Loe raamatut: «Thomas Hart Benton», lehekülg 6
Without doubt, the honors of the nullification dispute were borne off by Benton and Webster. The latter's reply to Hayne is, perhaps, the greatest single speech of the nineteenth century, and he deserves the highest credit for the stubbornness with which he stood by his colors to the last. There never was any question of Webster's courage; on the occasions when he changed front he was actuated by self-interest and ambition, not by timidity. Usually he appears as an advocate rather than an earnest believer in the cause he represents; but when it came to be a question of the Union, he felt what he said with the whole strength of his nature.
An even greater meed of praise attaches to Benton for the unswerving fidelity which he showed to the Union in this crisis. Webster was a high-tariff man, and was backed up by all the sectional antipathies of the Northeast in his opposition to the Nullifiers; Benton, on the contrary, was a believer in a low tariff, or in one for revenue merely, and his sectional antipathies were the other way. Yet, even when deserted by his chief, and when he was opposed to every senator from south of the Potomac and the Ohio, he did not flinch for a moment from his attitude of aggressive loyalty to the national Union. He had a singularly strong and upright character; this country has never had a statesman more fearlessly true to his convictions, when great questions were at stake, no matter what might be the cost to himself, or the pressure from outside,—even when, as happened later, his own state was against him. Intellectually he cannot for a moment be compared to the great Massachusetts senator; but morally he towers much higher.
Yet, while praising Jackson and Benton for their behavior towards South Carolina, we cannot forget that but a couple of years previously they had not raised their voices even in the mildest rebuke of Georgia for conduct which, though not nearly so bad in degree as that of South Carolina, was of much the same kind. Towards the close of Adams's term, Georgia had bid defiance to the mandates of the Supreme Court, and proceeded to settle the Indian question within her borders without regard to the authority of the United States, and these matters were still unsettled when Jackson became president. Unfortunately he let his personal feelings bias him; and, as he took the Western and Georgian view of the Indian question, and, moreover, hated the Supreme Court because it was largely Federalist in its composition, he declined to interfere. David Crockett, himself a Union man and a nationalist to the backbone, rated Jackson savagely, and with justice, for the inconsistency of his conduct in the two cases, accusing him of having, by his harmful leniency to Georgia, encouraged South Carolina to act as she did, and ridiculing him because, while he smiled at the deeds of the one state, when the like acts were done by the other, "he took up the rod of correction and shook it over her".
CHAPTER VI
JACKSON AND BENTON MAKE WAR ON THE BANK
If the struggle with the Nullifiers showed Benton at his best, in the conflict with the Bank he exhibited certain qualities which hardly place him in so favorable a light. Jackson's attack upon the Bank was a move undertaken mainly on his own responsibility, and one which, at first, most of his prominent friends were alarmed to see him undertake. Benton alone supported him from the beginning. Captain and lieutenant alike intensely appreciated the joy of battle; they cared for a fight because it was a fight, and the certainty of a struggle, such as would have daunted weaker or more timid men, simply offered to them an additional inducement to follow out the course they had planned. Benton's thorough-going support was invaluable to Jackson. The president sorely needed a friend in the Senate who would uphold him through thick and thin, and who yet commanded the respect of all his opponents by his strength, ability, and courage. To be sure, Benton's knowledge of financial economics was not always profound; but, on the other hand, a thorough mastery of the laws of finance would have been, in this fight, a very serious disadvantage to any champion of Jackson.
The rights and wrongs of this matter have been worn threadbare in countless discussions. For much of the hostility of Jackson and Benton towards the Bank, there were excellent grounds; but many of their actions were wholly indefensible and very harmful in their results to the country. An assault upon what Benton called "the money power" is apt to be popular in a democratic republic, partly on account of the vague fear with which the poorer and more ignorant voters regard a powerful institution, whose working they do not understand, and partly on account of the jealousy they feel towards those who are better off than themselves. When these feelings are appealed to by men who are intensely in earnest, and who are themselves convinced of the justice and wisdom of their course, they become very formidable factors in any political contest.
The struggle first became important when the question of the re-charter of the Bank was raised, towards the end of Jackson's first term, the present charter still having three years to run. This charter had in it many grave faults; and there might well be a question as to whether it should be renewed. The Bank itself, beyond doubt, possessed enormous power; too much power for its own or outsiders' good. Its president, Biddle, was a man of some ability, but conceited to the last degree, untruthful, and to a certain extent unscrupulous in the use he made of the political influence of the great moneyed institution over which he presided. Some of the financial theories on which he managed the Bank were wrong; yet, on the whole, it was well conducted, and under its care the monetary condition of the country was quiet and good, infinitely better than it had been before, or than, under the auspices of the Jacksonian Democracy, it afterwards became.
