What Hath God Wrought (57 page)

The election returns of 1832, like those four years earlier, showed Old Hickory a markedly sectional candidate. South of Kentucky and Maryland he racked up 88 percent of the popular vote; no Clay ballots at all were recorded in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, where Indian Removal overshadowed everything else. Voter turnout (55.4 percent) fell slightly from 1828.
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The Bank issue cost Jackson some votes, although the veto message held his losses down and allowed the Democrats to make inroads in New England. Jackson’s 54.2 percent of the popular vote overall, though impressive, was 1.8 percentage points below his previous record, which disappointed him.
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(This is the only time that a president has been reelected to a second term with a smaller popular vote percentage than in his first election.)
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Further limiting the scope of Jackson’s victory, his party lost control of the Senate.

Most historians have concluded that Biddle’s decision to press for early recharter was unwise, although there is no reason to think that Clay would have done any better in the election if the Bank had not been an issue. Biddle’s only real hope to salvage something for his institution lay in trying to compromise with Jackson. Several of the criticisms that Jackson made of the Bank could have been accommodated if Biddle had been more flexible (for example, it would have been worth phasing out foreign stock ownership as the price of recharter). Instead of allying with Clay, Biddle could have urged Martin Van Buren to put in a good word for the BUS. Van Buren went along with the Bank War only reluctantly, viewing it as an unwelcome complication in his project of becoming Jackson’s White House successor.
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But to pull a charter renewal out of the hat may have been a trick beyond even the famous Magician. There is no assurance that Jackson would have accepted any accommodation with Biddle. Given the personalities of its two hostile protagonists, the Bank War probably could not have been avoided.

Jackson’s Bank War reinforced the political lines already established by Indian Removal and the Maysville Road veto. Taken together, the three issues shaped the party politics of the next generation. Indian Removal set the pattern for Jacksonian Democratic support for continental imperialism and white supremacy. The Maysville veto and the Bank War defined the Jacksonian attitude on economic issues. In both these cases the president struck down a highly visible symbol of centralized economic activity only to turn around and encourage the same kind of economic activity (internal improvements in the one case, banking in the other) on a decentralized, unplanned basis. It was economic planning, not economic progress or even government aid to individual enterprises, that Jacksonian Democracy characteristically opposed. In his annual message of December 1832, the newly reelected president rejoiced that “the free enterprise of our citizens, aided by the State sovereignties, will work out improvements and ameliorations which can not fail to demonstrate the great truth that the people can govern themselves.”
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The dual essence of Jackson’s Bank Veto—the defense of the people against the unfairly privileged and the strict construction of the Constitution—would remain the message of the Democratic Party for a long time to come.

IV

Jackson interpreted his reelection as “a decision of the people against the bank.”
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But the BUS was not abolished because public opinion demanded it. Just as quite a few congressional Democrats had supported recharter, there were many voters—especially in Pennsylvania—who had backed Old Hickory in spite of, rather than because of, his Bank Veto. Martin Van Buren himself believed that nothing but Jackson’s personal popularity could have carried the day against the widespread support for the Bank. The historian Robert Remini has summed it up well: “The killing of the BUS was primarily the work of one man, and that man was Andrew Jackson.”
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The president of the United States was convinced that the Bank concentrated too much power in private hands. The ensuing “Bank War,” in origin a struggle over sovereignty, turned out to inflame hostilities of party and class.

