Chapter XLVIII
TAX ON BANK NOTES: MR. BENTON'S SPEECH: EXTRACTS:
Mr. Benton brought forward his promised motion for leave to bring in a bill to tax the circulation of banks and bankers, and of all corporations, companies or individuals which issued paper currency. He said nothing was more reasonable than to require the moneyed interest which was employed in banking, and especially in that branch of banking which was dedicated to the profitable business of converting lampblack and rags into money, to contribute to the support of the government. It was a large interest, very able, and very proper, to pay taxes, and which paid nothing on their profitable issues--profitable to them--injurious to the country. It was an interest which possessed many privileges over the rest of the community by law; which usurped many others which the laws did not grant; which, in fact, set the laws and the government at defiance whenever it pleased; and which, in addition to all these privileges and advantages, was entirely exempt from federal taxation. While the producing and laboring classes were all taxed; while these meritorious classes, with their small incomes, were taxed in their comforts and necessaries--in their salt, iron, sugar, blankets, hats, coats and shoes, and so many other articles--the banking interest, which dealt in hundreds of millions, which manufactured and monopolized money, which put up and put down prices, and held the whole country subject to its power, and tributary to its wealth, paid nothing. This was wrong in itself, and unjust to the rest of the community. It was an error or mistake in government which he had long intended to bring to the notice of the Senate and the country; and he judged the present conjuncture to be a proper time for doing it. Revenue is wanted. A general revision of the tariff is about to take place. An adjustment of the taxes for a long period is about to be made. This is the time to bring forward the banking interest to bear their share of the public burdens, and the more so, as they are now in the fact of proving themselves to be a great burden on the public, and the public mind is beginning to consider whether there is any way to make them amenable to law and government.
In other countries, Mr. B. said, the banking interest was subject to taxation. He knew of no country in which banking was tolerated, except our own, in which it was not taxed. In Great Britain--that country from which we borrow the banking system--the banking interest pays its fair and full proportion of the public taxes: it pays at present near four millions of dollars. It paid in 1836 the sum of $3,725,400: in 1837 it paid $3,594,300. These were the last years for which he had seen the details of the British taxation, and the amounts he had stated comprehended the bank tax upon the whole united kingdom: upon Scotland and Ireland, as well as upon England and Wales. It was a handsome item in the budget of British taxation, and was levied on two branches of the banking business: on the circulation, and on bills of exchange. In the bill which he intended to bring forward, the circulation alone was proposed to be taxed; and, in that respect, the paper system would still remain more favored here than it was in Great Britain.
In our own country, Mr. B. said, the banking interest had formerly been taxed, and that in all its branches; in its circulation, its discounts, and its bills of exchange. This was during the late war with Great Britain; and though the banking business was then small compared to what it is now, yet the product of the tax was considerable, and well worth the gathering: it was about $500,000 per annum. At the end of the war this tax was abolished; while most of the war taxes, laid at the same time, for the same purpose, and for the same period, were continued in force; among them the tax on salt, and other necessaries of life. By a perversion of every principle of righteous taxation, the tax on banks was abolished, and that on salt was continued. This has remained the case for twenty-five years, and it is time to reverse the proceeding. It is time to make the banks pay and to let salt go free.
Mr. B. next stated the manner of levying the bank tax at present in Great Britain, which he said was done with great facility and simplicity. It was a levy of a fixed sum on the average circulation of the year, which the bank was required to give in for taxation like any other property, and the amount collected by a distress warrant if not paid. This simple and obvious method of making the levy, had been adopted in 1815, and had been followed ever since. Before that time it was effected through the instrumentality of a stamp duty; a stamp being required for each note, but with the privilege of compounding for a gross sum. In 1815 the option of compounding was dropped: a gross amount was fixed by law as the tax upon every million of the circulation; and this change in the mode of collection has operated so beneficially that, though temporary at first, it has been made permanent. The amount fixed was at the rate of £3,500 for every million. This was for the circulation only: a separate, and much heavier tax was laid upon bills of exchange, to be collected by a stamp duty, without the privilege of composition.
Mr. B. here read, from a recent history of the Bank of England, a brief account of the taxation of the circulation of that institution for the last fifty years--from 1790 to the present time. It was at that time that her circulation began to be taxed, because at that time only did she begin to have a circulation which displaced the specie of the country. She then began to issue notes under ten pounds, having been first chartered with the privilege of issuing none less than one hundred pounds. It was a century--from 1694 to 1790--before she got down to £5, and afterwards to £2, and to £1; and from that time the specie basis was displaced, the currency convulsed, and the banks suspending and breaking. The government indemnified itself, in a small degree, for the mischiefs of the pestiferous currency which it had authorized; and the extract which he was about to read was the history of the taxation on the Bank of England notes which, commencing at the small composition of £12,000 per annum, now amounts to a large proportion of the near four millions of dollars which the paper system pays annually to the British Treasury. He read:
"The Bank, till lately, has always been particularly favored in the composition which they paid for stamp duties. In 1791, they paid composition of £12,000 per annum, in lieu of all stamps, either on bill or notes. In 1799, on an increase of the stamp duty, their composition was advanced to £20,000; and an addition of £4,000 for notes issued under £5, raised the whole to £24,000. In 1804, an addition of not less than fifty per cent. was made to the stamp duty; but, although the Bank circulation of notes under £5 had increased from one and a half to four and a half millions, the whole composition was only raised from £24,000 to £32,000. In 1808, there was a further increase of thirty-three per cent. to the stamp duty, at which time the composition was raised from £32,000 to £42,000. In both these instances, the increase was not in proportion even to the increase of duty; and no allowance whatever was made for the increase in the amount of the bank circulation. It was not till the session of 1815, on a further increase of the stamp duty, that the new principle was established, and the Bank compelled to pay a composition in some proportion to the amount of their circulation. The composition is now fixed as follows: Upon the average circulation of the preceding year, the Bank is to pay at the rate of £3,500 per million, on their aggregate circulation, without reference to the different classes and value of their notes. The establishment of this principle, it is calculated, caused a saving to the public, in the years 1815 and 1816, of £70,000. By the neglect of this principle, which ought to have been adopted in 1799, Mr. Ricardo estimated the public to have been losers, and the Bank consequently gainers, of no less a sum than half a million."
Mr. B. remarked briefly upon the equity of this tax, the simplicity of its levy since 1815, and its large product. He deemed it the proper model to be followed in the United States, unless we should go on the principle of copying all that was evil, and rejecting all that was good in the British paper system. We borrowed the banking system from the English, with all its foreign vices, and then added others of our own to it. England has suppressed the pestilence of notes under £5 (near $25); we retain small notes down to a dollar, and thence to the fractional parts of a dollar. She has taxed all notes; and those under £5 she taxed highest while she had them; we, on the contrary, tax none. The additional tax of £4,000 on the notes under £5 rested on the fair principle of taxing highest that which was most profitable to the owner, and most injurious to the country. The small notes fell within that category, and therefore paid highest.
Having thus shown that bank circulation was now taxed in Great Britain, and had been for fifty years, he proceeded to show that it had also been taxed in the United States. This was in the year 1813. In the month of August of that year, a stamp-act was passed, applicable to banks and to bankers, and taxing them in the three great branches of their business, to wit: the circulation, the discounts, and the bills of exchange. On the circulation, the tax commenced at one cent on a one dollar note, and rose gradually to fifty dollars on notes exceeding one thousand dollars; with the privilege of compounding for a gross sum in lieu of the duty. On the discounts, the tax began at five cents on notes discounted for one hundred dollars, and rose gradually to five dollars on notes of eight thousand dollars and upwards. On bills of exchange, it began at five cents on bills of fifty dollars, and rose to five dollars on those of eight thousand dollars and upwards.
Such was the tax, continued Mr. B., which the moneyed interest, employed in banking, was required to pay in 1813, and which it continued to pay until 1817. In that year the banks were released from taxation, while taxes were continued upon all the comforts and necessaries of life. Taxes are now continued upon articles of prime necessity--upon salt even--and the question will now go before the Senate and country, whether the banking interest, which has now grown so rich and powerful--which monopolizes the money of the country--beards the government--makes distress or prosperity when it pleases--the question is now come whether this interest shall continue to be exempt from tax, while every thing else has to pay.
Mr. B. said he did not know how the banking interest of the present day would relish a proposition to make them contribute to the support of the government. He did not know how they would take it; but he did know how a banker of the old school--one who paid on sight, according to his promise, and never broke a promise to the holder of his notes--he did know how such a banker viewed the act of 1813; and he would exhibit his behavior to the Senate; he spoke of the late Stephen Girard of Philadelphia; and he would let him speak for himself by reading some passages from a petition which he presented to Congress the year after the tax on bank notes was laid.
Mr. B. read:
"That your memorialist has established a bank in the city of Philadelphia, upon the foundation of his own individual fortune and credit, and for his own exclusive emolument, and that he is willing most cheerfully to contribute, in common with his fellow-citizens throughout the United States, a full proportion of the taxes which have been imposed for the support of the national government, according to the profits of his occupation and the value of his estate; but a construction has been given to the acts of Congress laying duties on notes of banks, &c., from which great difficulties have occurred, and great inequalities daily produced to the disadvantage of his bank, that were not, it is confidently believed, within the contemplation of the legislature. And your memorialist having submitted these considerations to the wisdom of Congress, respectfully prays, that the act of Congress may be so amended as to permit the Secretary of the Treasury to enter into a composition for the stamp duty, in the case of private bankers, as well as in the case of corporations and companies, or so as to render the duty equal in its operations upon every denomination of bankers."
Mr. B. had read these passages from Mr. Girard's petition to Congress in 1814, first, for the purpose of showing the readiness with which a banker of the old school paid the taxes which the government imposed upon his business; and, next, to show the very considerable amount of that tax, which on the circulation alone amounted to ten thousand dollars on the million. All this, with the additional tax on the discounts, and on the bills of exchange, Mr. Girard was entirely willing to pay, provided all paid alike. All he asked was equality of taxation, and that he might have the benefit of the same composition which was allowed to incorporated banks. This was a reasonable request, and was immediately granted by Congress.
Mr. B. said revenue was one object of his bill: the regulation of the currency by the suppression of small notes and the consequent protection of the constitutional currency, was another: and for that purpose the tax was proposed to be heaviest on notes under twenty dollars, and to be augmented annually until it accomplished its object.
Chapter XLIX
LIBERATION OF SLAVES BELONGING TO AMERICAN CITIZENS IN BRITISH COLONIAL PORTS.
Up to this time, and within a period of ten years, three instances of this kind had occurred. First, that of the schooner Comet. This vessel sailed from the District of Columbia in the year 1830, destined for New Orleans, having, among other things, a number of slaves on board. Her papers were regular, and the voyage in all respects lawful. She was stranded on one of the false keys of the Bahama Islands, opposite to the coast of Florida, and almost in sight of our own shores. The persons on board, including the slaves, were taken by the wreckers, against the remonstrance of the captain and the owners of the slaves, into Nassau, New Providence--one of the Bahama Islands; where the slaves were forcibly seized and detained by the local authorities. The second was the case of the Encomium. She sailed from Charleston in 1834, destined to New Orleans, on a voyage lawful and regular, and was stranded near the same place, and with the same fate with the Comet. She was carried into Nassau, where the slaves were also seized and detained by the local authorities. The slaves belonged to the Messrs. Waddell of North Carolina, among the most respectable inhabitants of the State, and on their way to Louisiana with a view to a permanent settlement in that State. The third case was that of the Enterprize, sailing from the District of Columbia in 1835, destined for Charleston, South Carolina, on a lawful voyage, and with regular papers. She was forced unavoidably, by stress of weather, into Port Hamilton, Bermuda Island, where the slaves on board were forcibly seized and detained by the local authorities. The owners of the slaves, protesting in vain, at the time, and in every instance, against this seizure of their property, afterwards applied to their own government for redress; and after years of negotiation with Great Britain, redress was obtained in the two first cases--the full value of the slaves being delivered to the United States, to be paid to the owners. This was accomplished during Mr. Van Buren's administration, the negotiation having commenced under that of President Jackson. Compensation in the case of the Enterprize had been refused; and the reason given for the distinction in the cases, was, that the two first happened during the time that slavery existed in the British West India colonies--the latter after its abolition there. All these were coasting voyages between one port of the United States and another, and involved practical questions of great interest to all the slave States. Mr. Calhoun brought the question before the Senate in a set of resolutions which he drew up for the occasion; and which were in these words:
"Resolved, That a ship or a vessel on the high seas, in time of peace, engaged in a lawful voyage, is, according to the laws of nations, under the exclusive jurisdiction of the State to which her flag belongs; as much so as if constituting a part of its own domain.
"Resolved, That if such ship or vessel should be forced by stress of weather, or other unavoidable cause, into the port of a friendly power, she would, under the same laws, lose none of the rights appertaining to her on the high seas; but, on the contrary, she and her cargo and persons on board, with their property, and all the rights belonging to their personal relations, as established by the laws of the State to which they belong, would be placed under the protection which the laws of nations extend to the unfortunate under such circumstances.
"Resolved, That the brig Enterprize, which was forced unavoidably by stress of weather into Port Hamilton, Bermuda Island, while on a lawful voyage on the high seas from one port of the Union to another, comes within the principles embraced in the foregoing resolutions; and that the seizure and detention of the negroes on board by the local authority of the island, was an act in violation of the laws of nations, and highly unjust to our own citizens to whom they belong."
It was in this latter case that Mr. Calhoun wished to obtain the judgment of the Senate, and the point he had to argue was, whether a municipal regulation of Great Britain could alter the law of nations? Under that law she made indemnity for the slaves liberated in the two first cases: under her own municipal law she denied it in the latter case. The distinction taken by the British minister was, that in the first cases, slavery existing in this British colony and recognized by law, the persons coming in with their slaves had a property in them which had been divested: in the latter case that slavery being no longer recognized in this colony, there was no property in them after their arrival; and consequently no rights divested. Mr. Calhoun admitted that would be the case if the entrance had been voluntary; but denied it where the entrance was forced; as in this case. His argument was:
"I object not to the rule. If our citizens had no right to their slaves, at any time after they entered the British territory--that is, if the mere fact of entering extinguished all right to them (for that is the amount of the rule)--they could, of course, have no claim on the British government, for the plain reason that the local authority, in seizing and detaining the negroes, seized and detained what, by supposition, did not belong to them. That is clear enough; but let us see the application: it is given in a few words. He says: 'Now the owners of the slaves on board the Enterprize never were lawfully in possession of those slaves within the British territory;' assigning for reason, 'that before the Enterprize arrived at Bermuda, slavery had been abolished in the British empire'--an assertion which I shall show, in a subsequent part of my remarks, to be erroneous. From that, and that alone, he comes to the conclusion, 'that the negroes on board the Enterprize had, by entering within the British jurisdiction, acquired rights which the local courts were bound to protect.' Such certainly would have been the case if they had been brought in, or entered voluntarily. He who enters voluntarily the territory of another State, tacitly submits himself, with all his rights, to its laws, and is as much bound to submit to them as its citizens or subjects. No one denies that; but that is not the present case. They entered not voluntarily, but from necessity; and the very point at issue is, whether the British municipal laws could divest their owners of property in their slaves on entering British territory, in cases such as the Enterprize, when the vessel has been forced into their territory by necessity, through an act of Providence, to save the lives of those on board. We deny they can, and maintain the opposite ground:--that the law of nations in such cases interposes and protects the vessel and those on board, with their rights, against the municipal laws of the State, to which they have never submitted, and to which it would be cruel and inhuman, as well as unjust, to subject them. Such is clearly the point at issue between the two governments; and it is not less clear, that it is the very point assumed by the British negotiator in the controversy."
This is fair reasoning upon the law of the case, and certainly left the law of nations in full force in favor of the American owners. The equity of the case was also fully stated and the injury shown to be of a practical kind, which self-protection required the United States to prevent for the future. In this sense, Mr. Calhoun argued:
"To us this is not a mere abstract question, nor one simply relating to the free use of the high seas. It comes nearer home. It is one of free and safe passage from one port to another of our Union; as much so to us, as a question touching the free and safe use of the channels between England and Ireland on the one side, and the opposite coast of the continent on the other, would be to Great Britain. To understand its deep importance to us, it must be borne in mind, that the island of Bermuda lies but a short distance off our coast, and that the channel between the Bahama islands and Florida is not less than two hundred miles in length, and on an average not more than fifty wide; and that through this long, narrow and difficult channel, the immense trade between our ports on the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast must pass, which, at no distant period, will constitute more than half of the trade of the Union. The principle set up by the British government, if carried out to its full extent, would do much to close this all-important channel, by rendering it too hazardous for use. She has only to give an indefinite extension to the principle applied to the case of the Enterprize, and the work would be done; and why has she not as good a right to apply it to a cargo of sugar or cotton, as to the slaves who produced it."
The resolutions were referred to the committee on foreign relations, which reported them back with some slight alteration, not affecting or impairing their force; and in that form they were unanimously adopted by the Senate. Although there was no opposition to them, the importance of the occasion justified a record of the vote: and they were accordingly taken by yeas and nays--or rather, by yeas: for there were no nays. This was one of the occasions on which the mind loves to dwell, when, on a question purely sectional and Southern, and wholly in the interest of slave property, there was no division of sentiment in the American Senate.
Chapter L
RESIGNATION OF SENATOR HUGH LAWSON WHITE OF TENNESSEE: HIS DEATH: SOME NOTICE OF HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER.
