Merchants are crumbling to ruin, manufactures perishing, agriculture stagnating and distress universal. (John Quincy Adams.)
If we can believe our Democratic editors and public declaimers it [Bank of the United States] is a Hydra, a Cerberus, a Gorgon, a Vulture, a Viper. (William Harris Crawford.)
Where one prudent and honest man applies for [bankruptcy] one hundred rogues are facilitated in their depredations. (Hezekiah Niles.)
Merchants and traders are harassed by twenty different systems of laws, prolific in endless frauds, perjuries and evasions. (Harrison Gray Otis.)
The months of February and March, 1819, are memorable in American history, for during those months John Marshall delivered three of his greatest opinions. All of these opinions have had a determinative effect upon the political and industrial evolution of the people; and one of them[437] has so decisively influenced the growth of the Nation that, by many, it is considered as only second in importance to the Constitution itself. At no period and in no land, in so brief a space of time, has any other jurist or statesman ever bestowed upon his country three documents of equal importance. Like the other fundamental state papers which, in the form of judicial opinions, Marshall gave out from the Supreme Bench, those of 1819 were compelled by grave and dangerous conditions, National in extent.
It was a melancholy prospect over which Marshall's broad vision ranged, when from his rustic bench under his trees at Richmond, during the spring and autumn of 1818, he surveyed the situation in which the American people found themselves. It was there, or in the quiet of the Blue Ridge Mountains where he spent the summer months, that he formed the outlines of those charts which he was soon to present to the country for its guidance; and it was there that at least one of them was put on paper.
The interpretation of John Marshall as the constructing architect of American Nationalism is not satisfactorily accomplished by a mere statement of his Nationalist opinions and of the immediate legal questions which they answered. Indeed, such a narrative, by itself, does not greatly aid to an understanding of Marshall's immense and enduring achievements. Not in the narrow technical points involved, some of them diminutive and all uninviting in their formality; not in the dreary records of the law cases decided, is to be found the measure of his monumental service to the Republic or the meaning of what he did. The state of things which imperatively demanded the exercise of his creative genius and the firm pressure of his steadying hand must be understood in order to grasp the significance of his labors.
When the Supreme Court met in February, 1819, almost the whole country was in grievous turmoil; for nearly three years conditions had been growing rapidly worse and were now desperate. Poverty, bankruptcy, chicanery, crime were widespread and increasing. Thrift, prudence, honesty, and order had seemingly been driven from the hearts and minds of most of the people; while speculation, craft, and unscrupulous devices were prevalent throughout all but one portion of the land. Only New England had largely escaped the universal curse that appeared to have fallen upon the United States; and even that section was not untouched by the economic and social plague that had raged and was becoming more deadly in every other quarter.
While it is true that a genuine democratizing evolution was in progress, this fact does not explain the situation that had grown up throughout the country. Neither does the circumstance that the development of land and resources was going forward in haphazard fashion, at the hands of a new population hard pressed for money and facilities for work and communication, reveal the cause of the appalling state of affairs. It must frankly be said of the conditions, to us now unbelievable, that they were due partly to the ignorance, credulity, and greed of the people; partly to the spirit of extravagance; partly to the criminal avarice of the financially ambitious; partly to popular dread of any great centralized moneyed institution, however sound; partly to that pest of all democracies, the uninformed and incessant demagogue whipping up and then pandering to the passions of the multitude; partly to that scarcely less dangerous creature in a Republic, the fanatical doctrinaire, proclaiming the perfection of government by word-logic and insisting that human nature shall be confined in the strait-jacket of verbal theory. From this general welter of moral and economic debauchery, Localism had once more arisen and was eagerly reasserting its domination.
The immediate cause of the country's plight was an utter chaos in banking. Seldom has such a financial motley ever covered with variegated rags the backs of a people. The confusion was incredible; but not for a moment did the millions who suffered, blame themselves for their tragic predicament. Now praising banks as unfailing fountains of money, now denouncing banks as the sources of poisoned waters, clamoring for whatever promised even momentary relief, striking at whatever seemingly denied it, the people laid upon anything and anybody but themselves and their improvidence, the responsibility for their distress.