EXPUNGING RESOLUTION—PERORATION OF SENATOR BENTON'S SECOND SPEECH.
"The condemnation of the President, combining as it did all that illegality and injustice could inflict, had the further misfortune to be co-operative in its effect with the conspiracy of the Bank of the United States to effect the most wicked and universal scheme of mischief which the annals of modern times exhibit. It was a plot against the government, and against the property of the country. The government was to be upset, and property revolutionized. Six hundred banks were to be broken—the general currency ruined—myriads bankrupted—all business stopped—all property sunk in value—all confidence destroyed! that out of this wide spread ruin and pervading distress, the vengeful institution might glut its avarice and ambition, trample upon the President, take possession of the government, reclaim its lost deposits, and perpetuate its charter. These crimes, revolting and frightful in themselves, were to be accomplished by the perpetration of a whole system of subordinate and subsidiary crime! the people to be deceived and excited; the President to be calumniated; the effects of the bank's own conduct to be charged upon him; meetings got up; business suspended; distress deputations organized; and the Senate chamber converted into a theatre for the dramatic exhibition of all this fictitious woe. That it was the deep and sad misfortune of the Senate so to act, as to be co-operative in all this scene of mischief, is too fully proved by the facts known, to admit of denial. I speak of acts, not of motives. The effect of the Senate's conduct in trying the President and uttering alarm speeches; was to co-operate with the bank, and that secondarily, and as a subordinate performer; for it is incontestable that the bank began the whole affair; the little book of fifty pages proves that. The bank began it; the bank followed it up; the bank attends to it now. It is a case which might well be entered on our journal as a State is entered against a criminal in the docket of a court: the Bank of the United States versus President Jackson: on impeachment for removing the deposits. The entry would be justified by the facts, for these are the indubitable facts. The bank started the accusation; the Senate took it up. The bank furnished arguments; the Senate used them. The bank excited meetings; the Senate extolled them. The bank sent deputations; the senators received them with honor. The deputations reported answers for the President which he never gave; the Senate repeated and enforced these answers. Hand in hand throughout the whole process, the bank and the Senate acted together, and succeeded in getting up the most serious and afflicting panic ever known in this country. The whole country was agitated. Cities, towns, and villages, the entire country and the whole earth seemed to be in commotion against one man. A revolution was proclaimed! the overthrow of all law was announced! the substitution of one man's will for the voice of the whole government, was daily asserted! the public sense was astounded and bewildered with dire and portentous annunciations! In the midst of all this machinery of alarm and distress, many good citizens lost their reckoning; sensible heads went wrong; stout hearts quailed; old friends gave way; temporizing counsels came in; and the solitary defender of his country was urged to yield! Oh, how much depended upon that one man at that dread and awful point of time! If he had given way, then all was gone! An insolent, rapacious, and revengeful institution would have been installed in sovereign power. The federal and State governments, the Congress, the Presidency, the State legislatures, all would have fallen under the dominion of the bank; and all departments of the government would have been filled and administered by the debtors, pensioners, and attorneys of that institution. He did not yield, and the country was saved. The heroic patriotism of one man prevented all this calamity, and saved the Republic from becoming the appendage and fief of a moneyed corporation. And what has been his reward? So far as the people are concerned, honor, gratitude, blessings, everlasting benedictions; so far as the Senate is concerned, dishonor, denunciation, stigma, infamy. And shall these two verdicts stand? Shall our journal bear the verdict of infamy, while the hearts of the people glow and palpitate with the verdict of honor?
"President Jackson has done more for the human race than the whole tribe of politicians put together; and shall he remain stigmatized and condemned for the most glorious action of his life? The bare attempt to stigmatize Mr. Jefferson was not merely expunged, but cut out from the journal; so that no trace of it remains upon the Senate records. The designs are the same in both cases; but the aggravations are inexpressibly greater in the case of President Jackson. Referring to the journals of the House of Representatives for the character of the attempt against President Jefferson, and the reasons for repulsing it, and it is seen that the attempt was made to criminate Mr. Jefferson, and to charge him upon the journals with a violation of the laws; and that this attempt was made at a time, and under circumstances insidiously calculated to excite unjust suspicion in the minds of the people against the Chief Magistrate. Such was precisely the character of the charge; and the effect of the charge against President Jackson, with the difference only that the proceeding against President Jackson, was many ten thousand times more revolting and aggravated; commencing as it did in the Bank, carried on by a violent political party, prosecuted to sentence and condemnation; and calculated, if believed, to destroy the President, to change the administration, and to put an end to popular representative government. Yes, sir, to put an end to elective and representative government! For what are all the attacks upon President Jackson's administration but attacks upon the people who elect and re-elect him, who approve his administration, and by approving, make it their own? To condemn such a President, thus supported, is to condemn the people, to condemn the elective principle, to condemn the fundamental principle of our government; and to establish the favorite dogma of the monarchists, that the people are incapable of self-government, and will surrender themselves as collared slaves into the hands of military chieftains.
