XXIX. REDUCTION OF EXECUTIVE PATRONAGE…

XXIX. REDUCTION OF EXECUTIVE PATRONAGE

In the session 1825-'26, Mr. Macon moved that the select committee, to which had been committed the consideration of the propositions for amending the constitution in relation to the election of President and Vice-President, should also be charged with an inquiry into the expediency of reducing Executive patronage, in cases in which it could be done by law consistently with the constitution, and without impairing the efficiency of the government. The motion was adopted, and the committee (Messrs. Benton, Macon, Van Buren, White of Tennessee, Findlay of Pennsylvania, Dickerson, Holmes, Hayne, and Johnson of Kentucky) made a report, accompanied by six bills; which report and bills, though not acted upon at the time, may still have their use in showing the democratic principles, on practical points of that day (when some of the fathers of the democratic church were still among us);--and in recalling the administration of the government, to the simplicity and economy of its early days. The six bills reported were. 1. To regulate the publication of the laws of the United States, and of the public advertisements. 2. To secure in office the faithful collectors and disbursers of the revenue, and to displace defaulters. 3. To regulate the appointment of postmasters. 4. To regulate the appointment of cadets. 5. To regulate the appointment of midshipmen. 6. To prevent military and naval officers from being dismissed the service at the pleasure of the President.--In favor of the general principle, and objects of all the bills, the report accompanying them, said:

"In coming to the conclusion that Executive patronage ought to be diminished and regulated, on the plan proposed, the committee rest their opinion on the ground that the exercise of great patronage in the hands of one man, has a constant tendency to sully the purity of our institutions, and to endanger the liberties of the country. This doctrine is not new. A jealousy of power, and of the influence of patronage, which must always accompany its exercise, has ever been a distinguished feature in the American character. It displayed itself strongly at the period of the formation, and of the adoption, of the federal constitution. At that time the feebleness of the old confederation had excited a much greater dread of anarchy than of power--'of anarchy among the members than of power in the head'--and although the impression was nearly universal that a government of more energetic character had become indispensably necessary, yet, even under the influence of this conviction--such was the dread of power and patronage--that the States, with extreme reluctance, yielded their assent to the establishment of the federal government. Nor was this the effect of idle and visionary fears, on the part of an ignorant multitude, without knowledge of the nature and tendency of power. On the contrary, it resulted from the most extensive and profound political knowledge,--from the heads of statesmen, unsurpassed, in any age, in sagacity and patriotism. Nothing could reconcile the great men of that day to a constitution of so much power, but the guards which were put upon it against the abuse of power. Dread and jealousy of this abuse displayed itself throughout the instrument. To this spirit we are indebted for the freedom of the press, trial by jury, liberty of conscience, freedom of debate, responsibility to constituents, power of impeachment, the control of the Senate over appointments to office; and many other provisions of a like character. But the committee cannot imagine that the jealous foresight of the time, great as it was, or that any human sagacity, could have foreseen, and placed a competent guard upon, every possible avenue to the abuse of power. The nature of a constitutional act excludes the possibility of combining minute perfection with general excellence. After the exertion of all possible vigilance, something of what ought to have been done, has been omitted; and much of what has been attempted, has been found insufficient and unavailing in practice. Much remains for us to do, and much will still remain for posterity to do--for those unborn generations to do, on whom will devolve the sacred task of guarding the temple of the constitution, and of keeping alive the vestal flame of liberty.

"The committee believe that they will be acting in the spirit of the constitution, in laboring to multiply the guards, and to strengthen the barriers, against the possible abuse of power. If a community could be imagined in which the laws should execute themselves--in which the power of government should consist in the enactment of laws--in such a state the machine of government would carry on its operations without jar or friction. Parties would be unknown, and the movements of the political machine would but little more disturb the passions of men, than they are disturbed by the operations of the great laws of the material world. But this is not the case. The scene shifts from this imaginary region, where laws execute themselves, to the theatre of real life, wherein they are executed by civil and military officers, by armies and navies, by courts of justice, by the collection and disbursement of revenue, with all its train of salaries, jobs, and contracts; and in this aspect of the reality, we behold the working of PATRONAGE, and discover the reason why so many stand ready, in any country, and in all ages, to flock to the standard of POWER, wheresoever, and by whomsoever, it may be raised.

"The patronage of the federal government at the beginning, was founded upon a revenue of two millions of dollars. It is now operating upon twenty-two millions; and, within the lifetime of many now living, must operate upon fifty. The whole revenue must, in a few years, be wholly applicable to subjects of patronage. At present about one half, say ten millions of it, are appropriated to the principal and interest of the public debt, which, from the nature of the object, involves but little patronage. In the course of a few years, this debt, without great mismanagement, must be paid off. A short period of peace, and a faithful application of the sinking fund, must speedily accomplish that most desirable object. Unless the revenue be then reduced, a work as difficult in republics as in monarchies, the patronage of the federal government, great as it already is, must, in the lapse of a few years, receive a vast accession of strength. The revenue itself will be doubled, and instead of one half being applicable to objects of patronage, the whole will take that direction. Thus, the reduction of the public debt, and the increase of revenue, will multiply in a four-fold degree the number of persons in the service of the federal government, the quantity of public money in their hands, and the number of objects to which it is applicable; but as each person employed will have a circle of greater or less diameter, of which he is the centre and the soul--a circle composed of friends and relations, and of individuals employed by himself on public or on private account--the actual increase of federal power and patronage by the duplication of the revenue, will be, not in the arithmetical ratio, but in geometrical progression--an increase almost beyond the power of the mind to calculate or to comprehend."

This was written twenty-five years ago. Its anticipations of increased revenue and patronage are more than realized. Instead of fifty millions of annual revenue during the lifetime of persons then living, and then deemed a visionary speculation, I saw it rise to sixty millions before I ceased to be a senator; and saw all the objects of patronage expanding and multiplying in the same degree, extending the circle of its influence, and, in many cases, reversing the end of its creation. Government was instituted for the protection of individuals--not for their support. Office was to be given upon qualifications to fill it--not upon the personal wants of the recipient. Proper persons were to be sought out and appointed--(by the President in the higher appointments, and by the heads of the different branches of service in the lower ones); and importunate suppliants were not to beg themselves into an office which belonged to the public, and was only to be administered for the public good. Such was the theory of the government. Practice has reversed it. Now office is sought for support, and for the repair of dilapidated fortunes; applicants obtrude themselves, and prefer "claims" to office. Their personal condition and party services, not qualification, are made the basis of the demand: and the crowds which congregate at Washington, at the change of an administration, supplicants for office, are humiliating to behold, and threaten to change the contests of parties from a contest for principle into a struggle for plunder.

The bills which were reported were intended to control, and regulate different branches of the public service, and to limit some exercises of executive power. 1. The publication of the government advertisements had been found to be subject to great abuse--large advertisements, and for long periods, having been often found to be given to papers of little circulation, and sometimes of no circulation at all, in places where the advertisement was to operate--the only effect of that favor being to conciliate the support of the paper, or to sustain an efficient one. For remedy, the bill for that purpose provided for the selection, and the limitation of the numbers, of the newspapers which were to publish the federal laws and advertisements, and for the periodical report of their names to Congress. 2. The four years' limitation law was found to operate contrary to its intent, and to have become the facile means of getting rid of faithful disbursing officers, instead of retaining them. The object of the law was to pass the disbursing officers every four years under the supervision of the appointing power, for the inspection of their accounts, in order that defaulters might be detected and dropped, while the faithful should be ascertained and continued. Instead of this wholesome discrimination, the expiration of the four years' term came to be considered as the termination and vacation of all the offices on which it fell, and the creation of vacancies to be filled by new appointments at the option of the President. The bill to remedy this evil gave legal effect to the original intention of the law by confining the vacation of office to actual defaulters. The power of the President to dismiss civil officers was not attempted to be curtailed, but the restraints of responsibility were placed upon its exercise by requiring the cause of dismission to be communicated to Congress in each case. The section of the bill to that effect was in these words: "That in all nominations made by the President to the Senate, to fill vacancies occasioned by an exercise of the President's power to remove from office, the fact of the removal shall be stated to the Senate at the same time that the nomination is made, with a statement of the reasons for which such officer may have been removed." This was intended to operate as a restraint upon removals without cause, and to make legal and general what the Senate itself, and the members of the committee individually, had constantly refused to do in isolated cases. It was the recognition of a principle essential to the proper exercise of the appointing power, and entirely consonant to Mr. Jefferson's idea of removals; but never admitted by any administration, nor enforced by the Senate against any one--always waiting the legal enactment. The opinion of nine such senators as composed the committee who proposed to legalize this principle, all of them democratic, and most of them aged and experienced, should stand for a persuasive reason why this principle should be legalized. 3. The appointment of military cadets was distributed according to the Congressional representation, and which has been adopted in practice, and perhaps become the patronage of the member from a district instead of the President. 5. The selection of midshipmen was placed on the same footing, and has been followed by the same practical consequence. 6. To secure the independence of the army and navy officers, the bill proposed to do, what never has been done by law,--define the tenure by which they held their commissions, and substitute "good behavior" for the clause which now runs "during the pleasure of the President." The clause in the existing commission was copied from those then in use, derived from the British government; and, in making army and navy officers subject to dismission at the will of the President, departs from the principle of our republican institutions, and lessens the independence of the officers.

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Chapter XXX

EXCLUSION OF MEMBERS OF CONGRESS FROM CIVIL OFFICE APPOINTMENTS

An inquiry into the expediency of amending the constitution so as to prevent the appointment of any member of Congress to any federal office of trust or profit, during the period for which he was elected, was moved at the session 1825-26, by Mr. Senator Thomas W. Cobb, of Georgia; and his motion was committed to the consideration of the same select committee to which had been referred the inquiries into the expediency of reducing executive patronage, and amending the constitution in relation to the election of President and Vice-President. The motion as submitted only applied to the term for which the senator or representative was elected--only carried the exclusion to the end of his constitutional term; but the committee were of opinion that such appointments were injurious to the independence of Congress and to the purity of legislation; and believed that the limitation on the eligibility of members should be more comprehensive than the one proposed, and should extend to the President's term under whom the member served as well as to his own--so as to cut off the possibility for a member to receive an appointment from the President to whom he might have lent a subservient vote: and the committee directed their chairman (Mr. Benton) to report accordingly. This was done; and a report was made, chiefly founded upon the proceedings of the federal convention which framed the constitution, and the proceedings of the conventions of the States which adopted it--showing that the total exclusion of members of Congress from all federal appointments was actually adopted in the convention on a full vote, and struck out in the absence of some members; and afterwards modified so as to leave an inadequate, and easily evaded clause in the constitution in place of the full remedy which had been at first provided. It also showed that conventions of several of the States, and some of the earlier Congresses, endeavored to obtain amendments to the constitution to cut off members of Congress entirely from executive patronage. Some extracts from that report are here given to show the sense of the early friends of the constitution on this important point. Thus:

"That, having had recourse to the history of the times in which the constitution was formed, the committee find that the proposition now referred to them, had engaged the deliberations of the federal convention which framed the constitution, and of several of the State conventions which ratified it.

"In an early stage of the session of the federal convention, it was resolved, as follows:

"'Article 6, section 9. The members of each House (of Congress) shall be ineligible to, and incapable of holding, any office under the authority of the United States, during the time for which they shall respectively be elected; and the members of the Senate shall be ineligible to, and incapable of holding any such office for one year afterwards.'

"It further appears from the journal, that this clause, in the first draft of the constitution, was adopted with great unanimity; and that afterwards, in the concluding days of the session, it was altered, and its intention defeated, by a majority of a single vote, in the absence of one of the States by which it had been supported.

"Following the constitution into the State conventions which ratified it, and the committee find, that, in the New-York convention, it was recommended, as follows:

"'That no senator or representative shall, during the time for which he was elected, be appointed to any office under the authority of the United States.

"By the Virginia convention, as follows:

"'That the members of the Senate and House of Representatives shall be ineligible to, and incapable of holding, any civil office under the authority of the United States, during the term for which they shall respectively be elected.'

"By the North Carolina convention, the same amendment was recommended, in the same words.

"In the first session of the first Congress, which was held under the constitution, a member of the House of Representatives submitted a similar proposition of amendment; and, in the third session of the eleventh Congress, James Madison being President, a like proposition was again submitted, and being referred to a committee of the House, was reported by them in the following words:

"'No senator or representative shall be appointed to any civil office, place, or emolument, under the authority of the United States, untill the expiration of the presidential term in which such person shall have served as a senator or representative.'

"Upon the question to adopt this resolution, the vote stood 71 yeas, 40 nays.--wanting but three votes of the constitutional number for referring it to the decision of the States.

"Having thus shown, by a reference to the venerable evidence of our early history, that the principle of the amendment now under consideration, has had the support and approbation of the first friends of the constitution, the committee will now declare their own opinion in favor of its correctness, and expresses its belief that the ruling principle in the organization of the federal government demands its adoption."

It is thus seen that in the formation of the constitution, and in the early ages of our government, there was great jealousy on this head--great fear of tampering between the President and the members--and great efforts made to keep each independent of the other. For the safety of the President, and that Congress should not have him in their power, he was made independent of them in point of salary. By a constitutional provision his compensation was neither to be diminished nor increased during the term for which he was elected;--not diminished, lest Congress should starve him into acquiescence in their views;--not increased, lest Congress should seduce him by tempting his cupidity with an augmented compensation. That provision secured the independence of the President; but the independence of the two Houses was still to be provided for; and that was imperfectly effected by two provisions--the first, prohibiting office holders under the federal government from taking a seat in either House; the second, by prohibiting their appointment to any civil office that might have been created, or its emoluments increased, during the term for which he should have been elected. These provisions were deemed by the authors of the federalist (No. 55) sufficient to protect the independence of Congress, and would have been, if still observed in their spirit, as well as in their letter, as was done by the earlier Presidents. A very strong instance of this observance was the case of Mr. Alexander Smythe, of Virginia, during the administration of President Monroe. Mr. Smythe had been a member of the House of Representatives, and in that capacity had voted for the establishment of a judicial district in Western Virginia, and by which the office of judge was created. His term of service had expired: he was proposed for the judgeship: the letter of the constitution permitted the appointment: but its spirit did not. Mr. Smythe was entirely fit for the place, and Mr. Monroe entirely willing to bestow it upon him. But he looked to the spirit of the act, and the mischief it was intended to prevent, as well as to its letter; and could see no difference between bestowing the appointment the day after, or the day before, the expiration of Mr. Smythe's term of service: and he refused to make the appointment. This was protecting the purity of legislation according to the intent of the constitution; but it has not always been so. A glaring case to the contrary occurred in the person of Mr. Thomas Butler King, under the presidency of Mr. Fillmore. Mr. King was elected a member of Congress for the term at which the office of collector of the customs at San Francisco had been created, and had resigned his place: but the resignation could not work an evasion of the constitution, nor affect the principle of its provision. He had been appointed in the recess of Congress, and sent to take the place before his two years had expired--and did take it; and that was against the words of the constitution. His nomination was not sent in until his term expired--the day after it expired--having been held back during the regular session; and was confirmed by the Senate. I had then ceased to be a member of the Senate, and know not whether any question was raised on the nomination; but if I had been, there should have been a question.

But the constitutional limitation upon the appointment of members of Congress, even when executed beyond its letter and according to its spirit, as done by Mr. Monroe, is but a very small restraint upon their appointment, only applying to the few cases of new offices created, or of compensation increased, during the period of their membership. The whole class of regular vacancies remain open! All the vacancies which the President pleases to create, by an exercise of the removing power, are opened! and between these two sources of supply, the fund is ample for as large a commerce between members and the President--between subservient votes on one side, and executive appointments on the other--as any President, or any set of members, might choose to carry on. And here is to be noted a wide departure from the theory of the government on this point, and how differently it has worked from what its early friends and advocates expected. I limit myself now to Hamilton, Madison and Jay; and it is no narrow limit which includes three such men. Their names would have lived for ever in American history, among those of the wise and able founders of our government, without the crowning work of the "ESSAYS" in behalf of the constitution which have been embodied under the name of "FEDERALIST"--and which made that name so respectable before party assumed it. The defects of the constitution were not hidden from them in the depths of the admiration which they felt for its perfections; and these defects were noted, and as far as possible excused, in a work devoted to its just advocation. This point (of dangerous commerce between the executive and the legislative body) was obliged to be noticed--forced upon their notice by the jealous attacks of the "ANTI-FEDERALISTS"--as the opponents of the constitution were called: and in the number 55 of their work, they excused, and diminished, this defect in these terms:

"Sometimes we are told, that this fund of corruption (Executive appointments) is to be exhausted by the President in subduing the virtue of the Senate. Now, the fidelity of the other House is to be the victim. The improbability of such a mercenary and perfidious combination of the several members of the government, standing on as different foundations as republican principles will well admit, and at the same time accountable to the society over which they are placed, ought alone to quiet this apprehension. But, fortunately, the constitution has provided a still further safeguard. The members of the Congress are rendered ineligible to any civil offices that may be created, or of which the emoluments may be increased, during the term of their election. No offices, therefore, can be dealt out to the existing members, but such as may become vacant by ordinary casualties; and to suppose that these would be sufficient to purchase the guardians of the people, selected by the people themselves, is to renounce every rule by which events ought to be calculated, and to substitute an indiscriminate and unbounded jealousy, with which all reasoning must be vain."

Such was their defence--the best which their great abilities, and ardent zeal, and patriotic devotion, could furnish. They could not deny the danger. To diminish its quantum, and to cover with a brilliant declamation the little that remained, was their resource. And, certainly if the working of the government had been according to their supposition, their defence would have been good, I have taken the liberty to mark in italics the ruling words contained in the quotation which I have made from their works--"ordinary casualties." And what were they? deaths, resignations, removals upon impeachment, and dismissions by the President and Senate. This, in fact, would constitute a very small amount of vacancies during the presidential term; and as new offices, and those of increased compensation, were excluded, the answer was undoubtedly good, and even justified the visible contempt with which the objection was repulsed. But what has been the fact? what has been the working of the government at this point? and how stands this narrow limitation of vacancies to "ordinary casualties?" In the first place, the main stay of the argument in the Federalist was knocked from under it at the outset of the government; and so knocked by a side-blow from construction. In the very first year of the constitution a construction was put on that instrument which enabled the President to create as many vacancies as he pleased, and at any moment that he pleased. This was effected by yielding to him the kingly prerogative of dismissing officers without the formality of a trial, or the consent of the other part of the appointing power. The authors of the Federalist had not foreseen this construction: so far from it they had asserted the contrary: and arguing logically from the premises, "that the dismissing power was appurtenant to the appointing power," they had maintained in that able and patriotic work--(No. 77)--that, as the consent of the Senate was necessary to the appointment of an officer, so the consent of the same body would be equally necessary to his dismission from office. But this construction was overruled by the first Congress which sat under the constitution. The power of dismission from office was abandoned to the President alone; and, with the acquisition of this prerogative, the power and patronage of the presidential office was instantly increased to an indefinite extent; and the argument of the Federalist against the capacity of the President to corrupt members of Congress, founded on the small number of places which he could use for that purpose, was totally overthrown. This is what has been done by construction. Now for the effects of legislation: and without going into an enumeration of statutes so widely extending and increasing executive patronage in the multiplication of offices, jobs, contracts, agencies, retainers, and sequiturs of all sorts, holding at the will of the President, it is enough to point to a single act--the four years' limitation act; which, by vacating almost the entire civil list--the whole "Blue Book"--the 40,000 places which it registers--in every period of a presidential term--puts more offices at the command of the President than the authors of the Federalist ever dreamed of; and enough to equip all the members and all their kin if they chose to accept his favors. But this is not the end. Large as it opens the field of patronage, it is not the end. There is a practice grown up in these latter times, which, upon every revolution of parties, makes a political exodus among the adversary office-holders, marching them off into the wilderness, and leaving their places for new-comers. This practice of itself, also unforeseen by the authors of the Federalist, again over-sets their whole argument, and leaves the mischief from which they undertook to defend the constitution in a degree of vigor and universality of which the original opposers of that mischief had never formed the slightest conception.

