Strangely enough, so reliable an historian as McMaster has described these elections as a triumph of the Whigs. Such was not the interpretation of the Whigs themselves. Hone thought that they were “badly beaten—worse than the least sanguine of us expected.”[772] Webster accepted the verdict as final, and, much to the distress and indignation of Biddle, announced that he was through. But the most conclusive evidence of the contemporary opinion of the Whigs comes from Thurlow Weed, the sagacious Whig journalist of the “Albany Journal.” More prescient than most of the Whig leaders of the time, he had foreseen the inevitable result of an attempt to win upon the Bank issue. Quite early, when Webster’s keynote speech on the Bank, delivered at a mass meeting in Boston, was sent for publication to all the party papers, the copy that reached Weed never found its way into the “Albany Journal.”[773] And immediately after the election in 1834, he editorially expressed the feeling which appears to have taken possession of the party generally. “There is one cause,” he wrote, “for congratulations, connected with the recent election, in which even we participate. It has terminated the United States Bank war.... We have from the beginning deprecated the successive conflicts in defense of the Bank.... But we have gone with our friends through these three campaigns, under a strong and settled conviction that in every issue to be tried by the people to which the Bank was a party, we must be beaten. After struggling along from year to year with a doomed Bank upon our shoulders, both the Bank and our party are finally overwhelmed.[774]” Nor is it surprising that Clay, whose selfishness had forced Biddle into making the recharter a campaign issue, was glad to dump the doomed Bank from his shoulders. It is impossible to follow his course, pointing as every act does to a purely party purpose, without arriving at the conviction that he really cared little about the institution on Chestnut Street. As the fight became more hopeless, he found the importunities of Biddle more irksome. Viewed purely as a political or party contest, the clever politicians who dominated the Jacksonian camp had shown far more prescience and sagacity than the wisest of the Whigs. Amos Kendall had a better understanding of the psychology of the masses than Clay or Webster. Among the Whigs, Weed alone saw the end from the beginning. The attempt to arouse the people in behalf of a great moneyed institution against the attacks of a popular hero was in itself a grotesque and ghastly absurdity. But after the decision had been made to undertake it, the methods of Biddle and his political allies made defeat a certainty. Frank Blair, of the “Globe,” was evidently sincere in his assertion that had he been permitted to dictate the policy of the Whigs, he could not have hit upon a plan more satisfactory to the Democrats.
That Jackson knew little of banking and advanced some strange theories in the course of the fight; that he resorted to methods of violence in some instances; and that he fought to kill, rather than to reform, may be admitted. But the very nature of the fight he waged compelled the Bank to disclose its tremendous power over the prosperity of the people. No matter what they may have thought in the beginning, no one could have doubted toward the end that the Bank did have the power to precipitate panics, to punish the people for legislation it resented, to dominate, in the end, the legislation of the future by the threat of reprisal upon the business of the Nation. No one, in 1834, doubted that the National Bank, in the hands of a man like Biddle domineering over pliant directors, and assuming dictatorial authority over the members of Congress, possessed powers incompatible with the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people. From that day on, the Bank has had its apologists among historians, and Jackson has been excoriated as an ignorant usurper, but there has never been a time since when the American people would have tolerated a return to the system that was destroyed. Through several years the country was to be disturbed by the sometimes stumbling processes of transition from the old to the new system, but the Bank fight ended with the verdict of the polls in 1834. Only the censure of the Senate remained to poison the mind of the iron man in the White House. The Bank lingered on, a little while, under the laws of Pennsylvania, and then crashed to the earth, ruining many of its supporters.[775] And on the banker’s death, Hone copied into his diary the comment of William Cullen Bryant in the “New York Evening Post,” that Biddle “died at his country seat where he passed the last of his days in elegant retirement, which, if justice had taken place, would have been spent in the penitentiary.”[776]
The prolonged battle has left a lasting impression upon the political life and methods of the Republic. It aroused, as never before, that class consciousness, to which politicians have ever since appealed; it gave dignity to demagogy, and made it pay. It marked the beginning of the active participation of powerful corporations, as such, in the politics of the country, witnessed the adoption of the methods of intimidation and coercion, of systematic propaganda, of the subsidization of disreputable newspapers. From that day on, the powerful corporation has been anathema to the masses, monopoly has been a red rag, and the contest between capital and labor has been a reality. If this has been unfortunate, the fault has been no less with Clay, who sought and made the issue, and with Biddle and his arrogant reliance on the power of money, than with Jackson and the Kitchen Cabinet who challenged the political pretensions of the Bank.
