"Mr. President, I have some knowledge of history, and some acquaintance with the dangers which nations have encountered, and from which heroes and statesmen have saved them. I have read much of ancient and modern history, and nowhere have I found a parallel to the services rendered by President Jackson in crushing the conspiracy of the Bank, but in the labors of the Roman Consul in crushing the conspiracy of Catiline. The two conspiracies were identical in their objects; both directed against the government, and the property of the country. Cicero extinguished the Catilinarean conspiracy, and saved Rome; President Jackson defeated the conspiracy of the Bank, and saved our America. Their heroic service was the same, and their fates have been strangely alike. Cicero was condemned for violating the laws and the constitution; so has been President Jackson. The consul was refused a hearing in his own defence: so has been President Jackson. The life of Cicero was attempted by two assassins; twice was the murderous pistol levelled at our President. All Italy, the whole Roman world, bore Cicero to the Capitol, and tore the sentence of the consul's condemnation from the fasti of the republic: a million of Americans, fathers and heads of families, now demand the expurgation of the sentence against the President. Cicero, followed by all that was virtuous in Rome, repaired to the temple of the tutelary gods, and swore upon the altar that he had saved his country: President Jackson, in the temple of the living God, might take the same oath, and find its response in the hearts of millions. Nor shall the parallel stop here; but after times, and remote posterities shall render the same honors to each. Two thousand years have passed, and the great actions of the consul are fresh and green in history. The school-boy learns them; the patriot studies them; the statesman applies them: so shall it be with our patriot President. Two thousand years hence,—ten thousand,—nay, while time itself shall last, for who can contemplate the time when the memory of this republic shall be lost? while time itself shall last, the name and fame of Jackson shall remain and flourish; and this last great act by which he saved the government from subversion, and property from revolution, shall stand forth as the seal and crown of his heroic services. And if any thing that I myself may do or say, shall survive the brief hour in which I live, it will be the part which I have taken, and the efforts which I have made, to sustain and defend the great defender of his country.
"Mr. President, I have now finished the view which an imperious sense of duty has required me to take of this subject. I trust that I have proceeded upon proofs and facts, and have left nothing unsustained which I feel it to be my duty to advance. It is not my design to repeat, or to recapitulate; but there is one further and vital consideration which demands the notice of a remark, and which I should be faithless to the genius of our government, if I should pretermit. It is known, sir, that ambition for office is the bane of free States, and the contentions of rivals the destruction of their country. These contentions lead to every species of injustice, and to every variety of violence, and all cloaked with the pretext of the public good. Civil wars and banishment at Rome; civil wars, and the ostracism at Athens; bills of attainder, star-chamber prosecutions, and impeachments In England; all to get rid of some envied, or hated rival, and all pretexted with the public good: such has been the history of free States for two thousand years. The wise men who framed our constitution were well aware of all this danger and all this mischief, and took effectual care, as they thought, to guard against it. Banishment, the ostracism, the star-chamber prosecutions, bills of attainder, all those summary and violent modes of hunting down a rival, which deprive the victim of defence by depriving him of the intervention of an accusing body to stand between the accuser and the trying body; all these are proscribed by the genius of our constitution. Impeachments alone are permitted; and these would most usually occur for political offences, and be of a character to enlist the passions of many, and to agitate the country. An effectual guard, it was supposed, was provided against the abuse of the impeachment power, first, by requiring a charge to be preferred by the House of Representatives, as the grand Inquest of the nation; and next, in confining the trial to the Senate, and requiring a majority of two-thirds to convict. The gravity, the dignity, the age of the senators, and the great and various powers with which they were invested—greater and more various than are united in the same persons under any other constitutional government upon earth—these were supposed to make the Senate a safe depository for the impeachment power; and if the plan of the constitution is followed out it must be admitted to be so. But if a public officer can be arraigned by his rivals before the Senate for impeachable offences without the intervention of the House of Representatives, and if he can be pronounced guilty by a simple majority, instead of a majority of two-thirds, then has the whole frame of our government miscarried, and the door left wide open to the greatest mischief which has ever afflicted the people of free States. Then can rivals and competitors go on to do what it was intended they should never do; accuse, denounce, condemn, and hunt down each other! Great has been the weight of the American Senate. Time was when its rejections for office were fatal to character; time is when its rejections are rather passports to public favor. Why this sad and ominous decline? Let no one deceive himself. Public opinion is the arbiter of character in our enlightened day; it is the Areopagus from which there is no appeal! That arbiter has pronounced against the Senate. It has sustained the President, and condemned the Senate. If it had sustained the Senate, the President must have been ruined! as it has not, the Senate must be ruined, if it perseveres in its course, and goes on to brave public opinion!—as an institution, it must be ruined!"