The two great reasons for Jackson's success throughout his political career were to be found in the strength of the feeling in his favor among the poorer and least educated classes of voters, and in the ardent support given him by the low politicians, who, by playing on his prejudices and passions, moulded him to their wishes, and who organized and perfected in their own and his interests a great political machine, founded on the "spoils system"; and both the Jacksonian rank and file and the Jacksonian politicians soon agreed heartily in their opposition to the Bank. Jackson and Benton opposed it for the same reasons that the bulk of their followers did; that is to say, partly from honest and ignorant prejudice and partly from a well-founded feeling of distrust as to some of its actions. The mass of their fellow party-leaders and henchmen assailed it with the cry that it was exerting its influence to debauch politics, while at the same time they really sought to use it as a power in politics on their own side.
Jackson, in his first annual message in 1829, had hinted that he was opposed to the re-charter of the Bank, then a question of the future and not to arise for four or five years. At the same time he had called in question the constitutionality and expediency of the Bank's existence, and had criticised as vicious its currency system. The matter of constitutionality had been already decided by the Supreme Court, the proper tribunal, and was, and had been for years, an accepted fact; it was an absurdity to call it in question. As regards the matter of expediency, certainly the Jacksonians failed signally to put anything better in its place. Yet it was undeniable that there were grave defects in the currency system.
The president's message roused but little interest, and what little it did rouse was among the Bank's friends. At once these began to prepare the way for the re-charter by an active and extensive agitation in its favor. The main bank was at Philadelphia, but it had branches everywhere, and naturally each branch bank was a centre of opposition to the president's proposed policy. As the friends of the Bank were greatly interested, and as the matter did not immediately concern those who afterwards became its foes, the former, for the time, had it all their own way, and the drift of public opinion seemed to be strongly in its favor.
Benton was almost the only public man of prominence who tried to stem this tide from the beginning. Jackson's own party associates were originally largely against him, and so he stood all the more in need of the vigorous support which he received from the Missouri senator. Indeed, it would be unfair in the matter of the attack on the Bank to call Benton Jackson's follower; he might with more propriety be called the leader in the assault, although of course he could accomplish little compared with what was done by the great popular idol. He had always been hostile to the Bank, largely as a matter of Jeffersonian tradition, and he had shown his hostility by resolutions introduced in the Senate before Jackson was elected president.
Early in 1831 he asked leave to introduce a resolution against the re-charter of the Bank; his purpose being merely to give formal notice of war against it, and to attempt to stir up a current of feeling counter to that which then seemed to be generally prevailing in its favor. In his speech he carefully avoided laying stress upon any such abstract point as that of constitutionality, and dwelt instead upon the questions that would affect the popular mind; assailing the Bank "as having too much power over the people and the government, over business and politics, and as too much disposed to exercise that power to the prejudice of the freedom and equality which should prevail in a republic, to be allowed to exist in our country." The force of such an argument in a popular election will be acknowledged by all practical politicians. But, although Benton probably believed what he said, or at any rate most of it, he certainly ought not to have opened the discussion of a great financial measure with a demagogic appeal to caste prejudices. He wished to substitute a gold currency in the place of the existing bank-notes, and was not disturbed at all as to how he would supply the place of the Bank, saying: "I am willing to see the charter expire, without providing any substitute for the present Bank. I am willing to see the currency of the federal government left to the hard money mentioned and intended in the Constitution; … every species of paper might be left to the state authorities, unrecognized by the federal government!" Of the beauties of such a system as the last the country later on received practical demonstration. Some of his utterances, however, could be commended to the friends of greenbacks and of dishonest money even at the present day, as when he says: "Gold and silver are the best currency for a republic; it suits the men of middle property and the working people best; and if I was going to establish a workingman's party it should be on the basis of hard money—a hard-money party against a paper party." The Bank was in Philadelphia; much of the stock was held in the East, and a good deal was held abroad, which gave Benton a chance to play on sectional feelings, as follows: "To whom is all the power granted? To a company of private individuals, many of them foreigners, and the mass of them residing in a remote and narrow corner of the Union, unconnected by any sympathy with the fertile regions of the Great Valley, in which the natural power of this Union—the power of numbers—will be found to reside long before the renewed term of a second charter would expire." Among the other sentences occurs the following bit of pure demagogic pyrotechnics: "It [the Bank] tends to aggravate the inequality of fortunes; to make the rich richer and the poor poorer; to multiply nabobs and paupers; and to deepen and widen the gulf which separates Dives from Lazarus. A great moneyed power is favorable to great capitalists, for it is the principle of money to favor money. It is unfavorable to small capitalists, for it is the principle of money to eschew the needy and unfortunate. It is injurious to the laboring classes." Altogether it was not a speech to be proud of. The Senate refused permission to introduce the resolution by the close vote of twenty-three to twenty.
