The party battles of the Jackson period

by Claude G. Bowers

When these committees, composed of bitter enemies of the President, began to pour into the capital and knock at the White House door, they were received, at first, with urbanity and heard with patience. The committeemen, however, carried back “grossly colored” stories of the interviews, and Jackson thereafter decided to hear and dismiss them without discussion.[682] In these stories Jackson is pictured as raving and ranting, spluttering and spouting imprecations and profanity. McMaster, however, accepts as true that he received these committees “with that stately courtesy for which he was so justly distinguished,” and concludes from the evidence that he “soon began to lecture them.”[683] In these lectures Jackson is reported to have told the committees to “go to the Bank” or to “go to Biddle” for relief. No less an authority than Catterall has concluded that he was not far wrong. On one occasion he did use extreme language to a committee which implied the threat of rebellion. “If that be your game,” he exclaimed, “come with your armed Bank mercenaries, and, by the Eternal, I will hang you around the Capitol on gallows higher than Haman.”[684] There is no doubt that he did harangue the committees with bitter denunciations of “The Monster” and properly ascribed a large part of the distress to the deliberate purpose of the Bank to “discipline” the Nation. Some historians have suggested that these outbursts were staged, and it is recorded as a fact by Henry A. Wise, the brilliant Virginia Whig. “When a Bank committee would come ...” he writes, “he would lay down his pipe, rise to the full height of his stature and voice, and seem to foam at the mouth whilst declaiming vehemently against the dangers of money monopoly. The committee would retire in disgust, thinking they were leaving a mad man, and as soon as they were gone, he would resume his pipe, and, chuckling, say, ‘They thought I was mad,’ and coolly comment on the policy of never never compromising a vital issue.”[685] This interpretation of Jackson’s tempests and whirlwinds of passion, coming from a severe critic of his Bank policy, is the most dependable of all the opinions that have been expressed by friend or foe.

IX

And while the committees may have hooted the idea that the Bank was responsible for the severity and continuance of the panic, it very slowly began to dawn upon the New York merchants that possibly the “Emperor Nicholas” might be able to alleviate conditions without in the least compromising the safety of the Bank. Some of his champions were slow to realize or loath to concede this declining popularity. In February the bankers and merchants of New York appointed a committee to wait upon him and urge a suspension of the contraction, and Albert Gallatin, former Secretary of the Treasury, pointedly warned him that the committee was satisfied of his ability to grant relief, and would so report to the New York merchants. Thus cornered and threatened with the desertion of its friends, the Bank finally agreed that up to May 1st there should be no further contraction. This was a fatal concession in that it was a confession that relief had been previously deliberately denied.[686] Even such champions of the Bank as James Watson Webb found real cause for melancholy complaint in heavy losses in Bank stock, and we find him whining that he had lost all except his paper, and that other speculators, including Alexander Hamilton, Jr., had been among the victims.

Thus the drift against the Bank, which began when Governor Wolf of Pennsylvania denounced its actions in his Message to the Legislature, increased alarmingly. The fact that the Governor had been a firm supporter gave tremendous weight to his act. The friends of the institution were stunned, and, as we shall see a little later, the Governor was bitterly denounced and warmly defended in the Senate. Thus the advice of Jackson to “see Biddle,” so mirthfully related by the committees at the time, and so much ridiculed by some historians since, was demonstrating its wisdom. One month after Wolf acted, Governor Marcy of New York imitated his example with the recommendation of a State plan of relief. His proposal to issue $6,000,000 of five per cent State stock to be loaned to State banks was adopted.

The Bank, in its game of “disciplining” the people, had vastly overplayed its hand, and, by its cruel, implacable policy of ruining friends as well as foes, had begun to lose ground in the late winter and early spring. Even among the ultra-conservatives of business, the feeling was germinating that Jackson was not far wrong in the conclusion that a moneyed institution possessing the power to precipitate panics to influence governmental action, was dangerous to the peace, prosperity, and liberty of the people.