Besides the direct commerce which may take place between the Executive and a member, there are other evils resulting from their appointment to office, wholly at war with the theory of our government, and the purity of its action. Responsibility to his constituents is the corner-stone and sheet-anchor, in the system of representative government. It is the substance without which representation is but a shadow. To secure that responsibility the constitution has provided that the members shall be periodically returned to their constituents--those of the House at the end of every two years, those of the Senate at the end of every six--to pass in review before them--to account for what may have been done amiss, and to receive the reward or censure of good or bad conduct. This responsibility is totally destroyed if the President takes a member out of the hands of his constituents, prevents his return home, and places him in a situation where he is independent of their censure. Again: the constitution intended that the three departments of the government,--the executive, the legislative, and the judicial--should be independent of each other: and this independence ceases, between the executive and legislative, the moment the members become expectants and recipients of presidential favor;--the more so if the President should have owed his office to their nomination. Then it becomes a commerce, upon the regular principle of trade--a commerce of mutual benefit. For this reason Congress caucuses for the nomination of presidential candidates fell under the ban of public opinion, and were ostracised above twenty years ago--only to be followed by the same evil in a worse form, that of illegal and irresponsible "conventions;" in which the nomination is an election, so far as party power is concerned; and into which the member glides who no longer dares to go to a Congress caucus;--whom the constitution interdicts from being an elector--and of whom some do not blush to receive office, and even to demand it, from the President whom they have created. The framers of our government never foresaw--far-seeing as they were--this state of things, otherwise the exclusion of members from presidential appointments could never have failed as part of the constitution, (after having been first adopted in the original draught of that instrument); nor repulsed when recommended by so many States at the adoption of the constitution; nor rejected by a majority of one in the Congress of 1789, when proposed as an amendment, and coming so near to adoption by the House.

Thus far I have spoken of this abuse as a potentiality--as a possibility--as a thing which might happen: the inexorable law of history requires it to be written that it has happened, is happening, becomes more intense, and is ripening into a chronic disease of the body politic. When I first came to the Senate thirty years ago, aged members were accustomed to tell me that there were always members in the market, waiting to render votes, and to receive office; and that in any closely contested, or nearly balanced question, in which the administration took an interest, they could turn the decision which way they pleased by the help of these marketable votes. It was a humiliating revelation to a young senator--but true; and I have seen too much of it in my time--seen members whose every vote was at the service of government--to whom a seat in Congress was but the stepping-stone to executive appointment--to whom federal office was the pabulum for which their stomachs yearned--and who to obtain it, were ready to forget that they had either constituents or country. And now, why this mortifying exhibition of a disgusting depravity? I answer--to correct it:--if not by law and constitutional amendment (for it is hard to get lawgivers to work against themselves), at least by the force of public opinion, and the stern rebuke of popular condemnation.

I have mentioned Mr. Monroe as a President who would not depart, even from the spirit of the constitution, in appointing, not a member, but an ex-member of Congress, to office. Others of the earlier Presidents were governed by the same principle, of whom I will only mention (for his example should stand for all) General Washington, who entirely condemned the practice. In a letter to General Hamilton (vol. 6, page 53, of Hamilton's Works), he speaks of his objections to these appointments as a thing well known to that gentleman, and which he was only driven to think of in a particular instance, from the difficulty of finding a Secretary of State, successor to Mr. Edmund Randolph. No less than four persons had declined the offer of it; and seeing no other suitable person without going into the Senate, he offered it to Mr. Rufus King of that body--who did not accept it: and for this offer, thus made in a case of so much urgency, and to a citizen so eminently fit, Washington felt that the honor of his administration required him to show a justification. What would the Father of his country have thought if members had come to him to solicit office? and especially, if these members (a thing almost blasphemous to be imagined in connection with his name) had mixed in caucuses and conventions to procure his nomination for President? Certainly he would have given them a look which would have sent such suppliants for ever from his presence. And I, who was senator for thirty years, and never had office for myself or any one of my blood, have a right to condemn a practice which my conduct rebukes, and which the purity of the government requires to be abolished, and which the early Presidents carefully avoided.

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XXXI. DEATH OF THE EX-PRESIDENTS JOHN ADAMS AND THOMAS JEFFERSON

It comes within the scope of this View to notice the deaths and characters of eminent public men who have died during my time, although not my contemporaries, and who have been connected with the founding or early working of the federal government. This gives me a right to head a chapter with the names of Mr. John Adams and Mr. Jefferson--two of the most eminent political men of the revolution, who, entering public life together, died on the same day,--July 4th, 1826,--exactly fifty years after they had both put their hands to that Declaration of Independence which placed a new nation upon the theatre of the world. Doubtless there was enough of similitude in their lives and deaths to excuse the belief in the interposition of a direct providence, and to justify the feeling of mysterious reverence with which the news of their coincident demise was received throughout the country. The parallel between them was complete. Born nearly at the same time, Mr. Adams the elder, they took the same course in life--with the same success--and ended their earthly career at the same time, and in the same way:--in the regular course of nature, in the repose and tranquillity of retirement, in the bosom of their families, and on the soil which their labors had contributed to make free.

Born, one in Massachusetts, the other in Virginia, they both received liberal educations, embraced the same profession (that of the law), mixed literature and science with their legal studies and pursuits, and entered early into the ripening contest with Great Britain--first in their counties and States, and then on the broader field of the General Congress of the Confederated Colonies. They were both members of the Congress which declared Independence--both of the committee which reported the Declaration--both signed it--were both employed in foreign missions--both became Vice Presidents--and both became Presidents. They were both working men; and, in the great number of efficient laborers in the cause of Independence which the Congresses of the Revolution contained, they were doubtless the two most efficient--and Mr. Adams the more so of the two. He was, as Mr. Jefferson styled him, "the Colossus" of the Congress--speaking, writing, counselling--a member of ninety different committees, and (during his three years' service) chairman of twenty five--chairman also of the board of war and board of appeals: his soul on fire with the cause, left no rest to his head, hands, or tongue. Mr. Jefferson drew the Declaration of Independence, but Mr. Adams was "the pillar of its support, and its ablest advocate and defender," during the forty days it was before the Congress. In the letter which he wrote that night to Mrs. Adams (for, after all the labors of the day, and such a day, he could still write to her), he took a glowing view of the future, and used those expressions, "gloom" and "glory," which his son repeated in the paragraph of his message to Congress in relation to the deaths of the two ex-Presidents, which I have heard criticized by those who did not know their historical allusion, and could not feel the force and beauty of their application. They were words of hope and confidence when he wrote them, and of history when he died. "I am well aware of the toil, and blood, and treasure, that it will cost to maintain this Declaration, and to support and defend these States; yet through all the gloom, I can see the rays of light and glory!" and he lived to see it--to see the glory--with the bodily, as well as with the mental eye. And (for the great fact will bear endless repetition) it was he that conceived the idea of making Washington commander-in-chief, and prepared the way for his unanimous nomination.

In the division of parties which ensued the establishment of the federal government, Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson differed in systems of policy, and became heads of opposite divisions, but without becoming either unjust or unkind to each other. Mr. Adams sided with the party discriminated as federal; and in that character became the subject of political attacks, from which his competitor generously defended him, declaring that "a more perfectly honest man never issued from the hands of his Creator;" and, though opposing candidates for the presidency, neither would have any thing to do with the election, which they considered a question between the systems of policy which they represented, and not a question between themselves. Mr. Jefferson became the head of the party then called republican--now democratic; and in that character became the founder of the political school which has since chiefly prevailed in the United States. He was a statesman: that is to say, a man capable of conceiving measures useful to the country and to mankind--able to recommend them to adoption, and to administer them when adopted. I have seen many politicians--a few statesmen--and, of these few, he their pre-eminent head. He was a republican by nature and constitution, and gave proofs of it in the legislation of his State, as well as in the policy of the United States. He was no speaker, but a most instructive and fascinating talker; and the Declaration of Independence, even if it had not been sistered by innumerable classic productions, would have placed him at the head of political writers. I never saw him but once, when I went to visit him in his retirement; and then I felt, for four hours, the charms of his bewitching talk. I was then a young senator, just coming on the stage of public life--he a patriarchal statesman just going off the stage of natural life, and evidently desirous to impress some views of policy upon me--a design in which he certainly did not fail. I honor him as a patriot of the Revolution--as one of the Founders of the Republic--as the founder of the political school to which I belong; and for the purity of character which he possessed in common with his compatriots, and which gives to the birth of the United States a beauty of parentage which the genealogy of no other nation can show.

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XXXII. BRITISH INDEMNITY FOR DEPORTED SLAVES

In this year was brought to a conclusion the long-continued controversy with Great Britain in relation to the non-fulfilment of the first article of the treaty of Ghent (1814), for the restitution of slaves carried off by the British troops in the war of 1812. It was a renewal of the misunderstanding, but with a better issue, which grew up under the seventh article of the treaty of peace of 1783 upon the same subject. The power of Washington's administration was not able to procure the execution of that article, either by restoration of the slaves or indemnity. The slaves then taken away were carried to Nova Scotia, where, becoming an annoyance, they were transferred to Sierra Leone; and thus became the foundation of the British African colony there. The restitution of deported slaves, stipulated in the first article of the Ghent treaty, could not be accomplished between the two powers; they disagreed as to the meaning of words; and, after seven years of vain efforts to come to an understanding, it was agreed to refer the question to arbitrament. The Emperor Alexander accepted the office of arbitrator, executed it, and decided in favor of the United States. That decision was as unintelligible to Great Britain as all the previous treaty stipulations on this same subject had been. She could not understand it. A second misunderstanding grew up, giving rise to a second negotiation, which was concluded by a final agreement to pay the value of the slaves carried off. In 1827 payment was made--twelve years after the injury and the stipulation to repair it, and after continued and most strenuous exertions to obtain redress.

The case was this: it was a part of the system of warfare adopted by the British, when operating in the slave States, to encourage the slaves to desert from their owners, promising them freedom; and at the end of the war these slaves were carried off. This carrying off was foreseen by the United States Commissioners at Ghent, and in the first article of the treaty was provided against in these words; "all places taken, &c. shall be restored without delay, &c., or carrying away any of the artillery, or other public property originally captured in the said posts or places, and which shall remain therein upon the exchange of the ratifications of this treaty, or any slaves or other private property." The British Government undertook to extend the limitation which applied to public property to that which was private also; and so to restore only such slaves as were originally captured within the forts, and which remained therein at the time of the exchange of ratifications--a construction which would have excluded all that were induced to run away, being nearly the whole; and all that left the forts before the exchange of ratifications, which would have included the rest. She adhered to the construction given to the parallel article in the treaty of 1783, and by which all slaves taken during the war were held to be lawful prize of war, and free under the British proclamation, and not to be compensated for. The United States, on the contrary, confined this local limitation to things appurtenant to the forts; and held the slaves to be private property, subject to restitution, or claim for compensation, if carried away at all, no matter how acquired.

The point was solemnly carried before the Emperor Alexander, the United States represented by their minister, Mr. Henry Middleton, and Great Britain by Sir Charles Bagot--the Counts Nesselrode and Capo D'Istrias receiving the arguments to be laid before the Emperor. His Majesty's decision was peremptory; "that the United States of America are entitled to a just indemnification from Great Britain for all private property carried away by the British forces; and, as the question regards slaves more especially, for all such slaves as were carried away by the British forces from the places and territories of which the restitution was stipulated by the treaty, in quitting the said places and territories." This was explicit; but the British minister undertook to understand it as not applying to slaves who voluntarily joined the British troops to free themselves from bondage, and who came from places never in possession of the British troops; and he submitted a note to that effect to the Russian minister, Count Nesselrode, to be laid before the Emperor. To this note Alexander gave an answer which is a model of categorical reply to unfounded dubitation. He said: "the Emperor having, by the mutual consent of the two plenipotentiaries, given an opinion, founded solely upon the sense which results from the text of the article in dispute, does not think himself called upon to decide here any question relative to what the laws of war permit or forbid to the belligerents; but, always faithful to the grammatical interpretation of the first article of the treaty of Ghent, his Imperial Majesty declares, a second time, that it appears to him, according to this interpretation, that, in quitting the places and territories of which the treaty of Ghent stipulates the restitution to the United States, his Britannic Majesty's forces had no right to carry away from the same places and territories, absolutely, any slave, by whatever means he had fallen or come into their power." This was the second declaration, the second decision of the point; and both parties having bound themselves to abide the decision, be it what it might, a convention was immediately concluded for the purpose of carrying the Emperor's decision into effect, by establishing a board to ascertain the number and value of the deported slaves. It was a convention formally drawn up, signed by the ministers of the three powers, done in triplicate, ratified, and ratifications exchanged, and the affair considered finished. Not so the fact! New misunderstanding, new negotiation, five years more consumed in diplomatic notes, and finally a new convention concluded! Certainly it was not the value of the property in controversy, not the amount of money to be paid, that led Great Britain to that pertinacious resistance, bordering upon cavilling and bad faith. It was the loss of an advantage in war--the loss of the future advantage of operating upon the slave States through their slave property, and which advantage would be lost if this compensation was enforced,--which induced her to stand out so long against her own stipulations, and the decisions of her own accepted arbitrator.

This new or third treaty, making indemnity for these slaves, was negotiated at London, November, 1826, between Mr. Gallatin on the part of the United States, and Messrs. Huskisson and Addington on the part of Great Britain. It commenced with reciting that "difficulties having arisen in the execution of the convention concluded at St. Petersburg, July 12th, 1822, under the mediation of his majesty the Emperor of all the Russias, between the United States of America and Great Britain, for the purpose of carrying into effect the decision of his Imperial Majesty upon the differences which had arisen between the said United States and Great Britain as to the true construction and meaning of the first article of the treaty of Ghent, therefore the said parties agree to treat again," &c. The result of this third negotiation was to stipulate for the payment of a gross sum to the government of the United States, to be by it divided among those whose slaves had been carried off: and the sum of one million two hundred and four thousand nine hundred and sixty dollars was the amount agreed upon. This sum was satisfactory to the claimants, and was paid to the United States for their benefit in the year 1827--just twelve years after the conclusion of the war, and after two treaties had been made, and two arbitrations rendered to explain the meaning of the first treaty, and which fully explained itself. Twelve years of persevering exertion to obtain the execution of a treaty stipulation which solely related to private property, and which good faith and sheer justice required to have been complied with immediately! At the commencement of the session of Congress, 1827-28, the President, Mr. John Quincy Adams, was able to communicate the fact of the final settling and closing up of this demand upon the British government for the value of the slaves carried off by its troops. The sum received was large, and ample to pay the damages; but that was the smallest part of the advantage gained. The example and the principle were the main points--the enforcement of such a demand against a government so powerful, and after so much resistance, and the condemnation which it carried, and the responsibility which it implied--this was the grand advantage. Liberation and abduction of slaves was one of the modes of warfare adopted by the British, and largely counted on as a means of harassing and injuring one half of the Union. It had been practised during the Revolution, and indemnity avoided. If avoided a second time, impunity would have sanctioned the practice and rendered it inveterate; and in future wars, not only with Great Britain but with all powers, this mode of annoyance would have become an ordinary resort, leading to servile insurrections. The indemnity exacted carried along with it the condemnation of the practice, as a spoliation of private property to be atoned for; and was both a compensation for the past and a warning for the future. It implied a responsibility which no power, or art, or time could evade, and the principle of which being established, there will be no need for future arbitrations.

I have said that this article in the treaty of Ghent for restitution, or compensation, for deported slaves was brought to a better issue than its parallel in the treaty of peace of 1783. By the seventh article of this treaty it was declared that the evacuation (by the British troops) should be made "without carrying away any negroes or other property belonging to the American inhabitants." Yet three thousand slaves were carried away (besides ten times that number--27,000 in Virginia alone--perishing of disease in the British camps); and neither restitution nor compensation made for any part of them. Both were resisted--the restitution by Sir Guy Carleton in his letter of reply to Washington's demand, declaring it to be an impossible infamy in a British officer to give up those whom they had invited to their standard; but reserving the point for the consideration of his government, and, in the mean time, allowing and facilitating the taking of schedules of all slaves taken away--names, ages, sex, former owners, and States from which taken. The British government resisted compensation upon the ground of war captures; that, being taken in war, no matter how, they became, like other plunder, the property of the captors, who had a right to dispose of it as they pleased, and had chosen to set it free; that the slaves, having become free, belonged to nobody, and consequently it was no breach of the treaty stipulation to carry them away. This ground was contested by the Congress of the confederation to the end of its existence, and afterwards by the new federal government, from its commencement until the claim for indemnity was waived or abandoned, at the conclusion of Jay's treaty, in 1796. The very first message of Washington to Congress when he became President, presented the inexecution of the treaty of peace in this particular, among others, as one of the complaints justly existing against Great Britain; and all the diplomacy of his administration was exerted to obtain redress--in vain. The treaties of '94 and '96 were both signed without allusion to the subject; and, being left unprovided for in these treaties, the claim sunk into the class of obsolete demands; and the stipulation remained in the treaty a dead letter, although containing the precise words, and the additional one "negroes," on which the Emperor Alexander took the stand which commanded compensation and dispensed with arguments founded in the laws of war. Not a shilling had been received for that immense depredation upon private property; although the Congress of the confederation adopted the strongest resolves, and even ordered each State to be furnished with copies of the schedules of the slaves taken from it; and hopes of indemnity were kept alive until extinguished by the treaty of '96. It was a bitter complaint against that treaty, as the Congress debates of the time, and the public press, abundantly show.

Northern men did their duty to the South in getting compensation (and, what is infinitely more, establishing the principle that there shall be compensation in such cases) for the slaves carried away in the war of 1812. A majority of the commissioners at Ghent who obtained the stipulation for indemnity were Northern men--Adams, Russell, Gallatin, from the free, and Clay and Bayard from the slave States. A Northern negotiator (Mr. Gallatin), under a Northern President (Mr. John Quincy Adams), finally obtained it; and it is a coincidence worthy of remark that this Northern negotiator, who was finally successful, was the same debater in Congress, in '96, who delivered the best argument (in my opinion surpassing even that of Mr. Madison), against the grounds on which the British Government resisted the execution of this article of the treaty.

I am no man to stir up old claims against the federal government; and, I detest the trade which exhumes such claims, and deplore the facility with which they are considered--too often in the hands of speculators who gave nothing, or next to nothing, for them. But I must say that the argument on which the French spoliation claim is now receiving so much consideration, applies with infinitely more force to the planters whose slaves were taken during the war of the Revolution than in behalf of these French spoliation claims. They were contributing--some in their persons in the camp or council, all in their voluntary or tax contributions--to the independence of their country when they were thus despoiled of their property. They depended upon these slaves to support their families while they were supporting their country. They were in debt to British merchants, and relied upon compensation for these slaves to pay those debts, at the very moment when compensation was abandoned by the same treaty which enforced the payment of the debts. They had a treaty obligation for indemnity, express in its terms, and since shown to be valid, when deprived of this stipulation by another treaty, in order to obtain general advantages for the whole Union. This is something like taking private property for public use. Three thousand slaves, the property of ascertained individuals, protected by a treaty stipulation, and afterwards abandoned by another treaty, against the entreaties and remonstrances of the owners, in order to obtain the British commercial treaty of '94, and its supplement of '96: such is the case which this revolutionary spoliation of slave property presents, and which puts it immeasurably ahead of the French spoliation claims prior to 1800. There is but four years' difference in their ages--in the dates of the two treaties by which they were respectively surrendered--and every other difference between the two cases is an argument of preference in favor of the losers under the treaty of 1796. Yet I am against both, and each, separately or together; and put them in contrast to make one stand as an argument against the other. But the primary reason for introducing the slave spoliation case of 1783, and comparing its less fortunate issue with that of 1812, was to show that Northern men will do justice to the South; that Northern men obtained for the South an indemnity and security in our day which a Southern Administration, with Washington at its head, had not been able to obtain in the days of our fathers.

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Chapter XXXIII

MEETING OF THE FIRST CONGRESS ELECTED UNDER THE ADMINISTRATION OF MR. ADAMS.

The nineteenth Congress, commencing its legal existence, March the 4th, 1825, had been chiefly elected at the time that Mr. Adams' administration commenced, and the two Houses stood divided with respect to him--the majority of the Representatives being favorable to him, while the majority of the Senate was in opposition. The elections for the twentieth Congress--the first under his administration--were looked to with great interest, both as showing whether the new President was supported by the country, and his election by the House sanctioned, and also as an index to the issue of the ensuing presidential election. For, simultaneously with the election in the House of Representatives did the canvass for the succeeding election begin--General Jackson being the announced candidate on one side, and Mr. Adams on the other; and the event involving not only the question of merits between the parties, but also the question of approved or disapproved conduct on the part of the representatives who elected Mr. Adams. The elections took place, and resulted in placing an opposition majority in the House of Representatives, and increasing the strength of the opposition majority in the Senate. The state of parties in the House was immediately tested by the election of speaker, Mr. John W. Taylor, of New-York, the administration candidate, being defeated by Mr. Andrew Stevenson, of Virginia, in the opposition. The appointment of the majority of members on all the committees, and their chairmen, in both Houses adverse to the administration, was a regular consequence of the inflamed state of parties, although the proper conducting of the public business would demand for the administration the chairman of several important committees, as enabling it to place its measures fairly before the House. The speaker (Mr. Stevenson) could only yield to this just sense of propriety in the case of one of the committees, that of foreign relations, to which Mr. Edward Everett, classing as the political and personal friend of the President, was appointed chairman. In other committees, and in both Houses, the stern spirit of the times prevailed; and the organization of the whole Congress was adverse to the administration.

