Charles Austin Beard
The Rise of American Civilization
THE creation of nine states beyond the mountains, accelerating the steady movement of political power toward the West, was synchronous with profound social changes on the seaboard changes equally disturbing to eastern gentlemen of the old school in wigs, ruffles, knee breeches, and silver buckles. While the widening agricultural area was sending an ever-increasing number of representatives to speak for farmers upon the floor of Congress, state after state on the Atlantic coast was putting ballots into the hands of laborers and mechanics whom the Fathers of the Republic had feared as Cicero feared the proletariat and desperate debtors of ancient Rome. Even Jefferson, fiery apostle of equality in the abstract, shrank at first from the grueling test of his own logic; not until long after the Declaration of Independence did he commit himself to the dangerous doctrine of manhood suffrage.
Expressing their anxieties in law, the framers of the first state constitutions, as we have noted, placed taxpaying or property qualifications on the right to vote. The more timid excluded from public office all except the possessors of substantial property; and those who stood aghast at the march of secularism applied religious tests that excluded from places of political trust Catholics, Jews, Unitarians, and scoffers who denied belief in hell. All people thus laid under the ban of the law they regarded as socially unsafe. "The tumultuous populace of large cities," ran the warning words of Washington, "are ever to be dreaded." In Jefferson's opinion also, "the mobs of the great cities" were "sores on the body politic."
Such was the prevailing view among the ruling classes of the time and it was founded on no mere theories of state. The conduct of the rioters in the days of the Stamp Act agitation, the fierce treatment meted out to Tories in the years of the Revolution, and the mass meetings of workingmen in New York and Philadelphia when the first state constitutions were being framed, all indicated that social forces of unknown power were stirring beneath the surface of society.
There was a brief period of peace and reaction while the Constitution was being launched but that was the calm before the storm. Washington had been safely installed only a few weeks when the alarm bell of the French Revolution gave the signal for an uprising of the sansculottes of the western world. Before long, in all the cities of the American seaboard, a movement for white manhood suffrage was in full swing. Indeed, the mechanics of Pennsylvania had already set an example in 1776 by forcing the adoption of a low taxpaying franchise which gave a broad popular base to the government and paved the way for a Jacobinical democracy. During Washington's first administration, in 1791, to be exact, Vermont came into the Union without property restrictions, and Delaware gave the ballot to all white men who paid taxes. Though reckoned among the conservative states, Maryland "shot Niagara" in 1809 by adopting manhood suffrage; and nine years later Connecticut, even less devoted to the quest for novelties, decided that all males who contributed a trivial sum to the support of the government could be trusted with the ballot.
The fire spread to Massachusetts. Into the state constitutional convention of 1820 strode radicals ready to strike down all the political privileges expressly accorded to property, raising anew the specter of Daniel Shays. Frightened at their demands, Daniel Webster, then in the prime of his manhood, and John Adams, at the close of his memorable career, joined in protesting against innovations. With his customary eloquence, Webster warned the convention that all the revolutions of history which had shaken society to its foundations had been revolts against property; that equal suffrage was incompatible with inequality in property; and that if adopted it would either end in assaults on wealth or new restraints upon democracy a reaction of the notables. In spite of the fact that the argument was cogent, it did not rally the delegates as one man to the established bulwarks. The privileges of riches in the state senate were indeed retained but the straight property test for the suffrage was abandoned and a small taxpaying restriction adopted, merely to be swept away itself within a few years.
A similar contest took place in New York in 1821 when a band of Federalists in the constitutional convention argued, threatened, and raged to save the political rights of property, only to go down in defeat after gaining some petty concessions which were abolished within five years in favor of white manhood suffrage. From this struggle echoes were heard in Rhode Island where the mechanics of Providence, learning of Tammany's victory in New York, called for a similar unhorsing of the freeholders who ruled their own state. Unawed by their hue and cry, the conservatives stood firm while the tiny commonwealth founded by apostles of liberty was shaken by a long and stormy agitation over the rights of man. For nearly twenty years the tempest blew hard, provoking an armed uprising, known as Dorr's Rebellion, and culminating in the substitution of a taxpaying for the freehold qualification on the suffrage.
Still more obdurate were Virginia and North Carolina, notwithstanding the power of Jefferson's great name; the former would not let anybody but landowners vote until 1850; the latter did not surrender that restriction for six years more. But the delay was not so significant, for the growth of the western counties in those two states gave them each a population of small farmers who had no more love for the planters on the coast than the Irish mechanics of New York City had for the stockholders in the United States Bank. Thus it may be said that when the nineteenth century turned its first quarter, political power was slipping from the hands of seaboard freeholders, capitalists, and planters into the grip of frontier farmers usually heavily in debt to the East for capital and credit and into the hands of the working class of the industrial towns, already tinged with leveling doctrines from fermenting Europe.
As the cohorts of the new democracy marched in serried ranks upon the government, they inevitably modified the spirit and practice of American politics. First of all, they criticized the method of electing the President. Shrinking from the hubbub of popular agitations, the Fathers had sought to remove the choice of the chief magistrate as far as possible from the passions of the multitude; though impressed by the difficulties of the task they hoped to introduce a quiet, dignified procedure about as decorous as the selection of a college rector by a board of clerical trustees. To attain their end, they provided that the President of the United States and also the Vice-President should be carefully chosen by a small body of electors selected as the legislatures of the states might decide.
Given this choice, the legislatures, naturally greedy for power, proceeded to exercise the right themselves; but before long the new democracy was thundering at their doors, demanding the transfer of that sovereign prerogative to the voters at the polls. Slowly but surely the managers of politics yielded to the cry for the popular choice of the President; in 1824 only six states still allowed the legislatures to choose the presidential electors and eight years later but a single state, South Carolina, clung to the original mode. One of the great safeguards against the tyranny of majorities was now submerged in the tossing waves of democracy.
Yet the all-devouring populace was by no means satisfied with this gain, for the nomination of party candidates for President was still in the control of a small body of politicians known as the "congressional caucus." After the country divided into two parties, it became necessary for each of them to select its candidate in advance of the election; but of course the rank and file of its personnel could not assemble for that purpose in one forum, travel being tedious and expensive even for exalted officers. Accordingly the party members in Congress simply took upon themselves the high function. When the season for choosing the presidential candidate approached, the congressmen of each party met in caucus behind closed doors and agreed upon the dignitary to be put before the people. While the election of President and Vice-President was passing into popular control, the choice of candidates thus remained in the grip of a few managers in Washington.
To the new democracy this situation was intolerable and a roar of protest went up against it. In 1824, on the refusal of "old King Caucus" to nominate General Andrew Jackson, such a clatter was raised that never again did members of Congress dare officially to select the people's candidates for them. When the campaign of 1832 came around, there was substituted for the caucus an institution known as the nominating convention, an extra-legal party conference composed of faithful delegates chosen by local assemblies of loyal partisans. To be sure, Senators and Representatives were always prominent in the convention but they were now faced by hundreds of party agents "fresh from the people," as Jackson was wont to say.
In fact, the grand convention was mainly ruled by officeholders and aspirants for office. While the election of the President was vested in the people legally, the choice of candidates, in fact, passed from the congressional monopoly to professional politicians at large. This transfer was noted by many eminent observers, especially by those who failed to win a nomination; and soon the convention was denounced in the vivid terms formerly applied to the caucus. Nevertheless, the new party institution took root and flourished; by 1840 it seemed as rigidly fixed as the Constitution itself. It also became at the same time the accepted organ of party operation in the lower ranges of state and county politics. Men who refused to abide by its decisions were anathematized and treated like social pariahs.
