Expansion and Conflict

by William Edward Dodd

The financial situation was, therefore, the one thing with which Van Buren had to deal during most of his term. After the emergency measures had passed, he gave earnest attention to the enacting of a law which would create responsible agencies in the larger cities for the receipt and expenditure of the public moneys. The purpose was to avoid concentration and monopoly such as the National Bank had maintained, and to keep the control of the finances in the hands of the Government. It was called the Independent Treasury system. The President pressed the measure before a divided Congress and without the support of any concerted or strong public opinion. To the surprise of many, Calhoun, the bitterest of his enemies, came to his assistance. This meant the support of most of the cotton and tobacco planters. Yet the measure failed of passage during the sessions of 1837-38 and 1838-39.

Van Buren did not know how to appeal to the popular heart when powerful congressional leaders and shrewd business men pressed too hard. He simply adhered to his Independent Treasury Bill against all opposition, fair and unfair. A group of conservative Democrats broke away from his leadership in 1838 and deprived him of a majority; in the next Congress he was no stronger, and the one measure of reform which he urged failed to pass before June, 1840. Another legacy of Jackson, his “illustrious predecessor,” was a war with the Seminole Indians, who resisted removal to the western frontier; and before 1842 the suppression of these desperate natives and their slave allies, runaways from the Georgia plantations, cost the Government $40,000,000, most of which had to be borrowed at high rates of interest.

Even more threatening than the Seminole troubles was the Texas problem. The last act of Jackson's official life was to recognize the independence of that aspiring State. But this was only preliminary to the real purposes of Texas and her agents, who pressed Van Buren in the summer of 1837 for annexation to the United States; though these same agents wrote home that if annexation did not succeed, the South would break away from the Union, and that if it did succeed, the North would withdraw from the federal compact. So that while Calhoun and his friends aided the President in his financial measures, they at the same time importuned him to help the South by adding another pro-slavery State to the Union. This was not the first time this question had embarrassed a president. As already seen, Clay had denounced Monroe for giving away that princely domain; Benton and Van Buren had warred upon Adams and Clay in 1826-28 for not compelling a restoration, and under this pressure and that of the South in general, Adams had sought in vain to purchase Texas; under Jackson the problem was several times taken up, and as much as $5,000,000 was offered. Still the astute General had steered clear of trouble when annexation “with war” was offered in 1836.

Van Buren likewise delayed and risked his Southern popularity. Meanwhile a revolt against the British Government broke out in Canada, and thousands of Americans along the border, from Maine to Wisconsin, lent open assistance to their “oppressed” neighbors. Van Buren remained strictly neutral. With much difficulty was the peace maintained, and at the expense of many savage attacks upon the Administration for its un-American policy and lack of sympathy with men who fought for “freedom.”

While the President was seeking to reform the national currency and restrain the imperialistic tendencies of his countrymen, one great State, New York, under the leadership of Silas Wright, was showing the country what could be done locally to make banking safe. In 1829 a law was enacted compelling every newly chartered bank to contribute a certain percentage of its income to a common safety fund. The disasters of 1837 showed these reserves to be too small, and in 1839 every bank in the State was required to deposit with the Treasury securities enough to protect all notes to be put into circulation. At the same time any group of capitalists who would conform to the law might open a bank without let or hindrance, which had the effect of putting financial operations on simple business principles, removing the political motive which had wrought so much damage to innocent depositors. During the next decade the New York example had great influence, and Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, and other older States instituted safe and conservative banking systems.

But while these communities learned slowly the lesson of careful finance, Michigan, Mississippi, and other States, East and West, hard pressed by their circumstances and the overwhelming debts which they piled up till about 1840, repudiated or failed to meet their obligations. And when suits were brought by domestic or foreign creditors, state legislatures simply declined to pay and claimed immunity from federal pressure under the Eleventh Amendment to the National Constitution. Nor were the resources of the Western communities equal to the discharge of their onerous burdens. To have attempted to force upon the people the payment of the debts their leaders had fixed upon them would have caused wholesale migrations to Wisconsin, Iowa, and Texas. The people of the West, of the country as a whole, perhaps, were still in the position of frontiersmen as compared to Europeans. They needed all the time more capital than they could repay in many years, and they were not as yet disciplined to the point of bearing heavy burdens.

With so much distress in the country and with the Administration overburdened with problems, Clay, Adams, and Webster organized the opposition in Congress and throughout the country very much as Van Buren, Calhoun, and Jackson had done in 1826-28. The President, they said, was no friend of the people; he had not so much as mentioned their case in his messages to Congress. He was likened to a sea captain who seizes the lifeboats on a distressed ship in midocean and, saving himself and crew, leaves the passengers to the mercies of the angry waves. Clay said the panic had been due entirely to the ungodly Jackson and his foolish successor; Webster saw the sole cause of the ills of the time in the foolhardy policy of the last half-dozen years. John Quincy Adams never tired of ridiculing the puerile maneuvers of backwoods politicians whose ignorance amounted almost to high crime. To him the Independent Treasury Bill was an attempt to separate the Government from business, as futile as to try to divorce the law from the judges in the administration of justice.

Business men were appealed to to help avert the further catastrophes which a Democratic Administration would surely inflict. Distressed planters were reminded of the low price of cotton, all the friends of the former National Bank were told to remember the war on the Bank which had ruined them and the country at the same time. Indignation meetings were held in the East to denounce Van Buren and the “Loco-focos,” a term of reproach applied generally to the party in power; Henry Clay made a tour of the Eastern States thanking God that he had been spared to help in undoing the work of Jackson; Webster canvassed the West in the hope of restoring the minds of the people to their wonted sanity and a renewal of the alliance of West and East, on which alone depended the prospect of good government in the United States. The Whig party was now a powerful machine, and its leaders would take the people into their confidence. “The honesty of plain men” became a favorite expression of the time; and Adams, Clay, and Webster repeated the experiment of Jackson, Calhoun, and Benton in 1828, in a four-year campaign against Van Buren. A disinterested philosopher might have said that it was poetic justice for the persecuted Adams of 1828 to appear in the rôle of persecutor in 1840.

Though the President was an abler politician than Adams had been in the former struggle, he was hardly able to parry the blows of Clay and his Eastern allies, especially after the elections of 1838, when both houses of Congress were lost to the Administration. Calhoun, Benton, and Silas Wright made a strong fight on behalf of the Democrats. To the Independent Treasury measure they added the preëmption and graduation bills, which commanded almost unanimous support in the West, and at last secured the passage of all three in June, 1840. Though Clay and his party waged a powerful opposition through four full years, they had no definite program to offer. The groups of their organization were as yet poorly knit together. Their popular appeal was “to drive the Goths and Vandals” from the capital. The “new Napoleon and his minions,” according to another historical comparison, must give way to the old régime, to gentlemen “who knew how to govern.” And consequently the new alignments were much the same as those which had supported Adams and Clay in 1828, the South and West uniting on the “reform” Treasury system and Benton's land bills, while the East and certain conservative elements of the West and South indorsed, tentatively, at least, the “American System,” or at least lent willing ears to the eloquence of Clay.

Still the people hardly knew whom to believe, and they grouped themselves in the different States in a way which seemed unlike the earlier combinations. Thick-and-thin followers of Van Buren called themselves Democrats and insisted that they were the disciples of Thomas Jefferson; the organizers of the opposition to Jackson in his war on the Bank had claimed to be National Republicans, though they accepted with pride the name of Whigs after 1836. They asserted also that they were the followers of the great Virginia democrat; perhaps the historian would be compelled to deny that either faction was democratic.