X

But the politicians in the Congress were the last to see the drift. Long after the bankers and merchants had lost interest in the fate of Biddle’s Bank, they continued their fight in its behalf throughout the most bitter congressional session the Republic had ever known. The actions of the Bank, the tumult of the market-places, the proceedings of the merchants, are all intimately interwoven with the activities of the Bank’s champions in House and Senate. There the last stand was taken, there the battle was definitely lost. And there the most dramatic feature of the fight was staged. It was at this juncture that three important figures, not hitherto intimately identified with or against the Administration, moved to the firing line. Thomas H. Benton assumed the leadership of the Jacksonian forces, and Clay’s fighters were brilliantly augmented by the advent of two Senators, William Campbell Preston of South Carolina, and Benjamin Watkins Leigh of Virginia.

The complete harmony between Benton’s views and Jackson’s actions in the Bank controversy has given an overshadowing prominence to his leadership. For thirty years he was a constructive force in legislation, associating his name with more important measures written into law than Clay, Webster, and Calhoun combined. In the Senate his faults of mannerism, his arrogance, and stupendous conceit, together with the interminable length of his speeches and his diffusive tendencies, served to overshadow his very substantial contributions to the discussions. The fact that the Chamber emptied and the galleries cleared when he arose did not disturb him in the least. He spoke from the Chamber to the country, and his carefully prepared speeches, especially during the Bank fight, were treatises intended for the education of the people. His personal life was above reproach. His austerity, his imposing dignity, discouraged attempts at intimacy in a day when men loved conviviality and were a trifle lax in their morals. He was one of the colossal figures of American politics and he never loomed larger than in his fight for Jackson.

William C. Preston, fresh from oratorical triumphs in the Nullification contest, entered the Senate at the age of thirty-eight. Few have made a more favorable début in that body. His fame as an orator had preceded him, and Clay’s plans had dedicated the panic session to perfervid oratory. It is impossible to understand, from his speeches in the “Congressional Globe,” the extravagant enthusiasm of so stern a critic as Adams. But we cannot discount the common verdict of his contemporaries who considered him one of the most consummate of orators, and “one of the greatest rhetoricians and declaimers of his generation.”[687] From another we learn that “many thought him the most finished orator the South had produced,” and that he “could arouse his audiences to enthusiasm, and then move them to tears.”[688] Not least among the truimphs of his art was his power to sway a mob in the street as well as move the case-hardened critics of the Senate house. Poet and painter, as he was, it is not surprising that in the heat of advocacy his feelings often predominated over his judgment, and his superheated imagination sometimes led him beyond the realms of reality, but these very weaknesses were to delight the enemies of the Jackson Administration, led to the daily assault by Clay. Thus, in his first year in the Senate, he took his place, far in advance of most of his colleagues, and side by side with Clay, Webster, Calhoun, and Clayton.

In addition to Preston, the Opposition was to be further strengthened by the arrival with the panic session of Leigh. Intellectually, he was one of the strongest men in a State of strong men, and at the bar he was recognized as a great constitutional and civil lawyer. As an orator, he was fluent, fiery, intense, impressive. Wise, who was himself no mean master of English, has described him as “a purist in his Anglo-Saxon,” and as having a style “equal to that of the Elizabethan age of English literature.”[689] Like Prentiss, he was a small man who loomed large when speaking, and, like him, too, he had one short leg and wore a cork on the sole of his shoe. Unlike Prentiss, he capitalized his infirmity oratorically. Wise found that, while his mannerisms were not graceful, they “always excited sympathy for his infirmity.” His voice, which was no small part of his oratorical equipment, has been described as “clear, soft, flute-like, not loud, but like murmuring music.”[690] His manner, his speaking method, his very appearance, fitted in well with Clay’s programme of dramatic, lugubrious oratory, and he at once moved to his place beside the panic orators, and played a conspicuous and theatrical part.