A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (45 page)

Many saw the tariff debate itself as a referendum of sorts on slavery. Nathan Appleton, a textile manufacturer in Massachusetts, noted that southerners’ hostility to the tariff arose from the “fear and apprehension of the South that the General Government may one day interfere with the right of property in slaves. This is the bond which unites the South in a solid phalanx.”
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Adoption of the infamous gag rule a few years later would reinforce Appleton’s assessment that whatever differences the sections had over the tariff and internal improvements on their own merits, the disagreement ultimately came down to slavery, which, despite the efforts of the new Democratic Party to exclude it from debate, increasingly wormed its way into almost all legislation.

Amid the tariff controversy, for example, slavery also insinuated itself into the Webster-Hayne debate over public lands. Originating in a resolution by Senator Samuel Foot of Connecticut, which would have restricted land sales in the West, it evoked the ire of westerners and southerners who saw it as an attempt to throttle settlement and indirectly provide a cheap work force for eastern manufacturers. Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, a staunch Jackson man who denounced the bill, found an ally in Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina. Hayne contended that the bill placed undue hardships on one section in favor of another, which was the essence of the dissatisfaction with the tariff as well. During the Adams administration, Benton had proposed a reduction on the price of western lands from seventy-five to fifty cents per acre, and then, if no one purchased western land at that price, he advocated giving the land away. Westerners applauded Benton’s plan, but manufacturers thought it another tactic to lure factory workers to the West.

Land and tariffs were inextricably intertwined in that they provided the two chief sources of federal revenue. If land revenues declined, opponents of the tariff would have to acknowledge its necessity as a revenue source. National Republicans, on the other hand, wanted to keep land prices
and
tariff rates high, but through a process of “distribution,” turn the excess monies back to the states for them to use for internal improvement.
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Closing western lands also threatened the slave South, whose own soil had started to play out. Already, the “black belt” of slaves, which in 1820 had been concentrated in Virginia and the Carolinas, had shifted slowly to the southeast, into Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. If the North wished to permanently subjugate the South as a section (which many southerners, such as Calhoun, feared), the dual-pronged policy of shutting down western land sales and enacting a high tariff would achieve that objective in due time. This was the case made by Senator Hayne in 1830, when he spoke on the Senate floor against Foot’s bill, quickly moving from the issue of land to nullification.

Hayne outlined a broad conspiracy by the North against westerners and southerners. His defense of nullification merely involved a reiteration of Calhoun’s compact theories presented in his “Exposition,” conjuring up images of sectional tyranny and dangers posed by propertied classes. The eloquent Black Dan Webster challenged Hayne, raising the specter of civil war if sectional interests were allowed to grow and fester. Although he saved his most charged rhetoric for last, Webster envisioned a point where two sections, one backward and feudal, one advanced and free, stood apart from each other. He warned that the people, not state legislatures, comprised the Union or, as he said, the Union was “a creature of the people.”
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To allow states to nullify specific federal laws would turn the Constitution into a “rope of sand,” Webster observed—hence the existence of the Supreme Court to weigh the constitutionality of laws. Liberty and the Union were not antithetical, noted Webster, they were “forever, one and inseparable.”
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The Foot resolution went down to defeat.

Jackson, who sat in the audience during the Webster-Hayne debate, again abandoned the states’ rights-small government view in favor of the federal government. At a Jefferson Day Dinner, attended by Calhoun, Jackson, and Van Buren, Jackson offered a toast directed at Calhoun, stating, “Our Union. It must be preserved.”
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Calhoun offered an ineffectual retort in his toast—“The Union, next to our liberty most dear!”—but the president had made his point, and it widened the rift between the two men.