CHAPTER CXLII.
DISTRIBUTION OF THE LAND REVENUE.
"The great loss of the bank has been in the depreciation of the securities; and the only way to regain a capital is to restore their value. A large portion of them consists of State stocks, which are so far below their intrinsic worth that the present prices could not have been anticipated by any reasonable man. No doubt can be entertained of their ultimate payment. The States themselves, unaided, can satisfy every claim against them; they will do it speedily, if Congress adopt the measures contemplated for their relief. A division of the public lands among the States, which would enable them all to pay their debts—or a pledge of the proceeds of sales for that purpose—would be abundant security. Either of these acts would inspire confidence, and enhance the value of all kinds of property." This paragraph appeared in the Philadelphia National Gazette, was attributed to Mr. Biddle, President of the Bank of the United States; and connects that institution with all the plans for distributing the public land money among the States, either in the shape of a direct distribution, or in the disguise of a deposit of the surplus revenue; and this for the purpose of enhancing the value of the State stocks held by it. That institution was known to have interfered in the federal legislation, to promote or to baffle the passage of laws, as deemed to be favorable or otherwise to her interests; and this resort to the land revenue through an act of Congress was an eminent instance of the spirit of interference. This distribution had become, very nearly, a party measure; and of the party of which the bank was a member, and Mr. Clay the chief. He was the author of the scheme—had introduced it at several sessions—and now renewed it. Mr. Webster also made a proposition to the same effect at this session. It was the summer of the presidential election; and great calculations were made by the party which favored the distribution upon its effect in adding to their popularity. Mr. Clay limited his plan of distribution to five years; but the limitation was justly considered as nothing—as a mere means of beginning the system of these distributions—which once began, would go on of themselves, while our presidential elections continued, and any thing to divide could be found in the treasury. Mr. Benton opposed the whole scheme, and confronted it with a proposition to devote the surplus revenue to the purposes of national defence; thereby making an issue, as he declared, between the plunder of the country and the defence of the country. He introduced an antagonistic bill, as he termed it, devoting the surplus moneys to the public defences; and showing by reports from the war and navy departments that seven millions a year for fifteen years would be required for the completion of the naval defences, and thirty millions to complete the military defences; of which nine millions per annum could be beneficially expended; and then went on to say:
"That the reports from which he had read, taken together, presented a complete system of preparation for the national defence; every arm and branch of defence was to be provided for; an increase of the navy, including steamships; appropriate fortifications, including steam batteries; armories, foundries, arsenals, with ample supplies of arms and munitions of war; an increase of troops for the West and Northwest; a line of posts and a military road from the Red River to the Wisconsin, in the rear of the settlements, and mounted dragoons to scour the country; every thing was considered; all was reduced to system, and a general, adequate, and appropriate plan of national defence was presented, sufficient to absorb all the surplus revenue, and wanting nothing but the vote of Congress to carry it into effect. In this great system of national defence the whole Union was equally interested; for the country, in all that concerned its defences, was but a unit, and every section was interested in the defence of every other section, and every individual citizen was interested in the defence of the whole population. It was in vain to say that the navy was on the sea, and the fortifications on the seaboard, and that the citizens in the interior States, or in the valley of the Mississippi, had no interest in these remote defences. Such an idea was mistaken and delusive. The inhabitant of Missouri and of Indiana had a direct interest in keeping open the mouths of the rivers, defending the seaport towns, and preserving a naval force that would protect the produce of his labor in crossing the ocean, and arriving safely in foreign markets. All the forts at the mouth of the Mississippi were just as much for the benefit of the western States, as if those States were down at the mouth of that river. So of all the forts on the Gulf of Mexico. Five forts are completed in the delta of the Mississippi; two are completed on the Florida or Alabama coast; and seven or eight more are projected; all calculated to give security to western commerce in passing through the Gulf of Mexico. Much had been done for that frontier, but more remained to be done; and among the great works contemplated in that quarter were large establishments at Pensacola, Key West, or the Dry Tortugas. Large military and naval stations were contemplated at these points, and no expenditure or preparations could exceed in amount the magnitude