This resignation took place under circumstances, not frequent, but sometimes occurring in the Senate--that of receiving instructions from the General Assembly of his State, which either operate as a censure upon a senator, or require him to do something which either his conscience, or his honor forbids. Mr. White at this time--the session of 1839-'40--received instructions from the General Assembly of his State which affected him in both ways--condemning past conduct, and prescribing a future course which he could not follow. He had been democratic from his youth--came into the Senate--had grown aged--as such: but of late years had voted generally with the whigs on their leading measures, and classed politically with them in opposition to Mr. Van Buren. In these circumstances he received instructions to reverse his course of voting on these leading measures--naming them; and requiring him to support the administration of Mr. Van Buren. He consulted his self-respect, as well as obeyed a democratic principle; and sent in his resignation. It was the conclusion of a public life which disappointed its whole previous course. From his youth he had been a popular man, and that as the fair reward of conduct, without practising an art to obtain it, or even seeming to know that he was winning it. Bred a lawyer, and coming early to the bar, he was noted for a probity, modesty and gravity--with a learning, ability, assiduity and patience--which marked him for the judicial bench: and he was soon placed upon it--that of the Superior Court. Afterwards, when the judiciary of the State was remodelled, he was placed on the bench of the Supreme Court. It was considered a favor to the public to get him to take the place. That is well known to the writer of this View, then a member of the General Assembly of Tennessee, and the author of the new modelled judiciary. He applied to Judge White, who had at that time returned to the bar to know if he would take the place; and considered the new system accredited with the public on receiving his answer that he would. That was all that he had to do with getting the appointment: he was elected unanimously by the General Assembly, with whom the appointment rested. That is about the way in which he received all his appointments, either from his State, or from the federal government--merely agreeing to take the office if it was offered to him; but not always agreeing to accept: often refusing--as in the case of a cabinet appointment offered him by President Jackson, his political and personal friend of forty years' standing. It was long before he would enter a political career, but finally consented to become senator in the Congress of the United States: always discharging the duties of an office, when accepted, with the assiduity of a man who felt himself to be a machine in the hands of his duty; and with an integrity of purpose which left his name without spot or stain. It is beautiful to contemplate such a career; sad to see it set under a cloud in his advanced years. He became alienated from his old friends, both personally and politically--even from General Jackson; and eventually fell under the censure of his State, as above related--that State which, for more than forty years, had considered it a favor to itself that he should accept the highest offices in her gift. He resigned in January, and died in May--his death accelerated by the chagrin of his spirit; for he was a man of strong feelings, though of such measured and quiet deportment. His death was announced in the Senate by the senator who was his colleague at the time of his resignation--Mr. Alexander Anderson; and the motion for the usual honors to his memory was seconded by Senator Preston, who pronounced on the occasion a eulogium on the deceased as just as it was beautiful.
"I do not know, Mr. President, whether I am entitled to the honor I am about to assume in seconding the resolutions which have just been offered by the senator from Tennessee, in honor of his late distinguished colleague; and yet, sir, I am not aware that any one present is more entitled to this melancholy honor, if it belongs to long acquaintance, to sincere admiration, and to intimate intercourse. If these circumstances do not entitle me to speak, I am sure every senator will feel, in the emotions which swell his own bosom, an apology for my desire to relieve my own, by bearing testimony to the virtues and talents, the long services and great usefulness, of Judge White.
"My infancy and youth were spent in a region contiguous to the sphere of his earlier fame and usefulness. As long as I can remember any thing, I remember the deep confidence he had inspired as a wise and upright judge, in which station no man ever enjoyed a purer reputation, or established a more implicit reliance in his abilities and honesty. There was an antique sternness and justness in his character. By a general consent he was called Cato. Subsequently, at a period of our public affairs very analogous to the present, he occupied a position which placed him at the head of the financial institutions of East Tennessee. He sustained them by his individual character. The name of Hugh L. White was a guarantee that never failed to attract confidence. Institutions were sustained by the credit of an individual, and the only wealth of that individual was his character. From this more limited sphere of usefulness and reputation, he was first brought to this more conspicuous stage as a member of an important commission on the Spanish treaty, in which he was associated with Mr. Tazewell and Mr. King. His learning, his ability, his firmness, and industry, immediately extended the sphere of his reputation to the boundaries of the country. Upon the completion of that duty, he came into this Senate. Of his career here, I need not speak. His grave and venerable form is even now before us--that air of patient attention, of grave deliberation, of unrelaxed firmness. Here his position was of the highest--beloved, respected, honored; always in his place--always prepared for the business in hand--always bringing to it the treasured reflections of a sedate and vigorous understanding. Over one department of our deliberations he exercised a very peculiar control. In the management of our complex and difficult relations with the Indians we all deferred to him, and to this he addressed himself with unsparing labor, and with a wisdom, a patient benevolence, that justified and vindicated the confidence of the Senate.
"In private life he was amiable and ardent. The current of his feelings was warm and strong. His long familiarity with public affairs had not damped the natural ardor of his temperament. We all remember the deep feeling with which he so recently took leave of this body, and how profoundly that feeling was reciprocated. The good will, the love, the respect which we bestowed upon him then, now give depth and energy to the mournful feelings with which we offer a solemn tribute to his memory."
And here this notice would stop if it was the design of this work merely to write on the outside of history--merely to chronicle events; but that is not the design. Inside views are the main design: and this notice of Senator White's life and character would be very imperfect, and vitally deficient, if it did not tell how it happened that a man so favored by his State during a long life should have lost that favor in his last days--received censure from those who had always given praise--and gone to his grave under a cloud after having lived in sunshine. The reason is briefly told. In his advanced age he did the act which, with all old men, is an experiment; and, with most of them, an unlucky one. He married again: and this new wife having made an immense stride from the head of a boarding-house table to the head of a senator's table, could see no reason why she should not take one step more, and that comparatively short, and arrive at the head of the presidential table. This was before the presidential election of 1836. Mr. Van Buren was the generally accepted democratic candidate: he was foremost of all the candidates: and the man who is ahead of all the rest, on such occasions, is pretty sure to have a combination of all the rest against him. Mr. Van Buren was no exception to this rule. The whole whig party wished to defeat him: that was a fair wish. Mr. Calhoun's party wished to defeat him: that was invidious: for they could not elect Mr. Calhoun by it. Many professing democrats wished to defeat him, though for the benefit of a whig: and that was a movement towards the whig camp--where most of them eventually arrived. All these parties combined, and worked in concert; and their line of operations was through the vanity of the victim's wife. They excited her vain hopes. And this modest, unambitious man, who had spent all his life in resisting office pressed upon him by his real friends, lost his power of resistance in his old age, and became a victim to the combination against him--which all saw, and deplored, except himself. As soon as he was committed, and beyond extrication, one of the co-operators against him, a whig member of Congress from Kentucky--a witty, sagacious man of good tact--in the exultation of his feelings wrote the news to a friend in his district, who, in a still higher state of exultation, sent it to the newspapers--thus: "Judge White is on the track, running gayly, and won't come off; and if he would, his wife won't let him." This was the whole story, briefly and cheerily told--and truly. He ran the race! without prejudice to Mr. Van Buren--without benefit to the whig candidates--without support from some who had incited him to the trial: and with great political and social damage to himself.
Long an inhabitant of the same State with Judge White--indebted to him for my law license--moving in the same social and political circle--accustomed to respect and admire him--sincerely friendly to him, and anxious for his peace and honor, I saw with pain the progress of the movement against him, and witnessed with profound grief its calamitous consummation.
Chapter LI
DEATH OF EX-SENATOR HAYNE OF SOUTH CAROLINA: NOTICE OF HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER.
Nature had lavished upon him all the gifts which lead to eminence in public, and to happiness, in private life. Beginning with the person and manners--minor advantages, but never to be overlooked when possessed--he was entirely fortunate in these accessorial advantages. His person was of the middle size, slightly above it in height, well proportioned, flexible and graceful. His face was fine--the features manly, well formed, expressive, and bordering on the handsome: a countenance ordinarily thoughtful and serious, but readily lighting up, when accosted, with an expression of kindness, intelligence, cheerfulness, and an inviting amiability. His face was then the reflex of his head and his heart, and ready for the artist who could seize the moment to paint to the life. His manners were easy, cordial, unaffected, affable; and his address so winning, that the fascinated stranger was taken captive at the first salutation. These personal qualities were backed by those of the mind--all solid, brilliant, practical, and utilitarian: and always employed on useful objects, pursued from high motives, and by fair and open means. His judgment was good, and he exercised it in the serious consideration of whatever business he was engaged upon, with an honest desire to do what was right, and a laudable ambition to achieve an honorable fame. He had a copious and ready elocution, flowing at will in a strong and steady current, and rich in the material which constitutes argument. His talents were various, and shone in different walks of life, not often united: eminent as a lawyer, distinguished as a senator: a writer as well as a speaker: and good at the council table. All these advantages were enforced by exemplary morals; and improved by habits of study, moderation, temperance, self-control, and addiction to business. There was nothing holiday, or empty about him--no lying in to be delivered of a speech of phrases. Practical was the turn of his mind: industry an attribute of his nature: labor an inherent impulsion, and a habit: and during his ten years of senatorial service his name was incessantly connected with the business of the Senate. He was ready for all work--speaking, writing, consulting--in the committee-room as well as in the chamber--drawing bills and reports in private, as well as shining in the public debate, and ready for the social intercourse of the evening when the labors of the day were over. A desire to do service to the country, and to earn just fame for himself, by working at useful objects, brought all these high qualities into constant, active, and brilliant requisition. To do good, by fair means, was the labor of his senatorial life; and I can truly say that, in ten years of close association with him I never saw him actuated by a sinister motive, a selfish calculation, or an unbecoming aspiration.
Thus, having within himself so many qualities and requisites for insuring advancement in life, he also had extrinsic advantages, auxiliary to talent, and which contribute to success in a public career. He was well descended, and bore a name dear to the South--the synonym of honor, courage, and patriotism--memorable for that untimely and cruel death of one of its revolutionary wearers, which filled the country with pity for his fate, and horror for his British executioners. The name of Hayne, pronounced any where in the South, and especially in South Carolina, roused a feeling of love and respect, and stood for a passport to honor, until deeds should win distinction. Powerfully and extensively connected by blood and marriage, he had the generous support which family pride and policy extends to a promising scion of the connection. He had fortune, which gave him the advantage of education, and of social position, and left free to cultivate his talents, and to devote them to the public service. Resident in Charleston, still maintaining its colonial reputation for refined society, and high and various talent, he had every advantage of enlightened and elegant association. Twice happily married in congenial families (Pinckney and Alston), his domestic felicity was kept complete, his connections extended, and fortune augmented. To crown all, and to give effect to every gift with which nature and fortune had endowed him, he had that further advantage, which the Grecian Plutarch never fails to enumerate when the case permits it, and which he considered so auxiliary to the advancement of some of the eminent men whose lives he commemorated--the advantage of being born in a State where native talent was cherished, and where the community made it a policy to advance and sustain a promising young man, as the property of the State, and for the good of the State. Such was, and is, South Carolina; and the young Hayne had the full benefit of the generous sentiment. As fast as years permitted, he was advanced in the State government: as soon as age and the federal constitution permitted, he came direct to the Senate, without passing through the House of Representatives; and to such a Senate as the body then was--Rufus King, John Taylor of Caroline, Mr. Macon, John Gaillard, Edward Lloyd of Maryland, James Lloyd of Massachusetts, James Barbour of Virginia, General Jackson, Louis McLane of Delaware, Wm. Pinkney of Maryland, Littleton Waller Tazewell, Webster, Nathan Sandford, of New York, M. Van Buren, King of Alabama, Samuel Smith of Maryland, James Brown, and Henry Johnson of Louisiana; and many others, less known to fame, but honorable to the Senate from personal decorum, business talent, and dignity of character. Hayne arrived among them; and was considered by such men, and among such men, as an accession to the talent and character of the chamber. I know the estimate they put upon him, the consideration they had for him, and the future they pictured for him: for they were men to look around, and consider who were to carry on the government after they were gone. But the proceedings of the Senate soon gave the highest evidence of the degree of consideration in which he was held. In the very second year of his service, he was appointed to a high duty--such as would belong to age and long service, as well as to talent and elevated character. He was made chairman of the select committee--and select it was--which brought in the bill for the grants ($200,000 in money, and 24,000 acres of land), to Lafayette; and as such became the organ of the expositions, as delicate as they were responsible, which reconciled such grants to the words and spirit of our constitution, and adjusted them to the merit and modesty of the receiver: a high function, and which he fulfilled to the satisfaction of the chamber, and the country.
Six years afterwards he had the great debate with Mr. Webster--a contest of many days, sustained to the last without losing its interest--(which bespoke fertility of resource, as well as ability in both speakers), and in which his adversary had the advantage of a more ripened intellect, an established national reputation, ample preparation, the choice of attack, and the goodness of the cause. Mr. Webster came into that field upon choice and deliberation, well feeling the grandeur of the occasion; and profoundly studying his part. He had observed during the summer, the signs in South Carolina, and marked the proceedings of some public meetings unfriendly to the Union; and which he ran back to the incubation of Mr. Calhoun. He became the champion of the constitution and the Union, choosing his time and occasion, hanging his speech upon a disputed motion with which it had nothing to do, and which was immediately lost sight of in the blaze and expansion of a great national discussion: himself armed and equipped for the contest, glittering in the panoply of every species of parliamentary and forensic weapon--solid argument, playful wit, biting sarcasm, classic allusion; and striking at a new doctrine of South Carolina origin, in which Hayne was not implicated: but his friends were--and that made him their defender. The speech was at Mr. Calhoun, then presiding in the Senate, and without right to reply. Hayne became his sword and buckler, and had much use for the latter to cover his friend--hit by incessant blows--cut by many thrusts: but he understood too well the science of defence in wordy as well as military digladiation to confine himself to fending off. He returned, as well as received blows; but all conducted courteously; and stings when inflicted gently extracted on either side by delicate compliments. Each morning he returned re-invigorated to the contest, like Antæus refreshed, not from a fabulous contact with mother earth, but from a real communion with Mr. Calhoun! the actual subject of Mr. Webster's attack: and from the well-stored arsenal of his powerful and subtle mind, he nightly drew auxiliary supplies. Friends relieved the combatants occasionally; but it was only to relieve; and the two principal figures remained prominent to the last. To speak of the issue would be superfluous; but there was much in the arduous struggle to console the younger senator. To cope with Webster, was a distinction: not to be crushed by him, was almost a victory: to rival him in copious and graceful elocution, was to establish an equality at a point which strikes the masses: and Hayne often had the crowded galleries with him. But, equal argument! that was impossible. The cause forbid it, far more than disparity of force; and reversed positions would have reversed the issue.
I have said elsewhere (Vol. I. of this work), that I deem Mr. Hayne to have been entirely sincere in professing nullification at that time only in the sense of the Virginia resolutions of '98-'99, as expounded by their authors: three years afterwards he left his place in the Senate to become Governor of South Carolina, to enforce the nullification ordinance which the General Assembly of the State had passed, and against which President Jackson put forth his impressive proclamation. Up to this point, in writing this notice, the pen had run on with pride and pleasure--pride in portraying a shining American character: pleasure in recalling recollections of an eminent man, whom I esteemed--who did me the honor to call me friend; and with whom I was intimate. Of all the senators he seemed nearest to me--both young in the Senate, entering it nearly together; born in adjoining States; not wide apart in age; a similarity of political principle: and, I may add, some conformity of tastes and habits. Of all the young generation of statesmen coming on, I considered him the safest--the most like William Lowndes; and best entitled to a future eminent lead. He was democratic, not in the modern sense of the term, as never bolting a caucus nomination, and never thinking differently from the actual administration; but on principle, as founded in a strict, in contradistinction to a latitudinarian construction of the constitution; and as cherishing simplicity and economy in the administration of the federal government, in contradistinction to splendor and extravagance.
With his retiring from the Senate, Mr. Hayne's national history ceases. He does not appear afterwards upon the theatre of national affairs: but his practical utilitarian mind, and ardent industry, found ample and beneficent employment in some noble works of internal improvement. The railroad system of South Carolina, with its extended ramifications, must admit him for its founder, from the zeal he carried into it, and the impulsion he gave it. He died in the meridian of his life, and in the midst of his usefulness, and in the field of his labors--in western North Carolina, on the advancing line of the great iron railway, which is to connect the greatest part of the South Atlantic with the noblest part of the Valley of the Mississippi.
The nullification ordinance, which he became Governor of South Carolina to enforce, was wholly directed against the tariff system of the time--not merely against a protective tariff, but against its fruits--undue levy of revenue, extravagant expenditure; and expenditure in one quarter of the Union of what was levied upon the other. The levy and expenditure were then some twenty-five millions of dollars: they are now seventy-five millions: and the South, while deeply agitated for the safety of slave property--(now as safe, and more valuable than ever, as proved by the witness which makes no mistakes, the market price)--is quiet upon the evil which produced the nullification ordinance of 1832: quiet under it, although that evil is three times greater now than then: and without excuse, as the present vast expenditure is the mere effect of mad extravagance. Is this quietude a condemnation of that ordinance? or, is it of the nature of an imaginary danger which inflames the passions, that it should supersede the real evil which affects the pocket? If the Hayne of 1824, and 1832, was now alive, I think his practical and utilitarian mind would be seeking a proper remedy for the real grievance, now so much greater than ever; and that he would leave the fires of an imaginary danger to die out of themselves, for want of fuel.
