THE BANK BILL went to Andrew Jackson. The president knew he was being put to the test. He had distrusted and despised Clay since the Kentuckian accepted John Quincy Adams’s offer of the state department. He distrusted and despised him even more now. Jackson hadn’t picked this fight; Clay had. And he had done it for political purposes, Jackson judged. Jackson had never backed down from a fight, and he wasn’t about to start.
Jackson vetoed the renewal bill, and he sent Congress a stern message explaining why. In the first place, it was unconstitutional. John Marshall and the Supreme Court had declared otherwise, the president acknowledged, but the high court’s opinion bound only the lower courts. “The Congress, the executive, and the court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the president to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them for passage or approval as it is of the supreme judges when it may be brought before them for judicial decision. The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the president is independent of both.” Justice Marshall and the Supreme Court might think that the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution stretched to cover the charter of a national bank; this president did not.
In time, Jackson’s rejection of the authority of the Supreme Court to bind the president would come to seem shocking, almost revolutionary. But the doctrine of judicial review developed slowly, and in Jackson’s time it had far to go. His statement defying John Marshall was noteworthy for its boldness, but not for its originality.
Jackson attacked the renewal bill on additional grounds. The bank was bad policy, he said. Its monopoly position enriched its shareholders at the expense of Americans generally. Modest inequalities of wealth were unavoidable and not necessarily injurious to democracy, but great inequalities were a dire threat. The bank aggravated inequality by favoring the already wealthy, who employed its monopoly powers to enrich themselves further. The bank’s renewal would compound the problem. “Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government,” Jackson said. “Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.”
The bank had just the opposite effect. It must be terminated. The renewal bill was vetoed.
DANIEL WEBSTER SAW the veto coming but still professed shock. “A great majority of the people are satisfied with the bank as it is and desirous that it should be continued,” he told the Senate. “They wished no change.” As evidence Webster cited conversations with constituents, not to mention the favorable vote for the bank in both houses of Congress. But Jackson had cast the people and Congress aside. “The president has undertaken, on his own responsibility, to arrest the measure, by refusing his assent to the bill.” Jackson’s assertion of unconstitutionality defied reason, logic and the law, and it established tyranny. “If these opinions of the president be maintained, there is an end of all law and all judicial authority. Statutes are but recommendations, judgments no more than opinions. Both are equally destitute of binding force. Such a universal power as is now claimed for him, a power of judging over the laws and over the decisions of the tribunal, is nothing less than pure despotism. If conceded to him, it makes him at once what Louis the Fourteenth proclaimed himself to be when he said, ‘I am the state.’ ”
NICHOLAS BIDDLE BY this time was not surprised by the veto. Neither was he discouraged. “You ask, what is the effect of the veto?” he wrote to Henry Clay. “My impression is that it is working as well as the friends of the Bank and of the country could desire. I have always deplored making the Bank a party question, but since the President will have it so, he must pay the penalty of his own rashness. As to the veto message, I am delighted with it. It has all the fury of a chained panther biting the bars of his cage. It is really a manifesto of anarchy, such as Marat or Robespierre might have issued to the mob of the Faubourg St. Antoine; and my hope is that it will contribute to relieve the country from the dominion of these miserable people.”
Biddle thought the veto would benefit Clay. “You are destined to be the instrument of that deliverance,” he said, “and at no period of your life has the country ever had a deeper stake in you. I wish you success most cordially, because I believe the institutions of the Union are involved in it.”
CLAY WASN’T AS sanguine as Biddle, for he knew the American electorate better. The veto solidified anti-Jackson sentiment in the expected places: the boardrooms of creditors, the offices of large merchants, the editorial desks of newspapers, the clubs of the wealthy and educated. But among the populace as a whole, among the many Americans as suspicious of banks as Jackson was, the veto seemed a defense of the people against the moneyed interests. “It diffuses universal joy among your friends and dismay among your enemies,” a delighted John Randolph wrote to Jackson from Virginia, regarding the veto.
Jackson himself exhibited a rare smile. “The veto works well everywhere,” he told a close friend. “It has put down the Bank instead of prostrating me.”
The veto indeed worked well for Jackson. The Anti-Masons, in the first national nominating convention in American history, chose William Wirt of Maryland, a colleague and sometime rival of Daniel Webster at the Supreme Court bar. The convention idea caught on, and the National Republicans made Henry Clay their champion. A convention of Jacksonians, adopting the name Democrats, nominated Jackson, with Martin Van Buren as his running mate.
In the balloting that autumn, Jackson carried sixteen states and won 219 electoral votes. Clay won six states and 49 electoral votes. Wirt carried one state, and John Floyd, who ran on a nullification platform, carried South Carolina.