Andrew Jackson (75 page)

J
ackson hadn’t intended to fight the 1832 election on the bank issue. In his annual message of December 1831 he had barely mentioned the subject. But when Clay, Webster, and Biddle insisted on making a contest over the bank, he couldn’t resist such a tempting prospect. Better than any of them, Jackson understood the symbolism of the bank and what it meant for popular government in America. He received the renewal bill from Congress on July 4, which seemed fitting to those friends of capital who hoped the measure would secure their independence from ignorant democrats and provocatively ironic to those same democrats, who felt it fastened an aristocracy of finance upon the country. Jackson stood decisively with the democrats, returning the bill to Congress a week later, with a resounding message explaining his veto.

“A bank of the United States is in many respects convenient for the Government and useful to the people,” he acknowledged. It managed government finances and expedited many transactions. For this reason he hadn’t chosen to challenge the bank’s existence in the declining years of its charter, despite his reservations about several aspects of its creation and continuance. The bill before him, however, would perpetuate the bank: both its conveniences and its much larger deficiencies. The latter were what required his veto.

The basic problem with the bank, Jackson said, was that it was unconstitutional. The bank’s defenders cited political precedent and Supreme Court decisions as providing constitutional sanction. “To this conclusion I can not assent,” he rejoined. “Mere precedent is a dangerous source of authority, and should not be regarded as deciding questions of constitutional power except where the acquiescence of the people and the States can be considered as well settled.” If anything, the history of the Bank of the United States showed that the question was far from settled. Congress had approved a bank in 1791 and disapproved it in 1811. It had debated long before reapproving it in 1816. As for the states, Jackson reckoned that the sum of legislative, executive, and judicial opinions from the states ran against the bank by as much as four to one.

Regarding the Supreme Court, Jackson didn’t think it had spoken in anything like a definitive tone on the bank. But more to the point, Jackson didn’t believe the executive was bound by Supreme Court decisions. Nor, for that matter, was the legislature. To a later generation such a position might appear radical, even anarchic. But in the 1830s decisions of the Supreme Court had yet to acquire the finality they would eventually win, and Jackson saw no reason to defer to an unelected tribunal.

The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them for passage or approval as it is of the supreme judges when it may be brought before them for judicial decision. The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both.

Regardless, therefore, of what John Marshall had written in the McCulloch case or any other, it was for the president to render his own judgment on the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States. Like many other issues involving federal authority, the bank question turned on the “elastic” clause of the Constitution, the one endowing Congress with authority to enact measures “necessary and proper” to the accomplishment of the enumerated responsibilities. Jackson thought Congress had overstepped in establishing the bank. “It can not be ‘
necessary
’ or ‘
proper
’ for Congress to barter away or divest themselves of any of the powers vested in them by the Constitution to be exercised for the public good”—which it had done in giving the bank de facto control of the currency. The Constitution
did
give Congress the authority to legislate for the District of Columbia; within the federal square, Jackson acknowledged, a federally chartered bank could be constitutional. But in the states, no.

There was much more to Jackson’s opposition than strict construction. Like Benton and other anti-bankers, the president feared the emergence of a monopoly of money. He didn’t oppose monopolies per se. Patents and copyrights were monopolies that were both constitutional and conducive to the general welfare. But a monopoly of money was inherently dangerous. Of the bank’s twenty-five directors, only five were chosen by the government, the rest by the stockholders of the bank. Thus the public interest was always outweighed by the interests of the bank’s private owners, who must have been saints not to be tempted by the power they held over the nation’s economy. “It is easy to conceive that great evils to our country and its institutions might flow from such a concentration of power in the hands of a few men irresponsible to the people,” Jackson said. Nor was the economy the sum of what was at risk from the bank’s excessive power. “Is there no danger to our liberty and independence? . . . Will there not be cause to tremble for the purity of our elections in peace and for the independence of our country in war?”

Jackson already feared for equality in America. “It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” Jackson was no leveler. “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.” Yet those institutions should not magnify natural inequalities. “When the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages . . . 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 injustices of their Government.” In a sweeping affirmation of the democratic promise, Jackson perorated:

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.

The bank renewal bill did just the opposite and therefore had to be rejected.

V
etoes were rare in the days before Jackson; his six predecessors had turned back but ten bills total. Jackson exceeded that number by himself, starting with a veto of a measure to build a road from Maysville, Kentucky, to Lexington. His objection was precisely the one articulated in his first annual message, that internal improvements were best and most constitutionally left to the states. The many supporters of the Maysville Road remarked the irony of Jackson, the self-proclaimed champion of popular government, defying the will of the people as expressed by their duly elected representatives.

