CHAPTER XV.
The elections for the Twelfth Congress, as far as they took place in 1810, showed a change in public opinion, and not only reduced the Federalists to their old rank of a faction rather than a party, but also weakened the conservative Republicans of Jefferson’s school; while the losses of both strengthened a new party, which called itself Republican, but favored energy in government. Henry Clay and William Lowndes, John C. Calhoun and Felix Grundy, Langdon Cheves and Peter B. Porter, whatever they might at times say, cared little for Jeffersonian or Madisonian dogmas. The election which decided the character of the Twelfth Congress, by choosing men of this character to lead it, decided also the popular judgment on the Eleventh Congress, which had as yet run only half its course. Rarely in American history has any particular Congress been held in high popular esteem, but seldom if ever was a Congress overwhelmed by contempt so deep and general as that which withered the Eleventh in the midst of its career. Not only did Republicans and Federalists think alike for once, but even among the members themselves no one of weight had a good word to say of the body to which he belonged.
Quick to feel a popular rebuke, Congressmen submitted to punishment, and obeyed the orders they would rather have resisted; but their work in such a temper was sure to be done without good-will or good faith, for a body which had lost its own respect could hardly respect its successor. The American system of prolonging the existence of one Legislature after electing another, never worked worse in practice than when it allowed this rump Congress of 1809, the mere scourings of the embargo, to assume the task of preparing for the War of 1812, to which it was altogether opposed and in which it could not believe. No Congress had been confronted by greater perplexities. President Madison submitted to it a number of Executive acts more than doubtful in legality, which must all be approved; and these measures, when approved, led to a policy of war with England and Spain, which required great increase of Executive strength, careful reorganization of the Executive machinery, especially great care of the national credit and of its chief financial agents,—political duties of extreme difficulty and delicacy.
President Madison’s Annual Message, December 5, called attention to such business as he wished to present. Naturally, the revocation of the French Decrees took the first place. The President assumed that the revocation was complete, and that his proclamation was issued in regular course, “as prescribed by law,” the President having no discretion; but he admitted disappointment that the sequestered property had not been restored. “It was particularly anticipated that, as a further evidence of just disposition toward them, restoration would have been immediately made of the property of our citizens, seized under a misapplication of the principle of reprisals, combined with a misconstruction of a law of the United States. This expectation has not been fulfilled.” England had not yet relinquished her illegitimate blockades, and she avowed that the blockade of May, 1806, was comprehended in the subsequent Orders in Council; the withdrawal of that blockade had therefore been required by the President as one of the conditions of renewing intercourse with Great Britain. The state of the Spanish monarchy had produced a change in West Florida, a district “which though of right appertaining to the United States had remained in the possession of Spain, awaiting the result of negotiations for its actual delivery to them.” The Spanish authority being subverted, the President did not delay taking possession; “the legality and necessity of the course pursued assure me of the favorable light in which it will present itself to the Legislature.”
If this sketch of foreign affairs lacked perfect candor, the view of domestic concerns gave matter for other doubts. “With the Indian tribes,” said the Message, “the peace and friendship of the United States are found to be so eligible that the general disposition to preserve both continues to gain strength.” The story of Tippecanoe and Tecumthe soon threw new light on this assertion. To Indian friendship domestic prosperity succeeded, and the Message praised the economy and policy of manufactures. “How far it may be expedient to guard the infancy of this improvement in the distribution of labor by regulations of the commercial tariff, is a subject which cannot fail to suggest itself to your patriotic reflections.” A navigation law was also required to place American shipping on a level of competition with foreign vessels. A national university “would contribute not less to strengthen the foundations than to adorn the structure of our free and happy system of government.” Further means for repressing the slave-trade were required. Fortifications, arms, and organization of the militia were to be provided. The Military School at West Point needed enlargement.
Congress found more satisfaction in Gallatin’s Annual Report, sent to Congress a week afterward, than they could draw from Madison’s Message, for Gallatin told them that he had succeeded in bringing the current expenses within the annual income; and only in case they should decide to prohibit the importation of British goods after Feb. 2, 1811, should he need further legislation both to make good the revenue and to enforce the prohibition.
