It did not prove so easy as it seemed. Calhoun and his followers were still hostile. In Tennessee, Hugh Lawson White was heading a serious revolt against Jackson and all his party, and of course New England was still dissatisfied. Since the great fight between the President and the Bank in 1833-34, Henry Clay had been welding together all the forces of the opposition. States-rights men in the South, like John Tyler, of Virginia, and William C. Preston, of South Carolina, the conservative forces in the Middle States who were connected with banking and “big business,” and the internal improvements forces of the West that were still discontented, were all united in a more or less cohesive party of opposition. A platform they could not risk; in fact, platforms were not as yet necessary for election, nor was it thought best to nominate a single pair of candidates and submit their case to the country. The Whigs, as the opposition now came to be called, arranged a ticket which Daniel Webster led in the East, which William Henry Harrison, a popular military hero of the Northwest, headed in that section, and which Hugh Lawson White, a Jackson man till 1834, championed in the Southwest. There followed a four-cornered contest which resulted in the choice of Van Buren by a popular majority of less than 30,000. Van Buren carried more of the New England States than did Webster and more of the South than did White, but he lost most of the West, even Tennessee, which had been the stronghold of his party. The counties of the old South where Jackson had been most feared gave their votes to Van Buren, the “safe and sane”; and many New England and Middle States manufacturers preferred to take their chances with a masterful organizer of conservative temper, who had been the balance wheel of the Jackson Administration, to risking all in an election in the House of Representatives, where the sections would be fighting fiercely for political and party advantages. The new régime of 1829 was thus about to be turned into a reaction. There was a common feeling that Van Buren would do nothing “radical.” Even Calhoun thought better of the President-elect than he thought of the “old hero,” and the first six months of the new Administration had not passed before he gave the President his support.
The political sun of Jackson went down brightly, not a cloud on the horizon; and his chosen successor declared openly in his inaugural that he would gladly follow in “the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor.” The country was still prosperous and the wheels of industry were running at full speed. Foreign Governments looked on with envy as the young Western Republic stretched her limbs and rose to gigantic proportions.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The most important book on the bank question is R. C. H. Catterall's The Second Bank of the United States (1903). The biographies referred to at the close of chapter IV of this volume are all serviceable in general till about 1840. James Schouler's History of the United States (1894-99), vol. IV, and H. von Holst's Constitutional and Political History of the United States (new ed., 1899), vol. II, give full narratives of the “war on the bank.” J. Q. Adams's Memoirs are ever ready with the spice of personality to make its pages readable. The Register of Debates, the official publication of Congress which succeeded the former Annals of Congress and Niles's Weekly Register, published in Baltimore from 1811 to 1849, give the various phases of public opinion as it was expressed in Congress and in the newspapers of the time. House Reports, 22d Cong., 1st Sess., no. 460, and House Executive Documents, 23d Cong., 1st Sess., no. 523, will satisfy those who seek to know the two sides as viewed by the parties to the conflict. There is no satisfactory biography of Nicholas Biddle, though his papers may be consulted in the Pennsylvania Historical Society Library. R. G. Wellington's The Political and Sectional Influence of the Public Lands, 1828-1842 (1914) tends to show how much of the controversies of these years was due to sectional jealousy.
CHAPTER VI[ToC]
DISTRESS AND REACTION
Martin Van Buren came to office without the enthusiastic support of any large segment of public opinion. The machine forces of the time and the hearty recommendation of Andrew Jackson had been responsible for his elevation. His position was very much like that of John Quincy Adams in 1825. If the East had preferred him to his predecessor, it was not because the East proposed to surrender any of her interests; and if the West liked him less than she had liked her hero, it was just because his feelings and interests were suspected.
He had supported Jackson in the breaking-down of a stable civil service in 1829, in order to ruin their common opponents, Adams and Clay. Now Van Buren was to inherit the evils of the spoils system, and Adams, Clay, and Webster were leading the attack upon him both in Congress and in the country. Jackson's collector of the customs in New York defaulted in the sum of $1,250,000 during the first year of Van Buren's term; and to make matters worse the new appointee behaved quite as scandalously the next year. Out of sixty-seven land officers in the West and South, sixty-four were reported in 1837 as defaulters, and the United States Treasury lost nearly a million dollars on their account. The Jacksonian Democracy was certainly putting its worst foot foremost, and the great leaders of the opposition held up their hands in horror at a system which “reeked with corruption from center to circumference.”