The profits as well as the powers of public office now became objects of interest to the new democracy. "To the victors belong the spoils," a slogan of New York politicians, was elevated to the dignity of a national principle in the age of Andrew Jackson. And yet it would be a mistake to assume that the doctrine was a product of the period. To the statesmen of ancient Rome the emoluments of office and the plunder of the provinces were matters of prime concern; the hands of the righteous Cicero were far from spotless. The government of England in the era of the Georges was an immense aggregation of sinecures and profitable positions, the impeccable Pitt having his Newcastle to distribute pelf among the beggars of the better sort that swarmed around Parliament.
In colonial America, contests over lucrative posts filled official circles with petty rackets; the thrifty Franklin made the most of his opportunity as royal postmaster-general of America. Once independence was established, there were problems of statecraft to be considered. Even the virtuous Washington, placed by a sense of honor and private fortune above jobbery in public offices, could not ignore its function in party management. In making his first appointments, he was careful to choose friends rather than enemies of the new Constitution, although he occasionally tried to clip the wings of especially dangerous critics by giving them places in the administration; and, taught by experience the perils of doubters in his own household, he finally vowed that he would henceforth select only welldisposed persons for office, on the highly defensible theory that no government can rely on its foes for success. Jefferson was equally careful, when removals, resignations, and deaths occurred, to make selections with reference to party loyalty.
This practice the labor and agrarian democracy which later swept into power merely amplified by ousting a larger proportion of office-holders and by avowing more frankly that the sweets of place were among the joys of victory. To this doctrine, they added another, namely, rotation in office, demanding that terms be short so that more party workers could share in the delights of conquest. The bucolic openly admitted the purpose; while the sophisticated argued that long tenure made officers lazy, bureaucratic, and tyrannical.
In either form the new gospel weighed heavily with farmers who seldom saw as much as a hundred dollars cash in the course of a whole year and with mechanics who labored at the bench or forge for seventy-five cents a day. To them a chance at the public "trough," as the phrase ran in gross colloquialism, was to be welcomed gratefully on any axiom of ethics. Indeed, it was often difficult to distinguish, except in mathematical terms, between those who suffered from the taint of vulgarity in office-seeking and those who united public emoluments and private retainers in the higher ranges of the public service. Whatever the niceties of the occasion required, it was clear to all that the advent of the farmer-labor democracy was bound to work changes in the more decorous proceedings handed down from the Fathers.
The flow of time in which occurred these modifications in American political life carried off the heroic figures of the Revolution and left the race to the fleet men of a new generation. Washington died in 1799, still "first in the hearts of his countrymen," as Light Horse Harry Lee said in the funeral oration. Patrick Henry had already gone to his long home; Samuel Adams was soon to follow.
In 1804, Alexander Hamilton, in the prime of life, was shot in a duel by Aaron Burr. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, old and bent under the weight of years, trudged on in the dusty way until 1826, when they died within a few hours of each other on July 4, reconciled and at peace.
Charles Carroll, last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, lived to turn the first sod for the Baltimore and Ohio Railway on July 4, 1828, and to see with dimmed eyes the outlines of a progressive future; but in four years he too was no more. James Madison, philosopher of the Constitution, kept up the good fight long enough to write a ringing protest against nullification in South Carolina; then death carried him off at the ripe old age of eighty-five.
When the election of 1824 arrived, there was no Father of the republic, in the vigor of manhood and crowned with the halo of a romantic age, able to take up the office laid down by Colonel Monroe. Time as ever was ruthless. The Virginia succession had come to an end. Even the Federalist party, founded by Hamilton and Washington, was out of the field or rather incorporated as a disturbing factor in the all-embracing Republican party of Jefferson. The "era of good feeling" was closing; buried or concealed hatreds were reviving. New men, looking to the future rather than to the past, were jostling one another for place and power in the forum, but none stood out head and shoulders above the others as the inevitable successor to Monroe.
Puzzled by this state of affairs, the congressional caucus nominated for the presidency W.H. Crawford of Georgia, a man of ability but not a commanding personality. Its decree was in regular form but it could not be enforced because, forsooth, three other candidates insisted on enterng the lists. John Quincy Adams, son of the second President, regarded himself as heir apparent in virtue of his services as Secretary of State; while the frontier brought as hard fist down on the political table with emphasis, announcing the rights of Henry Clay of Kentucky and Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. "The wild men of the Mississippi region" could not be ignored but fortune postponed their mastery.
So divided were the returns from the polls that no one of the four had a majority of the presidential electors as required by the Constitution; Jackson stood at the top, Clay at the bottom. From this it followed that the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, where each state could cast only one vote --the vote of its delegation and men elected in calmer days held the floor under the leadership of Clay as Speaker. Upon the trained ears of the old political dynasty, the cries of Jackson's hordes swarming into the lobbies sounded like the voices of willful fanatics. Bent on defeating them at all costs, Clay, whose small number of votes left him outside the pale, threw his strength heavily to the right and by skillful management won the presidency for Adams with the office of Secretary of State for himself, perhaps, as alleged, quite accidentally.
Though the roaring flood of the new democracy was now foaming perilously near the crest, the great dike of prescriptive rights still held, for Adams could no doubt give to the government the tone of the old regime. He called himself a Republican in politics, having turned against the Federalists and affiliated with the Jeffersonians in the days when the latter were regarded by the New England aristocracy as "a Jacobinical rabble." Nevertheless, he was no hornyhanded farmer, aproned mechanic, or bold Indian fighter, dear to the rising electorate of the age. Educated at Harvard and in the politest circles of Europe, Adams viewed public service as a kind of noblesse oblige to be kept untainted by the vulgar odors of loot and spoils a service capable of protecting democracy by efficient administration against the inroads of the plutocracy.
Besides being out of lockstep in matter of political patronage, he was opposed to flinging western land out to impecunious members of Congress, avid speculators, and gambling farmers. Looking to the long future, he believed in preserving the public domain as a great national treasury of resources to be wisely and honestly managed with a view to revenues for roads, canals, and education in letters, arts, and sciences. Besides anticipating by nearly a hundred years some of the most enlightened measures of conservation, Adams foresaw in a livid flash the doom of slavery in a social war.
By no possible effort could he become a Jacksonian "mixer"; like his illustrious descendant, Henry Adams, he was destined to wander in space without finding rest or peace. From the beginning to the end of his administration, misfortune dogged his steps. When he appointed Clay head of the State Department, the resentment of Jackson's party broke all bounds, worshipers of "Old Hickory," seeing in the appointment conclusive proof that a "corrupt bargain" had defeated their Hero. With a feeling of righteous indignation, they began to prepare for the next election, filling Adams' four-years with torment by abuse and with chagrin by gathering in his friends as they fled from the sinking ship. In a tidal wave the country repudiated Adams at the next election.
The campaign of 1828 was marked by extreme rancor a bitterness akin to that of 1800 when the Jeffersonian hordes drove the elder Adams from power. Metropolitan newspapers, the clergy, federal office-holders, manufacturers, and bankers were in general hotly in favor of reelecting Adams; the richest planters of the Old South preferred him to Jackson, even if they had little love for a New England Puritan himself. Against this combination were aligned the farmers, particularly those burdened with poverty and debts, and the mechanics of the towns who shouted their "Hurrah for Jackson !" with a gusto.
