But peace was not to be. Rumors spread that Illinois settlers were desecrating Indian graves. The Sauk felt the pinch of diminishing supplies of corn, and they became increasingly agitated over having been forced to flee their ancestral village. Believing that earlier treaties were fraudulent, and trusting the words of the prophet White Cloud, who envisioned the support of other tribes and even the British, with whom the Sauk fought in the War of 1812, Black Hawk, in the spring of 1832, recrossed the Mississippi.
The war to which his name was given lasted a few months. At first, Black Hawk and his several hundred followers confounded the efforts of the army of several thousand. Andrew Jackson became so dismayed that he dispatched General Winfield Scott to the region, but the cholera epidemic traveled west along with the soldiers and prevented them from having any impact on the course of the war. The raids and skirmishes went back and forth. At one point, some Indian scouts tried to surrender, but in the haze of mixed communications and suspicions they were killed when soldiers opened fire. On August 2, 1832, the war ended when forces slaughtered more than a hundred Indian men, women, and children at the Battle of Bad Axe. The next day, William Clark received word that “the Inds. were pushed literally into the Mississippi, the current of which was at one time perceptibly tinged with the blood of the Indians who were shot on its margin & in the stream.” Two weeks later, Black Hawk, dressed in a new white deerskin outfit, surrendered.23
The prisoner was chained and transported down to Jefferson Barracks, near St. Louis. The lieutenant in charge was Jefferson Davis, whom Black Hawk praised as a “good and brave young chief.” Also serving in the detail was Lieutenant Robert Anderson, who would one day become a national hero in the North by refusing to surrender Fort Sumter to a Confederate government headed by Davis. The lesson that allies could become enemies was one that Black Hawk knew all too well.
Incarcerated in St. Louis, Black Hawk received visitors who were curious to see the warrior and his fellow prisoners. One traveler who spent time with the Sauk was the artist George Catlin, who had arrived in St. Louis in 1830 “with the determination of reaching, ultimately, every tribe of Indians on the Continent of North America, and of bringing home faithful portraits of their principal personages, both men and women.” Like so many men of his generation, Catlin had studied to become a lawyer, but he abandoned the courts for the canvas and set out to make his reputation and fortune with his paintbrush. He imagined the creation of a traveling, changing “Gallery unique, for the use and instruction of future ages,” and he passed most of the decade among the tribes of the West. Catlin painted a portrait of Black Hawk in which the aged warrior appears dignified but despondent. The Sauk prisoners would soon be transported east, where they would be imprisoned in Virginia and then released to return to their new home west of the Mississippi.24
In the fall of 1831, while making plans for a journey up the Missouri River, Catlin met Pigeon’s Egg Head, also known as Wi-jun-jon. The Assiniboine warrior was part of a delegation headed for Washington to visit Jackson. Catlin painted him in his “classic and exceedingly beautiful” native costume: “His leggings and shirt were of the mountain-goat skin, richly garnished with quills of the porcupine, and fringed with locks of scalps, taken from enemies’ heads. Over these floated his long hair in plaits, that fell nearly to the ground; his head was decked with the war-eagle’s plumes—his robe was of the skin of the young buffalo bull, richly garnished and emblazoned with the battles of his life.”25
The following spring, Catlin and Wi-jun-jon met again on the steamboat traveling to the Yellowstone, and the Assiniboine’s story, expressed in both word and image, served as the artist’s cautionary tale about the fate of the Indians. Once in the East, Wi-jun-jon “travelled the giddy maze, and beheld amid the buzzing din of civil life, their tricks of art, their handiwork, and their finery; he visited their principal cities—he saw their forts, their ships, their great guns, steamboats, balloons, &c. &c.” He returned a changed man, and Catlin eventually painted a portrait, Pigeon’s Egg Head (The Light) Going to and Returning from Washington. He went east a warrior and returned west a dandy, exchanging his native costume for a blue military outfit laced with gold and epaulettes, and donning a high-crown beaver hat, stifflace collar, white gloves, and high-heeled boots that made him “step like a yoked hog.” Wi-jun-jon held an umbrella in one hand and a fan in the other, and from his pockets protruded flasks of whiskey. “In this fashion,” reported Catlin, “was poor Wi-jun-jon metamorphosed, on his return from Washington; and, in this plight was he strutting and whistling Yankee Doodle, about the deck of the steamer winding its way up the mighty Missouri, and taking him to his native land again.”