On March 19, 1833, the president polled his cabinet and advisors on the wisdom of removing the government’s deposits from the BUS. This would hit the institution’s capital hard, for the federal government had almost $10 million in the Bank, almost half of its total deposits.
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The president intended to retaliate for the role the Bank had played in the election and limit its influence during the remaining years of its life. (He seems to have feared the Bank might persuade Congress to reconsider the recharter issue, though his veto could certainly not be overridden.) Only Kendall and Taney responded to his proposal with enthusiasm; to most it seemed gratuitously provocative, since the Bank’s charter would expire anyway during Jackson’s second term. Particularly significant was the opposition of Treasury Secretary Louis McLane. By law, the deposits could only be removed from the Bank if the secretary of the Treasury made an official finding that they were unsafe there and communicated this finding to Congress. However, a Treasury inquiry had just shown that the BUS had $79 million in assets and $37 million in liabilities—clearly a solvent and safe bank. The House of Representatives had recently concluded an investigation of its own, undertaken at the president’s behest, by voting 109 to 46 to affirm the safety of the government’s deposits.
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Jackson had anticipated McLane’s reluctance to carry out removal and had a solution in mind. He reshuffled his cabinet, shifting McLane over to the State Department, where his views coincided with the president’s more closely, sending Livingston to be diplomatic envoy in Paris and appointing William J. Duane secretary of the Treasury on June 1. Duane was a known critic of the BUS, and Jackson assumed he would cooperate with removal.

To Jackson’s surprise, Duane proved no more willing to remove the deposits than his predecessor. Although the new secretary opposed renewal of the Bank’s charter, he informed the president in a letter of July 10 that he considered the deposits perfectly safe there in the meantime. Duane warned that removing the deposits to other banks would encourage the latter in reckless extensions of credit. The secretary took the position that he had to use his own judgment in finding the deposits unsafe in the Bank and could not simply defer to the wishes of the White House. “You called on me, sir,” he said to the president in a dramatic conversation on July 15, “to do an act for which I might be impeached.” When the president declared, “A secretary, sir, is merely an executive agent, a subordinate, and you may say so in self-defense,” Duane responded, “In this particular case, Congress confers a discretionary power, and requires reasons if I exercise it. Surely this contemplates responsibility on my part.”
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Failing to persuade Duane to change his mind, on September 23 a frustrated Andrew Jackson summarily dismissed the secretary of the Treasury and put Roger Taney in his place. Taney’s was an interim appointment, allowing him to take over immediately without waiting for Senate confirmation; he retained the office of attorney general as well until replaced there by Benjamin Butler, Van Buren’s law partner. Taney promptly initiated a process designed as a fig leaf to legitimate removal: Rather than a sudden gigantic withdrawal of funds, the Treasury made no more deposits but continued to pay its bills with drafts on the BUS, thus gradually running down its account to zero by the end of 1833. Instead of putting its tax receipts in the BUS, the Treasury placed them in state banks scattered throughout the Union. Dubbed the “pet banks,” these were selected more for their political friendship to the administration than for their financial soundness, which was certainly no improvement over that of the BUS. The reasons for removal submitted by Taney to Congress related more to the Bank’s antiadministration activities than to its financial condition. Demonstrating the Jackson administration’s solicitude for overseas markets, Taney directed the pet banks to give merchants engaged in foreign trade preference when extending credit.
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Jackson had defied the wishes of Congress and most of his cabinet; he had violated the spirit, perhaps the letter, of the law. McLane and Cass, the secretaries of state and war, both tendered their resignations, which the president persuaded them to withdraw by publicly declaring that removal of the deposits was his personal decision, for which they shared no responsibility. Vice President Van Buren stayed out of town, distancing himself both literally and figuratively from the removal policy, which he feared would divide the Democratic party and jeopardize his hopes to succeed Jackson. The political and business communities were shocked. No parallel episode would occur again until 1973, when President Nixon fired two attorneys general in order to find one who would obey his order to dismiss the special prosecutor Archibald Cox.