Passions of rank and place, rather than definite issues, divided the two factions and in the mad scramble for power both resorted to billingsgate of the most finished quality. Though garbed in the mantle of respectability, the Adams faction pictured Jackson, to use the terse summary of a recent historian, Claude Bowers, "as a usurper, an adulterer, a gambler, a cock-fighter, a brawler, a drunkard, and a murderer." It also turned on his wife, its national campaign committee even sinking so low as to send out bales of pamphlets attacking the moral character of his "dear Rachel" who, although she did smoke a pipe, was a woman of exemplary life. In this unsavory game, Jackson's faction, determined not to be outdone, portrayed Adams as a stingy Puritan, an aristocrat who hated the people, a corruptionist who had bought his own election, and a waster of the people's money on White House decorations; and accused Clay of managing Adams' campaign "like a shyster, pettifogging in a bastard suit before a country squire."
When the smoke of the fray had lifted, it was found that Adams had won nothing but the electoral votes of New England and not even all those; whereas Jackson had carried the rest of the Union, making an absolutely clean sweep in the South and West. The collapse of the Adams party was terrible to behold. Gentlemen and grand dames of the old order, like the immigrant nobles and ladies of France fleeing from the sansculottes of Paris, could discover no consolation in their grief.
On March 4, 1829, a son of the soil rode into Washington to take the oath of office. All the Presidents before Andrew Jackson had come from families that possessed property and its cultural accompaniments. None had been compelled to work with his hands for a livelihood; all except Washington had received a college education. Jackson, on the other hand, born of poverty-stricken parents in the uplands of South Carolina, was of the earth earthy. It is not even known just how or when he got the barest rudiments of learning but it is certain that to the end of his life his language, if forceful and direct, was characterized by grammar strangely and wonderfully constructed.
In his youth Jackson had gone to the Tennessee frontier where, as a land speculator, horse trader, politician, and rural genius in general, he managed to amass a large estate and a goodly number of slaves. Tall and sinewy, he loved wrestling matches, fist fights, and personal quarrels. By way of settling one dispute, he killed a man in a duel and ever afterward treasured the pistol that performed the deed as a trophy to show his visitors. In an awful brawl with the Benton brothers, he himself received a bullet which remained imbedded in his flesh for many years as evidence of his hardihood. Whenever an Indian fight occurred in his neighborhood, he rushed to the front.
Elevated to the leadership of the local militia by his undoubted courage, Jackson won the passionate devotion of his men by sharing their hardships and perils. Already a local hero, he had leaped into national fame in 1815 by defeating a blundering and incompetent British general at the battle of New Orleans. Finally, he had added more laurels by wresting Florida from Spain, summarily hanging two English subjects, and stamping out warlike Indians on the border.
This son of the soil, transformed in the eyes of his devotees into a military figure comparable to Napoleon the Great, furnished excellent presidential timber for the new democracy. That his views on the tariff, internal improvements, and other current issues were nebulous in no way detracted from his immense and irresistible availability. He was from the West. He was a farmer a slave owner, no doubt, but still a farmer. He had none of the unction that marked the politicians of the seaboard school and the mechanics could think of him as one of themselves.
Jackson's opponents, of course, sneered because he was rough in manner, smoked an old pipe, chewed tobacco profusely, told stories that could not be printed, loafed around with a week's bristles on his face, and wore soiled clothes. John Quincy Adams, who knew Jackson well, could hardly suppress his anguish when Harvard gave "the brawler from Tennessee" the degree of doctor of laws. It was not a pure accident that Jackson's chief regret at the end of his presidential course was "that he had never had an opportunity to shoot Clay or hang Calhoun." But the contempt of his enemies only endeared him the more to the masses, especially as all charges were discreetly counterbalanced by news that he regularly read the Bible, recited countless lines of Watts' doleful hymns, and asked the blessing at the table. Moreover, those who saw him dressed in his best, with his pipe and plug laid aside, bowing in his courtliest manner, concluded that the discreditable tales about him were partisan falsehoods.
When the day of Jackson's inauguration came, the city of Washington was jammed with crowds. From near and far thousands of his devoted followers had come to witness the spectacle and in many cases to get jobs in the new administration. All the decorum of former days was rudely broken. Bowing right and left to cheering throngs, Jackson and his party walked from his hotel to the inaugural ceremonies. After taking the oath of office, he rode in his best military style down the Avenue to the White House, followed by a surging sea of worshippers.
On his arrival at the presidential residence the doors were thrown open to everybody and, if Webster is to be accepted as authority, the pushing idolaters behaved like hoodlums, upsetting the punch bowls, breaking glasses, and standing in muddy boots on damask chairs to catch a glimpse of the people's Napoleon. "The reign of King Mob seemed triumphant," groaned Justice Story of the Supreme Court. Recalling the refinements of Jefferson, Mrs. Margaret Bayard Smith, a leader in the local social set, held her nose and wrote: "The noisy and disorderly rabble ... brought to my mind descriptions I have read of the mobs in the Tuileries and at Versailles."
With utmost dispatch the business of government and dividing the spoils was begun. To aid him in the operation, Jackson chose two cabinets. The first, composed of the heads of departments, was filled with men of fair talent and some distinction; many a worse ministry has been assembled since. The second, known as the "Kitchen Cabinet," was made up of Isaac Hill, Amos Kendall, and other private advisers, who served as a collective agency to keep the king informed about the gossip of the Capital and to keep the masses in good humor with news meet for their understanding.
As soon as the chiefs were installed, a survey of the gentlemen in federal berths commenced. "No damn rascal who made use of an office or its profits for the purpose of keeping Mr. Adams in or General Jackson out of power is entitled to the least leniency save that of hanging," wrote one of the President's applicants. "You may say to all our anxious Adamsites that the Barnacles will be scraped clean off the Ship of State," declared a member of the kitchen sanhedrin. "Most of them have grown so large and stick so tight that the scraping process will doubtless be fatal to them."
Though the threats were terrifying, in fact the slaughter of the innocents was not as great as the opposition alleged. Indeed, many got only their just deserts; some of the tenants were found to be scoundrels, prosecuted, and convicted for fraudulent transactions while public servants, one of the "martyrs," a personal friend of Adams, being sent to prison for stealing from the Treasury. No doubt hundreds of old and faithful officers were ousted; but on the other hand hundreds were allowed to retain their places in spite of the severe pressure from the Jackson followers, begging for jobs.
It is therefore due to the memory of the President to say that, like Clive in India, he had reason to be proud of his moderation. To this judgment must be quickly joined the statement that Jackson started the custom of making wholesale removals in favor of party workers, giving high national sanction to the practice of bestowing the spoils upon the victors. A few intellectuals, such as James Russell Lowell, soon poured ridicule upon the system; many statesmen, especially those who had never had occasion to make use of it, denounced it; yet as time passed that form of political etiquette became more and more prevalent, hardening into prescription.
In addition to scraping barnacles from the Ship of State, Jackson gave energetic consideration to the political issues of the hour: the tariff, nullification, the Bank, internal improvements, and the disposal of western lands. All these questions were economic in character, presenting new phases of the struggle that had produced the colonial revolt against Great Britain, the reaction under Hamilton, and the swing to Jefferson. And their management involved the fortunes of the three marked sections into which the country was divided --the capitalistic Northeast, the planting South, and the farming regions beyond the seaboard with the mechanics of the towns coming into the play whenever the aristocracy of wealth and talents was to be pommeled.
