A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (46 page)

Whatever his final intentions, Jackson needed to eliminate the BUS as both an institutional rival to whatever he had planned and as a source of political patronage for his foes. Between 1829, when he had asked Kendall to draft his own plan, and 1833, Jackson and his allies attempted to work out a compromise on the existing BUS recharter effort. They outlined four major areas where the bank could alter its charter without damaging the institution.
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In fact, thanks to the advice of Clay and Webster, Biddle was assured that the BUS had enough support in Congress that a recharter would sail through without the compromises. Probank forces introduced legislation in 1832 to charter the BUS four years ahead of its 1836 expiration, no doubt hoping to coordinate the effort with the presidential campaign of Henry Clay, who had already been nominated as the choice of the National Republicans to run against Jackson. The gauntlet had been thrown.

Many bank supporters thought Jackson would not risk his presidential run by opposing such a popular institution, but Old Hickory saw it as an opportunity to once again tout his independence. In May 1832, typically personalizing the conflict, Jackson told Van Buren, “The Bank is trying to kill me. But I will kill it.”
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When the BUS recharter passed in Congress, Jackson responded with a July veto. In his eight-year term, Jackson issued more vetoes than all previous presidents put together, but the bank veto, in particular, represented a monumental shift in power toward the executive. Other presidential vetoes had involved questions surrounding the constitutionality of specific legislation, with the president serving as a circuit breaker between Congress and the Supreme Court. No longer. In a message written by Roger B. Taney of Maryland, Jackson invoked thin claims that the bank was “
un
necessary” and “
im
proper.” Of course, Marshall’s Court had already settled that issue a decade earlier. Jackson’s main line of attack was to call the bank evil and announce that he intended to destroy it. Clay misjudged the appeal of Jackson’s rhetoric, though, and printed thousands of copies of the veto message, which he circulated, thinking it would produce a popular backlash. Instead, it enhanced Jackson’s image as a commoner standing against the monied elites who seemingly backed the Kentuckian. Jackson crushed Clay, taking just over 56 percent of the popular vote and 219 electoral votes to Clay’s 49, but voter turnout dropped, especially in light of some earlier state elections.
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Upon winning, Jackson withdrew all federal deposits from the BUS, removing its main advantage over all private competitors. Without deposits, a bank has nothing to lend. Jackson then placed the deposits in several banks whose officials had supported Jackson, and while not all were Democrats, most were. These “pet banks” further revealed the hypocrisy of Jackson’s antibank stance: he opposed banks, as long as they were not working for his party. Jackson’s disdain for the law finally met with resistance. His own secretary of the treasury, Louis McLane, who had supported Jackson in his “war,” now realized the dangerous constitutional waters in which the administration sailed. When Jackson instructed him to carry out the transfer of the deposits, McLane refused, and Jackson sacked him. The president then named William J. Duane to the post (which required senatorial approval by custom, though not according to the Constitution). Jackson ignored congressional consent, then instructed Duane to remove the deposits. Duane, too, viewed the act as unconstitutional and refused. Out went Duane, replaced by Jackson loyalist Roger B. Taney, who complied with Old Hickory’s wishes, although Jackson had finally persuaded Congress to pass the Deposit Act of 1836, giving the actions a cloak of legitimacy. As a reward, Taney later was appointed chief justice of the United States. All in all, the entire bank war was a stunning display of abuse of power by the chief executive and demonstrated a willingness by the president to flout the Constitution and convention in order to get his way. At the same time, it reaffirmed the adage that the American people usually get what they deserve, and occasionally allow those who govern to bend, twist, or even trample certain constitutional principles to attain a goal.

What occurred next was misunderstood for more than a century. Biddle called in loans, hoping to turn up the heat on Jackson by making him appear the enemy of the nation’s economy. A financial panic set in, followed by rapid inflation that many observers then and for some time to come laid at the feet of the bank war. Without the BUS to restrain the printing of bank notes, so the theory went, private banks churned out currency to fill the void left by Biddle’s bank. A new type of institution, the “wildcat” bank, also made its first appearance. Wildcat banks were in fact “free banks,” organized by state general incorporation statutes to relieve the burden on the state legislatures from having to pass special chartering ordinances to allow banks to open. In modern times, virtually no businesses need special legislation from government to operate, but the free bank and general incorporation laws had only just appeared in the 1830s. Supposedly, the wildcat banks printed up far more money than they had specie in vault, but established branches “where a wildcat wouldn’t go” made it nearly impossible to redeem the notes. Or, in other words, the banks printed unbacked currency. Again, the theory held that without the BUS to control them, banks issued money willy-nilly, causing a massive inflation.

Much of this inflation, it was thought, moved westward to purchase land, driving up land prices. By the end of Jackson’s second term, rising land prices had become, in his view, a crisis, and he moved to stem the tide by passing the Specie Circular of 1836, which required that all public land purchases be with gold or silver. Attributing the rising prices to speculation, Jackson naturally was pleased when the boom abruptly halted.