The presidential message contained no new recommendations, but referred to those previously made, and not yet acted upon; among which internal improvement, and the encouragement of home industry, were most prominent. It gave an account of the failure of the proposed congress of Panama; and, consequently, of the inutility of all our exertions to be represented there. And, as in this final and valedictory notice by Mr. Adams of that once far-famed congress, he took occasion to disclaim some views attributed to him, I deem it just to give him the benefit of his own words, both in making the disclaimer, and in giving the account of the abortion of an impracticable scheme which had so lately been prosecuted, and opposed, with so much heat and violence in our own country. He said of it:

"Disclaiming alike all right and all intention of interfering in those concerns which it is the prerogative of their independence to regulate as to them shall seem fit, we hail with joy every indication of their prosperity, of their harmony, of their persevering and inflexible homage to those principles of freedom and of equal rights, which are alone suited to the genius and temper of the American nations. It has been therefore with some concern that we have observed indications of intestine divisions in some of the republics of the South, and appearances of less union with one another, than we believe to be the interest of all. Among the results of this state of things has been that the treaties concluded at Panama do not appear to have been ratified by the contracting parties, and that the meeting of the Congress at Tacubaya has been indefinitely postponed. In accepting the invitations to be represented at this Congress, while a manifestation was intended on the part of the United States, of the most friendly disposition towards the Southern republics by whom it had been proposed, it was hoped that it would furnish an opportunity for bringing all the nations of this hemisphere to the common acknowledgment and adoption of the principles, in the regulation of their international relations, which would have secured a lasting peace and harmony between them, and have promoted the cause of mutual benevolence throughout the globe. But as obstacles appear to have arisen to the reassembling of the Congress, one of the two ministers commissioned on the part of the United States has returned to the bosom of his country, while the minister charged with the ordinary mission to Mexico remains authorized to attend at the conferences of the Congress whenever they may be resumed."

This is the last that was heard of that so much vaunted Congress of American nations, and in the manner in which it died out of itself, among those who proposed it, without ever having been reached by a minister from the United States, we have the highest confirmation of the soundness of the objections taken to it by the opposition members of the two Houses of our Congress.

In stating the condition of the finances, the message, without intending it, gave proof of the paradoxical proposition, first, I believe, broached by myself, that an annual revenue to the extent of a fourth or a fifth below the annual expenditure, is sufficient to meet that annual expenditure; and consequently that there is no necessity to levy as much as is expended, or to provide by law for keeping a certain amount in the treasury when the receipts are equal, or superior to the expenditure. He said:

"The balance in the treasury on the first of January last was six millions three hundred and fifty-eight thousand six hundred and eighty-six dollars and eighteen cents. The receipts from that day to the 30th of September last, as near as the returns of them yet received can show, amount to sixteen millions eight hundred and eighty-six thousand five hundred and eighty-one dollars and thirty-two cents. The receipts of the present quarter, estimated at four millions five hundred and fifteen thousand, added to the above, form an aggregate of twenty-one millions four hundred thousand dollars of receipts. The expenditures of the year may perhaps amount to twenty-two millions three hundred thousand dollars, presenting a small excess over the receipts. But of these twenty-two millions, upwards of six have been applied to the discharge of the principal of the public debt; the whole amount of which, approaching seventy-four millions on the first of January last, will on the first day of next year fall short of sixty-seven millions and a half. The balance in the treasury on the first of January next, it is expected, will exceed five millions four hundred and fifty thousand dollars; a sum exceeding that of the first of January, 1825, though falling short of that exhibited on the first of January last."

In this statement the expenditures of the year are shown to exceed the income, and yet to leave a balance, about equal to one fourth of the whole in the treasury at the end of the year; also that the balance was larger at the end of the preceding year, and nearly the same at the end of the year before. And the message might have added, that these balances were about the same at the end of every quarter of every year, and every day of every quarter--all resulting from the impossibility of applying money to objects until there has been time to apply it. Yet in the time of those balances of which Mr. Adams speaks, there was a law to retain two millions in the treasury; and now there is a law to retain six millions; while the current balances, at the rate of a fourth or a fifth of the income, are many times greater than the sum ordered to be retained; and cannot be reduced to that sum, by regular payments from the treasury, until the revenue itself is reduced below the expenditure. This is a financial paradox, sustainable upon reason, proved by facts, and visible in the state of the treasury at all times; yet I have endeavored in vain to establish it; and Congress is as careful as ever to provide an annual income equal to the annual expenditure; and to make permanent provision by law to keep up a reserve in the treasury; which would be there of itself without such law as long as the revenue comes within a fourth or a fifth of the expenditure.

The following members composed the two Houses at this, the first session of the twentieth Congress:

SENATE.

MAINE--John Chandler, Albion K. Parris.

NEW HAMPSHIRE--Samuel Bell, Levi Woodbury.

MASSACHUSETTS--Nathaniel Silsbee, Daniel Webster.

CONNECTICUT--Samuel A. Foot, Calvin Willey.

RHODE ISLAND--Nehemiah R. Knight, Asher Robbins.

VERMONT--Dudley Chase, Horatio Seymour.

NEW-YORK--Martin Van Buren, Nathan Sanford.

NEW JERSEY--Mahlon Dickerson, Ephraim Bateman.

PENNSYLVANIA--William Marks, Isaac D. Barnard.

DELAWARE--Louis M'Lane, Henry M. Ridgeley.

MARYLAND--Ezekiel F. Chambers, Samuel Smith.

VIRGINIA--Littleton W. Tazewell, John Tyler.

NORTH CAROLINA--John Branch, Nathaniel Macon.

SOUTH CAROLINA--William Smith, Robert Y. Hayne.

GEORGIA--John M'Pherson Berrien, Thomas W. Cobb.

KENTUCKY--Richard M. Johnson, John Rowan.

TENNESSEE--John H. Eaton, Hugh L. White.

OHIO--William H. Harrison, Benjamin Ruggles.

LOUISIANA--Dominique Bouligny, Josiah S. Johnston.

INDIANA--William Hendricks, James Noble.

MISSISSIPPI--Powhatan Ellis, Thomas H. Williams.

ILLINOIS--Elias K. Kane, Jesse B. Thomas.

ALABAMA--John McKinley, William R. King.

MISSOURI--David Barton, Thomas H. Benton.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.

MAINE--John Anderson, Samuel Butman, Rufus M'Intire, Jeremiah O'Brien, James W. Ripley, Peleg Sprague, Joseph F. Wingate--7.

NEW HAMPSHIRE--Ichabod Bartlett, David Barker, jr., Titus Brown, Joseph Healey, Jonathan Harvey, Thomas Whipple, jr.--6.

MASSACHUSETTS--Samuel C. Allen, John Bailey, Isaac C. Bates, B. W. Crowninshield, John Davis, Henry W. Dwight, Edward Everett, Benjamin Gorham, James L. Hodges, John Locke, John Reed, Joseph Richardson, John Varnum--15.

RHODE ISLAND--Tristam Burges; Dutee J. Pearce--2.

CONNECTICUT--John Baldwin, Noyes Barber, Ralph J. Ingersoll, Orange Merwin, Elisha Phelps, David Plant--6.

VERMONT--Daniel A. A. Buck, Jonathan Hunt, Rolin C. Mallary, Benjamin Swift, George E. Wales--5.

NEW-YORK--Daniel D. Barnard, George O. Belden, Rudolph Bunner, C. C. Cambreleng, Samuel Chase, John C. Clark, John D. Dickinson, Jonas Earll, jr., Daniel G. Garnsey, Nathaniel Garrow, John I. De Graff, John Hallock, jr., Selah R. Hobbie, Michael Hoffman, Jeromus Johnson, Richard Keese, Henry Markell, H. C. Martindale, Dudley Marvin, John Magee, John Maynard, Thomas J. Oakley, S. Van Rensselaer, Henry R. Storrs, James Strong, John G. Stower, Phineas L. Tracy, John W. Taylor, G. C. Verplanck, Aaron Ward, John J. Wood, Silas Wood, David Woodcock, Silas Wright, jr.--34.

NEW JERSEY--Lewis Condict, George Holcombe, Isaac Pierson, Samuel Swan, Edge Thompson, Ebenezer Tucker--6.

PENNSYLVANIA--William Addams, Samuel Anderson, Stephen Barlow, James Buchanan, Richard Coulter, Chauncey Forward, Joseph Fry, jr., Innes Green, Samuel D. Ingham, George Kremer, Adam King, Joseph Lawrence, Daniel H. Miller, Charles Miner, John Mitchell, Samuel M'Kean, Robert Orr, jr., William Ramsay, John Sergeant, James S. Stevenson, John B. Sterigere, Andrew Stewart, Joel B. Sutherland, Espy Van Horn, James Wilson, George Wolf--26.

DELAWARE--Kensy Johns, jr.--1.

MARYLAND--John Barney, Clement Dorsey, Levin Gale, John Leeds Kerr, Peter Little, Michael C. Sprigg, G. C. Washington, John C. Weems, Ephraim K. Wilson--9.

VIRGINIA--Mark Alexander, Robert Allen, Wm. S. Archer, Wm. Armstrong, jr., John S. Barbour, Philip P. Barbour, Burwell Bassett, N. H. Claiborne, Thomas Davenport, John Floyd, Isaac Leffler, Lewis Maxwell, Charles F. Mercer, William M'Coy, Thomas Newton, John Randolph, William C. Rives, John Roane, Alexander Smyth, A. Stevenson, John Talliaferro, James Trezvant--22.

NORTH CAROLINA--Willis Alston, Daniel L. Barringer, John H. Bryan, Samuel P. Carson, Henry W. Conner, John Culpeper, Thomas H. Hall, Gabriel Holmes, John Long, Lemuel Sawyer, A. H. Shepperd, Daniel Turner, Lewis Williams--13.

SOUTH CAROLINA--John Carter, Warren R. Davis, William Drayton, James Hamilton, jr., George M'Duffie, William D. Martin, Thomas R. Mitchell, Wm. T. Nuckolls, Starling Tucker--9.

GEORGIA--John Floyd, Tomlinson Fort, Charles E. Haynes, George R. Gilmer, Wilson Lumpkin, Wiley Thompson, Richard H. Wilde--7.

KENTUCKY--Richard A. Buckner, James Clark, Henry Daniel, Joseph Lecompte, Robert P. Letcher, Chittenden Lyon, Thomas Metcalfe, Robert M'Hatton, Thomas P. Moore, Charles A. Wickliffe, Joel Yancey, Thomas Chilton--12.

TENNESSEE--John Bell, John Blair, David Crockett, Robert Desha, Jacob C. Isacks, Pryor Lea, John H. Marable, James C. Mitchell, James K. Polk--9.

OHIO--Mordecai Bartley, Philemon Beecher, William Creighton, jr., John Davenport, James Findlay, Wm. M'Lean, William Russell, John Sloane, William Stanberry, Joseph Vance, Samuel F. Vinton, Elisha Whittlesey, John Woods, John C. Wright--14.

LOUISIANA--William L. Brent, Henry H. Gurley, Edward Livingston--3.

INDIANA--Thomas H. Blake, Jonathan Jennings, Oliver H. Smith--3.

MISSISSIPPI--William Haile--1.

ILLINOIS--Joseph Duncan--1.

ALABAMA--Gabriel Moore, John M'Kee, George W. Owen--3.

MISSOURI--Edward Bates--1.

DELEGATES.

ARKANSAS TERRITORY--A. H. Sevier.

MICHIGAN TERRITORY--Austin E. Wing.

FLORIDA TERRITORY--Joseph M. White.

This list of members presents an immense array of talent, and especially of business talent; and in its long succession of respectable names, many will be noted as having attained national reputations--others destined to attain that distinction--while many more, in the first class of useful and respectable members, remained without national renown for want of that faculty which nature seems most capriciously to have scattered among the children of men--the faculty of fluent and copious speech;--giving it to some of great judgment--denying it to others of equal, or still greater judgment--and lavishing it upon some of no judgment at all. The national eyes are fixed upon the first of these classes--the men of judgment and copious speech; and even those in the third class obtain national notoriety; while the men in the second class--the men of judgment and few words--are extremely valued and respected in the bodies to which they belong and have great weight in the conduct of business. They are, in fact, the business men, often more practical and efficient than the great orators. This twentieth Congress, as all others that have been, contained a large proportion of these most useful and respectable members; and it will be the pleasant task of this work to do them the justice which their modest merit would not do for themselves.

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XXXIV. REVISION OF THE TARIFF

The tariff of 1828 is an era in our legislation, being the event from which the doctrine of "nullification" takes its origin, and from which a serious division dates between the North and the South. It was the work of politicians and manufacturers; and was commenced for the benefit of the woollen interest, and upon a bill chiefly designed to favor that branch of manufacturing industry. But, like all other bills of the kind, it required help from other interests to get itself along; and that help was only to be obtained by admitting other interests into the benefits of the bill. And so, what began as a special benefit, intended for the advantage of a particular interest, became general, and ended with including all manufacturing interests--or at least as many as were necessary to make up the strength necessary to carry it. The productions of different States, chiefly in the West, were favored by additional duties on their rival imports; as lead in Missouri and Illinois, and hemp of Kentucky; and thus, though opposed to the object of the bill, many members were necessitated to vote for it. Mr. Rowan, of Kentucky, well exposed the condition of others in this respect, in showing his own in some remarks which he made, and in which he said:

"He was not opposed to the tariff as a system of revenue, honestly devoted to the objects and purposes of revenue--on the contrary, he was friendly to a tariff of that character; but when perverted by the ambition of political aspirants, and the secret influence of inordinate cupidity, to purposes of individual, and sectional ascendency, he could not be seduced by the captivation of names, or terms, however attractive, to lend it his individual support.

"It is in vain, Mr. President, said he, that it is called the American System--names do not alter things. There is but one American System, and that is delineated in the State and Federal constitutions. It is the system of equal rights and privileges secured by the representative principle--a system, which, instead of subjecting the proceeds of the labor of some to taxation, in the view to enrich others, secures to all the proceeds of their labor--exempts all from taxation, except for the support of the protecting power of the government. As a tax necessary to the support of the government, he would support it--call it by what name you please;--as a tax for any other purpose, and especially for the purposes to which he had alluded--it had his individual reprobation, under whatever name it might assume.

"It might, he observed, be inferred from what he had said, that he would vote against the bill. He did not wish any doubts to be entertained as to the vote he should give upon this measure, or the reasons which would influence him to give it. He was not at liberty to substitute his individual opinion for that of his State. He was one of the organs here, of a State, that had, by the tariff of 1824, been chained to the car of the Eastern manufacturers--a State that had been from that time, and was now groaning under the pressure of that unequal and unjust measure--a measure from the pressure of which, owing to the prevailing illusion throughout the United States, she saw no hope of escape, by a speedy return to correct principles;--and seeing no hope of escaping from the ills of the system, she is constrained, on principles of self-defence, to avail herself of the mitigation which this bill presents, in the duties which it imposes upon foreign hemp, spirits, iron, and molasses. The hemp, iron, and distilled spirits of the West, will, like the woollens of the Eastern States, be encouraged to the extent of the tax indirectly imposed by this bill, upon those who shall buy and consume them. Those who may need, and buy those articles, must pay to the grower, or manufacturer of them, an increased price to the amount of the duties imposed upon the like articles of foreign growth or fabric. To this tax upon the labor of the consumer, his individual opinion was opposed. But, as the organ of the State of Kentucky, he felt himself bound to surrender his individual opinion, and express the opinion of his State."

Thus, this tariff bill, like every one admitting a variety of items, contains a vicious principle, by which a majority may be made up to pass a measure which they do not approve. But besides variety of agricultural and manufacturing items collected into this bill, there was another of very different import admitted into it, namely, that of party politics. A presidential election was approaching: General Jackson and Mr. Adams were the candidates--the latter in favor of the "American System"--of which Mr. Clay (his Secretary of State) was the champion, and indissolubly connected with him in the public mind in the issue of the election. This tariff was made an administration measure, and became an issue in the canvass; and to this Mr. Rowan significantly alluded when he spoke of a tariff as being "perverted by the ambition of political aspirants." It was in vain that the manufacturers were warned not to mix their interests with the doubtful game of politics. They yielded to the temptation--yielded as a class, though with individual exceptions--for the sake of the temporary benefit, without seeming to realize the danger of connecting their interests with the fortunes of a political party. This tariff of '28, besides being remarkable for giving birth to "nullification," and heart-burning between the North and the South, was also remarkable for a change of policy in the New England States, in relation to the protective system. Being strongly commercial, these States had hitherto favored free trade; and Mr. Webster was the champion of that trade up to 1824. At this session a majority of those States, and especially those which classed politically with Mr. Adams and Mr. Clay, changed their policy: and Webster became a champion of the protective system. The cause of this change, as then alleged, was the fact that the protective system had become the established policy of the government, and that these States had adapted their industry to it; though it was insisted, on the other hand, that political calculation had more to do with the change than federal legislation: and, in fact, the question of this protection was one of those which lay at the foundation of parties, and was advocated by General Hamilton in one of his celebrated reports of fifty years ago. But on this point it is right that New England should speak for herself, which she did at the time of the discussion of the tariff in '28; and through the member, now a senator (Mr. Webster), who typified in his own person the change which his section of the Union had undergone. He said:

"New England, sir, has not been a leader in this policy. On the contrary, she held back, herself, and tried to hold others back from it, from the adoption of the constitution to 1824. Up to 1824, she was accused of sinister and selfish designs, because she discountenanced the progress of this policy. It was laid to her charge, then, that having established her manufactures herself, she wished that others should not have the power of rivalling her; and, for that reason, opposed all legislative encouragement. Under this angry denunciation against her, the act of 1824 passed. Now the imputation is precisely of an opposite character. The present measure is pronounced to be exclusively for the benefit of New England; to be brought forward by her agency, and designed to gratify the cupidity of her wealthy establishments.

"Both charges, sir, are equally without the slightest foundation. The opinion of New England, up to 1824, was founded in the conviction, that, on the whole, it was wisest and best, both for herself and others, that manufacturers should make haste slowly. She felt a reluctance to trust great interests on the foundation of government patronage; for who could tell how long such patronage would last, or with what steadiness, skill, or perseverance, it would continue to be granted? It is now nearly fifteen years, since, among the first things which I ever ventured to say here, was the expression of a serious doubt, whether this government was fitted by its construction, to administer aid and protection to particular pursuits; whether, having called such pursuits into being by indications of its favor, it would not, afterwards, desert them, when troubles come upon them; and leave them to their fate. Whether this prediction, the result, certainly, of chance, and not of sagacity, will so soon be fulfilled, remains to be seen.

"At the same time it is true, that from the very first commencement of the government, those who have administered its concerns have held a tone of encouragement and invitation towards those who should embark in manufactures. All the Presidents, I believe, without exception, have concurred in this general sentiment; and the very first act of Congress, laying duties of impost, adopted the then unusual expedient of a preamble, apparently for little other purpose than that of declaring, that the duties, which it imposed, were imposed for the encouragement and protection of manufactures. When, at the commencement of the late war, duties were doubled, we were told that we should find a mitigation of the weight of taxation in the new aid and succor which would be thus afforded to our own manufacturing labor. Like arguments were urged, and prevailed, but not by the aid of New England votes, when the tariff was afterwards arranged at the close of the war, in 1816. Finally, after a whole winter's deliberation, the act of 1824 received the sanction of both Houses of Congress, and settled the policy of the country. What, then, was New England to do? She was fitted for manufacturing operations, by the amount and character of her population, by her capital, by the vigor and energy of her free labor, by the skill, economy, enterprise, and perseverance of her people. I repeat, what was she, under these circumstances, to do? A great and prosperous rival in her near neighborhood, threatening to draw from her a part, perhaps a great part, of her foreign commerce; was she to use, or to neglect, those other means of seeking her own prosperity which belonged to her character and her condition? Was she to hold out, forever, against the course of the government, and see herself losing, on one side, and yet making no efforts to sustain herself on the other? No, sir. Nothing was left to New England, after the act of 1824, but to conform herself to the will of others. Nothing was left to her, but to consider that the government had fixed and determined its own policy; and that policy was protection."

