippi and Louisiana. Hermann,
Briggs & Co., of New Orleans, failed, with liabilities said to be from
four to eight millions. As soon as this was known in New York, their
correspondents, J. L. & S. Joseph & Co. failed. The first break in the
expanded fabric of credit therefore came in connection with cotton.
The price had advanced so much during the last three or four years
as to draw many thousands of persons who had no capital into cotton
production, but the profits were so great that a good crop or two would
pay for all the capital. The planters of Mississippi especially had
accordingly organized themselves into banking corporations and issued
notes as the easiest way to borrow the capital they wanted. From 1830
to 1839 the banking capital of Mississippi increased from three to
seventy-five millions, which of course represented one credit built
upon another, on renewed and extended debt, as the old planters bought
more slaves and took up more land instead of paying for the old, or
as new settlers came in. Mississippi was therefore indebted to the
Northeast for the redemption of their immense bank debt, or for the
capital bought with it. The high rates for money in England and this
country at last checked the rise in cotton in 1836. Bad harvests and
high prices for food fell in with a glut of manufactured cotton, and
when cotton began to fall ruin was certain. As soon as the revulsion
came it ran through the whole speculative system. The new suburbs which
had been laid out in every city and village never came to anything.
Western lands lost all speculative value, and railroad and canal stock
fell with rapidity.
The first resort for help was to Mr. Biddle. The calamity most
apprehended was a shipment of specie, and the effort was to gain an
extension of credit or the substitution of a better for a less known
credit. The Bank of the United States had high credit in Europe, and
indeed all over the world. Ultimately payment must be made by crops yet
to be produced or forwarded. Biddle entered into an agreement with the
New York banks which seems to have been only partially carried out, but
he sold post notes payable one year from date at Barny’s in London. He
received one hundred and twelve and one-half for these, specie being at
one hundred and seven. The bonds were discounted in England at five per
cent. United States Bank stock was at one hundred and twenty.
The situation in England was so serious that all seemed to depend on
remittances from the United States. The Bank of England extended aid
to “the three W’s” to the extent of five hundred thousand pounds on
a guarantee made up in the city, and opened a credit of two million
pounds for the United States Bank, if one-half the amount should be
shipped in specie. To this condition the United States Bank would not
agree. The proposition attributed to the Bank of the United States
a strength which it did not possess. The management of the Bank of
England in this and the two following years was bad, and did much to
enhance the mischief in both countries. France participated in the
distress although there had been no speculation there.
A delegation of New York merchants was sent to Washington on May 3
to ask the President to recall the specie circular, to defer the
collection of duty bonds, and to call an extra session of Congress. In
their address to him they sum up the situation: in six months at New
York, real estate had shrunk forty millions; in two months two hundred
and fifty firms had failed, and stocks had shrunk twenty millions;
merchandise had fallen thirty per cent, and within a few weeks twenty
thousand persons had been thrown out of employment.
Early in May three banks at Buffalo failed. On May 8, the Dry Dock Bank
(New York) failed. On the tenth all the New York City banks suspended.
The militia were under arms and there were fears of a riot. On the
eleventh the Philadelphia banks suspended, because the New York banks
had, and because, although they had plenty of specie for themselves,
they had not enough for the whole “Atlantic seaboard.” They said,
however, that they were debtors, on balance, to New York. As the news
spread through the country, the banks, with few exceptions, suspended.
It was one of the notions born of the bank war that the United States
Bank was guilty of oppression when it called on state banks for their
balances, and the state banks had practiced “leniency” towards each
other. Bank statements of the period show enormous sums as due to and
from other banks. This was what carried them all down together, for one
could not stand alone unless its debits and credits were with the same
banks.
