The reply of Benton was characteristic in its slashing style, its exhaustive appeal to facts and figures, and chiefly important as a campaign argument in its elaborate discussion of the relations of the Bank with the Western States. Not to be outdone in dire predictions, he insisted that the triumph of the Bank would mean the end of free institutions; that “no individual could stand in the States against the power of the Bank, and the Bank flushed with the victory over the conqueror of the conquerors of Bonaparte”; that “an oligarchy would be immediately established, and that oligarchy, in a few generations, would ripen into a monarchy.” He realized that all nations must ultimately perish. “Rome had her Pharsalia and Greece her Chæronea, and this Republic, more illustrious in her birth, was entitled to a death as glorious as theirs.” He would not have her “die by poison” or “perish in corruption,” but “a field of arms and glory should be her end.”

And he, too, eagerly accepted the challenge of Webster: “Why debate the Bank question now, and not before?” he asked. “With what object do they speak? Sir, this post facto debate is not for the Senate, nor the President, nor to alter the fate of the Bank Bill. It is to arouse the officers of the Bank—to direct the efforts of its mercenaries in their designs upon the people—to bring out its streams of corrupting influence, by inspiring hope, and to embody all its recruits at the polls to vote against Jackson. Without an avowal we would all know this; but we have not been left without an avowal. The Senator from Massachusetts commenced his speech by showing that Jackson must be put down; that he stood as an impassable barrier between the Bank and a new charter; and that the road to success was through the ballot boxes at the presidential election. The object of this debate is then known, confessed, declared, avowed; the Bank is in the field; enlisted for the war; a battering ram—the catapulta, not of the Romans but of the National Republicans [Whigs]; not to beat down the walls of hostile cities, but to beat down the citadel of American liberty; to batter down the rights of the people; to destroy a patriot and a hero; to command the elections and to elect a Bank President.”

Thus the politicians sounded the keynotes of the two parties in the approaching campaign in the country.

The debate was not to end without its serio-comedy. Benton had criticized Clay for lack of decent courtesy to the President, and when he resumed his seat, Clay arose to question the Missourian’s qualification to pass on decent courtesy, and to revive the story that Benton had once said that should Jackson ever reach the Presidency, Senators “would have to legislate with pistols and dirks.” Benton excitedly denied it. The lie was passed. The angry statesmen were called to order and forced to apologize to the Senate, and thus the Whig nominee for the Presidency closed the debate in a none too dignified fashion.

The necessary two thirds to override the veto could not be mustered, and Clay left Washington on the adjournment of Congress, July 16th, happy in the knowledge that “something had turned up” that would force the Bank and all its resources and influence to battle with a personal motive for his election.

And Jackson and his friends were jubilant.

Thus ended one of the longest and most bitter sessions the American Congress had ever known, “fierce in the beginning, and becoming more furious to the end.”[478]

CHAPTER IX
THE DRAMATIC BATTLE OF 1832

I

The campaign of 1832 marked the beginning of many things that have come to be commonplace in American politics. For the first time the politicians were under the compulsion of cultivating and conciliating, not factions and groups, but the masses of the people. The day of Democracy had dawned, with all that means of good and evil. And in this struggle for the suffrage of the masses, Clay had unwittingly intrigued the Jacksonians into the advantage. Accustomed for years to relying solely on the wealthy and the influential, the great Whig leaders signally failed to appreciate that the very elements they had rallied to their support would tend to alienate the mechanics of the cities, the farmers of the plains, the pioneers struggling with poverty on the fringe of the forest. Thurlow Weed, who was one of the few practical Whig politicians, saw it, but he was then comparatively obscure. The clever politicians of the Kitchen Cabinet instantly sensed the opportunity and grasped it. A great moneyed institution, never popular with the masses, was seeking the humiliation of the most popular of Presidents. The most fortunate of that day were responding to the call of the Bank. The first battle at the polls between the “soul-less corporation” and the “sons of toil” was on. For the first time in a presidential election the demagogue appeared with his appeals to class prejudice and class hate, and all the demagogy was not on the part of the Jacksonians. If these sought to arouse the masses against the prosperous, the prosperous, with gibes about the “mob,” were quite as busy in prejudicing the classes against the masses.