Chapter LII
ABOLITION OF SPECIFIC DUTIES BY THE COMPROMISE ACT OF 1833: ITS ERROR, AND LOSS TO THE REVENUE, SHOWN BY EXPERIENCE.
The introduction of the universal ad valorem system in 1833 was opposed and deprecated by practical men at the time, as one of those refined subtleties which, aiming at an ideal perfection, overlooks the experience of ages, and disregards the warnings of reason. Specific duties had been the rule--ad valorems the exception--from the beginning of the collection of custom-house revenue. The specific duty was a question in the exact sciences, depending upon a mathematical solution by weight, count, or measure: the ad valorem presented a question to the fallible judgment of men, sure to be different at different places; and subject, in addition to the fallibility of judgment, to the chances of ignorance, indifference, negligence and corruption. All this was urged against the act at the time, but in vain. It was a piece of legislation arranged out of doors--christened a compromise, which was to save the Union--brought into the House to be passed without alteration: and was so passed, in defiance of all judgment and reason by the aid of the votes of those--always a considerable per centum in every public body--to whom the name of compromise is an irresistible attraction: amiable men, who would do no wrong of themselves, and without whom the designing could do but little wrong. Objections to this pernicious novelty (of universal ad valorems), were in vain urged then: experience, with her enlightened voice, now came forward to plead against them. The act had been in force seven years: it had had a long, and a fair trial: and that safest of all juries--Time and Experience--now came forward to deliver their verdict. At this session ('39-'40) a message was sent to the House of Representatives by the President, covering reports from the Secretary of the Treasury, and from the Comptroller of the Treasury, with opinions from the late Attorneys-general of the United States (Messrs. Benjamin F. Butler and Felix Grundy), and letters from the collectors of the customs in all the principal Atlantic ports, all relating to the practical operation of the ad valorem system, and showing it to be unequal, uncertain, unsafe--diverse in its construction--injurious to the revenue--open to unfair practices--and greatly expensive from the number of persons required to execute it. The whole document may be profitably studied by all who deprecate unwise and pernicious legislation; but a selection of a few of the cases of injurious operation which it presents will be sufficient to give an idea of the whole. Three classes of goods are selected--silks, linens, and worsted: all staple articles, and so well known as to be the least susceptible of diversity of judgment; and yet on which, in the period of four years, a fraction over five millions of dollars had been lost to the Treasury from diversity of construction between the Treasury officers and the judiciary--with the further prospective loss of one million and three-quarters in the ensuing three years if the act was not amended. The document, at page 44, states the annual ascertained loss during four years' operation of the act on these classes of goods, to be:
"In 1835 - $624,356 In 1837 - 463,090 1836 - 847,162 1838 - 428,237
"Making in the four years $2,362,845; and the comptroller computes the annual prospective loss during the time the act may remain unaltered, at $800,000. So much for silks; now for linens. The same page, for the same four years, represents the annual loss on this article to be:
In 1835 - $370,785 In 1837 - 303,241 1836 - 516,988 1838 - 226,375
"Making the sum of $1,411,389 on this article for the four years; to which is to be added the estimated sum of $400,000, for the future annual losses, if the act remains unaltered.
"On worsted goods, for the same time, and on page 45, the report exhibits the losses thus:
In 1835 - $409,329 In 1837 - 209,391 1836 - 416,832 1838 - 249,590
"Making a total of ascertained loss on this head, in the brief space of four years, amount to the sum of $1,285,142; with a computation of a prospective loss of $500,000 per annum, while the compromise act remains as it is."
Such were the losses from diversity of construction alone on three classes of goods, in the short space of four years; and these classes staple goods, composed of a single material. When it came to articles of mixed material, the diversity became worse. Custom-house officers disagreed: comptrollers and treasurers disagreed: attorneys-general disagreed. Courts were referred to, and their decision overruled all. Many importers stood suits; and the courts and juries overruled all the officers appointed to collect the revenue. The government could only collect what they are allowed. Often, after paying the duty assessed, the party has brought his action and recovered a large part of it back. So that this ad valorem system, besides its great expense, its chance for diversity of opinions among the appraisers, and its openness to corruption, also gave rise to differences among the highest administrative and law officers of the government, with resort to courts of law, in nearly all which the United States was the loser.
Chapter LIII
REFINED SUGAR AND RUM DRAWBACKS: THEIR ABUSE UNDER THE COMPROMISE ACT OF 1833: MR. BENTON'S SPEECH.
Mr. Benton rose to make the motion for which he had given notice on Friday last, for leave to bring in a bill to reduce the drawbacks allowed on the exportation of rum and refined sugars; and the bounties and allowances to fishing vessels, in proportion to the reduction which had been made, and should be made, in the duties upon imported sugars, molasses and salt, upon which these bounties and allowances were respectively granted.
Mr. B. said that the bill, for the bringing in of which he was about to ask leave, proposed some material alteration in the act of 1833, for the modification of the tariff, commonly called the compromise act; and as that act was held by its friends to be sacred and inviolable, and entitled to run its course untouched and unaltered, it became his duty to justify his bill in advance; to give reasons for it before he ventured to submit the question of leave for its introduction; and to show, beforehand, that here was great and just cause for the measure he proposed.
Mr. B. said it would be recollected, by those who were contemporary with the event, and might be seen by all who should now look into our legislative history of that day, that he was thoroughly opposed to the passage of the act of 1833; that he preferred waiting the progress of Mr. Verplanck's bill; that he opposed the compromise act, from beginning to end; made speeches against it, which were not answered; uttered predictions of it, which were disregarded; proposed amendments to it, which were rejected; showed it to be an adjournment, not a settlement, of the tariff question; and voted against it, on its final passage, in a respectable minority of eighteen. It was not his intention at this time to recapitulate all the objections which he then made to the act; but to confine himself to two of those objections, and to those two of them, the truth and evils of which TIME had developed; and for which evils the public good demands an immediate remedy to be applied. He spoke of the drawbacks and allowances founded upon duties, which duties were to undergo periodical reductions, while the drawbacks and allowances remained undiminished; and of the vague and arbitrary tenor of the act, which rendered it incapable of any regular, uniform, or safe execution. He should confine himself to these two objections; and proceed to examine them in the order in which they were mentioned.
At page 208 of the Senate journal, session of 1832-33, is seen this motion: "Moved by Mr. Benton to add to the bill a section in the following words: 'That all drawbacks allowed on the exportation of articles manufactured in the United States from materials imported from foreign countries, and subject to duty, shall be reduced in proportion to the reduction of duties provided for in this act.'" The particular application of this clause, as explained and enforced at the time, was to sugar and molasses, and the refined sugar, and the rum manufactured from them.
As the laws then stood, and according to the principle of all drawbacks, the exporters of these refined sugars and rum were allowed to draw back from the Treasury precisely as much money as had been paid into the Treasury on the importation of the article out of which the exported article was manufactured. This was the principle, and this was the law; and so rigidly was this insisted upon by the manufacturing and exporting interest, that only four years before the compromise act, namely, in 1829, the drawback on refined sugars exported was raised from four to five cents a pound upon the motion of General Smith, a then senator from Maryland; and this upon an argument and a calculation made by him to show that the quantity of raw sugar contained in every pound of refined sugar, had, in reality, paid five instead of four cents duty. My motion appeared to me self-evidently just, as the new act, in abolishing all specific duties, and reducing every thing to an ad valorem duty of twenty per centum, would reduce the duties on sugar and molasses eventually to the one-third or the one-fourth of their then amount; and, unless the drawback should be proportionately reduced, the exporter of refined sugars and rum, instead of drawing back the exact amount he had paid into the Treasury, would in reality draw back three or four times as much as had been paid in. This would be unjust in itself; and, besides being unjust, would involve a breach of the constitution, for, so much of the drawback as was not founded upon the duty, would be a naked bounty paid for nothing out of the Treasury. I expected my motion to be adopted by a unanimous vote; on the contrary, it was rejected by a vote of 24 to 18;[2] and I had to leave it to Time, that slow, but sure witness, to develope the evils which my arguments had been unable to show, and to enforce the remedies which the vote of the Senate had rejected. That witness has come. Time, with his unerring testimony, has arrived. The act of 1833 has run the greater part of its course, without having reached its ultimate depression of duties, or developed its greatest mischiefs; but it has gone far enough to show that it has done immense injury to the Treasury, and must continue to do it if a remedy is not applied. Always indifferent to my rhetoric, and careful of my facts--always leaving oratory behind, and laboring to establish a battery of facts in front--I have applied at the fountain head of information--the Treasury Department--for all the statistics connected with the subject; and the successive reports which had been received from that department, on the salt duties and the fishing bounties and allowances, and on the sugar and molasses duties, and the drawbacks on exported rum and refined sugar, and which had been printed by the order of the Senate, had supplied the information which constituted the body of facts which must carry conviction to the mind of every hearer.
[2] The following was the vote:
YEAS--Messrs. Benton, Buckner, Calhoun, Dallas, Dickerson, Dudley, Forsyth, Johnston, Kane, King, Rives, Robinson, Seymour, Tomlinson, Webster, White, Wilkins, and Wright--18.
NAYS--Messrs. Bell, Bibb, Black, Clay, Clayton, Ewing, Foot, Grundy, Hendricks, Holmes, Knight, Mangum, Miller, Moore, Naudain, Poindexter, Prentiss, Robbins, Silsbee, Smith, Sprague, Tipton, Troup, Tyler--24.
Mr. B. said he would take up the sugar duties first, and show what had been the operation of the act of 1833, in relation to the revenue from that article, and the drawbacks founded upon it. In document No. 275, laid upon our tables on Friday last, we find four tables in relation to this point, and a letter from the Register of the Treasury, Mr. T. L. Smith, describing their contents.
These tables are all valuable. The whole of the information which they contain is useful, and is applicable to the business of legislation, and goes to enlighten us on the subject under consideration; but it is not in my power, continued Mr. B., to quote them in detail. Results and prominent facts only can be selected; and, proceeding on this plan, I here show to the Senate, from table No. 1, that as early as the year 1837--being only four years after the compromise act--the drawback paid on the exportation of refined sugar actually exceeded the amount of revenue derived from imported sugar, by the sum of $861 71. As the duties continued to diminish, and the drawback remained the same, this excess was increased in 1838 to $12,690; and in 1839 it was increased to $20,154 37. Thus far the results are mathematical; they are copied from the Treasury books; they show the actual operation of the compromise act on this article, down to the end of the last year. These are facts to pause at, and think upon. They imply that the sugar refiners manufactured more sugar than was imported into the United States for each of these three years--that they not only manufactured, but exported, in a refined state, more than was imported into the United States, about 400,000 lbs. more the last of these years--that they paid duty on these quantities, not leaving a pound of imported sugar to have been used or duty paid on it by any other person--and not leaving a pound of their own refined sugar to be used in the United States. In other words, the whole amount of the revenue from brown and clayed sugars was paid over to 29 sugar refiners from 1837: and not only the whole amount, but the respective sums of $861 71, and $12,690, and $20,154 37, in that and the two succeeding years, over and above that amount. This is what the table shows as far as the act has gone; and as we know that the refiners only consumed a small part of the sugar imported, and only exported a part of what they refined, and consequently only paid duty on a small part, it stands to reason that a most enormous abuse has been committed--the fault of the law allowing them to "draw back" out of the Treasury what they had never put into it.
The table then goes on to show the prospective operation of the act for the remainder of the time which it has to run, and which will include the great reductions of duty which are to take place in 1841 and 1842; and here the results become still more striking. Assuming the importation of each succeeding year to be the same that it was in 1839, and the excess of the drawback over the duties will be, for 1840, $37,343 38; for 1841, the same; for 1842, $114,693 94; and for 1843, the sum of $140,477 45. That is to say, these refiners will receive the whole of the revenue from the sugar tax, and these amounts in addition, for these four years; when they would not be entitled, under an honest law, to more than the one fortieth part of the revenue--which, in fact, is more than they received while the law was honest. These will be the bounties payable out of the Treasury in the present, and in the three succeeding years, provided the importation of sugars shall be the same that it was in 1839; but will it be the same? To this question, both reason and experience answer in the negative. They both reply that the importation will increase in proportion to the increased profit which the increasing difference between the duty and the drawback will afford; and this reply is proved by the two first columns in the table under consideration. These columns show that, under the encouragement to importation already afforded by the compromise act, the import of sugar increased in six years from 1,558,971 pounds, costing $72,336, to 11,308,561 pounds, costing $554,119. Here was an enormous increase under a small inducement compared to that which is to follow; so that we have reason to conclude that the importations of the present and ensuing years, unless checked by the passage of the bill which I propose to bring in, will not only increase in the ratio of the past years, but far beyond it; and will in reality be limited only by the capacity of the world to supply the demand: so great will be the inducement to import raw or clayed sugars, and export refined. The effect upon our Treasury must be great. Several hundred thousand dollars per annum must be taken from it for nothing; the whole extracted from the Secretary of the Treasury in hard money; his reports having shown us that, while paper money, and even depreciated paper, is systematically pressed upon the government in payment of duties, nothing but gold and silver will be received back in payment of drawbacks. But it is not the Treasury only that would suffer: the consumers of sugar would come in for their share of the burden: the drawback will keep up the price; and the home consumer must pay the drawback as well as the government; otherwise the refined sugar will seek a foreign market. The consumers of brown sugar will suffer in the same manner; for the manufacturers will monopolize it, and refine it, and have their five cents drawback, either at home or abroad. Add to all this, it will be well if enterprising dealers shall not impose domestic sugars upon the manufacturers, and thus convert the home crop into an article entitled to drawback.
Such are the mischiefs of the act of 1833 in relation to this article; they are great already, and still greater are yet to come. As early as 1837, the whole amount of the sugar revenue, and $861,71 besides, was delivered over to some twenty odd manufacturers of refined sugars! At this day, the whole amount of that revenue goes to these few individuals, and $37,343,38 besides. This is the case this year. Henceforth they are to receive the whole amount of this revenue, with some hundreds of thousands of dollars besides, to be drawn from other branches of revenue, unless this bill is passed which I propose to bring in. This is the effect of the act, dignified with the name of compromise, and hallowed by the imputed character of sacred and inviolable! It turns over a tax levied from seventeen millions of people on an article of essential comfort, and almost a necessary; it turns over this whole tax to a few individuals; and that not being enough to satisfy their demand, they receive the remainder from the National Treasury! It violates the constitution to the whole extent of the excess of the drawback over the duty. It subjects the Treasury to an unforeseen amount of undue demands. It deprives the people of the whole benefit of the reduction of the sugar tax, provided for by the act itself; and subjects them to the mercies of those who may choose to monopolize the article for refinement and exportation. The whole number of persons into whose hands all this money and power is thrown, is, according to a statement derived from Gov. Wolf, the late collector of the customs at Philadelphia, no more than own the 29 sugar refineries; the whole of which, omitting some small ones in the West, and three in New Orleans, are situate on the north side of Mason and Dixon's line. Members from the South and West complain of the unequal working of our revenue system--of the large amounts expended in the northeast--the trifle expended South and West. But, why complain? Their own improvident and negligent legislation makes it so. This bill alone, in only one of its items--the sugar item--will send millions, before 1842, to the north side of that famous line: and this bill was the concoction, and that out of doors, of one member from the South and one more from the West.
Mr. Benton would proceed to the next article to the effect upon which, of the compromise act, he would wish to call their attention; and that article was imported molasses, and its manufacture, in the shape of exported rum. On this article, and its manufacture, the operation of the act was of the same character, though not to the same degree, that it was on sugars; the duties were reduced, while the drawback remained the same. This was constantly giving drawback where no duty had been paid; and in 1842 the whole of the molasses tax will go to these rum distillers--giving the legal implication that they had imported all the molasses that came into the United States, and paid duty on it--and then exported it all in the shape of rum--leaving not a gallon to have been consumed by the rest of the community, nor even a gallon of their own rum to have been drank in the United States. All this is clear from the regular operation of the compromise act, in reducing duties without making a corresponding reduction in the drawbacks founded upon them. But is there not to be cheating in addition to the regular operation of the act? If not, we shall be more fortunate than we have been heretofore, and that under the circumstances of greater temptation. It is well known that whiskey can be converted into New England rum, and exported as such, and receive the drawback of the molasses duty; and that this has been done just as often as the price of whiskey (and the meanest would answer the purpose) was less than the cost of molasses. The process was this. Purchase base whiskey at a low rate--filtrate it through charcoal, to deprive it of smell and taste--then pass it through a rum distillery, in company with a little real rum--and the whiskey would come out rum, very fit to be sold as such at home, or exported as such, with the benefit of drawback. All this has been done, and has been proved to be done; and, therefore, may be done again, and certainly will be done, under the increased temptation which the compromise act now affords, and will continue to afford, if not amended as proposed by the bill I propose to bring in. It was proved before a committee of the House of Representatives in the session of 1827-8. Mr. Jeromus Johnson, then a member of Congress from the city of New York, now a custom-house officer in that city, testified directly to the fact. To the question: "Are there not large quantities of whiskey used with molasses in the distillation of what is called New England rum?" He answered: "There are:" and that when mixed at the rate of only four gallons to one, and the mixture run through a rum distillery--the whiskey previously deprived of its taste and smell by filtration through charcoal--the best practised rum drinker could not tell the difference--even if appealed to by a custom-house officer. That whiskey is now used for that purpose, is clearly established by the table marked B. That table shows that the importation of foreign molasses for the year 1839 was 392,368 gallons; and the exportation of distilled rum for that quantity was 356,699 gallons; that is to say, nearly as many gallons of rum went out as of molasses came in; and, admitting that a gallon of good molasses will make a gallon of rum, yet the average is below it. Inferior or common molasses falls short of producing gallon for gallon by from 5 to 7-1/2 per cent. Now make an allowance for this deficiency; allow also for the quantity of foreign molasses consumed in the United States in other ways; allow likewise for the quantity of rum made from molasses, and not exported, but consumed at home: allow for these three items, and the conviction becomes irresistible, that whiskey was used in the distillation of rum in the year 1839, and exported with the benefit of drawback! and that such will continue to be the case (if this blunder is not corrected), as the duty gets lower and the temptation to export whiskey, under the disguise of New England rum, becomes greater. After 1842, this must be a great business, and the molasses drawback a good profit on mean whiskey.
