Thirty Years' View (Vol. I of 2)

Mr. B. had an extract from a second letter to read upon this subject. It was to the president of the New Orleans branch, Mr. W. W. Montgomery, and dated Bank of the United States the 24th of January. He read the extract: "The state of things here is very gloomy; and, unless Congress takes some decided step to prevent the progress of the troubles, they may soon outgrow our control. Thus circumstanced, our first duty is, to the institution, to preserve it from all danger; and we are therefore anxious, for a short time at least, to keep our business within manageable limits, and to make some sacrifice of property to entire security. It is a moment of great interest, and exposed to sudden changes in public affairs, which may induce the bank to conform its policy to them; of these dangers, should any occur, you will have early advice." When he had read this extract, Mr. B. proceeded to comment upon it; almost every word of it being pregnant with political and revolutionary meaning of the plainest import. The whole extract, he said, was the language of a politician, not of a banker, and looked to political events to which the bank intended to conform its policy. In this way, he commented successively upon the gloomy state of things at the bank (for the letter is dated in the bank), and the troubles which were to outgrow their control, unless Congress took some decided step. These troubles, Mr. B. said, could not be the dangers to the bank; for the bank had taken entire care of itself in the two-and-twenty orders which it had sent out to curtail loans and break up exchanges. Every one of these orders announced the power of the bank, and the determination of the bank, to take care of itself. Troubles outgrow our control! What insolence! When the bank itself, and its confederates, were the creators and fomenters of all these troubles, the progress of which it affected to deplore. The next words – moment of great interest, exposed to sudden changes in public affairs, induce the bank to conform its policy to them – Mr. B. said, were too flagrant and too barefaced for comment. They were equivalent to an open declaration that a revolution was momently expected, in which Jackson's administration would be overthrown, and the friends of the bank brought into power; and, as soon as that happened, the bank would inform its branches of it; and would then conform its policy to this revolution, and relieve the country from the distress which it was then inflicting upon it. Sir, said Mr. B., addressing the Vice-President, thirty years ago, the prophetic vision of Mr. Jefferson foresaw this crisis; thirty years ago, he said that this bank was an enemy to our form of government; that, by its ramification and power, and by seizing on a critical moment in our affairs, it could upset the government! And this is what it would have done last winter, had it not been for one man! one man! one single man! with whom God had vouchsafed to favor our America in that hour of her greatest trial. That one man stood a sole obstacle to the dread career of the bank; stood for six months as the rampart which defended the country, the citadel upon which the bank artillery incessantly thundered! And what was the conduct of the Senate all this time? It was trying and condemning that man, killing him off with a senatorial condemnation, removing the obstacle which stood between the bank and its prey; and, in so doing, establishing the indissoluble connection between the movement of the bank in distressing the country, and the movement of the Senate in condemning the President.

Mr. B. said that certainly no more proof was necessary, on this head, to show that the designs of the bank were political and revolutionary, intended to put down General Jackson's administration, and to connect itself with the Senate; but he had more proof, that of a publication under the editorial head of the National Gazette, and which publication he assumed to say, was written by the president of the bank. It was a long article of four columns; but he would only read a paragraph. He read: "The great contest now waging in this country is between its free institutions and the violence of a vulgar despotism. The government is turned into a baneful faction, and the spirit of liberty contends against it throughout the country. On the one hand is this miserable cabal, with all the patronage of the Executive; on the other hand, the yet unbroken mind and heart of the country, with the Senate and the bank; – [in reading these words, in which the bank associated itself with the Senate, Mr. B. repeated the famous expression of Cardinal Wolsey, in associating himself with the king: 'Ego et rex meus;'] – the House of Representatives, hitherto the intuitive champion of freedom, shaken by the intrigues of the kitchen, hesitates for a time, but cannot fail before long to break its own fetters first, and then those of the country. In that quarrel, we predict, they who administer the bank will shrink from no proper share which the country may assign to them. Personally, they must be as indifferent as any of their fellow-citizens to the recharter of the bank. But they will not suffer themselves, nor the institution intrusted to them, to be the instruments of private wrong and public outrage; nor will they omit any effort to rescue the institutions of the country from being trodden under foot by a faction of interlopers. To these profligate adventurers, whether their power is displayed in the executive or legislative department, the directors of the bank will, we are satisfied, never yield the thousandth part of an inch of their own personal rights, or their own official duties; and will continue this resistance until the country, roused to a proper sense of its dangers and its wrongs, shall drive the usurpers out of the high places they dishonor." This letter, said Mr. B., discloses, in terms which admit of no explanation or denial, the design of the bank in creating the pressure which was got up and continued during the panic session. It was to rouse the people, by dint of suffering, against the President and the House of Representatives, and to overturn them both at the ensuing elections. To do this, now stands revealed as its avowed object. The Senate and the bank were to stand together against the President and the House; and each to act its part for the same common object: the bank to scourge the people for money, and charge its own scourging upon the President; the Senate to condemn him for a violation of the laws and constitution, and to brand him as the Cæsar, Cromwell, Bonaparte – the tyrant, despot, usurper, whose head would be cut off in any kingdom of Europe for such acts as he practised here. Mr. B. said, the contemplation of the conduct of the bank, during the panic session, was revolting and incredible. It combined every thing to revolt and shock the moral sense. Oppression, falsehood, calumny, revolution, the ruin of individuals, the fabrication of false pretences, the machinations for overturning the government, the imputation of its own crimes upon the head of the President; the enriching its favorites with the spoils of the country, insolence to the House of Representatives, and its affected guardianship of the liberties of the people and the free institutions of the country; such were the prominent features of its conduct. The parallel of its enormity was not to be found on this side of Asia; an example of such remorseless atrocity was only to be seen in the conduct of the Paul Benfields and the Debi Sings who ravaged India under the name of the Marquis of Hastings. Even what had been casually and imperfectly brought to light, disclosed a system of calculated enormity which required the genius of Burke to paint. What was behind would require labors of a committee, constituted upon parliamentary principles, not to plaster, but to probe the wounds and ulcers of the bank; and such a committee he should hope to see, not now, but hereafter, not in the vacation but in the session of Congress. For he had no idea of these peripatetic and recess committees, of which the panic session had been so prolific. He wanted a committee, unquestionable in the legality of its own appointment, duly qualified in a parliamentary sense for discovering the misconduct they are set to investigate; and sitting under the wing of the authority which can punish the insolent, compel the refractory, and enforce the obedience which is due to its mandates.

