[55]. There is, perhaps, no other of the writings of Hamilton which more strikingly exhibits his marvellous powers, the perspicuity of his style, and his faculty of illustrating an intricate subject, than this report. When he made it he was at the age of thirty-three. It reads as if he had passed a long life in some country where banks had been established for centuries, and in some official connection with them, or in mercantile pursuits that had brought him into daily experience of their operations; yet he had never been out of the United States since he came from the Island of St. Christopher, at the age of fifteen; there had been but three banks in this country when he wrote this report; and every part of his life that had not been passed in the army, in Congress, or in the proceedings to form and establish the Constitution of the United States, had been employed in the practice of the law. This master-piece of exposition may be read with delight by any person of taste, such are the grace, precision, force and completeness with which he handles his subject. We need not wonder that it carried conviction among the members of the body to which it was addressed.
[56]. Works of Thomas Jefferson.
[57]. See the history of the various bills for creating a national bank stated more in detail in the Life of Mr. Webster, by the present writer, vol. I.
[58]. McCullough vs. the State of Maryland, 4 Wheaton’s R. 316.
[59]. At the time of the election of Mr. Van Buren, the whole number of electoral votes was 294, a majority being 148. There was no choice of a Vice President by the electoral colleges. Richard M. Johnson, of Kentucky, received 147 votes, and was afterwards elected Vice President by the Senate. General Harrison, the leading Whig candidate for the Presidency, received the electoral votes of Vermont, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana, seventy-three in all. The fourteen votes of Massachusetts were given to Mr. Webster. Hugh L. White, of Tennessee, received the votes of Tennessee and of Georgia, twenty-six in all. The votes of South Carolina, eleven, were given to W. P. Mangum, of North Carolina. It is apparent, therefore, that at this time the Whigs, if we comprehend in that term all the opponents of the Democratic party, were in a decided minority in the country at large. This was partly because their leading candidate was far inferior to the important men of the opposition; but it was chiefly because the great States of New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia still adhered to the financial and other measures of General Jackson, and because so many of the smaller States were still indisposed to return to the policy of a national bank.
[60]. The persons here referred to as “Conservatives,” were a class of Democrats or Republicans, who stood aloof for a time from their party.
[61]. Subsequent generations will need a key to the “log cabin” and the barrel of “hard cider,” the shouts of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” the long processions of trades, the enormous multitudes that gathered at the great open-air meetings. Omnia quæ vidi, the writer might say, and he might add with a variation, quorum pars minima fui.
[62]. The sixty electoral votes obtained by Mr. Van Buren were given by the States of New Hampshire, Virginia, South Carolina, Illinois, Alabama, Missouri and Arkansas.
[63]. In a letter from one of his friends, which lies before me, written at the time of his re-election, it is said that he was the first person who had been elected a second time to the Senate of the United States by the legislature of Pennsylvania.
[64]. April 4th, 1841.