What Hath God Wrought (56 page)

The president had made up his mind to veto the measure. He interpreted Biddle’s bid for early recharter as a declaration of war. When Van Buren returned from England and hurried over to the White House, he found Jackson pale as a “spectre” but steely with resolve. “The bank is trying to kill me,” the old warrior glowered,
“but I will kill it!”
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The Bank did not have the votes in Congress to override a veto. All the cabinet secretaries except Attorney General Roger Taney (pronounced “Tawney”) advised the president to leave room in his veto message for some possible compromise in the future.
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But Jackson wanted to make an uncompromising, ringing statement that would rally voters. He enlisted a team of anti-Bank loyalists to help him compose his veto message, including Taney and Amos Kendall from the kitchen cabinet.

On July 10, 1832, Andrew Jackson issued the most important presidential veto in American history. The economic criticisms the veto message made of the Bank were necessarily weak. Jackson and his close advisors, “hard-money” advocates themselves, needed the support of “soft-money” supporters of paper currency and easy credit to kill the Bank; hence a discussion of economic issues had to be ambiguous. The message complained about the dangerous influence of foreign stockholders in the Bank, although they were not allowed to vote their shares, and it was actually to the advantage of the United States to attract overseas investment. (Of 350,000 shares, 84,055 were owned by foreigners.)
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In spite of Marshall’s repeated Supreme Court decisions, Jackson rehashed arguments against the constitutionality of the Bank, taking the position that the executive and legislative branches were not bound by the judiciary and could judge constitutional questions for themselves. Jackson made at least one valid point: Considering how much the value of its shares was expected to increase as soon as recharter passed, the government should have charged the Bank more than $3 million for the renewal.
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Yet for all its deficiencies the veto message was a masterstroke. Jackson attacked the Bank more on political than economic grounds, as a threat to the sovereignty of the American people. The most memorable part of the message came near the end.

As the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has pointed out, the “resounding and demagogic language” of this passage “diverted attention” from the inability of the Bank’s critics to agree on a substitute for it.
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Jackson cast himself as defender of the natural social order and the artificial Monster Bank as its corrupter. But he coupled his appeal to the “humbler members of society” with an invocation of state rights.

Jackson was capitalizing on a combination of populist resentment of the rich with faith in limited government and local autonomy. This represented a distinctively American political tradition going back to colonial times, expressed most notably in the Revolution and more recently by Antifederalists and Old Republicans. It reflected an advantageous ratio between land and population and the widespread attitude that if people were left to themselves they could improve their lot by their own efforts.

Jackson’s personal hostility toward the Bank resonated with much in American culture. He was obsessed with vigilance against enemies; Americans had a long-standing suspicion of conspiracies against them. Their recurrent fear of conspiracy had manifested itself in some ways well justified and others less well justified, against such varied targets as George III’s ministries, deistic “Bavarian illuminati,” rebellious slaves, and, most recently, Freemasonry.
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Throughout his public career, Jackson positioned himself as the champion of the people against a variety of conspiratorial adversaries. He had denounced a “corrupt bargain” for the presidency, dismissed privileged officeholders, and exposed Calhoun’s conspiracy against him. Now he was protecting American integrity against foreign influence, maintaining a strict construction of the Constitution against an activist Supreme Court, and, most of all, defending ordinary people against a conspiratorial Bank. The “virtue” of which Jackson spoke, and on which he believed the republic depended, belonged to the common people, not to a public-spirited elite. “The Jackson cause,” a Democratic newspaper summed up, “is the cause of democracy and the people, against a corrupt and abandoned aristocracy.”
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Nicholas Biddle, upon reading the veto message, commented that “it has all the fury of a chained panther biting the bars of his cage” and called it “a manifesto of anarchy.”
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When the Senate received the message, the debate turned nasty. Clay taunted Benton by reminding him of his gunfight with Jackson years before, and soon the two angry senators, shouting accusations at each other, needed to be restrained.
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All across the country, the veto message raised passions. At first, the Bank’s supporters actually distributed copies of the message in the belief that it confirmed their warnings about Jackson’s demagogy and irresponsibility. National Republicans accused him of waging class war, setting the poor against the rich. In the twentieth century, some of his historical admirers would cheerfully plead him guilty to that charge.
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Jackson did indeed take advantage of popular resentments against banks in general in his campaign against the Bank of the United States. But the Bank War was not a class war of labor against capital or the propertyless against the propertied. Jackson gave voice to the feelings of farmers and planters who resented their creditors as much as they needed their financial services. But he was also supported by elements of the business community who had reasons of their own to join in an attack on the BUS. These included New York bankers who wanted Wall Street to replace Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street as the nation’s financial center; “wildcat” bankers operating on a shoestring, mainly in the West, who resented the way the BUS monitored their behavior; and soft-money entrepreneurs who hoped that without a national bank it would be easier to obtain credit. At the same time Jackson also drew support from people at the opposite pole of public opinion: those who sympathized with his own hard-money views and wanted to abolish paper currency.

