by H. W. Brands
Jackson didn’t like the august airs the chief justice put on, and he didn’t like the undemocratic nature of the court’s decisions—which was why he refused in principle to defer to the court’s decisions. And he didn’t like Marshall’s judgment in the Cherokee case of 1832. “Being more and more convinced that the destiny of the Indians within the settled portion of the United States depends upon their entire and speedy migration to the country west of the Mississippi set apart for their permanent residence,” he wrote to Congress in February 1832, while the case was before the court, “I am anxious that all the arrangements necessary to the complete execution of the plan of removal and to the ultimate security and improvement of the Indians should be made without further delay.” Marshall’s ruling represented one such delay, one that encouraged foolish thinking on the part of reluctant Indians and their self-proclaimed supporters. Jackson reiterated that he simply proposed to treat the Indians as he treated the other inhabitants of Georgia and the several states—in fact, better, in that he was offering to pay their way west. “Should any of them, however, repel the offer of removal, they are free to remain, but they must remain with such privileges and disabilities as the respective states within whose jurisdiction they live may prescribe.”
In his 1832 annual message, several months after the Supreme Court’s decision, Jackson didn’t deign to acknowledge the decision or even notice that the issue had come before the court. “I am happy to inform you,” he told Congress, “that the wise and humane policy of transferring from the eastern to the western side of the Mississippi the remnants of our aboriginal tribes, with their own consent and upon just terms, has been steadily pursued, and is approaching, I trust, its consummation.” Jackson’s single reference to the recent court case was oblique to the point of being willfully obscure. “With one exception every subject involving any question of conflicting jurisdiction or of peculiar difficulty has been happily disposed of. . . . With that portion of the Cherokees, however, living within the State of Georgia it has been found impracticable as yet to make a satisfactory adjustment.” Defending as generous his offers to the Georgia Cherokees, Jackson went so far as to say, “Whatever difference of opinion may have prevailed respecting the just claims of these people, there will probably be none respecting the liberality of the propositions, and very little respecting the expediency of their immediate acceptance.”
In fact there was considerable difference of opinion regarding the liberality of the president’s propositions. Indian advocates decried Jackson’s defiance of the Supreme Court and his insistence on Indian removal, claiming he was playing agent for grasping Georgia speculators and rewarding his party allies in that state. Politicians and editors who opposed him for other reasons became sudden allies of the Cherokees.
Jackson might claim his policy was liberal, but the claim didn’t make it so. He held out the alternative that the Cherokees might remain in Georgia by submitting to the authority of the state and living like whites. But considering how far the Cherokees had adopted white ways and how little their efforts had won them of respect from their neighbors, such a response would have required a daunting leap of faith. The harsh fact of the matter was that Georgia was determined to expel the Cherokees and take their land. Jackson knew this, and he refused to prevent it.
He was on firmer ground in declaring his policy inescapable. The defenders of the Cherokees were few and mostly far away from Georgia; their persecutors were many and near at hand. Given the racist realities of the time, Jackson was almost certainly correct in contending that for the Cherokees to remain in Georgia risked their extinction. To preserve the Cherokees as a tribe—to enforce Marshall’s decision—would have required raising and sending federal troops to Georgia, stationing them there indefinitely, and ordering them to shoot white Georgians who threatened the Indians. Jackson realized that American democracy simply wouldn’t sustain such a policy. It was one thing to threaten to use force to preserve the Union; in such an endeavor he could expect broad support from the people who would actually do the fighting. It was another thing to ask white citizens to risk death protecting Indians. They wouldn’t do it. Horace Greeley put words in Jackson’s mouth when the New York editor quoted the president as saying, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” Yet the words captured Jackson’s attitude. The chief justice would have to enforce the decision, because nobody else would.
Nicholas Biddle was a more resourceful foe than John Marshall, in a very literal sense. The resources at the command of the Bank of the United States included a large portion of the country’s money supply. If Biddle employed those resources against the administration, he could bring the American economy to its knees.
He hoped this wouldn’t be necessary. Even after Jackson’s veto of the bank renewal bill, and after Jackson’s reelection, Biddle believed the bank’s position was impregnable. The critical issue for the bank—and for Jackson—was control of the deposits of the federal government. They constituted the bank’s primary source of financial strength, providing the assets against which the bank made loans. They were under the control of the Treasury, which was to say, under the control of Jackson, and if the president were to remove the deposits, the bank would be crippled. But to do so would disrupt financial channels developed over the sixteen years of the bank’s existence, would seriously inconvenience the government and the public, and would destabilize the economy.
Biddle felt secure, even smug. “They will not dare to remove them,” he told Daniel Webster. “If the deposits are withdrawn, it will be a declaration of war which cannot be recalled.”
War was precisely what Jackson intended, although he would have said that Biddle brought the conflict on himself. In February 1833 the president received an alarming report of what he considered the bank’s continuing designs against democracy. “I am informed by a gentleman whose knowledge of the U.S. Bank is second only to that of its president . . . that the Bank counts upon being rechartered,” James Hamilton wrote.