Putting these two items together--the sugar and the molasses drawbacks--and some millions must be plundered from the Treasury under the preposterous provisions of this compromise act.
Chapter LIV
FISHING BOUNTIES AND ALLOWANCES, AND THEIR ABUSE: MR. BENTON'S SPEECH: EXTRACTS.
The bill which I am asking leave to introduce, proposes to reduce the fishing bounties and allowances in proportion to the reduction which the salt duty has undergone, and is to undergo; and at the threshold I am met by the question, whether these allowances are founded upon the salt duty, and should rise and fall with it, or are independent of that duty, and can be kept up without it? I hold the affirmative of this question. I hold that the allowances rest upon the duty, and upon nothing else, and that there is neither statute law nor constitution to support them on any other foundation. This is what I hold: but I should not have noticed the question at this time except for the issue joined upon it between the senator from Massachusetts who sits farthest on the other side (Mr. Davis), and myself. He and I have made up an issue on this point; and without going into the argument at this time, I will cite him to the original petition from the Massachusetts legislature, asking for a drawback of the duties, or, as they styled it, "a remission of duties on all the dutiable articles used in the fisheries; and also premiums and bounties:" and having shown this petition, I will point to half a dozen acts of Congress which prove my position--hoping that they may prove sufficient, but promising to come down upon him with an avalanche of authorities if they are not.
The dutiable articles used in the fisheries, and of which a remission duty was asked in the petition, were: salt, rum, tea, sugar, molasses, coarse woollens, lines and hooks, sail-cloth, cordage, iron, tonnage. This petition, presented to Congress in the year 1790, was referred to the Secretary of State (Mr. Jefferson), for a report upon it; and his report was, that a drawback of duties ought to be allowed, and that the fisheries are not to draw support from the Treasury; the words, "drawback of duty," only applying to articles exported, was confined to the salt upon that part of the fish which were shipped to foreign countries: and to this effect was the legislation of Congress. I briefly review the first half dozen of these acts.
1. The act of 1789--the same which imposed a duty of six cents a bushel on salt, and which granted a bounty of five cents a barrel on pickled fish exported, and also on beef and pork exported, and five cents a quintal on dried fish exported--declared these bounties to be "in lieu of a drawback of the duties imposed on the importation of the salt employed and expended thereon." This act is decisive of the whole question. In the first place it declares the bounty to be in lieu of a drawback of the salt duty. In the second place, it conforms to the principle of all drawbacks, and only grants the bounty on the part of the fish which is exported. In the third place, it gives the same bounty, and in the same words, to the exporters of salted beef and pork which is given to the exporters of fish: and certainly mariners were not expected to be created among the raisers of swine and cattle--which negatives the idea of this being an encouragement to the formation of seamen.
2. In 1790 the duty on salt was doubled: it was raised from six to twelve cents a bushel: by the same act the fishing bounties and allowances were also doubled: they were raised from five to ten cents the barrel and the quintal. By this act the bounties and allowances both to fish and provisions, were described to be "in lieu of drawback of the duty on salt used in curing fish and provisions exported."
3. The act of 1792 repeals "the bounty in lieu of drawback on dried fish;" and, "in lieu of that, and as commutation thereof, and as an equivalent therefor," shifts the bounty from the "quintal" of dried fish to the "tonnage" of the fishing vessel; and changes its name from "bounty" to "allowance." This is the key act to the present system of tonnage allowance to the fishing vessel; and was passed upon the petition of the fishermen, and to enable the "crew" of the vessel to draw the bounty instead of letting it fall into the hands of the exporting merchant. It was done upon the fishermen's petition, and for the benefit of the crew, interested in the adventure, and who had paid the duty on the salt which they used. And to exclude all idea of considering this change as a change of policy, and to cut off all inference that the allowance was now to become a bounty from the Treasury as an encouragement for a seaman's nursery, the act went on to make this precise and explicit declaration: "That the allowance so granted to the fishing vessel was a commutation of, and an equivalent for, the bounty in lieu of drawback of the duties imposed on the importation of the salt used in curing the fish exported." This is plain language--the plain language used by legislators of that day--and defies misconception, misunderstanding, or cavil.
4. In 1797 the duty on salt was raised from twelve cents to twenty cents a bushel: by the same act a corresponding increase was made in the bounties both to exported salted provisions and pickled fish, and in the allowance to the fishing vessels. The salt duty was raised one-third and a fraction: and these bounties and allowances were raised one-third. Thirty-three and one-third per cent. was added all round; and the act, to make all sure, was express in again declaring the bounties and allowances to be a commutation in lieu of the drawback of the salt duty.
5. The act of April 12th, 1800, continues the salt duty, and with it all the bounties to salted provisions and pickled fish exported, and all the allowances to fishing vessels, for ten years; and then adds this proviso: "That these allowances shall not be understood to be continued for a longer time than the correspondent duties on salt, respectively, for which the said allowances were granted, shall be payable." Such are the terms of the act of the year 1800. It is a clincher. It nails up, and crushes every thing. It shows that Congress was determined that the salt duty, and the bounties and allowances, should be one and indivisible: that they should come, and go together--should rise and fall together--should live and die together.
6. In 1807, Mr. Jefferson being President, the salt tax was abolished upon his recommendation: and with it all the bounties and allowances to fishing vessels, to pickled fish, and to salted beef and pork were all swept away. The same act abolished the whole. The first section repealed the salt duty: the second repealed the bounties and allowances: and the repeal of both was to take effect on the same day--namely, on the first day of January, 1808: a day which deserves to be nationally commemorated, as the day of the death of an odious, criminal and impious tax. The beneficent and meritorious act was in these words: "That from and after the first day of January next, so much of any act as allows a bounty on exported salt provisions and pickled fish, in lieu of drawback of the duties on the salt employed in curing the same, and so much of any act as makes allowances to the owners and crews of fishing vessels, in lieu of drawback of the duties paid on the salt used in the same, shall be, and the same hereby is repealed." This was the end of the first salt tax in the United States, and of all the bounties and allowances built upon it. It fell, with all its accessories, under the republican administration of Mr. Jefferson--and with the unanimous vote of every republican--and also with the vote of many federalists: so much more favorable were the old federalists than the whigs of this day, to the interests of the people. In fact there were only five votes against the repeal, and not one of these upon the ground that the bounties and allowances were independent of the salt duty.
7. After this, and for six years, there was no salt tax--no fishing bounties or allowances in the United States. The tax, and its progeny lay buried in one common grave, and had no resurrection until the year 1813. The war with Great Britain revived them--the tax and its offspring together; but only as a temporary measure--as a war tax--to cease within one year after the termination of the war. Before that year was out, the tax, and its appendages were continued--not for any determinate period, but until repealed by Congress. They have not been repealed yet! and that was forty years ago! No act could then have been obtained to continue this duty for the short space of three years. The continuance could only be obtained on the argument that Congress could then repeal it at any time; a fallacious reliance, but always seductive to men of easy and temporizing temperaments.
The pretension that these fishing bounties and allowances were granted as encouragement to mariners, is rejected by every word of the acts which grant them, and by the striking fact, that no part of them goes to the whale fisheries. Not a cent of them had ever gone to a whale ship: they had only gone to the cod and mackerel fisheries. The noble whaler of four or five hundred tons, with her ample crew, which sailed twenty thousand miles, doubling a most tempestuous cape before she arrived at the field of her labors--which remained out three years, waging actual war with the monsters of the deep--a war in which a brave heart, a steady eye, and an iron nerve were as much wanted as in any battle with man;--this noble whaler got nothing. It all went to the hook-and-line men--to the cod and mackerel fisheries, which were carried on in diminutive vessels, as small as five tons, and in the rivers, and along the shores, and on the shallow banks of Newfoundland. Meritorious as these hook-and-line fishermen might be, they cannot compare with the whalers: and these whalers receive no bounties and allowances because they pay no duty on imported salt, re-exported by them.
I now come to the clause in my bill which has called forth these preliminary remarks; the third clause, which proposes the reduction of fishing bounties and allowances in proportion to the reduction which the salt tax has undergone, and shall undergo. And here, it is not the compromise act alone that is to be blamed: a previous act shares that censure with it. In 1830 the salt duty was reduced one-half, to take effect in 1830 and 1831; the fishing bounties and allowances should have been reduced one-half at the same time. I made the motion in the Senate to that effect; but it failed of success. When the compromise act was passed in 1833, and provided for a further reduction of the salt duty--a reduction which has now reduced it two-thirds, and in 1841 and '42 will reduce it still lower--when this act was passed, a reduction of the fishing bounties and allowances should have taken place. The two senators who concocted that act in their chambers, and brought it here to be registered as the royal edicts were registered in the times of the old French monarchy; when these two senators concocted this act, they should have inserted a provision in it for the correspondent reduction of the fishing bounties and allowances with the salt tax: they should have placed these allowances, and the refined sugar, and the rum drawbacks, all on the same footing, and reduced them all in proportion to the reduction of the duties on the articles on which they were founded. They did not do this. They omitted the whole; with what mischief you have already seen in the case of rum and refined sugar, and shall presently see in the case of the fishing bounties and allowances. I attempted to supply a part of their omission in making the motion in relation to drawbacks, which was read to you at the commencement of these remarks. Failing in that motion, I made no further attempt, but waited for TIME, the great arbiter of all questions, to show the mischief, and to enforce the remedy. That arbiter is now here, with his proofs in his hand, in the shape of certain reports from the Treasury Department in relation to the salt duty and the fishing bounties and allowances, which have been printed by the order of the Senate, and constitute part of the salt document, No. 196. From that document I now proceed to collect the evidences of one branch of the mischief--the pecuniary branch of it--which the omission to make the proper reductions in these allowances has inflicted upon the country.
The salt duty was reduced one-fourth in the year 1831; the fishing bounties and allowances that year were $313,894; they should have been reduced one-fourth also, which would have made them about $160,000. In 1832 the duty was reduced one-half; the fishing bounties and allowances were paid in full, and amounted to $234,137; they should have been reduced one-half; and then $117,018 would have discharged them. The compromise act was made in 1833, and, under the operation of that act, the salt duty has undergone biennial reductions, until it is now reduced to about one-third of its original amount: if it had provided for the correspondent reduction of the fishing bounties and allowances, there would have been saved from that year to the year 1839--the last to which the returns have been made up--an annual average sum of about $150,000, or a gross sum of about $900,000. The prospective loss can only be estimated; but it is to increase rapidly, owing to the large reductions in the salt duty in the years 1841 and 1842.
The present year, 1840, lacks but a little of exhausting the whole amount of the salt revenue in paying the fishing bounties and allowances; the next year will take more than the whole; and the year after will require about double the amount of the salt revenue of that year to be taken from other branches of the revenue to satisfy the demands of the fishing vessels: thus producing the same result as in the case of the sugar duties--the whole amount of the salt duty, and as much more out of other duties, being paid to the cod and mackerel fishermen, as the whole amount of the sugar tax, and considerably more, is paid to the sugar-refiners. The results for the present year, and the ensuing ones, are of course computed: they are computations founded upon the basis of the last ascertained year's operations. The last year to which all the heads of this branch of business is made up, is the year 1838; and for that year they stand thus: Salt imported, in round numbers, seven millions of bushels; net revenue from it, about $430,000; fishing bounties and allowances, $320,000. Assuming the importation of the present year to be the same, and the bounties and allowances to be the same, the loss to the Treasury will be $206,000; for the salt duty this year will undergo a further reduction. In 1842, when this duty has reached its lowest point, the whole amount of revenue derived from it is computed at about $170,000, while the fishing bounties and allowances continuing the same, namely, about $320,000, the salt revenue in the gross will be little more than half enough to pay it; and, after deducting the weighers' and measurers' fees, which come out of the Treasury, and amount to $52,500 on an importation of seven millions; after deducting this item, there will be a deficiency of about $200,000 in the salt revenue, in meeting the drawbacks, in the shape of bounties and allowances founded upon it. Thus two-thirds of the whole amount of the salt revenue is at this time paid to the fishing vessels. Next year it will all go to them; and after 1842, we shall have to raise money from other sources to the amount of $200,000 per annum, or raise the salt duty itself to produce that amount, in order to satisfy these drawbacks, which were permitted to take the form of bounties and allowances to fishing vessels. Such is the operation of the compromise act! that act which is styled sacred and inviolable!
Of the other mischiefs resulting from this compromise act, which reduced the duties on salt, and the one which preceded it for the same purpose, without reducing the correspondent bounties and allowances to the fishing interest--of these remaining mischiefs, whereof there are many, I mean to mention but one; and merely to mention that, and not to argue it. It is the constitutional objection to the payment of any thing beyond the duty received--the payment of any thing which exceeds the drawback of the duty. Up to that point, I admit the constitutionality of drawbacks, whether passing under that name, or changed to the name of a bounty, or an allowance in lieu of a drawback. I admit the constitutional right of Congress to permit a drawback of the amount paid in: I deny the constitutional right to permit a drawback of any amount beyond what was paid in. This is my position, which I pledge myself to maintain, if any one disputes it; and applying this principle to the fishing bounties and allowances, and also to the drawbacks in the case of refined sugars and rum: and I boldly affirm that the constitution of the United States has been in a state of flagrant violation, under the compromise act, from the day of its passage to the present hour, and will continue so until the bill is passed which I am about to ask leave to bring in.
Sir, I quit this part of my subject with presenting, in a single picture, the condensed view of what I have been detailing. It is, that the whole annual revenue derived from sugar, salt, and molasses, is delivered over gratuitously to a few thousand persons in a particular section of the Union, and is not even sufficient to satisfy their demands! In other words, that a tax upon a nation of seventeen millions of people, upon three articles of universal consumption, articles of necessity, and of comfort, is laid for the benefit of a few dozen rum distillers and sugar refiners, and a few thousand fishermen; and not being sufficient for them, the deficit, amounting to many hundred thousand dollars per annum, is taken from other branches of the revenue, and presented to them! and all this the effect of an act which was made out of doors, which was not permitted to be amended on its passage, and which is now held to be sacred and inviolable! and which will eventually sink under its own iniquities, though sustained now by a cry which was invented by knavery, and is repeated by ignorance, folly, and faction--a cry that that compromise saved the Union. This is the picture I present--which I prove to be true--and the like of which is not to be seen in the legislation, or even in the despotic decrees, of arbitrary monarchs, in any other country upon the face of the earth.
About five millions of dollars have been taken from the Treasury under these bounties and allowances--the greater part of it most unduly and abusefully.[3] The fishermen are only entitled to an amount equal to the duty paid on the imported salt, which is used upon that part of the fish which is exported; and the law requires not only the exportation to be proved, but the landing and remaining of the cargo in a foreign country. They draw back this year $355,000. Do they pay that amount of duty on the salt put on the modicum of fish which they export? Why, it is about the entire amount of the whole salt tax paid by the whole United States! and to justify their right to it, they must consume on the exported part of their fish the whole quantity of foreign salt now imported into the United States--leaving not a handful to be used by the rest of the population, or by themselves on that part of their fish which is consumed at home--and which is so much greater than the exported part. This shows the enormity of the abuse, and that the whole amount of the salt tax now goes to a few thousand fishermen; and if this compromise act is not corrected, that whole amount, after 1842, will not be sufficient to pay this small class--not equal in number to the farmers in a common Kentucky county; and other money must be taken out of the Treasury to make good the deficiency. I have often attempted to get rid of the whole evil, and render a great service to the country, by repealing in toto the tax and all the bounties and allowances erected upon it. At present I only propose, and that without the least prospect of success, to correct a part of the abuse, by reducing the payments to the fishermen in proportion to the reduction of the duty on salt: but the true remedy is the one applied under Mr. Jefferson's administration--total repeal of both.
[3] About four and a quarter millions taken since; and still taking.