The question of a protective tariff had now not only become political, but sectional. In the early years of the federal government it was not so. The tariff bills, as the first and the second, that were passed, declared in their preambles that they were for the encouragement of manufactures, as well as for raising revenue; but then the duties imposed were all moderate--such as a revenue system really required; and there were no "minimums" to make a false basis for the calculation of duties, by enacting that all which cost less than a certain amount should be counted to have cost that amount; and be rated at the custom-house accordingly. In this early period the Southern States were as ready as any part of the Union in extending the protection to home industry which resulted from the imposition of revenue duties on rival imported articles, and on articles necessary to ourselves in time of war; and some of her statesmen were amongst the foremost members of Congress in promoting that policy. As late as 1816, some of her statesmen were still in favor of protection, not merely as an incident to revenue, but as a substantive object: and among these was Mr. Calhoun, of South Carolina--who even advocated the minimum provision--then for the first time introduced into a tariff bill, and upon his motion--and applied to the cotton goods imported. After that year (1816) the tariff bills took a sectional aspect--the Southern States, with the exception of Louisiana (led by her sugar-planting interest), against them: the New England States also against them: the Middle and Western States for them. After 1824 the New England States (always meaning the greatest portion when a section is spoken of) classed with the protective States--leaving the South alone, as a section, against that policy. My personal position was that of a great many others in the three protective sections--opposed to the policy, but going with it, on account of the interest of the State in the protection of some of its productions. I moved an additional duty upon lead, equal to one hundred per centum; and it was carried. I moved a duty upon indigo, a former staple of the South, but now declined to a slight production; and I proposed a rate of duty in harmony with the protective features of the bill. No southern member would move that duty, because he opposed the principle: I moved it, that the "American System," as it was called, should work alike in all parts of our America. I supported the motion with some reasons, and some views of the former cultivation of that plant in the Southern States, and its present decline, thus:

"Mr. Benton then proposed an amendment, to impose a duty of 25 cents per pound on imported indigo, with a progressive increase at the rate of 25 cents per pound per annum, until the whole duty amounted to $1 per pound. He stated his object to be two-fold in proposing this duty, first, to place the American System beyond the reach of its enemies, by procuring a home supply of an article indispensable to its existence; and next, to benefit the South by reviving the cultivation of one of its ancient and valuable staples.

"Indigo was first planted in the Carolinas and Georgia about the year 1740, and succeeded so well as to command the attention of the British manufacturers and the British parliament. An act was passed for the encouragement of its production in these colonies, in the reign of George the Second; the preamble to which Mr. B. read, and recommended to the consideration of the Senate. It recited that a regular, ample, and certain supply of indigo was indispensable to the success of British manufacturers; that these manufacturers were then dependent upon foreigners for a supply of this article; and that it was the dictate of a wise policy to encourage the production of it at home. The act then went on to direct that a premium of sixpence sterling should be paid out of the British treasury for every pound of indigo imported into Great Britain, from the Carolinas and Georgia. Under the fostering influence of this bounty, said Mr. B., the cultivation of indigo became great and extensive. In six years after the passage of the act, the export was 217,000 lbs. and at the breaking out of the Revolution it amounted to 1,100,000 lbs. The Southern colonies became rich upon it; for the cultivation of cotton was then unknown; rice and indigo were the staples of the South. After the Revolution, and especially after the great territorial acquisitions which the British made in India, the cultivation of American indigo declined. The premium was no longer paid; and the British government, actuated by the same wise policy which made them look for a home supply of this article from the Carolinas, when they were a part of the British possessions, now looked to India for the same reason. The export of American indigo rapidly declined. In 1800 it had fallen to 400,000 lbs.; in 1814 to 40,000 lbs,; and in the last few years to 6 or 8,000 lbs. In the mean time our manufactories were growing up; and having no supply of indigo at home, they had to import from abroad. In 1826 this importation amounted to 1,150,000 lbs., costing a fraction less than two millions of dollars, and had to be paid for almost entirely in ready money, as it was chiefly obtained from places where American produce was in no demand. Upon this state of facts, Mr. B. conceived it to be the part of a wise and prudent policy to follow the example of the British parliament in the reign of George II. and provide a home supply of this indispensable article. Our manufacturers now paid a high price for fine indigo, no less than $2 50 per pound, as testified by one of themselves before the Committee on Manufactures raised in the House of Representatives. The duty which he proposed was only 40 per cent. upon that value, and would not even reach that rate for four years. It was less than one half the duty which the same bill proposed to lay instanter upon the very cloth which this indigo was intended to dye. In the end it would make all indigo come cheaper to the manufacturer, as the home supply would soon be equal, if not superior to the demand; and in the mean time, it could not be considered a tax on the manufacturer, as he would levy the advance which he had to pay, with a good interest, upon the wearer of the cloth.

"Mr. B. then went into an exposition of the reasons for encouraging the home production of indigo, and showed that the life of the American System depended upon it. Neither cotton nor woollen manufactures could be carried on without indigo. The consumption of that article was prodigious. Even now, in the infant state of our manufactories, the importation was worth two millions of dollars: and must soon be worth double or treble that sum. For this great supply of an indispensable article, we were chiefly indebted to the jealous rival, and vigilant enemy, of these very manufactures, to Great Britain herself. Of the 1,150,000 lbs. of indigo imported, we bring 620,000 lbs. from the British East Indies; which one word from the British government would stop for ever; we bring the further quantity of 120,000 lbs. from Manilla, a Spanish possession, which British influence and diplomacy could immediately stop: and the remainder came from different parts of South America, and might be taken from us by the arts of diplomacy, or by a monopoly of the whole on the part of our rival. A stoppage of a supply of indigo for one year, would prostrate all our manufactories, and give them a blow from which they would not recover in many years. Great Britain could effect this stoppage to the amount of three fourths of the whole quantity by speaking a single word, and of the remainder by a slight exertion of policy, or the expenditure of a sum sufficient to monopolize for one year, the purchase of what South America sent into the market.

"Mr. B. said he expected a unanimous vote in favor of his amendment. The North should vote for it to secure the life of the American System; to give a proof of their regard for the South; to show that the country south of the Potomac is included in the bill for some other purpose besides that of oppression. The South itself, although opposed to the further increase of duties, should vote for this duty; that the bill, if it passes, may contain one provision favorable to its interests. The West should vote for it through gratitude for fifty years of guardian protection, generous defence, and kind assistance, which the South had given it under all its trials; and for the purpose of enlarging the market, increasing the demand in the South and its ability to purchase the horses, mules, and provisions which the West can sell nowhere else. For himself he had personal reasons for wishing to do this little justice to the South. He was a native of one of these States (N. Carolina)--the bones of his father and his grandfathers rested there. Her Senators and Representatives were his early and his hereditary friends. The venerable Senator before him (Mr. Macon) had been the friend of him and his, through four generations in a straight line; the other Senator (Mr. Branch) was his schoolfellow: the other branch of the legislature, the House of Representatives, also showed him in the North Carolina delegation, the friends of him and his through successive generations. Nor was this all. He felt for the sad changes which had taken place in the South in the last fifty years. Before the Revolution it was the seat of wealth as well as of hospitality. Money, and all that it commanded, abounded there. But how now? All this is reversed.

"Wealth has fled from the South, and settled in the regions north of the Potomac, and this in the midst of the fact that the South, in four staples alone, in cotton, tobacco, rice and indigo (while indigo was one of its staples), had exported produce since the Revolution, to the value of eight hundred million of dollars, and the North had exported comparatively nothing. This sum was prodigious; it was nearly equal to half the coinage of the mint of Mexico since the conquest by Cortez. It was twice or thrice the amount of the product of the three thousand gold and silver mines of Mexico, for the same period of fifty years. Such an export would indicate unparalleled wealth; but what was the fact? In place of wealth, a universal pressure for money was felt; not enough for current expenses; the price of all property down; the country drooping and languishing; towns and cities decaying; and the frugal habits of the people pushed to the verge of universal self-denial, for the preservation of their family estates. Such a result is a strange and wonderful phenomenon. It calls upon statesmen to inquire into the cause; and if they inquire upon the theatre of this strange metamorphosis, they will receive one universal answer from all ranks and all ages, that it is federal legislation which has worked this ruin. Under this legislation the exports of the South have been made the basis of the federal revenue. The twenty odd millions annually levied upon imported goods, are deducted out of the price of their cotton, rice and tobacco, either in the diminished price which they receive for these staples in foreign ports, or in the increased price which they pay for the articles they have to consume at home. Virginia, the two Carolinas and Georgia, may be said to defray three fourths of the annual expense of supporting the federal government; and of this great sum annually furnished by them, nothing, or next to nothing, is returned to them in the shape of government expenditure. That expenditure flows in an opposite direction; it flows northwardly, in one uniform, uninterrupted and perennial stream; it takes the course of trade and of exchange; and this is the reason why wealth disappears from the South and rises up in the North. Federal legislation does all this; it does it by the simple process of eternally taking away from the South, and returning nothing to it. If it returned to the South the whole, or even a good part of what it exacted, the four States south of the Potomac might stand the action of this system, as the earth is enabled to stand the exhausting influence of the sun's daily heat by the refreshing dews which are returned to it at night; but as the earth is dried up, and all vegetation destroyed in regions where the heat is great, and no dews returned, so must the South be exhausted of its money and its property by a course of legislation which is for ever taking from it, and never returning any thing to it.

"Every new tariff increases the force of this action. No tariff has ever yet included Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, within its provisions, except to increase the burdens imposed upon them. This one alone, presents the opportunity to form an exception, by reviving and restoring the cultivation of one of its ancient staples,--one of the sources of its wealth before the Revolution. The tariff of 1828 owes this reparation to the South, because the tariff of 1816 contributed to destroy the cultivation of indigo; sunk the duty on the foreign article, from twenty-five to fifteen cents per pound. These are the reasons for imposing the duty on indigo, now proposed. What objections can possibly be raised to it? Not to the quality; for it is the same which laid the foundation of the British manufactures, and sustained their reputation for more than half a century; not to the quantity; for the two Carolinas and Georgia alone raised as much fifty years ago as we now import, and we have now the States of Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, and the Territories of Florida and Arkansas, to add to the countries which produce it; not to the amount of the duty; for its maximum will be but forty per cent., only one half of the duty laid by this bill on the cloth it is to dye; and that maximum, not immediate, but attained by slow degrees at the end of four years, in order to give time for the domestic article to supply the place of the imported. And after all, it is not a duty on the manufacturer, but on the wearer of the goods; from whom he levies, with a good interest on the price of the cloths, all that he expends in the purchase of materials. For once, said Mr. B., I expect a unanimous vote on a clause in the tariff. This indigo clause must have the singular and unprecedented honor of an unanimous voice in its favor. The South must vote for it, to revive the cultivation of one of its most ancient and valuable staples; the West must vote for it through gratitude for past favors--through gratitude for the vote on hemp this night[2]--and to save, enlarge, and increase the market for its own productions; the North must vote for it to show their disinterestedness; to give one proof of just feeling towards the South; and, above all, to save their favorite American System from the deadly blow which Great Britain can at any moment give it by stopping or interrupting the supplies of foreign indigo; and the whole Union, the entire legislative body, must vote for it, and vote for it with joy and enthusiasm, because it is impossible that Americans can deny to sister States of the Confederacy what a British King and a British Parliament granted to these same States when they were colonies and dependencies of the British crown."

[2] "The vote on hemp this night." In rejecting Mr. Webster's motion to strike out the duty on hemp, and a vote in which the South went unanimously with the West.--Note by Mr. B.

Mr. Hayne, of South Carolina, seconded my motion in a speech of which this is an extract:

"Mr. Hayne said he was opposed to this bill in its principles as well as in its details. It could assume no shape which would make it acceptable to him, or which could prevent it from operating most oppressively and unjustly on his constituents. With these views, he had determined to make no motion to amend the bill in any respect whatever; but when such motions were made by others, and he was compelled to vote on them, he knew no better rule than to endeavor to make the bill consistent with itself. On this principle he had acted in all the votes he had given on this bill. He had endeavored to carry out to its legitimate consequences what gentlemen are pleased to miscall the 'American System.' With a fixed resolution to vote against the bill, he still considered himself at liberty to assist in so arranging the details as to extend to every great interest, and to all portions of the country, as far as may be practicable, equal protection, and to distribute the burdens of the system equally, in order that its benefits as well as its evils may be fully tested. On this principle, he should vote for the amendment of the gentleman from Missouri, because it was in strict conformity with all the principles of the bill. As a southern man, he would ask no boon for the South--he should propose nothing; but he must say that the protection of indigo rested on the same principles as every other article proposed to be protected by this bill, and he did not see how gentlemen could, consistently with their maxims, vote against it. What was the principle on which this bill was professedly founded? If there was any principle at all in the bill, it was that, whenever the country had the capacity to produce an article with which any imported article could enter into competition, the domestic product was to be protected by a duty. Now, had the Southern States the capacity to produce indigo? The soil and climate of those States were well suited to the culture of the article. At the commencement of the Revolution our exports of the article amounted to no less than 1,100,000 lbs. The whole quantity now imported into the United States is only 1,150,000 lbs.; so that the capacity of the country to produce a sufficient quantity of indigo to supply the wants of the manufacturers is unquestionable. It is true that the quantity now produced in the country is not great.

"In 1818 only 700 lbs. of domestic indigo were exported.

"In 1825 9,955 do.

"In 1826 5,289 do.

"This proves that the attention of the country is now directed to the subject. The senator from Indiana, in some remarks which he made on this subject yesterday, stated that, according to the principles of the American System (so called), protection was not extended to any article which the country was not in the habit of exporting. This is entirely a mistake. Of the articles protected by the tariff of 1824, as well as those included in this bill, very few are exported at all. Among these are iron, woollens, hemp, flax, and several others. If indigo is to be protected at all, the duties proposed must surely be considered extremely reasonable, the maximum proposed being much below that imposed by this bill on wool, woollens, and other articles. The duty on indigo till 1816, was 25 cents per pound. It was then (in favor of the manufacturers) reduced to 15 cents. The first increase of duty proposed here, is only to put back the old duty of 25 cents per pound, equal to an ad valorem duty of from 10 to 15 per cent.--and the maximum is only from 40 to 58 per cent. ad valorem, and that will not accrue for several years to come. With this statement of facts, Mr. H. said he would leave the question in the hands of those gentlemen who were engaged in giving this bill the form in which it is to be submitted to the final decision of the Senate."

The proposition for this duty on imported indigo did not prevail. In lieu of the amount proposed, and which was less than any protective duty in the bill, the friends of the "American System" (constituting a majority of the Senate) substituted a nominal duty of five cents on the pound--to be increased five cents annually for ten years--and to remain at fifty. This was only about twenty per centum on the cost of the article, and that only to be attained after a progression of ten years; while all other duties in the bill were from four to ten times that amount--and to take effect immediately. A duty so contemptible, so out of proportion to the other provisions of the bill, and doled out in such miserable drops, was a mockery and insult; and so viewed by the southern members. It increased the odiousness of the bill, by showing that the southern section of the Union was only included in the "American System" for its burdens, and not for its benefits. Mr. McDuffie, in the House of Representatives, inveighed bitterly against it, and spoke the general feeling of the Southern States when he said:

"Sir, if the union of these States shall ever be severed, and their liberties subverted, the historian who records these disasters will have to ascribe them to measures of this description. I do sincerely believe that neither this government nor any free government, can exist for a quarter of a century, under such a system of legislation. Its inevitable tendency is to corrupt, not only the public functionaries, but all those portions of the Union and classes of society who have an interest, real or imaginary, in the bounties it provides, by taxing other sections and other classes. What, sir, is the essential characteristic of a freeman? It is that independence which results from an habitual reliance upon his own resources and his own labor for his support. He is not in fact a freeman, who habitually looks to the government for pecuniary bounties. And I confess that nothing in the conduct of those who are the prominent advocates of this system, has excited more apprehension and alarm in my mind, than the constant efforts made by all of them, from the Secretary of the Treasury down to the humblest coadjutor, to impress upon the public mind, the idea that national prosperity and individual wealth are to be derived, not from individual industry and economy, but from government bounties. An idea more fatal to liberty could not be inculcated. I said, on another occasion, that the days of Roman liberty were numbered when the people consented to receive bread from the public granaries. From that moment it was not the patriot who had shown the greatest capacity and made the greatest sacrifices to serve the republic, but the demagogue who would promise to distribute most profusely the spoils of the plundered provinces, that was elevated to office by a degenerate and mercenary populace. Every thing became venal, even in the country of Fabricius, until finally the empire itself was sold at public auction! And what, sir, is the nature and tendency of the system we are discussing? It bears an analogy, but too lamentably striking, to that which corrupted the republican purity of the Roman people. God forbid that it should consummate its triumph over the public liberty, by a similar catastrophe, though even that is an event by no means improbable, if we continue to legislate periodically in this way, and to connect the election of our Chief Magistrate with the question of dividing out the spoils of certain States--degraded into Roman provinces--among the influential capitalists of the other States of this Union! Sir, when I consider that, by a single act like the present, from five to ten millions of dollars may be transferred annually from one part of the community to another; when I consider the disguise of disinterested patriotism under which the basest and most profligate ambition may perpetrate such an act of injustice and political prostitution, I cannot hesitate, for a moment, to pronounce this very system of indirect bounties, the most stupendous instrument of corruption ever placed in the hands of public functionaries. It brings ambition and avarice and wealth into a combination, which it is fearful to contemplate, because it is almost impossible to resist. Do we not perceive, at this very moment, the extraordinary and melancholy spectacle of less than one hundred thousand capitalists, by means of this unhallowed combination, exercising an absolute and despotic control over the opinions of eight millions of free citizens, and the fortunes and destinies of ten millions? Sir, I will not anticipate or forebode evil. I will not permit myself to believe that the Presidency of the United States will ever be bought and sold, by this system of bounties and prohibitions. But I must say that there are certain quarters of this Union in which, if a candidate for the Presidency were to come forward with the Harrisburg tariff in his hand, nothing could resist his pretensions, if his adversary were opposed to this unjust system of oppression. Yes, sir, that bill would be a talisman which would give a charmed existence to the candidate who would pledge himself to support it. And although he were covered with all the "multiplying villanies of nature," the most immaculate patriot and profound statesman in the nation could hold no competition with him, if he should refuse to grant this new species of imperial donative."

Allusions were constantly made to the combination of manufacturing capitalists and politicians in pressing this bill. There was evidently foundation for the imputation. The scheme of it had been conceived in a convention of manufacturers in the State of Pennsylvania, and had been taken up by politicians, and was pushed as a party measure, and with the visible purpose of influencing the presidential election. In fact these tariff bills, each exceeding the other in its degree of protection, had become a regular appendage of our presidential elections--coming round in every cycle of four years, with that returning event. The year 1816 was the starting point: 1820, and 1824, and now 1828, having successively renewed the measure, with successive augmentations of duties. The South believed itself impoverished to enrich the North by this system; and certainly a singular and unexpected result had been seen in these two sections. In the colonial state, the Southern were the rich part of the colonies, and expected to do well in a state of independence. They had the exports, and felt secure of their prosperity: not so of the North, whose agricultural resources were few, and who expected privations from the loss of British favor. But in the first half century after Independence this expectation was reversed. The wealth of the North was enormously aggrandized: that of the South had declined. Northern towns had become great cities: Southern cities had decayed, or become stationary; and Charleston, the principal port of the South, was less considerable than before the Revolution. The North became a money-lender to the South, and southern citizens made pilgrimages to northern cities, to raise money upon the hypothecation of their patrimonial estates. And this in the face of a southern export since the Revolution to the value of eight hundred millions of dollars!--a sum equal to the product of the Mexican mines since the days of Cortez! and twice or thrice the amount of their product in the same fifty years. The Southern States attributed this result to the action of the federal government--its double action of levying revenue upon the industry of one section of the Union and expending it in another--and especially to its protective tariffs. To some degree this attribution was just, but not to the degree assumed; which is evident from the fact that the protective system had then only been in force for a short time--since the year 1816; and the reversed condition of the two sections of the Union had commenced before that time. Other causes must have had some effect: but for the present we look to the protective system; and, without admitting it to have done all the mischief of which the South complained, it had yet done enough to cause it to be condemned by every friend to equal justice among the States--by every friend to the harmony and stability of the Union--by all who detested sectional legislation--by every enemy to the mischievous combination of partisan politics with national legislation. And this was the feeling with the mass of the democratic members who voted for the tariff of 1828, and who were determined to act upon that feeling upon the overthrow of the political party which advocated the protective system; and which overthrow they believed to be certain at the ensuing presidential election.

