| Jackson and Benton. |
After March 4th, 1829, the leadership of the party was in the hands of the President, and Benton became Jackson's lieutenant in the Senate. There had been personal feuds between the two men, but they now harmonized politically, and in no point did that harmony become more complete than in the war against the Bank.
It is probable that at the moment of his accession to power Jackson had not thought out the relation of the democratic principle to the Bank, but he undoubtedly felt it, and the feeling guided him to the position which he assumed, first toward the questions of detail in the Bank's policy and management, and then toward the general question of its existence. The controversy between his Secretaries and the Bank's officers, upon which Mr. Adams laid so much stress, probably precipitated matters, but the crisis would have developed under other circumstances had not these existed. The social and political forces at play were bound to bring it about under one issue or another. It may have astonished the politicians and statesmen of the East then, and it may astonish the casual reader of American history now, that Jackson attacked the question of the future existence of the Bank in his first annual message, but there is nothing surprising in it to the careful student of American history, who comprehends the development of the democratic spirit of the West during the third decade of the century.
| The Bank and the people. |
It is doubtful whether the President was correct in saying, as he did in his message of 1829, that a large portion of the people questioned the constitutionality and expediency of the law creating the Bank, and it is certain that the Bank was not considered by all to have failed in the establishment of a sound and uniform currency. It is far more probable that the people generally acquiesced in the decision of the Court pronouncing the Bank law constitutional, and that the majority of the people, at that moment, regarded it as good policy, and believed that the Bank had fairly fulfilled the purpose of its creation. The President was simply assuming that the people thought as he did, as democratic leaders usually do. Taken in that sense there was nothing extraordinary in what he said. He had a right to disagree in opinion with the Court, and to say so, and to make any recommendation to Congress which seemed wise to him, in regard to the re-charter of the Bank. That an expiring law is constitutional is not always a convincing argument for its re-enactment.
| The existence of the Bank made a political issue. |
The President's criticism occasioned an investigation into the principle and status of the Bank, and brought the Bank question into the politics of the day.
The committee on Finance of the Senate, and the committee on Ways and Means of the House, made reports, in March and April of 1830, vigorously defending the constitutionality, the expediency, and the management of the Bank, and demonstrating the great political and financial dangers of such a Government bank as the President suggested. The chairman of the committee on Ways and Means was, it will be remembered, Mr. McDuffie, the political economist of the slavery interest. To his mind the Bank question had evidently little connection with the slavery question.