"Great are the services which President Jackson has rendered his country. As a General he has extended her frontiers, saved a city, and carried her renown to the highest pitch of glory. His civil administration has rivalled and transcended his warlike exploits. Indemnities procured from the great powers of Europe for spoliations committed on our citizens under former administrations, and which, by former administrations were reclaimed in vain; peace and friendship with the whole world, and, what is more, the respect of the whole world; the character of our America exalted in Europe; so exalted that the American citizen, treading the continent of Europe, and contemplating the sudden and great elevation of the national character, might feel as if he himself was an hundred feet high. Such is the picture abroad! At home we behold a brilliant and grateful scene; the public debt paid,—taxes reduced,—the gold currency restored,—the Southern States released from a useless and dangerous population,—all disturbing questions settled,—a gigantic moneyed institution repulsed in its march to the conquest of the government,—the highest prosperity attained,—and the Hero Patriot now crowning the list of his glorious services by covering his country with the panoply of defence, and consummating his measures for the restoration and preservation of the currency of the constitution. We have had brilliant and prosperous administrations; but that of President Jackson eclipses, surpasses, and casts into the shade, all that have preceded it. And is he to be branded, stigmatized, condemned, unjustly and untruly condemned; and the records of the Senate to bear the evidence of this outrage to the latest posterity? Shall this President, so glorious in peace and in war, so successful at home and abroad, whose administration, now, hailed with applause and gratitude by the people, and destined to shine for unnumbered ages in the political firmament of our history: shall this President, whose name is to live for ever, whose retirement from life and services will be through the gate that leads to the temple of everlasting fame; shall he go down to posterity with this condemnation upon him; and that for the most glorious action of his life?
"Mr. President, I have some knowledge of history, and some acquaintance with the dangers which nations have encountered, and from which heroes and statesmen have saved them. I have read much of ancient and modern history, and nowhere have I found a parallel to the services rendered by President Jackson in crushing the conspiracy of the Bank, but in the labors of the Roman Consul in crushing the conspiracy of Catiline. The two conspiracies were identical in their objects; both directed against the government, and the property of the country. Cicero extinguished the Catilinarean conspiracy, and saved Rome; President Jackson defeated the conspiracy of the Bank, and saved our America. Their heroic service was the same, and their fates have been strangely alike. Cicero was condemned for violating the laws and the constitution; so has been President Jackson. The consul was refused a hearing in his own defence: so has been President Jackson. The life of Cicero was attempted by two assassins; twice was the murderous pistol levelled at our President. All Italy, the whole Roman world, bore Cicero to the Capitol, and tore the sentence of the consul's condemnation from the fasti of the republic: a million of Americans, fathers and heads of families, now demand the expurgation of the sentence against the President. Cicero, followed by all that was virtuous in Rome, repaired to the temple of the tutelary gods, and swore upon the altar that he had saved his country: President Jackson, in the temple of the living God, might take the same oath, and find its response in the hearts of millions. Nor shall the parallel stop here; but after times, and remote posterities shall render the same honors to each. Two thousand years have passed, and the great actions of the consul are fresh and green in history. The school-boy learns them; the patriot studies them; the statesman applies them: so shall it be with our patriot President. Two thousand years hence,—ten thousand,—nay, while time itself shall last, for who can contemplate the time when the memory of this republic shall be lost? while time itself shall last, the name and fame of Jackson shall remain and flourish; and this last great act by which he saved the government from subversion, and property from revolution, shall stand forth as the seal and crown of his heroic services. And if any thing that I myself may do or say, shall survive the brief hour in which I live, it will be the part which I have taken, and the efforts which I have made, to sustain and defend the great defender of his country.
"Mr. President, I have now finished the view which an imperious sense of duty has required me to take of this subject. I trust that I have proceeded upon proofs and facts, and have left nothing unsustained which I feel it to be my duty to advance. It is not my design to repeat, or to recapitulate; but there is one further and vital consideration which demands the notice of a remark, and which I should be faithless to the genius of our government, if I should pretermit. It is known, sir, that ambition for office is the bane of free States, and the contentions of rivals the destruction of their country. These contentions lead to every species of injustice, and to every variety of violence, and all cloaked with the pretext of the public good. Civil wars and banishment at Rome; civil wars, and the ostracism at Athens; bills of attainder, star-chamber prosecutions, and impeachments In England; all to get rid of some envied, or hated rival, and all pretexted with the public good: such has been the history of free States for two thousand years. The wise men who framed our constitution were well aware of all this danger and all this mischief, and took effectual care, as they thought, to guard against it. Banishment, the ostracism, the star-chamber prosecutions, bills of attainder, all those summary and violent modes of hunting down a rival, which deprive the victim of defence by depriving him of the intervention of an accusing body to stand between the accuser and the trying body; all these are proscribed by the genius of our constitution. Impeachments alone are permitted; and these would most usually occur for political offences, and be of a character to enlist the passions of many, and to agitate the country. An effectual guard, it was supposed, was provided against the abuse of the impeachment power, first, by requiring a charge to be preferred by the House of Representatives, as the grand Inquest of the nation; and next, in confining the trial to the Senate, and requiring a majority of two-thirds to convict. The gravity, the dignity, the age of the senators, and the great and various powers with which they were invested—greater and more various than are united in the same persons under any other constitutional government upon earth—these were supposed to make the Senate a safe depository for the impeachment power; and if the plan of the constitution is followed out it must be admitted to be so. But if a public officer can be arraigned by his rivals before the Senate for impeachable offences without the intervention of the House of Representatives, and if he can be pronounced guilty by a simple majority, instead of a majority of two-thirds, then has the whole frame of our government miscarried, and the door left wide open to the greatest mischief which has ever afflicted the people of free States. Then can rivals and competitors go on to do what it was intended they should never do; accuse, denounce, condemn, and hunt down each other! Great has been the weight of the American Senate. Time was when its rejections for office were fatal to character; time is when its rejections are rather passports to public favor. Why this sad and ominous decline? Let no one deceive himself. Public opinion is the arbiter of character in our enlightened day; it is the Areopagus from which there is no appeal! That arbiter has pronounced against the Senate. It has sustained the President, and condemned the Senate. If it had sustained the Senate, the President must have been ruined! as it has not, the Senate must be ruined, if it perseveres in its course, and goes on to brave public opinion!—as an institution, it must be ruined!"