Benton lived only a generation after that one which had itself experienced oppression from a king, from an aristocratic legislature and from a foreign power; and so his rant about the undue influence of foreigners in our governmental affairs, and his declamation over the purely supposititious powers that were presumed to be conspiring against the welfare of the poorer classes probably more nearly expressed his real feelings than would be the case with the similar utterances of any leading statesman nowadays. He was an enthusiastic believer in the extreme Jeffersonian doctrinaire views as to the will of the majority being always right, and as to the moral perfection of the average voter. Like his fellow-statesmen he failed to see the curious absurdity of supporting black slavery, and yet claiming universal suffrage for whites as a divine right, not as a mere matter of expediency resulting on the whole better than any other method. He had not learned that the majority in a democracy has no more right to tyrannize over a minority than, under a different system, the latter would have to oppress the former; and that, if there is a moral principle at stake, the saying that the voice of the people is the voice of God may be quite as untrue, and do quite as much mischief, as the old theory of the divine right of kings. The distinguishing feature of our American governmental system is the freedom of the individual; it is quite as important to prevent his being oppressed by many men as it is to save him from the tyranny of one.
This speech on the re-charter showed a great deal of wide reading and much information; but a good part of it was sheer declamation, in the turgid, pompous style that Benton, as well as a great many other American public speakers, was apt to mistake for genuine oratory. His subsequent speech on the currency, however, was much better. This was likewise delivered on the occasion of asking leave to present a joint resolution, which leave was refused. The branch draft system was the object of the assault. These branch drafts were for even sums of small denomination, circulating like bank-notes; they were drawn on the parent bank at Philadelphia to the order of some officer of the branch bank and were indorsed by the latter to bearer. Thus paper was issued at one place which was payable at another and a distant place; and among other results there ensued a constant inflation of credit. They were very mischievous in their workings; they had none of the marks of convertible bank-notes or money, and so long as credit was active there could be no check on the inflation of the currency by them. Payment could be voluntarily made at the branch banks whence issued, but if it was refused the owner had only the right to go to Philadelphia and sue the directors there. Most of these drafts were issued at the most remote and inaccessible branches, the payment of them being, therefore, much delayed by distance and difficulty; nor were the directors liable for excessive issues. They constituted the bulk of all the paper seen in circulation; they were supposed to be equivalent to money, but being bills of exchange they were merely negotiable instruments; they did not have the properties of bank-notes, which are constantly and directly interchangeable with money. In their issue Biddle had laid himself open to attack; and in defending them he certainly did not always speak the truth, willfully concealing or coloring facts. Moreover, his self-satisfaction and the foolish pride in his own power, which he could not conceal, led him into making imprudent boasts as to the great power the Bank could exercise over other local banks, and over the general prosperity of the country, while dilating upon its good conduct in not using this power to the disadvantage of the public. All this was playing into Benton's hands. He showed some of the evils of the branch draft system, although apparently not seeing others that were quite as important. He attacked the Bank for some real and many imaginary wrongdoings; and quoted Biddle himself as an authority for the existence of powers dangerous to the welfare of the state.
The advocates of the Bank were still in the majority in both houses of Congress, and soon began preparations for pushing through a bill for the re-charter. The issue began to become political. Webster, Clay, and most of the other anti-administration men were for the Bank; and so when the convention of the National Republicans, who soon afterwards definitely assumed the name of Whigs, took place, they declared heartily in its favor, and nominated for the presidency its most enthusiastic supporter, Henry Clay. The Bank itself unquestionably preferred not to be dragged into politics; but Clay, thinking he saw a chance for a successful stroke, fastened upon it, and the convention that nominated him made the fight against Jackson on the ground that he was hostile to the Bank. Even had this not already been the case no more certain method of insuring his hostility could have been adopted.
Still, however, many of Jackson's supporters were also advocates of re-charter; and the bill for that purpose commanded the majority in Congress. Benton took the lead in organizing the opposition, not with the hope of preventing its passage, but "to attack incessantly, assail at all points, display the evil of the institution, rouse the people, and prepare them to sustain the veto." In other words, he was preparing for an appeal to the people, and working to secure an anti-Bank majority in the next Congress. He instigated and prepared the investigation into the affairs of the Bank, which was made in the House, and he led the harassing parliamentary warfare carried on against the re-chartering bill in the Senate. He himself seems to have superintended the preparation of the charges which were investigated by the House. A great flurry was made over them, Benton and all his friends claiming that they were fully substantiated; but the only real point scored was that against the branch drafts. Benton, with the majority of the committee of investigation, had the loosest ideas as to what a bank ought to do, loud though they were in denunciation of what this particular Bank was alleged to have done.
