The party battles of the Jackson period

by Claude G. Bowers

“I think you ought to say nothing about the Bank at present,” was the response.

“Oh, but, my friend, I am pledged against the Bank, but if you think that is enough, so let it be.”[416]

Some students of the period are prone to ascribe Jackson’s hostility to the Bank to a personal grievance of Isaac Hill. The flimsy assumption that the President’s Bank policy was born of the quarrel of the Concord editor with Biddle, because of the retention in the presidency of the Portsmouth branch of Jeremiah Mason, is unimpressive. Equally absurd to deny that the Mason incident played no part. According to some, Hill, in his attempt to force the removal of Mason, was wholly actuated by a desire to get political control of the institution; to others, to the inability of the editor-politician to get a loan. The truth is that the hostility to Mason was not confined to politicians, but was shared by many of the merchants of New Hampshire. This hostility was due to Mason’s austere action, on discovering that some bad loans had been made on speculative ventures, in exacting hard terms of the local merchants. The petition sent to Biddle by Hill contained the names of sixty members of the legislature, and most of the business men of Portsmouth, of both parties.[417] The president of the Portsmouth branch was a great lawyer, a statesman of reputation, an orator of power, and a partisan as bitter and intolerant as ever breathed the proscriptive air of New Hampshire. In the correspondence which followed between Secretary Ingham, who is said to have had a personal grievance,[418] and Nicholas Biddle, the president of the Bank, who has been variously described according to the bias of the writer, was unquestionably flippant and intolerant of suggestions from the Administration. While his position in the Mason incident can be justified, he was unnecessarily arrogant and tactless; but quickly realizing his mistake, he thereafter changed his tone, and throughout the summer and autumn of 1829 made every effort to conciliate the President. His letters of this period to the heads of the various branches insisting that the Bank be kept out of politics smack of sincerity.[419] But the harm had been done, and there is every reason to conclude that Amos Kendall was deeply concerned in the President’s decision to attack the Bank in his first Message. Certain it is that a letter from Kendall to Noah in November led the “New York Courier and Enquirer” to launch its editorial campaign against the institution. This letter, announcing the presidential decision to attack in his first Message, and presenting an argument in support of the position he was to assume, was sent by Noah to the newspaper, and “a portion of Amos Kendall’s letter, with a head and tail put to it ... was published as an editorial the next morning”; and this “was the first savage attack on the United States Bank” in the columns of that paper.[420] And almost immediately afterwards James Gordon Bennett, writing for the “Courier and Enquirer,” began a series of powerful articles in support of the policy of that journal.[421]

Indeed, if an explanation for Jackson’s position must be sought in the Kitchen Cabinet, it would be more profitable to seek it in the principles of Amos Kendall, who had written against the Bank long before he had met the President, and while still on friendly terms with Clay. Others of Jackson’s intimates were equally hostile. The views of Benton had been urged for years; and Hugh L. White, Senator from Tennessee, one of his confidential advisers in the early days of his Administration, had long distrusted the institution as tending to extravagant speculation, and as threatening the liberties of the people through its increasing influence in elections.[422] But Jackson himself needed no propagandists at his elbow. He had been prejudiced against the Bank for twenty years by Clay’s slashing speech against it when the first Bank applied for a recharter.[423]

In his Message of December, 1830, Jackson dismissed the Bank in a paragraph, clearly indicative of unfriendliness; and in December, 1831, he scarcely mentioned it at all, except to call attention to his previous statements. But from the moment the first Message was read, Biddle’s complacency was disturbed. His correspondence during the next two years shows him active and alert in attempts to conciliate his foe in the White House. Less than a week after one son of Alexander Hamilton had penned the first warning of war, Biddle was reading a letter from Alexander Hamilton, Jr., a brother, assuring him that the die was cast, the war inevitable, and warning him against the presidential aspirations of Van Buren, to whose political fortunes his brother was then attached.[424] Biddle replied that the Bank views of the Message were Jackson’s, honestly held, and that for the time the Bank’s policy would be one of “abstinence and self-defense.”[425] “The expressions of the Message were the President’s own,” he wrote the head of the Washington branch immediately afterward, “ ... and inserted in opposition to the wishes, if not the advice of all his habitual counsellors. It is not, therefore, a cabinet measure, nor a party measure, but a personal measure.”[426] And had he not ample encouragement in the letters of Major Lewis, a household guest of Jackson’s, recommending the appointment of certain men to the directorship of the branch in Nashville?[427] Nevertheless, he was not at all positive that the recharter might not be made a party measure. Especially concerned with Van Buren’s attitude, he was being constantly warned against him, but his advices were contradictory. Within a month he was reassured by one correspondent[428] and alarmed by Clay, who wrote him from Ashland that, while in Richmond, Van Buren had entered into a conspiracy with politicians to destroy the Bank.[429] And to add to the mystic maze of contradictions, Major Lewis wrote, in a “confidential” note, that the report that Jackson would veto a bill rechartering the Bank “must be some mistake because the report was at variance with what I had heard him say upon the subject.”[430] Still another correspondent[431] informed him that Van Buren had told him that “he disapproved of that part of the message and was not hostile to the Bank.”