Economist Peter Temin found that for more than a century this consistent explanation of what happened after Jackson killed the BUS remained universally accepted.
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The tale had no internal conflicts, and the technology did not exist to disprove it. But after the availability of computing tools, economists like Temin could analyze vast quantities of data on gold and silver movements, and they came to a startlingly different conclusion about Jackson’s war—it meant little. What happened was that large supplies of Mexican silver had come into the country in the late 1820s over the newly opened Santa Fe Trail, causing the inflation (increasing prices), and this silver flowed into the trade network, financing porcelain and tea exchanges with China and ending up in England after the Chinese bought British goods. The British, in turn, lent it back to American entrepreneurs. But in the early 1830s, with the Texas revolt, the Mexican silver dried up, and so did the flow of silver around the world that finally found its way into English vaults. With the silver reserve disappearing, the Bank of England raised interest rates, which spun the U.S. economy into a depression. Temin proved that the BUS did not have the size or scope of operations to affect the American economy that historians had previously thought. No matter how petty and ill conceived Jackson’s attack on the bank was, he must be absolved of actually causing much direct harm to industrial growth—although new research suggests that his redistribution of the surplus probably contributed to the damage in financial markets.
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On the other hand, whatever benefits his supporters thought they gained by killing “the monster” were imagined.

Jackson and Goliath

By the end of his second term, Old Hickory suffered constantly from his lifetime of wounds and disease. Often governing from bed, the Hero of New Orleans had become a gaunt, skeletal man whose sunken cheeks and white hair gave him the appearance of a scarecrow in a trench coat. Weak and frail as he may have been, when he left office, Andrew Jackson had more totally consolidated power in the executive branch than any previous president, unwittingly ensuring that the thing Van Buren most dreaded—a powerful presidency, possibly subject to sectional pressures—would come to pass. His adept use of the spoils system only created a large-scale government bureaucracy that further diminished states’ rights, overriding state prerogative with federal might.

Jackson’s tenure marked a sharp upward spike in real expenditures by the U.S. government, shooting up from about $26 million when Old Hickory took office to more than $50 million by the time Van Buren assumed the presidency.
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In addition, real per capita U.S. government expenditures also rose suddenly under Jackson, and although they fell dramatically at the beginning of Van Buren’s term, by 1840 they had remained about 50 percent higher when Van Buren left office than under Adams. The levels of spending remained remarkably small—about $3 per person by the federal government from 1800 to 1850. If optimistic claims about personal income growth during the era are accurate, it is possible that, in fact, government spending as a percent of real per capita income may have fallen. But it is also undeniable that the number of U.S. government employees rose at a markedly faster rate from 1830 to 1840, then accelerated further after 1840, although per capita government employment grew only slightly from 1830 to 1850. The best case that can be made by those claiming that the Jacksonian era was one of small government is that relative to the population, government only doubled in size; but in actual terms, government grew by a factor of five between the Madison and Harrison administrations. In short, citing the Jackson/Van Buren administrations as examples of small government is at best misleading and at worst completely wrong.

More important, no matter what had happened immediately, the Jacksonians had planted the seeds of vast expansions of federal patronage and influence. Jackson’s Democrats had prefigured the New Deal and the Great Society in viewing the federal government—and the executive branch especially—as the most desirable locus of national power.

The End of Jackson, but not Jacksonianism

W
hen Andrew Jackson polished off the BUS, he piously announced: “I have obtained a glorious triumph…and put to death that mammoth of corruption.”
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It was an ironic and odd statement from a man whose party had now institutionalized spoils and, some would say, a certain level of corruption that inevitably accompanied patronage. By that time, Jackson’s opponents recognized as much, labeling him ‘King Andrew I,’ without much apparent effect on his popularity. Judging Jackson’s clout, though, especially in light of the Panic of 1837, is problematic. His protégé was unceremoniously tossed out of office after one term, becoming the third one-term president in the short history of the Republic.

Old Hickory, of course, had named his vice president, Martin Van Buren, as his successor. In a sense, Van Buren had rigged the system to ensure his election when he crafted the Democratic Party structure years earlier, using Jackson as the pitch man to get the party off the ground. Van Buren was full of contradictions. He stood for liberty and later moved to the Free Soil Party. Yet before his departure, his Democratic Party structure required the quelling of discussions of slavery. He sided with free enterprise, except when it involved the freedom to start and operate banks, and he had voted for tariffs in the past. Associated with small government, he supported public funding of the early national road. Ultimately, the Red Fox of Kinderhook, as Van Buren was also known, led a third antislavery party, but it marked a deathbed conversion of sorts, since he had ensured the dominance of a proslavery party in national politics.

