CHAPTER 24
WASHINGTON READIED FOR political war. R. K. Polk, a cousin of the Speaker of the House, arrived in the city four days before Christmas. The intensity of the fight was rising; young Polk had just recovered from what he called “a burning fever and violent headache,” but Jackson’s foes were consumed, in a way, by their own sickness. Polk went straight to the Capitol to watch the debates over the deposits and heard George McDuffie of South Carolina denounce Jackson. McDuffie was, Polk said, “quite severe on the president of the United States in the course of his remarks and quite complimentary to the character of Biddle, observing that it had been General Jackson’s whole aim … for the last three years to destroy that institution.”
Clay was to speak on the day after Christmas, and Jackson spent the holiday so consumed by callers and business that he had time for nothing else. Thinking of home, Emily wrote a sister, “I suppose you all are at my Dear Mother’s today as usual, and I can well picture to myself the happy group, and wish I was there to join it. Here everybody goes to church, but as Uncle had a great many gentlemen to visit him today we did not go, and I have been quite alone thinking of you all in Tennessee, particularly of my Dearest Mother.… I wish for nothing so much as to see her once more, and be quietly settled at home.”
There was nothing quiet about Clay’s performance the next day. “We are in the midst of a revolution, hitherto bloodless, but rapidly tending towards a total change of the pure republican character of the Government, and to the concentration of all power in the hands of one man,” Clay told the Senate on Thursday, December 26, 1833. Jackson, he said, was destroying the America of the Founders, the America created by the Revolution. “In a term of eight years, a little more than equal to that which was required to establish our liberties, the government will have been transformed into an elective monarchy—the worst of all forms of government.”
Clay’s peroration was purple but moving. “The eyes and hopes of the American people are anxiously turned to Congress.… The premonitory symptoms of despotism are upon us; and if Congress [does] not apply an instantaneous remedy, the fatal collapse will soon come on, and we shall die—ignobly die—base, mean, and abject slaves; the scorn and contempt of mankind; unpitied, unwept, unmourned!” In the audience, observers said, there was “loud and repeated applause from the immense crowd”—cheers that grew so loud Van Buren was forced to “order the galleries cleared.” Jackson had stymied the Washington establishment time and again. Now Clay was striking at what Jackson cherished most: his power and his honor.
JACKSON TOOK JOY in the fight. “You would be surprised to see the General,” Andrew Donelson wrote to Edward Livingston on Friday, March 7, 1834. “This Bank excitement has restored his former energy, and gives to him the appearance he had ten years ago.” He was thriving on the drama of the people’s president standing fast against the aristocrats’ banker.
His foes were flummoxed by his insistence on going straight to the nation. After Jackson’s remarks to the Cabinet about removing the deposits were published in the Globe, an enraged Calhoun virtually sputtered in the Senate. Making the arguments to the Cabinet public, Calhoun said, “was clearly and manifestly intended as an appeal to the people of the United States, and opens a new and direct organ of communication between the President and them unknown to the Constitution and the laws.”
In their understanding of the presidency, as in so much else, Calhoun and Jackson were worlds apart. Ever legalistic, Calhoun went on: “There are but two channels … through which the President can communicate with the people—by messages to the two Houses of Congress, as expressly provided for in the Constitution, or by proclamation, setting forth the interpretations which he places upon a law it has become his official duty to execute. Going beyond is one among the alarming signs of the times which portend the overthrow of the Constitution and the approach of despotic power.”
Such was the verdict of the senator from South Carolina about the idea that a president might discuss issues directly with the nation. Calhoun’s hope (and Clay’s) was that a strict construction of the Constitution could hobble Jackson’s campaign to make the presidency the center of action. “What, then, is the real question which now agitates the country?” Calhoun said. “I answer, it is a struggle between the Executive and Legislative departments of the Government—a struggle, not in relation to the existence of the Bank, but which, Congress or the President, should have the power to create a Bank, and the consequent control over the currency of the country. This is the real question.”
Jackson and his allies were, Calhoun said, “artful, cunning, and corrupt politicians.… They have entered the Treasury, not sword in hand, as public plunderers, but with the false keys of sophistry, as pilferers, under the silence of midnight.… With money we will get partisans, with partisans votes, and with votes money, is the maxim of our public pilferers.”
Calhoun was explicit about the political stakes. The removal of the deposits and the prospect of a national Democratic nominating convention filled with Jacksonians (whose loyalty and votes will have been presumably purchased) will, Calhoun said, “dictate the succession … and all the powers of our Republic [will] be consolidated in the President, and perpetuated by his dictation.” The Calhoun of 1834 was terribly worried about the health of the institutions of the American Union.
