CXLII. DISTRIBUTION OF THE LAND REVENUE…

CXLII. DISTRIBUTION OF THE LAND REVENUE

"The great loss of the bank has been in the depreciation of the securities; and the only way to regain a capital is to restore their value. A large portion of them consists of State stocks, which are so far below their intrinsic worth that the present prices could not have been anticipated by any reasonable man. No doubt can be entertained of their ultimate payment. The States themselves, unaided, can satisfy every claim against them; they will do it speedily, if Congress adopt the measures contemplated for their relief. A division of the public lands among the States, which would enable them all to pay their debts--or a pledge of the proceeds of sales for that purpose--would be abundant security. Either of these acts would inspire confidence, and enhance the value of all kinds of property." This paragraph appeared in the Philadelphia National Gazette, was attributed to Mr. Biddle, President of the Bank of the United States; and connects that institution with all the plans for distributing the public land money among the States, either in the shape of a direct distribution, or in the disguise of a deposit of the surplus revenue; and this for the purpose of enhancing the value of the State stocks held by it. That institution was known to have interfered in the federal legislation, to promote or to baffle the passage of laws, as deemed to be favorable or otherwise to her interests; and this resort to the land revenue through an act of Congress was an eminent instance of the spirit of interference. This distribution had become, very nearly, a party measure; and of the party of which the bank was a member, and Mr. Clay the chief. He was the author of the scheme--had introduced it at several sessions--and now renewed it. Mr. Webster also made a proposition to the same effect at this session. It was the summer of the presidential election; and great calculations were made by the party which favored the distribution upon its effect in adding to their popularity. Mr. Clay limited his plan of distribution to five years; but the limitation was justly considered as nothing--as a mere means of beginning the system of these distributions--which once began, would go on of themselves, while our presidential elections continued, and any thing to divide could be found in the treasury. Mr. Benton opposed the whole scheme, and confronted it with a proposition to devote the surplus revenue to the purposes of national defence; thereby making an issue, as he declared, between the plunder of the country and the defence of the country. He introduced an antagonistic bill, as he termed it, devoting the surplus moneys to the public defences; and showing by reports from the war and navy departments that seven millions a year for fifteen years would be required for the completion of the naval defences, and thirty millions to complete the military defences; of which nine millions per annum could be beneficially expended; and then went on to say:

"That the reports from which he had read, taken together, presented a complete system of preparation for the national defence; every arm and branch of defence was to be provided for; an increase of the navy, including steamships; appropriate fortifications, including steam batteries; armories, foundries, arsenals, with ample supplies of arms and munitions of war; an increase of troops for the West and Northwest; a line of posts and a military road from the Red River to the Wisconsin, in the rear of the settlements, and mounted dragoons to scour the country; every thing was considered; all was reduced to system, and a general, adequate, and appropriate plan of national defence was presented, sufficient to absorb all the surplus revenue, and wanting nothing but the vote of Congress to carry it into effect. In this great system of national defence the whole Union was equally interested; for the country, in all that concerned its defences, was but a unit, and every section was interested in the defence of every other section, and every individual citizen was interested in the defence of the whole population. It was in vain to say that the navy was on the sea, and the fortifications on the seaboard, and that the citizens in the interior States, or in the valley of the Mississippi, had no interest in these remote defences. Such an idea was mistaken and delusive. The inhabitant of Missouri and of Indiana had a direct interest in keeping open the mouths of the rivers, defending the seaport towns, and preserving a naval force that would protect the produce of his labor in crossing the ocean, and arriving safely in foreign markets. All the forts at the mouth of the Mississippi were just as much for the benefit of the western States, as if those States were down at the mouth of that river. So of all the forts on the Gulf of Mexico. Five forts are completed in the delta of the Mississippi; two are completed on the Florida or Alabama coast; and seven or eight more are projected; all calculated to give security to western commerce in passing through the Gulf of Mexico. Much had been done for that frontier, but more remained to be done; and among the great works contemplated in that quarter were large establishments at Pensacola, Key West, or the Dry Tortugas. Large military and naval stations were contemplated at these points, and no expenditure or preparations could exceed in amount the magnitude of the interests to be protected. On the Atlantic board the commerce of the States found its way to the ocean through many outlets, from Maine to Florida; in the West, on the contrary, the whole commerce of the valley of the Mississippi, all that of the Alabama, of western Florida, and some part of Georgia, passes through a single outlet, and reaches the ocean by passing between Key West and Cuba. Here, then, is an immense commerce collected into one channel, compressed into one line, and passing, as it were, through one gate. This gives to Key West and the Dry Tortugas an importance hardly possessed by any point on the globe; for, besides commanding the commerce of the entire West, it will also command that of Mexico, of the West Indies, of the Caribbean sea, and of South America down to the middle of that continent at its most eastern projection, Cape Roque. To understand the cause of all this (Mr. B. said), it was necessary to look to the trade winds, which, blowing across the Atlantic between the tropics, strike the South American continent at Cape Roque, follow the retreating coast of that continent up to the Caribbean sea, and to the Gulf of Mexico, creating the gulf stream as they go, and by the combined effect of a current in the air and in the water, sweeping all vessels from this side Cape Roque into its stream, carrying them round west of Cuba and bringing them out between Key West and the Havana. These two positions, then, constitute the gate through which every thing must pass that comes from the valley of the Mississippi, from Mexico, and from South America as low down as Cape Roque. As the masters of the Mississippi, we should be able to predominate in the Gulf of Mexico; and, to do so, we must have great establishments at Key West and Pensacola. Such establishments are now proposed; and every citizen of the West should look upon them as the guardians of his own immediate interests, the indispensable safeguard to his own commerce; and to him the highest, most sacred, and most beneficial object to which surplus revenue could be applied. The Gulf of Mexico should be considered as the estuary of the Mississippi. A naval and military supremacy should be established in that gulf, cost what it might; for without that supremacy the commerce of the entire West would lie at the mercy of the fleets and privateers of inimical powers.

"Mr. B. returned to the immediate object of his remarks--to the object of showing that the defences of the country would absorb every surplus dollar that would ever be found in the treasury. He recapitulated the aggregates of those heads of expenditure; for the navy, about forty millions of dollars, embracing the increase of the navy, navy yards, ordnance, and repairs of vessels for a series of years; for fortifications, about thirty millions, reported by the engineer department; and which sum, after reducing the size of some of the largest class of forts, not yet commenced, would still be large enough, with the sum reported by the ordnance department, amounting to near thirty millions, to make a totality not much less than one hundred millions; and far more than sufficient to swallow up all the surpluses which will ever be found to exist in the treasury. Even after deducting much from these estimates, the remainder will still go beyond any surplus that will actually be found. Every person knows that the present year is no criterion for estimating the revenue; excess of paper issues has inflated all business, and led to excess in all branches of the revenue; next year it will be down, and soon fall as much below the usual level as it now is above it. More than that; what is now called a surplus in the treasury is no surplus, but a mere accumulation for want of passing the appropriation bills. The whole of it is pledged to the bills which are piled upon our tables, and which we cannot get passed; for the opposition is strong enough to arrest the appropriations, to dam up the money in the treasury; and then call that a surplus which would now be in a course of expenditure, if the necessary appropriation bills could be passed.

"The public defences will require near one hundred millions of dollars; the annual amount required for these defences alone amount to thirteen or fourteen millions. The engineer department answers explicitly that it can beneficially expend six millions of dollars annually; the ordnance that it can beneficially expend three millions; the navy that it can beneficially expend several millions; and all this for a series of years. This distribution bill has five years to run, and in that time, if the money is applied to defence instead of distribution, the great work of national defence will be so far completed as to place the United States in condition to cause her rights and her interests, her flag and her soil, to be honored and respected by the whole world."

The bill was passed in the Senate, though by a vote somewhat close--25 to 20. The yeas were:

Messrs. Black, Buchanan, Clay, Clayton, Crittenden, Davis, Ewing of Ohio, Goldsborough, Hendricks, Kent, Knight, Leigh, McKean, Mangum, Naudain, Nicholas, Porter, Prentiss, Preston, Robbins, Southard, Swift, Tomlinson, Webster White.

NAYS.--Messrs. Benton, Calhoun, Cuthbert, Ewing of Illinois, Grundy, Hill, Hubbard, King of Alabama, King of Georgia, Linn, Moore, Morris, Niles, Rives, Robinson, Ruggles, Shepley, Tallmadge, Walker, Wright.

Being sent to the House for concurrence it became evident that it could not pass that body; and then the friends of distribution in the Senate fell upon a new mode to effect their object, and in a form to gain the votes of many members who held distribution to be a violation of the constitution--among them Mr. Calhoun;--who took the lead in the movement. There was a bill before the Senate to regulate the keeping of the public moneys in the deposit banks; and this was turned into distribution of the surplus public moneys with the States, in proportion to their representation in Congress, to be returned when Congress should call for it: and this was called a deposit with the States; and the faith of the States pledged for returning the money. The deposit was defended on the same argument on which Mr. Calhoun had proposed to amend the constitution two years before; namely that there was no other way to get rid of the surplus. And to a suggestion from Mr. Wright that the moneys, when once so deposited might never be got back again, Mr. Calhoun answered:

"But the senator from New-York objects to the measure, that it would, in effect, amount to a distribution, on the ground, as he conceives, that the States would never refund. He does not doubt but that they would, if called on to refund by the government; but he says that Congress will in fact never make the call. He rests this conclusion on the supposition that there would be a majority of the States opposed to it. He admits, in case the revenue should become deficient, that the southern or staple States would prefer to refund their quota, rather than to raise the imposts to meet the deficit; but he insists that the contrary would be the case with the manufacturing States, which would prefer to increase the imposts to refunding their quota, on the ground that the increase of the duties would promote the interests of manufactures. I cannot agree with the senator that those States would assume a position so utterly untenable as to refuse to refund a deposit which their faith would be plighted to return, and rest the refusal on the ground of preferring to lay a tax, because it would be a bounty to them, and would consequently throw the whole burden of the tax on the other States. But, be this as it may, I can tell the senator that, if they should take a course so unjust and monstrous, he may be assured that the other States would most unquestionably resist the increase of the imposts; so that the government would have to take its choice, either to go without the money, or call on the States to refund the deposits."

Mr. Benton took an objection to this scheme of deposit, that it was a distribution under a false name, making a double disposition of the same money; that the land money was to be distributed under the bill already passed by the Senate: and he moved an amendment to except that money from the operation of the deposit to be made with the States. He said it was hardly to be supposed that, in the nineteenth century, a grave legislative body would pass two bills for dividing the same money; and it was to save the Senate from the ridicule of such a blunder that he called their attention to it, and proposed the amendment. Mr. Calhoun said there was a remedy for it in a few words, by adding a proviso of exception, if the land distribution bill became a law. Mr. Benton was utterly opposed to such a proviso--a proviso to take effect if the same thing did not become law in another bill. Mr. Morris also wished to know if the Senate was about to make a double distribution of the same money? As far it respected the action of the Senate the land bill was, to all intents and purposes, a law. It had passed the Senate, and they were done with it. It had changed its title from "bill" to "act." It was now the act of the Senate, and they could not know what disposition the House would make of it. Mr. Webster believed the land bill could not pass the House; that it was put to rest there; and therefore he had no objection to voting for the second one: thus admitting that, under the name of "distribution" the act could not pass the House, and that a change of name was indispensable. Mr. Wright made a speech of statements and facts to show that there would be no surplus; and taking up that idea, Mr. Benton spoke thus:

"About this time two years ago, the Senate was engaged in proclaiming the danger of a bankrupt Treasury, and in proving to the people that utter ruin must ensue from the removal of the deposits from the Bank of the United States. The same Senate, nothing abated in confidence from the failure of former predictions, is now engaged in celebrating the prosperity of the country, and proclaiming a surplus of forty, and fifty, and sixty millions of dollars in that same Treasury, which so short a time since they thought was going to be bankrupt. Both occupations are equally unfortunate. Our Treasury is in no more danger of bursting from distension now, than it was of collapsing from depletion then. The ghost of the panic was driven from this chamber in May, 1834, by the report of Mr. Taney, showing that all the sources of the national revenue were in their usual rich and bountiful condition; and that there was no danger of bankruptcy. The speech and statement, so brief and perspicuous, just delivered by the senator from New York [Mr. Wright], will perform the same office upon the distribution spirit, by showing that the appropriations of the session will require nearly as much money as the public Treasury will be found to contain. The present exaggerations about the surplus will have their day, as the panic about an empty Treasury had its day; and time, which corrects all things, will show the enormity of these errors which excite the public mind, and stimulate the public appetite, for a division of forty, fifty, and sixty millions of surplus treasure."

The bill being ordered to a third reading, with only six dissenting votes, the author of this View could not consent to let it pass without an attempt to stigmatize it, and render it odious to the people, as a distribution in disguise--as a deposit never to be reclaimed; as a miserable evasion of the constitution; as an attempt to debauch the people with their own money; as plundering instead of defending the country; as a cheat that would only last till the presidential election was over; for there would be no money to deposit after the first or second quarter;--and as having the inevitable effect, if not the intention, to break the deposit banks; and, finally, as disappointing its authors in their schemes of popularity: in which he was prophetic; as, out of half a dozen aspirants to the presidency, who voted for it, no one of them ever attained that place. The following are parts of his speech:

"I now come, Mr. President (continued Mr. B.), to the second subject in the bill--the distribution feature--and to which the objections are, not of detail, but of principle; but which objections are so strong, in the mind of myself and some friends, that, far from shrinking from the contest, and sneaking away in our little minority of six, where we were left last evening, we come forward with unabated resolution to renew our opposition, and to signalize our dissent; anxious to have it known that we contended to the last against the seductions of a measure, specious to the view, and tempting to the taste, but fraught with mischief and fearful consequences to the character of this government, and to the stability and harmony of this confederacy.

"Stripping this enactment of statutory verbiage, and collecting the provisions of the section into a single view, they seem to be these: 1. The public moneys, above a specific sum, are to be deposited with the States, in a specified ratio; 2. The States are to give certificates of deposit, payable to the United States; but no time, or contingency, is fixed for the payment; 3. The Secretary of the Treasury is to sell and assign the certificates, limited to a ratable proportion of each, when necessary to meet appropriations made by Congress; 4. The certificates so assigned are to bear an interest of five per cent., payable half yearly; 5. To bear no interest before assignment; 6. The principal to be payable at the pleasure of the State.

"This, Mr. President, is the enactment; and what is such an enactment? Sir, I will tell you what it is. It is, in name, a deposit; in form, a loan; in essence and design, a distribution. Names cannot alter things; and it is as idle to call a gift a deposit, as it would be to call a stab of the dagger a kiss of the lips. It is a distribution of the revenues, under the name of a deposit, and under the form of a loan. It is known to be so, and is intended to be so; and all this verbiage about a deposit is nothing but the device and contrivance of those who have been for years endeavoring to distribute the revenues, sometimes by the land bill, sometimes by direct propositions, and sometimes by proposed amendments to the constitution. Finding all these modes of accomplishing the object met and frustrated by the constitution, they fall upon this invention of a deposit, and exult in the success of an old scheme under a new name. That it is no deposit, but a free gift, and a regular distribution, is clear and demonstrable, not only from the avowed principles, declared intentions, and systematic purposes of those who conduct the bill, but also from the means devised to effect their object. Names are nothing. The thing done gives character to the transaction; and the imposition of an erroneous name cannot change that character. This is no deposit. It has no feature, no attribute, no characteristic no quality of a deposit. A deposit is a trust requiring the consent of two parties, leaving to one the rights of ownership, and imposing on the other the duties of trustee. The depositor retains the right of property, and reserves the privilege of resumption; the depositary is bound to restore. But here the right of property is parted with; the privilege of resumption is surrendered; the obligation to render back is not imposed. On the contrary, our money is put where we cannot reach it. Our treasury warrant cannot pursue it. The States are to keep the money, free of interest, until it is needed to meet appropriations; and then the Secretary of the Treasury is--to do what?--call upon the State? No! but to sell and assign the certificate; and the State is to pay the assignee an interest half yearly, and the principal when it pleases. Now, these appropriations will never be made. The members of Congress are not yet born--the race of representatives is not yet known--who will vote appropriations for national objects, to be paid out of their own State treasuries. Sooner will the tariff be revived, or the price of public land be raised. Sooner will the assignability of the certificate be repealed by law. The contingency will never arrive, on which the Secretary is to assign: so the deposit will stand as a loan for ever, without interest. At the end of some years, the nominal transaction will be rescinded; the certificates will all be cancelled by one general, unanimous, harmonious vote in Congress. The disguise of a deposit, like the mask after a play, will be thrown aside; and the delivery of the money will turn out to be, what it is now intended to be, a gift from the beginning. This will be the end of the first chapter. And now, how unbecoming in the Senate to practise this indirection, and to do by a false name what cannot be done by its true one. The constitution, by the acknowledgment of many who conduct this bill, will not admit of a distribution of the revenues. Not further back than the last session, and again at the commencement of the present session, a proposition was made to amend the constitution, to permit this identical distribution to be made. That proposition is now upon our calendar, for the action of Congress. All at once, it is discovered that a change of names will do as well as a change of the constitution. Strike out the word 'distribute,' and insert the word 'deposit;' and, incontinently, the impediment is removed: the constitution difficulty is surmounted; the division of the money can be made. This, at least, is quick work. It looks magical, though not the exploit of the magician. It commits nobody, though not the invention of the non-committal school. After all, it must be admitted to be a very compendious mode of amending the constitution, and such a one as the framers of that instrument never happened to think of. Is this fancy, or is it fact? Are we legislating, or amusing ourselves with phantasmagoria? Can we forget that we now have upon the calendar a proposition to amend the constitution, to effect this very distribution, and that the only difference between that resolution and this thirteenth section, is in substituting the word 'deposit' for the word 'distribute?'

"Having shown this pretended deposit to be a distribution in disguise, and to be a mere evasion of the constitution, Mr. B. proceeded to examine its effects, and to trace its ruinous consequences upon the federal government and the States. It is brought forward as a temporary measure, as a single operation, as a thing to be done but once; but what career, either for good or for evil, ever stopped with the first step? It is the first step which costs the difficulty; that taken, the second becomes easy, and repetition habitual. Let this distribution, in this disguise, take effect; and future distribution will be common and regular. Every presidential election will bring them, and larger each time; as the consular elections in Rome, commencing with distributions of grain from the public granaries, went on to the exhibitions of games and shows, the remission of debts, largesses in money, lands, and provisions; until the rival candidates openly bid against each other, and the diadem of empire was put up at auction, and knocked down to the last and highest bidder. The purity of elections may not yet be affected in our young and vigorous country; but how long will it be before voters will look to the candidates for the magnitude of their distributions, instead of looking to them for the qualifications which the presidential office requires?

"The bad consequences of this distribution of money to the States are palpable and frightful. It is complicating the federal and State systems, and multiplying their points of contact and hazards of collision. Take it as ostensibly presented; that of a deposit or loan, to be repaid at some future time; then it is establishing the relation of debtor and creditor between them: a relation critical between friends, embarrassing between a State and its citizens; and eminently dangerous between confederate States and their common head. It is a relation always deprecated in our federal system. The land credit system was abolished by Congress, fifteen years ago, to get rid of the relation of debtor and creditor between the federal government and the citizens of the States; and seven or eight millions of debt, principal and interest, was then surrendered. The collection of a large debt from numerous individual debtors, was found to he almost impossible. How much worse if the State itself becomes the debtor! and more, if all the States become indebted together! Any attempt to collect the debt would be attended, first with ill blood, then with cancellation. It must be the representatives of the States who are to enforce the collection of the debt. This they would not do. They would stand together against the creditor. No member of Congress could vote to tax his State to raise money for the general purposes of the confederacy. No one could vote an appropriation which was to become a charge on his own State treasury. Taxation would first be resorted to, and the tariff and the public lands would become the fountain of supply to the federal government. Taken as a real transaction--as a deposit with the States, or a loan to the States--as this measure professes to be, and it is fraught with consequences adverse to the harmony of the federal system, and fraught with new burdens upon the customs, and upon the lands; taken as a fiction to avoid the constitution, as a John Doe and Richard Roe invention to convey a gift under the name of a deposit, and to effect a distribution under the disguise of a loan, and it is an artifice which makes derision of the constitution, lets down the Senate from its lofty station; and provides a facile way for doing any thing that any Congress may choose to do in all time to come. It is only to depose one word and instal another--it is merely to change a name--and the frowning constitution immediately smiles on the late forbidden attempt.

