Thirty Years' View (Vol. 1 of 2) / or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850

by Thomas Hart Benton

From President Jackson, the country has first learned the true theory and practical intent of the constitution, in giving to the Executive a qualified negative on the legislative power of Congress. Far from being an odious, dangerous, or kingly prerogative, this power, as vested in the President, is nothing but a qualified copy of the famous veto power vested in the tribunes of the people among the Romans, and intended to suspend the passage of a law until the people themselves should have time to consider it. The qualified veto of the President destroys nothing; it only delays the passage of a law, and refers it to the people for their consideration and decision. It is the reference of a law, not to a committee of the House, or of the whole House, but to the committee of the whole Union. It is a recommitment of the bill to the people, for them to examine and consider; and if, upon this examination, they are content to pass it, it will pass at the next session. The delay of a few months is the only effect of a veto, in a case where the people shall ultimately approve a law; where they do not approve it, the interposition of the veto is the barrier which saves them the adoption of a law, the repeal of which might afterwards be almost impossible. The qualified negative is, therefore, a beneficent power, intended, as General Hamilton expressly declares in the 'Federalist,' to protect, first, the executive department from the encroachments of the legislative department; and, secondly, to preserve the people from hasty, dangerous, or criminal legislation on the part of their representatives. This is the design and intention of the veto power; and the fear expressed by General Hamilton was, that Presidents, so far from exercising it too often, would not exercise it as often as the safety of the people required; that they might lack the moral courage to stake themselves in opposition to a favorite measure of the majority of the two Houses of Congress; and thus deprive the people, in many instances, of their right to pass upon a bill before it becomes a final law. The cases in which President Jackson has exercised the veto power has shown the soundness of these observations. No ordinary President would have staked himself against the Bank of the United States, and the two Houses of Congress, in 1832. It required President Jackson to confront that power—to stem that torrent—to stay the progress of that charter, and to refer it to the people for their decision. His moral courage was equal to the crisis. He arrested the charter until it could go to the people, and they have arrested it for ever. Had he not done so, the charter would have become law, and its repeal almost impossible. The people of the whole Union would now have been in the condition of the people of Pennsylvania, bestrode by the monster, in daily conflict with him, and maintaining a doubtful contest for supremacy between the government of a State and the directory of a moneyed corporation.

To detail specific acts which adorn the administration of President Jackson, and illustrate the intuitive sagacity of his intellect, the firmness of his mind, his disregard of personal popularity, and his entire devotion to the public good, would be inconsistent with this rapid sketch, intended merely to present general views, and not to detail single actions, howsoever worthy they may be of a splendid page in the volume of history. But how can we pass over the great measure of the removal of the public moneys from the Bank of the United States, in the autumn of 1833? that wise, heroic, and masterly measure of prevention, which has rescued an empire from the fangs of a merciless, revengeful, greedy, insatiate, implacable, moneyed power! It is a remark for which I am indebted to the philosophic observation of my most esteemed colleague and friend (pointing to Dr. Linn), that, while it requires far greater talent to foresee an evil before it happens, and to arrest it by precautionary measures, than it requires to apply an adequate remedy to the same evil after it has happened, yet the applause bestowed by the world is always greatest in the latter case. Of this, the removal of the public moneys from the Bank of the United States is an eminent instance. The veto of 1832, which arrested the charter which Congress had granted, immediately received the applause and approbation of a majority of the Union: the removal of the deposits, which prevented the bank from forcing a recharter, was disapproved by a large majority of the country, and even of his own friends; yet the veto would have been unavailing, and the bank would inevitably have been rechartered, if the deposits had not been removed. The immense sums of public money since accumulated would have enabled the bank, if she had retained the possession of it, to have coerced a recharter. Nothing but the removal could have prevented her from extorting a recharter from the sufferings and terrors of the people. If it had not been for that measure, the previous veto would have been unavailing; the bank would have been again installed in power; and this entire federal government would have been held as an appendage to that bank; and administered according to her directions, and by her nominees. That great measure of prevention, the removal of the deposits, though feebly and faintly supported by friends at first, has expelled the bank from the field, and driven her into abeyance under a State charter. She is not dead, but, holding her capital and stockholders together under a State charter, she has taken a position to watch events, and to profit by them. The royal tiger has gone into the jungle; and, crouched on his belly, he awaits the favorable moment for emerging from his covert, and springing on the body of the unsuspicious traveller!

