ANDREW JACKSON WAS not impressed by Henry Clay’s eloquence or by anything else about the Kentucky senator. The president acknowledged Clay’s help in defusing the nullification crisis, but he ascribed it to opportunism rather than principle. He took a similar view of Clay’s part in the fight over the charter of the Bank of the United States. Jackson found it nearly impossible to believe that anyone who differed with him on an important matter could be sincere, let alone correct. Clay was despicable and corrupt, and that was that.
The fight over the bank persisted into Jackson’s second term. Clay and Nicholas Biddle hoped to salvage something from the fiasco they had created, perhaps a reprieve from the execution scheduled for 1836. If the bank could somehow outlast Jackson, they judged, it might win another life. Jackson, for his part, imputing such designs to his enemies, determined to strike first and deliver the coup de grâce.
It could be done quite simply. The lifeblood of the bank was the deposits it held from the United States government. If those deposits were removed and placed in state banks, the national bank would quickly expire. Opinions differed on who had the authority to remove the deposits: the president, the secretary of the treasury, or Congress? Jackson, however, had no doubt; the authority was his, and he intended to use it. He broached the idea to his cabinet and found little support. His treasury secretary, William Duane, was flatly opposed. Jackson thereupon fired Duane, replacing him with Roger Taney, the attorney general, and ignored the remaining skeptics. He plunged ahead.
Nicholas Biddle wasn’t surprised, nor was he alarmed. He had sensed it would come to this: a test of strength between Jackson and himself. He thought he had the advantage. “In half an hour, I can remove all the constitutional scruples in the District of Columbia,” he told an associate. It was simply a matter of distributing bribes: “Half a dozen presidencies”—of branch banks—“a dozen cashierships, fifty clerkships, a hundred directorships to worthy friends who have no character and no money.” Against enticements like these, Jackson stood no chance.
Complementing Biddle’s bribery was the bank’s financial leverage. When Jackson announced the removal of the deposits, Biddle ordered his lieutenants to launch a counteroffensive. The bank and its branches recalled outstanding loans, stopped making new ones, and generally starved the economy of the cash it required to operate. Biddle explained the measures as a prudent hedge against the uncertainty produced by the president’s decision, and he wasn’t lying. But no less was he attempting to show that the country couldn’t survive without the bank. Jackson might think the country could, but he was wrong. Biddle would prove it.
HENRY CLAY WAS appalled, though not surprised, at Jackson’s unprecedented move. Clay proposed that the Senate officially censure the president for arrogating to himself “the exercise of a power over the treasury of the United States not granted to him by the Constitution and the laws, and dangerous to the liberties of the people.” Clay no longer called Jackson a military chieftain; the general’s arrogance had gone far beyond that. “We are in the midst of a revolution, hitherto bloodless, but rapidly tending towards a total change of the pure republican character of the government, and to the concentration of all power in the hands of one man,” he said. The president had seized the financial assets of the nation. “Where now is the public treasury? Who can tell? It is certainly without a local habitation, if it has a name. Where is the money of the people of the United States? Floating about on treasury drafts or checks, to the amount of millions, placed in the hands of tottering banks to enable them to pay their own just debts instead of being applied to the service of the people. These checks are scattered to the winds by the secretary of the treasury.”
The assault on the finances was a symptom of a larger lust for power, Clay asserted. “Why does the executive think of nothing but itself? It is I! It is I! It is I!, that is meant!” The bank heist was of a piece with Jackson’s unprecedented use of the veto. “The question is no longer what laws will Congress pass, but what will the executive not veto?” The arrogance of the deposits’ removal should send chills through every lover of republican self-rule. “The premonitory symptoms of despotism are upon us; and if Congress do not apply an instantaneous and effective remedy, the fatal collapse will soon come on, and we shall die—ignobly die—base, mean and abject slaves, the scorn and contempt of mankind, unpitied, unwept, unmourned!”
Clay’s speech had drawn another large crowd to the Senate chamber, and his final words were followed by loud and sustained applause. Martin Van Buren, presiding, embarrassed by the enthusiasm against the administration, banged his gavel and ordered the galleries cleared.