"To the federal government the consequences of these distributions must be deplorable and destructive. It must be remitted to the helpless condition of the old confederacy, depending for its supplies upon the voluntary contributions of the States. Worse than depending upon the voluntary contributions, it will be left to the gratuitous leavings, to the eleemosynary crumbs, which remain upon the table after the feast of the States is over. God grant they may not prove to be the feasts of the Lapithæ and Centaurs! But the States will be served first; and what remains may go to the objects of common defence and national concern for which the confederacy was framed, and for which the power of raising money was confided to Congress. The distribution bills will be passed first, and the appropriation bills afterwards; and every appropriation will be cut down to the lowest point, and kept off to the last moment. To stave off as long as possible, to reduce as low as possible, to defeat whenever possible, will be the tactics of federal legislation; and when at last some object of national expenditure has miraculously run the gauntlet of all these assaults, and escaped the perils of these multiplied dangers, behold the enemy still ahead, and the recapture which awaits the devoted appropriation, in the shape of an unexpended balance, on the first day of January then next ensuing. Thus it is already; distribution has occupied us all the session. A proposition to amend the constitution, to enable us to make the division, was brought in in the first month of the session. The land bill followed, and engrossed months, to the exclusion of national defence. Then came the deposit scheme, which absorbs the remainder of the session. For nearly seven months we have been occupied with distribution, and the Senate has actually passed two bills to effect the same object, and to divide the same identical money. Two bills to divide money, while one bill cannot be got through for the great objects of national defence named in the constitution. We are now near the end of the seventh month of the session. The day named by the Senate for the termination of the session is long passed by; the day fixed by the two Houses is close at hand. The year is half gone, and the season for labor largely lost; yet what is the state of the general, national, and most essential appropriations? Not a shilling is yet voted for fortifications; not a shilling for the ordnance; nothing for filling the empty ranks of the skeleton army; nothing for the new Indian treaties; nothing for the continuation of the Cumberland road; nothing for rebuilding the burnt-down Treasury; nothing for the custom-house in New Orleans; nothing for extinguishing the rights of private corporators in the Louisville canal, and making that great thoroughfare free to the commerce of the West; nothing for the western armory, and arsenals in the States which have none; nothing for the extension of the circuit court system to the new States of the West and Southwest; nothing for improving the mint machinery; nothing for keeping the mints regularly supplied with metals for coining; nothing for the new marine hospitals; nothing for the expenses of the visitors now gone to the Military Academy; nothing for the chain of posts and the military road along the Western and Northwestern frontier. All these, and a long list of other objects, remain without a cent to this day; and those who have kept them off now coolly turn upon us, and say the money cannot be expended if appropriated, and that, on the first of January, it must fall into the surplus fund to be divided. Of the bills passed, many of the most essential character have been delayed for months, to the great injury of individuals and of the public service. Clerks and salaried officers have been borrowing money at usury to support their families, while we, wholly absorbed with dividing surpluses, were withholding from them their stipulated wages. Laborers at Harper's Ferry Armory have been without money to go to market for their families, and some have lived three weeks without meat, because we must attend to the distribution bills before we can attend to the pay bills. Disbursing officers have raised money on their own account, to supply the want of appropriations. Even the annual Indian Annuity Bill has but just got through; the Indians even--the poor Indians, as they were wont to be called--even they have had to wait, in want and misery, for the annual stipends solemnly guarantied by treaties. All this has already taken place under the deplorable influence of the distribution spirit.

"The progress which the distribution spirit has made in advancing beyond its own pretensions, is a striking feature in the history of the case, and ominous of what may be expected from its future exactions. Originally the proposition was to divide the surplus. It was the surplus, and nothing but the surplus, which was to be taken; that bona fide and inevitable surplus which remained after all the defences were provided for, and all needed appropriations fully made. Now the defences are postponed and decried; the needful appropriations are rejected, stinted, and deferred, till they cannot be used; and, instead of the surplus, it is the integral revenue, it is the money in the Treasury, it is the money appropriated by law, which is to be seized upon and divided out. It is the unexpended balances which are now the object of all desire and the prize of meditated distribution. The word surplus is not in the bill! that word, which has figured in so many speeches, which has been the subject of so much speculation, which has been the cause of so much delusion in the public mind, and of so much excited hope; that word is not in the bill! It is carefully, studiously, systematically excluded, and a form of expression is adopted to cover all the money in the Treasury, a small sum excepted, although appropriated by law to the most sacred and necessary objects. A recapture of the appropriated money is intended; and thus the very identical money which we appropriate at this session is to be seized upon on the first day of January, torn away from the objects to which it was dedicated, and absorbed in the fund for general distribution. And why? because the cormorant appetite of distribution grows as it feeds, and becomes more ravenous as it gorges. It set out for the surplus; now it takes the unexpended balances, save five millions; next year it will take all. But it is sufficient to contemplate the thing as it is; it is sufficient to contemplate this bill as seizing upon the unexpended balances on the first day of January, regardless of the objects to which they are appropriated; and to witness its effect upon the laws, the policy, and the existence of the federal government.

"Such, then, is the progress of the distribution spirit; a cormorant appetite, growing as it feeds, ravening as it gorges; seizing the appropriated moneys, and leaving the federal government to starve upon crumbs, and to die of inanition. But this appetite is not the sole cause for this seizure. There is another reason for it, connected with the movements in this chamber, and founded in the deep-seated law of self-preservation. For six months the public mind has been stimulated with the story of sixty millions of surplus money in the Treasury; and two months ago, the grave Senate of the United States carried the rash joke of that illusory asseveration so far as to pass a bill to commence the distribution of that vast sum. It was the land bill which was to do it, commencing its swelling dividends on the 1st day of July, dealing them out every ninety days, and completing the splendid distribution of prizes, in the sixty-four million lottery, in eighteen months from the commencement of the drawing. It was two months ago that we passed this bill; and all attempts then made to convince the people that they were deluded, were vain and useless. Sixty-four millions they were promised, sixty-four millions they were to have, sixty-four millions they began to want; and slates and pencils were just as busy then in figuring out the dividends of the sixty-four millions, to begin on the 1st of July, as they now are in figuring out the dividends under the forty, fifty, and sixty millions, which are to begin on the 1st of January next. And now behold the end of the first chapter. The 1st of July is come, but the sixty-four millions are not in the Treasury! It is not there; and any attempt to commence the distribution of that sum, according to the terms of the land bill, would bankrupt the Treasury, stop the government, and cause Congress to be called together, to levy taxes or make loans. So much for the land bill, which two months ago received all the praises which are now bestowed upon the deposit bill. So the drawing had to be postponed, the performance had to be adjourned, and the 1st of January was substituted for the 1st of July. This gives six months to go upon, and defers the catastrophe of the mountain in labor until the presidential election is over. Still the first of January must come; and the ridicule would be too great, if there was nothing, or next to nothing, to divide. And nothing, or next to nothing, there would be, if the appropriations were fairly made, and made in time, and if nothing but a surplus was left to divide. There would be no more in the deposit bank, in that event, than has usually been in the Bank of the United States--say ten, or twelve, or fourteen, or sixteen millions; and from which, in the hands of a single bank, none of those dangers to the country were then seen which are now discovered in like sums in three dozen unconnected and independent banks. Even after all the delays and reductions in the appropriations, the surplus will now be but a trifle--such a trifle as must expose to ridicule, or something worse, all those who have tantalized the public with the expectation of forty, fifty, or sixty millions to divide. To avoid this fate, and to make up something for distribution, then, the unexpended balances have been fallen upon; the law of 1795 is nullified; the fiscal year is changed; the policy of the government subverted; reason, justice, propriety outraged; all contracts, labor, service, salaries cut off, interrupted, or reduced; appropriations recaptured, and the government paralyzed. Sir, the people are deceived; they are made to believe that a surplus only, an unavoidable surplus, is to be divided, when the fact is that appropriated moneys are to be seized.

"Sir, I am opposed to the whole policy of this measure. I am opposed to it as going to sap the foundations of the Federal Government, and to undo the constitution, and that by evasion, in the very point for which the constitution was made. What is that point? A Treasury! a Treasury! a Treasury of its own, unconnected with, and independent of the States. It was for this that wise and patriotic men wrote, and spoke, and prayed for the fourteen years that intervened from the declaration of independence, in 1776, to the formation of the constitution in 1789. It was for this that so many appeals were made, so many efforts exerted, so many fruitless attempts so long repeated, to obtain from the States the power of raising revenue from imports. It was for this that the convention of 1787 met, and but for this they never would have met. The formation of a federal treasury, unconnected with the States, and independent of the States, was the cause of the meeting of that convention; it was the great object of its labors; it was the point to which all its exertions tended, and it was the point at which failure would have been the failure of the whole object of the meeting, of the whole frame of the general government, and of the whole design of the constitution. With infinite labor, pains, and difficulty, they succeeded in erecting the edifice of the federal treasury; we, not builders, but destroyers, "architects of ruin," undo in a night what they accomplished in many years. We expunge the federal treasury; we throw the federal government back upon States for supplies; we unhinge and undo the constitution; and we effect our purpose by an artifice which derides, mocks, ridicules that sacred instrument, and opens the way to its perpetual evasion by every paltry performer that is able to dethrone one word, and exalt another in its place.

"I object to the time for another reason. There is no necessity to act at all upon this subject, at this session of Congress. The distribution is not to take effect until after we are in session again, and when the true state of the treasury shall be known. Its true state cannot be known now; but enough is known to make it questionable whether there will be any surplus, requiring a specific disposition, over and beyond the wants of the country. Many appropriations are yet behind; two Indian wars are yet to be finished; when the wars are over, the vanquished Indians are to be removed to the West; and when there, either the Federal Government or the States must raise a force to protect the people from them. Twenty-five thousand Creeks, seven thousand Seminoles, eighteen thousand Cherokees, and others, making a totality of seventy-two thousand, are to be removed; and the expenses of removal, and the year's subsistence afterwards, is close upon seventy dollars per head. It is a problem whether there will be any surplus worth disposing of. The surplus party themselves admit there will be a disappointment unless they go beyond the surplus, and seize the appropriated moneys. The Senator from New-York [Mr. Wright], has made an exposition, as candid and perspicuous as it is patriotic and unanswerable, showing that there will be an excess of appropriations over the money in the treasury on the day that we adjourn; and that we shall have to depend upon the accruing revenue of the remainder of the year to meet the demands which we authorize. This is the state of the surplus question: problematical, debatable; the weight of the evidence and the strength of the argument entirely against it; time enough to ascertain the truth, and yet a determination to reject all evidence, refuse all time, rush on to the object, and divide the money, cost what it may to the constitution, the government, the good of the States, and the purity of elections. The catastrophe of the land bill project ought certainly to be a warning to us. Two months ago it was pushed through, as the only means of saving the country, as the blessed act which was to save the republic. It was to commence on the first day of July its magnificent operations of distributing sixty four millions; now it lies a corpse in the House of Representatives, a monument of haste and folly, its very authors endeavoring to supersede it by another measure, because it could not take effect without ruining the country; and, what is equally important to them, ruining themselves.

"Admitting that the year produces more revenue than is wanting, is it wise, is it statesmanlike, is it consonant with our experience, to take fright at the event, and throw the money away? Did we not have forty millions of income in the year 1817? and did we not have an empty treasury in 1819? Instead of taking fright and throwing the money away, the statesman should look into the cause of things; he should take for his motto the prayer of Virgil: Cognoscere causa rerum. Let me know the cause of things; and, learning this cause, act accordingly. If the redundant supply is accidental and transient, it will quickly correct itself; if founded in laws, alter them. This is the part not merely of wisdom, but of common sense: it was the conduct of 1817, when the excessive supply was seen to be the effect of transient causes--termination of the war and efflorescence of the paper system--and left to correct itself, which it did in two years. It should be the conduct now, when the excessive income is seen to be the effect of the laws and the paper system combined, and when legislation or regulation is necessary to correct it. Reduction of the tariff; reduction of the price of land to actual settlers; rejection of bank paper from universal receivability for public dues; these are the remedies. After all, the whole evil may be found in a single cause, and the whole remedy may be seen in a single measure. The public lands are exchangeable for paper. Seven hundred and fifty machines are at work striking off paper; that paper is performing the grand rounds, from the banks to the public lands, and from the lands to the banks. Every body, especially a public man, may take as much as his trunks can carry. The public domain is changing into paper; the public treasury is filling up with paper; the new States are deluged with paper; the currency is ruining with paper; farmers, settlers, cultivators, are outbid, deprived of their selected homes, or made to pay double for them, by public men loaded, not like Philip's ass, with bags of gold, but like bank advocates, with bales of paper. Sir, the evil is in the unbridled state of the paper system, and in the unchecked receivability of paper for federal dues. Here is the evil. Banks are our masters; not one, but seven hundred and fifty! and this splendid federal Congress, like a chained and chastised slave, lies helpless and powerless at their feet.

"Sir, I can see nothing but evil, turn on which side I may, from this fatal scheme of dividing money; not surplus money, but appropriated funds; not by an amendment, but by a derisory evasion of the constitution. Where is it to end? History shows us that those who begin revolutions never end them; that those who commence innovations never limit them. Here is a great innovation, constituting in reality--not in figure of speech, but in reality--a revolution in the form of our government. We set out to divide the surplus; we are now dividing the appropriated funds. To prevent all appropriations except to the powerful States, will be the next step; and the small States, in self-defence, must oppose all appropriations, and go for a division of the whole. They will have to stand together in the Senate, and oppose all appropriations. It will not do for the large States to take all the appropriations first, and the bulk of the distribution afterwards; and there will be no way to prevent it but to refuse all appropriations, divide out the money among the States, and let each State lay it out for itself. A new surplus party will supersede the present surplus party, as successive factions supersede each other in chaotic revolutions. They will make Congress the quæstor of provinces, to collect money for the States to administer. This will be their argument: the States know best what they need, and can lay out the money to the best advantage, and to suit themselves. One State will want roads and no canals; another canals and no roads; one will want forts, another troops; one wants ships, another steam-cars; one wants high schools, another low schools; one is for the useful arts, another is for the fine arts, for lyceums, athenæums, museums, arts, statuary, painting, music; and the paper State will want all for banks. Thus will things go on, and Congress will have no appropriation to make, except to the President, and his head clerks, and their under clerks. Even our own pay, like it was under the confederation, may be remitted to our own States. The eight dollars a day may be voted to them, and supported by the argument that they can get better men for four dollars a day; and so save half the money, and have the work better done. Such is the progress in this road to ruin. Sir, I say of this measure, as I said of its progenitor, the land bill: if I could be willing to let evil pass, that good might come of it, I should be willing to let this bill pass. A recoil, a reaction, a revulsion must take place. This confederacy cannot go to ruin. This Union has a place in the hearts of the people which will save it from nullification in disguise, as well as from nullification in arms. One word of myself. It is now ten years since schemes of distribution were broached upon this floor. They began with a senator from New Jersey, now Secretary of the navy (Mr. Dickerson). They were denounced by many, for their unconstitutionality, their corrupting tendencies, and their fatal effects upon the federal and State governments. I took my position then, have stood upon it during all the modifications of the original scheme; and continue standing upon it now. My answer then was, pay the public debt and reduce the taxes; my answer now is, provide for the public defences, reduce the taxes, and bridle the paper system. On this ground I have stood--on this I stand; and never did I feel more satisfaction and more exultation in my vote, when triumphant in numbers, than I now do in a minority of six."

The bill went to the House, and was concurred in by a large majority--one hundred and fifty-five to thirty-eight--although, under the name of distribution, there was no chance for it to pass that House. Deeming the opposition of this small minority courageous as well as meritorious, and deserving to be held in honorable remembrance, their names are here set down; to wit:

Messrs. Michael W. Ash, James M. H. Beale, Benning M. Bean, Andrew Beaumont, John W. Brown, Robert Burns, John F. H. Claiborne, Walter Coles, Samuel Cushman, George C. Dromgoole, John Fairfield, William K. Fuller, Ransom H. Gillet, Joseph Hall, Thomas L. Hamer, Leonard Jarvis, Cave Johnson, Gerrit Y. Lansing, Gideon Lee, George Loyall, Abijah Mann, jr., John Y. Mason, James J. McKay, John McKeon, Isaac McKim, Gorham Parks, Franklin Pierce, Henry L. Pinckney, John Roane, James Rogers, Nicholas Sickles, William Taylor, Francis Thomas, Joel Turrill, Aaron Vanderpoel, Aaron Ward, Daniel Wardwell, Henry A. Wise.

The bill passed the House, and was approved by the President, but with a repugnance of feeling, and a recoil of judgment, which it required great efforts of friends to overcome; and with a regret for it afterwards which he often and publicly expressed. It was a grief that his name was seen to such an act. It was a most unfortunate act, a plain evasion of the constitution for a bad purpose--soon gave a sad overthrow to the democracy--and disappointed every calculation made upon it. Politically, it was no advantage to its numerous and emulous supporters--of no disservice to its few determined opponents--only four in number, in the Senate, the two senators from Mississippi voting against it, for reasons found in the constitution of their State. To the States, it was of no advantage, raising expectations which were not fulfilled, and upon which many of them acted as realities, and commenced enterprises to which they were inadequate. It was understood that some of Mr. Van Buren's friends favored the President's approval, and recommended him to sign it--induced by the supposed effect which its rejection might have on the democratic party in the election. The opponents of the bill did not visit the President to give him their opinions, nor had he heard their arguments. If they had seen him, their opinions concurring with his own feelings and judgment, his conduct might have been different, and the approval of the act withheld. It might not have prevented the act from becoming a law, as two thirds in each House might have been found to support it; but it would have deprived the bill of the odor of his name, and saved himself from subsequent regrets. In a party point of view, it was the commencement of calamities, being an efficient cause in that general suspension of specie payments, which quickly occurred, and brought so much embarrassment on the Van Buren administration, ending in the great democratic defeat of 1840. But of this hereafter.

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Chapter CXLIII

RECHARTER OF THE DISTRICT BANKS--SPEECH OF MR. BENTON: THE PARTS OF LOCAL AND TEMPORARY INTEREST OMITTED.

"Mr. Benton rose to oppose the passage of the bill, notwithstanding it was at the third reading, and that it was not usual to continue opposition, which seemed to be useless, at that late stage. But there were occasions when he never took such things into calculation, and when he continued to resist pernicious measures, regardless of common usages, as long as the forms of parliamentary proceeding would allow him to go on. Thus he had acted at the passing of the United States Bank charter, in 1832; thus he did at the passing of the resolution against President Jackson, in 1834; and thus he did at the passing of the famous land bill, at the present session. He had continued to speak against all these measures, long after speaking seemed to be of any avail; and, far from regretting, he had reason to rejoice at the course that he had pursued. The event proved him to be right; for all these measures, though floated through this chamber upon the swelling wave of a resistless and impatient majority, had quickly run their brief career. Their day of triumph had been short. The bank charter perished at the first general election; the condemnatory resolution was received by the continent in a tempest of execration; and the land bill, that last hope of expiring party, has dropped an abortion from the Senate. It is dead even here, in this chamber, where it originated--where it was once so omnipotent that, to speak against it, was deemed by some to be an idle consumption of time, and by others to be an unparliamentary demonstration against the ascertained will of the House. Yet, that land bill is finished. That brief candle is out. The Senate has revoked that bill; has retracted, recanted, and sung its palinode over that unfortunate conception. It has sent out a committee--an extraordinary committee of nine--to devise some other scheme for dividing that same money which the land bill divides! and, in doing so, the Senate has authentically declared a change of opinion, and a revocation of its sentiments in favor of that bill. Thus it has happened, in recent and signal cases, that, by continuing the contest after the battle seemed to be lost, the battle was in fact gained; and so it may be again. These charters may yet be defeated; and whether they will be or not, is nothing to me. I believe them to be wrong--greatly, immeasurably wrong!--and shall continue to oppose them without regard to calculations, or consequences, until the rules of parliamentary proceeding shall put an end to the contest. Mr. B. said he had moved for a select committee, at the commencement of the session, to examine into the condition of these banks, and he had done so with no other object than to endeavor to provide some checks and guards for the security of the country against the abuses and excesses of the paper system. The select committee had not been raised. The standing Committee on the District of Columbia had been charged with the subject; and, seeing that they had made a report adverse to his opinions, and brought in a bill which he could not sanction, it would be his part to act upon the meagre materials which had been placed before the Senate and endeavor to accomplish as a member of that body, what could have been attempted, with better prospects of success, as a member of a committee which had had the management of the subject.

"Mr. B. said he had wished to have been on a select committee for the charter of these banks; he wished to have revived the idea of a bank without circulation, and to have disconnected the government from the banking of the district. He had failed in his attempt to raise such a committee; and, as an individual member of the Senate, he could now do no more than mention in debate the ideas which he would have wished to have ripened into legislation through the instrumentality of a committee.

