Part 6 (1/2)
Through federal officers and the leaders of the Union party Jackson kept himself fully informed upon the situation, and six weeks before the nullification convention was called he began preparations to meet all eventualities. The naval authorities at Norfolk were directed to be in readiness to dispatch a squadron to Charleston; the commanders of the forts in Charleston Harbor were ordered to double their vigilance and to defend their posts against any persons whatsoever; troops were ordered from Fortress Monroe; and General Scott was sent to take full command and to strengthen the defenses as he found necessary. The South Carolinians were to be allowed to talk, and even to adopt ”ordinances,” to their hearts' content. But the moment they stepped across the line of disobedience to the laws of the United States they were to be made to feel the weight of the nation's restraining hand.
”The duty of the Executive is a plain one,” wrote the President to Joel R. Poinsett, a prominent South Carolina unionist; ”the laws will be executed and the United States preserved by all the const.i.tutional and legal means he is invested with.” When the situation bore its most serious aspect Jackson received a call from Sam Dale, who had been one of his dispatch bearers at the Battle of New Orleans. ”General Dale,”
exclaimed the President during the conversation, ”if this thing goes on, our country will be like a bag of meal with both ends open. Pick it up in the middle or endwise, and it will run out. I must tie the bag and save the country.” ”Dale,” he exclaimed again later, ”they are trying me here; you will witness it; but, by the G.o.d of heaven, I will uphold the laws.” ”I understood him to be referring to nullification again,” related Dale in his account of the interview, ”and I expressed the hope that things would go right.” ”They shall go right, sir,” the President fairly shouted, shattering his pipe on the table by way of further emphasis.
When Jackson heard that the convention at Columbia had taken the step expected of it, he made the following entry in his diary: ”South Carolina has pa.s.sed her ordinance of nullification and secession. As soon as it can be had in authentic form, meet it with a proclamation.”
The proclamation was issued December 10, 1832. Parton relates that the President wrote the first draft of this proclamation under such a glow of feeling that he was obliged ”to scatter the written pages all over the table to let them dry,” and that the doc.u.ment was afterwards revised by his scholarly Secretary of State, Edward Livingston. With Jackson supplying the ideas and spirit and Livingston the literary form, the result was the ablest and most impressive state paper of the period. It categorically denied the right of a State either to annul a federal law or to secede from the Union. It admitted that the laws complained of operated unequally but took the position that this must be true of all revenue measures. It expressed the inflexible determination of the Administration to repress and punish every form of resistance to federal authority. Deep argument, solemn warning, and fervent entreaty were skillfully combined. But the most powerful effect was likely to be that produced by the President's flaming denial--set in bold type in the contemporary prints--of the Hayne-Calhoun creed: ”I consider the power to annul a law of the United States, a.s.sumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Const.i.tution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.”
Throughout the North this vindication of national dignity and power struck a responsive chord, and for once even the Adams and Clay men found themselves in hearty agreement with the President. Bostonians gathered in Faneuil Hall and New Yorkers in a great meeting in the Park to shower encomiums upon the proclamation and upon its author.
The nullifiers did not at once recoil from the blow. The South Carolina Legislature called upon Governor Hayne officially to warn ”the good people of this State against the attempt of the President of the United States to seduce them from their allegiance”; and the resulting counterblast, in the form of a proclamation made public on the 20th of December, was as vigorous as the liveliest ”fire-eater”
could have wished. The Governor declared that the State would maintain its sovereignty or be ”buried beneath its ruins.”
The date of the expected crisis--February 1, 1833, when the nullification ordinance was to take effect--was now near at hand, and on both sides preparations were pushed. During the interval, however, the tide turned decidedly against the nullifiers. A call for a general convention of the States ”to determine and consider ... questions of disputed power” served only to draw out strong expressions of disapproval of the South Carolina program, showing that it could not expect even moral support from outside. On the 16th of January Jackson asked Congress for authority to alter or abolish certain ports of entry, to use force to execute the revenue laws, and to try in the federal courts cases that might arise from the present emergency. Five days later a bill on these lines--popularly denominated the ”Force Bill”--was introduced; and while many men who had no sympathy with nullification drew back from a plan involving the coercion of a State, it was soon settled that some sort of measure for strengthening the President's hand would be pa.s.sed.