6. The distress of the country occasioned by the Bank of the United States and the Senate of the United States. – This, Mr. B. said, might be an unpleasant topic to discuss in the Senate; but this Senate, for four months of the last session, and during the whole debate on the resolution to condemn the President, had resounded with the cry that the President had created all the distress; and the huge and motley mass, throughout the Union, which marched under the oriflamme of the bank, had every where repeated and reiterated the same cry. If there was any thing unpleasant, then, in the discussion of this topic in this place, the blame must be laid on those who, by using that argument in support of their resolution against the President, devolved upon the defenders of the President the necessity of refuting it. Mr. B. would have recourse to facts to establish his position. The first fact he would recur to was the history of a reduction of deposits, made once before in this same bank, so nearly identical in every particular with the reduction which took place under the order for the late removal of deposits, that it would require exact references to documentary evidence to put its credibility beyond the incredulity of the senses. Not only the amount from which the reduction was made, its progress, and ultimate depression, corresponded so closely as each to seem to be the history of the same transaction, but they began in the same month, descended in the same ratio, except in the instances which operate to the disadvantage of the late reduction, and, at the end of fifteen months, had reached the same point. Mr. B. spoke of the reduction of deposits which took place in the years 1818 and 1819; and would exhibit a table to compare it with the reductions under the late order for the removal of the deposits.

Here, said Mr. B., is a similar and parallel redaction of deposits in this same bank, and that at a period of real pecuniary distress to itself; a period when great frauds were discovered in its management; when a committee examined it, and reported it guilty of violating its charter; when its stock fell in a few weeks from one hundred and eighty to ninety; when propositions to repeal its charter, without the formality of a scire facias, were discussed in Congress; when nearly all presses, and nearly all voices, condemned it; and when a real necessity compelled it to reduce its discounts and loans with more rapidity, and to a far greater comparative extent, than that which has attended the late reduction. Yet, what was the state of the country? Distressed, to be sure, but no panic; no convulsion in the community; no cry of revolution. And why this difference? If mere reduction of deposits was to be attended with these effects at one time, why not at the other? Sir, said Mr. B., addressing the Vice-President, the reason is plain and obvious. The bank was unconnected with politics, in 1819; it had no desire, at that time, to govern the elections, and to overturn an administration; it had no political confederates; it had no president of the bank then to make war upon the President of the United States, and to stimulate and aid a great political party in crushing the President, who would not sign a new charter, and in crushing the House of Representatives which stood by him. There was no resolution then to condemn the President for a violation of the laws and the constitution. And it was this fatal resolution, which we now propose to expunge, which did the principal part of the mischief. That resolution was the root of the evil; the signal for panic meetings, panic memorials, panic deputations, panic speeches, and panic jubilees. That resolution, exhibited in the Senate chamber, was the scarlet mantle of the consul, hung out from his tent; it was the signal for battle. That resolution, and the alarm speeches which attended it, was the tocsin which started a continent from its repose. And the condemnation which followed it, and which left this chamber just in time to reach the New-York, Virginia, and Connecticut elections, completed the effect upon the public mind, and upon the politics and commerce of the country, which the measures of the bank had been co-operating for three months to produce. And here he must express his especial and eternal wonder how all these movements of bank and Senate co-operating together, if not by arrangement, at least by a most miraculous system of accidents, to endanger the political rights, and to injure the pecuniary interests of the people of the United States, could so far escape the observation of the investigating committee of the Senate, as not to draw from them the expression of one solitary opinion, the suggestion of one single idea, the application of one single remark, to the prejudice of the bank. Surely they ought to have touched these scenes with something more than a few meagre, stinted, and starved lines of faint allusion to the "new measures understood to be in contemplation;" those new measures which were so falsely, so wickedly fabricated to cover the preconcerted and premeditated plot to upset the government by stimulating the people to revolution, through the combined operations of the pecuniary pressure and political alarms.