12. George Catlin, Black Hawk, a Prominent Sauk Chief (Courtesy of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr.)
13. George Catlin, Pigeon’s Egg Head (The Light) Going to and Returning from Washington (Courtesy of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr.)
Wi-jun-jon’s return to his people ended in tragedy. After he arrived home and “passed the usual salutations among his friends, he commenced the simple narration of scenes he had passed through, and of things he had beheld among the whites; which appeared to them so much like fiction, that it was impossible to believe them, and they set him down as an imposter.” Wi-jun-jon fell into disgrace and drunkenness. As he unraveled, so did his outfit, until all that was left was his umbrella, which he always held in his hand. The stories he told about gaping multitudes and fabulous cities and “curious and wonderful machines” earned him a reputation among his people not only as a liar, but as a conjurer whose medicine was potent and evil. At last, a member of the tribe fitted the muzzle of his gun with an iron projectile made out of a pot handle and, while Wi-jun-jon was talking to a trader, came up behind the storyteller and “blew out his brains.”
Civilization had destroyed the Indian not only by turning him to foppery and whiskey but by revealing scenes that, to the Indians of the West, could not possibly be true, though they were. Catlin drew out the moral for his listeners, readers, and viewers: “Thus ended the days and the greatness, and all the pride and hope of Wi-jun-jon, the Pigeon’s Egg Head, a warrior and a brave of the valient Assinboins, who travelled eight thousand miles to see the President, and all the great cities of the civilized world; and who, for telling the truth, and nothing but the truth, was, after he got home, disgraced and killed for a wizard.”
Catlin was not the only traveler to experience and document the fate of the North American Indians. On Christmas Day, on a steamboat heading down the Mississippi from Memphis to New Orleans, Alexis de Tocqueville recorded the “truly lamentable” scene of a group of Choctaw being boarded for a journey to Arkansas: “The Indians came forward toward the shore with a despondent air; they first made the horses go, several of which, little accustomed to the forms of civilized life, took fright and threw themselves into the Mississippi, from which they could be pulled out only with difficulty. Then came the men, who, following their usual custom, carried nothing except their weapons; then the women, carrying their children attached to their backs or wrapped up in the blankets that covered them; they were, moreover, overburdened with loads that contained all their riches. Finally, the old people were led on. There was among them a woman of a hundred and ten years of age. I have never seen a more frightening figure. She was naked, with the exception of a blanket that allowed one to see, in a thousand places, the most emaciated body that one can imagine. She was escorted by two or three generations of grandchildren. To leave her country at that age to go seek her fate in a strange land, what misery! … There was, in the whole of this spectacle, an air of ruin and destruction, something that savored of a farewell that was final and with no return; no one could witness this without being sick at heart.”
“The Americans of the United States,” concluded Tocqueville, “more humane, more moderate, more respectful of l
aw and legality, never bloodthirsty, are profoundly more destructive, and it is impossible to doubt that within a hundred years there will remain in North America, not a single nation, not even a single man belonging to the most remarkable of the Indian races.”26
BANK OF THE UNITED STATES
The Indians were not Jackson’s only enemy. With equal fervor, he sought to destroy the Bank of the United States. The Southeastern tribes and the Bank may seem like random pursuits, but for Jackson they were united in one crucial way: both stood as impediments to the interests of the states.
Congress chartered the First Bank of the United States in 1791. As envisioned by Alexander Hamilton, the Bank regulated the supply of currency by issuing bank notes redeemable in gold or silver, collected taxes, and served as the depository for all government funds. Private investors controlled the Bank, which was rooted in Philadelphia with branches located in other cities. The charter expired in 1811, and in 1816 a Second Bank of the United States, chartered for twenty years, began operations and started opening branches in major cities across the United States.