But the response to Jackson’s bank veto made the earlier complaints sound like quibbles. Henry Clay called the veto a vestige of royalty and Jackson a would-be tyrant. Daniel Webster decried the “fearful and appalling aspect” of the power Jackson claimed for himself, and accused the president of trying to set “the poor against the rich.” Pro-bank papers gnashed their type. “A more deranging, radical, law-upsetting document was never promulgated by the wildest Roman fanatic,” one New England editor declared of the veto message. “The revolutionists of France went but little further.”
Niles’ Register
reported that the veto had brought business to a standstill around the country. In Philadelphia angry anti-Jacksonians gathered before the bank’s headquarters to assert that Jackson had “wantonly trampled upon the interests of his fellow citizens and upon the constitution of his country.” Should the veto stand, the result would be a “national calamity.”

Jackson let his rivals rage. The veto cost him support in certain states, including Kentucky, where the Jacksonian candidate for governor won narrowly rather than by the comfortable margin he had enjoyed before the veto. But on the whole the veto served to consolidate Jackson’s reputation as the defender of the common man against the moneyed interests. “It diffuses universal joy among your friends and dismay among your enemies,” John Randolph wrote from Virginia. Jackson himself was pleased. “The veto works well everywhere,” he wrote William Lewis. “It has put down the Bank instead of prostrating me.”

And so it appeared as Americans moved toward the polls in the autumn of 1832. The threat and reality of the cholera epidemic that summer diminished the excitement that often surrounded politics in the age of democracy, yet enough remained to astonish certain foreign observers. Though Tocqueville had gone home by now, another French visitor, intrigued by the same phenomena, produced an account of the campaign. A pro-Jackson parade, held at night in New York, convinced him that democracy wasn’t simply the reigning political philosophy but the American civic religion.

It was nearly a mile long. The democrats marched in good order, to the glare of torches. The banners were more numerous than I had ever seen them in any religious festival; all were in transparency, on account of the darkness. On some were inscribed the names of the democratic societies or sections:
Democratic young men of the ninth or eleventh ward
; others bore imprecations against the Bank of the United States;
Nick Biddle
and
Old Nick
here figured largely. Then came portraits of General Jackson afoot and on horseback; there was one in the uniform of a general, and another in the person of the Tennessee farmer, with the famous hickory cane in his hand. Those of Washington and Jefferson, surrounded with democratic mottoes, were mingled with emblems in all tastes and of all colors. Among these figured an eagle—not a painting, but a real, live eagle, tied by the legs, surrounded by a wreath of leaves, and hoisted upon a pole, after the manner of the Roman standards. The imperial bird was carried by a stout sailor, more pleased than ever was a sergeant permitted to hold one of the strings of the canopy in a Catholic ceremony. From further than the eye could reach, came marching on the democrats. I was struck with the resemblance of their air to the train that escorts the
viaticum
in Mexico or Puebla. . . . The democratic procession, also like the Catholic procession, had its halting-places; it stopped before the houses of the Jackson men to fill the air with cheers, and halted at the doors of the leaders of the Opposition, to give three, six, or nine groans.

Henry Clay, nominated by the anti-Jackson National Republican party, marshaled the support of the business classes, most newspapers and their editors, a majority of the well-educated elements of society, and assorted additional individuals and groups offended by Jackson on one topic or another. A separate wing of anti-Jacksonians mustered under the banner of the Anti-Masonic party, which nominated William Wirt of Maryland. (Jackson was a Mason, but that wasn’t the only thing for which the Anti-Masons faulted him.)

Against these Jackson claimed the support of a broad array of farmers, mechanics, casual laborers, small merchants, and others for whom the dream of democracy—that ordinary people might control their own destiny—seem inextricably tied to all that he stood for. Van Buren joined Jackson on the ticket, the two having been formally nominated by a convention at Baltimore whose delegates had no difficulty choosing a presidential candidate (Jackson, by wild acclamation), a bit more selecting a vice presidential candidate (Van Buren, by ballot), and still more settling on a name for themselves (Democrats, by exhausting the alternatives and themselves). Van Buren elicited nothing like the adulation felt for Old Hickory—no one in America did—but he helped secure New York and certain political figures who admired his cleverness and were willing to bet on his future.

The result was a resounding endorsement of Jackson and Jacksonism. The president received 219 electoral votes to Clay’s 49. He carried sixteen of the twenty-four states, including the entire West except Clay’s Kentucky home, nearly all the South except Calhoun’s South Carolina (which voted for an obscure protest candidate), and several states of the Northeast, including parts of New England. The popular vote was 688,000 for Jackson and 530,000 for Clay.

J
ackson had little time to savor his victory. The very papers that brought the news of the election returns also brought reports of alarming developments in South Carolina. State elections there had produced a strong majority for nullification, whose sponsors proceeded to call a convention. The convention denounced the tariff of 1828 and an 1832 revision that had reduced rates without abandoning the principle of protection. The convention proceeded to adopt an ordinance formally nullifying the tariffs—that is, forbidding the collection of the duties within the boundaries of the state, effective February 1, 1833. Finally, the convention asserted that any act by Congress to authorize the use of force against South Carolina would be considered “inconsistent with the longer continuance of South Carolina in the Union.”