IV
The Whig leaders entered upon the congressional session of December in a bitter mood. Calhoun was especially vicious and in a chronic rage against the President and the Administration. The fury of the Whigs was not moderated by the fact that State Legislatures were beginning to demand the expunging from the records of the resolution of censure. Benton, in the previous session, had served notice of his intention to move to expunge, and the Kitchen Cabinet in the meanwhile had been busy in building backfires against the offending Senators among their constituents. The first State to act was Alabama. The day before Senator King presented the Alabama resolutions, during a running discussion of the revelations of mismanagement and crookedness in the Post-Office Department, Senator Preston suggested that the Senate should censure some one. Just whom he would censure was not made clear, but he did refer to the previous declaration of Jackson that he was responsible for the Executive departments. “Does any one doubt the turpitude of the Post-Office?” asked Preston. “When hardly the age of man, it is found steeped in corruption the most foul, the most melancholy. If the President is responsible, and the officers acted improperly, is this the house to present the subject? And shall we stand by without saying or doing anything in regard to the present state of things in that department?”
Calhoun was instantly on his feet. He had listened to the report on the Post-Office “with sorrow and deep mortification.” After twenty-two years of connection with the Government he was able to say that “in all that time the charges of corruption against all the departments of the Government that he had ever heard of were not equal to the disclosures here made.” In truth he thought that “the exhibition would disgrace the rottenest age of the Roman Republic.” He hoped some resolution would be presented.
This implied threat was not lost on the ever alert Benton, and on the following day he took the floor, reminded the Senate of his promise, declared that nothing less than the expurgation of the offensive censure would suffice, and served notice of his intention to present the resolution. This opened the first debate on expurgation. Clay, with a personal fling at Benton, saltily expressed the hope that before acting the Missourian would carefully examine the Constitution, and concluded that he would “oppose such a resolution at the very threshold.” Preston conceded that his party had been “beaten down,” and demanded to know whether “everything that we have done shall be expunged.” Calhoun would “like to see a resolution which proposed to repeal the journal—to repeal a fact.” If the thing could be done, “the Senate itself could be expunged,” and the Government itself was at an end. He was “anxious to see who would attempt to carry out the doctrines of the Protest of last year—doctrines as despotic as those which were held by the autocrat of all the Russias.”
To this, King took vigorous exception. The resolution of censure was not “a fact.” “The Democracy of this land has spoken and pronounced its condemnation of the proceeding.” He had hoped, when Calhoun declared on a previous occasion that he would act for the country, he would have little more to do with party, but he had since manifested a very different feeling. Stung by the taunt, Calhoun made no half-hearted denial of partisan bias. “I have no purpose to serve,” he said. “I have no desire to be here.” And then, with evident insincerity, he added, “Sir, I would not turn upon my heel to be entrusted with the management of the Government.”[777]
When, a few weeks later, the day before the expiration of the session, the discussion was renewed, Hugh Lawson White, now rapidly cooling to frigidity toward Jackson, moved to amend Benton’s resolution by striking out the word “expunge” and substituting “rescind, reverse, and to make null and void.” This incident has been given an historical importance beyond its due by many who have attributed to the motion the final break between Jackson and White. The action of the Tennessee Senator unquestionably outraged the Jacksonians, who ascribed it to hostility, but such was not the dominating motive. He took the position that he could not vote to “obliterate and deface the journal of the Senate.” Benton protested that the word “expunge” was strictly parliamentary. To his astonishment and chagrin, he discovered that White was not the only Democrat who objected to his phrasing of the resolution, as others crowded about him to urge the acceptance of the amendment. Finding himself almost deserted, he afterwards said that he “yielded a mortifying and reluctant consent.”[778] All this the proud Missourian could stand. But when Webster immediately arose, and, after sounding the pæan of triumph, moved that the resolution be laid upon the table; and after Clay and Calhoun had spoken with bitterness and contempt, the spirit of compromise died out in his heart, and he then and there promised himself to continue the battle. The debate was acrimonious in spirit, and in the midst of “great excitement.”[779] This was the preliminary battle which was to have a spectacular ending in a Jacksonian triumph a short time before the expiration of the iron man’s Presidency.