LV. EXPENDITURES OF THE GOVERNMENT
At no point does the working of the government more seriously claim the attention of statesmen than at that of its expenses. It is the tendency of all governments to increase their expenses, and it should be the care of all statesmen to restrain them within the limits of a judicious economy. This obligation was felt as a duty in the early periods of our history, and the doctrine of economy became a principle in the political faith of the party, which, whether called Republican as formerly, or Democratic as now, is still the same, and was incorporated in its creed. Mr. Jefferson largely rested the character of his administration upon it; and deservedly: for even in the last year of his administration, and after the enlargement of our territory by the acquisition of Louisiana, the expenses of the government were but about three millions and a half of dollars. At the end of Mr. Monroe's administration, sixteen years later, they had risen to about seven millions; and in the last year of Mr. Van Buren's (sixteen years more), they had risen to about thirteen millions. At the same time, at each of these epochs, and in fact, in every year of every administration, there were payments from the Treasury for extraordinary or temporary objects, often far exceeding in amount the regular governmental expenses. Thus, in the last year of Mr. Jefferson, the whole outlay from the Treasury, was about twelve millions and a half; of which eight millions went to the payment of principal and interest on the public debt, and about one million to other extra objects. And in the last year of Mr. Monroe, the whole payments were about thirty-two millions of dollars, of which sixteen millions and a half went to the liquidation of the public debt; and above eight millions more to other extraordinary and temporary objects. Towards the close of Mr. Van Buren's administration, this aggregate of outlay for all objects had risen to about thirty-seven millions, which the opposition called thirty-nine; and presenting this gross sum as the actual expenses of the government, made a great outcry against the extravagance of the administration; and the people, not understanding the subject, were seriously impressed with the force and truth of that accusation, while the real expenses were but about the one-third of that sum. To present this result in a plain and authentic form, the author of this View obtained a call upon the Secretary for the different payments, ordinary and extraordinary, from the Treasury for a series of years, in which the payments would be placed under three heads--the ordinary, the extraordinary, and the public debt--specifying the items of each; and extending from Monroe's time (admitted to be economical), to Mr. Van Buren's charged with extravagance. This return was made by the Secretary, divided into three columns, with specifications, as required; and though obtained for a temporary and transient purpose, it possesses a permanent interest as giving a complete view of the financial working of the government, and fixing points of comparison in the progress of expenditure--very proper to be looked back upon by those who would hold the government to some degree of economy in the use of the public money. There has been no such examination since the year 1840: there would seem to be room for it now (1855), when the aggregate of appropriations exceed seventy millions of dollars. A deduction for extraordinaries would largely reduce that aggregate, but still leave enough behind to astound the lovers of economy. Three branches of expenditure alone, each within itself, exceeds by upwards of four to one, the whole ordinary expenses of the government in the time of Mr. Jefferson; and upwards of double of such expense in the time of Mr. Monroe; and some millions more than the same aggregate in the last year of Mr. Van Buren. These three branches are, 1. The civil, diplomatic, and miscellaneous, $17,265,929 and 50 cents. 2. The naval service (without the pensions and "reserved" list), $15,012,091 and 53 cents. 3. The army, fortifications, military academy (without the pensions), $12,571,496 and 64 cents. These three branches of expenditure alone would amount to about forty-five millions of dollars--to which twenty-six millions more are to be added. The dormant spirit of economy--hoped to be only dormant, not dead--should wake up at this exhibition of the public expenditure: and it is with that view--with the view of engaging the attention of some economical members of Congress, that the exhibit is now made--that this chapter is written--and some regard invoked for the subject of which it treats. The evils of extravagance in the government are great. Besides the burden upon the people, it leads to corruption in the government, and to a janissary horde of office holders to live upon the people while polluting their elections and legislation, and poisoning the fountains of public information in moulding public opinion to their own purposes. More than that. It is the true source of the just discontent of the Southern States, and must aggravate more and more the deep-seated complaint against the unnecessary levy of revenue upon the industry of one half of the Union to be chiefly expended in the other. That complaint was great enough to endanger the Union twenty-five years ago, when the levy and expenditure was thirty odd millions: it is now seventy odd! At the same time it is the opinion of this writer, that a practical man, acquainted with the objects for which the federal government was created, and familiar with its financial working from the time its fathers put it into operation, could take his pen and cross out nearly the one half of these seventy odd millions, and leave the government in full vigor for all its proper objects, and more pure, by reducing the number of those who live upon the substance of the people. To complete the effect of this chapter, some extracts are given in the ensuing one, from the speech made in 1840, upon the expenditures of the government, as presenting practical views upon a subject of permanent interest, and more worthy of examination now than then.
Chapter LVI
EXPENSES OF THE GOVERNMENT, COMPARATIVE AND PROGRESSIVE, AND SEPARATED FROM EXTRAORDINARIES.
Mr. Benton moved to print an extra number of these tabular statements received from the Secretary of the Treasury, and proposed to give his reasons for the motion, and for that purpose, asked that the papers should be sent to him (which was done); and Mr. B. went on to say that his object was to spread before the country, in an authentic form, the full view of all the government expenses for a series of years past, going back as far as Mr. Monroe's administration; and thereby enabling every citizen, in every part of the country, to see the actual, the comparative, and the classified expenditures of the government for the whole period. This proceeding had become necessary, Mr. B. said, from the systematic efforts made for some years past, to impress the country with the belief that the expenditures had increased threefold in the last twelve years--that they had risen from thirteen to thirty-nine millions of dollars; and that this enormous increase was the effect of the extravagance, of the corruption, and of the incompetency of the administrations which had succeeded those of Mr. Adams and Mr. Monroe. These two latter administrations were held up as the models of economy; those of Mr. Van Buren and General Jackson were stigmatized as monsters of extravagance; and tables of figures were so arranged as to give color to the characters attributed to each. These systematic efforts--this reiterated assertion, made on this floor, of thirteen millions increased to thirty-nine--and the effect which such statements must have upon the minds of those who cannot see the purposes for which the money was expended, appeared to him (Mr. B.), to require some more formal and authentic refutation than any one individual could give--something more imposing than the speech of a solitary member could afford. Familiar with the action of the government for twenty years past--coming into the Senate in the time of Mr. Monroe--remaining in it ever since--a friend to economy in public and in private life--and closely scrutinizing the expenditures of the government during the whole time--he (Mr. B.) felt himself to be very able at any time to have risen in his place, and to have exposed the delusion of this thirteen and thirty-nine million bugbear; and, if he did not do so, it was because, in the first place, he was disinclined to bandy contradictions on the floor of the Senate; and, in the second place, because he relied upon the intelligence of the country to set all right whenever they obtained a view of the facts. This view he had made himself the instrument of procuring, and the Secretary of the Treasury had now presented it. It was ready for the contemplation of the American people; and he could wish every citizen to have the picture in his own hands, that he might contemplate it at his own fireside, and at his full leisure. He could wish every citizen to possess a copy of this report, now received from the Secretary of the Treasury, under the call of the Senate, and printed by its order; he could wish every citizen to possess one of these authentic copies, bearing the imprimatur of the American Senate; but that was impossible; and, limiting his action to what was possible, he would propose to print such number of extra copies as would enable some to reach every quarter of the Union.
Mr. B. then opened the tables, and explained their character and contents. The first one (marked A) consisted of three columns, and exhibited the aggregate, and the classified expenditures of the government from the year 1824 to 1839, inclusive; the second one (marked B) contained the detailed statement of the payments annually made on account of all temporary or extraordinary objects, including the public debt, for the same period. The second table was explanatory of the third column of the first one; and the two, taken together, would enable every citizen to see the actual expenditures, and the comparative expenditures, of the government for the whole period which he had mentioned.
Mr. B. then examined the actual and the comparative expenses of two of the years, taken from the two contrasted periods referred to, and invoked the attention of the Senate to the results which the comparison would exhibit. He took the first and the last of the years mentioned in the tables--the years 1824 and 1839--and began with the first item in the first column. This showed the aggregate expenditures for every object for the year 1824, to have been $31,898,538 47--very near thirty-two millions of dollars, said Mr. B., and if stated alone, and without explanation, very capable of astonishing the public, of imposing upon the ignorant, and of raising a cry against the dreadful extravagance, the corruption, and the wickedness of Mr. Monroe's administration. Taken by itself (and indisputably true it is in itself), and this aggregate of near thirty-two millions is very sufficient to effect all this surprise and indignation in the public mind; but, passing on to the second column to see what were the expenditures, independent of the public debt, and this large aggregate will be found to be reduced more than one half; it sinks to $15,330,144 71. This is a heavy deduction; but it is not all. Passing on to the third column, and it is seen that the actual expenses of the government for permanent and ordinary objects, independent of the temporary and extraordinary ones, for this same year, were only $7,107,892 05; being less than the one-fourth part of the aggregate of near thirty-two millions. This looks quite reasonable, and goes far towards relieving Mr. Monroe's administration from the imputation to which a view of the aggregate expenditure for the year would have subjected it. But, to make it entirely satisfactory, and to enable every citizen to understand the important point of the government expenditures--a point on which the citizens of a free and representative government should be always well informed--to attain this full satisfaction, let us pass on to the second table (marked B), and fix our eyes on its first column, under the year 1824. We shall there find every temporary and extraordinary object, and the amount paid on account of it, the deduction of which reduced an aggregate of near thirty-two millions to a fraction over seven millions. We shall there find the explanation of the difference between the first and third columns. The first item is the sum of $16,568,393 76, paid on account of the principal and interest of the public debt. The second is the sum of $4,891,386 56, paid to merchants for indemnities under the treaty with Spain of 1819, by which we acquired Florida. And so on through nine minor items, amounting in the whole, exclusive of the public debt, to about eight millions and a quarter. This total added to the sum paid on account of the public debt, makes close upon twenty-five millions of dollars; and this, deducted from the aggregate of near thirty-two millions, leaves a fraction over seven millions for the real expenses of the government--the ordinary and permanent expenses--during the last year of Mr. Monroe's administration.
This is certainly a satisfactory result. It exempts the administration of that period from the imputation of extravagance, which the unexplained exhibition of the aggregate expenditures might have drawn upon it in the minds of uninformed persons. It clears that administration from all blame. It must be satisfactory to every candid mind. And now let us apply the test of the same examination to some year of the present administration, now so incontinently charged with ruinous extravagance. Let us see how the same rule will work when applied to the present period; and, for that purpose, let us take the last year in the table, that of 1839. Let others take any year that they please, or as many as they please: I take one, because I only propose to give an example; and I take the last one in the table, because it is the last. Let us proceed with this examination, and see what the results, actual and comparative, will be.
Commencing with the aggregate payments from the Treasury for all objects, Mr. B. said it would be seen at the foot of the first column in the first table, that they amounted to $37,129,396 80; passing to the second column, and it would be seen that this sum was reduced to $25,982,797 75; and passing to the third, and it would be seen that this latter sum was itself reduced to $13,525,800 18; and, referring to the second table, under the year 1839, and it would be seen how this aggregate of thirty-seven millions was reduced to thirteen and a half. It was a great reduction; a reduction of nearly two-thirds from the aggregate amount paid out; and left for the proper expenses of the government--its ordinary and permanent expenses--an inconceivably small sum for a great nation of seventeen millions of souls, covering an immense extent of territory, and acting a part among the great powers of the world. To trace this reduction--to show the reasons of the difference between the first and the third columns, Mr. B. would follow the same process which he had pursued in explaining the expenditures of the year 1824, and ask for nothing in one case which had not been granted in the other.
1. The first item to be deducted from the thirty-seven million aggregate, was the sum of $11,146,599 05, paid on account of the public debt. He repeated, on account of the public debt; for it was paid in redemption of Treasury notes; and these Treasury notes were so much debt incurred to supply the place of the revenue deposited with the States, in 1836, or shut up in banks during the suspension of 1837, or due from merchants, to whom indulgence had been granted. To supply the place of these unattainable funds, the government went in debt by issuing Treasury notes; but faithful to the sentiment which abhorred a national debt, it paid off the debt almost as fast as it contracted it. Above eleven millions of this debt was paid in 1839, amounting to almost the one-third part of the aggregate expenditure of that year; and thus, nearly the one-third part of the sum which is charged upon the administration as extravagance and corruption, was a mere payment of debt!--a mere payment of Treasury notes which we had issued to supply the place of our misplaced and captured revenue--our three instalments of ten millions cash presented to the States under the false and fraudulent name of a deposit, and our revenue of 1837 captured by the banks when they shut their doors upon their creditors. The glorious administration of President Jackson left the country free from public debt: its worthy successor will do the same.
Removal of Indians from the Southern and Western States, and extinction of their titles, and numerous smaller items, all specified in the third column of the table, amount to about twelve millions and a half more; and these added to the payments on the public debt, the remainder is the expense of the government, and is but about the one-third of the aggregate expenditure--to be precise, about thirteen millions and a half.
With this view of the tabular statements Mr. B. closed the examination of the items of expenditure, and stated the results to be a reduction of the thirty-seven million aggregate in 1839, like that of the thirty-two million aggregate in 1824, to about one-third of its amount. The very first item, that of the payment of public debt in the redemption of Treasury notes, reduced it eleven millions of dollars: it sunk it from thirty-seven millions to twenty-six. The other eighteen items amounted to $12,656,977, and reduced the twenty-six millions to thirteen and a half. Here then is a result which is attained by the same process which applies to the year 1824, and to every other year, and which is right in itself; and which must put to flight and to shame all the attempts to excite the country with this bugbear story of extravagance. In the first place the aggregate expenditures have not increased threefold in fifteen years; they have not risen from thirteen to thirty-nine millions, as incontinently asserted by the opposition; but from thirty-two millions to thirty-seven or thirty-nine. And how have they risen? By paying last year eleven millions for Treasury notes, and more than twelve millions for Indian lands, and wars, removals of Indians, and increase of the army and navy, and other items as enumerated. The result is a residuum of thirteen and a half millions for the real expenses of the government; a sum one and a half millions short of what gentlemen proclaim would be an economical expenditure. They all say that fifteen millions would be an economical expenditure; very well! here is thirteen and a half! which is a million and a half short of that mark.
Chapter LVII
DEATH OF MR. JUSTICE BARBOUR OF THE SUPREME COURT, AND APPOINTMENT OF PETER V. DANIEL, ESQ., IN HIS PLACE.
Mr. Phillip P. Barbour was a representative in Congress from the State of Virginia when I was first elected to the Senate in 1820. I had the advantage--(for advantage I truly deemed it for a young member)--to be in habitual society with such a man--one of the same mess with him the first session of my service. Nor was it accidental, but sought for on my part. It was a talented mess--among others the brilliant orator, William Pinkney of Maryland; and the eloquent James Barbour, of the Senate, brother to the representative: their cousin the representative John S. Barbour, equal to either in the endowments of the mind: Floyd of Virginia: Trimble and Clay of Kentucky. I knew the advantage of such association--and cherished it. From that time I was intimate with Mr. Phillip P. Barbour during the twenty-one winters which his duties, either as representative in Congress, or justice of the Supreme Court, required him to be at Washington. He was a man worthy of the best days of the republic--modest, virtuous, pure: artless as a child: full of domestic affections: patriotic: filially devoted to Virginia as his mother State, and a friend to the Union from conviction and sentiment. He had a clear mind--a close, logical and effective method of speaking--copious without diffusion; and, always speaking to the subject, both with knowledge and sincerity, he was always listened to with favor. He was some time Speaker of the House, and was appointed to the bench of the Supreme Court by President Van Buren in 1837, in place of Mr. Justice Duval, resigned. He had the death which knows no pain, and which, to the body, is sleep without waking. He was in attendance upon the Supreme Court, in good health and spirits, and had done his part the night before in one of the conferences which the labors of the Supreme Bench impose almost nightly on the learned judges. In the morning he was supposed by his servant to be sleeping late, and, finally going to his bedside, found him dead--the face all serene and composed, not a feature or muscle disturbed, the body and limbs in their easy natural posture. It was evident that the machinery of life had stopped of itself, and without a shock. Ossification of the heart was supposed to be the cause. He was succeeded on the Supreme Bench by Peter V. Daniel, Esq., of the same State, also appointed by Mr. Van Buren--one in the first, the other in the last days of his administration.
A beautiful instance in Mr. Barbour of self-denial, and of fidelity to party and to personal friendship, and regard for honor and decorum, occurred while he was a member of the House. Mr. Randolph was in the Senate: the time for his re-election came round: he had some personal enemies in his own party, who, joined to the whig party, could defeat him: and it was a high object with the administration at Washington (that of Mr. Adams), to have him defeated. The disaffected and the opposition combined together, counted their numbers, ascertained their strength, and saw that they could dispose of the election; but only in favor of some one of the same party with Mr. Randolph. They offered the place to Mr. Barbour. It was the natural ascent in the gradation of his appointments; and he desired it; and, it may be said, the place desired him: for he was a man to adorn the chamber of the American Senate. But honor forbid; for with him Burns's line was a law of his nature: Where you feel your honor grip, let that still be your border. He was the personal and political friend of Mr. Randolph, and would not be used against him; and sent an answer to the combined parties which put an end to their solicitations. Mr. John Tyler, then governor of the State, and standing in the same relation with Mr. Barbour to Mr. Randolph, was then offered the place: and took it. It was his first step in the road to the whig camp; where he arrived eventually--and lodged, until elected out of it into the vice-presidential chair.
Judge Barbour was a Virginia country gentleman, after the most perfect model of that most respectable class--living on his ample estate, baronially, with his family, his slaves, his flocks and herds--all well cared for by himself, and happy in his care. A farmer by position, a lawyer by profession, a politician of course--dividing his time between his estate, his library, his professional, and his public duties--scrupulously attentive to his duties in all: and strict in that school of politics of which Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Madison, John Taylor of Caroline, Mr. Monroe, Mr. Macon, and others, were the great exemplars. A friend to order and economy in his private life, he carried the same noble qualities into his public stations, and did his part to administer the government with the simplicity and purity which its founders intended for it.
