Andrew Jackson (74 page)

The campaign for renewal began with preemptive propaganda. “It is obvious that a great effort will be made to array the influence of the Executive and all his party against the Bank,” Biddle told one of his operatives. “It is not less evident that our most effectual resistance is the dissemination of useful knowledge among the people.” Biddle had written a variety of articles outlining the benevolence and usefulness of the bank, and he now wished to distribute them to newspapers not irretrievably opposed to the bank. “For the insertion of these I will pay either as they appear or in advance. Thus for instance, if you will cause the articles I have indicated and others which I may prepare to be inserted in the newspaper in question, I will at once pay to you one thousand dollars.” Biddle concluded his letter by saying that though he had nothing to conceal, he wished for the letter’s return after it had been acted upon, “as it might be misconstrued.”

While the campaign proceeded, Biddle tried to fathom Jackson’s intentions. “The President is now perfectly confident of his reelection,” he wrote in October 1831. “The only question is the greater or the less majority, but he is sure of success and wishes to succeed by a greater vote than at the first election. If, therefore, while he is so confident of reelection, this question is put to him as one affecting his reelection, he might on that account be disposed to put his veto on it, if he be, as it were, dared to do it.”

Under the circumstances, Biddle was disinclined to dare the president. But Henry Clay had other plans. Like Biddle—and the rest of the country—Clay could see that Jackson remained overwhelmingly popular. Clay’s only chance against him was to cause a political explosion. And for this he required Biddle’s assistance. “Have you come to any decision about an application to Congress at this session for the renewal of your charter?” he inquired as the legislature convened for its last session before the election. “The friends of the Bank here, with whom I have conversed, seem to expect the application to be made.” Congressional approval was all but guaranteed, Clay intimated. Only Jackson’s response remained in doubt. “My own belief,” he confided to Biddle, “is that if
now
called upon, he would not negative the bill; but that if he should be re-elected the event might and probably would be different.”

Clay offered no evidence to support this belief, yet his words couldn’t be dismissed. He had just been nominated for president by a convention of anti-Jacksonians whose platform characterized the bank as a “great and beneficent institution” worthy of the warm support of the American people.

Daniel Webster joined the chorus of support for the bank. Webster had long been friendly with Biddle, meeting with him at bank headquarters and the gathering places of the upper class. Lately he had been conducting intelligence operations on behalf of the bank, speaking with everyone in Washington who might know something worth hearing. “The result of all these conversations,” he wrote Biddle, “has been a strong confirmation of the opinion which I expressed at Philadelphia that it
is
expedient for the Bank to apply for the renewal of its charter without delay. I do not meet a gentleman, hardly, of another opinion, and the little incidents and anecdotes that occur and circulate among us all tend to strengthen the impression. Indeed, I am now a good deal inclined to think that after General Jackson’s re-election there would be a poor chance for the bank.”

Persuaded, Biddle took the fateful step. “We have determined on applying to the present Congress for a renewal of the charter,” he wrote at the beginning of 1832. “To this course I have made up my mind after great reflection and with the clearest convictions of its propriety.” As earlier, Biddle professed to be above politics. “Neither I nor any of my associates have any thing whatever to do with the President or his election. I know nothing about it and care nothing about it. The Bank has never had any concern in elections. It will not have any now.” Biddle refused to believe that the president would veto a worthy bill simply for politics’ sake. “Even I, who do not feel the slightest interest in him, would be sorry to ascribe to a President of the United States a course much fitter for a humble demagogue than the Chief Magistrate of a great country.”

T
he initial reactions were positive. “I cannot but think you have done exactly right,” Webster said. “Whatever may be the result, it seems to me the path of duty is plain. In my opinion, a failure this session, if there should be one, will not at all diminish the chances of success next session.” Biddle learned that if he hadn’t put forward for renewal, the bank’s backers in Congress would have. An associate met with John Quincy Adams, now a congressman from Massachusetts, and reported back to Biddle: “Mr. Adams told me that if you had not petitioned, as you did, that it had been his intention to have offered a resolution.”

Biddle understood the stakes. “The present is a crisis for General Jackson and for the Bank,” he said as the renewal bill hit the floor of the Senate. But the strength of his support caused him to expect that Jackson, rather than the bank, would be overthrown. Biddle’s informational campaign appeared—to him—to have persuaded the country of the wrongheadedness of the bank’s opponents. “We set to work to disenchant the country of their foolery, and we have so well succeeded that I will venture to say that there is no man, no woman, and no child in the United States who does not understand that the worthy President was in a great error.” Biddle was confident the renewal bill would win congressional approval. What happened then would be up to Jackson. “If the bill passes and the President negatives it, I will not say that it will destroy him, but I certainly think it will, and moreover I think it ought to.”

The debate began in the Senate, where it quickly assumed proportions that made clear that much more than a bank was at stake. As Biddle himself had admitted to Tocqueville, democracy had swept the field of American political philosophy; no one could credibly speak against it. But as Tocqueville countered (in his book), the old convictions died hard, and there were plenty of individuals in America who thought the ordinary people too ignorant to manage the affairs of the country, certainly on matters as technical as the operation of a national bank. For both sides, the bank became a proxy for popular rule.