The Treasury order for excluding paper money from the land offices is another wise measure, originating in enlightened forecast, and preventing great mischiefs. The President foresaw the evils of suffering a thousand streams of paper money, issuing from a thousand different banks, to discharge themselves on the national domain. He foresaw that if these currents were allowed to run their course, that the public lands would be swept away, the Treasury would be filled with irredeemable paper, a vast number of banks must be broken by their folly, and the cry set up that nothing but a national bank could regulate the currency. He stopped the course of these streams of paper; and, in so doing, has saved the country from a great calamity, and excited anew the machinations of those whose schemes of gain and mischief have been disappointed; and who had counted on a new edition of panic and pressure, and again saluting Congress with the old story of confidence destroyed, currency ruined, prosperity annihilated, and distress produced, by the tyranny of one man. They began their lugubrious song; but ridicule and contempt have proved too strong for money and insolence; and the panic letter of the ex-president of the denationalized bank, after limping about for a few days, has shrunk from the lash of public scorn, and disappeared from the forum of public debate.

The difficulty with France: what an instance it presents of the superior sagacity of President Jackson over all the commonplace politicians who beset and impede his administration at home! That difficulty, inflamed and aggravated by domestic faction, wore, at one time, a portentous aspect; the skill, firmness, elevation of purpose, and manly frankness of the President, avoided the danger, accomplished the object, commanded the admiration of Europe, and retained the friendship of France. He conducted the delicate affair to a successful and mutually honorable issue. All is amicably and happily terminated, leaving not a wound, nor even a scar, behind—leaving the Frenchman and American on the ground on which they have stood for fifty years, and should for ever stand; the ground of friendship, respect, good will, and mutual wishes for the honor, happiness, and prosperity, of each other.

But why this specification? So beneficent and so glorious has been the administration of this President, that where to begin, and where to end, in the enumeration of great measures, would be the embarrassment of him who has his eulogy to make. He came into office the first of generals; he goes out the first of statesmen. His civil competitors have shared the fate of his military opponents; and Washington city has been to the American politicians who have assailed him, what New Orleans was to the British generals who attacked his lines. Repulsed! driven back! discomfited! crushed! has been the fate of all assailants, foreign and domestic, civil and military. At home and abroad, the impress of his genius and of his character is felt. He has impressed upon the age in which he lives the stamp of his arms, of his diplomacy, and of his domestic policy. In a word, so transcendent have been the merits of his administration, that they have operated a miracle upon the minds of his most inveterate opponents. He has expunged their objections to military chieftains! He has shown them that they were mistaken; that military men were not the dangerous rulers they had imagined, but safe and prosperous conductors of the vessel of state. He has changed their fear into love. With visible signs they admit their error, and, instead of deprecating, they now invoke the reign of chieftains. They labored hard to procure a military successor to the present incumbent; and if their love goes on increasing at the same rate, the republic may be put to the expense of periodical wars, to breed a perpetual succession of these chieftains to rule over them and their posterity for ever.