William J. Duane, savaged in Francis Blair’s
Washington Globe
and the rest of the Democratic press as proud, petty, and stubborn, retired quietly to private life, taking with him a clear conscience. A hard-money Democrat like the president, he had steadfastly resisted a policy of taking the taxpayers’ money out of a solvent bank in defiance of the law and scattering it among doubtful institutions over which the government had even less control than over the BUS.
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After Congress came back into session in December, the Senate refused Taney confirmation and declared the reasons he had given for deposit removal “unsatisfactory and insufficient.” Impeachment of the popular president was not politically viable, given Democratic strength in the House. The Senate, however, was dominated by Jackson’s opponents, notably the National Republicans Henry Clay and Daniel Webster and the nullifier John C. Calhoun. These three eloquent statesmen, dubbed “the great triumvirate,” led the Senate into what is universally recognized as its golden age.
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A fourth spokesman should in fairness be added to their number: the redoubtable Jacksonian Thomas Hart Benton. Crowds flocked to the Senate galleries to witness their debates, for it was a generation that appreciated public speaking as an art form and relished the drama unfolding.

Under Clay’s leadership, the Senate debated and finally passed (on March 28, 1834) by a vote of 26 to 20 a motion of censure on the president—the only one in American history. Jackson, the censure read, had “assumed upon himself authority and power not conferred by the Constitution and laws.” When Clay first introduced his censure motion, the Old Hero wanted to challenge him to a duel. “Oh, if I live to get these robes of office off me, I will bring the rascal to a dear account,” he raged. After censure passed, the president chose a more appropriate response. He sent an indignant protest addressed to the Senate, defending his right to remove cabinet officers and arguing that impeachment was the only constitutional recourse against presidential malfeasance. Wisely, Jackson emphasized presidential prerogatives rather than the substance of the financial issue in his remonstrance.
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Posterity would vindicate the right of a president to dismiss cabinet members who refuse to follow his orders, but his right to order an officer to break the law (in this case, to remove the deposits without finding them unsafe) is another matter.
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As Van Buren had feared, the war Jackson waged against the Bank in his second term drove a substantial number of prominent men out of the Democratic Party. Those alienated included some of the president’s own associates, among them Gulian Verplanck, Willie Magnum, John Bell, Hugh Lawson White, and even his close friend John Eaton, for whom Jackson had sacrificed so much. Defections were particularly conspicuous among the business community and in the South, where large cotton planters appreciated the usefulness of a sophisticated banking system and the potential dangers to them of a strong presidency. As Davy Crockett of Tennessee put it, “If Jackson is sustained in this act, we say that the will of one man shall be the law of the land.”
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By 1836, twenty-eight of the Democratic congressmen who had voted to recharter the Bank had left the party.

Encouraged by such recruits, in the spring of 1834 Jackson’s opponents adopted the name Whig, traditional term for critics of executive usurpations. James Watson Webb, editor of the New York
Courier and Enquirer
, encouraged use of the name. Clay gave it national currency in a speech on April 14, 1834, likening “the whigs of the present day” to those who had resisted George III, and by summer it was official. To the complaints of the Democrats that the BUS constituted a rich men’s conspiracy against the public, the Whigs responded with their own accusations of conspiracy. The Jackson administration, they charged, represented a conspiracy by a few political favorites typified by the kitchen cabinet and pet bankers to substitute executive tyranny for the balanced government of the Founders.
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The Antimasons came around to join with National Republicans in the new Whig Party (though in Massachusetts they temporarily allied with the Democrats);
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for a time the nullifiers also cooperated with the Whigs on some issues. For the next twenty years Whigs and Democrats would constitute the two major parties of what historians call “the second party system.”

In response to the deposits’ removal, America’s leading banker was not disposed to roll over and play dead. “This worthy President thinks that because he has scalped Indians and imprisoned Judges he is to have his way with the Bank,” Biddle declared. “He is mistaken.” During the recent election campaign, Biddle had extended credit generously in an effort to make the Bank popular. Now he resolved to use its power over the economy differently. The loss of up to half of all its deposits would impel the Bank to curtail its loans considerably. Biddle chose to impose an even sharper economic downturn than strictly necessary on the country, to make sure that Jackson’s deposit removal would be noticed and deplored. The change from his previous easy money policy came swiftly, forcing some firms to curtail expansion plans and others into bankruptcy. Layoffs of workers followed. “All the other banks and all the merchants may break, but the Bank of the United States shall not break,” Biddle resolved.
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