Congress lost no time. West Florida called first for attention; and Senator Giles, December 18, reported a bill extending the territory of Orleans to the river Perdido, in accordance with the President’s measures. In the debate which followed, Federalist senators attacked the President for exceeding the law and violating the Constitution. Their argument was founded on the facts already told, and required nothing more to support it; but the defence had greater interest, for no one could foretell with certainty by what expedient senators would cover an Executive act which, like the purchase of Louisiana itself, had best be accepted in silence as plainly beyond the Constitution. Henry Clay acted as the President’s champion, and explained on his behalf that the Act of Oct. 31, 1803, authorizing the President to occupy the ceded territory of Louisiana, was still in force, although regular possession to the Iberville had been taken, Dec. 20, 1803, in pursuance of that Act, without further demand on the part of the United States, and although the Act of March 20, 1804, providing for the temporary government of the territory, declared that “the Act passed the 31st day of October ... shall continue in force until the 1st day of October, 1804.” In face of this double difficulty,—the exhaustion of the power and its express limitation,—Clay asserted that the power had not been exhausted, and that the limitation, though apparently general, was intended only for the provisional government established by another portion of the Act of 1803. He produced in his support the Act of Feb. 24, 1804, empowering the President, to erect West Florida into a collection district whenever he deemed it expedient. “These laws,” continued Clay, “furnish a legislative construction of the treaty correspondent with that given by the Executive, and they vest in this branch of the government indisputably a power to take possession of the country whenever it might be proper in his discretion.”
Congress approved this opinion, which was in truth neither weaker nor stronger than the arguments by which the Louisiana purchase itself had been sustained. Fate willed that every measure connected with that territory should be imbued with the same spirit of force or fraud which tainted its title. The Southern States needed the Floridas, and cared little what law might be cited to warrant seizing them; yet a Virginia Republican should have been startled at learning that after October, 1803, every President, past or to come, had the right to march the army or send the navy of the United States at any time to occupy not only West Florida, but also Texas and Oregon, as far as the North Pole itself, since they claimed it all, except the Russian possessions, as a part of the Louisiana purchase, with more reason than they claimed West Florida.
As usual, the most pungent critic of Republican doctrines was Senator Pickering, who if he could not convince, could always annoy the majority. He replied to Clay, and in the course of his speech read Talleyrand’s letter of Dec. 21, 1804, which put an end to Monroe’s attempt to include West Florida in the Louisiana purchase. Nothing could be more apt; but nothing could be more annoying to the Administration, for Talleyrand’s letter was still secret. Confidentially communicated with other papers to Congress by Jefferson, Dec. 6, 1805, the injunction of secrecy had never been removed, and the publication tended to throw contempt on Madison not only for his past but particularly for his present dalliance with Napoleon. Pickering could charge, with more than usual appearance of probability, that West Florida was to be Madison’s reward for accepting the plainly deceptive pledge of Cadore’s letter of August 5. The Senate, with some doubts, resented Pickering’s conduct to a moderate extent. Samuel Smith moved it to be “a palpable violation of the rules;” and with the omission of “palpable,” the resolution was adopted. The deference to Executive authority which allowed so important a paper to be suppressed for five years showed more political sagacity than was proved in censuring Pickering by a party vote, which he would regard as a compliment, because he read a document that the Administration should have been ashamed not to publish and resent.
The interlude helped only to embarrass the true question,—what should be done with West Florida. President Madison’s doctrine, embodied in Giles’s bill, carried out the Livingston-Monroe theory that West Florida belonged to Louisiana. In theory, this arrangement might answer the purpose for which it was invented; but in fact West Florida did not belong to Louisiana, either as a Spanish or as an American province, and could not be treated as though it did. If Mobile Bay and the Gulf coast as far as the Perdido belonged to Louisiana, the territory afterward divided into the States of Alabama and Mississippi had no outlet to the gulf. Georgia would never consent to such treatment, merely to support President Madison in alleging that West Florida was occupied by him as a part of the Orleans territory. Senator Giles’s bill was silently dropped.