During the summer the governors of several states called extra
sessions of the legislatures. The President had refused to recall
the specie circular, or to call an extra session of Congress, but
the embarrassments of the Treasury forced him to do the latter. The
collection of duty bonds was deferred and the revenue thereby cut
off. The public money was in the suspended banks, and the Treasury,
nominally possessed of forty millions, at the very time when part of
this sum was being paid to the states, had to drag along from day to
day by the use of drafts on its collectors for the small sums received
or by chance left over in their hands since the suspension. As notes
under five dollars had been forbidden by nearly all the states, and as
specie was at ten per cent premium, all small change disappeared, and
the towns were flooded with notes and tickets for small sums, issued by
municipalities, corporations, and individuals.
The most interesting fact connected with this commercial credit is
that New York and Philadelphia took opposite policies in regard to
it, and thus offered, in their differing experience, an experimental
test of those policies. The New York legislature passed an act
allowing suspension for one year. The New York policy then was to
contract liabilities and prepare for resumption at the date fixed. The
Philadelphia policy, in which Mr. Biddle was the leader, was to wait
without active exertions for things to get better. In his letter of
May 13 to Adams, Biddle said that the Bank could have gone on without
trouble, but that consideration for the rest forced him to go with
them. What especially moved him was that, if the Pennsylvania banks
had not suspended, Pennsylvanians would have had to do business with a
better currency than the New Yorkers, which would have been unfair. Mr.
Biddle knew perfectly well that the exchanges would arrange all that.
He was an adept at writing plausible letters. The truth, which was not
known until four years later, was that the capital of the Bank had
never been withdrawn from the stock loans, that the chief officers of
the Bank were plundering it, and that suspension was not more welcome
to any institution in the country than to the great Bank. The jealousy
between New York and Philadelphia was very great at this time. Mr.
Biddle’s personal vanity seems to have been greatly flattered when, in
March, he was called on by the New Yorkers to help them. He was still
the leading financier of the country. The business men could not spare
him, even if the government had thrown him off. There seems also to be
some evidence that he hoped that a great and universal revulsion would
force the general government to re-charter his Bank. The success of his
post notes in England and France was another source of gratified vanity
to him. In his theory of banking he was one of those who believe that
the redemption of the bank note is effected by the merchandise. Hence
banking was, for him, an art by which the banker regulated commerce
through expansions and contractions of the circulation according to the
circumstances which he might observe in the market.
The first effect of the opposite courses taken by New York and
Philadelphia was very favorable to his views. The southern trade was
transferred from New York to Philadelphia. Southern notes were at a
discount of twenty or twenty-five per cent. Receiving these notes from
the merchants, the Bank employed them through Bevan and Humphreys in
buying cotton. This operation began in July and was intended to move
the cotton to Europe in order to meet the post notes of the Bank when
they should become due. The firm of Biddle and Humphreys was also
formed and established at Liverpool as the agent of this operation.
In the extension of the transaction cotton was bought and paid for
by drafts on Bevan and Humphreys of Philadelphia, which drafts were
discounted by the Bank. Biddle and Humphreys, having sold the cotton,
remitted the proceeds to Mr. Jandon, former cashier of the Bank, sent
to England as its agent in July. To all this it must be added that
the Bank assumed the function of securing, for its producers, a good
or fair price for cotton. Jandon’s instructions were to protect the
interests of the bank, and “of the country at large.”
If the Bank had simply been a strong, sound bank, intent on earning
profits, it would have sent two or three millions to Europe, selling
exchange at one hundred and twelve, and would not have suspended.
The rest of the story would then have been very different for all
concerned. The arrival in June of a ship in England with one hundred
thousand dollars specie sufficed to sustain American credit and to
revive American securities. When the credit of a debtor is tainted,
nothing revives it like payment.
The extra session of Congress met on September 4. The fourth
installment of the State Deposit Fund was postponed until January 1,
1839, but it was locked up in the suspended banks and, as the former
installments had been drawn from the better banks, the balance due
was all in the worst banks of the country, those of the southwestern
states. As they had loaned it to their customers, it was, in fact,
amongst the people of those states. A law was passed to institute suit
against these banks unless they paid on demand, or gave bonds to do so
in three installments before July 1, 1839. There were only six deposit
banks then paying specie; one was new, four had not suspended, and one
had resumed. Power to call on the states for the funds “deposited” with
them was taken from the Secretary of the Treasury and held by Congress.
