Basing themselves chiefly upon an individual report made by Mr. John Quincy Adams on May 14th, 1832, in regard to the condition of the Bank, and upon documents referred to in that report, recent historians attribute President Jackson's first attack upon the United States Bank to a personal feud between his friends in New Hampshire and Mr. Webster's friends there.
Senator Levi Woodbury, of New Hampshire, the leader of the Jackson party in New Hampshire, endeavored, in the summer of 1829, to have Jeremiah Mason, Mr. Webster's great friend, removed from the presidency of the branch of the United States Bank at Portsmouth, N. H., and Isaac Hill, another New Hampshire friend of the President, attempted at the same time to have the United States pension agency, connected with the Portsmouth branch of the United States Bank, removed to Concord, and connected with a little bank there of which Hill had been president, and in which he was still interested. Jackson's Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Ingham, asked Mr. Biddle, the president of the United States Bank, to have Mason removed, and his Secretary of War, Mr. Eaton, ordered Mason to transfer the pension agency to Hill's bank in Concord. Mr. Biddle looked into the matter, and being convinced that the whole thing was a political scheme, refused to have Mason removed from office, and prevented the execution of Eaton's order in regard to the transfer of the pension agency.
These are, very briefly stated, the facts upon which some of the American historians found the theory that Jackson, entertaining no opposition in principle to the Bank at the beginning of his Administration, became so enraged at its managers, because of their success in these petty bouts with his Cabinet officers, that he resolved upon its destruction. The treatment which Adams and Clay had received at the hands of Jackson and his friends from 1824 onward had led them to feel that Jackson's whole nature was full of personal rancor, and that he could see nothing except from a personal point of view. There is little doubt that this feeling largely determined Adams' ideas of Jackson's attitude in the Bank question, and that the historians have written the account of the Bank controversy under the influence of Adams' representations.
| Jackson's opposition in principle to the Bank. |
There is undoubtedly some truth in this view of the matter, but it is far from being the whole truth. It is not even that part of the truth which is most valuable to the student of American history. There was an opposition in principle to the United States Bank, as well as a personal conflict between leaders in regard to it. That opposition in principle was the opposition of "States' rights" democracy to centralized privilege.
In all political systems there is a political science as well as a public, or constitutional, law. The political science of a state is based chiefly upon the actual social conditions and relations of its population, and its public or constitutional law ought to be based upon its political science. In fact, however, we seldom see social conditions, political theory, and public law in a state of perfect harmony. It is the prime problem of political and legal progress to work out this great result.
| The political science of the Constitution of 1787. Western Democracy. The West and the "money power" of the East. |
The political science or theory upon which the Constitution of 1787 was founded was thoroughly English. It recognized social distinctions, and its most fundamental principle was compromise between conflicting interests. It was substantially in harmony with social conditions, on the one side, and was fairly expressed through the Constitution of 1787, on the other. Without the interposition of other forces it would have made out of the United States a new England. But French political science had already gained a foothold in the country. It was contained in the Declaration of Independence, and its prime postulate was "the equality of all men." It did not then comport with the social condition of the country, and the Constitution did not make its principle into positive law. It was, therefore, at the beginning, abstract, and theoretical. The man who taught it, however, became President, and the party which embraced it became the governing party. But their practice was not made consistent with their theory, and could not be, so long as the social conditions of the country contradicted their theory. It was the settlement of the country west of the Alleghanies which first created social conditions in harmony with their theory. The distinction between master and slave was not permitted to enter the larger portion of it; the distinction between the rich and the poor could not at first exist, or be, for many years, developed; and the distinction between the cultivated and the ignorant was likewise obliged to remain long in abeyance; while the dangers and the hardships of frontier life developed, speedily, a strong sense of self-reliance and self-esteem. General equality and practical self-help were the first social results of the levelling experiences of the camp, the wilderness, and the prairie. With such influences operating upon such characters as undertook the making of the West, the most adventurous part of the population of the East, that bold and boastful Democracy was produced, which began after 1820 to make itself powerfully felt in modifying the original conservative principles of the institutions of the country. Connect with these new social conditions, and the political principles evolved out of them, the fact that the West, like all new countries, had little money or capital, and was a constant borrower from the East, in order to furnish itself with roads, implements, means of transportation, and manufactured articles, and we have the forces and the interests which were bound, under the first general financial pressure, to make an onslaught upon the "money power and privilege" of the East, as embodied in the United States Bank.