About this time Jackson journeyed to the Hermitage, and Biddle asked a leading citizen of Nashville to “feel him out.” The banker’s correspondent entertained the President at his home, and after a confidential chat felt justified in advising Biddle that he was “well convinced that he will not interfere with Congress on the subject of the renewing of the charter.”[432] By this time, however, Biddle had convinced himself that political expediency would determine the President’s attitude, and in a letter to one of Jackson’s personal friends he pointed out the disastrous political results to the Administration if the impression gained ground that it was “unfriendly to sound currency.” He even graciously indicated the line the next Message might take to save the Administration from that embarrassment.[433] But before that suggestion reached its destination, Clay solemnly wrote him that only a devoted friend of the Bank in the Presidency would make a recharter possible, and warned him against Van Buren. He was convinced that the Jacksonian politicians had determined to make the Bank question the issue in the next campaign. “I have seen many evidences of it,” he wrote. “The editors of certain papers have received their orders to that effect, and embrace every occasion to act in conformity with them.”[434] But when Congress met in December, and Jackson reiterated his views on the Bank, Biddle was earnestly urged from Washington to meet the issue at once by applying for a new charter. This advice was finally rejected. Congress, he wrote, was favorable, “and moreover the President would not reject the bill,” but many members favorable to the recharter would prefer not to vote that session. Then, too, time was working the removal of prejudices.[435]

At the beginning of the session, December, 1831, with the charter five years to run, we are confronted with the mystery of the injection of the issue at that time. We know, however, that the strain of uncertainty had been telling on Biddle’s temper. The vultures that play on the political necessities of corporations were beginning to swoop down upon him. Duff Green, of the “National Telegraph,” had applied for a $20,000 loan.[436] And mindful of the importance of propaganda, he had already decided to cultivate the press by paying it well for the publication of Bank literature.[437] But just before the opening of the congressional session, his negotiations with McLane and Livingston of the Cabinet, both friendly to the Bank, had again diverted him from his disposition to fight. In October the Secretary of the Treasury had sat in the marble-front building in Philadelphia and told him of confidential communications with the President. Anxious to keep the Bank question out of the campaign, Jackson had reluctantly consented, on the importunities of Livingston and McLane, to omit all references to the Bank in his Message. Biddle feared it would be a mistake. Would it not be better merely to remind Congress of his previous comments, and leave the decision “with the representatives of the people?” The fact that this course was followed is one of the ironies of history.[438] Hardly had this decision been reached when Clay wrote from Ashland urging an immediate application for a new charter. This was a sensational reversal of views. Not only had he previously advised Biddle differently, but in August, 1830, he had taken strong grounds against such application so long before the expiration of the existing charter. “I am not prepared,” he said then, “to say whether the charter ought, or ought not to be renewed on the expiration of its present term. The question is premature. I may not be alive to form any opinion on it. It belongs to posterity. It ought to be indefinitely postponed.”[439] This speech was to be used with deadly effect by Blair in the “Globe” a little later.[440] Even then, before reaching Washington, Clay had determined to “turn up” the Bank charter as an issue.

II

When Congress met, Jackson had concluded to postpone his fight on the Bank. Three reasons entered into the decision—the friendliness of his Secretary of the Treasury to the institution, the realization that a majority in Congress favored the recharter, and the fear that a contest during the session would throw the tremendous weight of the Bank’s influence against him in the election. Most of his advisers, including Benton, were anxious to postpone the contest. Just as Biddle had thought that time would operate to the advantage of the institution, Benton was confident that it would work to its detriment, and he wished to strengthen the anti-Bank lines in the Senate and to have Van Buren in the chair when the contest came. McLane’s pronouncedly pro-Bank report had deeply embarrassed the President’s supporters. Creating indignation in some quarters, consternation in others, Jackson hastened to explain it away in a letter to Hamilton; but just how he persuaded himself that the views of the report did “not express any opposition to those entertained by myself,” is not clear.[441]

The Bank supporters had eagerly seized upon the McLane report, and Webb, of the “New York Courier and Enquirer,” now deserting the Administration on the Bank question, commented glowingly upon its author and his views. That this was gall and wormwood to Jackson and his intimates is evident in the correspondence which passed between them. “The article ... was calculated if Blair had replied, to do McLane irreparable injury in a political point of view, because it might have brought him and the President into seeming collision,” wrote Major Lewis to Hamilton.[442] And all this time, McLane, who was one of Hamilton’s correspondents, was frankly admitting to the latter that he had “most earnestly urged Mr. Clay not to attempt to pass a Bank bill at this session, insisting that, if deferred to the next session, he was satisfied that he could, by that time, induce Jackson to approve it”; but that Clay had “persisted in the hope, that if the President approved the bill, he would lose the support of those of his party who had approved his opposition to the Bank, and a vast many others who approved of the State Bank system.” Or, on the other hand, “if the President vetoed the bill, he would lose Pennsylvania and his election.”[443] Thus it is clear enough, that if Jackson could have determined, the Bank would not have been an issue in 1832.