Each section had an outstanding champion who sought to make congressional combinations of power in the interest of his constituents. Daniel Webster, as Fisher, his biographer, tells us, was "the hope and reliance of the moneyed and conservative classes, the merchants, manufacturers, capitalists, and bankers." John C. Calhoun acted frankly as the mouthpiece of the planting aristocracy; he acknowledged it and was proud of it. Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri was the shouting spokesman of the western farmers and land speculators who were struggling to wrench the public domain from the grip of the government. Happily placed between extremes, North and South, Henry Clay labored to construct a platform that would command the support of the eastern capitalists and the western farmers, unite hearts and make him President; but he failed to accomplish his design.
Into the lists Jackson entered as gladiator-at-large for the masses against the moneyed classes, declaring that the agricultural interest was "superior in importance" to all others and placing himself, as he said, at the head of "the humbler members of society the farmers, mechanics, and laborers who have neither the time nor the means" of securing special favors for themselves. They heard him gladly and thought him their Sir Galahad.
During Jackson's first administration the oldest of domestic questions, the tariff, became so acute that, in 1832, it raised a revolt among the South Carolina planters. Between the opening of the century and that date signal changes had been made in the economic condition of the country. The Embargo and the War of 1812, by cutting off the stream of English manufactures, produced an immense growth in American industries, a growth that was further enhanced by the tariff of 1816, enacted, ostensibly at least, to provide a continuous home market for agricultural produce. In this process the economic climate of several regions was radically altered.
Although the leaders of New England the home of American shipping interests engaged in a lively carrying trade had opposed the tariff of 1816, they accepted the unavoidable and turned their best energies, together with their capital, to the promotion of manufactures favored by protection. Iron masters of Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, having reaped high profits under the gracious shade of the tariff wall, naturally thought of increasing their earnings by raising the bulwark. Even the wool, hemp, and flax growers of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and the sugar planters of Louisiana discovered that, while free trade was good for agriculturists as a general theory, advantageous exceptions could be made in practice. Other economic interests of various kinds veered in the new direction.
And as the number of protected groups increased and their capital augmented, the pressure on Congress for additional safeguards became heavier and heavier. Then political weathervanes veered. Webster, who had fought the tariff of 1816, taking note of drifting flaw, became an ardent champion of protection. If Calhoun, finding the sea lanes to industrial England open once more, turned back upon his course to free trade, his colleague, Clay, developed the idea of "discriminating" customs duties into a perfect national system. "Dame Commerce," he exclaimed, "is a flirting, flippant, noisy Jade and if we are governed by her fantasies, we shall never put off the muslins of India and the cloths of Europe." So he appealed to "the yeomanry of the country, the true and genuine landlords of this tenement, called the United States," to emancipate the nation from dependence on foreign capitalists.
Under the drive of combined economic powers, the tariff was forced up in 1824, again in 1828, and higher still in 1832. The second of these three revisions, known as the "tariff of abominations" among its enemies, was carried through Congress by such a determined union of factions that the planting statesmen who now wanted to trade their produce freely for the manufactures of England were thrown into an unwonted political fear. Badly defeated in the forum at Washington, they began to build a backfire at home. Speaking through the legislatures of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, they solemnly denounced the tariff of abominations.
Then, finding such denunciations to be mere rhetoric flung against triumphant fact, South Carolina, weary of sheer verbalism, made ready for open resistance. In the autumn of 1832, the state legislature ordered an election of delegates to a convention, with a view of preparing for the worst. The elections were duly held, the assembly was convened, and an Ordinance of Nullification tossed defiantly in the face of the protected interests. This Ordinance named the battleground and the weapons. It declared that the tariff gave "bounties to classes and individuals ... at the expense and to the injury and oppression of other classes and individuals." Running true to American political phraseology, it proclaimed the tariff a violation of the Constitution therefore null and void and without force in the state of South Carolina. It closed with a solemn warning that, if the federal government attempted to coerce the people of the state, they would assert their independence and take their place as a sovereign power among the nations of the earth.
While the issue thus joined was fraught with peril to the republic, it was not absolutely intractable. No doubt, South Carolina's challenge of nullification coupled with secession, like the gesture of New England during the War of 1812, was defiant, but the planting forces were not yet welded into an unyielding cohesion. On the contrary, the cotton states to which South Carolina appealed for support as she did again in 1860 after condemning the tariff as abominable, refused point blank to approve nullification as a remedy. On the other side, the protected interests, assailed in the rear by Jacksonian farmers, were not strong enough to hold in an open affray sectors they had taken by congressional negotiation nor yet prepared to attempt a suppression of nullification by arms. Capitalism and cotton had many leagues to cover before they could be joined in a death grapple. Evidently an accommodation was both necessary and possible.
To the settlement, President Jackson contributed something, though what and how much it is hard to say. Beyond question his devotion to the Union was deep and sincere. Although he came from a region that had once been ready to "fly off" when the closure of the Mississippi was threatened, his state was now well content with the common roof the Fathers had built. While there were slave owners in Tennessee, and Jackson was one of them, the political community, largely dominated by small farmers, was by no means assimilated completely to the planting system. Cotton was not king there and Jackson's sympathies, as he was wont to say, were with the humble people, rather than with the planters or with capitalists. Moreover, he had a tiger's hatred for Calhoun, apostle of nullification --a personal hatred which grew out of a well-authenticated report that the South Carolina statesman, when a member of Monroe's Cabinet, had proposed the arrest of Jackson for his cavalier conduct during the Seminole War in Florida. Smarting with resentment, the General, at a Jefferson dinner in 1830, had snapped out his warning to Calhoun in a toast: "Our Federal Union. It must and shall be preserved." Besides this, Jackson was President of the United States and he regarded resistance to authority in the light of a personal insult as well as a violation of law.
When he heard the news of South Carolina's action, Jackson therefore declared himself ready to "hang every leader ... of that infatuated people, sir, by martial law, irrespective of his name or political or social position." Regarding nullification at bottom as a species of sedition, he vowed that he would meet it "at the threshold and have the leaders arrested and arraigned for treason." Still he was careful to confine such heated expressions to private letters and conversations. With a strong feeling for realities, he sent a shrewd politician to South Carolina to sound the earth at the very moment that he was preparing to order out additional troops.
In his public utterances Jackson spoke more softly, using the phrases of law and order rather than the language of the battlefield. Taking refuge in a long and eloquent proclamation, the President announced his firm belief in the sacredness and perpetuity of the Union and his intention to uphold it by the exercise of all the powers vested in him by the Constitution. This document was put in final form, it seems, by his Secretary of State, Edward Livingston, one of the most remarkable figures in American history; but the central idea of the paper was Jackson's own. Though emphatic, it contained no bluster, no threats of executions, no menace of martial law. It was firm, yet conciliatory toward the South Carolinians, appealing, as did Lincoln's inaugural address long afterward, to their love of Union rather than their fear of force. Employing also the tactics of moderation in his messages to Congress on the crisis, Jackson proposed that the tariff against which the nullifiers protested be lowered --that was just what they wanted and called for new legislation granting the President larger powers in the enforcement of the laws which they did not mind much if the laws pleased them.
Here was a case for compromise and Henry Clay, past master of that fine art, rose to the occasion, laying before the Senate in February, 1833, a plan which offered consolations to both parties. Turning courteously to the planters, he proposed that the tariff to which they objected be reduced to the level fixed in 1816, which Calhoun himself had then approved. Bowing tactfully to the other side, he suggested that nothing drastic be done immediately, that the proposed reduction should extend over a period of ten years, taking the form of curtailment by easy stages. Remembering the affection which all men professed for the Union, he also accepted a bill making provision for upholding its supremacy by armed force, if necessary. After a warm debate, both propositions --the one lowering the tariff and the other exalting the Union-- passed both houses of Congress and were signed by the President on the same day, March 2.
