A Biography of Henry Clay, the Senator from Kentucky / Containing Also, a Complete Report of All His Speeches; Selections From His Private Correspondence; Eulogies in the Senate and House; and a Poem, by George D. Prentice, Esq.

by Unknown

To complete this executive usurpation, one further object remained. By the constitution, the command of the army and the navy is conferred on the president. If he could unite the purse with the sword, nothing would be left to gratify the insatiable thirst for power. In 1838 the president seized the treasury of the United States, and from that day to this, it has continued substantially under his control. The seizure was effected by the removal of one secretary of the treasury, understood to be opposed to the measure, and by the dismissal of another, who refused to violate the law of the land upon the orders of the president.

It is, indeed, said, that not a dollar in the treasury can be touched without a previous appropriation by law, nor drawn out of thetreasury, without the concurrence and signature of the secretary, the treasurer, the register, and the comptroller. But are not all these pretended securities idle and unavailing forms? We have seen, that by the operation of the irresponsible power of dismission, all those officers are reduced to mere automata, absolutely subjected to the will of the president. What resistance would any of them make, with the penalty of dismission suspended over their heads, to any orders of the president, to pour out the treasure of the United States, whether an act of appropriation existed or not? Do not mock us with the vain assurance of the honor and probity of a president, nor remind us of the confidence which we ought to repose in his imagined virtues. The pervading principles of our system of governments—of all free government—is not merely the possibility, but the absolute certainty of infidelity and treachery, with even the highest functionary of the state; and hence all the restrictions, securities, and guarantees, which the wisdom of our ancestors or the sad experience of history had inculcated, have been devised and thrown around the chief magistrate.

Here, friends and fellow-citizens, let us pause and contemplate this stupendous structure of executive machinery and despotism, which has been reared in our young republic. The executive branch of the government is a unit; throughout all its arteries and veins, there is to be but one heart, one head, one will. The number of the subordinate executive officers and dependents in the United States has been estimated, in an official report, founded on public documents, made by a senator from South Carolina, (Mr. Calhoun,) at one hundred thousand. Whatever it may be, all of them, wherever they are situated, are bound implicitly to obey the orders of the president. And absolute obedience to his will is secured and enforced, by the power of dismissing them, at his pleasure, from their respective places. To make this terrible power of dismission more certain and efficacious, its exercise is covered up in mysterious secrecy, without exposure, without the smallest responsibility. The constitution and laws of the United States are to be executed in the sense in which the president understands them, although that sense may be at variance with the understanding of every other man in the United States. It follows, as a necessary consequence, from the principles deduced by the president from the constitutional injunction as to the execution of the laws, that, if an act of congress be passed, in his opinion, contrary to the constitution, or if a decision be pronounced by the courts, in his opinion, contrary to the constitution or the laws, that act or that decision the president is not obliged to enforce, and he could not cause it to be enforced, without a violation, as is pretended, of his official oath. Candor requires the admission that the principle has not yet been pushed in practice in these cases; but it manifestly comprehends them; and who doubts that, if thespirit of usurpation is not arrested and rebuked, they will be finally reached? The march of power is ever onward. As times and seasons admonished, it openly and boldly, in broad day, makes its progress; or, if alarm be excited by the enormity of its pretensions, it silently and secretly, in the dark of the night, steals its devious way. It now storms and mounts the ramparts of the fortress of liberty; it now saps and undermines its foundations. Finally, the command of the army and navy being already in the president, and having acquired a perfect control over the treasury of the United States, he has consummated that frightful union of purse and sword, so long, so much, so earnestly deprecated by all true lovers of civil liberty. And our present chief magistrate stands solemnly and voluntarily pledged, in the face of the whole world, to follow in the footsteps, and carry out the measures and the principles, of his illustrious predecessor!

The sum of the whole is, that there is but one power, one control, one will, in the state. All is concentrated in the president. He directs, orders, commands, the whole machinery of the state. Through the official agencies, scattered throughout the land, and absolutely subjected to his will, he executes, according to his pleasure or caprice, the whole power of the commonwealth, which has been absorbed and engrossed by him. And one sole will predominates in, and animates the whole of, this vast community. If this be not practical despotism, I am incapable of conceiving or defining it. Names are nothing. The existence or non-existence of arbitrary government does not depend upon the title or denomination bestowed on the chief of the state, but upon the quantum of power which he possesses and wields. Autocrat, sultan, emperor, dictator, king, doge, president, are all mere names, in which the power respectively possessed by them is not to be found, but is to be looked for in the constitution, or the established usages and practices, of the several states which they govern and control. If the autocrat of Russia were called president of all the Russias, the actual power remaining unchanged, his authority, under his new denomination, would continue undiminished; and if the president of the United States were to receive the title of autocrat of the United States, the amount of his authority would not be increased, without an alteration of the constitution.