The Senate reached this point December 31, but meanwhile the House reached the same standstill from another side. December 17 the Speaker appointed a committee, with Macon at its head, to report on the admission of Orleans territory as a State. The admission of the State of Louisiana into the Union was for many reasons a serious moment in American history; but one of its lesser incidents was the doubt which so much perplexed the Senate, whether Louisiana included West Florida. If this was the case, then by the third article of the treaty of purchase the inhabitants of Mobile and the district between Mobile and Baton Rouge, without division, should be “incorporated in the Union of the United States, and admitted as soon as possible” to the Union as part of the territory of Orleans. This was the opinion of Macon and his committee, as it had been that of Giles and his committee, and of the President and his Cabinet. December 27 Macon reported a bill admitting Louisiana, with West Florida to the Perdido, as a State; but no sooner did the debates begin, than the Georgians for the first time showed delicacy in regard to the rights of Spain. Troup could not consent to include in any State this territory “yet in dispute and subject to negotiation.” Bibb held the same misgivings: “The President by his proclamation, although he had required its occupation, had declared that the right should be subject to negotiation; now, if it became a State, would not all right of negotiation be taken from the President?” To prevent this danger, Bibb moved that West Florida, from the Iberville to the Perdido, should be annexed to the Mississippi Territory or made a separate government.
On the other hand, Rhea of Tennessee held that no other course was open to Congress than to admit the Orleans territory in its full extent as ceded by France, according to the President’s assertion. The treaty was peremptory, and Congress was bound by it to annex no part of the Orleans purchase to a pre-existing territory. West Florida belonged to Louisiana, and could not lawfully be given to Mississippi.
The House tried as usual to defer or compromise its difficulty. January 9, Macon’s bill was so amended as to withdraw West Florida from its operation; but when on the following day two members in succession asked the House to provide a government for West Florida, the House referred the motions back to the committee, and there the matter rested. No man knew whether West Florida belonged to Louisiana or not. If the President was right, Mobile and all the Gulf shore to a point within ten miles of Pensacola, although still held by the Spaniards, made part of the State of Louisiana, and even an Act of Congress could not affect it; while if this was not the case, the President in ordering the seizure of West Florida had violated the Constitution and made war on Spain.
Hardly had the House admitted its helplessness in the face of this difficulty, when it was obliged to meet the larger issue involved in the Louisiana affair; for Jan. 14, 1811, Josiah Quincy, with extreme deliberation, uttered and committed to writing a sentence which remained long famous:—
“If this bill passes, it is my deliberate opinion that it is virtually a dissolution of this Union; that it will free the States from their moral obligation; and, as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, definitely to prepare for a separation,—amicably if they can, violently if they must.”
The Speaker decided this language to be disorderly; but the House, by a vote of fifty-six to fifty-three, reversed the ruling, and Quincy went on arguing, as Jefferson had argued eight years before, that the introduction of new States, outside the original Union, was no part of the compact, and must end in overwhelming the original partners.
Quincy’s protest wanted only one quality to give it force. He spoke in the name of no party to the original compact. His own State of Massachusetts assented to the admission of Louisiana, and neither the governor nor the legislature countenanced the doctrine of Quincy and Pickering. If the partners themselves made no protest, the act had all the legality it needed, in the absence of appeal to higher authority; but it consummated a change in the nature of the United States government, and its results, however slow, could not fail to create what was in effect a new Constitution.
The House, without further delay, passed the bill by a vote of seventy-seven to thirty-six. After some amendment by the Senate, and dispute between the Houses, the bill was sent to the President, and Feb. 20, 1811, received his signature. The Act fixed the Iberville and the Sabine for the eastern and western boundaries of the new State. Meanwhile West Florida remained, till further legislation, a part of Orleans Territory for all purposes except those of admission into the Union; and, according to the view implied by the action of Executive and Legislature, the President retained power to order the military occupation of Texas under the Act of Oct. 31, 1803, subject to government afterward, like West Florida, by the proconsular authority of the Executive.