LVIII. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Mr. Van Buren was the democratic candidate. His administration had been so acceptable to his party, that his nomination in a convention was a matter of form, gone through according to custom, but the result commanded by the party in the different States in appointing their delegates. Mr. Richard M. Johnson, the actual Vice-President, was also nominated for re-election; and both nominations were made in conformity to the will of the people who sent the delegates. On the part of the whigs the same nominations were made as in the election of 1836--General William Henry Harrison of Ohio, for President; and Mr. John Tyler of Virginia, for Vice-President. The leading statesmen of the whig party were again passed by to make room for a candidate more sure of being elected. The success of General Jackson had turned the attention of those who managed the presidential nominations to military men, and an "odor of gunpowder" was considered a sufficient attraction to rally the masses, without the civil qualifications, or the actual military fame which General Jackson possessed. Availability, to use their own jargon, was the only ability which these managers asked--that is, available for the purposes of the election, and for their own advancement, relying on themselves to administer the government. Mr. Clay, the prominent man, and the undisputed head of the party, was not deemed available; and it was determined to set him aside. How to do it was the question. He was a man of too much power and spirit to be rudely thrust aside. Gentle, and respectful means were necessary to get him out of the way; and for that purpose he was concertedly importuned to withdraw from the canvass. He would not do so, but wrote a letter submitting himself to the will of the convention. When he did so he certainly expected an open decision--a vote in open convention--every delegate acting responsibly, and according to the will of his constituents. Not so the fact. He submitted himself to the convention: the convention delivered him to a committee: the committee disposed of him in a back chamber. It devised a process for getting at a result, which is a curiosity in the chapter of ingenious inventions--which is a study for the complication of its machinery--a model contrivance of the few to govern many--a secure way to produce an intended result without showing the design, and without leaving a trace behind to show what was done: and of which none but itself can be its own delineator: and, therefore, here it is:
"Ordered, That the delegates from each State be requested to assemble as a delegation, and appoint a committee, not exceeding three in number, to receive the views and opinions of such delegation, and communicate the same to the assembled committees of all the delegations, to be by them respectively reported to their principals; and that thereupon the delegates from each State be requested to assemble as a delegation, and ballot for candidates for the offices of President and Vice-President, and having done so, to commit the ballot designating the votes of each candidate, and by whom given, to its committee; and thereupon all the committees shall assemble and compare the several ballots, and report the result of the same to their several delegations, together with such facts as may bear upon the nomination; and said delegation shall forthwith re-assemble and ballot again for candidates for the above offices, and again commit the result to the above committees, and if it shall appear that a majority of the ballots are for any one man for candidate for President, said committee shall report the result to the convention for its consideration; but if there shall be no such majority, then the delegations shall repeat the balloting until such a majority shall be obtained, and then report the same to the convention for its consideration. That the vote of a majority of each delegation shall be reported as the vote of that State; and each State represented here shall vote its full electoral vote by such delegation in the committee."
As this View of the Thirty Years is intended to show the working of our political system, and how things were done still more than what was done; and as the election of chief magistrate is the highest part of that working; and as the party nomination of a presidential candidate is the election of that candidate so far as the party is concerned: in all these points of view, the device of this resolution becomes historical, and commends itself to the commentators upon our constitution. The people are to elect the President. Here is a process through multiplied filtrations by which the popular sentiment is to be deduced from the masses, collected in little streams, then united in one swelling current, and poured into the hall of the convention--no one seeing the source, or course of any one of the streams. Algebra and alchemy must have been laid under contribution to work out a quotient from such a combination of signs and symbols. But it was done. Those who set the sum could work it: and the quotient was political death to Mr. Clay. The result produced was--for General Scott, 16 votes: for Mr. Clay, 90 votes: for General Harrison, 148 votes. And as the law of these conventions swallows up all minorities in an ascertained majority, so the majority for General Harrison swallowed up the 106 votes given to Mr. Clay and General Scott, made them count for the victor, presenting him as the unanimity candidate of the convention, and the defeated candidate and all their friends bound to join in his support. And in this way the election of 1840 was effected! a process certainly not within the purview of those framers of the constitution, who supposed they were giving to a nation the choice of its own chief magistrate.
From the beginning it had been foreseen that there was to be an embittered contest--the severest ever known in our country. Two powers were in the field against Mr. Van Buren, each strong within itself, and truly formidable when united--the whole whig party, and the large league of suspended banks, headed by the Bank of the United States--now criminal as well as bankrupt, and making its last struggle for a new national charter in the effort to elect a President friendly to it. In elections as in war money is the sinew of the contest, and the broken and suspended banks were in a condition, and a temper, to furnish that sinew without stint. By mutual support they were able to make their notes pass as money; and, not being subject to redemption, it could be furnished without restraint, and with all the good will of a self-interest in putting down the democratic party, whose hard-money policy, and independent treasury scheme, presented it as an enemy to paper money and delinquent banks. The influence of this moneyed power over its debtors, over presses, over travelling agents, was enormous, and exerted to the uttermost, and in amounts of money almost fabulous; and in ways not dreamed of. The mode of operating divided itself into two general classes, one coercive--addressed to the business pursuits and personal interests of the community: the other seductive, and addressed to its passions. The phrases given out in Congress against the financial policy of the administration became texts to speak upon, and hints to act upon. Carrying out the idea that the re-election of Mr. Van Buren would be the signal for the downfall of all prices, the ruin of all industry, and the destruction of all labor, the newspapers in all the trading districts began to abound with such advertisements as these: "The subscriber will pay six dollars a barrel for flour if Harrison is elected, and three dollars if Van Buren is." "The subscriber will pay five dollars a hundred for pork if Harrison is elected, and two and a half if Van Buren is." And so on through the whole catalogue of marketable articles, and through the different kinds of labor: and these advertisements were signed by respectable men, large dealers in the articles mentioned, and well able to fix the market price for them. In this way the result of the election was brought to bear coercively upon the business, the property, and the pecuniary interest of the people. The class of inducements addressed to the passions and imaginations of the people were such as history blushes to record. Log-cabins, coonskins, and hard cider were taken as symbols of the party, and to show its identification with the poorest and humblest of the people: and these cabins were actually raised in the most public parts of the richest cities, ornamented with coonskins after the fashion of frontier huts, and cider drank in them out of gourds in the public meetings which gathered about them: and the virtues of these cabins, these skins, and this cider were celebrated by travelling and stationary orators. The whole country was put into commotion by travelling parties and public gatherings. Steamboats and all public conveyances were crowded with parties singing doggerel ballads made for the occasion, accompanied with the music of drums, fifes, and fiddles; and incited by incessant speaking. A system of public gatherings was got up which pervaded every State, county and town--which took place by day and by night, accompanied by every preparation to excite; and many of which gatherings were truly enormous in their numbers--only to be estimated by the acre; attempts at counting or computing such masses being out of the question. The largest of these gatherings took place at Dayton, in the State of Ohio, the month before the election; and the description of it, as given by its enthusiastic friends, will give a vivid idea of that monster assemblage, and of the myriads of others of which it was only the greatest--differing in degree only, not in kind:
"Dayton, the whole body there assembled in convention covered ten acres by actual measurement! And at no time were there more than two-thirds of the people on the ground. Every house with a flag was a hotel without price--the strings of every door being out, and every latch unfastened! One hundred thousand! It were useless to attempt any thing like a detailed description of this grand gathering of the people. We saw it all--felt it all--and shall bear to our graves, live we yet half a century, the impression it made upon our hearts. But we cannot describe it. No eye that witnessed it, can convey to the mind of another, even a faint semblance of the things it there beheld. The bright and glorious day--the beautiful and hospitable city--the green-clad and heaven-blessed valley--the thousand flags, fluttering in every breeze and waving from every window--the ten thousand banners and badges, with their appropriate devices and patriotic inscriptions--and, more than all, the hundred thousand human hearts beating in that dense and seething mass of people--are things which those alone can properly feel and appreciate, who beheld this grandest spectacle of time. The number of persons present was, during the whole of the morning, variously estimated at from seventy-five to ninety thousand. Conjecture, however, was put to rest in the afternoon, at the speakers' stand. Here, while the crowd was compact, as we have elsewhere described it, and during the speech of General Harrison, the ground upon which it stood was measured by three different civil engineers, and allowing to the square yard four persons, the following results were arrived at: the first made it 77,600, the second 75,000, and the third 80,000. During the time of making three measurements, the number of square yards of surface covered was continually changing, by pressure without and resistance from within. Mr. Van Buren and his wiseacre assistants, have so managed currency matters, that we have very little to do business with. We can, therefore, be away from home, a portion of the time, as well as at home. And with respect to our families, when we leave upon a rally, we take them with us! Our wives and daughters, we are proud to say, have the blood of their revolutionary mothers and grandmothers coursing through their veins. There is no man among us whose heart is more filled and animated than theirs, by the spirit of seventy-six. Look at the three hundred and fifty at Nashville, who invited Henry Clay, the nation's pride, to be with them and their husbands and brothers on the 15th of August! Look at the four hundred at St. Louis, the nine hundred at the Tippecanoe battle-ground, the five thousand at Dayton! What now, but the spirit of seventy-six, does all this manifest? Ay, and what tale does it all tell? Does it not say, that the wicked charlatanry, and mad ambition, and selfish schemings, of the leading members of this administration of the general government, have made themselves felt in the very sanctum sanctorum of domestic life? Does it not speak of the cheerless hearth, where willing hands sit without employment? Does it not speak of the half-recompensed toil of the worn laborer, who finds, now and then, a week's hard work, upon the scant proceeds of which he must subsist himself and his family for a month! Does it not speak of empty larders in the town, while the garners of the country are overflowing? Does it not speak of want here and abundance there, without any medium of exchange to equalize the disparity? Does it not speak of a general disorganization of conventional operations--of embarrassment, stagnation, idleness, and despondency--whose 'malign influences' have penetrated the inner temples of man's home, and aroused, to indignant speech and unusual action, her who is its peace, its gentleness, its love, its all but divinity? The truth is--and it should be told--the women are the very life and soul of these movements of the people. Look at their liberal preparations at Nashville. Look at their boundless hospitality at Dayton. Look at their ardor and activity every where. And last, though far from the least important, look at their presence, in hundreds and by thousands, wherever there is any good to be done, to animate and encourage, and urge on their fathers, husbands and brothers. Whence those six hundred and forty-four flags, whose stars and stripes wave in the morning breeze, from nearly every house-top, as we enter the beautiful little city of Dayton? From the hand of woman. Whence the decorations of these porticoes and balconies, that gleam in the rising sun, as we ride through the broad and crowded streets? From the hand of woman. Whence this handsome and proudly cherished banner, under which the Ohio delegation returned from Nashville, and which now marks the head-quarters of the Cincinnati delegation of one thousand to Dayton? From the hand of woman. Whence yon richly wrought and surpassingly beautiful standard, about which cluster the Tippecanoe hosts, and whose production has cost many weeks of incessant labor? From the hand of woman. And to come down to less poetical but more substantial things, whence all the wholesome viands prepared in the six hundred and forty-four flag-houses around us, for our refreshment, and all the pallets spread for our repose? From the hand of woman."
By arts like these the community was worked up into a delirium, and the election was carried by storm. Out of 294 electoral votes Mr. Van Buren received but 60: out of twenty-six States he received the votes of only seven. He seemed to have been abandoned by the people! On the contrary he had been unprecedentedly supported by them--had received a larger popular vote than ever had been given to any President before! and three hundred and sixty-four thousand votes more than he himself had received at the previous presidential election when he beat the same General Harrison fourteen thousand votes. Here was a startling fact, and one to excite inquiry in the public mind. How could there be such overwhelming defeat with such an enormous increase of strength on the defeated side? This question pressed itself upon every thinking mind; and it was impossible to give it a solution consistent with the honor and purity of the elective franchise. For, after making all allowance for the greater number of voters brought out on this occasion than at the previous election by the extraordinary exertions now made to bring them out, yet there would still be required a great number to make up the five hundred and sixty thousand votes which General Harrison received over and above his vote of four years before. The belief of false and fraudulent votes was deep-seated, and in fact susceptible of proof in many instances. Many thought it right, for the sake of vindicating the purity of elections, to institute a scrutiny into the votes; but nothing of the kind was attempted, and on the second Wednesday in February, 1841, all the electoral votes were counted without objection--General Harrison found to have a majority of the whole number of votes given--and Messrs. Wise and Cushing on the part of the House and Mr. Preston on the part of the Senate, were appointed to give him the formal notification of his election. Mr. Tyler received an equal number of votes with him, and became Vice-president: Mr. Richard M. Johnson fell twelve votes behind Mr. Van Buren, receiving but 48 electoral votes. It was a complete rout of the democratic party, but without a single moral effect of victory. The spirit of the party ran as high as ever, and Mr. Van Buren was immediately, and generally, proclaimed the democratic candidate for the election of 1844.
LIX. CONCLUSION OF MR. VAN BUREN'S ADMINISTRATION
The last session of the Twenty-sixth Congress was barren of measures, and necessarily so, as being the last of an administration superseded by the popular voice, and soon to expire; and therefore restricted by a sense of propriety, during the brief remainder of its existence, to the details of business and the routine of service. But his administration had not been barren of measures, nor inauspicious to the harmony of the Union. It had seen great measures adopted, and sectional harmony conciliated. The divorce of Bank and State, and the restoration of the constitutional currency, were illustrious measures, beneficial to the government and the people; and the benefits of which will continue to be felt as long as they shall be kept. One of them dissolved a meretricious connection, disadvantageous to both parties, and most so to the one that should have suffered least, and was made to suffer most. The other carried back the government to what it was intended to be--re-established it as it was in the first year of Washington's administration--made it in fact a hard-money government, giving solidity to the Treasury, and freeing the government and the people from the revulsions and vicissitudes of the paper system. No more complaints about the currency and the exchanges since that time. Unexampled prosperity has attended the people; and the government, besides excess of solid money in time of peace, has carried on a foreign war, three thousand miles from home, with its securities above par during the whole time: a felicitous distinction, never enjoyed by our country before, and seldom by any country of the world. These two measures constitute an era in the working of our government, entitled to a proud place in its history, on which the eye of posterity may look back with gratitude and admiration.
His administration was auspicious to the general harmony, and presents a period of remarkable exemption from the sectional bitterness which had so much afflicted the Union for some years before--and so much more sorely since. Faithful to the sentiments expressed in his inaugural address, he held a firm and even course between sections and parties, and passed through his term without offence to the North or the South on the subject of slavery. He reconciled South Carolina to the Union--received the support of her delegation in Congress--saw his administration receive the approving vote of her general assembly--and counted her vote among those which he received for the presidency--the first presidential vote which she had given in twelve years. No President ever had a more difficult time. Two general suspensions of the banks--one at the beginning, and the other towards the close of his administration--the delinquent institutions in both instances allying themselves with a great political party--were powerful enough to derange and distress the business of the country, and unscrupulous enough to charge upon his administration the mischiefs which themselves created. Meritorious at home, and in his internal policy, his administration was equally so in its foreign relations. The insurrection in Canada, contemporaneous with his accession to the presidency, made a crisis between the United States and Great Britain, in which he discharged his high duties with equal firmness, skill, and success. The border line of the United States, for a thousand miles, was in commotion to join the insurgent Canadians. The laws of neutrality, the duties of good neighborhood, our own peace (liable to be endangered by lawless expeditions from our shores), all required him to repress this commotion. And faithfully he did so, using all the means--judicial and military--which the laws put in his hands; and successfully for the maintenance of neutrality, but with some personal detriment, losing much popular favor in the border States from his strenuous repression of aid to a neighboring people, insurging for liberty, and militarily crushed in the attempt. He did his duty towards Great Britain by preventing succor from going to her revolted subjects; and when the scene was changed, and her authorities did an injury to us by the murder of our citizens, and the destruction of a vessel on our own shore--the case of the Caroline at Schlosser--he did his duty to the United States by demanding redress; and when one of the alleged perpetrators was caught in the State where the outrage had been committed, he did his duty to that State by asserting her right to punish the infraction of her own laws. And although he did not obtain the redress for the outrage at Schlosser, yet it was never refused to him, nor the right to redress denied, nor the outrage itself assumed by the British government as long as his administration lasted. Respected at home, his administration was equally so abroad. Cordially supported by his friends in Congress, he was equally so by his cabinet, and his leading newspaper, the Washington Globe. Messrs. Forsyth, Secretary of State--Woodbury of the Treasury--Poinsett of War--Paulding of the Navy--Kendall and John M. Niles, Postmasters-general--and Butler, Grundy and Gilpin, successive Attorneys-general--were all harmonious and efficient co-operators. With every title to respect, and to public confidence, he was disappointed of a second election, but in a canvass which had had no precedent, and has had no imitation; and in which an increase of 364,000 votes on his previous election, attests an increase of strength which fair means could not have overcome.
ADMINISTRATION OF WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON.
Chapter LX
INAUGURATION OF PRESIDENT HARRISON: HIS CABINET--CALL OF CONGRESS--AND DEATH.