Hailing the outcome as a glorious victory, South Carolina rescinded the Ordinance nullifying the tariff and satisfied her honor by declaring the force bill null and void.
Everywhere planters regarded the triumph of open resistance as complete. According to all outward signs, at least, they had every reason to rejoice, for whatever might be said about the flowers of speech that decorated the contest, they had actually checked the progress of the Hamilton-Webster system --checked it so thoroughly that a few years later, when the manufacturing interests succeeded in pushing the tariff up again, they were able to bring it down by easier means.
On the other hand, Jackson could point with pride to the fact that the Union had been duly preserved, and the protected industries could take pleasure in escaping a single swift blow of repudiation. It was not until his last days that Clay, on reviewing his career of strife and disappointment, found in his mind grave doubts about the wisdom of his course. Would it have been better if he had let Jackson and the nullifiers come to blows in 1833, settling then and there, by force of arms, the mighty economic question that divided the sections ? Who, working under the eye of eternity, could make answer ?
Interwoven with the tariff controversy was the public land question which had worried George III's ministers, plagued Hamilton, and continued to evoke heated dispute. Besides inspiring Senator Benton of Missouri to flights of eloquence, it called forth the celebrated Webster-Hayne debate in 1830, the greatest among the many verbal battles of the Jacksonian era. Although constitutional glosses have almost buried the substance of that disputation, its kernel was essentially economic. It arose over a proposal of a Connecticut Senator, Samuel A. Foote, to inquire into the expediency of limiting the sale of the public lands --a matter of moment both to protected manufacturers and slave-owning planters. The former, as eager to secure an abundance of cheap labor as to find shelter behind a tariff barrier, viewed with grave concern the westward rush to land in the public domain. Working people who forsook flaming forges and whirling spindles to till the soil in the Ohio Valley were lost to the mills; while those who remained behind could raise their wages by threatening to follow in the footsteps of the pioneers. On the other hand, southern planters, not yet aware that a valley of free farmers might in time contest their own sway, saw a possible addition to their strength in the growing agricultural population beyond the Alleghenies. Farmers and planters acting together, the latter reasoned, might overcome the manufacturing capitalists in politics at Washington.
There was nothing occult in this philosophy. Every statesman of the time knew the relation of the land question to the tariff issue and to the balance of power in the American Union, none better than Webster of Massachusetts and Hayne of South Carolina. In fact, Hayne in throwing down the gage was merely supporting a fiery Jacksonian Democrat, Senator Benton, who frankly spoke for the western farmers and kept his heart fixed on their concerns. Webster, taking up the gage, simply made a clever stroke by choosing the champion of slavery rather than the Gracchus of Missouri as the object of his attack. If he had opposed Benton, instead of the South Carolina lawyer, his plea for the Union might have been heard with less pleasure beyond the mountains and the formation of the Republican homestead-tariff bloc at Chicago in 1860 might have been still more difficult.
That problems in accountancy lay solidly beneath the cloud of constitutional argument was made manifest in the course of the debate, especially by the orator from South Carolina. Referring to the War of 1812, Hayne advanced passionately upon Webster, lashing out: "At this dark period of our National affairs, where was the Senator from Massachusetts ? How were his political associates employed ? 'Calculating the value of the union.'" More than that, he exclaimed, when the nation, in a perilous moment, was fighting for its life against a powerful foe, New England had resisted the enforcement of the law and prepared for a division of the country, all because her commercial interests were impaired.
With generality Hayne included some particulars. "Nothing was left undone," he said, "to embarrass the financial operations of the government, to prevent the enlistment of troops, to keep back the men and money of New England from the service of the Union, to force the President from his seat. ... With what justice or propriety can the South be accused of disloyalty from that quarter ?" In the heat of the fray, Hayne possibly overlooked the fact that his sword cut both ways. If South Carolina was right in 1830, why was New England wrong in 1814 ? If Massachusetts was disloyal in Madison's administration, what could be said of South Carolina in Jackson's administration ? Legally, nothing; ethically, perhaps, nullification was less defensible in war than in peace. The core of the matter lay in the reversed economic situation; but perhaps beyond economics lay something transcendent national destiny.
In an oration which has by general consent taken its place among the masterpieces of all time, Webster made the most of the opportunity presented by Hayne. He had been taunted with inconsistency; he answered in kind by showing the reversal of South Carolina's opinion on the tariff after 1816. New England had been charged with disloyalty to the Union; Webster faced the issue squarely by saying that, if anything savoring of treason was to be found in the records of New England, he offered not defense but rebuke. To Hayne's itemized bill of indictment against Massachusetts, Webster replied by throwing a blaze of glorious encomium on the record of the state in the Revolution and by adroitly covering the more recent pages of history with the mantle of evasion and oblivion.
The philosophy of nullification had been defended by Hayne; Webster, who had been perilously near it himself but a short time before, now marched upon it with sonorous rhetoric. Using historical allusions, many of them clouded by doubtful authenticity, employing logical inferences often more adroit than conclusive, he underwrote the doctrine of perpetual union: a union made by the people, not by the states, an object of love and admiration forever. In his peroration, Webster, the artist and prophetic man of letters, broke through the entanglements of the politician; in an almost superhuman effort he shot the white light of his poetic vision down the shadowed avenue of the future to dark and bloody places where men inspired by his ideal and reciting his moving periods were to die for the cause he had so magnificently celebrated.
In piling Ossa on Pelion, Webster did not overlook mundane considerations the economic and political substance of the pending issue, the sale of those annoying western lands. New England had been accused of enmity toward the West, of cherishing a hard and selfish policy; he answered by showing how New England had favored those internal improvements so dear to the West: roads that opened markets to produce and raised the values of land. Then he turned upon Hayne and warned him that the southern statesmen who, like the enemies of Banquo, had killed friendship between the farming and the commercial states would gain nothing in the end because they could never drag the West with them to nullification and secession, --another flare of prophecy that was fulfilled in 1861. But Webster was more than an orator. He was a practical man; when he came from the sky to earth, he moved to postpone indefinitely the resolution of Senator Foote which offended the West, burying it under the mountain of papers on the table.
The South Carolinian thus won a futile victory; and in the process New England also lost. If eastern members of Congress had in fact approved Benton's long-pending bill for giving away the public lands to farmers, if they had then and there effected a union with the West by yielding on the land question, as they were finally forced to do in 1860, they might have spared themselves a thirty years' struggle with the low tariff party. More than that, they would have made the forces of the Union a combination of power so formidable that secession would have scarcely dared to face it. But they failed to seize this grand occasion for the not unnatural reason that politicians must apparently work in the fear that rises from the instant need of things.
If the tariff and land questions had stood alone, the Northeast and the West might have found it easier to draw together in 1830, but the old banking and currency issue that had plagued America since the days of George III was once more to the front in a virulent form. The second United States Bank, chartered for twenty years in 1816 to enable the Jeffersonians to finance their war, was becoming in the minds of western farmers and eastern mechanics the very citadel of tyrannical money power.
Radical Democrats had denounced it on principle from the beginning and their attacks steadily increased in animosity. Others acquired their views from practice. The notes of the Bank, sound throughout the Union, drove from circulation the paper currency of shaky institutions chartered by state politicians, thus inflaming village states-men with anger against the "rich and well-born." Its managers were accused of showing favoritism to friendly politicians and of discriminating against the followers of Jackson in making loans; indeed a "psychic injury" of this character, alleged to have been inflicted on one of the President's friends, seems to have been the original source of his special rage against the Bank. The managers were likewise charged with using their power to contract the currency for the purpose of punishing their enemies, with giving retainers to some of their orators in Congress, and with spending corporate funds for campaign purposes. So the natural hostility of the masses to the plutocracy was intensified by dark and sinister rumors about a new "corrupt squadron."
