But in the end it was not the opposition of Democratic Senators that suddenly terminated the consideration of the Webster compromise. It was soon found that the friends of the Bank were hopelessly divided on any constructive programme. Even in the inner Bank circles there were clashing views. Biddle favored the Webster plan; Sergeant, the chief counsel, and Binney, leading spokesman in the House, preferred the Calhoun measure. Even these differences might have been reconciled but for the selfishness of Clay, who persisted in his determination to use the Bank for party purposes. “If Mr. C [Clay] and Mr. C [Calhoun] would go along with us,” Webster wrote Biddle, “we could carry the compromise bill through the Senate by a strong two thirds majority. Can you write through anybody to talk with Mr. Calhoun?”[720] In the meanwhile Calhoun was attempting the conversion of such Administration Senators as Benton and Silas Wright, without success.

While these negotiations were in progress, the fury of Clay over the independence of Webster increased in intensity, culminating in the threat that, if the New Englander failed to move to lay his own motion on the table, he would make the motion himself. Thus, one week after the delivery of his speech, Webster killed his own measure. When, with the explanation that he had been disappointed in his hopes, he made the motion to table, John Forsyth demanded the yeas and nays to show that Webster’s bill had not been killed by the Administration Senators, but by his own party friends. The roll-call showed practically all the Bank Senators voting to table, with Benton, Forsyth, White, Hill, Wright, and Grundy voting against the motion. Thus the only practical and constructive attempt made by the friends of the Bank to save the institution was slaughtered in the house of its friends.[721]

V

With the accumulating evidence of impatience in the country, Clay at length determined to bring to a vote the resolutions, submitted merely to irritate and provoke a debate that would give the panic time to act. So firmly was Clay convinced that the “disciplining” of the people was working the destruction of Jackson’s popularity, that he sought to transfer a portion of his fancied resentment to Van Buren, who was all but certain to be the Democratic nominee in 1836.[722] There has probably never been a more transparent bit of histrionics perpetrated upon a deliberative body than that of Clay in his pathetic appeal to Van Buren, seated in the chair, and with a padlock on his lips, to hasten to Jackson with a plea for the suffering people.

“To you, sir, in no unfriendly spirit, but with feelings softened and subdued by the deep distress which pervades every class of our countrymen, I make this appeal,” he exclaimed, his eyes moist with tears. “...Depict to him, if you can find language to portray, the heartrending wretchedness of thousands of the working classes cast out of employment. Tell him of the tears of helpless widows, no longer able to earn their bread, and of unclad and unfed orphans, who have been driven by this policy, out of the busy pursuits, in which, but yesterday, they were gaining an honest livelihood.... Tell him that he has been abused, deceived, betrayed by the wicked counsels of unprincipled men around him. Inform him that all efforts in Congress to alleviate or terminate the public distress are paralyzed and likely to prove totally unavailing, from his influence upon a large portion of its members who are unwilling to withdraw their support, or to take a course repugnant to his wishes and feelings. Tell him that in his bosom alone, under actual circumstances, does the power reside to relieve the country; and that unless he opens it to conviction, and corrects the errors of his Administration, no human imagination can conceive, and no human tongue can express the awful consequences which may follow.”

With this piece of play-acting, Clay, looking as much distressed as one of his petitioners, sank exhausted in his seat. Throughout the ludicrous scene, Van Buren “maintained the utmost decorum of countenance, looking respectfully and even innocently at the speaker all the while as if treasuring up every word he said to be repeated to the President.”[723] But all the while the more astute Red Fox was thinking that the speech “would tend to strengthen greatly the attachment of his friends; would warm up their sympathies in his behalf and concentrate their regard.”[724] With the eyes of all upon him—and the Senate had been really affected by Clay’s voice and manner—Van Buren called a Senator to the chair, placidly descended to the floor as though he were not the object of interest, deliberately walked to Clay’s seat, and, in his most courtly manner, and with his most courtly bow, asked for a pinch of his snuff. The startled orator gave him his snuffbox. Van Buren took a pinch, applied it to his nostrils, returned the box, bowed again, and resumed the chair as though nothing had happened. And the Senate smiled. Clay’s appeal had hovered dangerously near the ridiculous, and Van Buren pushed it over. No single incident so well illustrates the political purpose of Clay’s activities on the removal of the deposits.

But even panics and politics cannot go on forever, and the discussion on the Clay resolutions had covered “the longest period which had been occupied in a single debate in either House of Congress since the organization of the Government.”[725] Thus, on March 27th the Senate, by a vote of 26 to 20, placed the stigma of a censure upon the action of the President.

Jackson was now to have his inning.

VI

With mass meetings being organized against him in all sections, with the capital crowded with hostile delegations, and with the Senators thundering their extravagant philippics at the tyrant responsible for the widows’ and the orphans’ woes, Jackson remained serene and unafraid.[726] But with the adoption of the resolutions of censure, he determined to strike back in such a way as effectively to reach the people. There were men in those days who thought that a senatorial censure would wreck any reputation. They had not yet sensed the spirit of the times. Three weeks after the Senate acted, Major Donelson appeared in the Chamber with the famous Protest. Nothing could have been more merciless than the cold logic with which the iron man pounded the resolutions of condemnation; nothing more biting than his reference to those Senators supporting them, who had thus “deliberately disregarded the recorded opinion of their States.” He solemnly protested “against the proceedings ... as unauthorized by the Constitution, contrary to the spirit and to several of its express provisions, subversive of that distribution of powers of government which it has ordained and established, destructive of the checks and safeguards by which those powers were intended on the one hand to be controlled and on the other to be protected, and calculated, by their immediate and collateral effects, by their character and tendency, to concentrate in the hands of a body, not directly amenable to the people, a degree of influence and power dangerous to their liberties and fatal to the Constitution of their choice.”