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Chapter XXXV

THE PUBLIC LANDS--THEIR PROPER DISPOSITION--GRADUATED PRICES--PRE-EMPTION RIGHTS--DONATIONS TO SETTLERS.

About the year 1785 the celebrated Edmund Burke brought a bill into the British House of Commons for the sale of the crown lands, in which he laid down principles in political economy, in relation to such property, profoundly sagacious in themselves, applicable to all sovereign landed possessions, whether of kings or republics--applicable in all countries--and nowhere more applicable and less known or observed, than in the United States. In the course of the speech in support of his bill he said:

"Lands sell at the current rate, and nothing can sell for more. But be the price what it may; a great object is always answered, whenever any property is transferred from hands which are not fit for that property, to those that are. The buyer and the seller must mutually profit by such a bargain; and, what rarely happens in matters of revenue, the relief of the subject will go hand in hand with the profit of the Exchequer. * * * The revenue to be derived from the sale of the forest lands will not be so considerable as many have imagined; and I conceive it would be unwise to screw it up to the utmost, or even to suffer bidders to enhance, according to their eagerness, the purchase of objects, wherein the expense of that purchase may weaken the capital to be employed in their cultivation. * * * The principal revenue which I propose to draw from these uncultivated wastes, is to spring from the improvement and population of the kingdom; events infinitely more advantageous to the revenues of the crown than the rents of the best landed estate which it can hold. * * * It is thus I would dispose of the unprofitable landed estates of the crown: throw them into the mass of private property: by which they will come, through the course of circulation and through the political secretions of the State into well-regulated revenue. * * * Thus would fall an expensive agency, with all the influence which attends it."

I do not know how old, or rather, how young I was, when I first took up the notion that sales of land by a government to its own citizens, and to the highest bidder, was false policy; and that gratuitous grants to actual settlers was the true policy, and their labor the true way of extracting national wealth and strength from the soil. It might have been in childhood, when reading the Bible, and seeing the division of the promised land among the children of Israel: it might have been later, and in learning the operation of the feudal system in giving lands to those who would defend them: it might have been in early life in Tennessee, in seeing the fortunes and respectability of many families derived from the 640 acre head-rights which the State of North Carolina had bestowed upon the first settlers. It was certainly before I had read the speech of Burke from which the extract above is taken; for I did not see that speech until 1826; and seventeen years before that time, when a very young member of the General Assembly of Tennessee, I was fully imbued with the doctrine of donations to settlers, and acted upon the principle that was in me, as far as the case admitted, in advocating the pre-emption claims of the settlers on Big and Little Pigeon, French Broad, and Nolichucky. And when I came to the then Territory of Missouri in 1815, and saw land exposed to sale to the highest bidder, and lead mines and salt springs reserved from sale, and rented out for the profit of the federal treasury, I felt repugnance to the whole system, and determined to make war upon it whenever I should have the power. The time came round with my election to the Senate of the United States in 1820: and the years 1824, '26, and '28, found me doing battle for an ameliorated system of disposing of our public lands; and with some success. The pre-emption system was established, though at first the pre-emption claimant was stigmatized as a trespasser, and repulsed as a criminal; the reserved lead mines and salt springs, in the State of Missouri, were brought into market, like other lands; iron ore lands, intended to have been withheld from sale, were rescued from that fate, and brought into market. Still the two repulsive features of the federal land system--sales to the highest bidder, and donations to no one--with an arbitrary minimum price which placed the cost of all lands, good and bad, at the same uniform rate (after the auctions were over), at one dollar twenty-five cents per acre. I resolved to move against the whole system, and especially in favor of graduated prices, and donations to actual and destitute settlers. I did so in a bill, renewed annually for a long time; and in speeches which had more effect upon the public mind than upon the federal legislation--counteracted as my plan was by schemes of dividing the public lands, or the money arising from their sale, among the States. It was in support of one of these bills that I produced the authority of Burke in the extract quoted; and no one took its spirit and letter more promptly and entirely than President Jackson. He adopted the principle fully, and in one of his annual messages to Congress recommended that, as soon as the public (revolutionary) debt should be discharged (to the payment of which the lands ceded by the States were pledged), that they should CEASE TO BE A SUBJECT OF REVENUE, AND BE DISPOSED OF CHIEFLY WITH A VIEW TO SETTLEMENT AND CULTIVATION. His terms of service expired soon after the extinction of the debt, so that he had not an opportunity to carry out his wise and beneficent design.

Mr. Burke considered the revenue derived from the sale of crown lands as a trifle, and of no account, compared to the amount of revenue derivable from the same lands through their settlement and cultivation. He was profoundly right! and provably so, both upon reason and experience. The sale of the land is a single operation. Some money is received, and the cultivation is disabled to that extent from its improvement and cultivation. The cultivation is perennial, and the improved condition of the farmer enables him to pay taxes, and consume dutiable goods, and to sell the products which command the imports which pay duties to the government, and this is the "well-regulated revenue" which comes through the course of circulation, and through the "political secretions" of the State, and which Mr. Burke commends above all revenue derived from the sale of lands. Does any one know the comparative amount of revenue derived respectively from the sales and from the cultivation of lands in any one of our new States where the federal government was the proprietor, and the auctioneer, of the lands? and can he tell which mode of raising money has been most productive? Take Alabama, for example. How much has the treasury received for lands sold within her limits? and how much in duties paid on imports purchased with the exports derived from her soil? Perfect exactitude cannot be attained in the answer, but exact enough to know that the latter already exceeds the former several times, ten times over; and is perennial and increasing for ever! while the sale of the land has been a single operation, performed once, and not to be repeated; and disabling the cultivator by the loss of the money it took from him. Taken on a large scale, and applied to the whole United States, and the answer becomes more definite--but still not entirely exact. The whole annual receipts from land sales at this time (1850) are about two millions of dollars: the annual receipts from customs, founded almost entirely upon the direct or indirect productions of the earth, exceed fifty millions of dollars! giving a comparative difference of twenty-five to one for cultivation over sales; and triumphantly sustaining Mr. Burke's theory. I have looked into the respective amounts of federal revenue, received into the treasury from these two sources, since the establishment of the federal government; and find the customs to have yielded, in that time, a fraction over one thousand millions of dollars net--the lands to have yielded a little less than one hundred and thirty millions gross, not forty millions clear after paying all expenses of surveys, sales and management. This is a difference of twenty-five to one--with the further difference of endless future production from one, and no future production from the land once sold; that is to say, the same acre of land is paying for ever through cultivation, and pays but once for itself in purchase.

Thus far I have considered Mr. Burke's theory only under one of its aspects--the revenue aspect: he presents another--that of population--and here all measure of comparison ceases. The sale of land brings no people: cultivation produces population: and people are the true wealth and strength of nations. These various views were presented, and often enforced, in the course of the several speeches which I made in support of my graduation and donation bills: and, on the point of population, and of freeholders, against tenants, I gave utterance to these sentiments:

"Tenantry is unfavorable to freedom. It lays the foundation for separate orders in society, annihilates the love of country, and weakens the spirit of independence. The farming tenant has, in fact, no country, no hearth, no domestic altar, no household god. The freeholder, on the contrary, is the natural supporter of a free government; and it should be the policy of republics to multiply their freeholders, as it is the policy of monarchies to multiply tenants. We are a republic, and we wish to continue so: then multiply the class of freeholders; pass the public lands cheaply and easily into the hands of the people; sell, for a reasonable price, to those who are able to pay; and give, without price, to those who are not. I say give, without price, to those who are not able to pay; and that which is given, I consider as sold for the best of prices; for a price above gold and silver; a price which cannot be carried away by delinquent officers, nor lost in failing banks, nor stolen by thieves, nor squandered by an improvident and extravagant administration. It brings a price above rubies--a race of virtuous and independent laborers, the true supporters of their country, and the stock from which its best defenders must be drawn.

"'What constitutes a State? Not high-rais'd battlements, nor labored mound, Thick wall, nor moated gate; Nor cities proud, with spires and turrets crown'd, Nor starr'd and spangled courts, Where low-born baseness wafts perfume to pride: But MEN! high-minded men, Who their duties know, but know their RIGHTS, And, knowing, dare maintain them.'"

In favor of low prices, and donations, I quoted the example and condition of the Atlantic States of this Union--all settled under liberal systems of land distribution which dispensed almost (or altogether in many instances) with sales for money. I said:

"These Atlantic States were donations from the British crown; and the great proprietors distributed out their possessions with a free and generous hand. A few shillings for a hundred acres, a nominal quitrent, and gifts of a hundred, five hundred, and a thousand acres, to actual settlers: such were the terms on which they dealt out the soil which is now covered by a nation of freemen. Provinces, which now form sovereign States, were sold from hand to hand, for a less sum than the federal government now demands for an area of two miles square. I could name instances. I could name the State of Maine--a name, for more reasons than one, familiar and agreeable to Missouri, and whose pristine territory was sold by Sir Ferdinando Gorges to the proprietors of the Massachusetts Bay, for twelve hundred pounds, provincial money. And well it was for Maine that she was so sold; well it was for her that the modern policy of waiting for the rise, and sticking at a minimum of $1 25, was not then in vogue, or else Maine would have been a desert now. Instead of a numerous, intelligent, and virtuous population, we should have had trees and wild beasts. My respectable friend, the senator from that State (Gen. Chandler), would not have been here to watch so steadily the interest of the public, and to oppose the bills which I bring in for the relief of the land claimants. And I mention this to have an opportunity to do justice to the integrity of his heart, and to the soundness of his understanding--qualities in which he is excelled by no senator--and to express my belief that we will come together upon the final passage of this bill: for the cardinal points in our policy are the same--economy in the public expenditures, and the prompt extinction of the public debt. I say, well it was for Maine that she was sold for the federal price of four sections of Alabama pine, Louisiana swamp, or Missouri prairie. Well it was for every State in this Union, that their soil was sold for a song, or given as a gift to whomsoever would take it. Happy for them, and for the liberty of the human race, that the kings of England and the "Lords Proprietors," did not conceive the luminous idea of waiting for the rise, and sticking to a minimum of $1 25 per acre. Happy for Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio, that they were settled under States, and not under the federal government. To this happy exemption they owe their present greatness and prosperity. When they were settled, the State laws prevailed in the acquisition of lands; and donations, pre-emptions, and settlement rights, and sales at two cents the acre, were the order of the day. I include Ohio, and I do it with a knowledge of what I say: for ten millions of her soil,--that which now constitutes her chief wealth and strength,--were settled upon the liberal principles which I mention. The federal system only fell upon fifteen millions of her soil; and, of that quantity, the one half now lies waste and useless, paying no tax to the State, yielding nothing to agriculture, desert spots in the midst of a smiling garden, "waiting for the rise," and exhibiting, in high and bold relief, the miserable folly of prescribing an arbitrary minimum upon that article which is the gift of God to man, and which no parental government has ever attempted to convert into a source of revenue and an article of merchandise."

Against the policy of holding up refuse lands until they should rise to the price of good land, and against the reservation of saline and mineral lands, and making money by boiling salt water, and digging lead ore, or holding a body of tenantry to boil and dig, I delivered these sentiments:

"I do trust and believe, Mr. President, that the Executive of this free government will not be second to George the Third in patriotism, nor an American Congress prove itself inferior to a British Parliament in political wisdom. I do trust and believe that this whole system of holding up land for the rise, endeavoring to make revenue out of the soil of the country, leasing and renting lead mines, salt springs, and iron banks, with all its train of penal laws and civil and military agents, will be condemned and abolished. I trust that the President himself will give the subject a place in his next message, and lend the aid of his recommendation to the success of so great an object. The mining operations, especially, should fix the attention of the Congress. They are a reproach to the age in which we live. National mining is condemned by every dictate of prudence, by every maxim of political economy, and by the voice of experience in every age and country. And yet we are engaged in that business. This splendid federal government, created for great national purposes, has gone to work among the lead mines of Upper Louisiana, to give us a second edition, no doubt, of the celebrated "Mississippi Scheme" of John Law. For that scheme was nothing more nor less than a project of making money out of the same identical mines. Yes, Mr. President, upon the same identical theatre, among the same holes and pits, dug by John Law's men in 1720; among the cinders, ashes, broken picks, and mouldering furnaces, of that celebrated projector, is our federal government now at work; and, that no circumstance should be wanting to complete the folly of such an undertaking, the task of extracting "revenue" from these operations, is confided, not to the Treasury, but to the War Department.

"Salines and salt springs are subjected to the same system--reserved from sale, and leased for the purpose of raising revenue. But I flatter myself that I see the end of this branch of the system. The debate which took place a few weeks ago on the bill to repeal the existing duty upon salt, is every word of it applicable to the bill which I have introduced for the sale of the reserved salt springs. I claim the benefit of it accordingly, and shall expect the support of all the advocates for the repeal of that tax, whenever the bill for the sale of the salines shall be put to the vote."

Argument and sarcasm had their effect, in relation to the mineral and saline reserves in the State in which I lived--the State of Missouri. An act was passed in 1828 to throw them into the mass of private property--to sell them like other public lands. And thus the federal government, in that State, got rid of a degrading and unprofitable pursuit; and the State got citizen freeholders instead of federal tenants; and profitably were developed in the hands of individuals the pursuits of private industry which languished and stagnated in the hands of federal agents and tenants. But it was continued for some time longer (so far as lead ore was concerned) on the Upper Mississippi, and until an argument arrived which commanded the respect of the legislature: it was the argument of profit and loss--an argument which often touches a nerve which is dead to reason. Mr. Polk, in his message to Congress at the session of 1845-'46 (the first of his administration), stated that the expenses of the system during the preceding four years--those of Mr. Tyler's administration--were twenty-six thousand one hundred and eleven dollars, and eleven cents; and the whole amount of rents received during the same period was six thousand three hundred and fifty-four dollars, and seventy-four cents: and recommended the abolition of the whole system, and the sale of the reserved mines; which was done; and thus was completed for the Upper Mississippi what I had done for Missouri near twenty years before.

The advantage of giving land to those who would settle and cultivate it, was illustrated in one of my speeches, by reciting the case of "Granny White"--well known in her time to all the population of Middle Tennessee, and especially to all who travelled south from Nashville, along the great road which crossed the "divide" between the Cumberland and Harpeth waters, at the evergreen tree which gave name to the gap--the Holly Tree Gap. The aged woman, and her fortunes, were thus introduced into our senatorial debates and lodged on a page of our parliamentary history, to enlighten, by her incidents, the councils of national legislation:

"At the age of sixty, she had been left a widow, in one of the counties in the tide-water region of North Carolina. Her poverty was so extreme, that when she went to the county court to get a couple of little orphan grandchildren bound to her, the Justices refused to let her have them, because she could not give security to keep them off the parish. This compelled her to emigrate; and she set off with the two little boys, upon a journey of eight or nine hundred miles, to what was then called "the Cumberland Settlement." Arrived in the neighborhood of Nashville, a generous-hearted Irishman (his name deserves to be remembered--Thomas McCrory) let her have a corner of his land, on her own terms,--a nominal price and indefinite credit. It was fifty acres in extent, and comprised the two faces of a pair of confronting hills, whose precipitous declivities lacked a few degrees, and but a few, of mathematical perpendicularity. Mr. B. said he knew it well, for he had seen the old lady's pumpkins propped and supported with stakes, to prevent their ponderous weight from tearing up the vine, and rolling to the bottom of the hills. There was just room at their base for a road to run between, and not room for a house, to find a level place for its foundation; for which purpose a part of the hill had to be dug away. Yet, from this hopeless beginning, with the advantage of a little piece of ground that was her own, this aged widow, and two little grandchildren, of eight or nine years old, advanced herself to comparative wealth: money, slaves, horses, cattle; and her fields extended into the valley below, and her orphan grandchildren, raised up to honor and independence: these were the fruits of economy and industry, and a noble illustration of the advantage of giving land to the poor. But the federal government would have demanded sixty-two dollars and fifty cents for that land, cash in hand; and old Granny White and her grandchildren might have lived in misery and sunk into vice, before the opponents of this bill would have taken less."

I quoted the example of all nations, ancient and modern, republican and monarchical, in favor of giving lands, in parcels suitable to their wants, to meritorious cultivators; and denied that there was an instance upon earth, except that of our own federal government, which made merchandise of land to its citizens--exacted the highest price it could obtain--and refused to suffer the country to be settled until it was paid for. The "promised land" was divided among the children of Israel--the women getting a share where there was no man at the head of the family--as with the daughters of Manasseh. All the Atlantic States, when British colonies, were settled upon gratuitous donations, or nominal sales. Kentucky and Tennessee were chiefly settled in the same way. The two Floridas, and Upper and Lower Louisiana, were gratuitously distributed by the kings of Spain to settlers, in quantities adapted to their means of cultivation--and with the whole vacant domain to select from according to their pleasure. Land is now given to settlers in Canada; and £30,000 sterling, has been voted at a single session of Parliament, to aid emigrants in their removal to these homes, and commencing life upon them. The republic of Colombia now gives 400 acres to a settler: other South American republics give more or less. Quoting these examples, I added:

"Such, Mr. President, is the conduct of the free republics of the South. I say republics: for it is the same in all of them, and it would be tedious and monotonous to repeat their numerous decrees. In fact, throughout the New World, from Hudson's Bay to Cape Horn (with the single exception of these United States), land, the gift of God to man, is also the gift of the government to its citizens. Nor is this wise policy confined to the New World. It prevails even in Asia; and the present age has seen--we ourselves have seen--published in the capital of the European world, the proclamation of the King of Persia, inviting Christians to go to the ancient kingdom of Cyrus, Cambyses and Darius, and there receive gifts of land--first rate, not refuse--with a total exemption from taxes, and the free enjoyment of their religion. Here is the proclamation: listen to it.

The Proclamation.

"'Mirza Mahomed Saul, Ambassador to England, in the name, and by the authority of Abbas Mirza, King of Persia, offers to those who shall emigrate to Persia, gratuitous grants of land, good for the production of wheat, barley, rice, cotton, and fruits,--free from taxes or contributions of any kind, and with the free enjoyment of their religion; THE KING'S OBJECT BEING TO IMPROVE HIS COUNTRY.

"'London, July 8th, 1823.'"

The injustice of holding all lands at one uniform price, waiting for the cultivation of the good land to give value to the poor, and for the poorest to rise to the value of the richest, was shown in a reference to private sales, of all articles; in the whole of which sales the price was graduated to suit different qualities of the same article. The heartless and miserly policy of waiting for government land to be enhanced in value by the neighboring cultivation of private land, was denounced as unjust as well as unwise. The new States of the West were the sufferers by this federal land policy. They were in a different condition from other States. In these others, the local legislatures held the primary disposal of the soil,--so much as remained vacant within their limits,--and being of the same community, made equitable alienations among their constituents. In the new States it was different. The federal government held the primary disposition of the soil; and the majority of Congress (being independent of the people of these States), was less heedful of their wants and wishes. They were as a stepmother, instead of a natural mother: and the federal government being sole purchaser from foreign nations, and sole recipient of Indian cessions, it became the monopolizer of vacant lands in the West: and this monopoly, like all monopolies, resulted in hardships to those upon whom it acted. Few, or none of our public men, had raised their voice against this hard policy before I came into the national councils. My own was soon raised there against it: and it is certain that a great amelioration has taken place in our federal land policy during my time: and that the sentiment of Congress, and that of the public generally, has become much more liberal in land alienations; and is approximating towards the beneficent systems of the rest of the world. But the members in Congress from the new States should not intermit their exertions, nor vary their policy; and should fix their eyes steadily upon the period of the speedy extinction of the federal title to all the lands within the limits of their respective States;--to be effected by pre-emption rights, by donations, and by the sale (of so much as shall be sold), at graduated prices,--adapted to the different qualities of the tracts, to be estimated according to the time it has remained in market unsold--and by liberal grants to objects of general improvement, both national and territorial.

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Chapter XXXVI

CESSION OF A PART OF THE TERRITORY OF ARKANSAS TO THE CHEROKEE INDIANS.

