To make matters all the more embarrassing to Clay, his party had been placed in the position of deliberately withholding this vast domain from the axe of the pioneer and the spade of the cultivator, in the interest of the manufacturers of the East. This had resulted from the unfortunate wording of an official report of Richard Rush, a colleague of Clay’s in the Cabinet of Adams, in which he had lamented the preference of the American people for agricultural over manufacturing pursuits. The report had been referred to Clay whose practiced political eye instantly saw the possibilities in the perversion or exaggeration of the meaning of these paragraphs, and he had fruitlessly urged their elimination. The Democrats were quick to grasp their opportunity. The protectionists, Clay and his friends, planned that the National Government should, by holding on to the lands, retard their settlement by maintaining prices prohibitive to the settler; they proposed to maintain a large labor market in the industrial labor centers of the East where competition would be keen enough to keep down wages. For the sake of the protected interests, they were ready to sacrifice the opportunities of the poor of the Eastern cities and make them the galley slaves of the factories; retard the development of the West, and immolate the national interest on the altar of greed. And there was just enough truth in these charges, rather luridly put forth, to make them exceedingly dangerous in a presidential year.
The issue had been accentuated by the suggestion of McLane, Secretary of the Treasury, that the public lands should be sold to the States in which they were located, and the proceeds apportioned among all the States in the Union. This, naturally enough, made an instant appeal to the States most intimately concerned, and six of the new Commonwealths hastened to petition Congress for the cession. This brought the subject before the Senate, and in the spring of 1832 two motions were submitted, one to inquire into the wisdom of reducing the price of the public lands, the other into the expediency of the McLane proposition.
And it was at this juncture that the Jacksonians turned the trick on Clay and forced him into the open as an aggressive enemy of the wishes of the new States. With a regular Senate Committee on Public Lands, composed of men intimately acquainted with the subject, the amazing motion was made and carried that the matter be referred to the Committee on Manufactures of which Clay was chairman. The friends of the candidate bitterly protested against the reference; and Clay himself “protested,” “entreated,” and “implored” that the reference be changed to the Committee on Public Lands. “I felt,” he said later, “that the design was to place in my hands a many-edged instrument which I could not touch without being wounded.”[414]
Unable to extricate himself from the embarrassment, Clay set to work, and in a short time submitted a report, accompanied by a bill, providing against the reduction of the price of the land, but for granting to Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Alabama, Missouri, and Mississippi twelve and a half per cent of the proceeds from the sale of lands within their borders, to be applied to the purposes of education and internal improvements. This, of course, was a frank attempt to prevent the resentment of the people of these States from asserting itself at the polls. The remainder of the proceeds was then to be apportioned to the remaining States, according to their population, to be used for the schools, internal improvements, and negro colonization. The act was to remain in force for five years, provided no war intervened, in which event all the proceeds were to be used in defraying the expenses of the conflict. In this way Clay attempted to maintain the existing economic conditions while satisfying the new States whose electoral votes he sought.
If the political intent of the reference to Clay’s committee had been in the least open to doubt, all such was removed by the action of the Senate in thereupon ordering the matter referred to the Committee on Public Lands. Again Clay vehemently protested. He had not wanted to report upon the subject. He had protested against the reference. But the reference having been made, and the report submitted, he protested anew against the reflection upon his committee implied by the new reference.
At the head of the Committee on Public Lands was Senator King of Alabama, but Clay was right in ascribing the authorship of the report, soon to be submitted, to Thomas H. Benton.[415] This report vigorously assailed the reasoning and conclusions of Clay; attacked the disposition to look upon the public lands as useful primarily for revenue and secondarily for settlement, and reversed the order; and deprecated the suggestion of the use of the money to be distributed among the States for the colonization of the negroes as calculated to “light up the fires of the extinguished conflagration which lately blazed on the Missouri question.” It favored the reduction of the price of land to one dollar per acre during the next five years; then to fifty cents, with fifteen per cent of the proceeds to be apportioned among the States. Whatever may have been the objections to the Democratic plan, it gave promise of an earlier redemption of the wilderness by the cultivation of man, and the more speedy enhancement of the land of the pioneers already in possession.
Keenly appreciative of the purpose of his enemies, Clay delivered a long and powerful speech, his second campaign speech in the Senate, plausibly defending his position, explaining Rush’s meaning, and attempting to divert the greed of the new States into a different channel. That he made a profound impression may be properly assumed from the fact that the bill passed the Senate, although it was checked by a hostile House.
Thus his friends flattered themselves that he had scored a triumph and outwitted his foes. The old school politicians still gauged public opinion by the roll-calls of the Congress. The new school, which came in with Jackson, were least of all concerned with the views of the politicians at the capital. They were interesting themselves with the plain voters, and were devising means for reaching these in the campaign to follow. They had sensed the feelings and the prejudices and suspicions of the pioneers of the new States. They were an agricultural people and easily inflamed by the suggestion that their interests were to be subordinated or sacrificed to the interests of the Eastern industrial centers. They wanted the speedy felling of the forests, the cultivation of the fields, the building of homes and schools and churches, and the Benton plan of reduced prices and preemption for actual settlers appealed to them as in harmony with their desires.
And thus, while the friends of Clay were rejoicing in what they conceived to be the unanswerable logic of the Clay report, the politicians of the Kitchen Cabinet, Kendall and Blair, were rejoicing in having, in documentary form, the proof that Clay and the protectionists were hostile to the wishes of the new States. Amos Kendall knew that “free trade and free lands” was a shibboleth that these pioneers could understand. And while Clay, Webster, and Clayton were rejoicing over the passage of the bill in the Senate, Kendall and Blair were joyously arranging to spread the story of that triumph to the voters of the new States. After all, they had succeeded in their purpose. They had a Clay and a Jackson report to hold side by side, and the event disclosed that the politicians of the Kitchen Cabinet were wiser than the politicians of the Senate house.