That many of the charges against the Bank were groundless was later revealed by historical research. If some of Jackson's men were denied loans for business reasons, it was never proved that discriminations were made against Democratic politicians merely on account of their doctrinal views. If the Bank refused to be used by the brokers in spoils, its motive was economic rather than partisan. In the beginning at least, its president, Nicholas Biddle, it seems, tried to steer his way "on sound business lines" through the maze of politics.
After the war on the Bank commenced, however, both he and his colleagues laid hold of the various weapons at hand. From that time forward, the allegation that members of Congress received retainers from the Bank certainly rested on a substantial basis. In any case its mightiest spokesman in the Senate, Daniel Webster, was on the payroll of the corporation, a fact made clear in distant days by the publication of Biddle's letters and papers. In those documents it is recorded that, two weeks after the opening of a congressional session in which a battle royal was to be fought over its charter, Webster wrote to Biddle, shrewdly conveying the information that he had declined to take a case against the Bank and adding with charming frankness: "I believe my retainer has not been renewed or refreshed as usual. If it be wished that my relation to the bank should be continued, it may be well to send me the usual retainers."
Equally well established now is the charge that the Bank contracted its loans for the purpose of producing distress and breaking the back of the political opposition. Beyond all question, in the midst of the contest a term of financial stringency was deliberately inflicted on the country; Biddle, sure of his ground, declaring to the head of the Boston branch that "nothing but the evidence of suffering abroad will produce any effect in Congress." Webster himself, convinced that pressure on the populace would be useful, wrote to Biddle that "this discipline, it appears to me, must have very great effects on the general question of rechartering the Bank."
In fact, the private correspondence of the period now open to the student shows that the supporters and beneficiaries of the Bank had effected a strong union of forces for the purpose of controlling a large section of the press, dictating to politicians, frightening indifferent business men, and defying Jackson and his masses. "This worthy President," laughed Biddle, "thinks that because he has scalped Indians and imprisoned Judges, he is to have his way with the Bank. He is mistaken."
[Don't be so bashful Mr. Beard, as you know, after transmigration of Biddle's to Philadelphia there was an investigation which ascertained that at least $479,000 in bribes was advanced by the Biddle Bank to obtain the State charter, in 1836. How much was advanced for the renewal of the federal charter ? How much was advanced during the election campaign of Mr. Harrison ? Let us hear from Mr. Benton, the enemy of this bank, whose book you read:
"From this authentic report it appears that from the year 1830 to 1836--the period of its struggles for a re-charter--the loans and discounts of the bank were about doubled--its expenses trebled. Near thirty millions of these loans were not of a mercantile character--neither made to persons in trade or business, nor governed by the rules of safe endorsement and punctual payment which the by-laws of the institution, and the very safety of the bank, required; nor even made by the board of directors, as the charter required; but illegally and clandestinely, by the exchange committee--a small derivation of three from the body of the committee, of which the President of the bank was ex officio a member, and the others as good as nominated by him. It follows then that these, near thirty millions of loans, were virtually made by Mr. Biddle himself; and in violation of the charter, the by-laws and the principles of banking. To whom were they made ? To members of Congress, to editors of newspapers, to brawling politicians, to brokers and jobbers, to favorites and connections: and all with a view to purchase a re-charter, or to enrich connections, and exalt himself--having the puerile vanity to delight in being called the 'Emperor Nicholas.' Of course these loans were, in many instances, not expected to be returned--in few so secured as to compel return: and, consequently, near all a dead loss to the stockholders, whose money was thus disposed of." ]
Pride was, nevertheless, riding for a fall. Jackson's anger, once aroused, was terrible to behold; it was the anger of the warrior rushing on his foe heedless of wounds and death, not the cold and calculating wrath of the counting house. Moreover, he had behind him the accumulating discontent of the agrarian and labor elements in the new democracy an unrest which he steadily fanned into flame by very clever tactics. In his first message to Congress, Jackson attacked the Bank openly but not with might and main. In his second and third messages, he deftly referred to the subject, warily leaving the decision to "an enlightened people and their representatives."
If the opposition had maintained a discreet silence, a dash might have been avoided; but, boasting of its wisdom, it chose another course. The Bank was uneasy about the future; and Clay, sniffing the presidential air in 1832, decided to make an issue of it then and there. Though its charter had four more years to run, the Bank applied for a renewal and Congress, under the leadership of Clay, passed the bill granting the petition.
Jackson's reply to this defiance was a veto and a ringing message calling on the masses to support his position. Paying his respects to high sentiments, he took his stand by the Ark of the Covenant, declaring the Bank unconstitutional. Knowing full well that the Supreme Court had held otherwise a few years before, Jackson countered this uncomfortable verdict with the bold statement that each officer took the oath to support the Constitution as he understood it, not as it was understood by others a doctrine that probably set all aged gentlemen in horsehair and robes trembling for the future of their country, while pleasing Old Hickory's followers immensely.
Having paid his homage to the auspices, Jackson got down to the meat of the matter: the alignment of economic forces. He called attention to the fact that the people of the western and southwestern states held only $140,000 worth of the twenty-eight millions of capital stock out-standing in private hands, whereas the capitalists of the middle and eastern states held more than thirteen millions. He pointed out that, of the annual profits of the Bank, $1,640,000 came from nine western states where little or none of the stock was held.
The moral lesson was obvious. It was an economic conflict that happened to take a sectional form: the people of the agricultural West had to pay tribute to eastern and foreign capitalists on the money they had borrowed to buy land, make improvements, and engage in speculation. Jackson did not shrink from naming the contestants. "The rich and powerful" were bending the acts of the government to their selfish purposes; the rich were growing richer under special privilege; "many of our rich men ... have besought us to make them richer by acts of Congress. By attempting to gratify their desires, we have in the results of our legislation arrayed section against section, interest against interest, and man against man, in a fearful commotion which threatens to shake the foundations of our Union."
That was indeed a call to arms. The head of the Bank, Biddle, declared himself delighted with it. "It has all the fury of the unchained panther, biting the bars of his cage. It is really a manifesto of anarchy, such as Marat and Robespierre might have issued to the mob." The President's cheer leaders threw up their hats with sheer joy at the spectacle. Western farmers had been charged with seeking to avoid their honest debts; they had replied by asserting that the money they borrowed had been made by the printing presses of the Bank under government authority. Now Jackson embodied their theories and vehemence in a message. If there was any frosty philosopher present, looking serenely upon the battle, he has left us no memoirs.
In the election of 1832, after a campaign of unrestrained emotions, Jackson completely discomfited his opponent, Clay, and returned to the White House like a Roman conqueror with his victims at his chariot. The Bank had fought him; thinking in terms of war, the President proceeded to fight back. Its charter had four years of legal life remaining; the law could not be repealed by military decree; so other means of attack were found. Acting as head of the administration, Jackson ordered the Secretary of the Treasury to deposit no more federal revenues in the Bank or any of its branches and to withdraw in the payment of bills the government's cash already in its vaults. Besides this he distributed the national funds among state banks, remembering to reward those which had correct political affiliations institutions which became known as "pet banks." As the treasury surplus happened to be mounting, Congress, now in Democratic hands, got rid of it by spreading the money among the state governments, nominally in the form of loans, practically in the shape of gifts.
