The morning found Clayton confronted with a plan devised during the night to spare Calhoun the humiliation of voting for the hated amendment, provided enough votes were assured to carry it through without his vote. The immovable Clayton sternly shook his head. Calhoun must vote for every amendment and for the bill. When the Senate convened, it was still uncertain what the Carolinian would do. At length, after all of his friends had first stated their objections, and yet reluctantly yielded, Calhoun arose, repeated the performance, and, having voted for the amendment at the dictation of Clayton, voted for the bill.[605] The unhappy plight of Calhoun was not lost upon his enemies, and Blair found in it an inspiration for his sarcasm. “A single night,” he wrote, “was sufficient to change the settled opinion of the profound reader of the Constitution. We exceedingly doubt whether in the private interview in which Mr. Clay disposed of Mr. Calhoun’s constitutional scruples, a word was uttered in relation to the Constitution.”[606] Thus passed into law, under circumstances deserving of Benton’s reprehension, the measure concocted by a combination of erstwhile foes.[607] The Nullifiers died hard, and Duff Green, the pen of Nullification, made printer to the Senate by this incongruous combination, in performing the hateful official duty of publishing the Force Bill in the “Telegraph,” had the impudence to dress his paper in mourning. “This is the way,” observed a Jacksonian paper, “this ungrateful wretch shows his gratitude to the Senate for his recent appointment.”[608]
VIII
Meanwhile, what of South Carolina?
The letter of Cass, published in the “Richmond Enquirer,” had borne fruit, and Virginia had sent Benjamin Watkins Leigh, a lawyer of distinction and an orator of no mean ability, to Charleston to ask a suspension of the Nullification Ordinance until Congress had adjourned. An ardent devotee of State Rights, now a bitter enemy of Jackson, and soon to enter the Senate to make his opposition felt, he had much in his principles and personality to command a respectful hearing from South Carolina. The call of the Nullification Convention was consequently postponed until after the adjournment of Congress, and March 11th was fixed as the day for reassembling. By that time it was all over—the Force Bill in effect. The convention met at Columbia, with Hayne in the chair. Leigh was invited within the bar. The dominating figure of the scene, however, was Calhoun, who had gone post-haste to Carolina to urge the acceptance of the compromise. The tall, thin figure of the great Senator, seated among the delegates on the floor, was the star of the assembly. A committee was named to consider the general course of action; and one week later the Ordinance of Nullification was rescinded, and by a vote of 153 to 4 the convention agreed that the threatened danger was over.
The political effect of the fight was to be felt throughout the period of the generation then living. The Secessionists and Nullifiers paraded, with much flapping of banners, out of the Democratic Party, to be joyously and effusively welcomed by Henry Clay into the Opposition. During the remainder of Jackson’s Administration, the most bitter and persistent of his foes were to be men, once Democrats, who had left the party because Jackson was prepared to preserve the Union with the sword. Calhoun and Preston, McDuffie and Poindexter, Leigh and Tyler—these were to crowd Clay for the leadership of the party that now prepared to enter the lists against Jackson and his Administration, flying the flag, and posing as the real friends of the Republic and the Constitution. If they had been free with their characterizations of Jackson during the Nullification fight as “tyrant,” “despot,” “autocrat,” they were to use the epithets more frequently in opposing him upon the Bank. If during this latter struggle they were to speak with almost convincing eloquence of the destruction of free institutions, they had learned the language when calling upon the people to defend their liberties against the author of the Nullification Proclamation. Out of this alliance, for which Clay had so cunningly planned, was to come a party to oppose the Democratic Party with indifferent success for twenty-two years; and, strangely enough, the only one of its leaders to become a beneficiary of the unholy alliance was John Tyler, who was to reach the White House. Poinsett, after the Nullification fight, retired to his rice plantation, where he lived with his books and enjoying the society of cultivated men and women, until called by Van Buren to enter his Cabinet. Serving throughout the Administration, he returned, at the expiration of his term, to his plantation, where he died ten years before the attack on Sumter.
The passage of the two important measures was not, however, to end the drama of the session—one of the most dramatic in American history. It was on the last night that Jackson, finding many of his friends had left the Capitol, “pocketed” Clay’s Land Bill and his own veto. Naturally enough the session ended in bitter partisan wrangles and with much bad blood on both sides. Uproarious shouts of derision greeted the customary resolution of thanks to the Speaker. Many members were in a state of hopeless drunkenness. It was five o’clock in the morning when Adams invited Edward Everett to ride home with him. The drowsy driver touched the horses, and over the frozen ruts of the Avenue, the carriage jolted homeward. Almost immediately the driver was asleep, and the carriage, striking a rut in front of Gadsby’s, the sleepy statesmen narrowly escaped a plunge into the snow. Soon, however, they reached the “macadamized part of the Avenue,” without more mishaps; and having left Everett at his lodgings, Adams alighted and walked to his own home, with the thermometer registering six below zero. Thus the last figure of that historic and bitter session of whom we catch a glimpse is that of the short, blear-eyed ex-President, trudging homeward through the dark, ill-paved Washington streets at five o’clock on a frigid morning.[609]
CHAPTER XI
JACKSON VS. BIDDLE
I
Congress adjourned two days before the second inauguration of Jackson, which lacked the spectacular features of the first. His brief inaugural address revealed absolute confidence in the approval of the people. There was nothing on the surface to warn of his purpose to continue an aggressive war upon the Bank. The transfer of Livingston from the State Department to the Legation in Paris necessitated a reorganization of the Cabinet. Louis McLane, unsympathetic toward the President’s Bank policy, was moved from the Treasury to the State Department. This left the secretaryship of the Treasury vacant, and it was of the highest importance that it be filled by one in complete harmony with the Executive plans.
The choice finally fell on William J. Duane of Philadelphia, variously described as “a distinguished lawyer” and as “the bottom of the Philadelphia bar.” His selection had been recommended by Van Buren[610] and urged by McLane, who was Van Buren’s intimate at the time.[611] He was at least known to Jackson as the son of the fighting editor of the “Aurora,” which had led the fight against the Alien and Sedition Laws.[612] Assuming in the son the militant qualities of the father, and actuated partly, perhaps, by the thought that the appointment would strengthen the Administration in its fight upon the Bank, Duane was pressed to enter the Cabinet, and consented. The personality and character of Duane are dim on the page of history. The Democratic press was apparently hard put to explain the appointment. The “Harrisburg Chronicle” described him as possessing “a well disciplined mind, severe habits of business, which, combined with sound Democratic principles and unbending integrity, are the highest recommendations for office in a free popular government.” Thomas Ritchie, of the “Richmond Enquirer,” who made a more studied effort, feared that the appointment would “scarcely be hailed with the feeling of approbation which it so richly deserves.” But Duane understood “the character of the Bank of the United States—its designs and dangers,” and “on that cardinal subject we have no doubt he will deserve and command the confidence of the friends of the Constitution.” The “Pennsylvanian” informed the National Democracy that “Stephen Gerard saw and appreciated his talents,” and that he was “one of the most sagacious men of the age.”[613] It was only after his break with Jackson that the champions of the Bank discovered his many virtues, and Administration circles his utter insignificance. One of Jackson’s enemies, in berating him, referred to Duane as “that other darling whom you fished up from the desk of a dead miser, and the bottom of the Philadelphia bar.”[614] At first, however, Jackson was much impressed with his discovery, and frequently referred to him as “a chip of the old block, sir.”