The table itself was entitled to the gravest recollection, not only for the comparison which it suggested, but the fact of showing the actual progress and history of the removal of the deposits, and blasting the whole story of the President's hostility to the bank. From this table it is seen that the deposits, in point of fact, have never been all taken from the bank; that the removal, so far as it went, was gradual and gentle; that an average of three millions has always been there; that nearly four millions was there on the 1st day of January last; and before these facts, the fabricated story of the President's hostility to the bank, his vindictiveness, and violent determination to prostrate, destroy, and ruin the institution, must fall back upon its authors, and recoil upon the heads of the inventors and propagators of such a groundless imputation.

Mr. B. could give another fact to prove that it was the Senate and the bank, and the Senate more than the bank, which produced the distress during the last winter. It was this: that although the curtailments of the bank were much larger both before and after the session of Congress, yet there was no distress in the country, except during the session, and while the alarm speeches were in a course of delivery on this floor. Thus, the curtailment from the 1st of August to the 1st of October, was $4,066,000; from the 1st of October to the meeting of Congress in December, the curtailment was $5,641,000 – making $9,707,000 in four months, and no distress in the country. During the session of Congress (seven months) there was a curtailment of $3,428,138; and during this time the distress raged. From the rise of Congress (last of June) to the 1st of November, a period of four months, the curtailment was $5,270,771, and the word distress was not heard in the country. Why? Because there were no panic speeches. Congress had adjourned; and the bank, being left to its own resources, could only injure individuals, but could not alarm and convulse the community.

Mr. B. would finish this view of the conduct of the bank in creating a wanton pressure, by giving two instances; one was the case of the deposit bank in this city; the other was the case of a senator opposed to the bank. He said that the branch bank at this place had made a steady run upon the Metropolis Bank from the beginning to the ending of the panic session. The amount of specie which it had taken was $605,000: evidently for the purpose of blowing up the pet bank in this district; and during all that time the branch refused to receive the notes, or branch drafts, of any other branch, or the notes of the mother bank; or checks upon any city north of Baltimore. On the pet bank in Baltimore it would take checks, because the design was to blow up that also. Here, said Mr. B., was a clear and flagrant case of pressure for specie for the mere purpose of mischief, and of adding the Metropolis Bank to the list of those who stopped payment at that time. And here Mr. B. felt himself bound to pay his respects to the Committee on Finance, that went to examine the bank last summer. That committee, at pages 16 and 22, of their report, brought forward an unfounded charge against the administration for making runs upon the branches of the United States Bank, to break them; while it had been silent with respect to a well-founded instance of the same nature from the Bank of the United States towards the deposit bank in this district. Their language is: "The administrative department of the government had manifested a spirit of decided hostility to the bank. It had no reason to expect any indulgence or clemency at its hands; and in this opinion, if entertained by the directors, about which there can be but little question, subsequent events very soon proved they were not mistaken. The President's address to his cabinet; the tone assumed by the Secretary (Mr. Taney) in his official communication to Congress, and the developments subsequently made by Mr. Duane in his address to the public, all confirm the correctness of this anticipation. The measure which the bank had cause to fear was the accumulation by government of large masses of notes, and the existence thereby of heavy demands against its offices" (p. 16). "In persevering in its policy of redeeming its notes whenever presented, and thereby continuing them as a universal medium of exchange, in opposition to complaints on that head from some of the branches (see copies of correspondence), the security of the institution and the good of the country were alike promoted. The accumulation of the notes of any one branch for the purpose of a run upon it by any agent of the government, when specie might be obtained at the very places of collection, in exchange for the notes of the most distant branches, would have been odious in the eyes of the public, and ascribed to no other feeling than a feeling of vindictiveness" (p. 22). Upon these extracts, Mr. B. said, it was clear that the committee had been so unfortunate as to commit a series of mistakes, and every mistake to the advantage of the bank, and to the prejudice of the government and the country. First, the government is charged, for the charge is clear, though slightly veiled, that the President of the United States in his vindictiveness against the bank, would cause the notes of the branches to be accumulated, and pressed upon them to break them. Next, the committee omit to notice the very thing actually done, in our very presence here, by the Bank of the United States against a deposit bank, which it charges without foundation upon the President. Then it credits the bank with the honor of paying its notes every where, and exchanging the notes of the most distant branches for specie, when the case of the Metropolis Bank, here in our presence, for the whole period of the panic session, proves the contrary; and when we have a printed document, positive testimony from many banks, and brokers, testifying that the branches in Baltimore and New-York, during the fall of 1833, positively refused to redeem the notes of other branches, or to accept them in exchange for the notes of the local banks, though taken in payment of revenue; and that, in consequence, the notes of distant branches fell below par, and were sold at a discount, or lent for short periods without interest, on condition of getting specie for them; and that this continued till Mr. Taney coerced the bank, by means of transfer drafts, to cause the notes of her branches to be received and honored at other branches as usual. In all this, Mr. B. said, the report of the committee was most unfortunate; and showed the necessity for a new committee to examine that institution; a committee constituted upon parliamentary principles – a majority in favor of inquiry – like that of the Post Office. The creation of such a committee, Mr. B. said, was the more necessary, as one of the main guards intended by the charter to be placed over the bank was not there during the period of the pressure and panic operations; he alluded to the government directors; the history of whose rejection, after such long delays in the Senate to act on their nomination, is known to the whole country.

