A Republic No More. Jay Cost

Knife had stronger opinions on Native American affairs than any of his recent predecessors in the White House; while the latter acknowledged that removal of the native tribes to an area west of the Mississippi was advisable, Jackson made this a priority of his administration.⁵⁷ The trouble for Jackson was that the tribes of the region had treaties with the federal government that protected their lands from state encroachment. It was such a treaty with the Creek nation that prompted Quincy Adams to send the federal attorney to Georgia to warn that, if the state’s agents entered Creek territory to conduct an illegal survey, they would be arrested. While not as celebrated as Jackson’s victory over the South Carolina nullifiers, Adams’s justification rested on the same basis: the supremacy of federal laws over the states.⁵⁸ But Jackson had no time for any of this. Clearing the Native Americans out was a priority for him, and he used the states as the bad cop to his good cop. Taking on the pretensions of a benevolent father, Jackson warned the Native American tribes that he could not stop the states from abusing the treaties, and urged them to remove to the West.⁵⁹ Never mind, of course, that he simultaneously was threatening to hang South Carolinians who violated the tariff laws.

      In Jacksonian America, “princeps legibus solutus est”: the sovereign is not bound by the law.⁶⁰ Biddle would learn this the hard way.

      If the experience of the War of 1812 taught the Republicans that their nationalistic pretensions were incompatible with their Republican scruples, then the Bank War between Biddle and Jackson served to dramatize the point. By 1832, America had chartered a national bank to promote the economy and empowered a kinglike president to pursue (his vision of) the national good. Neither of these institutions was entirely in keeping with the principles of the past generation; certainly, both ran more than a modest risk of the corruption that the Republicans of the 1790s found intolerable. When they were arrayed against one another, as in the Bank War, the result was economic hardship and rampant lawlessness. If Hamilton would have had cause to gloat in 1816, certainly Jefferson would have been due a similar indulgence in 1834.

      As noted above, the Second Bank was popular by the time Jackson entered the White House in 1829, and not just in New England and Philadelphia, where one presumes the economy favored such an institution. Biddle’s efforts to expand credit to the South and West created a broad base of support in those regions as well. When the recharter came up for a congressional vote in 1832, it received support from all sectors of the country, and testimonials in favor of the Second Bank streamed in from the South and West.⁶¹

      Indeed, it was the popularity of the Second Bank that Biddle thought he could leverage against Jackson, who had expressed his disregard for the institution as early as his first annual presidential message. Jackson’s own financial difficulties had led him to distrust banks in general, and prefer only specie as the circulating medium.⁶² He further believed that the Second Bank represented everything that was wrong with the “Era of Good Feelings”; it concentrated power within the hands of a few, unelected moneymen who had the authority to make or break millions of ordinary Americans. On this matter, as with so many others, it is clear how the lines between Jackson’s own prejudices and his sense of the national interest were so easily blurred.

      Biddle knew that Jackson was indisposed to his institution, but he also knew that Old Hickory was looking to roll up an enormous reelection victory in 1832, which required the support of pro-Second Bank Pennsylvania. Thus, he contemplated submitting a bill for recharter in 1832, four years before the existing charter expired, in the hopes that political pressure on Jackson would force it through. On this matter Clay, who was running for president on the National Republican ticket and looking for an issue to campaign on, encouraged him. On the other hand, the administration’s friends of the Second Bank, above all Secretary of the Treasury Louis McClane, warned him that the request would provoke Jackson’s anger. In the end, the most persuasive advice came from House Ways and Means Committee Chairman George McDuffie, an ally of Calhoun, who predicted Old Hickory would never assent to a recharter, and the time to strike was now, when members of Congress would be feeling the heat in advance of the election.⁶³

      It is difficult to square Biddle’s political gamesmanship on the recharter with the principles of republican virtue. It certainly was not to be found in the Second Bank’s charter that its president had the authority to pressure politicians the way Biddle so clearly did. And from Old Hickory’s perspective, it was downright outrageous. Though the historical record suggests that Biddle was not in fact in cahoots with Clay, he nevertheless submitted a petition for recharter shortly after the National Republicans formally declared themselves in favor of the Second Bank.⁶⁴ This raised Jackson’s dander, and he would not rest until this enemy was destroyed.

      The Congress overwhelmingly voted to recharter the Second Bank, but Jackson sent back a veto message that has served as clarion call for class warriors ever since:

      It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society-the farmers, mechanics, and laborers-who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing. In the act before me there seems to be a wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles.⁶⁵

      This message has been quoted widely over the years, even making an appearance in Ted Kennedy’s famous Dream Will Never Die speech at the 1980 Democratic convention. Regardless, its constitutional claims had essentially been rendered moot by the Supreme Court; its economic reasoning was rubbish (an “unctuous mixture of agrarianism and laissez faire” is how historian Bray Hammond puts it); and its provenance was pure hypocrisy, coming as it did from the president who had done more than any predecessor to pervert the rule of law to his own ends. For better or worse, it set a new precedent that presidents could veto bills simply because they did not like them; prior to the Second Bank veto, the operative rule was that the president was obliged to sign into law all constitutionally valid measures of Congress.

      It also marked the start of a truly lawless period of American government, as Jackson and Biddle both violated their legal and moral responsibilities in a vain quest to destroy each other. Biddle launched the first salvo by committing the Second Bank thoroughly to the defeat of Jackson in the upcoming presidential campaign. He poured thousands upon thousands of dollars of the Second Bank’s money into the battle, prompting New York senator and Jackson ally William Marcy to fret, “The U.S. Bank is in the field and I cannot but fear the effect of $50,000 or $100,000 expected in conducting the election in such a city as New York.”⁶⁶ Biddle even went so far as to distribute 30,000 copies of Jackson’s veto message, foolishly believing that it would aid the Second Bank’s cause.

      In the end, Jackson won reelection easily, albeit it with a smaller share of the vote than he had carried four years prior. That should have been the end of the matter: Jackson was reelected; the recharter was defeated; and the existing charter was set to expire before the end of Old Hickory’s second term. But none of this was enough for Jackson, who wanted to see the Second Bank brought to its knees. To do that, he and his Kitchen Cabinet of intimate advisors adopted a plan to remove existing federal deposits from the Second Bank. Most of his official cabinet opposed that, including Secretary of Treasury William Duane, whom Jackson had installed because McLane had been too pro-Second Bank for the president.

      By law, only the secretary of the treasury could remove the deposits, and only if he feared that they were not safe. But a recent inquiry had shown that the Second Bank was perfectly safe,