In 1836 the second United States Bank automatically came to the end of its checkered career and the country under the inspiration of the new democracy entered an epoch of "wild cat" finance. The very next year, a terrible business depression fell like a blight upon the land, bringing as usual more suffering to farmers and mechanics than to the "rich and well-born"; but this calamity was likewise attributed by the masses to the machinations of the money power rather than to the conduct of their hero, President Jackson. Nothing would induce them to retrace their steps. For three decades a union of the South and West prevented a restoration of the centralized banking system. Not until the planting statesmen withdrew from Congress, and the storm of the Civil War swept minor gusts before it, were the ravages wrought by Jackson repaired by the directors of affairs in Washington.
The economic policies and personal conduct of Jackson split wide the Republican party of Jefferson and put a sudden term to the era of good feeling. No President had ever exercised such high perogatives as Jackson or shown so little consideration for the feelings of those who came under executive displeasure. Besides keeping the entire body of minor civil servants in constant terror of reprimand and dismissal, he treated his own Cabinet with scant courtesy, while deciding vital questions himself or with the advice of his backstairs coterie. When one Secretary of the Treasury refused to remove the deposits from the Bank on executive order, Jackson summarily appointed another; when the second also declined to be a mere tool, he chose a third, who finally did his bidding with the alacrity of an errand boy. Angered by a protest lodged by the Senate against his arbitrary conduct, Jackson made his followers force through a measure expunging the hated resolution, one of the lieutenants in flushed exultation blotting the censure from the records. Unawed by the majesty of the Supreme Court, Jackson treated the decisions of Chief Justice Marshall with little respect; and when death eventually removed that distinguished judge from the bench, the President put in Marshall's place Roger B. Taney, an able and astute politician who was known to favor state banking.
In faithful accord with the law of antithesis, the personality and measures of Jackson summoned into being an angry, if motley, opposition. His assault on the Bank aroused the undying hatred of high finance. His approval of a tariff that meant ultimately a material reduction in the protective features set most of the manufacturers fiercely against him. His efforts to stir up "the humble members of society farmers, mechanics, and laborers," to repeat his phrase against the "rich and powerful" had worried thousands of prosperous people in the South, especially cautious planters who thought they had as much to fear from the leveling passions of small farmers in the back country as from the tariffs of New England mill owners. In South Carolina they had an additional reason for opposing Jackson for he had talked in a high and mighty fashion of suppressing "insurrection" and hanging "traitors."
Here then were the elements for a powerful political combination if some process of welding could be discovered. Doubtless Jackson's enemies owned the major portion of the working capital of the country. Certainly they commanded oratory and ingenuity; but, as yet united merely by common antipathy to the President and his party by the timidity of property in the presence of unfathomable dangers they presented no solid array for a political contest. Only statecraft of the highest order could amalgamate nullifiers and nationalists, protectionists and free traders, planters and manufacturers into a working association. Only skill in appealing to popular imagination could convince the mass of voters that the great hope could be realized at last.
Nevertheless the task was worth while for many reasons and Henry Clay of Kentucky seemed fated for leadership in the undertaking. All things considered, Clay had several kinds of availability: he was from the West and so could invade Jackson's home province; he was favorably known among the manufacturers and financiers of the East but, unlike Webster, was not charged with being the pet and pensioner of capitalists. Though a facile speaker, he had not hopelessly committed himself in his school days to the ponderous periods of Cicero; while he could at times soar to the empyrean, he was always able to talk to the public in the vernacular.
Taking the title abandoned by Jackson, opponents of that popular hero called themselves "National Republicans" and later "Whigs," for short, after the manner of the English adversaries of royal prerogative. In 1832, with Clay at their head, they tried to oust the President by employing all the approved methods of politics, including propaganda and social terrorism.
In an imposing phalanx, they marshaled most of the middle classes friends of the national bank, advocates of sound money, lawyers, merchants, manufacturers, businessmen of the higher ranges, and college professors. Managers of the Bank subsidized the press by large payments for advertising. Mill owners threatened workmen with dismissal in case Jackson was elected. A packer in Cincinnnati told the farmers that he would pay $2.50 a hundred for pork if Clay was victorious and a dollar less if his opponent, the Democratic President, was returned to power in Washington.
And purists attacked Jackson in their especial field. Since his system of theology was about as nebulous as his politics, they charged him with irreligion. They accused him of beginning a long journey from the Hermitage on a Sabbath and he only escaped the serious censure of the virtuous by showing that he really started on Monday. When he declined to proclaim a day of prayer for relief from the cholera, suggesting instead that under the Constitution it was a matter for the states to decide, Clay pounced upon him for his impiety and moved a resolution in the Senate to name the day for the appeal to God. During the campaign the voters were not allowed to forget that impiety and unsound finance went hand in hand. And still all the legions and all the artillery could not defeat the hero of New Orleans.
After ruling the country with an iron hand for eight years, supported by the acclaim of the masses, Jackson naturally regarded the choice of his successor as a part of his sovereign prerogative. Indeed at the opening of his first administration, he had made it known discreetly that he wanted his Secretary of State, Martin Van Buren of New York, to take his place when he left the White House. Obedient to his lightest wish, his kitchen companions bent their efforts to the task of securing the throne for the "crown prince" and their labors were successful.
In a well-selected convention, "fresh from the people," they nominated Van Buren as the patty candidate for the presidential election of 1836. By this time the Jacksonians had discarded the safe old tide of Republican, chosen by Jefferson, and had taken instead the flaunting label, "Democrat" a word that once had grated as harshly on urbane ears as its constant companion, "anarchist." Subject to the law of familiarity, the insignia that had frightened grand gentlemen and fine ladies of the heroic days had become a household emblem; men who shrank from it with horror two decades before now wore it proudly on their shields.
Though they had in Van Buren a less formidable candidate to face, the Whigs, failing to unite on a single leader, went down to defeat. But just when everything seemed hopeless, the tide turned. The victorious President fell into a series of misfortunes that gave heart to his enemies. On the threshold of his administration, he encountered a disastrous business panic, the wild tumult of speculation and inflation ending in an explosion. While Jackson's war on high finance had doubtless hastened the inexorable, it was not the sole cause of the crash.
The fact was that one of the periodic cycles of capitalism was at hand and the party in power at Washington could offer no effective remedies, if any there were. On the contrary, it accelerated the ruinous process by repealing the law which provided for the distribution of surplus federal revenues among the state treasuries and by issuing the specie circular which directed federal officers to accept only gold and silver, save in certain cases, in payment for public lands. Having taken these precautions in the interest of its credit, the government simply allowed the winds to blow. Hundreds of banks failed; mills were shut down; work on canals and railways was stopped; thousands of laboring people were turned into the streets; federal revenues fell until a deficit supplanted a surplus; land sales dropped off; and speculation came to a standstill.
Throughout this panic President Van Buren maintained a kind of academic composure. As the leader of Jacksonian Democracy, he could do nothing that would please business men and financiers anyway; and his party had no constructive plan of its own. He, therefore, contented himself with urging the establishment of an independent treasury to receive and guard the funds of the federal government --a simple project of doubtful merit which Congress, after three years of discussion, finally adopted in 1840.
At that moment another presidential campaign was at hand. Whigs were making ready to restore Hamilton's system of economy; and Democrats to destroy the last vestiges of the "money power." Astute Whig leaders, counting heads, saw that they would have to be clever if they were to overcome the multitudinous Jacksonian host made up of farmers and mechanics with some of the planters in the vanguard. Accordingly they exercised the wisdom of serpents. They cast aside Clay, whose views on the Bank, tariff, and other economic questions were too well known and beat the Democrats at their own game, by themselves nominating a western farmer and military hero, General William Henry Harrison.