John Calhoun joined Clay in vehement opposition to Jackson’s move. Calhoun reminded the Senate that he and his fellow Carolinians had warned of Jackson’s dictatorial tendencies, predicting that what Jackson sought to do to South Carolina he would do to the rest of the country soon enough. The time had come. Caesar had plundered the Roman treasury en route to subverting the Roman republic; Jackson and his henchmen were doing the same to the American republic, only on the sly. “They have entered the treasury, not sword in hand, as public plunderers, but with the false keys of sophistry, as pilferers, under the silence of midnight,” Calhoun said. Caesar had cynically boasted that with money he would get men, and with men money. Jackson’s strategy was much the same. “With money we will get partisans, with partisans votes, and with votes money, is the maxim of our public pilferers.” Calhoun suggested that Americans should appreciate the group, or party, many of them had recently assailed as nullifiers and secessionists. “That party is the determined, the fixed and sworn enemy to usurpation, come from what quarter and under what form it may, whether from the executive upon the other departments of this government, or from this government on the sovereignty and rights of the States.”
THOMAS BENTON SAW things in a markedly different light. The Missouri senator, Jackson partisan and distruster of all banks thrilled at the president’s brave stroke. “I felt an emotion of the moral sublime at beholding such an instance of civic heroism,” Benton recalled afterward. “Here was a president, not bred up in the political profession, taking a great step upon his own responsibility from which many of his advisers shrunk, and magnanimously, in the act itself releasing all from the peril that he encountered, and boldly taking the whole upon himself. I say peril, for if the bank should conquer, there was an end to the political prospects of every public man concurring in the removal. He believed the act to be necessary, and believing that, he did the act, leaving the consequences to God and the country.”
Benton skeptically monitored the reaction of the bank and its allies. “From the moment of the removal of the deposits, it was seen that the plan of the Bank of the United States was to force their return, and with it a renewal of its charter, by operating on the business of the country and the alarms of the people,” he explained. Ergo Biddle’s squeeze on credit. “This pressure was made to fall upon the business community, especially upon large establishments employing a great many operatives, so as to throw as many laboring people as possible out of employment.” A campaign was set afoot to amplify the cries of the injured. “The first step in this policy was to get up distress meetings—a thing easily done—and then to have these meetings properly officered and conducted.” The meetings were held in every state and most congressional districts. “Men who had voted for Jackson, but now renounced him, were procured for president, vice-presidents, secretaries, and orators; distress orations were delivered; and after sufficient exercise in that way, a memorial and a set of resolves, prepared for the occasion, were presented and adopted.” The memorials were relayed to Washington not by the mails but by special delegations got up for the purpose. The memorials were presented to the Senate and the House by the members for the states and districts. “Every morning, for three months, the presentation of these memorials, with speeches to enforce them, was the occupation of each house, all the memorials bearing the impress of the same mint, and the orations generally cast after the same pattern,” Benton recounted. “These harangues generally gave, in the first place, some topographical or historical notice of the county or town from which it came—sometimes with a hint of its revolutionary services—then a description of the felicity which it enjoyed while the bank had the deposits, then the ruin which came upon it, at their loss; winding up usually with a great quantity of indignation against the man whose illegal and cruel conduct had occasioned such destruction upon their business.”
Henry Clay presented a memorial from Lexington that fit the pattern Benton described. “If there was any spot in the Union likely to be exempt from the calamities that had afflicted the others, it would be the region about Lexington and its immediate neighborhood,” Clay asserted on his constituents’ behalf. “Nowhere, to no other country, has Providence been more bountiful in its gifts. A country so rich and fertile that it yielded in fair and good seasons from sixty to seventy bushels of corn to the acre. It was a most beautiful country—all the land in it, not in a state of cultivation, was in parks”—natural meadows—“filled with flocks and herds, fattening on its luxuriant grass. But in what country, in what climate, the most favored by Heaven, can happiness and prosperity exist against bad government, against misrule, and against rash and ill-advised experiment?” Clay remarked that hemp, the region’s staple, had fallen in price by a fifth since the president’s unlawful action; corn was comparably depressed. Hogs and cattle could not be sold at any price. “We are not a complaining people,” Clay said of his fellow Kentuckians. “We think not so much of distress. Give us our laws, guarantee to us our Constitution, and we will be content with almost any form of government.”