To drop this irony, which the inconsistency of mad opponents has provoked, and to return to the plain delineations of historical painting, the mind instinctively dwells on the vast and unprecedented popularity of this President. Great is the influence, great the power, greater than any man ever before possessed in our America, which he has acquired over the public mind. And how has he acquired it? Not by the arts of intrigue, or the juggling tricks of diplomacy; not by undermining rivals, or sacrificing public interests for the gratification of classes or individuals. But he has acquired it, first, by the exercise of an intuitive sagacity which, leaving all book learning at an immeasurable distance behind, has always enabled him to adopt the right remedy, at the right time, and to conquer soonest when the men of forms and office thought him most near to ruin and despair. Next, by a moral courage which knew no fear when the public good beckoned him to go on. Last, and chiefest, he has acquired it by an open honesty of purpose, which knew no concealments; by a straightforwardness of action, which disdained the forms of office and the arts of intrigue; by a disinterestedness of motive, which knew no selfish or sordid calculation; a devotedness of patriotism, which staked every thing personal on the issue of every measure which the public welfare required him to adopt. By these qualities, and these means, he has acquired his prodigious popularity, and his transcendent influence over the public mind; and if there are any who envy that influence and popularity, let them envy, also, and emulate, if they can, the qualities and means by which they were acquired.

Great has been the opposition to President Jackson's administration; greater, perhaps, than ever has been exhibited against any government, short of actual insurrection and forcible resistance. Revolution has been proclaimed! and every thing has been done that could be expected to produce revolution. The country has been alarmed, agitated, convulsed. From the Senate chamber to the village bar-room, from one end of the continent to the other, denunciation, agitation, excitement, has been the order of the day. For eight years the President of this republic has stood upon a volcano, vomiting fire and flames upon him, and threatening the country itself with ruin and desolation, if the people did not expel the usurper, despot, and tyrant, as he was called, from the high place to which the suffrages of millions of freemen had elevated him.

Great is the confidence which he has always reposed in the discernment and equity of the American people. I have been accustomed to see him for many years, and under many discouraging trials; but never saw him doubt, for an instant, the ultimate support of the people. It was my privilege to see him often, and during the most gloomy period of the panic conspiracy, when the whole earth seemed to be in commotion against him, and when many friends were faltering, and stout hearts were quailing, before the raging storm which bank machination, and senatorial denunciation, had conjured up to overwhelm him. I saw him in the darkest moments of this gloomy period; and never did I see his confidence in the ultimate support of his fellow-citizens forsake him for an instant. He always said the people would stand by those who stand by them; and nobly have they justified that confidence! That verdict, the voice of millions, which now demands the expurgation of that sentence, which the Senate and the bank then pronounced upon him, is the magnificent response of the people's hearts to the implicit confidence which he then reposed in them. But it was not in the people only that he had confidence; there was another, and a far higher Power, to which he constantly looked to save the country, and its defenders, from every danger; and signal events prove that he did not look to that high Power in vain.

Sir, I think it right, in approaching the termination of this great question, to present this faint and rapid sketch of the brilliant, beneficent, and glorious administration of President Jackson. It is not for me to attempt to do it justice; it is not for ordinary men to attempt its history. His military life, resplendent with dazzling events, will demand the pen of a nervous writer; his civil administration, replete with scenes which have called into action so many and such various passions of the human heart, and which has given to native sagacity so many victories over practised politicians, will require the profound, luminous, and philosophical conceptions of a Livy, a Plutarch, or a Sallust. This history is not to be written in our day. The cotemporaries of such events are not the hands to describe them. Time must first do its office—must silence the passions, remove the actors, develope consequences, and canonize all that is sacred to honor, patriotism, and glory. In after ages the historic genius of our America shall produce the writers which the subject demands—men far removed from the contests of this day, who will know how to estimate this great epoch, and how to acquire an immortality for their own names by painting, with a master's hand, the immortal events of the patriot President's life.

And now, sir, I finish the task which, three years ago, I imposed on myself. Solitary and alone, and amidst the jeers and taunts of my opponents, I put this ball in motion. The people have taken it up, and rolled it forward, and I am no longer any thing but a unit in the vast mass which now propels it. In the name of that mass I speak. I demand the execution of the edict of the people; I demand the expurgation of that sentence which the voice of a few senators, and the power of their confederate, the Bank of the United States, has caused to be placed on the journal of the Senate; and which the voice of millions of freemen has ordered to be expunged from it.