Arkansas was an organized territory, and had been so since the year 1819. Her western boundary was established by act of Congress in May 1824 (chiefly by the exertions of her then delegate, Henry W. Conway),--and was an extension of her existing boundary on that side; and for national and State reasons. It was an outside territory--beyond the Mississippi--a frontier both to Mexico (then brought deep into the Valley of the Mississippi by the Florida treaty which gave away Texas), and to the numerous Indian tribes then being removed from the South Atlantic States to the west of the Mississippi. It was, therefore, a point of national policy to make her strong--to make her a first class State,--both for her own sake and that of the Union,--and equal to all the exigencies of her advanced and frontier position. The extension was on the west--the boundaries on the other three sides being fixed and immovable--and added a fertile belt--a parallelogram of forty miles by three hundred along her whole western border--and which was necessary to compensate for the swamp lands in front on the river, and to give to her certain valuable salt springs there existing, and naturally appurtenant to the territory, and essential to its inhabitants. Even with this extension the territory was still deficient in arable land--not as strong as her frontier position required her to be, nor susceptible (on account of swamps and sterile districts) of the population and cultivation which her superficial contents and large boundaries would imply her to be. Territorially, and in mere extent, the western addition was a fourth part of the territory: agriculturally, and in capacity for population, the addition might be equal to half of the whole territory; and its acquisition was celebrated as a most auspicious event for Arkansas at the time that it occurred.

In the month of May, 1828, by a treaty negotiated at Washington by the Secretary at War, Mr. James Barbour, on one side, and the chiefs of the Cherokee nation on the other, this new western boundary for the territory was abolished--the old line re-established: and what had been an addition to the territory of Arkansas, was ceded to the Cherokees. On the ratification of this treaty several questions arose, all raised by myself--some of principle, some of expediency--as, whether a law of Congress could be abolished by an Indian treaty? and whether it was expedient so to reduce, and thus weaken the territory (and future State) of Arkansas? I was opposed to the treaty, and held the negative of both questions, and argued against them with zeal and perseverance. The supremacy of the treaty-making power I held to be confined to subjects within its sphere, and quoted "Jefferson's Manual," to show that that was the sense in which the clause in the constitution was understood. The treaty-making power was supreme; but that supremacy was within its proper orbit, and free from the invasion of the legislative, executive, or judicial department. The proper objects of treaties were international interests, which neither party could regulate by municipal law, and which required a joint consent, and a double execution, to give it effect. Tried by this test, and this Indian treaty lost its supremacy. The subject was one of ordinary legislation, and specially and exclusively confined to Congress. It was to repeal a law which Congress had made in relation to territory; and to reverse the disposition which Congress had made of a part of its territory. To Congress it belonged to dispose of territory; and to her it belonged to repeal her own laws. The treaty avoided the word "repeal," while doing the thing: it used the word "abolish"--which was the same in effect, and more arrogant and offensive--not appropriate to legislation, and evidently used to avoid the use of a word which would challenge objection. If the word "repeal" had been used, every one would have felt that the ordinary legislation of Congress was flagrantly invaded; and the avoidance of that word, and the substitution of another of the same meaning, could have no effect in legalizing a transaction which would be condemned under its proper name. And so I held the treaty to be invalid for want of a proper subject to act upon, and because it invaded the legislative department.

The inexpediency of the treaty was in the question of crippling and mutilating Arkansas, reducing her to the class of weak States, and that against all the reasons which had induced Congress, four years before, to add on twelve thousand square miles to her domain; and to almost double the productive and inhabitable capacity of the Territory, and future State, by the character of the country added. I felt this wrong to Arkansas doubly, both as a neighbor to my own State, and because, having a friendship for the delegate, as well as for his territory, I had exerted myself to obtain the addition which had been thus cut off. I argued, as I thought, conclusively; but in vain. The treaty was largely ratified, and by a strong slaveholding vote, notwithstanding it curtailed slave territory, and made soil free which was then slave. Anxious to defeat the treaty for the benefit of Arkansas, I strongly presented this consequence, showing that there was, not only legal, but actually slavery upon the amputated part--that these twelve thousand square miles were inhabited, organized into counties, populous in some parts, and with the due proportion of slaves found in a southern and planting State. Nothing would do. It was a southern measure, negotiated, on the record, by a southern secretary at war, in reality by the clerk McKinney; and voted for by nineteen approving slaveholding senators against four dissenting. The affirmative vote was: Messrs. Barton, Berrien, Bouligny, Branch, Ezekiel Chambers, Cobb, King of Alabama, McKinley, McLane of Delaware, Macon, Ridgely, Smith of Maryland, Smith of South Carolina, John Tyler of Virginia, and Williams of Mississippi. The negative was, Messrs. Benton, Eaton, Rowan, and Tazewell.--Mr. Calhoun was then Vice-President, and did not vote; but he was in favor of the treaty, and assisted its ratification through his friends. The House of Representatives voted the appropriations to carry it into effect; and thus acquiesced in the repeal of an act of Congress by the President, Senate, and Cherokee Indians; and these appropriations were voted with the general concurrence of the southern members of the House. And thus another slice, and a pretty large one (twelve thousand square miles), was taken off of slave territory in the former province of Louisiana; which about completed the excision of what had been left for slave State occupation after the Missouri compromise of 1820, and the cession to Texas of contemporaneous date, and previous cessions to Indian tribes. And all this was the work of southern men, who then saw no objection to the Congressional legislation which acted upon slavery in territories--which further curtailed, and even extinguished slave soil in all the vast expanse of the former Louisiana--save and except the comparative little that was left in the State of Missouri and in the mutilated Territory of Arkansas. The reason of the southern members for promoting this amputation of Arkansas in favor of the Cherokees, was simply to assist in inducing their removal by adding the best part of Arkansas, with its salt springs, to the ample millions of acres west of that territory already granted to them; but it was a gratuitous sacrifice, as the large part of the tribe had already emigrated to the seven millions of acres, and the remainder were waiting for moneyed inducements to follow. And besides, the desire for this removal could have no effect upon the constitutional power of Congress to legislate upon slavery in territories, or upon the policy which curtails the boundaries of a future slave State.

I have said that the amputated part of Arkansas was an organized part of the territory, divided into counties, settled and cultivated. Now, what became of these inhabitants?--their property? and possessions? They were bought out by the federal government! A simultaneous act was passed, making a donation of three hundred and twenty acres of land (within the remaining part of Arkansas), to each head of a family who would retire from the amputated part; and subjecting all to military removal that did not retire. It was done. They all withdrew. Three hundred and twenty acres of land in front to attract them, and regular troops in the rear to push them, presented a motive power adequate to its object; and twelve thousand square miles of slave territory was evacuated by its inhabitants, with their flocks, and herds, and slaves; and not a word was said about it; and the event has been forgotten. But it is necessary to recall its recollection, as an important act, in itself, in relation to the new State of Arkansas--as being the work of the South--and as being necessary to be known in order to understand subsequent events.

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XXXVII. RENEWAL OF THE OREGON JOINT OCCUPATION CONVENTION

The American settlement at the mouth of the Columbia, or Oregon, was made in 1811. It was an act of private enterprise, done by the eminent merchant, Mr. John Jacob Astor, of New-York; and the young town christened after his own name, Astoria: but it was done with the countenance and stipulated approbation of the government of the United States; and an officer of the United States navy--the brave Lieutenant Thorn, who was with Decatur at Tripoli, and who afterwards blew up his ship in Nootka Sound to avoid her capture by the savages (blowing himself, crew and savages all into the air),--was allowed to command his (Mr. Astor's) leading vessel, in order to impress upon the enterprise the seal of nationality. This town was captured during the war of 1812, by a ship of war detached for that purpose, by Commodore Hillyar, commanding a British squadron in the Pacific Ocean. No attempt was made to recover it during the war; and, at Ghent, after some efforts on the part of the British commissioners, to set up a title to it, its restitution was stipulated under the general clause which provided for the restoration of all places captured by either party. But it was not restored. An empty ceremony was gone through to satisfy the words of the treaty, and to leave the place in the hands of the British. An American agent, Mr. John Baptist Prevost, was sent to Valparaiso, to go in a British sloop of war (the Blossom) to receive the place, to sign a receipt for it, and leave it in the hands of the British. This was in the autumn of the year 1818; and coincident with that nominal restitution was the conclusion of a convention in London between the United States and British government, for the joint occupation of the Columbia for ten years--Mr. Gallatin and Mr. Rush the American negotiators--if those can be called negotiators who are tied down to particular instructions. The joint occupancy was provided for, and in these words: "That any country claimed by either party on the northwest coast of America, together with its harbors, bays, and creeks, and the navigation of all rivers within the same, be free and open, for the term of ten years, to the subjects, citizens, and vessels of the two powers; without prejudice to any claim which either party might have to any part of the country."--I was a practising lawyer at St. Louis, no way engaged in politics, at the time this convention was published; but I no sooner saw it than I saw its delusive nature--its one-sidedness--and the whole disastrous consequences which were to result from it to the United States; and immediately wrote and published articles against it: of which the following is an extract:

"This is a specimen of the skill with which the diplomatic art deposits the seeds of a new contestation in the assumed settlement of an existing one,--and gives unequal privileges in words of equality,--and breeds a serious question, to be ended perhaps by war, where no question at all existed. Every word of the article for this joint occupation is a deception and a blunder--suggesting a belief for which there is no foundation, granting privileges for which there is no equivalent, and presenting ambiguities which require to be solved--peradventure by the sword. It speaks as if there was a mutuality of countries on the northwest coast to which the article was applicable, and a mutuality of benefits to accrue to the citizens of both governments by each occupying the country claimed by the other. Not so the fact. There is but one country in question, and that is our own;--and of this the British are to have equal possession with ourselves, and we no possession of theirs. The Columbia is ours; Frazer's River is a British possession to which no American ever went, or ever will go. The convention gives a joint right of occupying the ports and harbors, and of navigating the rivers of each other. This would imply that each government possessed in that quarter, ports, and harbors, and navigable rivers; and were about to bring them into hotch-potch for mutual enjoyment. No such thing. There is but one port, and that the mouth of the Columbia--but one river, and that the Columbia itself: and both port and river our own. We give the equal use of these to the British, and receive nothing in return. The convention says that the "claim" of neither party is to be prejudiced by the joint possession. This admits that Great Britain has a claim--a thing never admitted before by us, nor pretended by her. At Ghent she stated no claim, and could state none. Her ministers merely asked for the river as a boundary, as being the most convenient; and for the use of the harbor at its mouth, as being necessary to their ships and trade; but stated no claim. Our commissioners reported that they (the British commissioners) endeavored 'to lay a nest-egg' for a future pretension; which they failed to do at Ghent in 1815, but succeeded in laying in London in 1818; and before the ten years are out, a full grown fighting chicken will be hatched of that egg. There is no mutuality in any thing. We furnish the whole stake--country, river, harbor; and shall not even maintain the joint use of our own. We shall be driven out of it, and the British remain sole possessors. The fur trade is the object. It will fare with our traders on the Columbia under this convention as it fared with them on the Miami of the Lakes (and on the lakes themselves), under the British treaties of '94 and '96, which admitted British traders into our territories. Our traders will be driven out; and that by the fair competition of trade, even if there should be no foul play. The difference between free and dutied goods, would work that result. The British traders pay no duties: ours pay above an average of fifty per centum. No trade can stand against such odds. But the competition will not be fair. The savages will be incited to kill and rob our traders, and they will be expelled by violence, without waiting the slower, but equally certain process, of expulsion by underselling. The result then is, that we admit the British into our country, our river, and our harbor; and we get no admittance into theirs, for they have none--Frazer's River and New Caledonia being out of the question--that they will become sole possessors of our river, our harbor, and our country; and at the end of the ten years will have an admitted 'claim' to our property, and the actual possession of it."

Thus I wrote in the year 1818, when the joint occupation convention of that year was promulgated. I wrote in advance; and long before the ten years were out, it was all far more than verified. Our traders were not only driven from the mouth of the Columbia River, but from all its springs and branches;--not only from all the Valley of the Columbia, but from the whole region of the Rocky Mountains between 49 and 42 degrees;--not only from all this mountain region, but from the upper waters of all our far distant rivers--the Missouri, the Yellow Stone, the Big Horn, the North Platte; and all their mountain tributaries. And, by authentic reports made to our government, not less than five hundred of our citizens had been killed, nor less than five hundred thousand dollars worth of goods and furs robbed from them;--the British remaining the undisturbed possessors of all the Valley of the Columbia, acting as its masters, and building forts from the sea to the mountains. This was the effect of the first joint occupation treaty, and every body in the West saw its approaching termination with pleasure; but the false step which the government had made induced another. They had admitted a "claim" on the part of Great Britain, and given her the sole, under the name of a joint, possession; and now to get her out was the difficulty. It could not be done; and the United States agreed to a further continued "joint" occupation (as it was illusively called in the renewed convention), not for ten years more, but "indefinitely," determinable on one year's notice from either party to the other. The reason for this indefinite, and injurious continuance, was set forth in the preamble to the renewed convention (Mr. Gallatin now the sole United States negotiator); and recited that the two governments "being desirous to prevent, as far as possible, all hazard of misunderstanding, and with a view to give further time for maturing measures which shall have for their object a more definite settlement of the claims of each party to the said territory;" did thereupon agree to renew the joint occupation article of the convention of 1818, &c. Thus, we had, by our diplomacy in 1818, and by the permitted non-execution of the Ghent treaty in the delivery of the post and country, hatched a question which threatened a "misunderstanding" between the two countries; and for maturing measures for the settlement of which indefinite time was required--and granted--Great Britain remaining, in the mean time, sole occupant of the whole country. This was all that she could ask, and all that we could grant, even if we actually intended to give up the country.

I was a member of the Senate when this renewed convention was sent in for ratification, and opposed it with all the zeal and ability of which I was master: but in vain. The weight of the administration, the indifference of many to a remote object, the desire to put off a difficulty, and the delusive argument that we could terminate it at any time--(a consolation so captivating to gentle temperaments)--were too strong for reason and fact; and I was left in a small minority on the question of ratification. But I did not limit myself to opposition to the treaty. I proposed, as well as opposed; and digested my opinions into three resolves; and had them spread on the executive journal, and made part of our parliamentary history for future reference.

The resolves were: 1. "That it is not expedient for the United States and Great Britain to treat further in relation to their claims on the northwest coast of America, on the basis of a joint occupation by their respective citizens. 2. That it is expedient that the joint-occupation article in the convention of 1818 be allowed to expire upon its own limitation. 3. That it is expedient for the government of the United States to continue to treat with His Britannic Majesty in relation to said claims, on the basis of a separation of interests, and the establishment of a permanent boundary between their dominions westward of the Rocky Mountains, in the shortest possible time." These resolves were not voted upon; but the negative vote on the ratification of the convention showed what the vote would have been if it had been taken. That negative vote was--Messrs. Benton, Thomas W. Cobb of Georgia, Eaton of Tennessee, Ellis of Mississippi, Johnson of Kentucky, Kane of Illinois, and Rowan of Kentucky--in all 7. Eighteen years afterwards, and when we had got to the cry of "inevitable war," I had the gratification to see the whole Senate, all Congress, and all the United States, occupy the same ground in relation to this joint occupation on which only seven senators stood at the time the convention for it was ratified.

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Chapter XXXVIII

PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1828, AND FURTHER ERRORS OF MONS. DE TOCQUEVILLE.

General Jackson and Mr. Adams were the candidates;--with the latter, Mr. Clay (his Secretary of State), so intimately associated in the public mind, on account of the circumstances of the previous presidential election in the House of Representatives, that their names and interests were inseparable during the canvass. General Jackson was elected, having received 178 electoral votes to 83 received by Mr. Adams. Mr. Richard Rush, of Pennsylvania, was the vice-presidential candidate on the ticket of Mr. Adams, and received an equal vote with that gentleman: Mr. Calhoun was the vice-presidential candidate on the ticket with General Jackson, and received a slightly less vote--the deficiency being in Georgia, where the friends of Mr. Crawford still resented his believed connection with the "A. B. plot." In the previous election, he had been neutral between General Jackson and Mr. Adams; but was now decided on the part of the General, and received the same vote every where, except in Georgia. In this election there was a circumstance to be known and remembered. Mr. Adams and Mr. Rush were both from the non-slaveholding--General Jackson and Mr. Calhoun from the slaveholding States, and both large slave owners themselves--and both received a large vote (73 each) in the free States--and of which at least forty were indispensable to their election. There was no jealousy, or hostile, or aggressive spirit in the North at that time against the South!

The election of General Jackson was a triumph of democratic principle, and an assertion of the people's right to govern themselves. That principle had been violated in the presidential election in the House of Representatives in the session of 1824-'25; and the sanction, or rebuke, of that violation was a leading question in the whole canvass. It was also a triumph over the high protective policy, and the federal internal improvement policy, and the latitudinous construction of the constitution; and of the democracy over the federalists, then called national republicans; and was the re-establishment of parties on principle, according to the landmarks of the early ages of the government. For although Mr. Adams had received confidence and office from Mr. Madison and Mr. Monroe, and had classed with the democratic party during the fusion of parties in the "era of good feeling," yet he had previously been federal; and in the re-establishment of old party lines which began to take place after the election of Mr. Adams in the House of Representatives, his affinities, and policy, became those of his former party: and as a party, with many individual exceptions, they became his supporters and his strength. General Jackson, on the contrary, had always been democratic, so classing when he was a senator in Congress under the administration of the first Mr. Adams, and when party lines were most straightly drawn, and upon principle: and as such now receiving the support of men and States which took their political position at that time, and had maintained it ever since--Mr. Macon and Mr. Randolph, for example, and the States of Virginia and Pennsylvania. And here it becomes my duty to notice an error, or a congeries of errors, of Mons. de Tocqueville, in relation to the causes of General Jackson's election; and which he finds exclusively in the glare of a military fame resulting from "a very ordinary achievement, only to be remembered where battles are rare." He says:

"General Jackson, whom the Americans have twice elected to the head of their government, is a man of a violent temper and mediocre talents. No one circumstance in the whole course of his career ever proved that he is qualified to govern a free people; and, indeed, the majority of the enlightened classes of the Union has always been opposed to him. But he was raised to the Presidency, and has been maintained in that lofty station, solely by the recollection of a victory which he gained twenty years ago, under the walls of New Orleans;--a victory which, however, was a very ordinary achievement, and which could only be remembered in a country where battles are rare."--(Chapter 17.)