This man of Mars was, of course, no Napoleon comparable to the great Jackson of New Orleans, but he had beaten some Indians at the battle of Tippecanoe and had served with honor in the War of 1812. More than that, at the close of his military career, he had pleased western agrarians by settling down in a modest home in Ohio. To make his appeal perfect in the eyes of Whig managers, Harrison's political opinions were so hazy that no one could be alienated by them.
It was with an eye to such qualifications for the presidency that the shrewd Biddle, tutored by his experience with Jackson, gave sound direction to party managers in this style: "If Genl. Harrison is taken up as a candidate, it will be on account of the past. ... Let him say not one single word about his principles, or his creed let him say nothing promise nothing. Let no Committee, no convention no town meeting ever extract from him a single word about what he thinks now or will do hereafter. Let the use of pen and ink be wholly forbidden."
Conjuring with this spirit, the Whigs of 1840 refused to frame any platform of principles, and simply offered General Harrison to the country as a man of the people while they attacked Van Buren as an eastern aristocrat. In this fashion the tables were reversed: the old party of Tiberius Gracchus was trying to elect a patrician from New York, whereas the party of the rich and well-born was trying to elevate a Cincinnatus straight from the furrow.
Given these factors, the campaign of 1840 was naturally exuberant. Sobered by the possession of power and led by a man who loved good wine and old silver, symbols of aristocracy, Democrats softened their former raucous campaign cries. But the Whigs, made desperate by two defeats, took up the discarded tactics of their opponents. As a party they adopted no policies, avowed no doctrines. Carlyle's "magnificent" Webster assumed the fustian of the demagogue, announcing that he was ready to engage in a fist-fight with anyone who dubbed him an aristocrat, expressing deep regret that he too had not been born in a log cabin, and rejoicing that his older brothers and sisters had begun their lives in such a humble abode. "If I am ever ashamed of it," he boasted, "may my name and the name of my posterity be blotted from the memory of mankind !" That fastidious New York lawyer, William H. Seward, rode ostentatiously about in an old green farm wagon making speeches at crossroads villages on the superlative merits of the hero of Tippecanoe. The rank and file erected in every town of importance log cabins from which hard cider was served in copious draughts to stimulate the enthusiasm of the voters.
Before gaping crowds, Whig orators berated Van Buren as a man addicted to high living and lordly manners, alleging that he even put cologne on his whiskers and was liable to die of the gout before the end of his term, if elected. They accused him of eating from gold plate and declared that he "laced up in corsets such as women in town wear and if possible tighter than the best of them."
Having summarily disposed of Van Buren, the showmen then presented to the enfranchised their own candidate, General Harrison, as a noble old Roman of the West who lived in a hut, worked with his own hands in field and barn, and left his latchstring out hospitably for the wayfaring man. "We've tried your purse-proud lords who love in palaces to shine," they sang. "But we'll have a ploughman President of the Cincinnatus line."
Probably this buffoonery was distasteful to the staid and respectable Whigs of the East. In any event, since it was not as unpalatable as a low tariff and an unsound currency, they swallowed the medicine of the campaign in the hope of better times after the election. What else could they do ? Whatever their pains, the returns from the polls afforded them abundant consolation. Harrison won 234 electoral votes while Van Buren limped in with sixty.
After carrying the country in a dust storm, the Whig leaders soon revealed their inmost desires. If Harrison had not died shortly after his inauguration leaving his high office to the Vice President, John Tyler, they might have gone far on the way toward a restoration of the Hamilton system. At any rate, with the aid of protectionist Democrats speaking for special constituencies, they were able to push through the tariff act of 1842 raising the customs duties and destroying the compromise measure enacted nine years before. And, had no factional disputes intervened, they might have established a third United States Bank then and there.
Unfortunately for all designs veering in that direction, their two high captains, Tyler in the White House and Clay in the Senate, were looking beyond immediate results to their own possibilities in the coming election. The President, a Virginia man originally taken up by the Whigs to catch southern votes, knew very well how unpalatable were Hamilton's doctrines below the Potomac and he would only approve a national bank of restricted powers. On the other hand, Clay, long associated with financial interests in a practical way, deluded himself into believing that the country was ready for something more thorough. Neither one of the contestants, therefore, did his best to bring about an accommodation; a fight seemed better to them than a truce. So Tyler vetoed two bank bills in succession and Clay, turning back to the tactics of 1832, proposed to submit the issue to the voters at the polls.
As in the first instance, the solemn referendum of 1844 ended in the discomfiture of those who proposed it. Once more the shout of the Democratic masses rose to heaven against "the money power." Its machinations, they alleged, were more tyrannical than ever, citing for proof the increase in tariff duties and the effort to revive the hated Bank. In addition they drew attention to an attempt made in Congress in 1843 to force upon the federal government the assumption of bonds repudiated by a number of states in the late general panic. Though this scheme was not successful, as everybody knew, it furnished to the rural mind conclusive evidence that eastern capitalists and English creditors were trying to make the whole nation pay debts which it had not contracted.
Furthermore, the Whigs were compelled to bear the brunt of a damaging attack on the score that their English sympathies were as strong as those of the Federalists half a century earlier. In 1842 Webster, as Secretary of State, they were reminded, had negotiated with Lord Ashburton, representing England, an agreement relative to the longdisputed boundary of Maine in which he surrendered to Great Britain a large section of land that, under the treaty of 1783 closing the war for independence, appeared to belong to the United States. In spite of the fact that this concession seemed to be the only alternative to war or continual quarreling, the American public was not at all happy with the outcome and Webster felt it necessary to sweeten the pill by spending some money out of the secret service funds of his department to carry on a favorable propaganda through the religious press of Maine. Though the treaty was eventually ratified, it was roundly condemned by discontented Democrats, and especially by the doughty old warrior, Benton, who called it "a shame and an injury" "a solemn bamboozlement." When the use of public money in creating opinion for the support of the treaty became known through a congressional investigation, the wrath of the Democrats burst all bounds.
An accumulation of forces was certainly menacing the Whigs when the campaign of 1844 approached. Yet, determined to face the economic issues more firmly than in the previous contest, they nominated Clay --a threat which the Democrats answered by choosing as their candidate a friend and neighbor of Jackson, James K. Polk of Tennessee. In the referendum so clearly put, the verdict of the voters was emphatic. The party of the Bank, sound money[?], and high protection was thoroughly routed, in a sweep as decisive as that of 1800 which ousted the Federalists from the national capital. Spokesmen of the planting aristocracy, now alarmed by slavery agitation and deeply concerned over the fate of Texas, were beginning to comprehend that they had more to hope from leadership in a democracy of farmers, mechanics, and laborers in general, than from co-operation with the elements that composed the Whig party in the North.
[ Mr. Beard, you call bank-paper 'sound money'? You should have, and probably did, read contemporary descriptions of the soundness of bank paper, including the soundness and uniformity of the notes of the Bank of the United States. William Gouge's "A Short History" couldn't have escaped your attention.]
On the other hand, the Whigs themselves were made dimly aware that the balance of power was shifting into western hands; but it took more defeats to convince them that they could not destroy their foes with Hamilton's weapons alone. Not until 1860 were they able to make an effective union with the western farmers under the traditional name of Republican --the name which Jefferson had chosen in the early days of his party's history and Clay had approved when in 1832 he had christened the Federalist faction anew.