Its purpose is for the next two years to fortify itself beyond all hazard by calling in its responsibilities gradually. . . . This operation will be performed under the avowed idea that it is necessary and preliminary to winding up its concerns. . . . At a proper time, about the expiration of the period referred to, it will by withholding bills and by other means within its power cause exchange to advance so as to cause the exportation of specie and thus occasion a run upon all the monied institutions. This it will be prepared for. And the affairs of the state banks will consequently be so deranged as to compel them to stop specie payments. The immense injury to the whole nation resulting from that event, it is believed, and not without foundation, will induce a strong public feeling in favor of recharter of the Bank as the only means of restoring a sound currency.
Jackson couldn’t be sure that this was what Biddle intended, but it was just what he expected of banks and bankers. Jackson as president didn’t know much more about currency questions than he had as a struggling businessman in Nashville, but what he did know disposed him to think the worst of those with their hands on the money supply. The fact that a few men in eastern cities could determine the fate of the nation outraged his democratic sensibilities. Who had elected Nicholas Biddle? None but his cronies on the bank board, whose interests were equally at odds with those of ordinary men and women. Jackson would have opposed the money power even had its intentions been benign. That they were so patently malignant—that the bank had become a “hydra of corruption,” as he put it in a private letter—made his opposition that much easier.
During the spring of 1833 the president prepared his anti-bank offensive carefully. He dangled the possibility of creating a new national bank, confined to the District of Columbia, even as he polled his cabinet secretaries on the feasibility of relying on state banks to handle the fiscal affairs of the federal government. Jackson’s survey had a dual purpose: to test his ideas and to test the loyalty of his secretaries. No less than Bi
ddle did he know that removing the deposits would mean war, and he wanted to be sure that his lieutenants were as devoted to the cause as he was.
The one who displayed the greatest verve was Roger Taney, the attorney general. Like a seasoned prosecutor, Taney presented evidence that Biddle and the bank had consciously manipulated the money supply before the last congressional session. “Can any impartial and unprejudiced mind doubt the motive?” he asked rhetorically. “Was it not to compel the people to continue its monopoly and privileges, not on account of the benefits conferred by it, but to escape from the suffering which the corporation had the power to inflict?” Taney demonstrated that Biddle had bought favorable press coverage for the bank during the fight for renewal of the charter; this practice, of employing the people’s money to manipulate the democratic process, was “pregnant with so much evil,” Taney told Jackson, that it alone was cause for the severest censure. As for alternatives to Biddle’s bank, Taney contended that state banks, “judiciously selected and arranged,” would be able to perform the fiscal tasks of the federal government and supply “a general currency as wholesome and stable as that of the United States Bank.” Taney acknowledged that taking on the bank was fraught with peril. Biddle would wage a “fierce and desperate struggle” to preserve the bank and its prerogatives. But the risk was worth taking. “The purity of our institutions and the best interests of the country call for prompt, firm and decisive measures.”
Taney wasn’t a close friend of Jackson’s, but he knew him well enough to realize that nothing roused the old warrior like the promise of a bloody fight. Jackson indeed rose to the challenge, and by the end of June had fairly decided to remove the deposits and place them in state banks. But the man who would have to implement the policy, Treasury Secretary William Duane, was balking. Jackson sent him a paper defending the action. Duane and others worried that removal of the deposits would provoke Biddle to retaliate against the state banks that received the deposits, provoking financial panic. “If this apprehension be well founded, it proves two things of fearful import,” Jackson’s message to Duane asserted. “First, that the Bank of the United States has the power to accomplish the ruin of the state banks and cause general bankruptcy and distress among the people; and secondly, that there is a disposition to exercise that power, unless its forbearance be purchased by the Government.” Jackson wasn’t sure Biddle could bring down the economy, but if he could, that was all the more reason to bring down Biddle’s bank. “If this despotism be now partially fixed upon the country, a struggle must be made to cast it off, or our people will be forever enslaved.”
Duane, who had been one of the government-appointed directors of the Bank of the United States, wasn’t convinced, and he continued to argue against removal. But Jackson pressed forward. He sent Amos Kendall about the country to determine which state banks were willing and able to support the president against Biddle. In Baltimore, perhaps because it was so close to Philadelphia, the bankers were very hesitant. “Most of the banks there will answer precisely as the Bank of the United States desires,” Kendall reported. Boston was braver. “Some of the banks are not only willing to undertake the government business on the same terms that the Bank of the United States does it, but to give the personal responsibility of their directors and all they possess, for the security of the government.” Boston’s confidence was infectious. “The Maine bank at Portland has made the same tender. I expect to receive a similar offer from Portsmouth.” Yet all the state bankers said that if the deed were to be done, it must be done quickly. Biddle’s bank could crush any state bank that sided with the government but was left short of cash. “The only question, therefore, seems to me to be an immediate removal or no removal.”