“We have arrived at a fearful crisis,” Calhoun said. “Things cannot long remain as they are. It behooves all who love their country—who have affection for their offspring, or who have any stake in our institutions, to pause and reflect. Confidence is daily withdrawing from the General Government. Alienation is hourly going on. These will necessarily create a state of things inimical to the existence of our institutions, and, if not arrested, convulsions must follow, and then comes dissolution or despotism, when a thick cloud will be thrown over the cause of liberty and the future prospects of our country.”
At one point while Congress was in session, a Jacksonian congressman had a weak moment with Kendall. “We cannot resist this tremendous pressure; we shall be obliged to yield,” the lawmaker said of the opposition’s argument against removing the deposits.
“What!” Kendall said. “Are you prepared to give up the Republic? This is a struggle to maintain a government of the people against the most heartless of all aristocracies, that of money. Yield now, and the Bank of the United States will henceforth be the governing power whatever may be the form of our institutions.”
THE POLITICS OF the moment seemed to be in Jackson’s favor. “The distress so much complained of is disappearing,” Andrew Donelson told Emily’s brother, “or where it does exist illustrates only the dangerous power of the Bank; and thus instead of strengthening it justifies the ground occupied by the administration.” In late February 1834, Governor George Wolf of Pennsylvania—home of the Bank, and a critical state in presidential politics—said that Biddle’s curtailment policy had brought about “indiscriminate ruin.” Wolf’s move cheered the White House. “We are gaining strength politically,” Andrew told Stockley. “Wolf’s message a few days since has helped us very much. It serves to show the leaders of the Bank party that the people of that great state stand by the President.”
Jackson was in control. At the end of a long session in the Senate, Thomas Hart Benton would come down to the White House. It was always at night—“for I had no time to quit my seat during the day,” Benton said—and in the mansion’s soft light Jackson would listen to his friend’s report from the front. In all their years together, Benton said that Jackson never seemed “more truly heroic and grand than at this time. He was perfectly mild in his language, cheerful in his temper, firm in his conviction; and confident in his reliance on the power in which he put his trust.”
Benton’s accounts of the combat on the floor were full and detailed, and when the senator took his leave, Jackson was confiding and encouraging, drawing strength from the masses beyond the mansion. “We shall whip them yet,” Jackson told Benton.
AND THEY DID. The argument against Biddle—that he had abused the Bank’s power—stuck. While the more insulated Senate—whose members were still chosen by state legislatures, not the voters—thundered on about Jackson and his overreaching, the House, with its proximity to the people, gave Jackson what he wanted. On Friday, April 4, 1834, the House voted that the Bank “ought not to be rechartered” and that the state banks should keep the federal deposits. “I have obtained a glorious triumph,” Jackson said. The House had at last “put to death that mammoth of corruption and power, the Bank of the United States.”
In defeat, Jackson’s opponents wanted to see him brought low, and they hoped a resolution of Clay’s in the Senate would do it. The proposed measure would censure the president for allegedly exceeding his authority in removing the deposits and in dismissing Duane. Censure would have no legal effect. It was only a symbolic move, but symbols mattered.
The ensuing censure battle was therefore personal on both sides. A correspondent of Clay’s referred to Jackson as “Caesar” and thought the president “wholly unworthy” of power like that conferred on the office by the Force Bill. “The whole community of the United States seems to be under the influence of extraordinary political excitement,” Sir Charles Vaughan wrote Palmerston. Jackson’s foes, Vaughan added, were attacking “what is represented to be the illegal and reckless conduct of the President.”
FRIDAY, MARCH 28, 1834, was, in retrospect, one of the most consequential days of Andrew Jackson’s life. In Washington, he was censured for his removal of the deposits. The tally in the Senate was 26 to 20, the language straightforward:
Resolved, That the President, in the late Executive proceedings in relation to the public revenue, has assumed upon himself authority and power not conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in derogation of both.
Half a world away, on the same Friday, the Chamber of Deputies in France opened debate on paying the United States a debt of 25 million francs (about $5 million) as an indemnity for French damage to American shipping during the Napoleonic wars. France had agreed to pay the money under an 1831 treaty, but after four days of consideration, by a margin of eight, France declined to honor its obligations.
Jackson stood convicted in the records of the Senate, and America was repudiated in the councils of a foreign government. When he pondered what the Senate had done, Jackson could not get it out of his head that a verdict had been rendered against him, and against his vision of the presidency. When he thought of France, Jackson was convinced that both he and America were being put to the test—that his honor and the honor of the nation were now in question. He would use all of his power, all of his will, all of his ebbing physical strength to strike back, at home and abroad. He would not be censured and he would not let the country be insulted. He was now sixty-seven years old, tired and often sick, but he was ready to fight any battle for the sanctity of the presidency, for the reputation of the nation, and for the glory of his name.