Webster made the great argument in favor of the re-charter bill. Benton took the lead in opposition, stating, what was probably true,—that the bill was brought up so long before the charter expired for political reasons, and criticising it as premature; a criticism unfortunately applicable with even greater force to Jackson's message. His speech was largely mere talking against time, and he wandered widely from the subject. Among other things he invoked the aid of the principle of states'-rights, because the Bank then had power to establish branches in any state, whether the latter liked it or not, and free from state taxation. He also appealed to the Western members as such, insisting that the Bank discriminated against their section of the country in favor of the East; the facts being that the shrewdness and commercial morality of the Northeast, particularly of New England, saved them from the evils brought on the Westerners by the foolishness with which they abused their credit and the laxness with which they looked on monetary obligations. But in spite of all that Benton could do the bill passed both houses, the Senate voting in its favor by twenty-eight ayes against twenty nays.
Jackson, who never feared anything, and was more than ready to accept the fight which was in some measure forced on him, yet which in some degree he had courted, promptly vetoed the bill in a message which stated some truths forcibly and fearlessly, which developed some very queer constitutional and financial theories, and which contained a number of absurdities, evidently put in, not for the benefit of the Senate, but to influence voters at the coming presidential election. The leaders of the opposition felt obliged to make a show of trying to pass the bill over the veto in order to get a chance to answer Jackson. Webster again opened the argument. Clay made the fiercest onslaught, assailing the president personally, besides attacking the veto power, and trying to discredit its use. But the presidential power of veto is among the best features of our government, and Benton had no difficulty in making a good defense of it; although many of the arguments adduced by him in its favor were entirely unsound, being based on the wholly groundless assumption that the function of the president corresponded to that of the ancient Roman tribune of the people, and was supposed to be exercised in the interests of the people to control the legislature—thus willfully overlooking the fact that the legislature also was elected by the people. When on his ultra-democratic hobby Benton always rode very loose in the saddle, and with little knowledge of where he was going. Clay and Benton alike drew all sorts of analogies between the state of affairs in the United States and that formerly prevailing in France, England, and above all in the much-suffering republics of antiquity. Benton insisted that the Bank had wickedly persuaded the West to get in debt to it so as to have that section in its power, and that the Western debt had been created with a view to political engineering; the fact being that the Westerners had run into debt purely by their own fault, and that the Bank itself was seriously alarmed at the condition of its Western branches. The currency being in much worse shape in the West than in the Northeast, gold and silver naturally moved towards the latter place; and this result of their own shortcomings was again held up as a grievance of the Westerners against the Bank. He also read a severe lecture on the interests of party discipline to the Democrats who had voted for the re-charter, assuring them that they could not continue to be both for the Bank and for Jackson. The Jacksonian Democracy, nominally the party of the multitude, was in reality the nearest approach the United States has ever seen to the "one man power;" and to break with Jackson was to break with the Democratic party. The alternative of expulsion or of turning a somersault being thus plainly presented to the recalcitrant members, they for the most part chose the latter, and performed the required feat of legislative acrobatics with the most unobtrusive and submissive meekness. The debate concluded with a sharp and undignified interchange of personalities between the Missouri and Kentucky senators, Clay giving Benton the lie direct, and the latter retorting in kind. Each side, of course, predicted the utter ruin of the country, if the other prevailed. Benton said that, if the Bank conquered, the result would be the establishment of an oligarchy, and then of a monarchy, and finally the death of the Republic by corruption. Webster stated as his belief that, if the sentiments of the veto message received general approbation, the Constitution could not possibly survive its fiftieth year. Webster, however, in that debate, showed to good advantage. Benton was no match for him, either as a thinker or as a speaker; but with the real leader of the Whig party, Henry Clay, he never had much cause to fear comparison.
All the state banks were of course rabidly in favor of Jackson; and the presidential election of 1832 was largely fought on the bank issue. In Pennsylvania, however, the feeling for the Bank was only less strong than that for Jackson; and accordingly that Bœotian community sapiently cast its electoral votes for the latter, while instructing its senators and representatives to support the former. But the complete and hopeless defeat of Clay by Jackson sealed the fate of the Bank. Jackson was not even content to let it die naturally by the lapse of its charter. His attitude towards it so far had been one for which much could be said; indeed, very good grounds can be shown for thinking his veto proper. But of the impropriety of his next step there could be no possible question. Congress had passed a resolution declaring its belief in the safety of the United States deposits in the Bank; but the president, in the summer of 1833, removed these deposits and placed them in certain state banks. He experienced some difficulty in getting a secretary of the treasury who would take such a step; finally he found one in Taney.