Interest-bearing Treasury notes were provided for one year, to meet
expenses, and an extension of nine months was given on duty bonds.
At this session the sub-treasury system was brought forward as an
administration measure. It split the party. The “bank democrats” (state
bank interest which joined the Jackson party in 1832 to break down the
United States Bank) went into opposition. The advocates of the “credit
system” said the sub-treasury scheme, by giving the government control
of the specie in the country, would give it control of all credit.
Meanwhile Benton said that the eighty million specie in the country
was its bulwark against adversity, and the Locofocos said that any one
who exported specie was a British hireling. So that there was a fine
confusion of financial notions.
In the fall the English money market became much easier, and the same
tendency appeared here. Specie at New York was at about seven per
cent premium, but steadily declining. Prices of breadstuffs remained
very high (flour nine dollars to nine dollars and a half at New York)
and the stagnation of industry was complete. Migration to the West was
large.
On August 18 the New York banks called a convention of banks to
deliberate on resumption. The Philadelphia banks frustrated the
proposition by refusing. A convention met in October but adjourned
without action until April. On the 7th of April the New York banks
had assets two and a half times their liabilities, excluding real
estate, and were creditors of the Philadelphia banks for $1,200,000.
They had reduced their liabilities from $25,400,000 on January 1, 1837
to $12,900,000 on January 1, 1838, and the foreign exchanges were
favorable.
The bank convention met April 1, 1838, and voted by states to resume
January 1, 1839, without precluding an earlier day. New York and
Mississippi alone voted nay, the former because the date was too
remote; the latter because it was too early. New England joined
Philadelphia and Baltimore for the later day. Mr. Biddle published
another letter in which he blamed the rigor of the contraction at New
York; he wanted to remain “prepared to resume but not resuming,” and
looked to Congress to do the work. The exchange between New York and
Philadelphia was then four and a half per cent against the latter. The
southwestern exchanges were growing worse. On May 1, the Philadelphia
banks resolved to pay specie for demands under one dollar. The Bank
of England engaged to send one million pounds in specie to support
resumption, and did send one hundred thousand pounds, but then receded
from the undertaking; its stock of specie was now very large and
increasing. The New York banks resumed during the first week in May,
the Boston and New England banks generally at the same time. Specie was
coming into New York. On May 31 Congress repealed the specie circular,
whereupon Mr. Biddle published another letter saying that since
Congress had acted, he saw his way to resumption and would “coöperate.”
The Bank had, at this time, over thirteen millions loaned on “bills
receivable,” that is, on securities put in the teller’s drawer, as cash
to replace cash taken out.
After the adjournment of Congress on July 9 there was a much better
feeling, especially on account of the defeat of the sub-treasury
bill, and on July 10, Governor Ritner of Pennsylvania published a
proclamation requiring the banks to resume on August 13, and to pay and
withdraw all notes under five dollars. On July 23 a bank convention
composed of delegates from the middle states met at Philadelphia. It
was agreed to resume on August 13. The Philadelphia banks were obliged
to contract very suddenly and money was very dear there. As soon
as they resumed there were demands on them from New York, exchange
being against them. This caused excitement and indignation. The banks
generally declared dividends as soon as they resumed. Elsewhere, here
and in England, money was easy and the times rapidly improving. There
was, however, a feverish and uncertain market for cotton. Biddle and
Humphreys were carrying an immense stock, and buyers and sellers
differed as to prices.