"Mr. B. said he had demonstrated that no bank of circulation ought to be authorized in this district; and, he would add, that none to furnish currency, except of large notes, ought to be authorized any where; yet what are we doing? We are breeding six little corporations at a birth, to issue $2,250,000 of paper currency: and on what terms? No bonus; no tax on the capital; none on the circulation; no reduction of interest in lieu of bonus or tax; no specie but what the stockholders please to put in; and no liability on the part of the stockholders for a failure of these corporations to redeem their notes and pay their debts. This is what we are doing; and now let us see what burdens and taxes these six corporations will impose upon the business part of the community--the productive classes among which they are to be perpetuated. First, there is the support of these six corporation governments; for every bank must have a government, like a State or kingdom; and the persons who administer these corporation governments must be paid, and paid by the people, and that according to the rates fixed by themselves and not by the people. Each of these six banks must have its president, cashier, clerks, and messengers; its notary public to protest notes; and its attorney to bring suits. The aggregate salaries, fees, and perquisites, of all these officers of the six banks will be the first tax on the people. Next comes the profits to the stockholders. The nett profits of banks are usually eight to ten per cent. at present; the gross profits are several per cent. more; and the gross profits are what the people pay. Assuming the gross profits to be twelve per cent., and the annual levy upon the community will be about $270,000. The third loss to the community will be on the fluctuations of prices of labor and property, and the rise and fall of stocks, from the expansions and contractions of currency, produced by making money plenty or scarce, as it suits the interest of the bank managers. This item cannot be calculated and depends entirely upon the moderation and consciences of the Neptunes who preside over the flux and reflux of the paper ocean; and to whom all tides, whether of ebb or flow, and all conditions of the sea, whether of calm or storm, are equally welcome, equally auspicious, and equally productive. Then come three other heads of loss to the community, and of profit to the bank: loss of notes from wear and tear, counterfeits imposed upon the people for good notes, and good notes rejected by the banks for counterfeits; and then the loss to the holders from the stoppage and failure of banks, and the shaving in of notes and stocks. Such are the burdens and taxes to be imposed upon the people to give them a paper currency, when, if the paper currency were kept away, and only large notes used, as in France, they would have a gold and silver currency without paying a tax to any body for it, and without being subject to any of the frightful evils resulting from the paper system.

"Objecting to all banks of circulation, but not able to suppress them entirely, Mr. B. suggested some ameliorations in the charters proposed to be granted to render them less dangerous to the community. 1. The liability of the stockholders for all the debts of the institution, as in the Scottish banks. 2. The bank stock to be subject to taxation, like other property. 3. To issue or receive no note of less than twenty dollars. 4. The charters to be repealable at the will of Congress: and he gave reasons for each of these improvements; and first for the liability of the stockholders. He said:

"Reasons for this liability were strong and palpable. A man that owes should pay while he has property to pay with; and it is iniquitous and unjustifiable that a bank director, or stockholder, should riot in wealth while the business part of the community should hold the bank notes which they have put into circulation, and be able to get nothing for them after the bank had closed its doors. Such exemptions are contrary to the rights of this community, and one of the great causes of the failure of banks. A liability in the stockbrokers is one of the best securities which the public can have for the correct management and solvency of the institution. The famous Scottish banks, which, in upwards of one hundred years' operations, had neither once convulsed the country with contractions and expansions, nor once stopped payment, were constituted upon this principle. All the country banks in England, and all the bankers on the continent of Europe, were liable to a still greater degree; for in them each stockholder, or partner, was liable, individually, for the whole amount of the debts of the bank. The principle proposed to be incorporated in these charters strikes the just medium between the common law principle, which makes each partner liable for the whole debts of the firm; and the corporation principle in the United States, which absolves each from all liability, and leaves the penniless and soulless carcase of a defunct and eviscerated bank alone responsible to the community. Liability to the amount of the stock was an equitable principle, and with summary process for the recovery of the amounts of notes and deposits, and the invalidity of transfers of stock to avoid this liability, would be found a good remedy for a great evil. If the stockholders in the three banks which stopped payment in this city during the panic session had been thus liable, the notes would not have been shaved out of the hands of the holders; if the bank which stopped in Baltimore at the same time, had been subject to this principle, the riots, which have afflicted that city in consequence of that stoppage, would not have taken place. Instead of these losses and riots, law and remedy would have prevailed; every stockholder would have been summoned before a justice of the peace--judgment granted against him on motion--for the amount held by the complainant; and so on, until all were paid, or he could plead that he had paid up the whole amount of his stock."

The evil of small notes he classed under three general heads: 1. The banishment of gold and silver. 2. Encouragement to counterfeiting. 3. Throwing the burthens and losses of the paper system upon the laboring and small-dealing part of the community, who have no share in the profits of banking, and should not be made to bear its losses. On these points, he said:

"The instinct of banks to sink their circulation to the lowest denomination of notes which can be forced upon the community, is a trait in the system universally proved to exist wherever banks of circulation have been permitted to give a currency to a country; and the effect of that instinct has always been to banish gold and silver. When the Bank of England was chartered, in the year 1694, it could issue no note less than £100 sterling; that amount was gradually reduced by the persevering efforts of the bank, to £50; then to £20; then to £15; then to £10; at last to £5; and finally to £2 and £1. Those last denominations were not reached until the year 1797, or until one hundred and three years after the institution of the bank; and as the several reductions in the size of the notes, and the consequent increase of paper currency took place, gold became more and more scarce; and with the issue of the one and two pound notes, it totally disappeared from the country.

"This effect was foretold by all political economists, and especially by Mr. Burke, then aged and retired from public life, who wrote from his retreat, to Mr. Canning, to say to Mr. Pitt, the Prime Minister, these prophetic words: 'If this bill for the one and two pounds is permitted to pass, we shall never see another guinea in England.' The bill did pass, and the prediction was fulfilled; for not another guinea, half guinea, or sovereign, was seen in England, for circulation, until the bill was repealed two and twenty years afterwards! After remaining nearly a quarter of a century without a gold circulation, England abolished her one and two pound notes, limited her paper currency to £5 sterling, required all Bank of England notes to be paid in gold, and allowed four years for the act to take effect. Before the four years were out, the Bank of England reported to Parliament that it was ready to begin gold payments; and commenced accordingly, and has continued them ever since.

"The encouragement of counterfeiting was the next great evil which Mr. B. pointed out as belonging to a small note currency; and of all the denominations of notes, he said those of one and two pounds in England (corresponding with fives and tens in the United States), were those to which the demoralizing business of counterfeiting was chiefly directed! They were the chosen game of the forging depredator! and that, for the obvious reasons that fives and tens were small enough to pass currently among persons not much acquainted with bank paper, and large enough to afford some profit to compensate for the expense and labor of producing the counterfeit, and the risk of passing it. Below fives, the profits are too small for the labor and risk. Too many have to be forged and passed before an article of any value can be purchased; and the change to be got in silver, in passing one for a small article, is too little. Of twenty and upwards, though the profit is greater on passing them, yet the danger of detection is also greater. On account of its larger size, the note is not only more closely scrutinized before it is received, and the passer of it better remembered, but the circulation of them is more confined to business men and large dealers, and silver change will not be given for them in buying small articles. The fives and tens, then, in the United States, like the £1 and £2 in England, are the peculiar game of counterfeiters, and this is fully proved by the criminal statistics of the forgery department in both countries. According to returns made to the British Parliament for twenty-two years--from 1797 to 1819--the period in which the one and two pound notes were allowed to circulate, the whole number of prosecutions for counterfeiting, or passing counterfeit notes of the Bank of England, was 998: in that number there were 313 capital convictions; 530 inferior convictions; and 155 acquittals: and the sum of £249,900, near a million and a quarter of dollars, was expended by the bank in attending to prosecutions. Of this great number of prosecutions, the returns show that the mass of them were for offences connected with the one and two pound notes. The proportion may be distinctly seen in the number of counterfeit notes of different denominations detected at the Bank of England in a given period of time--from the 1st of January, 1812, to the 10th of April, 1818--being a period of six years and three months out of the twenty-two years that the one and two pound notes continued to circulate. The detections were, of one pound notes, the number of 107,238; of two pound notes, 17,787; of five pound notes, 5,826; of ten pound notes, 419; of twenty pound notes, 54. Of all above twenty pounds, 35. The proportion of ones and twos to the other sizes may be well seen in the tables for this brief period; but to have any idea of the mass of counterfeiting done upon those small notes, the whole period of twenty-two years must be considered, and the entire kingdom of Great Britain taken in; for the list only includes the number of counterfeits detected at the counter of the bank; a place to which the guilty never carry their forgeries, and to which a portion only of those circulating in and about London could be carried. The proportion of crime connected with the small notes is here shown to be enormously and frightfully great. The same results are found in the United States. Mr. B. had looked over the statistics of crime connected with the counterfeiting of bank notes in the United States, and found the ratio between the great and small notes to be about the same that it was in England. He had had recourse to the most authentic data--Bicknell's Counterfeit Detector--and there found the editions of counterfeit notes of the local or State banks, to be eight hundred and eighteen, of which seven hundred and fifty-six were of ten dollars and under; and sixty-two editions only were of twenty dollars and upwards. Of the Bank of the United States and its branches, he found eighty-two editions of fives; seventy-one editions of tens; twenty-six editions of twenties; and two editions of fifties; still showing that in the United States, as well as in England, on local banks as well as that of the United States, the course of counterfeiting was still the same; and that the whole stress of the crime fell upon the five and ten dollar notes in this country, and their corresponding classes, the one and two pound notes in England. Mr. B. also exhibited the pages of Bicknell's Counterfeit Detector, a pamphlet covered over column after column with its frightful lists, nearly all under twenty dollars; and he called upon the Senate in the sacred name of the morals of the country--in the name of virtue and morality--to endeavor to check the fountain of this crime, by stopping the issue of the description of notes on which it exerted nearly its whole force.

"Mr. B. could not quit the evils of the crime of counterfeiting in the United States without remarking that the difficulty of legal detection and punishment was so great, owing to the distance at which the counterfeits were circulated from the banks purporting to issue them, and the still greater difficulty (in most cases impossible) of getting witnesses to attend in person, in States in which they do not reside, the counterfeiters all choosing to practise their crime and circulate their forgeries in States which do not contain the banks whose paper they are imitating. So difficult is it to obtain the attendance of witnesses in other States, that the crime of counterfeiting is almost practised with impunity. The notes under $20 feed and supply this crime; let them be stopped, and ninety-nine hundredths of this crime will stop with them.

"A third objection which Mr. B. urged against the notes under twenty dollars was, that nearly the whole evils of that part of the paper system fell upon the laboring and small dealing part of the community. Nearly all the counterfeits lodged in their hands, or were shaved out of their hands. When a bank failed, the mass of its circulation being in small notes, sunk upon their hands. The gain to the banks from the wear and tear of small notes, came out of them; the loss from the same cause, falling upon them. The ten or twelve percent. annual profit for furnishing a currency in place of gold and silver (for which no interest would be paid to the mint or the government), chiefly falls upon them; for the paper currency is chiefly under twenty dollars. These evils they almost exclusively bear, while they have, over and above all these, their full proportion of all the evils resulting from the expansions and contractions which are incessantly going on, totally destroying the standard of value, periodically convulsing the country; and in every cycle of five or six years making a lottery of all property, in which all the prizes are drawn by bank managers and their friends.

"He wished the basis of circulation throughout the country to be in hard money. Farmers, laborers, and market people, ought to receive their payments in hard money. They ought not to be put to the risk of receiving bank notes in all their small dealings. They are no judges of good or bad notes. Counterfeits are sure to fall upon their hands; and the whole business of counterfeiting was mainly directed to such notes as they handle--those under twenty dollars.

"Mr. B. said he here wished to fix the attention of those who were in favor of a respectable paper currency--a currency of respectable-sized notes of twenty dollars and upwards--on the great fact, that the larger the specie basis, the larger and safer would be the superstructure of paper which rested upon it; the smaller that specie basis, the smaller and more unsafe must be the paper which rested on it. The currency of England is $300,000,000, to wit: £8,000,000 sterling (near $40,000,000) in silver; £22,000,000 sterling (above $100,000,000) in gold; and about £30,000,000 sterling (near $150,000,000) in bank notes. The currency of the United States is difficult to be ascertained, from the multitude of banks, and the incessant ebb and flow of their issues; calculations vary; but all put the paper circulation at less than $100,000,000; and the proportion of specie and paper, at more than one half paper. This is agreed upon all hands, and is sufficient for the practical result, that an increase of our specie to $100,000,000, and the suppression of small notes, will give a larger total circulation than we now have, and a safer one. The total circulation may then be $200,000,000, in the proportions of half paper and half specie; and the specie, half gold and half silver. This would be an immense improvement upon our present condition, both in quantity and in quality; the paper part would become respectable from the suppression of notes under twenty dollars, which are of no profit except to the banks which issue them, and the counterfeiters who imitate them; the specie part would be equally improved by becoming one half gold. Mr. B. could not quit this important point, namely, the practicability of soon obtaining a specie currency of $100,000,000, and the one half gold, without giving other proofs to show the facility with which it has been every where done when attempted. He referred to our own history immediately after the Revolution, when the disappearance of paper money was instantly followed, as if by magic, by the appearance of gold and silver; to France, where the energy of the great Napoleon, then first consul, restored an abundant supply of gold and silver in one year; to England, where the acquisition of gold was at the rate of $24,000,000 per annum for four years after the notes under five pounds were ordered to be suppressed; and he referred with triumph to our own present history, when, in defiance of an immense and powerful political and moneyed combination against gold, we will have acquired about $20,000,000 of that metal in the two concluding years of President Jackson's administration.

"Mr. B. took this occasion to express his regret that the true idea of banks seemed to be lost in this country, and that here we had but little conception of a bank, except as an issuer of currency. A bank of discount and deposit, in contradistinction to a bank of circulation, is hardly thought of in the United States; and it may be news to some bank projectors, who suppose that nothing can be done without banks to issue millions of paper, to learn that the great bankers in London and Paris, and other capitals of Europe, issue no paper; and, still more, it may be news to them to learn that Liverpool and Manchester, two cities which happen to do about as much business as a myriad of such cities as this our Washington put together, also happen to have no banks to issue currency for them. They use money and bills of exchange, and have banks of discount and deposit, but no banks of circulation. Mr. Gallatin, in his Essay upon Currency, thus speaks of them:

"'There are, however, even in England, where incorporated country banks issuing paper are as numerous, and have been attended with the same advantages, and the same evils, as our country banks, some extensive districts, highly industrious and prosperous, where no such bank does exist, and where that want is supplied by bills of exchange drawn on London. This is the case in Lancashire, which includes Liverpool and Manchester, and where such bills, drawn at ninety days after date, are indorsed by each successive holder, and circulate through numerous persons before they reach their ultimate destination, and are paid by the drawee.'

"Mr. B. greatly regretted that such banks as those in Liverpool and Manchester were not in vogue in the United States. They were the right kind of banks. They did great good, and were wholly free from mischief. They lent money; they kept money; they transferred credits on books; they bought and sold bills of exchange; and these bills, circulating through many hands, and indorsed by each, answered the purpose of large bank notes, without their dangers, and became stronger every time they were passed. To the banks it was a profitable business to sell them, because they got both exchange and interest. To the commercial community they were convenient, both as a remittance and as funds in hand. To the community they were entirely safe. Banks of discount and deposit in the United States, issuing no currency, and issuing no bank note except of $100 and upwards, and dealing in exchange, would be entitled to the favor and confidence of the people and of the federal government. Such banks only should be the depositories of the public moneys.

"It is the faculty of issuing paper currency which makes banks dangerous to the country, and the height to which this danger has risen in the United States, and the progress which it is making, should rouse and alarm the whole community. It is destroying all standard of value. It is subjecting the country to demoralizing and ruinous fluctuations of price. It is making a lottery of property, and making merchandise of money, which has to be bought by the ticket holders in the great lottery at two and three per cent. a month. It is equivalent to the destruction of weights and measures, and like buying and selling without counting, weighing, or measuring. It is the realization, in a different form, of the debasement and arbitrary alteration of the value of coins practised by the kings of Europe in former ages, and now by the Sultan of Turkey. It is extinguishing the idea of fixed, moderate, annual interest. Great duties are thus imposed upon the legislator; and the first of these duties is to revive and favor the class of banks of discount and deposit; banks to make loans, keep money, transfer credits on books, buy and sell exchange, deal in bullion; but to issue no paper. This class of banks should be revived and favored; and the United States could easily revive them by confiding to them the public deposits. The next great duty of the legislator is to limit the issues of banks of circulation, and make them indemnify the community in some little degree, by refunding, in annual taxes, some part of their undue gains.

"The progress of the banking business is alarming and deplorable in the United States. It is now computed that there are 750 banks and their branches in operation, all having authority to issue currency; and, what is worse, all that currency is receivable by the federal government. The quantity of chartered bank capital, as it is called, is estimated at near $800,000,000; the amount of this capital reported by the banks to have been paid in is about $300,000,000; and the quantity of paper money which they are authorized by their charters to issue is about $750,000,000. How much of this is actually issued can never be known with any precision; for such are the fluctuations in the amount of a paper currency, flowing from 750 fountains, that the circulation of one day cannot be relied upon for the next. The amount of capital, reported to be paid in, is, however, well ascertained, and that is fixed at $300,000,000. This, upon its face, and without recourse to any other evidence, is proof that our banking system, as a whole, is unsolid and delusive, and a frightful imposition upon the people. Nothing but specie can form the capital of a bank; there are not above sixty or seventy millions of specie in the country, and, of that, the banks have not the one half. Thirty millions in specie is the extent; the remainder of the capital must have been made up of that undefinable material called 'specie funds,' or 'funds equivalent to specie,' the fallacy of which is established by the facts already stated, and which show that all the specie in the country put together is not sufficient to meet the one fifth part of these 'specie funds,' or 'funds equivalent to specie.' The equivalent, then, does not exist! credit alone exists; and any general attempt to realize these 'specie funds,' and turn them into specie, would explode the whole banking system, and cover the country with ruin. There may be some solid and substantial banks in the country, and undoubtedly there are better and worse among them; but as a whole--and it is in that point of view the community is interested--as a whole, the system is unsolid and delusive; and there is no safety for the country until great and radical reforms are effected.

"The burdens which these 750 banks impose upon the people were then briefly touched by Mr. B. It was a great field, which he had not time to explore, but which could not, in justice, be entirely passed by. First, there were the salaries and fees of 750 sets of bank officers: presidents, cashiers, clerks, messengers, notaries public to protest notes, and attorneys to sue on them; all these had salaries, and good salaries, paid by the people, though the people had no hand in fixing these salaries: next, the profits to the stockholders, which, at an average of ten per centum gross would give thirty millions of dollars, all levied upon the people; then came the profits to the brokers, first cousins to the bankers, for changing notes for money, or for other notes at par; then the gain to the banks and their friends on speculations in property, merchandise, produce, and stocks, during the periodical visitations of the expansions and contractions of the currency; then the gain from the wear and tear of notes, which is so much loss to the people; and, finally, the great chapter of counterfeiting which, without being profitable to the bank, is a great burden to the people, on whose hands all the counterfeits sink. The amount of these burdens he could not compute; but there was one item about which there was no dispute--the salaries to the officers and the profits to the stockholders--and this presented an array of names more numerous, and an amount of money more excessive, than was to be found in the 'Blue Book,' with the Army and Navy Register inclusive.

"Mr. B. said this was a faint sketch of the burdens of the banking system as carried on in the United States, where every bank is a coiner of paper currency, and where every town, in some States, must have its banks of circulation, while such cities as Liverpool and Manchester have no such banks, and where the paper money of all these machines receive wings to fly over the whole continent, and to infest the whole land, from their universal receivability by the federal government in payment of all dues at their custom-houses, land-offices, post-offices, and by all the district attorneys, marshals, and clerks, employed under the federal judiciary. The improvidence of the States, in chartering such institutions, is great and deplorable; but their error was trifling, compared to the improvidence of the federal government in taking the paper coinage of all these banks for the currency of the federal government, maugre that clause in the constitution which recognizes nothing but gold and silver for currency, and which was intended for ever to defend and preserve this Union from the evils of paper money.

"Mr. B. averred, with a perfect knowledge of the fact, that the banking system of the United States was on a worse footing than it was in any country upon the face of the earth; and that, in addition to its deep and dangerous defects, it was also the most expensive and burdensome, and gave the most undue advantages to one part of the community over another. He had no doubt but that this banking system was more burdensome to the free citizens of the United States than ever the feudal system was to the villeins, and serfs, and peasants of Europe. And what did they get in return for this vast burden? A pestiferous currency of small paper! when they might have a gold currency without paying interest, or suffering losses, if their banks, like those in Liverpool and Manchester, issued no currency except as bills of exchange; or, like the Bank of France, issued no notes but those of 500 and 1,000 francs (say $100 and $500); or even, like the Bank of England, issued no note under £5 sterling, and payable in gold. And with how much real capital is this banking system, so burdensome to the people of the United States, carried on? About $30,000,000! Yes; on about $30,000,000 of specie rests the $300,000,000 paid in, and on which the community are paying interest, and giving profits to bankers, and blindly yielding their faith and confidence, as if the whole $300,000,000 was a solid bed of gold and silver, instead of being, as it is, one tenth part specie, and nine tenths paper credit!"

Other senators spoke against the recharter of these banks, without the amelioration of their charters which the public welfare required; but without effect. The amendments were all rejected, and the bill passed for the recharter of the whole six by a large vote--26 to 14. The yeas and nays were:

YEAS.--Messrs. Black, Buchanan, Calhoun, Clay, Crittenden, Cuthbert, Davis, Ewing of Ohio, Goldsborough, Hendricks, Hubbard, Kent, King of Alabama, Knight, Leigh, Naudain, Nicholas, Porter, Prentiss, Rives, Southard, Swift, Tallmadge, Tomlinson, Walker, Webster.