As though the Florida affair needed still further complication, the President, January 3, sent to Congress a secret message asking authority to seize East Florida:—
“I recommend ... the expediency of authorizing the Executive to take temporary possession of any part or parts of the said territory, in pursuance of arrangements which may be desired by the Spanish authorities.... The wisdom of Congress will at the same time determine how far it may be expedient to provide for the event of a subversion of the Spanish authorities within the territory in question, and an apprehended occupancy thereof by any other foreign Power.”
In secret session Congress debated and passed an Act, approved Jan. 15, 1811, authorizing the President to take possession of East Florida, in case the local authority should consent or a foreign Power should attempt to occupy it. The President immediately appointed two commissioners to carry the law into effect. The orders he gave them, the meaning they put on these orders, the action they took, and the President’s further measures were to form another remarkable episode in the complicated history of Florida.
Congress next turned to the charter of the United States Bank; but if it succumbed before West Florida, it was helpless in dealing with finance. Long hesitation had ended by creating difficulties. Local interests hostile to the Bank sprang into existence. In many States private banks were applying for charters, and preparing to issue notes in the hope of seizing their share of the profits of the United States Bank. The influence of these new corporations was great. They induced one State legislature after another to instruct their senators on the subject. That Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Maryland should wish to appropriate the profits of the National Bank was not surprising, but that Virginia and Kentucky should make themselves instruments of the capitalist States showed little knowledge of their true interests. As the crisis came near, the struggle became hotter, until it rivalled the embargo excitement, and every hour of delay increased the vehemence of opposition to the charter.
The Bank was vulnerable on more than one side. Largely owned in England, it roused jealousy as a foreign influence. Congress could hardly blame this ownership, since Congress itself, in 1802, aided President Jefferson in selling to the Barings, at a premium of forty-five per cent, the two thousand two hundred and twenty Bank shares still belonging to the government. The operation brought to the Treasury not only a profit of four hundred thousand dollars in premiums, but also about thirteen hundred thousand dollars of British capital to be used for American purposes. Fully two thirds of the Bank stock, amounting to ten million dollars, were owned in England; all the five thousand shares originally subscribed by the United States government had been sold to England; and as the Bank was a mere creature of the United States government, these seven millions of British capital were equivalent to a score of British frigates or regiments lent to the United States to use against England in war. By returning them, the United States seriously weakened themselves and strengthened their enemy.
Unfortunately this interest was national. Local interests felt that Englishmen received profits which should belong to Americans; and capitalists in general were not inclined to lower their profits by inviting foreign capital into the country unless they shared its returns. The second misfortune of the Bank was that of being a Federalist creation, chiefly used for the benefit of Federalists, who owned most of the active capital in the country. The third objection went deeper. The Bank was the last vestige of strong government created by the Federalists,—a possible engine of despotism; and no one could deny that if decentralization was wise, the Bank should be suppressed. Finally, the Bank was a bulwark to Gallatin; its destruction would weaken Madison and drive Gallatin from office.
Doubtless the objections to the Bank were so strong as some day to become fatal. In a society and government so little developed as those of America, a National Bank was out of keeping with other institutions. Even in England and France these banks exercised more influence over the Treasury than was proper; and in America, if once the Bank should unite in political sympathy with the Government, it might do no little harm. The necessity for such an institution was merely one of the moment, but in the period of national history between 1790 and 1860, the year 1811 was perhaps the only moment when destruction of the Bank threatened national ruin. A financial cataclysm had prostrated credit from St. Petersburg to New Orleans. Prices were nominal. England owed America large sums of money, but instead of discharging the debt, she was trying to escape payment and withdraw specie. Already the supply of specie in the United States was insufficient to sustain the bank-note circulation. In New York city the State banks were supposed to hold not more than half a million dollars, and in Pennsylvania not much more than a million; while the Bank of the United States had lost three and a half millions in eleven months, and had but five and a half millions left.[268]
Meanwhile the State banks not only expanded their issues, but also rapidly increased in number. Suppression of the National Bank could not fail to stimulate this movement. “The banks established by the State legislatures will scramble for the privilege of filling the chasm to be made by the destruction of the Bank of the United States. Already are they preparing for the patriotic endeavor. Our State legislatures are to be importuned to become bank jobbers and joint undertakers and copartners in the enterprise.”[269] Nothing could prevent expansion of credit, drain of specie, bankruptcy and confusion of the currency; and this was to be done at the time the country entered into a war with the only Power whose influence could shake the Union to its foundation.