On December 10, 1838, Biddle published another letter to Adams in
which he reviewed his policy of the last two years, and withdrew the
Bank from all its former public activity. He says: “It abdicates its
involuntary power.” He defended the cotton speculations, saying that
he had saved the great staple of our country from being sacrificed, by
introducing a new competitor into the market. Here then was a buyer who
had gone into the market on purpose to “bull” some one else’s property.
His fate could not be very doubtful. At this same time the Liverpool
market was very dull and the spinners were curtailing their demands
because the supply was under the control of speculators. It was true,
as was asserted, that the crop was short, but the buyers took this for
a speculator’s story, and, anticipating a break in the corner and a
fall in price, they refused to buy. The speculation no doubt unduly
depressed the price. The southwestern agents of the Bank of the United
States were offering advances of from two to five cents above the
market price to secure consignments to Biddle and Humphreys, and Mr.
Jandon, because he had lost instead of winning confidence, was paying
ruinous rates for money to carry on his operations.
During the winter most of the southern and western banks resumed, at
least nominally, but as the spring of 1839 approached the southern
exchanges again fell and many of the banks suspended again. On March
29 Biddle resigned the presidency of the Bank, saying that he left it
strong and prosperous. The stock fell from one hundred and sixteen to
one hundred and twelve, but soon recovered. The money market became
stringent again, influenced by fears of the South.
In March, by speculative sales, by the diminution of stock, and by the
real shortness of the crop, cotton was forced up one and one-fourth
pence at Liverpool, and Biddle and Humphreys sold out their entire
stock. The net profit was six hundred thousand dollars. This was
regarded as a great triumph, and as a complete vindication of Biddle’s
policy. In July, 1839, the Bank of the United States paid a semi-annual
dividend of four per cent--its last one.
The success of the cotton speculation led to a plan for renewing it on
a grander scale. On June 6, an unsigned circular was published at New
York, which proposed a scheme for advancing three-fourths of the value
at fourteen cents on all cotton consigned to Biddle and Humphreys.
They were to “hold on until prices vigorously rally.” The agent, Mr.
Wilder, declared that this had nothing to do with the United States
Bank, so far as he knew. It was, however, a scheme of the Bank. The
Southwestern notes were falling lower and lower, and the post notes
issued in the Southwest the year before were now falling due, and were
not paid. The pressure of this fell on Philadelphia, where money was
up to fifteen per cent and the banks were curtailing. The news from
England was also bad. Cotton was down two cents. The specie of the Bank
of England was rapidly declining and money was at five per cent. The
arrangements from this side in 1837 had simply consisted in renewals
or extensions, and as yet few payments had been made. Stocks, etc.,
were sent over, but they fell upon a glutted and stringent market and
the prices declined. These securities therefore did not furnish means
of payment, and specie shipments were found to be necessary. The Bank
of the United States had prevented any shipment of specie by offering
all the bills demanded at one hundred and nine and a half, and Mr.
Jandon had been obliged to adopt the most reckless means to meet these
bills. In August he wrote to Biddle and Humphreys to supply him with
money at any sacrifice of cotton. “Life or death to the Bank of the
United States is the issue.” The Bank here urged Bevan and Humphreys
to direct their agents to meet Jandon’s demands and the Bank assumed
the loss. In August the Bank sent an agent to New York, to draw all the
bills he could sell on Hottinguer at Paris, to draw the proceeds in
specie from the New York banks, and to ship it to meet the bills, the
object being to force the New York banks to suspend in order that their
example might again be quoted. The Bank also sold its post notes at a
discount of eighteen per cent per annum in Boston, New York, Baltimore,
and smaller places, and gathered up capital to meet the emergency at
Philadelphia caused by the failure of the Southern remittances. The
money markets in all these cities were very stringent until October. On
the ninth of that month the Bank of the United States failed on drafts
from New York, and on the tenth the news was received that the drafts
on Hottinguer had been protested. He had given notice that he would not
pay unless he was covered, and the drafts arrived before the specie
did. Jandon succeeded in getting Rothschild to take up the bills. The
amount was seven million francs.