NAYS.--Messrs. Benton, Ewing of Illinois, King of Georgia, Linn, McKean, Mangum, Morris, Niles, Robinson, Ruggles, Shepley, Wall, White, Wright.

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CXLIV. INDEPENDENCE OF TEXAS

During several months memorials had been coming in from public meetings in different cities in favor of acknowledging the independence of Texas--the public feeling in behalf of the people of that small revolted province, strong from the beginning of the contest, now inflamed into rage from the massacres of the Alamo and of Goliad. Towards the middle of May news of the victory of San Jacinto arrived at Washington. Public feeling no longer knew any bounds. The people were exalted--Congress not less so--and a feeling for the acknowledgment of Texian independence, if not universal, almost general. The sixteenth of May--the first sitting of the Senate after this great news--Mr. Mangum, of North Carolina, presented the proceedings of a public meeting in Burke county, of that State, praying Congress to acknowledge the independence of the young republic. Mr. Preston said: "The effects of that victory had opened up a curtain to a most magnificent scene. This invader had come at the head of his forces, urged on by no ordinary impulse--by an infuriate fanaticism--by a superstitious catholicism, goaded on by a miserable priesthood, against that invincible Anglo-Saxon race, the van of which now approaches the del Norte. It was at once a war of religion and of liberty. And when that noble race engaged in a war, victory was sure to perch upon their standard. This was not merely the retribution of the cruel war upon the Alamo, but that tide which was swollen by this extraordinary victory would roll on; and it was not in the spirit of prophecy to say where it would stop." Mr. Walker, of Mississippi, said:

"He had, upon the 22d of April last, called the attention of the Senate to the struggle in Texas, and suggested the reservation of any surplus that might remain in the treasury, for the purpose of acquiring Texas from whatever government might remain the government de facto of that country. At that period (said Mr. W.) no allusion had been made, he believed, by any one in either House of Congress to the situation of affairs in Texas. And now (said Mr. W.), upon the very day that he had called the attention of the Senate to this subject, it appeared that Santa Anna had been captured, and his army overthrown. Mr. W. said he had never doubted this result. When on the 22d of April last, resolutions were introduced before the Senate by the senator from Ohio (Mr. Morris), requesting Congress to recognize the independence of Texas, he (Mr. W.) had opposed laying these resolutions on the table, and advocated their reference to a committee of the Senate. Mr. W. said he had addressed the Senate then under very different circumstances from those which now existed. The cries of the expiring prisoners at the Alamo were then resounding in our ears; the victorious usurper was advancing onward with his exterminating warfare, and, in the minds of many, all was gloom and despondency; but Mr. W. said that the published report of our proceedings demonstrated that he did not for a moment despond; that his confidence in the rifle of the West was firm and unshaken; and that he had then declared that the sun was not more certain to set in the western horizon, than that Texas would maintain her independence; and this sentiment he had taken occasion to repeat in the debate on this subject in the Senate on the 9th of May last. Mr. W. said that what was then prediction was now reality; and his heart beat high, and his pulse throbbed with delight, in contemplating this triumph of liberty. Sir (said Mr. W.), the people of the valley of the Mississippi never could have permitted Santa Anna and his myrmidons to retain the dominion of Texas."

Mr. Walker afterwards moved the reference of all the memorials in relation to Texas to the Committee on Foreign Relations. If the accounts received from Texas had been official (for as yet there were nothing but newspaper accounts of the great victory), he would have moved for the immediate recognition of the Texian independence. Being unofficial, he could only move the reference to the committee in the expectation that they would investigate the facts and bring the subject before the Senate in a suitable form for action. Mr. Webster said:

"That if the people of Texas had established a government de facto, it was undoubtedly the duty of this government to acknowledge their independence. The time and manner of doing so, however, were all matters proper for grave and mature consideration. He should have been better satisfied, had this matter not been moved again till all the evidence had been collected, and until they had received official information of the important events that had taken place in Texas. As this proceeding had been moved by a member of the administration party, he felt himself bound to understand that the Executive was not opposed to take the first steps now, and that in his opinion this proceeding was not dangerous or premature. Mr. W. was of opinion that it would be best not to act with precipitation. If this information was true, they would doubtless before long hear from Texas herself; for as soon as she felt that she was a country, and had a country, she would naturally present her claims to her neighbors, to be recognized as an independent nation. He did not say that it would be necessary to wait for this event, but he thought it would be discreet to do so. He would be one of the first to acknowledge the independence of Texas, on reasonable proof that she had established a government. There were views connected with Texas which he would not now present, as it would be premature to do so; but he would observe that he had received some information from a respectable source, which turned his attention to the very significant expression used by Mr. Monroe in his message of 1822, that no European Power should ever be permitted to establish a colony on the American continent. He had no doubt that attempts would be made by some European government to obtain a cession of Texas from the government of Mexico."

Mr. King, of Alabama, counselled moderation and deliberation, although he was aware that in the present excited feeling in relation to Texas, every prudent and cautious course would be misunderstood, and a proper reserve be probably construed into hostility to Texian independence: but he would, so long as he remained a member on that floor, be regardless of every personal consideration, and place himself in opposition to all measures which he conceived were calculated to detract from the exalted character of this country for good faith, and for undeviating adherence to all its treaty stipulations. He then went on to say:

"He knew not whether the information received of the extraordinary successes of the Texans was to be relied on or not; he sincerely hoped it might prove true; no man here felt a deeper detestation of the bloodthirsty wretches who had cruelly butchered their defenceless prisoners, than he did; but, whether true or false, did it become wise, discreet, prudent men, bound by the strongest considerations to preserve the honor and faith of the country, to be hurried along by the effervescence of feeling, and at once abandon the course, and, he would say, the only true course, which this government has invariably, heretofore, pursued towards foreign powers? We have uniformly (said Mr. K.) recognized the existing governments--the governments de facto; we have not stopped to inquire whether it is a despotic or constitutional government; whether it is a republic or a despotism. All we ask is, does a government actually exist? and, having satisfied ourselves of that fact, we look no further, but recognize it as it is. It was on this principle (said Mr. K.)--this safe, this correct principle, that we recognized what was called the Republic of France, founded on the ruins of the old monarchy; then, the consular government; a little after, the imperial; and when that was crushed by a combination of all Europe, and that extraordinary man who wielded it was driven into exile, we again acknowledged the kingly government of the House of Bourbon, and now the constitutional King Louis Philippe of Orleans.

"Sir (said Mr. K.), we take things as they are; we ask not how governments are established--by what revolutions they are brought into existence. Let us see an independent government in Texas, and he would not be behind the senator from Mississippi nor the senator from South Carolina in pressing forward to its recognition, and establishing with it the most cordial and friendly relations."

Mr. Calhoun went beyond all other speakers, and advocated not only immediate recognition of the independence of Texas, but her simultaneous admission into the Union; was in favor of acting on both questions together, and at the present session; and saw an interest in the slaveholding States in preventing Texas from having the power to annoy them. And he said:

"He was of opinion that it would add more strength to the cause of Texas, to wait for a few days, until they received official confirmation of the victory and capture of Santa Anna, in order to obtain a more unanimous vote in favor of the recognition of Texas. He had been of but one opinion, from the beginning, that, so far from Mexico being able to reduce Texas, there was great danger of Mexico, herself, being conquered by the Texans. The result of one battle had placed the ruler of Mexico in the power of the Texans; and they were now able, either to dictate what terms they pleased to him, or to make terms with the opposition in Mexico. This extraordinary meeting had given a handful of brave men a most powerful control over the destinies of Mexico; he trusted they would use their victory with moderation. He had made up his mind not only to recognize the independence of Texas, but for her admission into this Union; and if the Texans managed their affairs prudently, they would soon be called upon to decide that question. No man could suppose for a moment that that country could ever come again under the dominion of Mexico; and he was of opinion that it was not for our interests that there should be an independent community between us and Mexico. There were powerful reasons why Texas should be a part of this Union. The Southern States, owning a slave population, were deeply interested in preventing that country from having the power to annoy them; and the navigating and manufacturing interests of the North and the East were equally interested in making it a part of this Union. He thought they would soon be called on to decide these questions; and when they did act on it, he was for acting on both together--for recognizing the independence of Texas, and for admitting her into the Union. Though he felt the deepest solicitude on this subject, he was for acting calmly, deliberately, and cautiously, but at the same time with decision and firmness. They should not violate their neutrality; but when they were once satisfied that Texas had established a government, they should do as they had done in all other similar cases: recognize her as an independent nation; and if her people, who were once citizens of this Republic, wished to come back to us, he would receive them with open arms. If events should go on as they had done, he could not but hope that, before the close of the present session of Congress, they would not only acknowledge the independence of Texas, but admit her into the Union. He hoped there would be no unnecessary delay, for, in such cases, delays were dangerous; but that they would act with unanimity, and act promptly."

The author of this View did not reply to Mr. Calhoun, being then on ill terms with him; but he saw in the speech much to be considered and remembered--the shadowings forth of coming events; the revelation of a new theatre for the slavery agitation; and a design to make the Texas question an element in the impending election. Mr. Calhoun had been one of Mr. Monroe's cabinet, at the time that Texas was ceded to Spain, and for reasons (as Mr. Monroe stated to General Jackson, in the private letter heretofore quoted) of internal policy and consideration; that is to say, to conciliate the free States, by amputating slave territory, and preventing their opposition to future Southern presidential candidates. He did not use those precise words, but that was the meaning of the words used. The cession of Texas was made in the crisis of the Missouri controversy; and both Mr. Monroe and Mr. Calhoun received the benefit of the conciliation it produced: Mr. Monroe in the re-election, almost unanimous, of 1820; and Mr. Calhoun in the vice-presidential elections of 1824 and 1828; in which he was so much a favorite of the North as to get more votes than Mr. Adams received in the free States, and owed to them his honorable election by the people, when all others were defeated, on the popular vote. Their justification (that of Mr. Monroe's cabinet) for this cession of a great province, was, that the loss was temporary--"that it could be got back again whenever it was wanted"--but the victory of San Jacinto was hardly foreseen at that time. It was these reasons (Northern conciliation, and getting it back when we pleased) that reconciled General Jackson to the cession, at the time it was made. One of the foremost to give away Texas, Mr. Calhoun was the very foremost to get her back; and at an immense cost to our foreign relations and domestic peace. The immediate admission of Texas into the Union, was his plan. She was at war with Mexico--we at peace: to incorporate her into the Union, was to adopt her war. We had treaties of amity with Mexico: to join Texas in the war, was to be faithless to those treaties. We had a presidential election depending; and to discuss the question of Texian admission into our Union, was to bring that element into the canvass, in which all prudent men who were adverse to the admission (as Mr. Van Buren and his friends were), would be thrown under the force of an immense popular current; while all that were in favor of it would expect to swim high upon the waves of that current. The proposition was incredibly rash, tending to involve us in war and dishonor; and also disrespectful to Texas herself, who had not asked for admission; and extravagantly hasty, in being broached before there was any official news of the great victory. Before the debate was over, the author of this View took an opportunity to reply, without reference to other speakers, and to give reasons against the present admission of Texas. But there was one of Mr. Calhoun's reasons for immediate admission, which to him was enigmatical, and at that time, incomprehensible; and that was, the prevention of Texas "from having the power to annoy" the Southern slave States. We had just been employed in suppressing, or exploding, this annoyance, in the Northeast; and, in the twinkling of an eye, it sprung up in the Southwest, two thousand miles off, and quite diagonally from its late point of apparition. That sudden and so distant re-appearance of the danger, was a puzzle, remaining unsolved until the Tyler administration, and the return of Mr. Duff Green from London, with the discovery of the British abolition plot; which was to be planted in Texas, spread into the South, and blow up its slavery. Mr. Bedford Brown, and others, answered Mr. Calhoun. Mr. Brown said:

"He regarded our national character as worth infinitely more than all the territorial possessions of Mexico, her wealth, or the wealth of all other nations added together. We occupied a standing among the nations of the earth, of which we might well be proud, and which we ought not to permit to be tarnished. We have, said Mr. B., arrived at that period of our history, as a nation, when it behooves us to act with the greatest wisdom and circumspection. But a few years since as a nation, we were comparatively in a state of infancy; we were now, in the confidence of youth, and with the buoyancy of spirit incident to this period of our existence as a nation, about to enter on 'man's estate.' Powerful in resources, and conscious of our strength, let us not forget the sacred obligations of justice and good faith, which form the indispensable basis of a nation's character--greatness and freedom; and without which, no people could long preserve the blessings of self-government. Republican government was based on the principles of justice; and for it to be administered on any other, either in its foreign or domestic affairs, was to undermine its foundation and to hasten its overthrow."

Mr. Rives concurred in the necessity for caution; and said:

"This government should act with moderation, calmness, and dignity; and, because he wished the Senate to act with that becoming moderation, calmness, and dignity, which ought to characterize its deliberations on international subjects, it was his wish that the subject might be referred. If it was postponed, it would come up again for discussion, from morning to morning, to the exclusion of most of the business of the Senate, as there was nothing to prevent the presentation of petitions every morning, to excite discussion. It was for the purpose of avoiding these discussions, that he should vote to refer it at once to the Committee on Foreign Relations. A prominent member of that committee had been long and intimately acquainted with the subject of our foreign relations, and there were members on it representing all the different sections of the country, to whose charge he believed the subject could be safely committed. It would seem, from the course of debate this morning, that gentlemen supposed the question of the recognition of the independence of Texas, or its admission into this Union, was directly before the Senate; and some gentlemen had volunteered their opinions in advance of the report of the committee. He did not vote to refer it to the committee to receive its quietus, but that they might give their views upon it; nor did he feel as if he were called upon to express an opinion upon the propriety of the measure. It was strange that senators, who stated that their opinions were made up, should oppose the reference."

Mr. Niles, of Connecticut, was entirely in favor of preserving the national faith inviolate, and its honor untarnished, and ourselves from the imputation of base motives in our future conduct in relation to Texas, and said:

"This was a case in which this government should act with caution. In ordinary cases of this kind the question was only one of fact, and was but little calculated to compromit the interests or honor of the United States; but the question in regard to Texas was very different, and vastly more important. That is a country on our own borders, and its inhabitants, most of them, emigrants from the United States; and most of the brave men constituting its army, who are so heroically fighting to redeem the province, are citizens of the United States, who have engaged in this bold enterprise as volunteers. Were this government to be precipitate in acknowledging the independence of Texas, might it not be exposed to a suspicion of having encouraged these enterprises of its citizens? There is another consideration of more importance. Should the independence of Texas be followed by its annexation to the United States, the reasons for suspicions derogatory to the national faith might be still stronger. If we, by our own act, contribute to clothe the constituted authorities of the province with the power of sovereignty over it, and then accept a cession of the country from those authorities, might there not be some reason to charge us with having recognized the independence of the country as a means of getting possession of it? These and other considerations require that this government should act with caution; yet, when the proper time arrives it will be our duty to act, and to act promptly. But he trusted that all would feel the importance of preserving the national faith and national honor. They should not only be kept pure, but free from injurious suspicions, being more to be prized than any extension of territory, wealth, population, or other acquisition, which enters into the elements of national prosperity or power."

The various memorials were referred to the committee on foreign relations, consisting of Mr. Clay, Mr. King of Georgia, Mr. Tallmadge, Mr. Mangum, and Mr. Porter of Louisiana; which reported early, and unanimously, in favor of the recognition of the independence of Texas, as soon as satisfactory information should be received, showing that she had a civil government in operation capable of performing the duties and fulfilling the obligations of a civilized power. In the report which accompanied the Resolution, its author, Mr. Clay, said:

"Sentiments of sympathy and devotion to civil liberty, which have always animated the people of the United States, have prompted the adoption of the resolution, and other manifestations of popular feeling which have been referred to the committee, recommending an acknowledgment of the independence of Texas. The committee shares fully in all these sentiments; but a wise and prudent government should not act solely on the impulse of feeling, however natural and laudable it may be. It ought to avoid all precipitation, and not adopt so grave a measure as that of recognizing the independence of a new Power, until it has satisfactory information, and has fully deliberated.

"The committee has no information respecting the recent movements in Texas, except such as is derived from the public prints. According to that, the war broke out in Texas last autumn. Its professed object, like that of our revolutionary contest in the commencement, was not separation and independence, but a redress of grievances. In March last, independence was proclaimed, and a constitution and form of government were established. No means of ascertaining accurately the exact amount of the population of Texas are at the command of the committee. It has been estimated at some sixty or seventy thousand souls. Nor are the precise limits of the country which passes under the denomination of Texas known to the committee. They are probably not clearly defined, but they are supposed to be extensive, and sufficiently large, when peopled, to form a respectable Power."

Mr. Southard concurred in the views and conclusion of the report, but desired to say a few words in reply to that part of Mr. Calhoun's speech which looked to the "balance of power, and the perpetuation of our institutions," as a reason for the speedy admission of Texas into the Union, and said:

"I should not have risen to express these notions, if I had not understood the Senator from South Carolina [Mr. Calhoun] to declare that he regarded the acknowledgment of the independence of Texas as important, and principally important, because it prepared the way for the speedy admission of that State as a member of our Union; and that he looked anxiously to that event, as conducing to a proper balance of power, and to the perpetuation of our institutions. I am not now, sir, prepared to express an opinion on that question--a question which all must foresee will embrace interests as wide as our Union, and as lasting in their consequences as the freedom which our institutions secure. When it shall be necessarily presented to me, I shall endeavor to meet it in a manner suitable to its magnitude, and to the vital interests which it involves; but I will not, on the present resolution, anticipate it; nor can I permit an inference, as to my decision upon it, to be drawn from the vote which I now give. That vote is upon this resolution alone, and confined to it, founded upon principles sustained by the laws of nations, upon the unvarying practice of our government, and upon the facts as they are now known to exist. It relates to the independence of Texas, not to the admission of Texas into this Union. The achievement of the one, at the proper time, may be justified; the other may be found to be opposed by the highest and strongest considerations of interest and duty. I discuss neither at this time; nor am I willing that the remarks of the senator should lead, in or out of this chamber, to the inference that all those who vote for the resolution concur with him in opinion. The question which he has started should be left perfectly open and free."

The vote in favor of the Resolution reported by Mr. Clay was unanimous--39 senators present and voting. In the House of Representatives a similar resolution was reported from the House Committee of foreign relations, Mr. John Y. Mason, of Virginia, chairman; and adopted by a vote of 113 to 22. The nays were: Messrs. John Quincy Adams, Heman Allen, Jeremiah Bailey, Andrew Beaumont, James W. Bouldin, William Clark, Walter Coles, Edward Darlington, George Grennell, jr., Hiland Hall, Abner Hazeltine, William Hiester, Abbott Lawrence, Levi Lincoln, Thomas C. Love, John J. Milligan, Dutee J. Pearce, Stephen C. Phillips, David Potts, jr., John Reed, David Russell, William Slade.

It is remarkable that in the progress of this Texas question both Mr. Adams and Mr. Calhoun reversed their positions--the former being against, and the latter in favor, of its alienation in 1819; the former being against, and the latter in favor of its recovery in 1836-'44.--Mr. Benton was the last speaker in the Senate in favor of the recognition of independence; and his speech being the most full and carefully historical of any one delivered, it is presented entire in the next chapter; and, it is believed, that in going more fully than other speakers did into the origin and events of the Texas Revolution, it will give a fair and condensed view of that remarkable event, so interesting to the American people.

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CXLV. TEXAS INDEPENDENCE--MR. BENTON'S SPEECH

'Mr. Benton rose and said he should confine himself strictly to the proposition presented in the resolution, and should not complicate the practical question of recognition with speculations on the future fate of Texas. Such speculations could have no good effect upon either of the countries interested; upon Mexico, Texas, or the United States. Texas has not asked for admission into this Union. Her independence is still contested by Mexico. Her boundaries and other important points in her political condition, are not yet adjusted. To discuss the question of her admission into this Union, under these circumstances, is to treat her with disrespect, to embroil ourselves with Mexico, to compromise the disinterestedness of our motives in the eyes of Europe; and to start among ourselves prematurely, and without reason, a question which, whenever it comes, cannot be without its own intrinsic difficulties and perplexities.