Madison stood aloof, and left on Gallatin the burden of the struggle; but Gallatin’s energies and influence could do little with the Eleventh Congress. He was strongest in the House; but there the debate, after many speeches, ended, January 24, by a vote of sixty-five to sixty-four in favor of indefinite postponement, and by common consent all parties waited for the Senate to decide. The omen was not happy for the Treasury.
Gallatin had at last found a capable senator to support him. The political fortunes of William Henry Crawford, which ended only at the threshold of the White House, drew no small part of their growth from his courageous defence of the Treasury during these chaotic years. Crawford showed the faults of a strong nature,—he was overbearing, high-tempered, and his ambition did not spurn what his enemies called intrigue; but he possessed the courage of Henry Clay, with more than Clay’s intelligence, though far less than his charm. Crawford was never weak, rarely oratorical; and if he was ever emotional he reserved his emotion for other places than the Senate. “One man at last appeared who filled my expectations,” wrote Gallatin many years afterward to an old and intimate friend.[270] “This was Mr. Crawford, who united to a powerful mind a most correct judgment and an inflexible integrity,—which last quality, not sufficiently tempered by indulgence and civility, has prevented his acquiring general popularity.” February 5 he introduced into the Senate a bill continuing the old Bank charter for twenty years on certain conditions; and February 11 he supported the bill in a speech remarkable for the severity of its truths. He began by challenging the Constitution itself:—
“Upon the most thorough examination [of the Constitution] I am induced to believe that many of the various constructions given to it are the result of a belief that it is absolutely perfect. It has become so extremely fashionable to eulogize this Constitution, whether the object of the eulogist is the extension or contraction of the powers of the government, that whenever its eulogium is pronounced I feel an involuntary apprehension of mischief.”
Upon the party theory that Congress could exercise no implied power, and therefore could not charter a corporation, Crawford fell energetically, until he came in contact with the instructions of State legislatures, which he swept out of his path with actual contempt:—
“What is the inducement with these great States to put down the Bank of the United States? Their avarice combined with their love of domination!... The great commercial States are to monopolize the benefits which are to arise from the deposits of your public money. The suppression of this Bank will benefit none of the interior or smaller States in which there is little or no revenue collected. As the whole benefit is to be engrossed by three or four of the great Atlantic States, so the whole of the power which the dissolution of this Bank will take from the national government will be exclusively monopolized by the same States.”
Under Gallatin’s teaching, Crawford bade fair to make himself, what the South so greatly needed, a statesman who understood its interests; but he was far in advance of his people. The society from which he sprang was more correctly represented by Giles, who answered him in the manner for which the Virginia senator had acquired unpleasant notoriety. February 14 John Randolph, who with all his faults was not so factious as to join in the scheme of the State banks, wrote to his friend Nicholson:[271] “Giles made this morning the most unintelligible speech on the Bank of the United States that I ever heard.” Never had Giles taken more trouble to be judicial, candid, and temperate; no one could have admitted with more impartiality the force of his opponent’s arguments; but his instincts, stronger than his logic, compelled him to vote against the Bank. The conclusion was as certain as the process was vague.