From the start, the Bank had its opponents. Local banks and state governments feared the centralizing, monopolizing powers of the Bank of the United States. Especially in the South and the West, where preferences ran to gold and silver rather than paper currency, local authorities dreaded the power of the Bank to control credit and currency and to engage in speculative practices. States began taxing branches of the Bank and challenged the constitutionality of the institution. The Bank fought back, and in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), Justice Marshall declared that the states could not tax a branch of the federal government and that Congress, under the implied-powers clause, had the authority to create the institution. In 1821, the Bank moved into an opulent building, modeled after the Parthenon, with Doric and Ionic pillars imported from Italy. Two years later, Nicholas Biddle, a member of Philadelphia’s social elite and a Pennsylvania state legislator, became president of the Bank and oversaw its expansion. In 1831, the bank issued nineteen million dollars in notes and had transactions of nearly fifty million in bills of exchange. Supporters praised it for providing a sound national currency, for efficiently handling deposits and transfers, and for supplying credit.
Jackson, from personal experiences as a land speculator that turned him against paper currency, and from political principles that made him hostile to remote, centralized authority, continued to oppose the Bank. Choosing to ignore John Marshall’s ruling, he declared in his First Annual Message, “The constitutionality and the expediency of the law creating this bank are well questioned by a large portion of our fellow-citizens, and it must be admitted by all that it has failed in the great end of establishing a uniform and sound currency.” A memo from an adviser informed Jackson that the bank was not only unconstitutional but also “dangerous to Liberty.” It concentrated power in the hands of a few men who used their influence to create and destroy wealth, its stock was owned largely by foreigners, and it strengthened the national government at the expense of state governments. Again, in his Second Annual Message, on December 6, 1830, Jackson averred that “nothing has occurred to lessen in any degree the dangers which many of our citizens apprehend” from the Bank. He thought it should be reorganized and “shorn of the influence which makes that bank formidable .”27
Events in 1831 would prove decisive for the fate of the Bank. Biddle eyed the coming storm, observing in January, “The President aims at the destruction of the bank.” Throughout the year, arguments against the bank issued forth on a regular basis. An essay by George Bancroft, published in the North American Review, an influential journal of politics and opinion that generally sustained the doctrines of the National Republicans, dismayed bank supporters. Bancroft, a Democrat and a historian, suggested that “the body politic might enjoy excellent health even without the National Bank … . The sun would still rise and set, and the day be spent in its usual business, and merchandise be bought and sold, and bills of exchange be negotiated, even without a machine so vast” as the Bank of the United States. In another widely circulated pamphlet, a Boston merchant condemned the Bank as an “engine of influence” contrived by Hamilton’s “monarchical party” to maintain influence and create private fortunes. The writer attacked the McCulloch decision and denounced the Bank as a monopolistic aggrandizement of power that was anathema to the democratic principles of the republic: “The Bank charter ought to have been pronounced unconstitutional by the Supreme Court … . If the principles laid down in deciding the McCulloch case are to prevail, the Constitution may mean any thing that Congress and the Supreme Court may choose to make it mean … . A monopoly is such an odious measure for pillaging the people—such a violation of natural right, that in this state of the world it will hardly be tolerated even in the most despotic countries.”28
Selected voices in the Northeast, where the Bank had its most ardent supporters, raised suspicions about the institution, but a voice from the West launched a full-scale political assault. Born in North Carolina, Thomas Hart Benton acquired land in Tennessee before settling in Missouri. He gained influence as a newspaper editor and was soon elected as a senator. Because of his love of hard currency and hatred of paper money, opponents awarded him the derisive sobriquet “Old Bullion.” On February 2, Benton rose in the Senate and blasted the Bank as “an institution too great and powerful to be tolerated in a government of free and equal laws.” He denounced Biddle’s Bank as embodying “a system of centralism, hostile to the federative principle of our Union, encroaching upon the wealth of the States, and organized upon a principle to give the highest effect to the greatest power.” The Bank, by controlling the flow of currency, created and destroyed fortunes, made “the rich richer, and the poor poorer.” It was no bank of the federal government, as the name might suggest, or even of the states, “but chiefly of private individuals, foreigners as well as natives.” The Bank, Benton thundered, was “dangerous and pernicious to the Government and the people.”29