"Since the three months that the affairs of Texas have been the subject of repeated discussion in this chamber, I have imposed on myself a reserve, not the effect of want of feeling, but the effect of strong feeling, and some judgment combined, which has not permitted me to give utterance to the general expression of my sentiments. Once only have I spoken, and that at the most critical moment of the contest, and when the reported advance of the Mexicans upon Nacogdoches, and the actual movement of General Gaines and our own troops in that direction, gave reason to apprehend the encounter of flags, or the collision of arms, which might compromise individuals or endanger the peace of nations. It was then that I used those words, not entirely enigmatical, and which have since been repeated by some, without the prefix of their important qualifications, namely; that while neutrality was the obvious line of our duty and of our interest, yet there might be emergencies in which the obligation of duty could have no force, and the calculations of interest could have no place; when, in fact, a man should have no head to think! nothing but a heart to feel! and an arm to strike! and I illustrated this sentiment. It was after the affair of Goliad, and the imputed order to unpeople the country, with the supposititious case of prisoners assassinated, women violated, and children slaughtered; and these horrors to be perpetrated in the presence or hearing of an American army. In such a case I declared it to be my sentiment--and I now repeat it, for I feel it to be in me--in such a case, I declared it to be my sentiment, that treaties were nothing, books were nothing, laws were nothing! that the paramount law of God and nature was every thing! and that the American soldier, hearing the cries of helplessness and weakness, and remembering only that he was a man, and born of woman, and the father of children, should fly to the rescue, and strike to prevent the perpetration of crimes which shock humanity and dishonor the age. I uttered this sentiment not upon impulsion, but with consideration; not for theatrical effect, but as a rule for action; not as vague declamation, but with an eye to possible or probable events, and with a view to the public justification of General Gaines and his men, if, under circumstances appalling to humanity, they should nobly resolve to obey the impulsions of the heart instead of coldly consulting the musty leaves of books and treaties.

"Beyond this I did not go, and, except in this instance, I do not speak. Duty and interest prescribed to the United States a rigorous neutrality; and this condition she has faithfully fulfilled. Our young men have gone to Texas to fight; but they have gone without the sanction of the laws, and against the orders of the Government. They have gone upon that impulsion which, in all time, has carried the heroic youth of all ages to seek renown in the perils and glories of distant war. Our foreign enlistment law is not repealed. Unlike England, in the civil war now raging in Spain, we have not licensed interference by repealing our penalties: we have not stimulated action by withdrawing obstacles. No member of our Congress, like General Evans in the British Parliament, has left his seat to levy troops in the streets of the metropolis, and to lead them to battle and to victory in the land torn by civil discord. Our statute against armaments to invade friendly powers is in full force. Proclamations have attested our neutral dispositions. Prosecutions have been ordered against violators of law. A naval force in the gulf, and a land force on the Sabine, have been directed to enforce the policy of the government; and so far as acts have gone, the advantage has been on the side of Mexico; for the Texian armed schooner Invincible has been brought into an American port by an American ship of war. If parties and individuals still go to Texas to fight, the act is particular, not national, compromising none but the parties themselves, and may take place on one side as well as on the other. The conduct of the administration has been strictly neutral; and, as a friend to that administration, and from my own convictions, I have conformed to its policy, avoiding the language which would irritate, and opposing the acts which might interrupt pacific and commercial communications. Mexico is our nearest neighbor, dividing with us the continent of North America, and possessing the elements of a great power. Our boundaries are co-terminous for more than two thousand miles. We have inland and maritime commerce. She has mines; we have ships. General considerations impose upon each power the duties of reciprocal friendship; especial inducements invite us to uninterrupted commercial intercourse. As a western senator, coming from the banks of the Mississippi, and from the State of Missouri, I cannot be blind to the consequences of interrupting that double line of inland and maritime commerce, which, stretching to the mines of Mexico, brings back the perennial supply of solid money which enriches the interior, and enables New Orleans to purchase the vast accumulation of agricultural produce of which she is the emporium. Wonderful are the workings of commerce, and more apt to find out its own proper channels by its own operations than to be guided into them by the hand of legislation. New Orleans now is what the Havana once was--the entrepot of the Mexican trade, and the recipient of its mineral wealth. The superficial reader of commercial statistics would say that Mexico but slightly encourages our domestic industry; that she takes nothing from our agriculture, and but little from our manufactures. On the contrary, the close observer would see a very different picture. He would see the products of our soil passing to all the countries of Europe, exchanging into fine fabrics, and these returning in the ships of many nations, our own predominant, to the city of New Orleans; and thence going off in small Mexican vessels to Matamoros, Tampico, Vera Cruz, and other Mexican ports. The return from these ports is in the precious metals; and, to confine myself to a single year, as a sample of the whole, it may be stated that, of the ten millions and three quarters of silver coin and bullion received in the United States, according to the custom-house returns during the least year, eight millions and one quarter of it came from Mexico alone, and the mass of it through the port of New Orleans. This amount of treasure is not received for nothing, nor, as it would seem on the commercial tables, for foreign fabrics unconnected with American industry, but, in reality, for domestic productions changed into foreign fabrics, and giving double employment to the navigation of the country. New Orleans has taken the place of the Havana; it has become the entrepot of this trade; and many circumstances, not directed by law, or even known to lawgivers, have combined to produce the result. First, the application of steam power to the propulsion of vessels, which, in the form of towboats, has given to a river city a prompt and facile communication with the sea; then the advantage of full and assorted cargoes, which brings the importing vessel to a point where she delivers freight for two different empires; then the marked advantage of a return cargo, with cheap and abundant supplies, which are always found in the grand emporium of the great West; then the discriminating duties in Mexican ports in favor of Mexican vessels, which makes it advantageous to the importer to stop and transship at New Orleans; finally, our enterprise, our police, and our free institutions, our perfect security, under just laws, for life, liberty, person and property. These circumstances, undirected by government, and without the knowledge of government, have given to New Orleans the supreme advantage of being the entrepot of the Mexican trade; and have presented the unparalleled spectacle of the noblest valley in the world, and the richest mines in the world, sending their respective products to meet each other at the mouth of the noblest river in the world; and there to create in lapse of time, the most wonderful city which any age or country has ever beheld. A look upon the map of the great West, and a tolerable capacity to calculate the aggregate of geographical advantages, must impress the beholder with a vast opinion of the future greatness of New Orleans; but he will only look upon one half of the picture unless he contemplates this new branch of trade which is making the emporium of the Mississippi the entrepot of Mexican commerce, and the recipient of the Mexican mines, and which, though now so great, is still in its infancy. Let not government mar a consummation so auspicious in its aspect, and teeming with so many rich and precious results. Let no unnecessary collision with Mexico interrupt our commerce, turn back the streams of three hundred mines to the Havana, and give a wound to a noble city which must be felt to the head-spring and source of every stream that pours its tribute into the King of Floods.

"Thus far Mexico has no cause of complaint. The conduct of our government has been that of rigorous neutrality. The present motion does not depart from that line of conduct; for the proposed recognition is not only contingent upon the de facto independence of Texas, but it follows in the train, and conforms to the spirit, of the actual arrangements of the President General Santa Anna, for the complete separation of the countries. We have authentic information that the President General has agreed to an armistice; that he has directed the evacuation of the country; that the Mexican army is in full retreat; that the Rio Grande, a limit far beyond the discovery and settlement of La Salle, in 1684, is the provisional boundary; and that negotiations are impending for the establishment of peace on the basis of separation. Mexico has had the advantage of these arrangements, though made by a captive chief, in the unmolested retreat and happy extrication of her troops from their perilous position. Under these circumstances, it can be no infringement of neutrality for the Senate of the United States to adopt a resolution for the contingent and qualified acknowledgment of Texian independence. Even after the adoption of the resolution, it will remain inoperative upon the hands of the President until he shall have the satisfactory information which shall enable him to act without detriment to any interest, and without infraction of any law.

"Even without the armistice and provisional treaty with Santa Anna, I look upon the separation of the two countries as being in the fixed order of events, and absolutely certain to take place. Texas and Mexico are not formed for union. They are not homogeneous. I speak of Texas as known to La Salle, the bay of St. Bernard--(Matagorda)--and the waters which belong to it, being the western boundary. They do not belong to the same divisions of country, nor to the same systems of commerce, nor to the same pursuits of business. They have no affinities--no attractions--no tendencies to coalesce. In the course of centuries, and while Mexico has extended her settlements infinitely further in other directions--to the head of the Rio Grande in the north, and to the bay of San Francisco in the northwest; yet no settlement had been extended east, along the neighboring coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The rich and deep cotton and sugar lands of Texas, though at the very door of Mexico, yet requiring the application of a laborious industry to make them productive, have presented no temptation to the mining and pastoral population of that empire. For ages this beautiful agricultural and planting region had lain untouched. Within a few years, and by another race, its settlement has begun; and the presence of this race has not smoothed, but increased, the obstacles to union presented by nature. Sooner or later, separation would be inevitable; and the progress of human events has accelerated the operation of natural causes. Goliad has torn Texas from Mexico; Goliad has decreed independence; San Jacinto has sealed it! What the massacre decreed, the victory has sealed; and the day of the martyrdom of prisoners must for ever be regarded as the day of disunion between Texas and Mexico. I speak of it politically, not morally; that massacre was a great political blunder, a miscalculation, an error, and a mistake. It was expected to put an end to resistance, to subdue rebellion, to drown revolt in blood, and to extinguish aid in terror. On the contrary, it has given life and invincibility to the cause of Texas. It has fired the souls of her own citizens, and imparted to their courage the energies of revenge and despair. It has given to her the sympathies and commiseration of the civilized world. It has given her men and money, and claims upon the aid and a hold upon the sensibilities of the human race. If the struggle goes on, not only our America, but Europe will send its chivalry to join in the contest. I repeat it; that cruel morning of the Alamo, and that black day of Goliad, were great political faults. The blood of the martyr is the seed of the church. The blood of slaughtered patriots is the dragon's teeth sown upon the earth, from which heroes, full grown and armed, leap into life, and rush into battle. Often will the Mexican, guiltless of that blood, feel the Anglo-American steel for the deed of that day, if this war continues. Many were the innocent at San Jacinto, whose cries, in broken Spanish, abjuring Goliad and the Alamo, could not save their devoted lives from the avenging remembrance of the slaughtered garrison and the massacred prisoners.

"Unhappy day, for ever to be deplored, that Sunday morning, March 6, 1836, when the undaunted garrison of the Alamo, victorious in so many assaults over twenty times their number perished to the last man by the hands of those, part of whom they had released on parole two months before, leaving not one to tell how they first dealt out to multitudes that death which they themselves finally received. Unhappy day that Palm Sunday, March 27, when the five hundred and twelve prisoners at Goliad, issuing from the sally port at dawn of day, one by one, under the cruel delusion of a return to their families, found themselves enveloped in double files of cavalry and infantry, marched to a spot fit for the perpetration of the horrid deed--and there, without an instant to think of parents, country, friends, and God--in the midst of the consternation of terror and surprise, were inhumanly set upon, and pitilessly put to death, in spite of those moving cries which reached to heaven, and regardless of those supplicating hands, stretched forth for mercy, from which arms had been taken under the perfidious forms of a capitulation. Five hundred and six perished that morning--young, vigorous, brave, sons of respectable families, and the pride of many a parent's heart--and their bleeding bodies, torn with wounds, and many yet alive, were thrown in heaps upon vast fires, for the flames to consume what the steel had mangled. Six only escaped, and not by mercy, but by miracles. And this was the work of man upon his brother; of Christian upon Christian; of those upon those who adore the same God, invoke the same heavenly benediction, and draw precepts of charity and mercy from the same divine fountain. Accursed be the ground on which the dreadful deed was done! Sterile, and set apart, let it for ever be! No fruitful cultivation should ever enrich it; no joyful edifice should ever adorn it; but shut up, and closed by gloomy walls, the mournful cypress, the weeping willow, and the inscriptive monument, should for ever attest the foul deed of which it was the scene, and invoke from every passenger the throb of pity for the slain, and the start of horror for the slayer. And you, neglected victims of the Old Mission and San Patricio, shall you be forgotten because your numbers were fewer, and your hapless fate more concealed? No! but to you also justice shall be done. One common fate befell you all; one common memorial shall perpetuate your names, and embalm your memories. Inexorable history will sit in judgment upon all concerned, and will reject the plea of government orders, even if those orders emanated from the government, instead of being dictated to it. The French National Convention, in 1793, ordered all the English prisoners who should be taken in battle to be put to death. The French armies refused to execute the decree. They answered, that French soldiers were the protectors, not the assassins of prisoners; and all France, all Europe, the whole civilized world, applauded the noble reply.

"But let us not forget that there is some relief to this black and bloody picture--some alleviation to the horror of its appalling features. There was humanity, as well as cruelty, at Goliad--humanity to deplore what it could not prevent. The letter of Colonel Fernandez does honor to the human heart. Doubtless many other officers felt and mourned like him, and spent the day in unavailing regrets. The ladies, Losero and others, of Matamoros, saving the doomed victims in that city, from day to day, by their intercessions, appear like ministering angels. Several public journals, and many individuals, in Mexico, have given vent to feelings worthy of Christians, and of the civilization of the age; and the poor woman on the Gaudaloupe, who succored and saved the young Georgian (Hadaway), how nobly she appears! He was one of the few that escaped the fate of the Georgia battalion sent to the Old Mission. Overpowered by famine and despair, without arms and without comrades, he entered a solitary house filled with Mexican soldiers hunting the fugitives of his party. His action amazed them; and, thinking it a snare, they stepped out to look for the armed body of which he was supposed to be the decoy. In that instant food was given him by the humane woman, and instant flight to the swamp was pointed out. He fled, receiving the fire of many guns as he went; and, escaping the perils of the way, the hazards of battle at San Jacinto, where he fought, and of Indian massacre in the Creek nation, when the two stages were taken and part of his travelling companions killed, he lives to publish in America that instance of devoted humanity in the poor woman of the Gaudaloupe. Such acts as all these deserve to be commemorated. They relieve the revolting picture of military barbarity--soften the resentments of nations--and redeem a people from the offence of individuals.

"Great is the mistake which has prevailed in Mexico, and in some parts of the United States, on the character of the population which has gone to Texas. It has been common to disparage and to stigmatize them. Nothing could be more unjust; and, speaking from knowledge either personally or well acquired (for it falls to my lot to know, either from actual acquaintance or good information the mass of its inhabitants), I can vindicate them from erroneous imputations, and place their conduct and character on the honorable ground which they deserve to occupy. The founder of the Texian colony was Mr. Moses Austin, a respectable and enterprising native of Connecticut, and largely engaged in the lead mines of Upper Louisiana when I went to the Territory of Missouri in 1815. The present head of the colony, his son, Mr. Stephen F. Austin, then a very young man, was a member of the Territorial Legislature, distinguished for his intelligence, business habits, and gentlemanly conduct. Among the grantees we distinguish the name of Robertson, son of the patriarchal founder and first settler of West Tennessee. Of the body of the emigrants, most of them are heads of families or enterprising young men, gone to better their condition by receiving grants of fine land in a fine climate, and to continue to live under the republican form of government to which they had been accustomed. There sits one of them (pointing to Mr. Carson, late member of Congress from North Carolina, and now Secretary of State for Texas). We all know him; our greetings on his appearance in this chamber attest our respect; and such as we know him to be, so do I know the multitude of those to be who have gone to Texas. They have gone, not as intruders, but as grantees; and to become a barrier between the Mexicans and the marauding Indians who infested their borders.

"Heartless is the calumny invented and propagated, not from this floor, but elsewhere, on the cause of the Texian revolt. It is said to be a war for the extension of slavery. It had as well be said that our own Revolution was a war for the extension of slavery. So far from it, that no revolt, not even our own, ever had a more just and a more sacred origin. The settlers in Texas went to live under the form of government which they had left behind in the United States--a government which extends so many guarantees for life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, and which their American and English ancestors had vindicated for so many hundred years. A succession of violent changes in government, and the rapid overthrow of rulers, annoyed and distressed them; but they remained tranquil under every violence which did not immediately bear on themselves. In 1822 the republic of 1821 was superseded by the imperial diadem of Iturbide. In 1823 he was deposed and banished, returned and was shot, and Victoria made President. Mentuno and Bravo disputed the presidency with Victoria; and found, in banishment, the mildest issue known among Mexicans to unsuccessful civil war. Pedraza was elected in 1828; Guerrero overthrew him the next year. Then Bustamente overthrew Guerrero; and, quickly, Santa Anna overthrew Bustamente, and, with him, all the forms of the constitution, and the whole frame of the federative government. By his own will, and by force, Santa Anna dissolved the existing Congress, convened another, formed the two Houses into one, called it a convention; and made it the instrument for deposing, without trial, the constitutional Vice-President, Gomez Farias, putting Barragan into his place, annihilating the State governments, and establishing a consolidated government, of which he was monarch, under the retained republican title of President. Still, the Texians did not take up arms: they did not acquiesce, but they did not revolt. They retained their State government in operation, and looked to the other States, older and more powerful than Texas, to vindicate the general cause, and to re-establish the federal constitution of 1824. In September, 1835, this was still her position. In that month, a Mexican armed vessel appeared off the coast of Texas, and declared her ports blockaded. At the same time, General Cos appeared in the West with an army of fifteen hundred men, with orders to arrest the State authorities, to disarm the inhabitants, leaving one gun to every five hundred souls; and to reduce the State to unconditional submission. Gonzales was the selected point for the commencement of the execution of these orders; and the first thing was the arms, those trusty rifles which the settlers had brought with them from the United States, which were their defence against savages, their resource for game, and the guard which converted their houses into castles stronger than those 'which the king cannot enter.' A detachment of General Cos's army appeared at the village of Gonzales, on the 28th of September, and demanded the arms of the inhabitants; it was the same demand, and for the same purpose, which the British detachment, under Major Pitcairn had made at Lexington, on the 19th of April 1775. It was the same demand! and the same answer was given--resistance--battle--victory! for the American blood was at Gonzales as it had been at Lexington; and between using their arms, and surrendering their arms, that blood can never hesitate. Then followed the rapid succession of brilliant events, which, in two months, left Texas without an armed enemy in her borders, and the strong forts of Goliad and the Alamo, with their garrisons and cannon, the almost bloodless prizes of a few hundred Texian rifles. This was the origin of the revolt; and a calumny more heartless can never be imagined than that which would convert this just and holy defence of life, liberty, and property, into an aggression for the extension of slavery.

"Just in its origin, valiant and humane in its conduct, sacred in its object, the Texian revolt has illustrated the Anglo-Saxon character, and given it new titles to the respect and admiration of the world.

"It shows that liberty, justice, valor--moral, physical, and intellectual power--discriminate that race wherever it goes. Let our America rejoice, let Old England rejoice, that the Brassos and Colorado, new and strange names--streams far beyond the western bank of the Father of Floods--have felt the impress, and witnessed the exploits of a people sprung from their loins, and carrying their language, laws, and customs, their magna charta and its glorious privileges, into new regions and far distant climes. Of the individuals who have purchased lasting renown in this young war, it would be impossible, in this place to speak in detail, and invidious to discriminate; but there is one among them whose position forms an exception, and whose early association with myself justifies and claims the tribute of a particular notice. I speak of him whose romantic victory has given to the Jacinto[11] that immortality in grave and serious history which the diskos of Apollo had given to it in the fabulous pages of the heathen mythology. General Houston was born in the State of Virginia, county of Rockbridge: he was appointed an ensign in the army of the United States, during the late war with Great Britain, and served in the Creek campaign under the banners of Jackson. I was the lieutenant colonel of the regiment to which he belonged, and the first field officer to whom he reported. I then marked in him the same soldierly and gentlemanly qualities which have since distinguished his eventful career: frank, generous, brave; ready to do, or to suffer, whatever the obligations of civil or military duty imposed; and always prompt to answer the call of honor, patriotism, and friendship. Sincerely do I rejoice in his victory. It is a victory without alloy, and without parallel, except at New Orleans. It is a victory which the civilization of the age, and the honor of the human race, required him to gain: for the nineteenth century is not the age in which a repetition of the Goliad matins could be endured. Nobly has he answered the requisition; fresh and luxuriant are the laurels which adorn his brow.

[11] Hyacinth; hyacinthus; huakinthos; water flower.

"It is not within the scope of my present purpose, to speak of military events, and to celebrate the exploits of that vanguard of the Anglo-Saxons who are now on the confines of the ancient empire of Montezuma; but that combat of the San Jacinto! it must for ever remain in the catalogue of military miracles. Seven hundred and fifty citizens, miscellaneously armed with rifles, muskets, belt pistols, and knives, under a leader who had never seen service, except as a subaltern, march to attack near double their numbers--march in open day across a clear prairie, to attack upwards of twelve hundred veterans, the élite of an invading army of seven thousand, posted in a wood, their flanks secured, front intrenched; and commanded by a general trained in civil wars, victorious in numberless battles; and chief of an empire of which no man becomes chief except as conqueror. In twenty minutes, the position is forced. The combat becomes a carnage. The flowery prairie is stained with blood; the hyacinth is no longer blue, but scarlet. Six hundred Mexicans are dead; six hundred more are prisoners, half wounded; the President General himself is a prisoner; the camp and baggage all taken; and the loss of the victors, six killed and twenty wounded. Such are the results, and which no European can believe, but those who saw Jackson at New Orleans. Houston is the pupil of Jackson; and he is the first self-made general, since the time of Mark Antony, and the King Antigonus, who has taken the general of the army and the head of the government captive in battle. Different from Antony, he has spared the life of his captive, though forfeited by every law, human and divine.