The next instance of wanton pressure which Mr. B. would mention, was the case of an individual, then a member of the Senate from Pennsylvania, now minister to St. Petersburg (Mr. Wilkins). That gentleman had informed him (Mr. B.), towards the close of the last session, that the bank had caused a scire facias to be served in his house, to the alarm and distress of his wife, to revive a judgment against him, whilst he was here opposing the bank.

[Mr. Ewing, of Ohio, here rose, and wished to know of Mr. B. whether it was the Bank of the United States that had issued this scire facias against Mr. Wilkins.]

Mr. B. was very certain that it was. He recollected not only the information, but the time and the place when and where it was given; it was the last days of the last session, and at the window beyond that door (pointing to the door in the corner behind him); and he added, if there is any question to be raised, it can be settled without sending to Russia; the scire facias, if issued, will be on record in Pittsburg. Mr. B. then said, the cause of this conduct to Mr. Wilkins can be understood when it is recollected that he had denied on this floor the existence of the great distress which had been depicted at Pittsburg; and the necessity that the bank was under to push him at that time can be appreciated by seeing that two and fifty members of Congress, as reported by the Finance Committee, had received "accommodations" from the bank and its branches in the same year that a senator, and a citizen of Pennsylvania, opposed to the bank, was thus proceeded against.10

Mr. B. returned to the resolution which it was proposed to expunge. He said it ought to go. It was the root of the evil, the father of the mischief, the source of the injury, the box of Pandora, which had filled the land with calamity and consternation for six long months. It was that resolution, far more than the conduct of the bank, which raised the panic, sunk the price of property, crushed many merchants, impressed the country with the terror of an impending revolution, and frightened so many good people out of the rational exercise of their elective franchise at the spring elections. All these evils have now passed away. The panic has subsided; the price of produce and property has recovered from its depression, and risen beyond its former bounds. The country is tranquil, prosperous, and happy. The States which had been frightened from their propriety at the spring elections, have regained their self-command. Now, with the total vanishing of its effects, let the cause vanish also. Let this resolution for the condemnation of President Jackson be expunged from the journals of the Senate! Let it be effaced, erased, blotted out, obliterated from the face of that page on which it should never have been written! Would to God it could be expunged from the page of all history, and from the memory of all mankind. Would that, so far as it is concerned, the minds of the whole existing generation should be dipped in the fabulous and oblivious waters of the river Lethe. But these wishes are vain. The resolution must survive and live. History will record it; memory will retain it; tradition will hand it down. In the very act of expurgation it lives; for what is taken from one page is placed on another. All atonement for the unfortunate calamitous act of the Senate is imperfect and inadequate. Expunge, if we can, still the only effect will be to express our solemn convictions, by that obliteration, that such a resolution ought never to have soiled the pages of our journal. This is all that we can do; and this much we are bound to do, by every obligation of justice to the President, whose name has been attainted; by every consideration of duty to the country, whose voice demands this reparation; by our regard to the constitution, which has been trampled under foot; by respect to the House of Representatives, whose function has been usurped; by self-respect, which requires the Senate to vindicate its justice, to correct its errors, and re-establish its high name for equity, dignity, and moderation. To err is human; not to err is divine; to correct error is the work of supereminent and also superhuman moral excellence, and this exalted work now remains for the Senate to perform.