Three weeks later Jackson announced the decision to his cabinet. He reiterated the constitutional arguments against the bank from his veto message but now emphasized the political and especially the moral elements of the case. The fight against the bank was the current battleground in the long struggle for liberty, he said. “The divine right of kings and the prerogative authority of rulers have fallen before the intelligence of the age. Standing armies and military chieftains can no longer uphold tyranny against the resistance of public opinion. The mass of the people have more to fear from combinations of the wealthy and professional classes—from an aristocracy which through the influence of riches and talents, insidiously employed, sometimes succeeds in preventing political institutions, however well adjusted, from securing the freedom of the citizen.” The moneyed aristocracy had attained a stranglehold over the nation’s economy. “The Bank has by degrees obtained almost entire dominion over the circulating medium, and with it, power to increase or diminish the price of property and to levy taxes on the people in the shape of premiums and interest to an amount only limited by the quantity of paper currency it is enabled to issue.” The Founding Fathers had revolted against England when such power was wielded against them. The current generation—in particular, the current administration—could do no less. Nor would it. By October 1, 1833, Jackson declared, the federal deposits would be transferred from the Bank of the United States to the state banks.
The decision, when it came, didn’t surprise Biddle. His spies had informed him of the debates within the administration and of the soundings of the state banks by Amos Kendall. He considered a preemptive strike by buying off vulnerable members of the administration and Congress. “In half an hour,” he boasted to an intimate, “I can remove all the constitutional scruples in the District of Columbia. Half a dozen presidencies”—of bank branches—“a dozen cashierships, fifty clerkships, a hundred directorships, to worthy friends who have no character and no money.” But he held back, not quite believing that Jackson would really go through with removal.
When Jackson did, Biddle launched a counterattack. He called in loans, tightened credit, and otherwise reduced the bank’s financial exposure. His publicly stated purpose was to strengthen the bank against the uncertainty that must follow the president’s hasty action, but his deeper aim was to demonstrate the economy’s need for a central bank beyond the reach of what he privately called the “nest of gamblers” in the administration. To complement his fiscal tightening, Biddle went ahead with his bribery, offering lucrative positions to Jackson loyalists if they would abandon the president and join the bank.
The attack on the money supply had an immediate effect, starting in the nation’s financial capital. Samuel Swartout, Jackson’s customs collector at New York, was one of those to whom Biddle offered a bank directorship. Swartout declined the offer but pleaded with Biddle to have mercy on the nation’s finances, which were beginning to scream. “It is dreadful here, and no hope of relief except through your institution,” Swartout said. “You must be liberal.” Swartout was no radical bank hater, which was why Biddle had thought he might be seduced. Speaking as one businessman to another, Swartout appealed to the better angels of Biddle’s nature, and to his political self-interest. “Now that the effect of the late measure has been made manifest, you can relieve the whole community. . . . Rely upon it, you would receive due credit and consideration for it.” Biddle must act before it was too late. “Nothing but extensive discounts by your institution can save your friends and the public in general. . . . The old friends and dependents of the Bank are perishing.”
Biddle refused to relent. The financial panic spread from New York across the country. Banks collapsed in Washington and Philadelphia while a Boston paper described conditions there as “absolutely frightful.” But Biddle maintained his choke hold on the money supply. “My own view of the matter is simply this,” he explained to the president of the Boston branch of his bank. “The projectives of this last assault on the Bank regret and are alarmed by it. But the ties of party allegiance can only be broken by the actual conviction of existing distress in the community. Nothing but the evidence of suffering abroad”—that is, in the country as a whole—“will produce any effect in Congress.” The president and the adm
inistration had started this fight. They would have to see it to the end. “If the Bank remains strong and quiet, the course of events will save the Bank and save all the institutions of the country which are now in great peril. But if from too great a sensitiveness, from the fear of offending or the desire of conciliating, the Bank permits itself to be frightened or coaxed into any relaxation of its present measures, the relief will be cited as evidence that the measures of the government are not injurious or oppressive, and the Bank will inevitably be prostrated.”
The louder the economy shrieked, the more determined Biddle grew. “The whole future is full of gloom and confusion,” he wrote in February 1834. “My own course is decided. All the other banks and the merchants may break, but the Bank of the United States shall not break.” Pleas for relief were in vain. “You may rely on it,” he told one pleader, “that the Bank has taken its final course, and that it will be neither frightened nor cajoled from its duty by any small driveling about relief to the country.” Jackson had chosen the wrong man to tangle with. “This worthy President thinks that because he has scalped Indians and imprisoned judges, he is to have his way with the Bank. He is mistaken. . . . He may as well send at once and engage lodgings in Arabia.”
This was what it came down to: the will of Jackson versus the will of Biddle. Banks might crumble, markets collapse, crops go unplanted, but one man would win. Jackson had no doubt who that would be. “The Bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me,” he told the vice president. “But I will kill it!”