This may pass for American history, in Europe and in a foreign language, and even finds abettors here to make it American history in the United States, with a preface and notes to enforce and commend it: but America will find historians of her own to do justice to the national, and to individual character. In the mean time I have some knowledge of General Jackson, and the American people, and the two presidential elections with which they honored the General; and will oppose it, that is, my knowledge, to the flippant and shallow statements of Mons. de Tocqueville. "A man of violent temper." I ought to know something about that--contemporaries will understand the allusion--and I can say that General Jackson had a good temper, kind and hospitable to every body, and a feeling of protection in it for the whole human race, and especially the weaker and humbler part of it. He had few quarrels on his own account; and probably the very ones of which Mons. de Tocqueville had heard were accidental, against his will, and for the succor of friends. "Mediocre talent, and no capacity to govern a free people." In the first place, free people are not governed by any man, but by laws. But to understand the phrase as perhaps intended, that he had no capacity for civil administration, let the condition of the country at the respective periods when he took up, and when he laid down the administration, answer. He found the country in domestic distress--pecuniary distress--and the national and state legislation invoked by leading politicians to relieve it by empirical remedies;--tariffs, to relieve one part of the community by taxing the other;--internal improvement, to distribute pubic money;--a national bank, to cure the paper money evils of which it was the author;--the public lands the pillage of broken bank paper;--depreciated currency and ruined exchanges;--a million and a half of "unavailable funds" in the treasury;--a large public debt;--the public money the prey of banks;--no gold in the country--only twenty millions of dollars in silver, and that in banks which refused, when they pleased, to pay it down in redemption of their own notes, or even to render back to depositors. Stay laws, stop laws, replevin laws, baseless paper, the resource in half the States to save the debtor from his creditor; and national bankrupt laws from Congress, and local insolvent laws, in the States, the demand of every session. Indian tribes occupying a half, or a quarter of the area of southern States, and unsettled questions of wrong and insult, with half the powers of Europe. Such was the state of the country when General Jackson became President: what was it when he left the Presidency? Protective tariffs, and federal internal improvement discarded; the national bank left to expire upon its own limitation; the public lands redeemed from the pillage of broken bank paper; no more "unavailable funds;" an abundant gold and silver currency; the public debt paid off; the treasury made independent of banks; the Indian tribes removed from the States; indemnities obtained from all foreign powers for all past aggressions, and to new ones committed; several treaties obtained from great powers that never would treat with us before; peace, friendship, and commerce with all the world; and the measures established which, after one great conflict with the expiring Bank of the United States, and all her affiliated banks in 1837, put an end to bank dominion in the United States, and all its train of contractions and expansions, panic and suspension, distress and empirical relief. This is the answer which the respective periods of the beginning and the ending of General Jackson's administration gives to the flippant imputation of no capacity for civil government. I pass on to the next. "The majority of the enlightened classes always opposed to him." A majority of those classes which Mons. de Tocqueville would chiefly see in the cities, and along the highways--bankers, brokers, jobbers, contractors, politicians, and speculators--were certainly against him, and he as certainly against them: but the mass of the intelligence of the country was with him! and sustained him in retrieving the country from the deplorable condition in which the "enlightened classes" had sunk it! and in advancing it to that state of felicity at home, and respect abroad, which has made it the envy and admiration of the civilized world, and the absorbent of populations of Europe. I pass on. "Raised to the Presidency and maintained there solely by the recollection of the victory at New Orleans." Here recollection, and military glare, reverse the action of their ever previous attributes, and become stronger, instead of weaker, upon the lapse of time. The victory at New Orleans was gained in the first week of the year 1815; and did not bear this presidential fruit until fourteen and eighteen years afterwards, and until three previous good seasons had passed without production. There was a presidential election in 1816, when the victory was fresh, and the country ringing, and imaginations dazzled with it: but it did not make Jackson President, or even bring him forward as a candidate. The same four years afterwards, at the election of 1820--not even a candidate then. Four years still later, at the election of 1824, he became a candidate, and--was not elected;--receiving but 99 electoral votes out of 261. In the year 1828 he was first elected, receiving 178 out of 261 votes; and in 1832 he was a second time elected, receiving 219 out of 288 votes. Surely there must have been something besides an old military recollection to make these two elections so different from the two former; and there was! That something else was principle! and the same that I have stated in the beginning of this chapter as entering into the canvass of 1828, and ruling its issue. I pass on to the last disparagement. "A victory which was a very ordinary achievement, and only to be remembered where battles were rare." Such was not the battle at New Orleans. It was no ordinary achievement. It was a victory if 4,600 citizens just called from their homes, without knowledge of scientific war, under a leader as little schooled as themselves in that particular, without other advantages than a slight field work (a ditch and a bank of earth) hastily thrown up--over double their numbers of British veterans, survivors of the wars of the French Revolution, victors in the Peninsula and at Toulouse, under trained generals of the Wellington school, and with a disparity of loss never before witnessed. On one side 700 killed (including the first, second and third generals); 1400 wounded; 500 taken prisoners. On the other, six privates killed, and seven wounded; and the total repulse of an invading army which instantly fled to its "wooden walls," and never again placed a hostile foot on American soil. Such an achievement is not ordinary, much less "very" ordinary. Does Mons. de Tocqueville judge the importance of victories by the numbers engaged, and the quantity of blood shed, or by their consequences? If the former, the cannonade on the heights of Valmy (which was not a battle, nor even a combat, but a distant cannon firing in which few were hurt), must seem to him a very insignificant affair. Yet it did what the marvellous victories of Champaubert, Montmirail, Château-Thierry, Vauchamps and Montereau could not do--turned back the invader, and saved the soil of France from the iron hoof of the conqueror's horse! and was commemorated twelve years afterwards by the great emperor in a ducal title bestowed upon one of its generals. The victory at New Orleans did what the connonade at Valmy did--drove back the invader! and also what it did not do--destroyed the one fourth part of his force. And, therefore, it is not to be disparaged, and will not be, by any one who judges victories by their consequences, instead of by the numbers engaged. And so the victory at New Orleans will remain in history as one of the great achievements of the world, in spite of the low opinion which the writer on American democracy entertains of it. But Mons. de Tocqueville's disparagement of General Jackson, and his achievement, does not stop at him and his victory. It goes beyond both, and reaches the American people, their republican institutions, and the elective franchise: It represents the people as incapable of self-government--as led off by a little military glare to elect a man twice President who had not one qualification for the place, who was violent and mediocre, and whom the enlightened classes opposed: all most unjustly said, but still to pass for American history in Europe, and with some Americans at home.

Regard for Mons. de Tocqueville is the cause of this correction of his errors: it is a piece of respect which I do not extend to the riffraff of European writers who come here to pick up the gossip of the highways, to sell it in Europe for American history, and to requite with defamation the hospitalities of our houses. He is not of that class: he is above it: he is evidently not intentionally unjust. But he is the victim of the company which he kept while among us; and his book must pay the penalty of the impositions practised upon him. The character of our country, and the cause of republican government, require his errors to be corrected: and, unhappily, I shall have further occasion to perform that duty.

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XXXIX. RETIRING OF MR. MACON

Philosophic in his temperament and wise in his conduct, governed in all his actions by reason and judgment, and deeply imbued with Bible images, this virtuous and patriotic man (whom Mr. Jefferson called "the last of the Romans)" had long fixed the term of his political existence at the age which the Psalmist assigns for the limit of manly life: "The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow, for it is soon cut off, and we fly away." He touched that age in 1828; and, true to all his purposes, he was true to his resolve in this, and executed it with the quietude and indifference of an ordinary transaction. He was in the middle of a third senatorial term, and in the full possession of all his faculties of mind and body; but his time for retirement had come--the time fixed by himself; but fixed upon conviction and for well-considered reasons, and inexorable to him as if fixed by fate. To the friends who urged him to remain to the end of his term, and who insisted that his mind was as good as ever, he would answer, that it was good enough yet to let him know that he ought to quit office before his mind quit him, and that he did not mean to risk the fate of the Archbishop of Grenada. He resigned his senatorial honors as he had worn them--meekly, unostentatiously, in a letter of thanks and gratitude to the General Assembly of his State;--and gave to repose at home that interval of thought and quietude which every wise man would wish to place between the turmoil of life and the stillness of eternity. He had nine years of this tranquil enjoyment, and died without pain or suffering June 29th, 1837,--characteristic in death as in life. It was eight o'clock in the morning when he felt that the supreme hour had come, had himself full-dressed with his habitual neatness, walked in the room and lay upon the bed, by turns conversing kindly with those who were about him, and showing by his conduct that he was ready and waiting, but hurrying nothing. It was the death of Socrates, all but the hemlock, and in that full faith of which the Grecian sage had only a glimmering. He directed his own grave on the point of a sterile ridge (where nobody would wish to plough), and covered with a pile of rough flint-stone, (which nobody would wish to build with), deeming this sterility and the uselessness of this rock the best security for that undisturbed repose of the bones which is still desirable to those who are indifferent to monuments.

In almost all strongly-marked characters there is usually some incident or sign, in early life, which shows that character, and reveals to the close observer the type of the future man. So it was with Mr. Macon. His firmness, his patriotism, his self-denial, his devotion to duty and disregard of office and emolument; his modesty, integrity, self-control, and subjection of conduct to the convictions of reason and the dictates of virtue, all so steadily exemplified in a long life, were all shown from the early age of eighteen, in the miniature representation of individual action, and only confirmed in the subsequent public exhibitions of a long, beautiful, and exalted career.

He was of that age, and a student at Princeton college, at the time of the Declaration of American Independence. A small volunteer corps was then on the Delaware. He quit his books, joined it, served a term, returned to Princeton, and resumed his studies. In the year 1778 the Southern States had become a battle-field, big with their own fate, and possibly involving the issue of the war. British fleets and armies appeared there, strongly supported by the friends of the British cause; and the conquest of the South was fully counted upon. Help was needed in these States; and Mr. Macon, quitting college, returned to his native county in North Carolina, joined a militia company as a private, and marched to South Carolina--then the theatre of the enemy's operations. He had his share in all the hardships and disasters of that trying time; was at the fall of Fort Moultrie, surrender of Charleston, defeat at Camden; and in the rapid winter retreat across the upper part of North Carolina. He was in the camp on the left bank of the Yadkin when the sudden flooding of that river, in the brief interval between the crossing of the Americans and the coming up of the British, arrested the pursuit of Cornwallis, and enabled Greene to allow some rest to his wearied and exhausted men. In this camp, destitute of every thing and with gloomy prospects ahead, a summons came to Mr. Macon from the Governor of North Carolina, requiring him to attend a meeting of the General Assembly, of which he had been elected a member, without his knowledge, by the people of his county. He refused to go: and the incident being talked of through the camp, came to the knowledge of the general. Greene was a man himself, and able to know a man. He felt at once that, if this report was true, this young soldier was no common character; and determined to verify the fact. He sent for the young man, inquired of him, heard the truth, and then asked for the reason of this unexpected conduct--this preference for a suffering camp over a comfortable seat in the General Assembly? Mr. Macon answered him, in his quaint and sententious way, that he had seen the faces of the British many times, but had never seen their backs, and meant to stay in the army till he did. Greene instantly saw the material the young man was made of, and the handle by which he was to be worked. That material was patriotism; that handle a sense of duty; and laying hold of this handle, he quickly worked the young soldier into a different conclusion from the one that he had arrived at. He told him he could do more good as a member of the General Assembly than as a soldier; that in the army he was but one man, and in the General Assembly he might obtain many, with the supplies they needed, by showing the destitution and suffering which he had seen in the camp; and that it was his duty to go. This view of duty and usefulness was decisive. Mr. Macon obeyed the Governor's summons; and by his representations contributed to obtain the supplies which enabled Greene to turn back and face Cornwallis,--fight him, cripple him, drive him further back than he had advanced (for Wilmington is South of Camden), disable him from remaining in the South (of which, up to the battle of Guilford, he believed himself to be master); and sending him to Yorktown, where he was captured, and the war ended.

The philosophy of history has not yet laid hold of the battle of Guilford, its consequences and effects. That battle made the capture at Yorktown. The events are told in every history; their connection and dependence in none. It broke up the plan of Cornwallis in the South, and changed the plan of Washington in the North. Cornwallis was to subdue the Southern States, and was doing it until Greene turned upon him at Guilford. Washington was occupied with Sir Henry Clinton, then in New-York, with 12,000 British troops. He had formed the heroic design to capture Clinton and his army (the French fleet co-operating) in that city, and thereby putting an end to the war. All his preparations were going on for that grand consummation when he got the news of the battle of Guilford; the retreat of Cornwallis to Wilmington, his inability to keep the field in the South, and his return northward through the lower part of Virginia. He saw his advantage--an easier prey--and the same result, if successful. Cornwallis or Clinton, either of them captured, would put an end to the war. Washington changed his plan, deceived Clinton, moved rapidly upon the weaker general, captured him and his 7000 men; and ended the revolutionary war. The battle of Guilford put that capture into Washington's hands; and thus Guilford and Yorktown became connected; and the philosophy of history shows their dependence, and that the lesser event was father to the greater. The State of North Carolina gave General Greene 25,000 acres of western land for that day's work, now worth a million of dollars; but the day itself has not yet obtained its proper place in American history.

The military life of Mr. Macon finished with his departure from the camp on the Yadkin, and his civil public life commenced on his arrival at the General Assembly, to which he had been summoned--that civil public life in which he was continued above forty years by free elections--representative in Congress under Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, and long the Speaker of the House; senator in Congress under Madison, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams; and often elected President of the Senate, and until voluntarily declining; twice refusing to be Postmaster General under Jefferson; never taking any office but that to which he was elected; and resigning his last senatorial term when it was only half run. But a characteristic trait remains to be told of his military life--one that has neither precedent nor imitation (the example of Washington being out of the line of comparison): he refused to receive pay, or to accept promotion, and served three years as a private through mere devotion to his country. And all the long length of his life was conformable to this patriotic and disinterested beginning: and thus the patriotic principles of the future senator were all revealed in early life, and in the obscurity of an unknown situation. Conformably to this beginning, he refused to take any thing under the modern acts of Congress for the benefit of the surviving officers and soldiers of the Revolution, and voted against them all, saying they had suffered alike (citizens and military), and all been rewarded together in the establishment of independence; that the debt to the army had been settled by pay, by pensions to the wounded, by half-pay and land to the officers; that no military claim could be founded on depreciated continental paper money, from which the civil functionaries who performed service, and the farmers who furnished supplies, suffered as much as any. On this principle he voted against the bill for Lafayette, against all the modern revolutionary pensions and land bounty acts, and refused to take any thing under them (for many were applicable to himself).

His political principles were deep-rooted, innate, subject to no change and to no machinery of party. He was democratic in the broad sense of the word, as signifying a capacity in the people for self-government; and in its party sense, as in favor of a plain and economical administration of the federal government, and against latitudinarian constructions of the constitution. He was a party man, not in the hackneyed sense of the word, but only where principle was concerned and was independent of party in all his social relations, and in all the proceedings which he disapproved. Of this he gave a strong instance in the case of General Hamilton, whom he deemed honorable and patriotic; and utterly refused to be concerned in a movement proposed to affect him personally, though politically opposed to him. He venerated Washington, admired the varied abilities and high qualities of Hamilton; and esteemed and respected the eminent federal gentlemen of his time. He had affectionate regard for Madison and Monroe; but Mr. Jefferson was to him the full and perfect exemplification of the republican statesman. His almost fifty years of personal and political friendship and association with Mr. Randolph is historical, and indissolubly connects their names in memories in the recollection of their friends, and in history, if it does them justice. He was the early friend of General Jackson, and intimate with him when he was a senator in Congress under the administration of the elder Mr. Adams; and was able to tell Congress and the world who he was when he began to astonish Europe and America by his victories. He was the kind observer of the conduct of young men, encouraging them by judicious commendation when he saw them making efforts to become useful and respectable, and never noting their faults. He was just in all things, and in that most difficult of all things, judging political opponents,--to whom he would do no wrong, not merely in word or act, but in thought. He spoke frequently in Congress, always to the point, and briefly and wisely; and was one of those speakers which Mr. Jefferson described Dr. Franklin to have been--a speaker of no pretension and great performance,--who spoke more good sense while he was getting up out of his chair, and getting back into it, than many others did in long discourses; and he suffered no reporter to dress up a speech for him.

He was above the pursuit of wealth, but also above dependence and idleness; and, like an old Roman of the elder Cato's time, worked in the fields at the head of his slaves in the intervals of public duty; and did not cease this labor until advancing age rendered him unable to stand the hot sun of summer--the only season of the year when senatorial duties left him at liberty to follow the plough, or handle the hoe. I think it was the summer of 1817,--that was the last time (he told me) he tried it, and found the sun too hot for him--then sixty years of age, a senator, and the refuser of all office. How often I think of him, when I see at Washington robustious men going through a scene of supplication, tribulation, and degradation, to obtain office, which the salvation of the soul does not impose upon the vilest sinner! His fields, his flocks, and his herds yielded an ample supply of domestic productions. A small crop of tobacco--three hogsheads when the season was good, two when bad--purchased the exotics which comfort and necessity required, and which the farm did not produce. He was not rich, but rich enough to dispense hospitality and charity, to receive all guests in his house, from the President to the day laborer--no other title being necessary to enter his house but that of an honest man; rich enough to bring up his family (two daughters) as accomplished ladies, and marry them to accomplished gentlemen--one to William Martin, Esq., the other to William Eaton, Esq., of Roanoke, my early school-fellow and friend for more than half a century; and, above all, he was rich enough to pay as he went, and never to owe a dollar to any man.

He was steadfast in his friendships, and would stake himself for a friend, but would violate no point of public duty to please or oblige him. Of this his relations with Mr. Randolph gave a signal instance. He drew a knife to defend him in the theatre at Philadelphia, when menaced by some naval and military officers for words spoken in debate, and deemed offensive to their professions; yet, when speaker of the House of Representatives, he displaced Mr. Randolph from the head of the committee of ways and means, because the chairman of that committee should be on terms of political friendship with the administration,--which Mr. Randolph had then ceased to be with Mr. Jefferson's. He was above executive office, even the highest the President could give; but not above the lowest the people could give, taking that of justice of the peace in his county, and refusing that of Postmaster-General at Washington. He was opposed to nepotism, and to all quartering of his connections on the government; and in the course of his forty-years' service, with the absolute friendship of many administrations and the perfect respect of all, he never had office or contract for any of his blood. He refused to be a candidate for the vice-presidency, but took the place of elector on the Van Buren ticket in 1836. He was against paper money and the paper system, and was accustomed to present the strong argument against both in the simple phrase, that this was a hard-money government, made by hard-money men, who had seen the evil of paper-money, and meant to save their posterity from it. He was opposed to securityships, and held that no man ought to be entangled in the affairs of another, and that the interested parties alone--those who expected to find their profit in the transaction--should bear the bad consequences, as well as enjoy the good ones, of their own dealings. He never called any one "friend" without being so; and never expressed faith in the honor and integrity of a man without acting up to the declaration when the occasion required it. Thus, in constituting his friend Weldon N. Edwards, Esq., his testamentary and sole executor, with large discretionary powers, he left all to his honor, and forbid him to account to any court or power for the manner in which he should execute that trust. This prohibition so characteristic, and so honorable to both parties, and has been so well justified by the event, that I give it in his own words, as copied from his will, to wit:

"I subjoin the following, in my own handwriting, as a codicil to this my last will and testament, and direct that it be a part thereof--that is to say, having full faith in the honor and integrity of my executor above named, he shall not be held to account to any court or power whatever for the discharge of the trust confided by me to him in and by the foregoing will."

And the event has proved that his judgment, as always, committed no mistake when it bestowed that confidence. He had his peculiarities--idiosyncracies, if any one pleases--but they were born with him, suited to him, constituting a part of his character, and necessary to its completeness. He never subscribed to charities, but gave, and freely, according to his means--the left hand not knowing what the right hand did. He never subscribed for new books, giving as a reason to the soliciting agent, that nobody purchased his tobacco until it was inspected; and he could buy no book until he had examined it. He would not attend the Congress Presidential Caucus of 1824, although it was sure to nominate his own choice (Mr. Crawford); and, when a reason was wanted, he gave it in the brief answer that he attended one once and they cheated him, and he had said that he would never attend another. He always wore the same dress--that is to say a suit of the same material, cut, and color, superfine navy blue--the whole suit from the same piece, and in the fashion of the time of the Revolution; and always replaced by a new one before it showed age. He was neat in his person, always wore fine linen, a fine cambric stock, a fine fur hat with a brim to it, fair top-boots--the boot outside of the pantaloons, on the principle that leather was stronger than cloth. He would wear no man's honors, and when complimented on the report on the Panama mission, which, as chairman of the committee on foreign relations, he had presented to the Senate, he would answer, "Yes; it is a good report; Tazewell wrote it." Left to himself, he was ready to take the last place, and the lowest seat any where; but in his representative capacity he would suffer no derogation of a constitutional or of a popular right. Thus, when Speaker of the House, and a place behind the President's Secretaries had been assigned him in some ceremony, he disregarded the programme; and, as the elect of the elect of all the people, took his place next after those whom the national vote had elected. And in 1803, on the question to change the form of voting for President and Vice-President, and the vote wanting one of the constitutional number of two thirds, he resisted the rule of the House which restricted the speaker's vote to a tie, or to a vote which would make a tie,--claimed his constitutional right to vote as a member, obtained it, gave the vote, made the two thirds, and carried the amendment. And, what may well be deemed idiosyncratic in these days, he was punctual in the performance of all his minor duties to the Senate, attending its sittings to the moment, attending all the committees to which he was appointed, attending all the funerals of the members and officers of the Houses, always in time at every place where duty required him; and refusing double mileage for one travelling, when elected from the House of Representatives to the Senate, or summoned to an extra session. He was an habitual reader and student of the Bible, a pious and religious man, and of the "Baptist persuasion," as he was accustomed to express it.

I have a pleasure in recalling the recollections of this wise, just, and good man, and in writing them down, not without profit, I hope, to rising generations, and at least as extending the knowledge of the kind of men to whom we are indebted for our independence, and for the form of government which they established for us. Mr. Macon was the real Cincinnatus of America, the pride and ornament of my native State, my hereditary friend through four generations, my mentor in the first seven years of my senatorial, and the last seven of his senatorial life; and a feeling of gratitude and of filial affection mingles itself with this discharge of historical duty to his memory.

ADMINISTRATION OF ANDREW JACKSON.