Squaring off against Van Buren and the Democrats was the new opposition party, the Whigs, who drew their name from the English and American Revolutionary opponents to the Tories. These Whigs were hardly the laissez-faire, limited-government firebrands who had brought about the Revolution: they supported a high protective tariff, a new national bank, and federal subsidies for internal improvements. Some Whigs were abolitionists; some advocated temperance; and many came from Protestant evangelical backgrounds, such as Presbyterians, Baptists, and Congregationalists.

Mostly, however, the men who composed the Whig Party were united only by their hatred of Jackson. The three leading Whigs—Clay, Calhoun, and Webster—could not agree on the most pressing issue of the day, slavery. Webster hated it, attacking the peculiar institution at every opportunity, although he also embraced compromises that, he thought, might put slavery on the road to extinction. Calhoun, on the other end of the spectrum, defended slavery with the most radical arguments.
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Clay adopted a firm position: he was both for it and against it. One other thing they had in common was a shared view that the best men should rule—the notion that educated, landed elites were best suited to govern by virtue of their character. In the age of the common man, such views were doomed.

Clay emerged as the chief spokesman for the new party. He was clearly the most recognizable, had a sterling reputation as an influence in both the House and Senate, had drafted the famous Missouri Compromise, and represented the West or, at least, sections of the West. Clay argued that each part of his American system supported the other and that all sections benefited by pulling the nation together rather than tearing it apart. Internal improvements aided southerners and westerners in getting their crops to markets, including markets abroad. The tariff protected infant manufacturing industries, so that the workingmen, too, had their share of the pie. And the bank held it all together by providing a uniform currency and plenty of credit to both agriculture and industry.
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All of this seemed plausible, and might have been sufficient in other eras. In the 1830s, however, it seemed unrealistic at best to ignore the looming sectional divisions over slavery, none of which would be solved by Clay’s somewhat superficial proposals. Indeed, northerners argued, the presence of a bank would only perpetuate slavery by lending to plantation owners, whereas southerners countered that the tariff only benefited the industrialists and abolitionists. Most agreed on internal improvements, but disagreed over where the government should involve itself, and to what degree. Naturally, the sections split over the locus of the proposed largesse.

Swimming upstream against an increasingly egalitarian sentiment, the Whigs were throwbacks to the Federalists. While they still commanded the votes of significant sections of the country (and, on occasion, a majority), their music simply was out of tune with the democratic rhythms of the mid-1800s. This emphasis on expanding the franchise and broadening educational opportunities—all spearheaded by a polyglot of reform and utopian movements—characterized Jacksonian culture in the age of the common man.

Buckskins and Bible Thumpers

The Jacksonian period ranks as one of the great periods of American social reform and cultural change. America’s Hudson River school of artists emerged, as did distinct and talented regional northeastern and southwestern writers. There were transformations of attitudes about social relationships, health, prisons, education, and the status of women and African American slaves. Advocates of communalism, vegetarianism, temperance, prison reform, public schools, feminism, and abolition grew into a substantial Jacksonian reform movement.
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Religious revivals washed over America in six great waves, ranging from the Puritan migration and Great Awakening of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the new millennialism of the late twentieth century. In between came the Age of Jackson’s monumental Great Revival, known to scholars as the Second Great Awakening. Throughout the 1815–1860 period, religious enthusiasm characterized American culture, from the churches of New England, to the camp meetings on western frontiers, to the black slave churches of the Old South.
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Why did this era foster religious fundamentalism? The emergent Industrial Revolution caused huge changes in the lives of Americans, an upheaval that, in part, explains the urgency with which they sought spiritual sustenance. Industry, urbanization, and rapid social shifts combined with the impending crisis over slavery to foment a quest for salvation and perfection. Hundreds of thousands of Americans found answers to their profound spiritual questions in Protestant Christianity. They adopted a democratic brand of religion open to all, featuring a diverse number of Protestant sects. Great Revival Christianity was also enthusiastic: worshippers sang and shouted to the heavens above. Together, believers sought perfection here on earth.