The National Republicans, for whom the Bank served as a central component of any vision of American growth, still controlled the Senate, and when Webster asked for the yeas and nays, Benton’s resolution against rechartering the Bank was defeated. But the rhetorical stakes had been raised, and throughout the year supporters issued encomiums for the Bank. Although Benton had used the language of class conflict in denouncing the Bank, Stephen Simpson, in his Working Man’s Manual, defended the institution. The Bank, he thought, had healed the nation of its economic illness after the War of 1812, when panic gripped the country. The Bank “is the physician of our country: it has restored it to a sanative and vigorous state; and let us not prove ungrateful or unwise, by forfeiting its diploma, and despising its prescriptions.” Simpson argued that the intentions of the framers should not matter in the debate over the constitutionality of the Bank: “Garments adapted to the limbs of a pigmy, would but ill suit the motions and colossal frame of a giant.” Sounding more like the National Republican he became in 1831 when he closed down the Mechanics’ Free Press and started the Pennsylvania Whig in opposition to Jackson, Simpson insisted that the Bank’s accumulation of capital was not to be feared but, rather, “instead of creating a monied aristocracy, it opens wide the door to the diffusion of capital, and promotes equality of fortune, competition in business, and republican habits.”30
A more authoritative voice in favor of the Bank was Albert Gallatin’s. Newly appointed president of John Jacob Astor’s National Bank, Gallatin had served as secretary of the Treasury under Jefferson and Madison. It was Gallatin who, as a congressman from Pennsylvania, proposed the creation of a standing committee on finance, the influential Ways and Means Committee. The Bank of the United States used Gallatin’s Considerations on the Currency and Banking System as a promotional pamphlet, though Gallatin—unlike Webster, who was on retainer—refused any payment from Biddle. Both experience and theory, urged Gallatin, demonstrated the pivotal role of the Bank of the United States
. The Bank provided a uniform currency, eased the government’s fiscal operations, afforded security in all transactions, and provided stability in times of crisis. The country could no more get along without a national bank than could a farmer without a barn. The issue came down to one of nationalism versus localism, and Gallatin defended a national bank in preference to the proliferation of state banks that had followed the dissolution of the First Bank of the United States. State banks offered no security, failed frequently, suspended specie payment regularly, were often improperly administered, and destroyed the uniformity of currency. The complaints of state banks that the Bank of the United States checked their activities bemused Gallatin, who pointed out, “It was for that very purpose that the bank was established.” Comparing the resources of state banks with the Bank of the United States, Gallatin concluded that they had no legitimate claim of excessive restraint or abuse on the part of the Bank of the United States. Simply put, the Bank had proved itself indispensable to the political economy of the nation.
Jackson remained impervious to arguments in favor of the Bank, but the dissolution of his Cabinet and appointment of a new secretary of the Treasury held out some promise of a compromise. Louis McLane, a former chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and minister to England, was a friend of Biddle’s and a supporter of the Bank. In an attempt to resolve the looming controversy over recharter, he proposed saving the Bank by selling the government’s stock in the institution (some seventy thousand shares, worth eight million dollars) and applying the proceeds toward paying off the national debt of twenty-four million. Jackson seemed intrigued by the idea and understood that, with the public debt retired, the administration could reduce tariff duties and in so doing neutralize the nullifiers in South Carolina. Asserting that McLane’s proposal still left him “free and uncommitted,” Jackson praised his secretary of the Treasury. McLane told Biddle that the president had agreed to a plan that would preserve the Bank. McLane had proved so successful that a draft of Jackson’s annual message made almost no mention of the Bank and even suggested that the issue should be left to Congress to decide. Attorney General Roger Taney objected that citizens would think that the president had reversed himself on the issue. The revised message delivered to Congress simultaneously reasserted the “opinions heretofore expressed” while leaving the subject to “an investigation of an enlightened people and their representatives.”
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