The unpopularity of banks among working people derived not only from their age-old suspicion of the wealthy but more immediately from the uncertainty of paper money. When antebellum banks made loans, they lent out their own paper notes, which then circulated as currency. If the bank of issue was far away, its currency might circulate at a discount. With transportation difficult and communication slow, it could be quite inconvenient to redeem the currency and not even easy to learn whether it was creditworthy at all. Unscrupulous businessmen paid workers or other unsophisticated creditors with discounted notes and pocketed the difference. With so many different kinds of notes in circulation, in denominations varying from ten thousand dollars to five cents, counterfeiting was easy. No wonder that many citizens, especially wage-earners, distrusted paper currency in general and preferred hard money—gold and silver. A ten-dollar gold piece, called an eagle, was certainly safer than the note of an overextended, remote, or nonexistent bank. Hard money seemed to provide the many with protection from the unscrupulous few.
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The advocates of hard money did not condemn banks as agents of capitalism. They condemned them as recipients of government favor, because their charters granted them the privilege of creating currency, which gave investors in banks of issue an unfair advantage over other entrepreneurs. Hard-money Democrat Robert Rantoul protested that “it is wrong and unjust that a set of individuals who make it a business to let money, should be allowed to enjoy privileges which would be denied to men in other business.” As the economic historian Naomi Lamoreaux explains, “The crucial point was government intervention”—specifically, government favoritism.
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To the supporters of hard money, the BUS looked like the greatest of all recipients of such favoritism.

In their attack on the Bank of the United States, Jackson and his followers exploited hard-money sentiments. But in the event, Jackson’s victory over Biddle’s Bank did nothing to reform the abuses from which the average person suffered. The elimination of the national bank removed restraints from regional and local banks, enabling them to behave more irresponsibly than ever. Getting rid of the BUS, whose notes had constituted the most reliable form of paper money, only exacerbated the difficulties that continued to plague the currency until the Civil War. On the other hand, improvements in communication and transportation helped stabilize the currency as well as minimize price differentials around the country.

Where the election of 1828 had pitted a candidate against a program, that of 1832 pitted the same candidate with his organization against an institution. For all his charm, Henry Clay had much less public appeal than the Old Hero, though the Bank had a strong constituency. The National Republicans accordingly deplored the Bank veto and Indian Removal more than they celebrated their candidate. The Democrats exploited the patronage they had built up while in office and continued to refine their get-out-the-vote techniques. Their party did not issue any statement of principles but allowed the Bank veto message to suffice. The National Republican platform condemned Jackson’s “character” as well as his policies.
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In the last analysis, the election constituted a referendum on Jackson himself. Was he a tyrant (“King Andrew the First,” as a famous National Republican cartoon called him) or a popular tribune?

The failure of the National Republicans to incorporate the Antimasons hurt the opposition in the campaign. Clay, a nominal but inactive Mason, refused to repudiate the order in terms that would make him acceptable to the followers of the “blessed spirit.” Antimasonic leaders hoped to persuade former postmaster general John McLean to head a third-party ticket: His combination of probity and Methodist piety fit perfectly with their movement. When McLean declined, sensing a hopeless cause, the Antimasons held (in September 1831) the first national political party convention to nominate a presidential candidate. Voluntary benevolent and reform associations had held such conventions; the Antimasons thought of their own movement as similar. By this time they had succeeded dramatically in reducing the size and influence of Freemasonry. Confronted with so much unfavorable publicity, most Masons apparently abandoned their order. The number of lodges represented at the New York State Grand Lodge meeting plummeted from 228 in 1827 to 52 in 1832, and some of the remaining ones were kept alive only by a handful of Masonic brothers.
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Having gained its point, the Antimasonic tide had begun to ebb by 1832. Its convention’s nominee, former attorney general William Wirt, carried Vermont’s seven electoral votes and 8 percent of the popular vote.

The Antimasons’ procedural innovation proved more successful than their candidate. They had correctly judged that holding a national convention would give a party publicity and its candidate the legitimacy that went with a public selection process. The two major parties (as they may now be termed) rushed to follow the Antimasons’ example by holding national conventions to anoint Clay and Jackson their respective leaders. Clay’s running mate, John Sergeant, attorney for the BUS and like Wirt a legal counsel for the Cherokee Nation, demonstrated that both of the anti-Jackson parties sought to enlist the opponents of Indian Removal. When the Democrats met in Baltimore, Jackson let it be known that he wanted Van Buren for vice president, and his convention complied. The first Democratic National Convention adopted a two-thirds rule for nominations, initiating a policy that gave the South a veto over Democratic candidates for the next hundred years. (In 1860, this rule denied Stephen A. Douglas the Democratic nomination at Charleston, setting the stage for secession.) The Democratic convention also instituted the “unit rule,” under which each state cast its votes as a bloc and minorities within state delegations were squelched.

Biddle’s recharter bid failed as a National Republican campaign strategy. Jackson was reelected in triumph, with 219 electoral votes. Clay did worse than John Quincy Adams four years before, winning only 49 electoral votes. Though the anti-Jackson vote was divided, Wirt did not cost Clay the election, and tactical alliances between Antimasons and National Republicans were achieved in some states, including New York.

The election proved Jackson more popular than the national bank—even in Pennsylvania, though by a much reduced margin.
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It also marked a stage in the gradual transition from the personal presidential campaigns of the 1820s to the party presidential campaigns that were to come.