| "States' rights" and the Bank. |
The "States' rights" opposition to the Bank had been aroused more than a decade before Jackson's message of 1829. The Bank and its branches were the sole depositories of the funds of the Government. By refusing to accept on deposit the bills of Commonwealth banks which did not redeem their bills in specie on demand, the Bank could prevent the officers of the Government from accepting such bills for dues to the Government. The Bank used this power to force the Commonwealth banks to specie payment. It was one of the purposes for which Congress created the Bank. It made the Bank, however, very unpopular with the officers and stockholders of the banks chartered by the Commonwealths. These persons were, as a rule, men of influence in their respective communities, and they succeeded in persuading many of the people that the United States Bank was a centralized monopoly, and was using its powers and privileges to oppress the institutions of the Commonwealths.
In 1818 the legislatures of Ohio and Maryland imposed a heavy tax on the branches of the Bank located within their respective jurisdictions. The purpose was to drive them out. The Bank resisted payment, and was sustained by the United States courts.
| The case of Brown and Maryland. |
In the February term of 1819 the Supreme Court of the United States decided the famous case of McCulloch and Maryland, declaring the act of Congress creating the Bank constitutional, and the act of the Maryland legislature undertaking to tax it unconstitutional. Maryland submitted at once, but the officers of the government of Ohio forced their way into the branch of the Bank in that State, at Chillicothe, and took one hundred thousand dollars out of the vault, and that too in the face of an injunction issued by the United States Circuit Court. The directors sued the officers of the Commonwealth for trespass, and the Commonwealth refused the use of its jails to confine the persons arrested. At the same time the Commonwealth reduced the tax to ten thousand dollars, and refunded ninety thousand, and finally receded entirely from its unlawful demand.
This defeat of the "States' rights" attack, and the excellent management of the Bank by Langdon Cheves, and then by Nicholas Biddle, seem to have silenced the complaints against the Bank from 1823 to 1828.