"I voted, in 1821, to acknowledge the absolute independence of Mexico; I vote now to recognize the contingent and expected independence of Texas. In both cases, the vote is given upon the same principle--upon the principle of disjunction where conjunction is impossible or disastrous. The Union of Mexico and Spain had become impossible; that of Mexico and Texas is no longer desirable or possible. A more fatal present could not be made than that of the future incorporation of the Texas of La Salle with the ancient empire of Montezuma. They could not live together, and extermination is not the genius of the age; and, besides, is more easily talked of than done. Bloodshed only could be the fruit of their conjunction; and every drop of that blood would be the dragon's teeth sown upon the earth. No wise Mexican should wish to have this Trojan horse shut up within their walls."

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CXLVI. THE SPECIE CIRCULAR

The issue of the Treasury order, known as the "Specie Circular," was one of the events which marked the foresight, the decision, and the invincible firmness of General Jackson. It was issued immediately after the adjournment of Congress, and would have been issued before the adjournment, except for the fear that Congress would counteract it by law. It was an order to all the land-offices to reject paper money, and receive nothing but gold and silver in payment of the public lands; and was issued under the authority of the resolution of the year 1816 which, in giving the Secretary of the Treasury discretionary authority to receive the notes of specie paying banks in revenue payments, gave him also the right to reject them. The number of these banks had now become so great, the quantity of notes issued so enormous, the facility of obtaining loans so universal, and the temptation to converting shadowy paper into real estate, so tempting, that the rising streams of paper from seven hundred and fifty banks took their course towards the new States, seat of the public domain--discharging in accumulated volume there collected torrents upon the different land-offices. The sales were running up to five millions a month, with the prospect of unbounded increase after the rise of Congress; and it was this increase from the land sales which made that surplus which the constitution had been burlesqued to divide among the States. And there was no limit to this conversion of public land into inconvertible paper. In the custom-house branch of the revenue there was a limit in the amount to be received--limited by the amount of duties to be paid: but in the land-office branch there was no limit. It was therefore at that point that the remedy was wanted; and, for that reason, the "Specie Circular" was limited in its application to the land-offices; and totally forbade the sale of the public lands for any thing but hard money. It was an order of incalculable value to the United States, and issued by President Jackson in known disregard of the will both of the majority of Congress and of his cabinet.

Before the adjournment of Congress, and in concert with the President, the author of this View had attempted to get an act of Congress to stop the evil; and in support of his motion to that effect gave his opinion of the evil itself, and of the benefits which would result from its suppression. He said:

"He was able to inform the Senate how it happened that the sales of the public lands had deceived all calculations, and run up from four millions a year to five millions a quarter; it was this: speculators went to banks, borrowed five, ten, twenty, fifty thousand dollars in paper, in small notes, usually under twenty dollars, and engaged to carry off these notes to a great distance, sometimes five hundred or a thousand miles; and there laid them out for public lands. Being land-office money, they would circulate in the country; many of these small notes would never return at all, and their loss would be a clear gain to the bank; others would not return for a long time; and the bank would draw interest on them for years before they had to redeem them. Thus speculators, loaded with paper, would outbid settlers and cultivators, who had no undue accommodations from banks, and who had nothing but specie to give for lands, or the notes which were its real equivalent. Mr. B. said that, living in a new State, it came within his knowledge that such accommodations as he had mentioned were the main cause of the excessive sales which had taken place in the public lands, and that the effect was equally injurious to every interest concerned--except the banks and the speculators: it was injurious to the treasury, which was filling up with paper; to the new States, which were flooded with paper; and to settlers and cultivators, who were outbid by speculators, loaded with this borrowed paper. A return to specie payments for lands is the remedy for all these evils."

Having exposed the evil, and that to the country generally as well as to the federal treasury, Mr. B. went on to give his opinion of the benefits of suppressing it; and said:

"It would put an end to every complaint now connected with the subject, and have a beneficial effect upon every public and private interest. Upon the federal government its effect would be to check the unnatural sale of the public lands to speculators for paper; it would throw the speculators out of market, limit the sales to settlers and cultivators, stop the swelling increases of paper surpluses in the treasury, put an end to all projects for disposing of surpluses; and relieve all anxiety for the fate of the public moneys in the deposit banks. Upon the new States, where the public lands are situated, its effects would be most auspicious. It would stop the flood of paper with which they are inundated, and bring in a steady stream of gold and silver in its place. It would give them a hard-money currency, and especially a share of the gold currency; for every emigrant could then carry gold to the country. Upon the settler and cultivator who wished to purchase land its effect would be peculiarly advantageous. He would be relieved from the competition of speculators; he would not have to contend with those who received undue accommodations at banks, and came to the land-offices loaded with bales of bank notes which they had borrowed upon condition of carrying them far away, and turning them loose where many would be lost, and never get back to the bank that issued them. All these and many other good effects would thus be produced, and no hardship or evil of any kind could accrue to the meritorious part of the country; for the settler and cultivator who wishes to buy land for use, or for a settlement for his children, or to increase his farm, would have no difficulty in getting hard money to make his purchase. He has no undue accommodations from banks. He has no paper but what is good; such as he can readily convert into specie. To him the exaction of specie payments from all purchasers would be a rule of equality, which would enable him to purchase what he needs without competition with fictitious and borrowed capital."

Mr. B. gave a view of the actual condition of the paper currency, which he described as hideous and appalling, doomed to a catastrophe; and he advised every prudent man, as well as the government, to fly from its embrace. His voice, and his warning, answered no purpose. He got no support for his motion. A few friends were willing to stand by him, but the opposition senators stood out in unbroken front against it, reinforced largely by the friends of the administration: but it is in vain to attribute the whole opposition to the measure merely to the mistaken opinions of friends, and the resentful policy of foes. There was another cause operating to the same effect; and the truth of history requires it to be told. There were many members of Congress engaged in these land speculations, upon loans of bank paper; and who were unwilling to see a sudden termination of so profitable a game. The rejection of the bill it was thought would be sufficient; and on the news of it the speculation redoubled its activity. But there was a remedy in reserve for the cure of the evil which they had not foreseen, and which was applied the moment that Congress was gone. Jackson was still President! and he had the nerve which the occasion required. He saw the public lands fleeting away--saw that Congress would not interfere--and knew the majority of his cabinet to be against his interference. He did as he had often done in councils of war--called the council together to hear a decision. He summoned his cabinet--laid the case before them--heard the majority of adverse opinions:--and directed the order to issue. His private Secretary, Mr. Donelson, was directed to prepare a draught of the order. The author of this View was all the while in the office of this private Secretary. Mr. Donelson came to him, with the President's decision, and requested him to draw up the order. It was done--the rough draught carried back to the council--put into official form--signed--issued. It was a second edition of the removal of the deposits scene, and made an immense sensation. The disappointed speculators raged. Congress was considered insulted, the cabinet defied, the banks disgraced. But the vindication of the measure soon came, in the discovery of the fact, that some tens of millions of this bank paper was on its way to the land-offices to be changed into land--when overtaken by this fatal "Specie Circular," and turned back to the sources from which it came.

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CXLVII. DEATH OF MR. MADISON, FOURTH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

He died in the last year of the second term of the presidency of General Jackson, at the advanced age of eighty-six, his mind clear and active to the last, and greatly occupied with solicitous concern for the safety of the Union which he had contributed so much to establish. He was a patriot from the beginning. "When the first blood was shed in the streets of Boston, he was a student in the process of his education at Princeton College, where the next year, he received the degree of Bachelor of Arts. He was even then so highly distinguished by the power of application and the rapidity of progress, that he performed all the exercises of the two senior collegiate years in one--while at the same time his deportment was so exemplary, that Dr. Witherspoon, then at the head of the college, and afterwards himself one of the most eminent patriots and sages of our revolution, always delighted in bearing testimony to the excellency of his character at that early stage of his career; and said to Thomas Jefferson long afterwards, when they were all colleagues in the revolutionary Congress, that in the whole career of Mr. Madison at Princeton, he had never known him say, or do, an indiscreet thing." So wrote Mr. John Quincy Adams in his discourse upon the "Life of James Madison," written at the request of the two Houses of Congress: and in this germ of manhood is to be seen all the qualities of head and heart which mature age, and great events, so fully developed, and which so nobly went into the formation of national character while constituting his own: the same quick intellect, the same laborious application, the same purity of morals, the same decorum of deportment. He had a rare combination of talent--a speaker, a writer, a counsellor. In these qualities of the mind he classed with General Hamilton; and was, perhaps, the only eminent public man of his day who so classed, and so equally contended in three of the fields of intellectual action. Mr. Jefferson was accustomed to say he was the only man that could answer Hamilton. Perspicuity, precision, closeness of reasoning, and strict adherence to the unity of his subject, were the characteristics of his style; and his speeches in Congress, and his dispatches from the State Department, may be equally studied as models of style, diplomatic and parliamentary as sources of information, as examples of integrity in conducting public questions: and as illustrations of the amenity with which the most earnest debate, and the most critical correspondence, can be conducted by good sense, good taste, and good temper. Mr. Madison was one of the great founders of our present united federal government, equally efficient in the working convention which framed the constitution and the written labors which secured its adoption. Co-laborer with General Hamilton in the convention and in the Federalist--both members of the old Congress and of the convention at the same time, and working together in both bodies for the attainment of the same end, until the division of parties in Washington's time began to estrange old friends, and to array against each other former cordial political co-laborers. As the first writer of one party, General Hamilton wrote some leading papers, which, as the first writer of the other party, Mr. Madison was called upon to answer: but without forgetting on the part of either their previous relations, their decorum of character, and their mutual respect for each other. Nothing that either said could give an unpleasant personal feeling to the other; and, though writing under borrowed names, their productions were equally known to each other and the public; for none but themselves could imitate themselves. Purity, modesty, decorum--a moderation, temperance, and virtue in everything--were the characteristics of Mr. Madison's life and manners; and it is grateful to look back upon such elevation and beauty of personal character in the illustrious and venerated founders of our Republic, leaving such virtuous private characters to be admired, as well as such great works to be preserved. The offer of this tribute to the memory of one of the purest of public men is the more gratefully rendered, private reasons mixing with considerations of public duty. Mr. Madison is the only President from whom he ever asked a favor, and who granted immediately all that was asked--a lieutenant-colonelcy in the army of the United States in the late war with Great Britain.

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CXLVIII. DEATH OF MR. MONROE, FIFTH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

He died during the first term of the administration of President Jackson, and is appropriately noticed in this work next after Mr. Madison, with whom he had been so long and so intimately associated, both in public and in private life; and whose successor he had been in successive high posts, including that of the presidency itself. He is one of our eminent public characters which have not attained their due place in history; nor has any one attempted to give him that place but one--Mr. John Quincy Adams--in his discourse upon the life of Mr. Monroe. Mr. Adams, and who could be a more competent judge? places him in the first line of American statesmen, and contributing, during the fifty years of his connection with the public affairs, a full share in the aggrandisement and advancement of his country. His parts were not shining, but solid. He lacked genius, but he possessed judgment: and it was the remark of Dean Swift, well illustrated in his own case and that of his associate friends, Harley and Bolingbroke (three of the rarest geniuses that ever acted together, and whose cause went to ruin notwithstanding their wit and eloquence), that genius was not necessary to the conducting of the affairs of state: that judgment, diligence, knowledge, good intentions, and will, were sufficient. Mr. Monroe was an instance of the soundness of this remark, as well as the three brilliant geniuses of Queen Anne's time, and on the opposite side of it. Mr. Monroe had none of the mental qualities which dazzle and astonish mankind; but he had a discretion which seldom committed a mistake--an integrity that always looked to the public good--a firmness of will which carried him resolutely upon his object--a diligence that mastered every subject--and a perseverance that yielded to no obstacle or reverse. He began his patriotic career in the military service, at the commencement of the war of the revolution--went into the general assembly of his native State at an early age--and thence, while still young, into the continental Congress. There he showed his character, and laid the foundation of his future political fortunes in his uncompromising opposition to the plan of a treaty with Spain by which the navigation of the Mississippi was to be given up for twenty-five years in return for commercial privileges. It was the qualities of judgment, and perseverance, which he displayed on that occasion, which brought him those calls to diplomacy in which he was afterwards so much employed with three of the then greatest European powers--France, Spain, Great Britain. And it was in allusion to this circumstance that President Jefferson afterwards, when the right of deposit at New Orleans had been violated by Spain, and when a minister was wanted to recover it, said, "Monroe is the man: the defence of the Mississippi belongs to him." And under this appointment he had the felicity to put his name to the treaty which secured the Mississippi, its navigation and all the territory drained by its western waters, to the United States for ever. Several times in his life he seemed to miscarry, and to fall from the top to the bottom of the political ladder: but always to reascend as high, or higher than ever. Recalled by Washington from the French mission, to which he had been appointed from the Senate of the United States, he returned to the starting point of his early career--the general assembly of his State--served as a member from his county--was elected Governor; and from that post restored by Jefferson to the French mission, soon to be followed by the embassies to Spain and England. Becoming estranged from Mr. Madison about the time of that gentleman's first election to the presidency, and having returned from his missions a little mortified that Mr. Jefferson had rejected his British treaty without sending it to the Senate, he was again at the foot of the political ladder, and apparently out of favor with those who were at its top. Nothing despairing, he went back to the old starting point--served again in the Virginia general assembly--was again elected Governor: and from that post was called to the cabinet of Mr. Madison, to be his double Secretary of State and War. He was the effective power in the declaration of war against Great Britain. His residence abroad had shown him that unavenged British wrongs was lowering our character with Europe, and that war with the "mistress of the seas" was as necessary to our respectability in the eyes of the world, as to the security of our citizens and commerce upon the ocean. He brought up Mr. Madison to the war point. He drew the war report which the committee on foreign relations presented to the House--that report which the absence of Mr. Peter B. Porter, the chairman, and the hesitancy of Mr. Grundy, the second on the committee, threw into the hands of Mr. Calhoun, the third on the list and the youngest of the committee; and the presentation of which immediately gave him a national reputation. Prime mover of the war, he was also one of its most efficient supporters, taking upon himself, when adversity pressed, the actual duties of war minister, financier, and foreign secretary at the same time. He was an enemy to all extravagance, to all intrigue, to all indirection in the conduct of business. Mr. Jefferson's comprehensive and compendious eulogium upon him, as brief as true, was the faithful description of the man--"honest and brave." He was an enemy to nepotism, and no consideration or entreaty--no need of the support which an office would give, or intercession from friends--could ever induce him to appoint a relative to any place under the government. He had opposed the adoption of the constitution until amendments were obtained; but these had, he became one of its firmest supporters, and labored faithfully, anxiously and devotedly, to administer it in its purity. He was the first President under whom the author of this View served, commencing his first senatorial term with the commencement of the second presidential term of this last of the men of the revolution who were spared to fill the office in the great Republic which they had founded.

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CXLIX. DEATH OF CHIEF JUSTICE MARSHALL

He died in the middle of the second term of General Jackson's presidency, having been chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States full thirty-five years, presiding all the while (to use the inimitable language of Mr. Randolph), "with native dignity and unpretending grace." He was supremely fitted for high judicial station:--a solid judgment, great reasoning powers, acute and penetrating mind: with manners and habits to suit the purity and the paucity of the ermine:--attentive, patient, laborious: grave on the bench, social in the intercourse of life: simple in his tastes, and inexorably just. Seen by a stranger come into a room, and he would be taken for a modest country gentleman, without claims to attention, and ready to take the lowest place in company, or at table, and to act his part without trouble to any body. Spoken to, and closely observed, he would be seen to be a gentleman of finished breeding, of winning and prepossessing talk, and just as much mind as the occasion required him to show. Coming to man's estate at the beginning of the revolution he followed the current into which so many young men, destined to become eminent, so ardently entered; and served in the army, and with notice and observation, under the eyes of Washington. Elected to Congress at an early age he served in the House of Representatives in the time of the elder Mr. Adams, and found in one of the prominent questions of the day a subject entirely fitted to his acute and logical turn of mind--the case of the famous Jonathan Robbins, claiming to be an American citizen, reclaimed by the British government as a deserter, delivered up, and hanged at the yard-arm of an English man-of-war. Party spirit took up the case, and it was one to inflame that spirit. Mr. Marshall spoke in defence of the administration, and made the master speech of the day, when there were such master speakers in Congress as Madison, Gallatin, William B. Giles, Edward Livingston, John Randolph. It was a judicial subject, adapted to the legal mind of Mr. Marshall, requiring a legal pleading: and well did he plead it. Mr. Randolph has often been heard to say that it distanced competition--leaving all associates and opponents far behind, and carrying the case. Seldom has one speech brought so much fame, and high appointment to any one man. When he had delivered it his reputation was in the zenith: in less than nine brief months thereafter he was Secretary at War, Secretary of State, Minister to France, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Politically, he classed with the federal party, and was one of those high-minded and patriotic men of that party, who, acting on principle, commanded the respect of those even who deemed them wrong.

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Chapter CL

DEATH OF COL. BURR, THIRD VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

He was one of the few who, entering the war of independence with ardor and brilliant prospects, disappointed the expectations he had created, dishonored the cause he had espoused, and ended in shame the career which he had opened with splendor. He was in the adventurous expedition of Arnold through the wilderness to Quebec, went ahead in the disguise of a priest to give intelligence of the approach of aid to General Montgomery, arrived safely through many dangers, captivated the General by the courage and address which he had shown, was received by him into his military family; and was at his side when he was killed. Returning to the seat of war in the Northern States he was invited by Washington, captivated like Montgomery by the soldierly and intellectual qualities he had shown, to his headquarters, with a view to placing him on his staff; but he soon perceived that the brilliant young man lacked principle; and quietly got rid of him. The after part of his life was such as to justify the opinion which Washington had formed of him; but such was his address and talent as to rise to high political distinction: Attorney General of New-York, Senator in Congress, and Vice-President of the United States. At the close of the presidential election of 1800, he stood equal with Mr. Jefferson in the vote which he received, and his undoubted successor at the end of Mr. Jefferson's term. But there his honors came to a stand, and took a downward turn, nor ceased descending until he was landed in the abyss of shame, misery, and desolation. He intrigued with the federalists to supplant Mr. Jefferson--to get the place of President, for which he had not received a single vote--was suspected, detected, baffled--lost the respect of his party, and was thrown upon crimes to recover a position, or to avenge his losses. The treasonable attempt in the West, and the killing of General Hamilton, ended his career in the United States. But although he had deceived the masses, and reached the second office of the government, with the certainty of attaining the first if he only remained still, yet there were some close observers whom he never deceived. The early mistrust of Washington has been mentioned: it became stronger as Burr mounted higher in the public favor; and in 1794, when a senator in Congress, and when the republican party had taken him for their choice for the French mission in the place of Mr. Monroe recalled, and had sent a committee of which Mr. Madison was chief to ask his nomination from Washington, that wise and virtuous man peremptorily refused it, giving as a categorical reason, that his rule was invariable, never to appoint an immoral man to any office. Mr. Jefferson had the same ill opinion of him, and, notwithstanding his party zeal, always considered him in market when the federalists had any high office to bestow. But General Hamilton was most thoroughly imbued with a sense of his unworthiness, and deemed it due to his country to balk his election over Jefferson; and did so. His letters to the federal members of Congress painted Burr in his true character, and dashed far from his grasp, and for ever, the gilded prize his hand was touching. For that frustration of his hopes, four years afterwards, he killed Hamilton in a duel, having on the part of Burr the spirit of an assassination--cold-blooded, calculated, revengeful, and falsely-pretexted. He alleged some trivial and recent matter for the challenge, such as would not justify it in any code of honor; and went to the ground to kill upon an old grudge which he was ashamed to avow. Hard was the fate of Hamilton--losing his life at the early age of forty-two for having done justice to his country in the person of the man to whom he stood most politically opposed, and the chief of the party by which he had been constrained to retire from the scene of public life at the age of thirty-four--the age at which most others begin it--he having accomplished gigantic works. He was the man most eminently and variously endowed of all the eminent men of his day--at once soldier and statesman, with a head to conceive, and a hand to execute: a writer, an orator, a jurist: an organizing mind, able to grasp the greatest system; and administrative, to execute the smallest details: wholly turned to the practical business of life, and with a capacity for application and production which teemed with gigantic labors, each worthy to be the sole product of a single master intellect; but lavished in litters from the ever teeming fecundity of his prolific genius. Hard his fate, when, withdrawing from public life at the age of thirty-four, he felt himself constrained to appeal to posterity for that justice which contemporaries withheld from him. And the appeal was not in vain. Statues rise to his memory: history embalms his name: posterity will do justice to the man who at the age of twenty was "the principal and most confidential aid of Washington," who retained the love and confidence of the Father of his country to the last; and to whom honorable opponents, while opposing his systems of policy, accorded honor, and patriotism, and social affections, and transcendental abilities.--This chapter was commenced to write a notice of the character of Colonel Burr; but that subject will not remain under the pen. At the appearance of that name, the spirit of Hamilton starts up to rebuke the intrusion--to drive back the foul apparition to its gloomy abode--and to concentrate all generous feeling on itself.