An odd coalition to reduce tariff rates arose in the meantime between Jackson and the newly elected congressman from Massachusetts, John Quincy Adams, who had become the only president in American history to lose an election and return to office as a congressman. The revised Adams-sponsored tariff bill cut duties and eliminated the worst elements of the 1828 tariff, but increased duties on iron and cloth. South Carolina’s antitariff forces were not appeased by the revisions nor intimidated by Jackson’s rhetoric. In 1832 the legislature, in a special session, established a state convention to adopt an ordinance of nullification that nullified both the 1828 and the 1832 tariff bills. South Carolina’s convention further authorized the legislature to refuse to collect federal customs duties at South Carolina ports after February 1, 1833, and, should federal troops be sent to collect those duties, to secede from the Union. Calhoun resigned the vice presidency and joined the nullification movement that advanced his theories, and soon ran for the U.S. Senate.

Jackson now faced a dilemma. He could not permit South Carolina to bandy about such language. Nullification, he rightly noted, was “incompatible with the existence of the Union.” More pointedly, he added, “be not deceived by names. Disunion by armed force is treason.”
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The modern reader should pause to consider that Jackson specifically was charging John C. Calhoun with treason—an accurate application, in this case, but still remarkable in its forthrightness and clarity, not to mention courage, which Old Hickory never lacked. Jackson then applied a carrot-and-stick approach, beginning with the stick: he requested that Congress pass the Force Act in January 1833, which allowed him to send military forces to collect the duties. It constituted something of a bluff, since the executive already had such powers. In reality, both he and South Carolinians knew that federal troops would constitute no less than an occupation force. The use of federal troops in the South threatened to bring on the civil war that Jefferson, Van Buren, and others had feared. Yet Jackson wanted to prove his willingness to fight over the issue, which in his mind remained “Union.” He dispatched General Winfield Scott and additional troops to Charleston, making plain his intention to collect the customs duties. At the same time, Jackson had no interest in the central issue, and the underlying cause of the dissatisfaction with the tariff, slavery, nor did he intend to allow the tariff to spin out of control. While acting bellicose in public, Jackson worked behind the scenes to persuade South Carolina to back down. Here, Jackson received support from his other political adversary, Henry Clay, who worked with Calhoun to draft a compromise tariff with greatly reduced duties beginning in 1833 and thereafter until 1842. Upon signing the bill, Jackson gloated, “The modified Tariff has killed the ultras, both tarifites, and the nullifiers,” although he also praised the “united influence” of Calhoun, Clay, and Webster.
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Then Congress passed both the tariff reduction and the Force Bill together, brandishing both threat and reward in plain sight. After the Tariff of 1833 passed, Clay won accolades, again as the Great Compromiser; Calhoun had earned Jackson’s scorn as a sectionalist agitator, but Jackson, although he had temporarily preserved the Union, had merely skirted the real issue once again by pushing slavery off to be dealt with by another generation.

Far from revealing a visionary leader, the episode exposed Jackson as supremely patriotic but shallow. In his election defeat to Adams, then his clash with Calhoun, he personalized party, sectional, and ideological conflicts, boiling them down into political bare-knuckle fighting. He stood for Union, that much was assured. But to what end? For what purpose? Jackson’s next challenge, the “war” with the Bank of the United States, would again degenerate into a mano a mano struggle with a private individual, and leave principle adrift on the shore.

Jackson’s “War” on the BUS

Having deflated the Nationalist Republicans’ programs on internal improvements and tariffs, there remained only one plank of their platform to be dismantled, the second Bank of the United States. Again, a great mythology arose over Jackson and his attitude toward the BUS. Traditional interpretations have held that the small-government-oriented Jackson saw the BUS as a creature in the grip of “monied elites” who favored business interests over the “common man.” A “hard money” man, so the story goes, Jackson sought to eliminate all paper money and put the country on a gold standard. Having a government-sponsored central bank, he supposedly thought, was both unconstitutional and undesirable. At least that was the generally accepted story for almost a century among American historians.
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Nicholas Biddle had run the bank expertly for several years, having replaced Langdon Cheves as president in 1823. A Philadelphian, Biddle had served as a secretary to the U.S. minister to France, edited papers and helped prepare the documents detailing the Lewis and Clark Expedition’s history, and briefly served in the Pennsylvania state senate. Biddle’s worldliness and savoir faire immediately branded him as one of the noxious elites Jackson fretted about. But he intuitively knew banking and finance, even if he had little practical experience. He appreciated the BUS’s advantages over state-chartered banks and used them, yet all the while cultivating good relationships with the local commercial banks.