March the 4th, at twelve o'clock, the Senate met in its chamber, as summoned to do by the retiring President, to be ready for the inauguration of the President elect, and the transaction of such executive business as he should bring before it. The body was quite full, and was called to order by the secretary, Mr. Asbury Dickens; and Mr. King, of Alabama, being elected temporary President of the Senate, administered the oath of office to the Vice-president elect, John Tyler, Esq., who immediately took the chair as President of the Senate. The scene in the chamber was simple and impressive. The senators were in their seats: members of the House in chairs. The justices of the Supreme Court, and the foreign diplomatic corps were in the front semicircle of chairs, on the floor of the Senate. Officers of the army and navy were present--many citizens--and some ladies. Every part of the chamber and galleries were crowded, and it required a vigilant police to prevent the entrance of more than the allotted number. After the Vice-president elect had taken his seat, and delivered to the Senate over which he was to preside a well-conceived, well-expressed, and well-delivered address, appropriately brief, a short pause and silence ensued. The President elect entered, and was conducted to the seat prepared for him in front of the secretary's table. The procession was formed and proceeded to the spacious eastern portico, where seats were placed, and the ceremony of the inauguration was to take place. An immense crowd, extending far and wide, stood closely wedged on the pavement and enclosed grounds in front of the portico. The President elect read his inaugural address, with animation and strong voice, and was well heard at a distance. As an inaugural address, it was confined to a declaration of general principles and sentiments; and it breathed a spirit of patriotism which adversaries, as well as friends, admitted to be sincere, and to come from the heart. After the conclusion of the address, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Mr. Taney, administered the oath prescribed by the constitution: and the ceremony of inauguration was at an end.
The Senate returned to its chamber, and having received a message from the President with the nominations for his cabinet, immediately proceeded to their consideration; and unanimously confirmed the whole. They were: Daniel Webster, Secretary of State; Thomas Ewing, Secretary of the Treasury; John Bell, Secretary at War; George E. Badger, Secretary of the Navy; Francis Granger, Postmaster-general; John J. Crittenden, Attorney-general.
On the 17th of March, the President issued a proclamation, convoking the Congress in extraordinary session for the 31st day of May ensuing. The proclamation followed the usual form in not specifying the immediate, or direct, cause of the convocation. It merely stated, "That sundry and weighty matters, principally growing out of the condition of the revenue and finances of the country, appear to call for the convocation of Congress at an earlier day than its next annual session, and thus form an extraordinary occasion which, in the judgment of the President, rendered it necessary for the two Houses to convene as soon as practicable."
President Harrison did not live to meet the Congress which he had thus convoked. Short as the time was that he had fixed for its meeting, his own time upon earth was still shorter. In the last days of March he was taken ill: on the fourth day of April he was dead--at the age of 69; being one year under the limit which the psalmist fixed for the term of manly life. There was no failure of health or strength to indicate such an event, or to excite apprehension that he would not go through his term with the vigor with which he commenced it. His attack was sudden, and evidently fatal from the beginning. A public funeral was given him, most numerously attended, and the body deposited in the Congress vault--to wait its removal to his late home at North Bend, Ohio;--whither it was removed in the summer. He was a man of infinite kindness of heart, affectionate to the human race,--of undoubted patriotism, irreproachable integrity both in public and private life; and of a hospitality of disposition which received with equal welcome in his house the humblest and the most exalted of the land.
The public manifestations of respect to the memory of the deceased President, were appropriate and impressive, and co-extensive with the bounds of the Union. But there was another kind of respect which his memory received, more felt than expressed, and more pervading than public ceremonies: it was the regret of the nation, without distinction of party: for it was a case in which the heart could have fair play, and in which political opponents could join with their adversaries in manifestations of respect and sorrow. Both the deceased President, and the Vice-president, were of the same party, elected by the same vote, and their administrations expected to be of the same character. It was a case in which no political calculation could interfere with private feeling; and the national regret was sincere, profound, and pervading. Gratifying was the spectacle to see a national union of feeling in behalf of one who had been so lately the object of so much political division. It was a proof that there can be political opposition without personal animosity.
General Harrison was a native of Virginia, son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a descendant of the "regicide" Harrison who sat on the trial of Charles I.
In the course of the first session of Congress after the death of General Harrison--that session which convened under his call--the opportunity presented itself to the author of this View to express his personal sentiments with respect to him. President Tyler, in his message, recommended a grant of money to the family of the deceased President "in consideration of his expenses in removing to the seat of government, and the limited means which he had left behind;" and a bill had been brought into the Senate accordingly, taking one year's presidential salary ($25,000) as the amount of the grant. Deeming this proceeding entirely out of the limits of the constitution--against the policy of the government--and the commencement of the monarchical system of providing for families, Mr. Benton thus expressed himself at the conclusion of an argument against the grant:
"Personally I was friendly to General Harrison, and that at a time when his friends were not so numerous as in his last days; and if I had needed any fresh evidences of the kindness of his heart, I had them in his twice mentioning to me, during the short period of his presidency, that, which surely I should never have mentioned to him--the circumstance of my friendship to him when his friends were fewer. I would gladly now do what would be kind and respectful to his memory--what would be liberal and beneficial to his most respectable widow; but, to vote for this bill! that I cannot do. High considerations of constitutional law and public policy forbid me to do so, and command me to make this resistance to it, that a mark may be made--a stone set up--at the place where this new violence was done to the constitution--this new page opened in the book of our public expenditures; and this new departure taken, which leads into the bottomless gulf of civil pensions and family gratuities."
The deceased President had been closely preceded, and was rapidly followed, by the deaths of almost all his numerous family of sons and daughters. A worthy son survives (John Scott Harrison, Esq.), a most respectable member of Congress from the State of Ohio.
ADMINISTRATION OF JOHN TYLER.
LXI. ACCESSION OF THE VICE-PRESIDENT TO THE PRESIDENCY
The Vice-president was not in Washington when the President died: he was at his residence in lower Virginia: some days would necessarily elapse before he could arrive. President Harrison had not been impressed with the probable fatal termination of his disease, and the consequent propriety of directing the Vice-president to be sent for. His cabinet could not feel themselves justified in taking such a step while the President lived. Mr. Tyler would feel it indelicate to repair to the seat of government, of his own will, on hearing the report of the President's illness. The attending physicians, from the most proper considerations, held out hopes of recovery to near the last; but, for four days before the event, there was a pervading feeling in the city that the President would not survive his attack. His death left the executive government for some days in a state of interregnum. There was no authority, or person present, legally empowered to take any step; and so vital an event as a change in the chief magistrate, required the fact to be formally and publicly verified. In the absence of Congress, and the Vice-president, the members of the late cabinet very properly united in announcing the event to the country, and in despatching a messenger of state to Mr. Tyler, to give him the authentic information which would show the necessity of his presence at the seat of government. He repaired to it immediately, took the oath of office, before the Chief Judge of the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, William Cranch, Esquire; and appointed the late cabinet for his own. Each was retained in the place held under his predecessor, and with the strongest expressions of regard and confidence.
Four days after his accession to the presidency, Mr. Tyler issued an address, in the nature of an inaugural, to the people of the United States, the first paragraph of which was very appropriately devoted to his predecessor, and to the circumstances of his own elevation to the presidential chair. That paragraph was in these words:
"Before my arrival at the seat of government, the painful communication was made to you, by the officers presiding over the several departments, of the deeply regretted death of WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON, late President of the United States. Upon him you had conferred your suffrages for the first office in your gift, and had selected him as your chosen instrument to correct and reform all such errors and abuses as had manifested themselves from time to time, in the practical operations of the government. While standing at the threshold of this great work, he has, by the dispensation of an all-wise Providence, been removed from amongst us, and by the provisions of the constitution, the efforts to be directed to the accomplishing of this vitally important task have devolved upon myself. This same occurrence has subjected the wisdom and sufficiency of our institutions to a new test. For the first time in our history, the person elected to the Vice-presidency of the United States, by the happening of a contingency provided for in the constitution, has had devolved upon him the presidential office. The spirit of faction, which is directly opposed to the spirit of a lofty patriotism, may find in this occasion for assaults upon my administration. And in succeeding, under circumstances so sudden and unexpected, and to responsibilities so greatly augmented, to the administration of public affairs, I shall place in the intelligence and patriotism of the people, my only sure reliance.--My earnest prayer shall be constantly addressed to the all-wise and all-powerful Being who made me, and by whose dispensation I am called to the high office of President of this confederacy, understandingly to carry out the principles of that constitution which I have sworn 'to protect, preserve, and defend.'"
Two blemishes were seen in this paragraph, the first being in that sentence which spoke of the "errors and abuses" of the government which his predecessor had been elected to "correct and reform;" and the correction and reformation of which now devolved upon himself. These imputed errors and abuses could only apply to the administrations of General Jackson and Mr. Van Buren, of both which Mr. Tyler had been a zealous opponent; and therefore might not be admitted to be an impartial judge. Leaving that out of view, the bad taste of such a reference was palpable and repulsive. The second blemish was in that sentence in which he contrasted the spirit of "faction" with the spirit of "lofty patriotism," and seemed to refer in advance all the "assaults" which should be made upon his administration, to this factious spirit, warring upon elevated patriotism. Little did he think when he wrote that sentence, that within three short months--within less time than a commercial bill of exchange usually has to run, the great party which had elected him, and the cabinet officers which he had just appointed with such warm expressions of respect and confidence, should be united in that assault! should all be in the lead and van of a public outcry against him! The third paragraph was also felt to be a fling at General Jackson and Mr. Van Buren, and therefore unfit for a place in a President's message, and especially in an inaugural address. It was the very periphrasis of the current party slang against General Jackson, plainly visible through the transparent hypothetical guise which it put on; and was in these words:
"In view of the fact, well avouched by history, that the tendency of all human institutions is to concentrate power in the hands of a single man, and that their ultimate downfall has proceeded from this cause, I deem it of the most essential importance that a complete separation should take place between the sword and the purse. No matter where or how the public moneys shall be deposited, so long as the President can exert the power of appointing and removing, at his pleasure, the agents selected for their custody, the commander-in-chief of the army and navy is in fact the treasurer. A permanent and radical change should therefore be decreed. The patronage incident to the presidential office, already great, is constantly increasing. Such increase is destined to keep pace with the growth of our population, until, without a figure of speech, an army of officeholders may be spread over the land. The unrestrained power exerted by a selfishly ambitious man, in order either to perpetuate his authority or to hand it over to some favorite as his successor, may lead to the employment of all the means within his control to accomplish his object. The right to remove from office, while subjected to no just restraint, is inevitably destined to produce a spirit of crouching servility with the official corps, which in order to uphold the hand which feeds them, would lead to direct and active interference in the elections, both State and federal, thereby subjecting the course of State legislation to the dictation of the chief executive officer, and making the will of that officer absolute and supreme."
This phrase of "purse and sword," once so appropriately used by Patrick Henry, in describing the powers of the federal government, and since so often applied to General Jackson, for the removal of the deposits, could have no other aim than a fling at him; and the abuse of patronage in removals and appointments to perpetuate power, or hand it over to a favorite, was the mere repetition of the slang of the presidential canvass, in relation to General Jackson and Mr. Van Buren.
Departing from the usual reserve and generalization of an inaugural, this address went into a detail which indicated the establishment of a national bank, or the re-charter of the defunct one, masked and vitalized under a Pennsylvania State charter. That paragraph ran thus:
"The public interest also demands that, if any war has existed between the government and the currency, it shall cease. Measures of a financial character, now having the sanction of legal enactment, shall be faithfully enforced until repealed by the legislative authority. But I owe it to myself to declare that I regard existing enactments as unwise and impolitic, and in a high degree oppressive. I shall promptly give my sanction to any constitutional measure which, originating in Congress, shall have for its object the restoration of a sound circulating medium, so essentially necessary to give confidence in all the transactions of life, to secure to industry its just and adequate rewards, and to re-establish the public prosperity. In deciding upon the adaptation of any such measure to the end proposed, as well as its conformity to the constitution, I shall resort to the fathers of the great republican school for advice and instruction, to be drawn from their sage views of our system of government, and the light of their ever glorious example."
The concluding part of this paragraph, in which the new President declares that, in looking to the constitutionality and expediency of a national bank, he should look for advice and instruction to the example of the fathers of the Republic, he was understood as declaring that he would not be governed by his own former opinions against a national bank, but by the example of Washington, a signer of the constitution (who signed the charter of the first national bank); and by the example of Mr. Madison, another signer of the constitution, who, yielding to precedent and the authority of judicial decisions, had signed the charter for the second bank, notwithstanding his early constitutional objections to it. In other parts of the paragraph he was considered as declaring in favor of the late United States Bank, as in the previous part of the paragraph where he used the phrases which had become catch-words in the long contest with that bank--"war upon the currency"--"sound circulating medium"--"restoration of national prosperity;" &c., &c. He was understood to express a preference for the re-charter of that institution. And this impression was well confirmed by other circumstances--his zealous report in favor of that bank when acting as volunteer chairman to the Senate's committee which was sent to examine it--his standing a canvass in a presidential election in which the re-charter of that bank, though concertedly blinked in some parts of the Union, was the understood vital issue every where--his publicly avowed preference for its notes over gold, at Wheeling, Virginia--the retention of a cabinet, pledged to that bank, with expressions of confidence in them, and in terms that promised a four years' service together--and his utter condemnation in other parts of his inaugural and in all his public speeches, of every other plan (sub-treasury, state banks, revival of the gold currency), which had been presented as remedies for the financial and currency disorders. All these circumstances and declarations left no doubt that he was not only in favor of a national bank, but of re-chartering the late one; and that he looked to it, and to it alone, for the "sound circulating medium" which he preferred to the constitutional currency--for the keeping of those deposits which he had condemned Jackson for removing from it--and for the restoration of that national prosperity, which the imputed war upon the bank had destroyed.
Chapter LXII
TWENTY-SEVENTH CONGRESS: FIRST SESSION: LIST OF MEMBERS, AND ORGANIZATION OF THE HOUSE.
Members of the Senate.
MAINE.--Reuel Williams, George Evans.
NEW HAMPSHIRE.--Franklin Pierce, Levi Woodbury.
VERMONT.--Samuel Prentis, Samuel Phelps.
MASSACHUSETTS.--Rufus Choate, Isaac C. Bates.
RHODE ISLAND.--Nathan F. Dixon, James F. Simmons.
CONNECTICUT.--Perry Smith, Jaz. W. Huntington.
NEW YORK.--Silas Wright, N. P. Tallmadge.
NEW JERSEY.--Sam. L. Southard, Jacob W. Miller.
PENNSYLVANIA.--James Buchanan, D. W. Sturgeon.
DELAWARE.--Richard H. Bayard, Thomas Clayton.
MARYLAND.--John Leeds Kerr, Wm. D. Merrick.
VIRGINIA.--Wm. C. Rives, Wm. S. Archer.
NORTH CAROLINA.--Wm. A. Graham, Willie P. Mangum.
SOUTH CAROLINA.--Wm. C. Preston, John C. Calhoun.
GEORGIA.--Alfred Cuthbert, John M. Berrien.
ALABAMA.--Clement C. Clay, William R. King.
MISSISSIPPI.--John Henderson, Robert J. Walker.
LOUISIANA.--Alexander Mouton, Alexander Barrow.
TENNESSEE.--A. O. P. Nicholson, Spencer Jarnagin, executive appointment. Ephraim H. Foster.
KENTUCKY.--Henry Clay, J. J. Morehead.
OHIO.--William Allen, Benjamin Tappan.
INDIANA.--Oliver H. Smith, Albert S. White.
ILLINOIS.--Richard M. Young, Sam'l McRoberts.
MISSOURI.--Lewis F. Linn, Thomas H. Benton.
ARKANSAS.--Ambrose H. Sevier, William S. Fulton.
MICHIGAN.--Augustus S. Porter, William Woodbridge.
Members of the House.
MAINE.--Nathaniel Clifford, Wm. P. Fessenden, Benj. Randall, David Bronson, Nathaniel Littlefield, Alfred Marshall, Joshua A. Lowell, Elisha H. Allen.
NEW HAMPSHIRE.--Tristram Shaw, Ira A. Eastman, Charles G. Atherton, Edmund Burke, John R. Reding.
VERMONT.--Hiland Hall, William Slade, Horace Everett, Augustus Young, John Mattocks.
MASSACHUSETTS.--Robert C. Winthrop, Leverett Saltonstall, Caleb Cushing, Wm. Parmenter, Charles Hudson, Osmyn Baker, Geo. N. Briggs, William B. Calhoun, Wm. S. Hastings, Nathaniel B. Borden, Barker Burnell, John Quincy Adams.
RHODE ISLAND.--Joseph L. Tillinghast, William B. Cranston.
CONNECTICUT.--Joseph Trumbull, Wm. W. Boardman, Thomas W. Williams, Thos. B. Osborne, Truman Smith, John H. Brockway.
NEW YORK.--Chas. A. Floyd, Joseph Egbert, John McKeon, James J. Roosevelt, Fernando Wood, Chas. G. Ferris, Aaron Ward, Richard D. Davis, James G. Clinton, John Van Buren, R. McClellan, Jacob Hauck, jr., Hiram P. Hunt, Daniel D. Barnard, Archibald L. Lin, Bernard Blair, Thos. A. Tomlinson, H. Van Rensselaer, John Sanford, Andrew W. Doig, John G. Floyd, David P. Brewster, T. C. Chittenden, Sam. S. Bowne, Samuel Gordon, John C. Clark, Lewis Riggs, Sam. Partridge, Victory Birdseye, A. L. Foster, Christopher Morgan, John Maynard, John Greig, Wm. M. Oliver, Timothy Childs, Seth M. Gates, John Young, Stanley N. Clark, Millard Fillmore, ---- Babcock.