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CLI. DEATH OF WILLIAM B. GILES, OF VIRGINIA

He also died under the presidency of General Jackson. He was one of the eminent public men coming upon the stage of action with the establishment of the new constitution--with the change from a League to a Union; from the confederation to the unity of the States--and was one of the most conspicuous in the early annals of our Congress. He had that kind of speaking talent which is most effective in legislative bodies, and which is so different from set-speaking. He was a debater; and was considered by Mr. Randolph to be, in our House of Representatives, what Charles Fox was admitted to be in the British House of Commons: the most accomplished debater which his country had ever seen. But their acquired advantages were very different, and their schools of practice very opposite. Mr. Fox perfected himself in the House, speaking on every subject; Mr. Giles out of the House, talking to every body. Mr. Fox, a ripe scholar, addicted to literature, and imbued with all the learning of all the classics in all time; Mr. Giles neither read nor studied, but talked incessantly with able men, rather debating with them all the while: and drew from this source of information, and from the ready powers of his mind, the ample means of speaking on every subject with the fulness which the occasion required, the quickness which confounds an adversary, and the effect which a lick in time always produces. He had the kind of talent which was necessary to complete the circle of all sorts of ability which sustained the administration of Mr. Jefferson. Macon was wise, Randolph brilliant, Gallatin and Madison able in argument; but Giles was the ready champion, always ripe for the combat--always furnished with the ready change to meet every bill. He was long a member of the House; then senator, and governor; and died at an advanced age, like Patrick Henry, without doing justice to his genius in the transmission of his labors to posterity; because, like Henry, he had been deficient in education and in reading. He was the intimate friend of all the eminent men of his day, which sufficiently bespeaks him a gentleman of manners and heart, as well as a statesman of head and tongue.

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CLII. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1836

Mr. Van Buren was the candidate of the democratic party; General Harrison the candidate of the opposition; and Mr. Hugh L. White that of a fragment of the democracy. Mr. Van Buren was elected, receiving one hundred and seventy electoral votes, to seventy-three given to General Harrison, and twenty-six given to Mr. White. The States voting for each, were:--Mr. Van Buren: Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, Missouri, Michigan, Arkansas. For General Harrison: Vermont, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana. For Mr. White: Georgia and Tennessee. Massachusetts complimented Mr. Webster by bestowing her fourteen votes upon him; and South Carolina, as in the two preceding elections, threw her vote away upon a citizen not a candidate, and not a child of her soil--Mr. Mangum of North Carolina--disappointing the expectations of Mr. White's friends, whose standing for the presidency had been instigated by Mr. Calhoun, to divide the democratic party and defeat Mr. Van Buren. Colonel Richard M. Johnson, of Kentucky, was the democratic candidate for the vice-presidency, and received one hundred and forty-seven votes, which, not being a majority of the whole number of votes given, the election was referred to the Senate, to choose between the two highest on the list; and that body being largely democratic, he was duly elected: receiving thirty-three out of forty-nine senatorial votes. The rest of the vice-presidential vote, in the electoral colleges, had been between Mr. Francis Granger, of New York, who received seventy-seven votes; Mr. John Tyler, of Virginia, who received forty-seven; and Mr. William Smith, of South Carolina, complimented by Virginia with her twenty-three votes. Mr. Granger, being the next highest on the list, after Colonel Johnson, was voted for as one of the two referred to the Senate; and received sixteen votes. A list of the senators voting for each will show the strength of the respective parties in the Senate, at the approaching end of President Jackson's administration; and how signally all the efforts intended to overthrow him had ended in the discomfiture of their authors, and converted an absolute majority of the whole Senate into a meagre minority of one third. The votes for Colonel Johnson were: Mr. Benton of Missouri; Mr. Black of Mississippi; Mr. Bedford Brown of North Carolina; Mr. Buchanan of Pennsylvania; Mr. Cuthbert of Georgia; Mr. Dana of Maine; Mr. Ewing of Illinois; Mr. Fulton of Arkansas; Mr. Grundy of Tennessee; Mr. Hendricks of Indiana; Mr. Hubbard of Maine; Mr. William Rufus King of Alabama; Mr. John P. King of Georgia; Mr. Louis F. Linn of Missouri; Mr. Lucius Lyon of Michigan Mr. McKean of Pennsylvania; Mr. Gabriel Moore of Alabama; Mr. Morris of Ohio; Mr. Alexander Mouton of Louisiana; Mr. Wilson C. Nicholas of Louisiana; Mr. Niles of Connecticut; Mr. John Norvell of Michigan; Mr. John Page of New Hampshire; Mr. Richard E. Parker of Virginia; Mr. Rives of Virginia; Mr. John M. Robinson of Illinois; Mr. Ruggles of Maine; Mr. Ambrose H. Sevier of Arkansas; Mr. Peleg Sprague of Maine; Mr. Robert Strange of North Carolina; Mr. Nathaniel P. Talmadge of New York; Mr. Tipton of Indiana; Mr. Robert J. Walker of Mississippi; Mr. Silas Wright of New York. Those voting for Mr. Francis Granger were: Mr. Richard H. Bayard of Delaware; Mr. Clay; Mr. John M. Clayton of Delaware; Mr. John Crittenden of Kentucky; Mr. John Davis of Massachusetts; Mr. Thomas Ewing of Ohio; Mr. Kent of Maryland; Mr. Nehemiah Knight of Rhode Island; Mr. Prentiss of Vermont; Mr. Asher Robbins of Rhode Island; Mr. Samuel L. Southard of New Jersey; Mr. John S. Spence of Maryland; Mr. Swift of Vermont; Mr. Gideon Tomlinson of Connecticut; Mr. Wall of New Jersey; Mr. Webster. South Carolina did not vote, neither in the person of Mr. Calhoun nor in that of his colleague, Mr. Preston: an omission which could not be attributed to absence or accident, as both were present; nor fail to be remarked and considered ominous in the then temper of the State, and her refusal to vote in the three preceding presidential elections.

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CLIII. LAST ANNUAL MESSAGE OF PRESIDENT JACKSON

At the opening of the second Session of the twenty-fourth Congress, President Jackson delivered his last Annual Message, and under circumstances to be grateful to his heart. The powerful opposition in Congress had been broken down, and he saw full majorities of ardent and tried friends in each House. We were in peace and friendship with all the world, and all exciting questions quieted at home. Industry in all its branches was prosperous. The revenue was abundant--too much so. The people were happy. His message, of course, was first a recapitulation of this auspicious state of things, at home and abroad; and then a reference to the questions of domestic interest and policy which required attention, and might call for action. At the head of these measures stood the deposit act of the last session--the act which under the insidious and fabulous title of a deposit of a surplus of revenue with the States--made an actual distribution of that surplus; and was intended by its contrivers to do so. His notice of this measure went to two points--his own regrets for having signed the act, and his misgivings in relation to its future observation. He said:

"The consequences apprehended, when the deposit act of the last session received a reluctant approval, have been measurably realized. Though an act merely for the deposit of the surplus moneys of the United States in the State Treasuries, for safe keeping, until they may be wanted for the service of the general government, it has been extensively spoken of as an act to give the money to the several States, and they have been advised to use it as a gift, without regard to the means of refunding it when called for. Such a suggestion has doubtless been made without a due consideration of the obligation of the deposit act, and without a proper attention to the various principles and interests which are affected by it. It is manifest that the law itself cannot sanction such a suggestion, and that, as it now stands, the States have no more authority to receive and use these deposits without intending to return them, than any deposit bank, or any individual temporarily charged with the safe-keeping or application of the public money, would now have for converting the same to their private use, without the consent and against the will of the government. But, independently of the violation of public faith and moral obligation which are involved in this suggestion, when examined in reference to the terms of the present deposit act, it is believed that the considerations which should govern the future legislation of Congress on this subject, will be equally conclusive against the adoption of any measure recognizing the principles on which the suggestion has been made."

This misgiving was well founded. Before the session was over there was actually a motion to release the States from their obligation to restore the money--to lay which motion on the table there were seventy-three resisting votes--an astonishing number in itself, and the more so as given by the same members, sitting in the same seats, who had voted for the act as a deposit a few months before. Such a vote was ominous of the fate of the money; and that fate was not long delayed. Akin to this measure, and in fact the parent of which it was the bastard progeny, was distribution itself, under its own proper name; and which it was evident was soon to be openly attempted, encouraged as its advocates were by the success gained in the deposit act. The President, with his characteristic frankness and firmness, impugned that policy in advance; and deprecated its effects under every aspect of public and private justice, and of every consideration of a wise or just policy. He said:

"To collect revenue merely for distribution to the States, would seem to be highly impolitic, if not as dangerous as the proposition to retain it in the Treasury. The shortest reflection must satisfy every one that to require the people to pay taxes to the government merely that they may be paid back again, is sporting with the substantial interests of the country, and no system which produces such a result can be expected to receive the public countenance. Nothing could be gained by it, even if each individual who contributed a portion of the tax could receive back promptly the same portion. But it is apparent that no system of the kind can ever be enforced, which will not absorb a considerable portion of the money, to be distributed in salaries and commissions to the agents employed in the process, and in the various losses and depreciations which arise from other causes; and the practical effect of such an attempt must ever be to burden the people with taxes, not for purposes beneficial to them, but to swell the profits of deposit banks, and support a band of useless public officers. A distribution to the people is impracticable and unjust in other respects. It would be taking one man's property and giving it to another. Such would be the unavoidable result of a rule of equality (and none other is spoken of, or would be likely to be adopted), inasmuch as there is no mode by which the amount of the individual contributions of our citizens to the public revenue can be ascertained. We know that they contribute unequally, and a rule therefore that would distribute to them equally, would be liable to all the objections which apply to the principle of an equal division of property. To make the general government the instrument of carrying this odious principle into effect, would be at once to destroy the means of its usefulness, and change the character designed for it by the framers of the constitution."

There was another consideration connected with this policy of distribution which the President did not name, and could not, in the decorum and reserve of an official communication to Congress: it was the intended effect of these distributions--to debauch the people with their own money, and to gain presidential votes by lavishing upon them the spoils of their country. To the honor of the people this intended effect never occurred; no one of those contriving these distributions ever reaching the high object of their ambition. Instead of distribution--instead of raising money from the people to be returned to the people, with all the deductions which the double operation of collecting and dividing would incur, and with the losses which unfaithful agents might inflict--instead of that idle and wasteful process, which would have been childish if it had not been vicious, he recommended a reduction of taxes on the comforts and necessaries of life, and the levy of no more money than was necessary for the economical administration of the government; and said:

"In reducing the revenue to the wants of the government, your particular attention is invited to those articles which constitute the necessaries of life. The duty on salt was laid as a war tax, and was no doubt continued to assist in providing for the payment of the war debt. There is no article the release of which from taxation would be felt so generally and so beneficially. To this may be added all kinds of fuel and provisions. Justice and benevolence unite in favor of releasing the poor of our cities from burdens which are not necessary to the support of our government, and tend only to increase the wants of the destitute."

The issuance of the "Treasury Circular" naturally claimed a place in the President's message; and received it. The President gave his reason for the measure in the necessity of saving the public domain from being exchanged for bank paper money, which was not wanted, and might be of little value or use when wanted; and expressed himself thus:

"The effects of an extension of bank credits, and over-issues of bank paper, have been strikingly illustrated in the sales of the public lands. From the returns made by the various registers and receivers in the early part of last summer it was perceived that the receipts arising from the sales of the public lands, were increasing to an unprecedented amount. In effect, however, these receipts amounted to nothing more than credits in bank. The banks lent out their notes to speculators; they were paid to the receivers, and immediately returned to the banks, to be lent out again and again; being mere instruments to transfer to speculators the most valuable public land, and pay the government by a credit on the books of the banks. Those credits on the books of some of the western banks, usually called deposits, were already greatly beyond their immediate means of payment, and were rapidly increasing. Indeed each speculation furnished means for another; for no sooner had one individual or company paid in the notes, than they were immediately lent to another for a like purpose; and the banks were extending their business and their issues so largely, as to alarm considerate men, and render it doubtful whether these bank credits, if permitted to accumulate, would ultimately be of the least value to the government. The spirit of expansion and speculation was not confined to the deposit banks, but pervaded the whole multitude of banks throughout the Union, and was giving rise to new institutions to aggravate the evil. The safety of the public funds, and the interest of the people generally, required that these operations should be checked; and it became the duty of every branch of the general and State governments to adopt all legitimate and proper means to produce that salutary effect. Under this view of my duty, I directed the issuing of the order which will be laid before you by the Secretary of the Treasury, requiring payment for the public lands sold to be made in specie, with an exception until the 15th of the present month, in favor of actual settlers. This measure has produced many salutary consequences. It checked the career of the Western banks, and gave them additional strength in anticipation of the pressure which has since pervaded our Eastern as well as the European commercial cities. By preventing the extension of the credit system, it measurably cut off the means of speculation, and retarded its progress in monopolizing the most valuable of the public lands. It has tended to save the new States from a non-resident proprietorship, one of the greatest obstacles to the advancement of a new country, and the prosperity of an old one. It has tended to keep open the public lands for the entry of emigrants at government prices, instead of their being compelled to purchase of speculators at double or treble prices. And it is conveying into the interior large sums in silver and gold, there to enter permanently into the currency of the country, and place it on a firmer foundation. It is confidently believed that the country will find in the motives which induced that order, and the happy consequences which will have ensued, much to commend and nothing to condemn."

The people were satisfied with the Treasury Circular; they saw its honesty and good effects; but the politicians were not satisfied with it. They thought they saw in it a new exercise of illegal power in the President--a new tampering with the currency--a new destruction of the public prosperity; and commenced an attack upon it the moment Congress met, very much in the style of the attack upon the order for the removal of the deposits; and with fresh hopes from the resentment of the "thousand banks," whose notes had been excluded, and from the discontent of many members of Congress whose schemes of speculation had been balked. And notwithstanding the democratic majorities in the two Houses, the attack upon the "Circular" had a great success, many members being interested in the excluded banks, and partners in schemes for monopolizing the lands. A bill intended to repeal the Circular was actually passed through both Houses; but not in direct terms. That would have been too flagrant. It was a bad thing, and could not be fairly done, and therefore gave rise to indirection and ambiguity of provisions, and complication of phrases, and a multiplication of amphibologies, which brought the bill to a very ridiculous conclusion when it got to the hands of General Jackson. But of this hereafter.

The intrusive efforts made by politicians and missionaries, first, to prevent treaties from being formed with the Indians to remove from the Southern States, and then to prevent the removal after the treaties were made, led to serious refusals on the part of some of these tribes to emigrate; and it became necessary to dispatch officers of high rank and reputation, with regular troops, to keep down outrages and induce peaceable removal. Major General Jesup was sent to the Creek nation, where he had a splendid success in a speedy and bloodless accomplishment of his object. Major General Scott was sent to the Cherokees, where a pertinacious resistance was long encountered, but eventually and peaceably overcome. The Seminole hostilities in Florida were just breaking out; and the President, in his message, thus notices all these events:

"The military movements rendered necessary by the aggressions of the hostile portions of the Seminole and Creek tribes of Indians, and by other circumstances, have required the active employment of nearly our whole regular force, including the marine corps, and of large bodies of militia and volunteers. With all these events, so far as they were known at the seat of government before the termination of your last session, you are already acquainted; and it is therefore only needful in this place to lay before you a brief summary of what has since occurred. The war with the Seminoles during the summer was, on our part, chiefly confined to the protection of our frontier settlements from the incursions of the enemy; and, as a necessary and important means for the accomplishment of that end, to the maintenance of the posts previously established. In the course of this duty several actions took place, in which the bravery and discipline of both officers and men were conspicuously displayed, and which I have deemed it proper to notice in respect to the former, by the granting of brevet rank for gallant services in the field. But as the force of the Indians was not so far weakened by these partial successes as to lead them to submit, and as their savage inroads were frequently repeated, early measures were taken for placing at the disposal of Governor Call, who, as commander-in-chief of the territorial militia, had been temporarily invested with the command, an ample force, for the purpose of resuming offensive operations in the most efficient manner, so soon as the season should permit. Major General Jesup was also directed, on the conclusion of his duties in the Creek country, to repair to Florida, and assume the command. Happily for the interests of humanity, the hostilities with the Creeks were brought to a close soon after your adjournment, without that effusion of blood, which at one time was apprehended as inevitable. The unconditional submission of the hostile party was followed by their speedy removal to the country assigned them west of the Mississippi. The inquiry as to the alleged frauds in the purchase of the reservations of these Indians, and the causes of their hostilities, requested by the resolution of the House of Representatives of the 1st of July last to be made by the President, is now going on, through the agency of commissioners appointed for that purpose. Their report may be expected during your present session. The difficulties apprehended in the Cherokee country have been prevented, and the peace and safety of that region and its vicinity effectually secured, by the timely measures taken by the war department, and still continued."

The Bank of the United States was destined to receive another, and a parting notice from General Jackson, and greatly to its further discredit, brought upon it by its own lawless and dishonest course. Its charter had expired, and it had delayed to refund the stock paid for by the United States, or to pay the back dividend; and had transferred itself with all its effects, and all its subscribers except the United States, to a new corporation, under the same name, created by a proviso to a road bill in the General Assembly of Pennsylvania, obtained by bribery, as subsequent legislative investigation proved. This transfer, or transmigration, was a new and most amazing procedure. The metempsychosis of a bank was a novelty which confounded and astounded the senses, and set the wits of Congress to work to find out how it could legally be done. The President, though a good lawyer and judge of law, did not trouble himself with legal subtleties and disquisitions. He took the broad, moral, practical, business view of the question; and pronounced it to be dishonest, unlawful, and irresponsible; and recommended to Congress to look after its stock. The message said:

"The conduct and present condition of that bank, and the great amount of capital vested in it by the United States, require your careful attention. Its charter expired on the third day of March last, and it has now no power but that given in the 21st section, 'to use the corporate name, style, and capacity, for the purpose of suits, for the final settlement and liquidation of the affairs and accounts of the corporation, and for the sale and disposition of their estate, real, personal, and mixed, and not for any other purpose, or in any other manner whatsoever, nor for a period exceeding two years after the expiration of the said term of incorporation.' Before the expiration of the charter, the stockholders of the bank obtained an act of incorporation from the legislature of Pennsylvania, excluding only the United States. Instead of proceeding to wind up their concerns, and pay over to the United States the amount due on account of the stock held by them, the president and directors of the old bank appear to have transferred the books, papers, notes, obligations, and most or all of its property, to this new corporation, which entered upon business as a continuation of the old concern. Amongst other acts of questionable validity, the notes of the expired corporation are known to have been used as its own, and again put in circulation. That the old bank had no right to issue or reissue its notes after the expiration of its charter, cannot be denied; and that it could not confer any such right on its substitute, any more than exercise it itself, is equally plain. In law and honesty, the notes of the bank in circulation, at the expiration of its charter, should have been called in by public advertisement, paid up as presented, and, together with those on hand, cancelled and destroyed. Their re-issue is sanctioned by no law, and warranted by no necessity. If the United States be responsible in their stock for the payment of these notes, their re-issue by the new corporation, for their own profit, is a fraud on the government. If the United States is not responsible, then there is no legal responsibility in any quarter, and it is a fraud on the country. They are the redeemed notes of a dissolved partnership, but, contrary to the wishes of the retiring partner, and without his consent, are again re-issued and circulated. It is the high and peculiar duty of Congress to decide whether any further legislation be necessary for the security of the large amount of public property now held and in use by the new bank, and for vindicating the rights of the government, and compelling a speedy and honest settlement with all the creditors of the old bank, public and private, or whether the subject shall be left to the power now possessed by the executive and judiciary. It remains to be seen whether the persons, who, as managers of the old bank, undertook to control the government, retained the public dividends, shut their doors upon a committee of the House of Representatives, and filled the country with panic to accomplish their own sinister objects, may now, as managers of a new Bank, continue with impunity to flood the country with a spurious currency, use the seven millions of government stock for their own profit, and refuse to the United States all information as to the present condition of their own property, and the prospect of recovering it into their own possession. The lessons taught by the bank of the United States cannot well be lost upon the American people. They will take care never again to place so tremendous a power in irresponsible hands, and it will be fortunate if they seriously consider the consequences which are likely to result on a smaller scale from the facility with which corporate powers are granted by their State government."

This novel and amazing attempt of the bank to transmigrate into the body of another bank with all its effects, was a necessity of its position--the necessity which draws a criminal to even insane acts to prevent the detection, exposure, and ruin from which guilt recoils in not less guilty contrivances. The bank was broken, and could not wind up, and wished to postpone, or by chance avert the dreaded discovery. It was in the position of a glass vase, cracked from top to bottom, and ready to split open if touched, but looking as if whole while sitting unmoved on the shelf. The great bank was in this condition, and therefore untouchable, and saw no resource except in a metempsychosis--a difficult process for a soulless institution--and thereby endeavoring to continue its life without a change of name, form, or substance. The experiment was a catastrophe, as might have been expected beforehand; and as was soon seen afterwards.