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XL. COMMENCEMENT OF GENERAL JACKSON'S ADMINISTRATION

On the 4th of March, 1829, the new President was inaugurated, with the usual ceremonies, and delivered the address which belongs to the occasion; and which, like all of its class, was a general declaration of the political principles by which the new administration would be guided. The general terms in which such addresses are necessarily conceived preclude the possibility of minute practical views, and leave to time and events the qualification of the general declarations. Such declarations are always in harmony with the grounds upon which the new President's election had been made, and generally agreeable to his supporters, without being repulsive to his opponents; harmony and conciliation being an especial object with every new administration. So of General Jackson's inaugural address on this occasion. It was a general chart of democratic principles; but of which a few paragraphs will bear reproduction in this work, as being either new and strong, or a revival of good old principles, of late neglected. Thus: as a military man his election had been deprecated as possibly leading to a military administration: on the contrary he thus expressed himself on the subject of standing armies, and subordination of the military to the civil authority: "Considering standing armies as dangerous to free government, in time of peace, I shall not seek to enlarge our present establishment; nor disregard that salutary lesson of political experience which teaches that the military should be held subordinate to the civil power." On the cardinal doctrine of economy, and freedom from public debt, he said: "Under every aspect in which it can be considered, it would appear that advantage must result from the observance of a strict and faithful economy. This I shall aim at the more anxiously, both because it will facilitate the extinguishment of the national debt--the unnecessary duration of which is incompatible with real independence;--and because it will counteract that tendency to public and private profligacy which a profuse expenditure of money by the government is but too apt to engender." Reform of abuses and non-interference with elections, were thus enforced: "The recent demonstration of public sentiment inscribes, on the list of executive duties, in characters too legible to be overlooked, the task of reform, which will require, particularly, the correction of those abuses that have brought the patronage of the federal government into conflict with the freedom of elections." The oath of office was administered by the venerable Chief Justice, Marshall, to whom that duty had belonged for about thirty years. The Senate, according to custom, having been convened in extra session for the occasion, the cabinet appointments were immediately sent in and confirmed. They were, Martin Van Buren, of New-York, Secretary of State (Mr. James A. Hamilton, of New-York, son of the late General Hamilton, being charged with the duties of the office until Mr. Van Buren could enter upon them); Samuel D. Ingham, of Pennsylvania, Secretary of the Treasury; John H. Eaton, of Tennessee, Secretary at War; John Branch, of North Carolina, Secretary of the Navy; John M. Berrien, of Georgia, Attorney General; William T. Harry, of Kentucky, Postmaster General; those who constituted the late cabinet, under Mr. Adams, only one of them, (Mr. John McLean, the Postmaster General,) classed politically with General Jackson; and a vacancy having occurred on the bench of the Supreme Court by the death of Mr. Justice Trimble, of Kentucky, Mr. McLean was appointed to fill it; and a further vacancy soon after occurring, the death of Mr. Justice Bushrod Washington (nephew of General Washington), Mr. Henry Baldwin, of Pennsylvania, was appointed in his place. The Twenty-first Congress dated the commencement of its legal existence on the day of the commencement of the new administration, and its members were as follows:

SENATE.

MAINE--John Holmes, Peleg Sprague.

NEW HAMPSHIRE--Samuel Bell, Levi Woodbury.

MASSACHUSETTS--Nathaniel Silsbee, Daniel Webster.

CONNECTICUT--Samuel A. Foot, Calvin Willey.

RHODE ISLAND--Nehemiah R. Knight, Asher Robbins.

VERMONT--Dudley Chase, Horatio Seymour.

NEW-YORK--Nathan Sanford, Charles E. Dudley.

NEW JERSEY--Theodore Frelinghuysen, Mahlon Dickerson.

PENNSYLVANIA--William Marks, Isaac D. Barnard.

DELAWARE--John M. Clayton, (Vacant.)

MARYLAND--Samuel Smith, Ezekiel F. Chambers.

VIRGINIA--L. W. Tazewell, John Tyler.

NORTH CAROLINA--James Iredell, (Vacant.)

SOUTH CAROLINA--William Smith, Robert Y. Hayne.

GEORGIA--George M. Troup, John Forsyth.

KENTUCKY--John Rowan, George M. Bibb.

TENNESSEE--Hugh L. White, Felix Grundy.

OHIO--Benjamin Ruggles, Jacob Burnet.

LOUISIANA--Josiah S. Johnston, Edward Livingston.

INDIANA--William Hendricks, James Noble.

MISSISSIPPI--Powhatan Ellis, (Vacant.)

ILLINOIS--Elias K. Kane, John McLane.

ALABAMA--John McKinley, William R. King.

MISSOURI--David Barton, Thomas H. Benton.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.

MAINE--John Anderson, Samuel Butman, George Evans, Rufus McIntire, James W. Ripley, Joseph F. Wingate--6. (One vacant.)

NEW HAMPSHIRE--John Brodhead, Thomas Chandler, Joseph Hammons, Jonathan Harvey, Henry Hubbard, John W. Weeks--6.

MASSACHUSETTS--John Bailey, Issac C. Bates, B. W. Crowninshield, John Davis, Henry W. Dwight, Edward Everett, Benjamin Gorham, George Grennell, jr., James L. Hodges, Joseph G. Kendall, John Reed, Joseph Richardson, John Varnum--13.

RHODE ISLAND--Tristam Burgess, Dutee J. Pearce--2.

CONNECTICUT--Noyes Barber, Wm. W. Ellsworth, J. W. Huntington, Ralph J. Ingersoll, W. L. Storrs, Eben Young--6.

VERMONT--William Cahoon, Horace Everett, Jonathan Hunt, Rollin C. Mallary, Benjamin Swift--5.

NEW-YORK--William G. Angel, Benedict Arnold, Thomas Beekman, Abraham Bockee, Peter I. Borst, C. C. Cambreleng, Jacob Crocheron, Timothy Childs, Henry B. Cowles, Hector Craig, Charles G. Dewitt, John D. Dickinson, Jonas Earll, jr., George Fisher, Isaac Finch, Michael Hoffman, Joseph Hawkins, Jehiel H. Halsey, Perkins King, James W. Lent, John Magee, Henry C. Martindale, Robert Monell, Thomas Maxwell, E. Norton, Gershom Powers, Robert S. Rose, Henry R. Storrs, James Strong, Ambrose Spencer, John W. Taylor, Phineas L. Tracy, Gulian. C. Verplanck, Campbell P. White--34.

NEW JERSEY--Lewis Condict, Richard M. Cooper, Thomas H. Hughes, Isaac Pierson, James F. Randolph, Samuel Swan--6.

PENNSYLVANIA--James Buchanan, Richard Coulter, Thomas H. Crawford, Joshua Evans, Chauncey Forward, Joseph Fry, jr., James Ford, Innes Green, John Gilmore, Joseph Hemphill, Peter Ihrie, jr., Thomas Irwin, Adam King, George G. Leiper, H. A. Muhlenburg, Alem Marr, Daniel H. Miller, William McCreery, William Ramsay, John Scott, Philander Stephens, John B. Sterigere, Joel B. Sutherland, Samuel Smith, Thomas H. Sill--25. (One vacant.)

DELAWARE--Kensy Johns, jr.--1.

MARYLAND--Elias Brown, Clement Dorsey, Benjamin C. Howard, George E. Mitchell, Michael C. Sprigg, Benedict I. Semmes, Richard Spencer, George C. Washington, Ephraim K. Wilson--9.

VIRGINIA--Mark Alexander, Robert Allen, Wm. S. Archer, Wm. Armstrong, jr., John S. Barbour, Philip P. Barbour, J. T. Boulding, Richard Coke, jr., Nathaniel H. Claiborne, Robert B. Craig, Philip Doddridge, Thomas Davenport, William F. Gordon, Lewis Maxwell, Charles F. Mercer, William McCoy, Thomas Newton, John Roane, Alexander Smyth, Andrew Stevenson, John Taliaferro, James Trezvant--22.

NORTH CAROLINA--Willis Alston, Daniel L. Barringer, Samuel P. Carson, H. W. Conner, Edmund Deberry, Edward B. Dudley, Thomas H. Hall, Robert Potter, William B. Shepard, Augustine H. Shepperd, Jesse Speight, Lewis Williams--12. (One vacant.)

SOUTH CAROLINA--Robert W. Barnwell, James Blair, John Campbell, Warren R. Davis, William Drayton, William D. Martin, George McDuffie, William T. Nuckolls, Starling Tucker--9.

GEORGIA--Thomas F. Forster, Charles E. Haynes, Wilson Lumpkin, Henry G. Lamar, Wiley Thompson, Richard H. Wilde, James M. Wayne--7.

KENTUCKY--James Clark, N. D. Coleman, Thomas Chilton, Henry Daniel, Nathan Gaither, R. M. Johnson, John Kinkaid, Joseph Lecompte, Chittenden Lyon, Robert P. Letcher, Charles A. Wickliffe, Joel Yancey--12.

TENNESSEE--John Blair, John Bell, David Crockett, Robert Desha, Jacob C. Isacks, Cave Johnson, Pryor Lea, James K. Polk, James Standifer--9.

OHIO--Mordecai Bartley, Joseph H. Crane, William Creighton, James Findlay, John M. Goodenow, Wm. W. Irwin, Wm. Kennon, Wm. Russell, William Stanberry, James Shields, John Thomson, Joseph Vance, Samuel F. Vinton, Elisha Whittlesey--14.

LOUISIANA--Henry H. Gurley, W. H. Overton, Edward D. White--3.

INDIANA--Ratliff Boon, Jonathan Jennings, John Test--3.

ALABAMA--R. E. B. Baylor, C. C. Clay, Dixon H. Lewis--3.

MISSISSIPPI--Thomas Hinds--1.

ILLINOIS--Joseph Duncan--1.

MISSOURI--Spencer Pettis--1.

DELEGATES.

MICHIGAN TERRITORY--John Biddle--1.

ARKANSAS TERRITORY--A. H. Sevier--1.

FLORIDA TERRITORY--Joseph M. White--1.

Andrew Stevenson, of Virginia, was re-elected speaker of the House, receiving 152 votes out of 191; and he classing politically with General Jackson, this large vote in his favor, and the small one against him (and that scattered and thrown away on several different names not candidates), announced a pervading sentiment among the people, in harmony with the presidential election--and showing that political principles, and not military glare, had produced the General's election.

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Chapter XLI

THE FIRST ANNUAL MESSAGE OF GENERAL JACKSON TO THE TWO HOUSES OF CONGRESS.

The first annual message of a new President, being always a recommendation of practical measures, is looked to with more interest than the inaugural address, confined as this latter must be, to a declaration of general principles. That of General Jackson, delivered the 8th of December, 1829, was therefore anxiously looked for; and did not disappoint the public expectation. It was strongly democratic, and contained many recommendations of a nature to simplify, and purify the working of the government, and to carry it back to the times of Mr. Jefferson--to promote its economy and efficiency, and to maintain the rights of the people, and of the States in its administration. On the subject of electing a President and Vice-President of the United States, he spoke thus:

"I consider it one of the most urgent of my duties to bring to your attention the propriety of amending that part of our Constitution which relates to the election of President and Vice-President. Our system of government was, by its framers, deemed an experiment; and they, therefore, consistently provided a mode of remedying its defects.

"To the people belongs the right of electing their chief magistrate: it was never designed that their choice should, in any case, be defeated, either by the intervention of electoral colleges, or by the agency confided, under certain contingencies, to the House of Representatives. Experience proves, that, in proportion as agents to execute the will of the people are multiplied, there is danger of their wishes being frustrated. Some may be unfaithful: all are liable to err. So far, therefore, as the people can, with convenience, speak, it is safer for them to express their own will.

"In this, as in all other matters of public concern, policy requires that as few impediments as possible should exist to the free operation of the public will. Let us, then, endeavor so to amend our system, as that the office of chief magistrate may not be conferred upon any citizen but in pursuance of a fair expression of the will of the majority.

"I would therefore recommend such an amendment of the constitution as may remove all intermediate agency in the election of President and Vice-President. The mode may be so regulated as to preserve to each State its present relative weight in the election; and a failure in the first attempt may be provided for, by confining the second to a choice between the two highest candidates. In connection with such an amendment, it would seem advisable to limit the service of the chief magistrate to a single term, of either four or six years. If, however, it should not be adopted, it is worthy of consideration whether a provision disqualifying for office the Representatives in Congress on whom such an election may have devolved, would not be proper."

This recommendation in relation to our election system has not yet been carried into effect, though doubtless in harmony with the principles of our government, necessary to prevent abuses, and now generally demanded by the voice of the people. But the initiation of amendments to the federal constitution is too far removed from the people. It is in the hands of Congress and of the State legislatures; but even there an almost impossible majority--that of two thirds of each House, or two thirds of the State legislatures--is required to commence the amendment; and a still more difficult majority--that of three fourths of the States--to complete it. Hitherto all attempts to procure the desired amendment has failed; but the friends of that reform should not despair. The great British parliamentary reform was only obtained after forty years of annual motions in parliament; and forty years of organized action upon the public mind through societies, clubs, and speeches; and the incessant action of the daily and periodical press. In the meantime events are becoming more impressive advocates for this amendment than any language could be. The selection of President has gone from the hands of the people--usurped by irresponsible and nearly self-constituted bodies--in which the selection becomes the result of a juggle, conducted by a few adroit managers, who baffle the nomination until they are able to govern it, and to substitute their own will for that of the people. Perhaps another example is not upon earth of a free people voluntarily relinquishing the elective franchise, in a case so great as that of electing their own chief magistrate, and becoming the passive followers of an irresponsible body--juggled, and baffled, and governed by a few dextrous contrivers, always looking to their own interest in the game which they play in putting down and putting up men. Certainly the convention system, now more unfair and irresponsible than the exploded congress caucus system, must eventually share the same fate, and be consigned to oblivion and disgrace. In the meantime the friends of popular election should press the constitutional amendment which would give the Presidential election to the people, and discard the use of an intermediate body which disregards the public will and reduces the people to the condition of political automatons.

Closely allied to this proposed reform was another recommended by the President in relation to members of Congress, and to exclude them generally from executive appointments; and especially from appointments conferred by the President for whom they voted. The evil is the same whether the member votes in the House of Representatives when the election goes to that body, or votes and manages in a Congress caucus, or in a nominating convention. The act in either case opens the door to corrupt practices; and should be prevented by legal, or constitutional enactments, if it cannot be restrained by the feelings of decorum, or repressed by public opinion. On this point the message thus recommended:

"While members of Congress can be constitutionally appointed to offices of trust and profit, it will be the practice, even under the most conscientious adherence to duty, to select them for such stations as they are believed to be better qualified to fill than other citizens; but the purity of our government would doubtless be promoted by their exclusion from all appointments in the gift of the President in whose election they may have been officially concerned. The nature of the judicial office, and the necessity of securing in the cabinet and in diplomatic stations of the highest rank, the best talents and political experience, should, perhaps, except these from the exclusion."

On the subject of a navy, the message contained sentiments worthy of the democracy in its early day, and when General Jackson was a member of the United States Senate. The republican party had a POLICY then in respect to a navy: it was, a navy for DEFENCE, instead of CONQUEST; and limited to the protection of our coasts and commerce. That policy was impressively set forth in the celebrated instructions to the Virginia senators in the year 1800, in which it was said:

"With respect to the navy, it may be proper to remind you that whatever may be the proposed object of its establishment, or whatever may be the prospect of temporary advantages resulting therefrom, it is demonstrated by the experience of all nations, who have ventured far into naval policy, that such prospect is ultimately delusive; and that a navy has ever in practice been known more as an instrument of power, a source of expense, and an occasion of collisions and wars with other nations, than as an instrument of defence, of economy, or of protection to commerce."

These were the doctrines of the republican party, in the early stage of our government--in the great days of Jefferson and his compeers. We had a policy then--the result of thought, of judgment, and of experience: a navy for defence, and not for conquest: and, consequently, confinable to a limited number of ships, adequate to their defensive object--instead of thousands, aiming at the dominion of the seas. That policy was overthrown by the success of our naval combats during the war; and the idea of a great navy became popular, without any definite view of its cost and consequences. Admiration for good fighting did it, without having the same effect on the military policy. Our army fought well also, and excited admiration; but without subverting the policy which interdicted standing armies in time of peace. The army was cut down in peace: the navy was building up in peace. In this condition President Jackson found the two branches of the service--the army reduced by two successive reductions from a large body to a very small one--6000 men--and although illustrated with military glory yet refusing to recommend an army increase: the navy, from a small one during the war, becoming large during the peace--gradual increase the law--ship-building the active process, and rotting down the active effect; and thus we have been going on for near forty years. Correspondent to his army policy was that of President Jackson in relation to the navy; he proposed a pause in the process of ship-building and ship-rotting. He recommended a total cessation of the further building of vessels of the first and second class--ships of the line, and frigates--with a collection of materials for future use--and the limitation of our naval policy to the object of commercial protection. He did not even include coast defence, his experience having shown him that the men on shore could defend the land. In a word, he recommended a naval policy; and that was the same which the republicans of 1798 had adopted, and which Virginia made obligatory upon her senators in 1800; and which, under the blaze of shining victories, had yielded to the blind, and aimless, and endless operation of building and rotting peaceful ships of war. He said:

"In time of peace, we have need of no more ships of war than are requisite to the protection of our commerce. Those not wanted for this object must lay in the harbors, where, without proper covering, they rapidly decay; and, even under the best precautions for their preservation, must soon become useless. Such is already the case with many of our finest vessels; which, though unfinished, will now require immense sums of money to be restored to the condition in which they were, when committed to their proper element. On this subject there can be but little doubt that our best policy would be, to discontinue the building of ships of the first and second class, and look rather to the possession of ample materials, prepared for the emergencies of war, than to the number of vessels which we can float in a season of peace, as the index of our naval power."

This was written twenty years ago, and by a President who saw what he described--many of our finest ships going to decay before they were finished--demanding repairs before they had sailed--and costing millions for which there was no return. We have been going on at the same rate ever since--building, and rotting, and sinking millions; but little to show for forty years of ship-carpentry; and that little nothing to do but to cruise where there is nothing to catch, and to carry out ministers to foreign courts who are not quite equal to the Franklins, Adamses and Jeffersons--the Pinckneys, Rufus Kings, and Marshalls--the Clays, Gallatins and Bayards--that went out in common merchant vessels. Mr. Jefferson told me that this would be the case twenty-five years ago when naval glory overturned national policy, and when a navy board was created to facilitate ship-construction. But this is a subject which will require a chapter of its own, and is only incidentally mentioned now to remark that we have no policy with respect to a navy, and ought to have one--that there is no middle point between defence and conquest--and no sequence to a conquering navy but wars with the world,--and the debt, taxes, pension list, and pauper list of Great Britain.

The inutility of a Bank of the United States as a furnisher of a sound and uniform currency, and of questionable origin under our constitution, was thus stated:

"The charter of the Bank of the United States expires in 1836, and its stockholders will most probably apply for a renewal of their privileges. In order to avoid the evils resulting from precipitancy in a measure involving such important principles, and such deep pecuniary interests, I feel that I cannot, in justice to the parties interested, too soon present it to the deliberate consideration of the legislature and the people. Both the constitutionality and the expediency of the law creating this bank, are well questioned by a large portion of our fellow-citizens; and it must be admitted by all, that it has failed in the great end of establishing a uniform and sound currency."

This is the clause which party spirit, and bank tactics, perverted at the time (and which has gone into history), into an attack upon the bank--a war upon the bank--with a bad motive attributed for a war so wanton. At the same time nothing could be more fair, and just, and more in consonance with the constitution which requires the President to make the legislative recommendations which he believes to be proper. It was notice to all concerned--the bank on one side, and the people on the other--that there would be questions, and of high import--constitutionality and expediency--if the present corporators, at the expiration of their charter, should apply for a renewal of their privileges. It was an intimation against the institution, not against its administrators, to whom a compliment was paid in another part of the same message, in ascribing to the help of their "judicious arrangement" the averting of the mercantile pressure which might otherwise have resulted from the sudden withdrawal of the twelve and a half millions which had just been taken from the bank and applied to the payment of the public debt. But of this hereafter. The receipts and expenditures were stated, respectively, for the preceding year, and estimated for the current year, the former at a fraction over twenty-four and a half millions--the latter a fraction over twenty-six millions--with large balances in the treasury, exhibiting the constant financial paradox, so difficult to be understood, of permanent annual balances with an even, or even deficient revenue. The passage of the message is in these words:

"The balance in the treasury on the 1st of January, 1829, was five millions nine hundred and seventy-two thousand four hundred and thirty-five dollars and eighty-one cents. The receipts of the current year are estimated at twenty-four millions, six hundred and two thousand, two hundred and thirty dollars, and the expenditures for the same time at twenty-six millions one hundred and sixty-four thousand five hundred and ninety-five dollars; leaving a balance in the treasury on the 1st of January next, of four millions four hundred and ten thousand and seventy dollars, eighty-one cents."

Other recommendations contained the sound democratic doctrines--speedy and entire extinction of the public debt--reduction of custom-house duties--equal and fair incidental protection to the great national interests (agriculture, manufactures and commerce)--the disconnection of politics and tariffs--and the duty of retrenchment by discontinuing and abolishing all useless offices. In a word, it was a message of the old republican school, in which President Jackson had been bred; and from which he had never departed; and which encouraged the young disciples of democracy, and consoled the old surviving fathers of that school.

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