Henry Clay, who followed on the same side, ironically complimented the Virginia senator, who had “certainly demonstrated to the satisfaction of all who heard him both that it was constitutional and unconstitutional, highly proper and improper, to prolong the charter of the Bank;” but Clay’s irony was as unfortunate as Giles’s logic. The sarcasm thrown at Giles recoiled on Clay himself, for he passed the rest of his life in contradicting and repenting the speech he made at this moment, in which he took ground against the power of Congress to create corporations. “The power to charter companies is not specified in the grant, and, I contend, is of a nature not transferable by mere implication. It is one of the most exalted attributes of sovereignty.” The legislation of twenty years which enforced the opposite opinion he swept aside in his peculiar manner. “This doctrine of precedents, applied to the legislature, appears to me to be fraught with the most mischievous consequences.” With more than his ordinary self-confidence, he affirmed that the Treasury could be as well conducted without as with the Bank; and he closed with a burst of rhetoric hardly to be paralleled in his oratory, by holding the Bank responsible for not preventing Great Britain from attacking the “Chesapeake,” impressing American seamen, and issuing the Orders in Council.
Clay’s excuse for extravagances like these was neither his youth nor his ignorance of affairs nor his obedience to instructions, nor yet a certain want of tact which made him through life the victim of needless mistakes, but was rather the simple repentance with which, within five years, he threw himself on the mercy of the public, admitting that had he foreseen the effect of his course he would have acted in a very different way.[272] Even for Giles some apology might be made, for no one could deny that consistency required him to vote as he did, and he could appeal to the record in his defence. The worst offender was not Giles or Clay, but Samuel Smith.
When Crawford flung so freely his charges of avarice and ambition about the Senate chamber, he had Samuel Smith directly in his eye; for Smith’s action was avowedly controlled by his interests, and since his speech on Macon’s bill his attitude toward public measures was better understood than before. No one could conceive Smith to be influenced by conscientious scruples about implied powers, but many persons besides Madison and Gallatin believed him to be selfish and grasping. Baltimore favored State banks, and Smith lent his reputation as a business man to the service of local politics and interests, except so far as in doing this he aimed at the overthrow of Gallatin. He gave what amounted to a pledge of his character as a merchant to the assertion that the State, banks were better, safer, and more efficient agencies for the Treasury than the Bank of the United States could possibly be. In making the speech which advanced these doctrines, he threw out an express challenge to Gallatin. “The secretary is considered by his friends a very great man in fiscal operations; in commercial matters I may be permitted to have opinions of my own.” As a commercial authority he asserted that government had much greater control over the State banks than over the United States Bank; that more confidence could be put in the security of the State banks than in that of the National Bank; that they could more easily effect the necessary exchanges; that they were as prudently conducted; that the National Bank did not act as a check upon them, but they acted as a check upon it; that the ordinary and extraordinary business of the Treasury could be as effectually and securely done by the State banks; and that the liquidation of the United States Bank would “be remembered nine days and not much longer.” When five years afterward the fallacy of these opinions became too notorious for question, Smith did not, like Clay, throw himself on the justice of his country or admit his errors, but he voted to re-establish the Bank in a far more extensive form, and took the ground that it was the only means of repairing mistakes which he had been a principal agent in making.
The other speeches made in this debate, although quite equal in ability to these, carried less political weight, for they implied less factiousness. One remained, which excited no small curiosity and some amusement.
When the Senate, February 20, divided on the motion to strike out the enacting clause, seventeen senators voted for the Bank and seventeen voted against it. Nine Northern senators voted in its favor, including seven of the ten from New England, and nine on the opposite side. Eight Southern senators voted one way, and eight the other. Of the twenty-seven Republican senators, seventeen voted against the Bank, and ten in its favor; while the three senators who were supposed to be in personal opposition to the President—Giles, Samuel Smith, and Michael Leib—all voted in opposition. The force of personal feeling was credited with still another vote; for when the result was announced, the Vice-President, George Clinton, whose attitude was notorious, made a short address to the effect that “the power to create corporations is not expressly granted; it is a high attribute of sovereignty, and in its nature not accessorial or derivative by implication, but primary and independent.” On this ground he threw his casting vote against the bill.
So perished the first Bank of the United States; and with its destruction the Federalist crisis, so long threatened, began at last to throw its shadow over the government.