What made Biddle dangerous, though, was not his capabilities as a bank president, but his political powers of patronage in a large institution with branches in many states—all with the power to lend. Only the Post Office and the military services, among all the federal agencies, could match Biddle’s base of spoils. Biddle also indirectly controlled the votes of thousands through favorable loans, generous terms, and easy access to cash. Whether Biddle actually engaged in politics in such manner is irrelevant: his mere capability threatened a man like Jackson, who saw eastern cabals behind every closed door. Thus, the “bank war” was never about the BUS’s abuse of its central banking powers or its supposed offenses against state banks (which overwhelmingly supported rechartering of the BUS in 1832). Rather, to Jackson, the bank constituted a political threat that must be dealt with.

Jackson sided with the hard-money faction, as governor of Tennessee having strongly resisted both the chartering of state banks and placement of a BUS branch in his state. But that was in the early 1820s, on the heels of the panic. His views moderated somewhat, especially when it came to the idea of a central bank. Jackson’s hatred of a central bank is exaggerated.
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Like Thomas Hart Benton, William Gouge, and Thomas Ritchie of the
Richmond Enquirer
, Democrats and Jackson supporters had reputations as hard-money men. Jackson himself once heaped scorn on the paper money he called rags emitted from banks. Still, a decade’s worth of prosperity had an impact on Jackson’s views, for by 1829, when he started to consider eliminating the BUS, he had asked his confidant Amos Kendall to draft a substitute plan for a national bank.
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Few historians deal with this proposal: Jackson’s best biographer, Robert Remini, dedicates approximately one page to it, but he misses the critical implications. Other noted writers all but ignore the draft message.
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The president did not intend to eliminate central banking entirely, but to replace one central bank with another in a continuation of the spoils system. Why was the current BUS corrupt? Because, in Jackson’s view, it was in the hands of the wrong people. As governor, he had not hesitated to write letters of recommendation to staff the Nashville branch of the BUS, using the same arguments—that the “right” people would purge the system of corruption. The existing BUS was corrupt, in Jackson’s view, only partly because it was a bank; what was more important was its heritage as the bank of the panic, the bank of the elites.

Given the intensity to which pro-Jacksonian authors cling to the antibank Andrew Jackson, let the reader judge. According to his close associate James Hamilton, Jackson had in mind a national money: his proposed bank would “afford [a] uniform circulating medium” and he promised to support any bank that would “answer the purposes of a safe depository of the public treasure and furnish the means of its ready transmission.” He was even more specific, according to Hamilton, because the 1829 plan would establish a new “national bank chartered upon the principles of the checks and balances of our federal government, with a branch in each state, and capital apportioned agreeably to representation…. A
national
bank, entirely
national
Bank, of deposit is all we ought tohave.”
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Was the same man who had proposed a “national” bank with interstate branches capable of furnishing the “ready transmission” of national treasure also eager to eliminate state banks? It seems unlikely, given his supposed affinity for the rights of states to exercise their sovereignty. Nothing in the U.S. Constitution prohibited a bank (or any other business, for that matter) from issuing and circulating notes. However, based on Jackson’s willingness to crush state sovereignty in the Indian Removal and his repudiation of South Carolina’s nullification, it is clear that to Andrew Jackson the concept of states’ rights meant what Andrew Jackson said it meant. More disturbing, perhaps, and more indicative of his true goals, was a series of measures introduced by the Democrats to limit the country to a hard-money currency. Again, historians concentrated on the hard-money aspect of the bills while missing the broader strategy, which involved a massive transfer of state power to the federal government.
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Jackson’s forces in Congress began their assault seeking to eliminate small bills, or change notes, which in and of themselves testified to the shocking shortage of small coin needed for change. Prohibition of small notes constituted the first step in the elimination of all paper money to these zealots, and would have moved the control of the money supply from market forces to a federal, central bank such as Jackson proposed.
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