The injury resulting to the public service from the long delay in making the appropriations at the last session--delayed while occupied with distribution bills until the season for labor had well passed away. On this point the message said:

"No time was lost, after the making of the requisite appropriations, in resuming the great national work of completing the unfinished fortifications on our seaboard, and of placing them in a proper state of defence. In consequence, however, of the very late day at which those bills were passed, but little progress could be made during the season which has just closed. A very large amount of the moneys granted at your last session accordingly remains unexpended; but as the work will be again resumed at the earliest moment in the coming spring, the balance of the existing appropriations, and, in several cases which will be laid before you, with the proper estimates, further sums for the like objects, may be usefully expended during the next year."

Here was one of the evils of dividing the public money, and of factious opposition to the government. The session of 1834-'5 had closed without a dollar for the military defences, leaving half finished works unfinished, and finished works unarmed; and that in the presence of a threatening collision with France; and at the subsequent session of 1835-6, the appropriations were not made until the month of July and when they could not be used or applied.

Scarcely did the railroad system begin to spread itself along the highways of the United States than the effects of the monopoly and extortion incident to moneyed corporations, began to manifest itself in exorbitant demands for the transportation of the mails, and in capricious refusals to carry them at all except on their own terms. President Jackson was not the man to submit to an imposition, or to capitulate to a corporation. He brought the subject before Congress, and invited particular attention to it in a paragraph of his message; in which he said:

"Your particular attention is invited to the subject of mail contracts with railroad companies. The present laws providing for the making of contracts are based upon the presumption that competition among bidders will secure the service at a fair price. But on most of the railroad lines there is no competition in that kind of transportation, and advertising is therefore useless. No contract can now be made with them, except such as shall be negotiated before the time of offering or afterwards, and the power of the Postmaster-general to pay them high prices is, practically, without limitation. It would be a relief to him, and no doubt would conduce to the public interest, to prescribe by law some equitable basis upon which such contracts shall rest, and restrict him by a fixed rule of allowance. Under a liberal act of that sort, he would undoubtedly be able to secure the services of most of the railroad companies, and the interest of the Department would be thus advanced."

The message recommended a friendly supervision over the Indian tribes removed to the West of the Mississippi, with the important suggestion of preventing intestine war by military interference, as well as improving their condition by all the usual means. On these points, it said:

"The national policy, founded alike in interest and in humanity, so long and so steadily pursued by this government, for the removal of the Indian tribes originally settled on this side of the Mississippi, to the west of that river, may be said to have been consummated by the conclusion of the late treaty with the Cherokees. The measures taken in the execution of that treaty, and in relation to our Indian affairs generally, will fully appear by referring to the accompanying papers. Without dwelling on the numerous and important topics embraced in them, I again invite your attention to the importance of providing a well-digested and comprehensive system for the protection, supervision and improvement of the various tribes now planted in the Indian country. The suggestions submitted by the commissioner of Indian affairs, and enforced by the secretary, on this subject, and also in regard to the establishment of additional military posts in the Indian country, are entitled to your profound consideration. Both measures are necessary for the double purpose of protecting the Indians from intestine war, and in other respects complying with our engagements to them, and of securing our Western frontier against incursions, which otherwise will assuredly be made on it. The best hopes of humanity, in regard to the aboriginal race, the welfare of our rapidly extending settlements, and the honor of the United States, are all deeply involved in the relations existing between this government and the emigrating tribes. I trust, therefore, that the various matters submitted in the accompanying documents, in respect to those relations, will receive your early and mature deliberation; and that it may issue in the adoption of legislative measures adapted to the circumstances and duties of the present crisis."

This suggestion of preventing intestine wars (as they are called) in the bosoms of the tribes, is founded equally in humanity to the Indians and duty to ourselves. Such wars are nothing but massacres, assassinations and confiscations. The stronger party oppress a hated, or feared minority or chief; and slay with impunity (in some of the tribes), where the assumption of a form of government, modelled after that of the white race, for which they have no capacity, gives the justification of executions to what is nothing but revenge and assassination. Under their own ancient laws, of blood for blood, and for the slain to avenge the wrong, this liability of personal responsibility restrained the killings to cases of public justifiable necessity. Since the removal of that responsibility, revenge, ambition, plunder, take their course: and the consequence is a series of assassinations which have been going on for a long time; and still continue. To aggravate many of these massacres, and to give their victims a stronger claim upon the protection of the United States, they are done upon those who are friends to the United States, upon accusations of having betrayed the interest of the tribe in some treaty for the sale of lands. The United States claim jurisdiction over their country, and exercise it in the punishment of some classes of criminals; and it would be good to extend it to the length recommended by President Jackson.

The message would have been incomplete without a renewal of the standing recommendation to take the presidential election out of the hands of intermediate bodies, and give it directly to the people. He earnestly urged an amendment to the constitution to that effect; but that remedy being of slow, difficult, and doubtful attainment, the more speedy process by the action of the people becomes the more necessary. Congressional caucuses were put down by the people in the election of 1824: their substitute and successor--national conventions--ruled by a minority, and managed by intrigue and corruption, are about as much worse than a Congress caucus as Congress itself would be if the members appointed, or contrived the appointment, of themselves, instead of being elected by the people. The message appropriately concluded with thanks to the people for the high honors to which they had lifted him, and their support under arduous circumstances, and said:

"Having now finished the observations deemed proper on this, the last occasion I shall have of communicating with the two Houses of Congress at their meeting, I cannot omit an expression of the gratitude which is due to the great body of my fellow citizens, in whose partiality and indulgence I have found encouragement and support in the many difficult and trying scenes through which it has been my lot to pass during my public career. Though deeply sensible that my exertions have not been crowned with a success corresponding to the degree of favor bestowed upon me, I am sure that they will be considered as having been directed by an earnest desire to promote the good of my country; and I am consoled by the persuasion that whatever errors have been committed will find a corrective in the intelligence and patriotism of those who will succeed us. All that has occurred during my administration is calculated to inspire me with increased confidence in the stability of our institutions, and should I be spared to enter upon that retirement which is so suitable to my age and infirm health, and so much desired by me in other respects, I shall not cease to invoke that beneficent Being to whose providence we are already so signally indebted for the continuance of his blessings on our beloved country."

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CLIV. FINAL REMOVAL OF THE INDIANS

At the commencement of the annual session of 1836-'37, President Jackson had the gratification to make known to Congress the completion of the long-pursued policy of removing all the Indians in the States, and within the organized territories of the Union, to their new homes west of the Mississippi. It was a policy commencing with Jefferson, pursued by all succeeding Presidents, and accomplished by Jackson. The Creeks and Cherokees had withdrawn from Georgia and Alabama; the Chickasaws and Choctaws from Mississippi and Alabama; the Seminoles had stipulated to remove from Florida; Louisiana, Arkansas and Missouri had all been relieved of their Indian population; Kentucky and Tennessee, by earlier treaties with the Chickasaws, had received the same advantage. This freed the slave States from an obstacle to their growth and prosperity, and left them free to expand, and to cultivate, to the full measure of their ample boundaries. All the free Atlantic States had long been relieved from their Indian populations, and in this respect the northern and southern States were now upon an equality. The result has been proved to be, what it was then believed it would be, beneficial to both parties; and still more so to the Indians than to the whites. With them it was a question of extinction, the time only the debatable point. They were daily wasting under contact with the whites, and had before their eyes the eventual but certain fate of the hundreds of tribes found by the early colonists on the Roanoke, the James River, the Potomac, the Susquehannah, the Delaware, the Connecticut, the Merrimac, the Kennebec and the Penobscot. The removal saved the southern tribes from that fate; and in giving them new and unmolested homes beyond the verge of the white man's settlement, in a country temperate in climate, fertile in soil, adapted to agriculture and to pasturage, with an outlet for hunting, abounding with salt water and salt springs--it left them to work out in peace the problem of Indian civilization. To all the relieved States the removal of the tribes within their borders was a great benefit--to the slave States transcendently and inappreciably great. The largest tribes were within their limits, and the best of their lands in the hands of the Indians, to the extent, in some of the States, as Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, of a third or a quarter of their whole area. I have heretofore shown, in the case of the Creeks and the Cherokees in Georgia, that the ratification of the treaties for the extinction of Indian claims within her limits, and which removed the tribes which encumbered her, received the cordial support of northern senators; and that, in fact, without that support these great objects could not have been accomplished. I have now to say the same of all the other slave States. They were all relieved in like manner. Chickasaws and Choctaws in Mississippi and Alabama; Chickasaw claims in Tennessee and Kentucky; Seminoles in Florida; Caddos and Quapaws in Louisiana and in Arkansas; Kickapoos, Delawares, Shawnees, Osages, Iowas, Pinkeshaws, Weas, Peorias, in Missouri; all underwent the same process, and with the same support and result. Northern votes, in the Senate, came to the ratification of every treaty, and to the passage of every necessary appropriation act in the House of Representatives. Northern men may be said to have made the treaties, and passed the acts, as without their aid it could not have been done, constituting, as they did, a large majority in the House, and being equal in the Senate, where a vote of two-thirds was wanting. I do not go over these treaties and laws one by one, to show their passage, and by what votes. I did that in the case of the Creek treaty and the Cherokee treaty, for the removal of these tribes from Georgia; and showed that the North was unanimous in one case, and nearly so in the other, while in both treaties there was a southern opposition, and in one of them (the Cherokee), both Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Clay in the negative: and these instances may stand for an illustration of the whole. And thus the area of slave population has been almost doubled in the slave States, by sending away the Indians to make room for their expansion; and it is unjust and cruel--unjust and cruel in itself, independent of the motive--to charge these Northern States with a design to abolish slavery in the South. If they had harbored such design--if they had been merely unfriendly to the growth and prosperity of these Southern States, there was an easy way to have gratified their feelings, without committing a breach of the constitution, or an aggression or encroachment upon these States: they had only to sit still and vote against the ratification of the treaties, and the enactment of the laws which effected this great removal. They did not do so--did not sit still and vote against their Southern brethren. On the contrary, they stood up and spoke aloud, and gave to these laws and treaties an effective and zealous support. And I, who was the Senate's chairman of the committee of Indian affairs at this time, and know how these things were done, and who was so thankful for northern help at the time; I, who know the truth and love justice, and cherish the harmony and union of the American people, feel it to be my duty and my privilege to note this great act of justice from the North to the South, to stand in history as a perpetual contradiction of all imputed design in the free States to abolish slavery in the slave States. I speak of States, not of individuals or societies.

I have shown that this policy of the universal removal of the Indians from the East to the West of the Mississippi originated with Mr. Jefferson, and from the most humane motives, and after having seen the extinction of more than forty tribes in his own State of Virginia; and had been followed up under all subsequent administrations. With General Jackson it was nothing but the continuation of an established policy, but one in which he heartily concurred, and of which his local position and his experience made him one of the safest of judges; but, like every other act of his administration, it was destined to obloquy and opposition, and to misrepresentations, which have survived the object of their creation, and gone into history. He was charged with injustice to the Indians, in not protecting them against the laws and jurisdiction of the States; with cruelty, in driving them away from the bones of their fathers; with robbery, in taking their lands for paltry considerations. Parts of the tribes were excited to resist the execution of the treaties, and it even became necessary to send troops and distinguished generals--Scott to the Cherokees, Jesup to the Creeks--to effect their removal; which, by the mildness and steadiness of these generals, and according to the humane spirit of their orders, was eventually accomplished without the aid of force. The outcry raised against General Jackson, on account of these measures, reached the ears of the French traveller and writer on American democracy (De Tocqueville), then sojourning among us and collecting materials for his work, and induced him to write thus in his chapter 18:

"The ejectment of the Indians very often takes place, at the present day, in a regular, and, as it were, legal manner. When the white population begins to approach the limit of a desert inhabited by a savage tribe, the government of the United States usually dispatches envoys to them, who assemble the Indians in a large plain, and having first eaten and drunk with them, accost them in the following manner: 'What have you to do in the land of your fathers? Before long you must dig up their bones in order to live. In what respect is the country you inhabit better than another? Are there no woods, marshes or prairies, except where you dwell? and can you live nowhere but under your own sun? Beyond those mountains, which you see at the horizon--beyond the lake which bounds your territory on the west--there lie vast countries where beasts of chase are found in great abundance. Sell your lands to us, and go and live happily in those solitudes.'

"After holding this language, they spread before the eyes of the Indians fire-arms, woollen garments, kegs of brandy, glass necklaces, bracelets of tinsel, ear-rings, and looking-glasses. If, when they have beheld all these riches, they still hesitate, it is insinuated that they have not the means of refusing their required consent, and that the government itself will not long have the power of protecting them in their rights. What are they to do? Half convinced, half compelled, they go to inhabit new deserts, where the importunate whites will not permit them to remain ten years in tranquillity. In this manner do the Americans obtain, at a very low price, whole provinces, which the richest sovereigns in Europe could not purchase."

The Grecian Plutarch deemed it necessary to reside forty years in Rome, to qualify himself to write the lives of some Roman citizens; and then made mistakes. European writers do not deem it necessary to reside in our country at all in order to write our history. A sojourn of some months in the principal towns--a rapid flight along some great roads--the gossip of the steamboat, the steam-car, the stage-coach, and the hotel--the whispers of some earwigs--with the reading of the daily papers and the periodicals, all more or less engaged in partisan warfare--and the view of some debates, or scene, in Congress, which may be an exception to its ordinary decorum and intelligence: these constitute a modern European traveller's qualifications to write American history. No wonder that they commit mistakes, even where the intent is honest. And no wonder that Mons. de Tocqueville, with admitted good intentions, but with no "forty years" residence among us, should be no exception to the rule which condemns the travelling European writer of American history to the compilation of facts manufactured for partisan effect, and to the invention of reasons supplied from his own fancy. I have already had occasion, several times, to correct the errors of Mons. de Tocqueville. It is a compliment to him, implicative of respect, and by no means extended to others, who err more largely, and of purpose, but less harmfully. His error in all that he has here written is profound! and is injurious, not merely to General Jackson, to whom his mistakes apply, but to the national character, made up as it is of the acts of individuals; and which character it is the duty of every American to cherish and exalt in all that is worthy, and to protect and defend from all unjust imputation. It was in this sense that I marked this passage in De Tocqueville for refutation as soon as his book appeared, and took steps to make the contradiction (so far as the alleged robbery and cheating of the Indians was concerned) authentic and complete and as public and durable as the archives of the government itself. In this sense I had a call made for a full, numerical, chronological and official statement of all our Indian purchases, from the beginning of the federal government in 1789 to that day, 1840--tribe by tribe, cession by cession, year by year--for the fifty years which the government had existed; with the number of acres acquired at each cession, and the amount paid for each.

The call was made in the Senate of the United States, and answered by document No. 616, 1st session, 26th Congress, in a document of thirteen printed tabular pages, and authenticated by the signatures of Mr. Van Buren, President; Mr. Poinsett, Secretary at War; and Mr. Hartley Crawford, Commissioner of Indian Affairs. From this document it appeared, that the United States had paid to the Indians eighty-five millions of dollars for land purchases up to the year 1840! to which five or six millions may be added for purchases since--say ninety millions. This is near six times as much as the United States gave the great Napoleon for Louisiana, the whole of it, soil and jurisdiction; and nearly three times as much as all three of the great foreign purchases--Louisiana, Florida and California--cost us! and that for soil alone, and for so much as would only be a fragment of Louisiana or California. Impressive as this statement is in the gross, it becomes more so in the detail, and when applied to the particular tribes whose imputed sufferings have drawn so mournful a picture from Mons. de Tocqueville. These are the four great southern tribes--Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws and Choctaws. Applied to them, and the table of purchases and payments stands thus: To the Creek Indians twenty-two millions of dollars for twenty-five millions of acres; which is seven millions more than was paid France for Louisiana, and seventeen millions more than was paid Spain for Florida. To the Choctaws, twenty-three millions of dollars (besides reserved tracts), for twenty millions of acres, being three millions more than was paid for Louisiana and Florida. To the Cherokees, for eleven millions of acres, was paid about fifteen millions of dollars, the exact price of Louisiana or California. To the Chickasaws, the whole net amount for which this country sold under the land system of the United States, and by the United States land officers, three millions of dollars for six and three-quarter millions of acres, being the way the nation chose to dispose of it. Here are fifty-six millions to four tribes, leaving thirty millions to go to the small tribes whose names are unknown to history, and which it is probable the writer on American democracy had never heard of when sketching the picture of their fancied oppressions.

I will attend to the case of these small remote tribes, and say that, besides their proportion of the remaining thirty-six millions of dollars, they received a kind of compensation suited to their condition, and intended to induct them into the comforts of civilized life. Of these I will give one example, drawn from a treaty with the Osages, in 1839; and which was only in addition to similar benefits to the same tribe, in previous treaties, and which were extended to all the tribes which were in the hunting state. These benefits were, to these Osages, two blacksmith's shops, with four blacksmiths, with five hundred pounds of iron and sixty pounds of steel annually; a grist and a saw mill, with millers for the same; 1,000 cows and calves; two thousand breeding swine; 1,000 ploughs; 1,000 sets of horse-gear; 1,000 axes; 1,000 hoes; a house each for ten chiefs, costing two hundred dollars apiece; to furnish these chiefs with six good wagons, sixteen carts, twenty-eight yokes of oxen, with yokes and log-chain; to pay all claims for injuries committed by the tribe on the white people, or on other Indians, to the amount of thirty thousand dollars; to purchase their reserved lands at two dollars per acre; three thousand dollars to reimburse that sum for so much deducted from their annuity, in 1825, for property taken from the whites, and since returned; and, finally, three thousand dollars more for an imputed wrongful withholding of that amount, for the same reason, in the annuity payment of the year 1829. In previous treaties, had been given seed grains, and seed vegetables, with fruit seeds and fruit trees; domestic fowls; laborers to plough up their ground and to make their fences, to raise crops and to save them, and teach the Indians how to farm; with spinning, weaving, and sewing implements, and persons to show their use. Now, all this was in one single treaty, with an inconsiderable tribe, which had been largely provided for in the same way in six different previous treaties! And all the rude tribes--those in the hunting state, or just emerging from it--were provided for in the same manner, the object of the United States being to train them to agriculture and pasturage--to conduct them from the hunting to the pastoral and agricultural state; and for that purpose, and in addition to all other benefits, are to be added the support of schools, the encouragement of missionaries, and a small annual contribution to religious societies who take charge of their civilization.

Besides all this, the government keeps up a large establishment for the special care of the Indians, and the management of their affairs; a special bureau, presided over by a commissioner at Washington City; superintendents in different districts; agents, sub-agents, and interpreters, resident with the tribe; and all charged with seeing to their rights and interests--seeing that the laws are observed towards them; that no injuries are done them by the whites; that none but licensed traders go among them; that nothing shall be bought from them which is necessary for their comfort, nor any thing sold to them which may be to their detriment. Among the prohibited articles are spirits of all kinds; and so severe are the penalties on this head, that forfeiture of the license, forfeiture of the whole cargo of goods, forfeiture of the penalty of the bond, and immediate suit in the nearest federal court for its recovery, expulsion from the Indian country, and disability for ever to acquire another license, immediately follow every breach of the laws for the introduction of the smallest quantity of any kind of spirits. How unfortunate, then, in M. de Tocqueville to write, that kegs of brandy are spread before the Indians to induce them to sell their lands! How unfortunate in representing these purchases to be made in exchange for woollen garments, glass necklaces, tinsel bracelets, ear-rings, and looking-glasses! What a picture this assertion of his makes by the side of the eighty-five millions of dollars at that time actually paid to those Indians for their lands, and the long and large list of agricultural articles and implements--long and large list of domestic animals and fowls--the ample supply of mills and shops, with mechanics to work them and teach their use--the provisions for schools and missionaries, for building fences and houses--which are found in the Osage treaty quoted, and which are to be found, more or less, in every treaty with every tribe emerging from the hunter state. The fact is, that the government of the United States has made it a fixed policy to cherish and protect the Indians, to improve their condition, and turn them to the habits of civilized life; and great is the wrong and injury which the mistake of this writer has done to our national character abroad, in representing the United States as cheating and robbing these children of the forest.

But Mons. de Tocqueville has quoted names and documents, and particular instances of imposition upon Indians, to justify his picture; and in doing so has committed the mistakes into which a stranger and sojourner may easily fall. He cites the report of Messrs. Clark and Cass, and makes a wrong application--an inverted application--of what they reported. They were speaking of the practices of disorderly persons in trading with the Indians for their skins and furs. They were reporting to the government an abuse, for correction and punishment. They were not speaking of United States commissioners, treating for the purchase of lands, but of individual traders, violating the laws. They were themselves those commissioners and superintendents of Indian affairs, and governors of Territories, one for the northwest, in Michigan, the other for the far west, in Missouri; and both noted for their justice and humanity to the Indians, and for their long and careful administration of their affairs within their respective superintendencies. Mons. de Tocqueville has quoted their words correctly, but with the comical blunder of reversing their application, and applying to the commissioners themselves, in their land negotiations for the government, the cheateries which they were denouncing to the government, in the illicit traffic of lawless traders. This was the comic blunder of a stranger: yet this is to appear as American history in Europe, and to be translated into our own language at home, and commended in a preface and notes.

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