Meanwhile a way of escape from the whole difficulty was unexpectedly opened. The friends of Van Buren began to fear that the disagreement of North and South upon the tariff question would cost their favorite the united support of the party in 1836. Accordingly they set on foot a movement in Congress to bring about a moderate reduction of the prevailing rates; and it was of course their hope that the nullifiers would be induced to recede altogether from the position which they had taken. Through Verplanck of New York, the Ways and Means Committee of the House brought in a measure reducing the duties, within two years, to about half the existing rates. Jackson approved the plan, although personally he had little to do with it.
But though the Verplanck Bill could not muster sufficient support to become law, it revived tariff discussion on promising lines, and it brought nullification proceedings to a halt in the very nick of time.
Shortly before February 1, 1833, the leading nullifiers came together in Charleston and entered into an extralegal agreement to postpone the enforcement of the nullification ordinance until the outcome of the new tariff debates should be known. The failure of the Verplanck measure, however, left matters where they were, and civil war in South Carolina again loomed ominously.
In this juncture patriots of all parties turned to the one man whose leaders.h.i.+p seemed indispensable in tariff legislation--the ”great pacificator,” Henry Clay, who after two years in private life had just taken his seat in the Senate. Clay was no friend of Jackson or of Van Buren, and it required much sacrifice of personal feeling to lend his services to a program whose political benefits would almost certainly accrue to his rivals. Finally, however, he yielded and on the 12th of February he rose in the Senate and offered a compromise measure proposing that on all articles which paid more than twenty per cent the amount in excess of that rate should be reduced by stages until in 1842 it would entirely disappear.
Stormy debates followed on both the Compromise Tariff and the Force Bill, but before the session closed on the 4th of March both were on the statute book. When, therefore, the South Carolina convention, in accordance with an earlier proclamation of Governor Hamilton, rea.s.sembled on the 11th of March, the wind had been taken out of the nullifiers' sails; the laws which they had ”nullified” had been repealed, and there was nothing for the convention to do but to rescind the late ordinance and the legislative measures supplementary to it. There was a chance, however, for one final fling. By a vote of 132 to 19 the convention soberly adopted an ordinance nullifying the Force Bill and calling on the Legislature to pa.s.s laws to prevent the execution of that measure--which, indeed, n.o.body was now proposing to execute.
So the tempest pa.s.sed. Both sides claimed victory, and with some show of reason. So far as was possible without an actual test of strength, the authority of the Federal Government had been vindicated and its dignity maintained; the const.i.tutional doctrines of Webster acquired a new sanction; the fundamental point was enforced that a law--that every law--enacted by Congress must be obeyed until repealed or until set aside by the courts as unconst.i.tutional. On the other hand, the nullifiers had brought about the repeal of the laws to which they objected and had been largely instrumental in turning the tariff policy of the country for some decades into a new channel. Moreover they expressed no regret for their acts and in no degree renounced the views upon which those acts had been based. They submitted to the authority of the United States, but on terms fixed by themselves. And, what is more, they supplied practically every const.i.tutional and political argument to be used by their sons in 1860 to justify secession.
CHAPTER IX
THE WAR ON THE UNITED STATES BANK
”Nothing lacks now to complete the love-feast,” wrote Isaac Hill sardonically to Thomas H. Benton after the collapse of nullification, ”but for Jackson and Webster to solemnize the coalition [in support of the Union] with a few mint-juleps! I think I could arrange it, if a.s.sured of the cooperation of yourself and Blair on our side, and Jerry Mason and Nick Biddle on theirs. But never fear, my friend. This mixing of oil and water is only the temporary shake-up of Nullification. Wait till Jackson gets at the Bank again, and then the scalping-knives will glisten once more.”
The South Carolina controversy had indeed brought Jacksonians and anti-Jacksonians together. But once the tension was relaxed, there began the conflict of interests which the New Hamps.h.i.+re editor had predicted. Men fell again into their customary political relations.h.i.+ps; issues that for the moment had been pushed into the background--internal improvements, public land policy, distribution of surplus revenue, and above all the Bank--were revived in full vigor.
Now, indeed, the President entered upon the greatest task to which he had yet put his hand. To curb nullification was a worthy achievement.
But, after all, Congress and an essentially united nation had stood firmly behind the Executive at every stage of that performance. To destroy the United States Bank was a different matter, for this inst.i.tution had the full support of one of the two great parties in which the people of the country were now grouped; Jackson's own party was by no means a unit in opposing it; and the prestige and influence of the Bank were such as to enable it to make a powerful fight against any attempts to annihilate it.