General Jackson was a bold and fearless reaper, carrying a wide row, but he did not gather the whole harvest; he left some gleanings to his faithful successor, and he seems resolved to sweep clean the field of power. The duty of inculcating on the official corps the active exertion of their personal and official influence, was left by him to be enforced by Mr. Van Buren, in all popular elections. It was not sufficient that the official corps was bound implicitly to obey the will of the president. It was not sufficient that this obedience was coerced by the tremendous power ofdismission. It soon became apparent, that this corps might be beneficially employed, to promote, in other matters than the business of their offices, the views and interest of the president and his party. They are far more efficient than any standing army of equal numbers. A standing army would be separated, and stand out from the people, would be an object of jealousy and suspicion; and, being always in corps, or in detachments, could exert no influence on popular elections. But the official corps is dispersed throughout the country, in every town, village, and city, mixing with the people, attending their meetings and conventions, becoming chairmen and members of committees, and urging and stimulating partisans to active and vigorous exertion. Acting in concert, and, throughout the whole union, obeying orders issued from the centre, their influence, aided by executive patronage, by the post-office department, and all the vast other means of the executive, is almost irresistible.

To correct this procedure, and to restrain the subordinates of the executive from all interference with popular elections, my colleague, (Mr. Crittenden,) now present, introduced a bill in the senate. He had the weight of Mr. Jefferson’s opinion, who issued a circular to restrain federal officers from intermeddling in popular elections. He had before him the British example, according to which, place-men and pensioners were not only forbidden to interfere, but were not, some of them, even allowed to vote at popular elections. But his bill left them free to exercise the elective franchise, prohibiting only the use of their official influence. And how was this bill received in the senate? Passed, by those who profess to admire the character, and to pursue the principles of Mr. Jefferson? No such thing. It was denounced as a sedition bill. And the just odium of that sedition bill, which was intended to protect office-holders against the people, was successfully used to defeat a measure of protection of the people against the office-holders! Not only were they left unrestrained, but they were urged and stimulated by an official report, to employ their influence in behalf of the administration, at the elections of the people.

Hitherto, the army and the navy have remained unaffected by the power of dismission, and they have not been called into the political service of the executive. But no attentive observer of the principles and proceedings of the men in power could fail to see that the day was not distant, when they, too, would be required to perform the partisan offices of the president. Accordingly, the process of converting them into executive instruments has commenced in a court-martial assembled at Baltimore. Two officers of the army of the United States have been there put upon their solemn trial, on the charge of prejudicing the democratic party, by making purchases for the supply of the army, from members of the whig party! It is not pretended that the United States wereprejudiced by those purchases; on the contrary, it was, I believe, established that they were cheaper than could have been made from the supporters of the administration. But the charge was, that the purchase at all from the opponents, instead of the friends, of the administration, was an injury to the democratic party, which required that the offenders should be put upon their trial, before a court-martial! And this trial was commenced at the instance of a committee of a democratic convention, and conducted and prosecuted by them! The scandalous spectacle is presented to an enlightened world, of the chief magistrate of a great people executing the orders of a self-created power, organized within the bosom of the state; and, upon such an accusation, arraigning before a military tribunal, gallant men, who are charged with the defence of the honor and the interest of their country, and with bearing its eagles in the presence of an enemy!

But the army and navy are too small, and, in composition, are too patriotic to subserve all the purposes of this administration. Hence, the recent proposition of the secretary of war, strongly recommended by the president, under color of a new organization of the militia, to create a standing force of two hundred thousand men, an amount which no conceivable foreign exigency can ever make necessary. It is not my purpose now to enter upon an examination of that alarming and most dangerous plan of the executive department of the federal government. It has justly excited a burst of general indignation; and nowhere has the disapprobation of it been more emphatically expressed than in this ancient and venerable commonwealth.

The monstrous project may be described in a few words. It proposes to create the force by breaking down Mason and Dixon’s line, expunging the boundaries of states; melting them up in a confluent mass, to be subsequently cut up into ten military parts, alienates the militia from its natural association, withdraws it from the authority and command and sympathy of its constitutional officers, appointed by the states, puts it under the command of the president, authorises him to cause it to be trained, in palpable violation of the constitution, and subjects it to be called out from remote and distant places, at his pleasure, and on occasions not warranted by the constitution!

Indefensible as this project is, fellow-citizens, do not be deceived, by supposing that it has been or will be abandoned. It is a principle of those who are now in power, that an election or a reëlection of the president implies the sanction of the people to all the measures which he had proposed, and all the opinions which, he had expressed, on public affairs, prior to that event. We have seen this principle applied on various occasions. Let Mr. Van Buren be reëlected in November next, and it will be claimed that the people have thereby approved of this plan of the secretary ofwar. All entertain the opinion, that it is important to train the militia, and render it effective; and it will be insisted, in the contingency mentioned, that the people have demonstrated that they approve of that specific plan. There is more reason to apprehend such a consequence, from the fact that a committee of the senate, to which this subject was referred, instead of denouncing the scheme as unconstitutional, and dangerous to liberty, presented a labored apologetic report, and the administration majority in that body ordered twenty thousand copies of the apology to be printed, for circulation among the people. I take pleasure in testifying, that one administration senator had the manly independence to denounce, in his place, the project as unconstitutional. That senator was from your own state.