While Clay was intriguing with the Nullifiers and the Anti-Masons, the Democrats were audaciously denouncing both, and were gaining rather than losing by their temerity.
IV
There was but one issue—and that the Bank. Clay had made it the issue with the officers of the institution and their allied business interests; the clever leaders of the Jackson forces made it an issue with the masses of the people, who had always looked with suspicion and dislike upon the powerful financial institution.[503] And then, perhaps, the “Emperor Nicholas” bitterly regretted having yielded to the blandishments of Clay. If he had not considered the cost in money to the institution when he yielded, Clay understood it as well as Webster. They knew that a fight against the “weak old man,” as they foolishly called Jackson, would be “no holiday affair.” Satisfied of the support of the business element, they had calculated the cost of reaching the people generally—and they had the work of Biddle cut out for him.[504] And almost immediately, Biddle was as deeply involved as Clay himself.
The campaign plans of the two parties differed, since their special appeals were to different elements. The Clay men relied on the distribution, with Bank money, of the printed speeches of Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, of tracts and pamphlets. These, falling into the hands of the masses, were thrown aside. They were sympathetically perused by the bankers, merchants, manufacturers, preachers, professors, and lawyers who were in no need of conversion.[505] The Bank made desperate efforts to win to its support the press of the larger cities and towns. It was notoriously willing to prove its appreciation of such support with the coin of the realm.[506] That Webb’s paper had been won over with Bank money was common knowledge after the congressional investigation, and Amos Kendall, in the “Globe,” charged that the “Evening Post” had been “approached,” and that the “Standard” of Philadelphia had been offered five hundred dollars and a new set of type, and the inducement had been increased by five hundred dollars two days later.
Thoroughly frightened, Biddle spent lavishly for the printing and distribution of speeches and articles. Mailing the president of the Kentucky Bank[507] Webster’s speech on the Veto, and an article reviewing the Message, he instructed that these, “as well as Mr. Clay’s & Mr. Ewing’s speeches on the same subject,” be “printed and dispersed.”[508] More than $80,000—an enormous sum for those days—was spent by the Bank under the head of “stationery and printing” during the period of the campaign. Thousands of friendly newspapers were bought in bulk and scattered broadcast, and Blair announced the discovery that “about four bushels of the ‘Extra Telegraph’ is sent to New York to a single individual for distribution.”[509] An analysis of Benton’s speech and a reply was printed in pamphlet form, and thousands flooded the country and burdened the mails.
But more sinister still was the appearance, for the first time in American politics, of the weapons of intimidation and coercion. In New Orleans a bank commenced discounting four months’ paper at eight per centum—“because of the veto.” An advertisement appeared in a Cincinnati paper offering $2.50 per hundred for pork if Clay should be elected, $1.50 if Jackson won—a bribe of one dollar a head on each hundred pounds of pork. From Brownsville, Pennsylvania, went forth the disturbing report that “a large manufacturer has discharged all his hands, and others have given notice to do so,” and that “not a single steam boat will be built this season at Wheeling, Pittsburg or Louisville.” From Baltimore: “A great many mechanics are thrown out of employment by the stoppage of building. The prospect ahead is that we shall have a very distressing winter.” And so the work went on, with the Bank and its political champions holding the sword of Damocles over the heads of the masses who dared to vote for Jackson.[510] Jackson was held before the conservative and timid as rash, dangerous, destructive. Webster’s State convention speech at Worcester, expanding on the unfortunate sentence from the Veto Message as to the finality of Supreme Court decisions, was given general circulation. Even the brilliant Ritchie, of the “Richmond Enquirer,” lived in constant terror of some rash act of Jackson’s that would wreck the country.[511]
For the benefit of the ardent Jacksonians who disliked and distrusted Van Buren, the nominee for Vice-President, the Whig and Bank press gravely quoted some mysterious “Philadelphian” to whom Jackson had said, “with his own lips,” that a reëlection would satisfy him as a vindication, and that he would resign and go home, leaving Van Buren in the Presidency. Even the “National Intelligencer” referred to the rumor as “the disclosure of an important fact ... going to confirm our own impressions.” And Blair had been forced to notice and denounce the story with the comment that “we had always thought Simpson the most depraved of all the miscreants purchased by the Bank, but certainly now Gales[512] deserves to be put below him.”[513] Earlier in the campaign the Whigs had attempted to serve the same purpose by circulating alarming reports regarding Jackson’s health. And Blair, in denouncing this canard, announced that the President “receives from 50 to 100 persons daily, is incessantly engaged in the despatch of the duties of his office, and joins regularly at table his large dinner parties of from 40 to 50 persons twice a week.”[514]
For the benefit of the preachers, teachers, and moral forces, the old stories of Jackson’s bloodthirstiness were revived, apropos of the attack by Sam Houston on a member of Congress. At first the President had merely instigated the assault—and then the imaginative Whig scribes worked out a bloodcurdling, circumstantial story. After the brutal attack, the swaggering Houston had met Postmaster-General Barry at the theater, and the two had talked it over at the theater bar, and, after being congratulated by the Cabinet member, he had called on Jackson and been heartily commended for his act.
Thus the Whigs used every weapon that came into their hands—money, subsidized and bought papers, the hostility to Masonry, the hate of the Nullifiers, the fear of Van Buren, intimidation, coercion, and slander. And something comparatively new to politics—the cartoon—soon became a feature of the fight. Here the Democrats were at a disadvantage, and the pictorial editorials that have come down to us are largely anti-Jackson. Here we find the President pictured as a raving maniac, as Don Quixote tilting at the pillars of the splendid marble bank building in Philadelphia, as a burglar attempting to force the bank doors with a battering ram, while the most popular cartoon among the friends of Clay pictured Jackson receiving a crown from Van Buren and a scepter from the Devil.[515]