of the interests to be protected. On the Atlantic board the commerce of the States found its way to the ocean through many outlets, from Maine to Florida; in the West, on the contrary, the whole commerce of the valley of the Mississippi, all that of the Alabama, of western Florida, and some part of Georgia, passes through a single outlet, and reaches the ocean by passing between Key West and Cuba. Here, then, is an immense commerce collected into one channel, compressed into one line, and passing, as it were, through one gate. This gives to Key West and the Dry Tortugas an importance hardly possessed by any point on the globe; for, besides commanding the commerce of the entire West, it will also command that of Mexico, of the West Indies, of the Caribbean sea, and of South America down to the middle of that continent at its most eastern projection, Cape Roque. To understand the cause of all this (Mr. B. said), it was necessary to look to the trade winds, which, blowing across the Atlantic between the tropics, strike the South American continent at Cape Roque, follow the retreating coast of that continent up to the Caribbean sea, and to the Gulf of Mexico, creating the gulf stream as they go, and by the combined effect of a current in the air and in the water, sweeping all vessels from this side Cape Roque into its stream, carrying them round west of Cuba and bringing them out between Key West and the Havana. These two positions, then, constitute the gate through which every thing must pass that comes from the valley of the Mississippi, from Mexico, and from South America as low down as Cape Roque. As the masters of the Mississippi, we should be able to predominate in the Gulf of Mexico; and, to do so, we must have great establishments at Key West and Pensacola. Such establishments are now proposed; and every citizen of the West should look upon them as the guardians of his own immediate interests, the indispensable safeguard to his own commerce; and to him the highest, most sacred, and most beneficial object to which surplus revenue could be applied. The Gulf of Mexico should be considered as the estuary of the Mississippi. A naval and military supremacy should be established in that gulf, cost what it might; for without that supremacy the commerce of the entire West would lie at the mercy of the fleets and privateers of inimical powers.
"Mr. B. returned to the immediate object of his remarks—to the object of showing that the defences of the country would absorb every surplus dollar that would ever be found in the treasury. He recapitulated the aggregates of those heads of expenditure; for the navy, about forty millions of dollars, embracing the increase of the navy, navy yards, ordnance, and repairs of vessels for a series of years; for fortifications, about thirty millions, reported by the engineer department; and which sum, after reducing the size of some of the largest class of forts, not yet commenced, would still be large enough, with the sum reported by the ordnance department, amounting to near thirty millions, to make a totality not much less than one hundred millions; and far more than sufficient to swallow up all the surpluses which will ever be found to exist in the treasury. Even after deducting much from these estimates, the remainder will still go beyond any surplus that will actually be found. Every person knows that the present year is no criterion for estimating the revenue; excess of paper issues has inflated all business, and led to excess in all branches of the revenue; next year it will be down, and soon fall as much below the usual level as it now is above it. More than that; what is now called a surplus in the treasury is no surplus, but a mere accumulation for want of passing the appropriation bills. The whole of it is pledged to the bills which are piled upon our tables, and which we cannot get passed; for the opposition is strong enough to arrest the appropriations, to dam up the money in the treasury; and then call that a surplus which would now be in a course of expenditure, if the necessary appropriation bills could be passed.
"The public defences will require near one hundred millions of dollars; the annual amount required for these defences alone amount to thirteen or fourteen millions. The engineer department answers explicitly that it can beneficially expend six millions of dollars annually; the ordnance that it can beneficially expend three millions; the navy that it can beneficially expend several millions; and all this for a series of years. This distribution bill has five years to run, and in that time, if the money is applied to defence instead of distribution, the great work of national defence will be so far completed as to place the United States in condition to cause her rights and her interests, her flag and her soil, to be honored and respected by the whole world."
The bill was passed in the Senate, though by a vote somewhat close—25 to 20. The yeas were:
Messrs. Black, Buchanan, Clay, Clayton, Crittenden, Davis, Ewing of Ohio, Goldsborough, Hendricks, Kent, Knight, Leigh, McKean, Mangum, Naudain, Nicholas, Porter, Prentiss, Preston, Robbins, Southard, Swift, Tomlinson, Webster White.
Nays.—Messrs. Benton, Calhoun, Cuthbert, Ewing of Illinois, Grundy, Hill, Hubbard, King of Alabama, King of Georgia, Linn, Moore, Morris, Niles, Rives, Robinson, Ruggles, Shepley, Tallmadge, Walker, Wright.