“Perfectionism,” or a belief that any sinner could be saved by Christ and, upon salvation, should pursue good works to ensure that saving grace, shifted the focus from the Puritan emphasis on the afterlife to the possibility of a sin-free world in this life. A few perfectionists were millenarians who believed that Christ’s second coming was imminent. The Millerites (named for their leader, William Miller), America’s most famous millenarians, actually donned white robes and climbed atop barn and house roofs in 1843 to meet Christ as he joined them on earth. He did not appear as the Millerites had prophesied—a nonevent they referred to as the Great Disappointment.
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Thousands left the faith, although a young woman named Ellen G. (Harmon) White (herself converted at a Methodist camp meeting and a protégé of Miller’s), a virtual American Joan of Arc, picked up the standard. She had several visions, and despite her sex and youth became a de facto leader of a group that, by 1860, had chosen the name Seventh-Day Adventists, referring to the impending advent of Christ. The church’s membership rolls swelled. Espousing a healthy lifestyle and avoidance of certain foods and meat, Adventists produced the cereal empire of John and Will Kellogg and influenced the career of another cereal giant, Charles W. Post.
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Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), who made her most important mark in American religious history slightly after the Jacksonian era, nevertheless rode the Second Great Awakening revivalist quest, adding to the health-food orientation of Ellen White the more radical doctrine of faith healing. Healed of great pain in her youth, Eddy founded the First Church of Christ Scientist (today known as Christian Scientists), in which spiritual healing depended heavily on mind over matter. Like others, she founded a college and an influential newspaper,
The Christian Science Monitor.
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These new millennial groups differed from the traditional churches not only in their perfectionist doctrine, but also in their religious practice. In sharp contrast to the prim and proper Puritans, many of the new sects exhibited an emotionalism characterized by falling, jerking, laughing, and crying. And it worked. Where old-line churches like the Presbyterians scoffed at the enthusiasm of the camp meetings (which had started as early as 1801 at Cane Ridge, in Kentucky), they could not match the attractiveness and energy of the evangelists. The Methodists, whose songs John Wesley had adapted from English pub tunes, grew rapidly to become the largest church in the United States by 1844. Like the Baptists, the Methodists believed in revivals, in which the evangelical fires would be fanned periodically by hellfire-and-brimstone preachers who crossed the countryside. While the sects posed doctrinal challenges for the established denominations, no one could deny that they nevertheless added to a climate of religious excitement, leading to the establishment of theological colleges in nearly every state.
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Most perfectionists believed that Christ’s coming would be preceded by the millennium (Revelations 20:1–3), a thousand-year period on earth of perfection—peace, prosperity, and Christian morality. The Second Great Awakening was a time when perfectionists commenced this millennium of peace on earth. Perfectionists preached that although man was sinful, he did not have to be. Individuals possessed the power to save themselves and join together to create a perfect world order. “To the universal reformation of the world,” evangelist Charles Grandison Finney exhorted, “they stand committed.”
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The Second Great Awakening was thus a radical extension of the religious enthusiasm of the Puritan migration and the First Great Awakening. Down-to-earth Jacksonian preachers and laymen fanned out to convert tens of thousands of sinners and lead them to salvation. Baptists and Methodists, sects less than a century old, figured prominently, but so too did Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Mormons. The Erie Canal route of upstate New York, a scene of tumultuous economic and social change, became such a hotbed of religious fervor that it was dubbed the “Burned-Over District” because of the waves of religious fire that regularly passed through. Here a new figure strode onto the scene: Charles Grandison Finney, a law student who simply woke up one morning to a realization that he needed the Lord. When he appeared before the bench that day, Finney was asked if he was ready to try the case. He responded, “I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause, I cannot plead yours.”
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Abandoning the passive Puritan view of salvation—one either was or was not saved—Finney initiated an activist, evangelical ministry that introduced many new practices that shocked the prim and pious churchgoers of the day. Among Finney’s new measures, as he called them, were allowing women to pray in mixed-sex meetings, camp services that ran for several days in a row, the use of colloquial language by the preachers, and praying for people by name. In 1827 the Presbyterians called a convention to investigate Finney’s methods, but they adjourned without taking any action against the new measures, and Finney’s revivals continued. The tall, athletic, spellbinding Presbyterian minister, whose popularity equaled that of Old Hickory himself, called on all Americans to “Stand up! Stand up for Jesus!”
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A much more radical sect appeared in Palmyra, New York, when Joseph Smith claimed that he had been visited by the angel Moroni. The angel showed him golden tablets, which he was allowed to translate through two mystical seer stones that broke the language code, dictating what was called the Book of Mormon (1830). Smith’s remarkable book related the history of the migration of an ancient tribe of Israel to the New World and the Indian tribes prior to the arrival of Europeans as well as the New World appearance of Christ. Smith quickly built a loyal following, and the group took the name Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, generally known as the Mormons. The members moved to Ohio, where they became entangled in a bank collapse, then to Missouri, where they were ensnared in the slavery debate, taking the antislavery side. Eventually settling in Nauvoo, Illinois—the largest town in the state—the Mormons posed a threat to the political structure by their policy of voting as a block. When the Whig Party in Illinois introduced a new charter, the Mormons supported it, and in 1844 Smith ran for the U.S. presidency as an independent on an abolition platform.
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At the same time, Smith had (according to revelation) laid down as church doctrine the practice of polygamy. Clashes with local anti-Mormon groups led to Smith’s arrest and then assassination while he was in a Carthage, Illinois, jail in 1844, so the Mormons prepared to move yet again, this time to the far West.
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