Daniel Webster led off for the bank. His outspoken support surprised those many who recalled him as a staunch opponent of the bank’s original charter in 1816, but not those fewer who knew him as an attorney who held to the philosophy that the rich deserved the best defense money could buy and who, not incidentally, had been on the bank’s payroll for years. “I believe my retainer has not been renewed or refreshed as usual,” he wrote to Biddle at a critical moment for the bank. “If it be wished that my relation to the Bank should be continued, it may be well to send me the usual retainers.” Webster discovered the merits of sound money and of the bank in making it so. “A disordered currency is one of the greatest of political evils,” he told the Senate. “It wars against industry, frugality, and economy; and it fosters the evil spirits of extravagance and speculation. Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effectual than that which deludes them with paper money.” Not for nothing had Webster become one of the best-paid lawyers in America; he now displayed his ingenuity by arguing the
democratic
case for Biddle’s bank. Flimsy money, he said, hurt ordinary people more than anyone else. “This is the most effectual of inventions to fertilize the rich man’s field by the sweat of the poor man’s brow. Ordinary tyranny, oppression, excessive taxation: these bear lightly the happiness of the mass of the community, compared with fraudulent currencies and the robberies committed by depreciated paper.” Webster deemed especially pernicious the wide use of paper notes in small denominations. The effect of such issues was to drive hard money—gold and silver coins—out of circulation. He told a story from English history. “When Mr. Pitt, in the year 1797, proposed in Parliament to authorize the Bank of England to issue one pound notes, Mr. Burke lay sick at Bath of an illness from which he never recovered. And he is said to have written to the late Mr. Canning, ‘Tell Mr. Pitt that if he consents to the issuing of one pound notes, he must never expect to see a guinea again.’”

The odd thing about Webster’s argument was that it might have been made, almost word for word, by the
opponents
of the bank. Webster’s point was that the Bank of the United States was the surest bulwark against state banks, which issued notes that served as money and did so with no coordination—indeed, often in destructive, inflationary competition. This was true enough. And if paper money there must be, then the Bank of the United States could help keep inflation in check. Yet some Jacksonians took Webster’s argument and pushed it further: toward the elimination of
all
banks, or at least those authorized to issue paper currency or its equivalent. Hard money was the only honest money, they contended. Everything else was, as Webster said, a plot against honesty, thrift, and personal industry.

The strongest opponent of the bank in Congress, or at any event the one who spoke the longest and loudest, was Thomas Benton. The senator from Missouri condemned the bank as the unconstitutional offspring of selfish private interest: wrong in law, wrong in policy, wrong in politics, wrong in morals. Where in the Constitution, he asked, was the article enabling Congress to create a national bank?
His
copy of the Constitution contained no such article. The policies of the bank were pernicious in favoring the East at the expense of the South and West. The bank was headquartered in Philadelphia; its lending policies drew hard currency from the rest of the country to the marble temple on Chestnut Street. “They lead to the
abduction of its gold and silver
,” Benton declaimed. “Every body in the South and West knows that the hard money of the country is constantly disappearing; but those only who have observed the working of the machinery of the Bank of the United States can tell where all this hard money is gone.” The directors of the bank and their minions were draining the very life from the West and South. “They gorge to repletion, then vomit their load into the vast receptacles of the Northeast, and gorge again.” The West and South, deprived of money, were filled with farmers and merchants unable to pay even the interest on their debts. The day of reckoning for these honest folks was fast approaching. “When that dread day comes . . . the towns and cities of the South and West—the fairest farms and goodliest mansions—will be set up at auction, to be knocked down to the bank agent, at the mock prices fixed in the compting room of the bank itself.” And from this would spring what had been implicit in the bank from the start.

In these mock sales of towns and cities may be laid the foundation for the titles and estates of our future nobility—Duke of Cincinnati! Earl of Lexington! Marquis of Nashville! Count of St. Louis! Prince of New Orleans! Such may be the titles of the bank nobility to whom the next generation of American farmers must “crook the pregnant hinges of the knee.” Yes, sir! When the renewed charter is brought in for us to vote upon, I shall consider myself as voting upon a bill for the establishment of
lords and commons
in this America, and for the eventual establishment of a
King
; for when the
lords and commons
are established, the
King
will come of himself!

It was demagoguery, of course, revealing little about the actual workings of the bank but much about the passions the bank provoked. If Webster wanted to have things both ways—hard currency but a bank that issued paper currency—so did Benton. Everyone knew that the chronic problem of the western economy—as it had been since the frontier days—was a shortage of money. There simply wasn’t enough gold and silver to go around, and never had been. And everyone knew that the West and South suffered more from the discounting of banknotes for distance from the issuing bank than the North and East and therefore benefited more from the comparatively uniform currency the notes the Bank of the United States provided. Nor were Webster and the bank’s backers the only ones who disguised their personal interest in the affair. Benton and the opponents of the bank found allies in the state banks that had seen the national bank steal their customers and suppress their profits; these state banks discovered ways of rewarding their often unacknowledged spokesmen in Congress.

Yet if economics cut both ways on the bank issue, emotion was all on the side of the opponents. No one warms to bankers. At best they gain a grudging respect for making money without seeming to work very hard. And the bigger the bank and the more powerful the bankers, the more grudging the respect. Biddle thought Jackson’s suspicions of banks foolishly idiosyncratic. They may or may not have been foolish, but they certainly weren’t idiosyncratic.

For all the suspicions of the populists and the thunderbolts of Benton, the renewal bill passed the Senate in a close vote, and the House by a somewhat larger margin. Opponents alleged bribery but couldn’t prove it, most likely because it wasn’t more blatant than the back scratching and palm greasing that passed for daily life in the legislature. Roger Taney, who had replaced John Berrien as attorney general and would become Jackson’s strong right arm in the bank fight, made this point regarding one congressman who reconsidered his initial opposition after receiving a large loan on easy terms from Biddle. “Now I do not mean to say that he was directly bribed to give this vote. From the character he sustained and from what I knew of him, I think he would have resented any thing that he regarded as an attempt to corrupt him. But he wanted the money, and felt grateful for the favor. And perhaps he thought that an institution which was so useful to him, and had behaved with so much kindness, could not be injurious or dangerous to the public, and that it would be as well to continue it.”