The Bank memorialized Congress at once; and the anti-administration majority in the Senate forthwith took up the quarrel. They first rejected Jackson's nominations for bank directors, and then refused to confirm Taney himself. Two years later Jackson made the latter Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in which position he lived to do even more mischief than he had time or opportunity to accomplish as secretary of the treasury.
Benton was the administration champion in the Senate. Opposed to him were Webster and Clay, as leaders of the Whigs, supported for the time being by Calhoun. The feeling of Clay and Calhoun against the president was bitterly personal, and was repaid by his rancorous hatred. But Webster, though he was really on most questions even more antagonistic to the ideas of the Jacksonian school, always remained personally on good terms with its leaders.
Clay introduced a resolution directing the return of the deposits; Benton opposed it; it passed by a vote of twenty-eight to eighteen, but was lost in the House. Clay then introduced a resolution demanding to know from the president whether the paper alleged to have been published by his authority as having been read to the cabinet, in relation to the removal of the deposits, was genuine or not; and, if it was, asking for a copy. Benton opposed the motion, which nevertheless passed. But the president refused to accede to the demand. Meanwhile the new departure in banking, inaugurated by the president, was working badly. One of the main grounds for removing the deposits was the allegation that they were used to debauch politics. This was never proved against the old United States Bank; but under Jackson's administration, which corrupted the public service in every way, the deposits became fruitful sources of political reward and bribery.
Clay then introduced his famous resolution censuring the president for his action, and supported it in a long and fiery speech; a speech which, like most of Clay's, was received by his followers at the time with rapture, but in which this generation fails to find the sign of that remarkable ability with which his own contemporaries credited the great Kentuckian. He attacked Jackson with fierce invective, painting him as an unscrupulous tyrant, who was inaugurating a revolution in the government of the Union. But he was outdone by Calhoun, who, with continual interludes of complacent references to the good already done by the Nullifiers, assailed Jackson as one of a band of artful, corrupt, and cunning politicians, and drew a picture even more lurid than Clay's of the future of the country, and the danger of impending revolution. Webster's speeches were more self-contained in tone. Benton was the only Jacksonian senator who could contend with the great Nullifier and the two great Whigs; and he replied at length, and in much the same style as they had spoken.
The Senate was flooded with petitions in favor of the Bank, which were presented with suitable speeches by the leading Whigs. Benton ridiculed the exaggerated tone of alarm in which these petitions were drawn, and declared that the panic, excitement, and suffering existing in business circles throughout the country were due to the deliberate design of the Bank, and afforded a fresh proof that the latter was a dangerous power to the state.
The resolution of censure was at last passed by a vote of twenty-six to twenty, and Jackson, in a fury, sent in a written protest against it, which the Senate refused to receive. The excitement all over the country was intense throughout the struggle. The suffering, which was really caused by the president's act, but which was attributed by his supporters to the machinations of the Bank, was very real; even Benton admitted this, although contending that it was not a natural result of the policy pursued, but had been artificially excited—or, as he very clumsily phrased it, "though fictitious and forged, yet the distress was real, and did an immensity of damage." Neither Jackson nor Benton yielded an inch to the outside pressure; the latter was the soul of the fight in Congress, making over thirty speeches during the struggle.
During the debate on receiving the president's protest, Benton gave notice of his intention at an early day to move to expunge from the journal the resolution of censure. This idea was entirely his own, and he gave the notice without having consulted anybody. It was, however, a motion after Jackson's own heart, as the latter now began to look upon the affair as purely personal to himself. His party accepted this view of the matter with a servile alacrity only surpassed by the way in which its leaders themselves bowed down before the mob; and for the next two years the state elections were concerned purely with personal politics, the main point at issue in the choice for every United States senator being, whether he would or would not support Benton's expunging resolution. The whole affair seems to us so puerile that we can hardly understand the importance attached to it by the actors themselves. But the men who happened at that period to be the leaders in public affairs were peculiarly and frankly incapable of separating in their minds matters merely affecting themselves from matters affecting their constituents. Each firmly believed that if he was not the whole state, he was at least a most important fraction of it; and this was as plainly seen in Webster's colossal egoism and the frank vanity of Henry Clay as in Benton's ponderous self-consciousness and the all-pervading personality of Andrew Jackson.