Daniel Webster delivered a similar memorial from Lynn, Massachusetts. “It is a beautiful town, situated upon the sea, is highly industrious, and has been hitherto prosperous and flourishing,” Webster said. Lynn’s chief business was the manufacture of shoes; of the town’s eight thousand inhabitants, three thousand worked in the shoe mills. They had been prosperous but were no longer. “A most serious change has taken place. They find their usual employments suddenly arrested, from the same cause which has smitten other parts of the country, with like effects.” They knew whom to blame. “Their memorial is short,” Webster said. “It complains of the illegal removal of the deposits, of the attack on the bank, and of the effect of these measures on their business.”
Clay, rising again, urged the administration to relieve the suffering of the country. “In twenty-four hours, the executive branch could adopt a measure which would afford an efficacious and substantial remedy, and re-establish confidence,” he said. He looked at Van Buren in the Senate chair. He gave the vice president a message to convey to Jackson. “Tell him, without exaggeration, but in the language of truth and sincerity, the actual condition of his bleeding country. Tell him it is nearly ruined and undone by the measures which he has been induced to put in operation. Tell him that his experiment is operating on the nation like the philosopher’s experiment upon a convulsed animal, in an exhausted receiver, and that it must expire, in agony, if he does not pause, give it free and sound circulation, and suffer the energies of the people to be revived and restored….Tell him of the tears of helpless widows, no longer able to earn their bread, and of unclad and unfed orphans….Entreat him to pause and to reflect that there is a point beyond which human endurance cannot go, and let him not drive this brave, generous and patriotic people to madness and despair.”
Thomas Benton observed Clay’s impassioned performance and Van Buren’s reaction. “The Vice President maintained the utmost decorum of countenance, looking respectfully and even innocently at the speaker all the while, as if treasuring up every word he said to be faithfully repeated to the President,” Benton recounted. “After it was over, and the Vice President had called some senator to the chair, he went up to Mr. Clay and asked him for a pinch of his fine maccoboy snuff, as he often did, and having received it, walked away.”
VAN BUREN’S SNUB of Clay was much cooler than Jackson’s response to the Kentucky senator. Jackson had concluded that the financial crisis was the cynical work of Clay and Nicholas Biddle, and he interpreted it as personal challenge. “The Bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me,” he told the vice president. “But I will kill it!” Jackson took note of the memorials delivered to Congress and of some sent straight to himself. He refused to reconsider his course. “Were all the worshippers of the golden calf to memorialise me and request a restoration of the deposits,” he told Van Buren. “I would cut my right hand from my body before I would do such an act.”
Jackson judged the panic grossly exaggerated. “There is no real general distress,” he asserted privately. “It is only with those who live by borrowing, trade on loans, and the gamblers in stocks.” The country would be better off without them. “It would be a god send to society if all such were put down.”
He did his part. A delegation of business types from Baltimore came to the White House. Their leader politely handed Jackson a petition asking relief from the distress. “Relief!” thundered Jackson. “Come not to me! Go to the monster! Did not Nicholas Biddle come here, sir, and on his oath swear before a committee that with six millions in his vaults he could meet the wants of the whole people? And now, when he has wrung more than ten millions from the people, he sends you to me for relief! It is folly, sir, to talk to Andrew Jackson. The government will not bow to the monster.”
But the people were suffering, the delegation’s leader declared.
“The people!” shouted Jackson. “Talk to Andrew Jackson about the people? The people, sir, are with me. I have undergone much peril for the liberties of this people.” It was the bank that was punishing the people, and Jackson would punish the bank. “Andrew Jackson yet lives to put his foot upon the head of the monster and crush him to the dust.”
The people were suffering, the delegation said again. Surely the president could reconsider.
Never, said Jackson. “I would rather undergo the tortures of ten Spanish inquisitions than that the deposits should be restored or the monster be rechartered.”
Jackson blamed Biddle for the implementation of the distress, but he held Henry Clay responsible for giving the banker ideas. The president watched Clay from the distance of the White House and took pleasure in his impotence on the bank question. “The storm in Congress is still raging, Clay reckless and as full of fury as a drunken man in a brothel,” he remarked. He himself would stand his ground. “This mammoth of power and corruption must die. The power it possesses would destroy our government in a few years. It is a power that never ought to have existed. Its present course now convinces all honest men that it never ought, and must be put down at the end of its charter. I have it chained. The monster must perish.”