The second Bank of the United States was chartered in 1816 for twenty years, with a capital of thirty-five million dollars, one-fifth of which had been subscribed by the Government. For some time it was not notably successful, partly because of bad management but mainly because of the disturbance of business which the panic of 1819 had produced. Furthermore, its power over local banks and over the currency system made it unpopular in the West and South, and certain States sought to cripple it by taxing out of existence the several branches which the board of directors voted to establish. In two notable decisions--M'Culloch _vs._ Maryland in 1819 and Osborn _vs._ United States Bank in 1824--the Supreme Court saved the inst.i.tution by denying the power of a State to impose taxation of the sort and by a.s.serting unequivocally the right of Congress to enact the legislation upon which the Bank rested. And after Nicholas Biddle, a Philadelphia lawyer-diplomat, succeeded Langdon Cheves as president of the Bank in 1823 an era of great prosperity set in.
The forces of opposition were never reconciled; indeed, every evidence of the increasing strength of the Bank roused them to fresh hostility.
The verdict of the Supreme Court in support of the const.i.tutionality of the Act of 1816 carried conviction to few people who were not already convinced. The restraints which the Bank imposed upon the dubious operations of the southern and western banks were vigorously resented. The Bank was regarded as a great financial monopoly, an ”octopus,” and Biddle as an autocrat bent only on dominating the entire banking and currency system of the country.
On Jackson's att.i.tude toward the Bank before he became President we have little direct information. But it is sufficiently clear that eventually he came to share the hostile views of his Tennessee friends and neighbors. In 1817 he refused to sign a memorial ”got up by the aristocracy of Nashville” for the establishment of a branch in that town. When, ten years later, such a branch was installed, General Thomas Cadwalader of Philadelphia, agent of the Bank, visited the town to supervise the arrangements and became very friendly with the ”lord of the Hermitage.” But correspondence of succeeding years, though filled with insinuating cordiality, failed to bring out any expression of goodwill toward the inst.i.tution such as the agent manifestly coveted.
Jackson seems to have carried to Was.h.i.+ngton in 1829 a deep distrust of the Bank, and he was disposed to speak out boldly against it in his inaugural address. But he was persuaded by his friends that this would be ill-advised, and he therefore made no mention of the subject. Yet he made no effort to conceal his att.i.tude, for he wrote to Biddle a few months after the inauguration that he did not believe that Congress had power to charter a bank outside of the District of Columbia, that he did not dislike the United States Bank more than other banks, but that ever since he had read the history of the South Sea Bubble he had been afraid of banks. After this confession the writer hardly needed to confess that he was ”no economist, no financier.”
Most of the officers of the ”mother bank” at Philadelphia and of the branches were anti-Jackson men, and Jackson's friends put the idea into his mind that the Bank had used its influence against him in the late campaign. Specific charges of partizans.h.i.+p were brought against Jeremiah Mason, president of the branch at Portsmouth, New Hamps.h.i.+re; and although an investigation showed the accusation to be groundless, Biddle's heated defense of the branch had no effect save to rouse the Jacksonians to a firmer determination to compa.s.s the downfall of the Bank.
Biddle labored manfully to stem the tide. He tried to improve his personal relations with the President, and he even allowed Jackson men to gain control of several of the western branches. The effort, however, was in vain. When he thought the situation right, Biddle brought forward a plan for a new charter which received the a.s.sent of most of the members of the official Cabinet, as well as that of some of the ”Kitchen” group. But Jackson met the proposal with his unshakable const.i.tutional objections and, to Biddle's deep disappointment, advanced in his first annual message to the formal, public a.s.sault. The Bank's charter, he reminded Congress, would expire in 1836; request for a new charter would probably soon be forthcoming; the matter could not receive too early attention from the legislative branch. ”Both the const.i.tutionality and the expediency of the law creating this bank,” declared the President, ”are well questioned by a large portion of our fellow-citizens; and it must be admitted by all that it has failed in the great end of establis.h.i.+ng a uniform and sound currency.” The first part of the statement was true, but the second was distinctly unfair. The Bank, to be sure, had not established ”a uniform and sound” currency. But it had accomplished much toward that end and was practically the only agency that was wielding any influence in that direction. The truth is that the more efficient the Bank proved in this task the less popular it became among those elements of the people from which Jackson mainly drew his strength.