NEW JERSEY.--John B. Aycrigg, John P. B. Maxwell, William Halsted, Joseph F. Randolph, Joseph F. Stratton, Thos. Jones Yorke.
PENNSYLVANIA.--Charles Brown, John Sergeant, George W. Tolland, Charles Ingersoll, John Edwards, Jeremiah Brown, Francis James, Joseph Fornance, Robert Ramsay, John Westbrook, Peter Newhard, George M. Keim, Wm. Simonton, James Gerry, James Cooper, Amos Gustine, James Irvine, Benj. Bidlack, John Snyder, Davis Dimock, Albert G. Marchand, Joseph Lawrence, Wm. W. Irwin, William Jack, Thomas Henry, Arnold Plumer.
DELAWARE.--George B. Rodney.
MARYLAND.--Isaac D. Jones, Jas. A. Pearce, James W. Williams, J. P. Kennedy, Alexander Randall, Wm. Cost Johnson, John T. Mason, Augustus R. Sollers.
VIRGINIA.--Henry A. Wise, Francis Mallory, George B. Cary, John M. Botts, R. M. T. Hunter, John Taliaferro, Cuthbert Powell, Linn Banks, Wm. O. Goode, John W. Jones, E. W. Hubbard, Walter Coles, Thomas W. Gilmer, Wm. L. Goggin, R. B. Barton, Wm. A. Harris, A. H. H. Stuart, Geo. W. Hopkins, Geo. W. Summers, S. L. Hays, Lewis Steinrod.
NORTH CAROLINA.--Kenneth Rayner, John R. J. Daniel, Edward Stanly, Wm. H. Washington, James J. McKay, Archibald Arrington, Edmund Deberry, R. M. Saunders, Aug'e H. Shepherd, Abraham Rencher, Green C. Caldwell, James Graham, Lewis Williams.
SOUTH CAROLINA.--Isaac E. Holmes, William Butler, F. W. Pickens, John Campbell, James Rogers, S. H. Butler, Thomas D. Sumter, R. Barnwell Rhett, C. P. Caldwell.
GEORGIA.--Rich'd W. Habersham, Wm. C. Dawson, Julius C. Alvord, Eugenius A. Nisbet, Lott Warren, Thomas Butler King, Roger L. Gamble, Jas. A. Merriwether, Thos. F. Foster.
ALABAMA.--Reuben Chapman, Geo. S. Houston, Dixon H. Lewis, Benj. G. Shields.
MISSISSIPPI.--A. L. Bingaman, W. R. Harley.
LOUISIANA.--Edward D. White, J. B. Dawson, John Moore.
ARKANSAS.--Edward Cross.
TENNESSEE.--Thomas D. Arnold, Abraham McClellan, Joseph L. Williams, Thomas J. Campbell, Hopkins L. Turney, Wm. B. Campbell, Robert L. Caruthers, Meredith P. Gentry, Harvey M. Watterson, Aaron V. Brown, Cave Johnson, Milton Brown, Christopher H. Williams.
KENTUCKY.--Linn Boyd, Philip Triplet, Joseph R. Underwood, Bryan W. Owsley, John B. Thompson, Willis Green, John Pope, James C. Sprigg, John White, Thomas F. Marshall, Landoff W. Andrews, Garret Davis, William O. Butler.
OHIO.--N. G. Pendleton, John B. Weller, Patrick G. Goode, Jeremiah Morrow, William Doane, Calvary Morris, Wm. Russell, Joseph Ridgeway, Wm. Medill, Samson Mason, B. S. Cowan, Joshua Matheot, James Matthews, Geo. Sweeney, S. J. Andrews, Joshua R. Giddings; John Hastings, Ezra Dean, Sam. Stockley.
INDIANA.--George W. Proffit, Richard W. Thompson, Joseph L. White, James H. Cravens, Andrew Kennedy, David Wallace, Henry S. Lane.
MISSOURI.--John Miller, John C. Edwards.
MICHIGAN.--Jacob M. Howard.
Mr. John White of Kentucky (whig), was elected Speaker of the House over Mr. John W. Jones of Virginia, democratic. Mr. Matthew St. Clair Clarke of Pennsylvania (whig), was elected clerk over Mr. Hugh A. Garland of Virginia, democratic. The whigs had a majority of near fifty in the House, and of seven in the Senate; so that all the legislative, and the executive department of the government--the two Houses of Congress and the President and cabinet--were of the same political party, presenting a harmony of aspect frequently wanting during the three previous administrations. Notwithstanding their large majority, the whig party proceeded slowly in the organization of the House in the adoption of rules for its proceeding. A fortnight had been consumed in vain when Mr. Cushing, urgently, and successfully exhorted his whig friends to action:
"I say (continued Mr. Cushing) that it is our fault if this House be disorganized. We are in the majority--we have a majority of forty--and we are responsible to our country, to the constitution, and to our God, for the discharge of our duty here. It is our duty to proceed to the organization of the House, to the transaction of the business for which the country sent us here. And I appeal to the whig party on this floor that they do their duty--that they act manfully and expeditiously, and that, howsoever the House may organize, under whatever rules, or under no rules at all; for I am prepared, if this resolution be not adopted, to call upon the Speaker for the second reading of a bill from the Senate, now upon the table, and to move that we proceed with it under the parliamentary law. We can go on under that. We are a House, with a speaker, clerk, and officers; and whether we have rules or not is immaterial. We can proceed as the Commons in England do. We can act upon bills by referring them to a Committee of the Whole on the state of the Union, or to select committees, if there are no standing committees. And I am prepared, if the House cannot be organized under the proposition now before us, for the purpose of testing the question and enabling the country to see whose fault it is that we do not go on with its business, to call at once for the action of the House upon that bill under the parliamentary law. Once more I appeal to the whig party, for party lines, I see, are now about to be drawn; I appeal to the whig party, to the friends of the administration--and I recognize but one, and that is the administration of John Tyler--that is the administration, and I recognize no other in the United States at this time; I appeal to the administration party, to the friends of the administration of John Tyler, that at this hour they come to the rescue of their country, and organize the House, under whatever rules: because, if we do not, we shall become, as we are now becoming, the laughing-stock, the scorn, the contempt of the people of these United States."
The bill from the Senate, for action on which Mr. Cushing was so impatient, and so ready to act without rules, was the one for the repeal of the sub-treasury; whilom characterized by him as a serpent hatched of a fowl's egg, (cockatrice); which the people would trample into the dust. Under his urgent exhortation the House soon organized, and made the repeal. Passed so promptly, this repealing bill, with equal celerity, was approved and signed by the President--leaving him in the first quarter of his administration in full possession of that formidable sword and long purse, the imputed union of which in the hands of General Jackson had been his incontinent deprecation, even in his inaugural address. For this repeal of the sub-treasury provided no substitute for keeping the public moneys, and left them without law in the President's hands.
Chapter LXIII
FIRST MESSAGE OF MR. TYLER TO CONGRESS, AND MR. CLAY'S PROGRAMME OF BUSINESS.
The first paragraph in the message related to the death of President Harrison, and after a proper expression of respect and regret, it went on to recommend a grant of money to his family, grounded on the consideration of his expenses in removing to the seat of government, and the limited means of his private fortune:
"With this public bereavement are connected other considerations which will not escape the attention of Congress. The preparations necessary for his removal to the seat of government, in view of a residence of four years, must have devolved upon the late President heavy expenditures, which, if permitted to burden the limited resources of his private fortune, may tend to the serious embarrassment of his surviving family; and it is therefore respectfully submitted to Congress, whether the ordinary principles of justice would not dictate the propriety of its legislative interposition."
This recommendation was considered by many as being without the pale of the constitution, and of dangerous precedent. With respect to the limited means of which he spoke, the fact was alike true and honorable to the late President. In public employment from early life and during the greatest part of his life, no pecuniary benefit had resulted to him. In situations to afford opportunities for emolument, he availed himself of none. With immense amounts of public money passing through his hands, it all went, not only faithfully to its objects, but without leaving any profit behind from its use. He lived upon his salaries, liberally dispensing hospitality and charities, and with simplicity and economy in all his habits. He used all that he received, and came out of office as he entered it, and died poor. This, among the ancient Romans was a commendable issue of a public career, to be mentioned with honor at the funeral of an illustrious man: and should be so held by all republican people.
The message showed that President Tyler would not have convoked the Congress in extra session had it not been done by his predecessor; but being convoked he would not disturb the arrangement; and was most happy to find himself so soon surrounded by the national representation:
"In entering upon the duties of this office, I did not feel that it would be becoming in me to disturb what had been ordered by my lamented predecessor. Whatever, therefore, may have been my opinion originally as to the propriety of convening Congress at so early a day from that of its late adjournment, I found a new and controlling inducement not to interfere with the patriotic desires of the late President, in the novelty of the situation in which I was so unexpectedly placed. My first wish, under such circumstances, would necessarily have been to have called to my aid in the administration of public affairs, the combined wisdom of the two Houses of Congress, in order to take their counsel and advice as to the best mode of extricating the government and the country from the embarrassments weighing heavily on both. I am then most happy in finding myself so soon, after my accession to the presidency, surrounded by the immediate representatives of the States and people."
The state of our foreign relations claimed but a brief paragraph. The message stated that no important change had taken place in them since the last session of Congress, and that the President saw nothing to make him doubt the continuance of the peace with which the country was blessed. He passed to home affairs:
"In order to supply the wants of the government, an intelligent constituency, in view of their best interests, will without hesitation, submit to all necessary burdens. But it is, nevertheless, important so to impose them as to avoid defeating the just expectations of the country growing out of pre-existing laws. The act of the 2d March, 1833, commonly called the compromise act, should not be altered, except under urgent necessities, which are not believed at this time to exist. One year only remains to complete the series of reductions provided for by that law, at which time provisions made by the same, and which law then will be brought actively in aid of the manufacturing interest of the Union, will not fail to produce the most beneficial results."
This compromise act of 1833, was drawing towards the close of its career, and was proving itself to have been a complete illusion in all the good it had promised, and a sad reality in all the ill that had been predicted of it. It had been framed on the principle of helping manufactures for nine years, and then to be a free trade measure for ever after. The first part succeeded, and so well, in keeping up high duties as to raise far more revenue than the government needed: the second part left the government without revenue for its current uses, and under the necessity of giving up that uniform twenty per centum duty on the value of imports, which was to have been the permanent law of our tariff; and which never became law at all. In the meanwhile, the compromise having provided for periodical reductions in the duties on imported sugars and molasses, made no provision for proportionate reductions of the drawback upon these articles when exported in the changed shape of rum and refined sugars: and enormous sums were drawn from the treasury by this omission in the compromise act--the great refiners and rum distillers driving an immense capital into their business for the mere purpose of getting the gratuitous drawbacks. The author of this View endeavored to supply the omission at the time, and repeatedly afterwards; but these efforts were resisted by the advocates of the compromise until these gratuities becoming enormous, rising from $2,000 per annum, to hundreds of thousands per annum, and finally reaching five hundred thousand, they roused the alarm of the government, and sunk under the enormity of their abuse. Yet it was this compromise which was held too sacred to have its palpable defects corrected, and the inviolability of which was recommended to be preserved, that in addition to its other faults, was making an annual present of some hundreds of thousands of dollars to two classes of manufacturers.
A bank of some kind was recommended, under the name of fiscal agent, as necessary to facilitate the operations of the Treasury, to promote the collection and disbursement of the public revenue, and to supply a currency of uniform value. The message said:
"In intimate connection with the question of revenue, is that which makes provision for a suitable fiscal agent, capable of adding increased facilities in the collection and disbursement of the public revenues, rendering more secure their custody, and consulting a true economy in the great multiplied and delicate operations of the Treasury department. Upon such an agent depends in an eminent degree, the establishment of a currency of uniform value, which is of so great importance to all the essential interests of society; and on the wisdom to be manifested in its creation, much depends."
These are the reasons which General Hamilton gave for asking the establishment of the first national bank, in 1791, and which have been given ever since, no matter with what variation of phraseology, for the creation of a similar institution. This preference for a bank, under a new name, was confirmed by the rejection of the sub-treasury and hard-money currency, assumed by the message to have been condemned by the people in the result of the presidential election. Speaking of this system, it said: "If carried through all the stages of its transmutation, from paper and specie to nothing but the precious metals, to say nothing of the insecurity of the public moneys its injurious effects have been anticipated by the country, in its unqualified condemnation." The justice and wisdom of this condemnation, thus inferred from the issue of the presidential election, and carried as that election was (and as has been described), has been tested by the experience of many years, without finding that insecurity of the public moneys, and those injurious effects which the message assumed. On the contrary those moneys have been safely kept, and the public prosperity never as great as under the Independent Treasury and the gold and silver currency of the federal government: and long has it been since any politician has allowed himself to be supposed to be against them. Up to the date of that message then--up to the first day of the extra session, 1841--Mr. Tyler may be considered as in favor of a national bank, with its paper currency, and opposed to the gold and silver currency, and the sub-treasury. A distribution of the proceeds of the sales of the public lands was recommended as a means of assisting the States in the payment of their debts, and raising the price of their stocks in foreign markets. Repudiating as unconstitutional, the federal assumption of the State debts, he still recommended a grant of money from the public funds to enable them to meet these debts. In this sense the message said:
"And while I must repudiate, as a measure founded in error, and wanting constitutional sanction, the slightest approach to an assumption by this government of the debts of the States, yet I can see in the distribution adverted to much to recommend it. The compacts between the proprietor States and this government expressly guarantee to the States all the benefits which may arise from the sales. The mode by which this is to be effected addresses itself to the discretion of Congress as the trustee for the States, and its exercise, after the most beneficial manner, is restrained by nothing in the grants or in the constitution so long as Congress shall consult that equality in the distribution which the compacts require. In the present condition of some of the States, the question of distribution may be regarded as substantially a question between direct and indirect taxation. If the distribution be not made in some form or other, the necessity will daily become more urgent with the debtor States for a resort to an oppressive system of direct taxation, or their credit, and necessarily their power and influence, will be greatly diminished. The payment of taxes, often the most inconvenient and oppressive mode, will be exacted in place of contributions for the most part voluntarily made, and therefore comparatively unoppressive. The States are emphatically the constituents of this government, and we should be entirely regardless of the objects held in view by them, in the creation of this government, if we could be indifferent to their good. The happy effects of such a measure upon all the States, would immediately be manifested. With the debtor States it would effect the relief to a great extent of the citizens from a heavy burden of direct taxation, which presses with severity on the laboring classes, and eminently assist in restoring the general prosperity. An immediate advance would take place in the price of the State securities, and the attitudes of the States would become once more, as it should ever be, lofty and erect. Whether such distribution should be made directly to the States in the proceeds of the sales, or in the form of profits by virtue of the operations of any fiscal agency having those proceeds as its basis, should such measure be contemplated by Congress, would well deserve its consideration."
Mr. Tyler, while a member of the democratic party, had been one of the most strict in the construction of the constitution, and one of the most vigilant and inflexible in bringing proposed measures to the test of that instrument--repulsing the most insignificant if they could not stand it. He had been one of the foremost against the constitutionality of a national bank, and voting for a scire facias to vacate the charter of the last one soon after it was established. Now, in recommending the grant of money to the family of General Harrison--in recommending a bank under the name of fiscal agent--in preferring a national paper currency--in condemning the currency of the constitution--in proposing a distribution of the land revenue--in providing for the payment of the State debts: in all these recommendations he seemed to have gone far beyond any other President, however latitudinarian. Add to this, he had instituted an inquisition to sit upon the conduct of officers, to hear and adjudge in secret; to the encouragement of informers and debaters, and to the infringement of the liberty of speech, and the freedom of opinion in the subordinates of the government. In view of all this, the author of this work immediately exclaimed:
"What times we have fallen upon! what wonders we witness! how strange are the scenes of the day! We have a President, who has been the foremost in the defence of the constitution, and in support of the rights of the States--whose walk has been on the outward wall of the constitution--his post in the front line of its defenders--his seat on the topmost branches of the democratic tree. I will not disparage the President by saying that he fought side by side with me in defence of the constitution and the States, and against the latitudinarians. It would be to wrong him to place him by my side. His position, as guard of the constitution, was far ahead, and far above mine. He was always in the advance--on the look-out--listening and watching--snuffing danger in the first tainted breeze, and making anticipated battle against the still invisible invader. Hardly any thing was constitutional enough for him. This was but a few brief years ago. Now we see the measures brought forward in the very bud and first blossom of this administration, which leave all former unconstitutional measures far in the rear--which add subterfuge and evasion to open violence, and aim more deadly wounds at the constitution than the fifty previous years of its existence had brought upon it. I know not the sentiment of the President upon these measures, except as disclosed by himself, and say nothing to reach him; but I know the measures themselves--their desperate character, and fatal issues: and I am free to say, if such things can come to pass--if they can survive the double ordeal of the House and the Senate--then there is an end of all that our fathers contended for in the formation of the federal government. To be sure, the machinery of government would still stand. We should still have President, Congress, and a Judiciary--an army, a navy--a taxing power, the tax-payers, the tax-gatherers, and the tax-consumers. But, if such measures as these are to pass--a bill to lavish the public lands on the (indebted) States in order to pay their debts, supply their taxes, and raise the market price of their stock--a contrivance to defraud the constitution, and to smuggle and bribe a bank, though a national bank, through Congress, under the alius dictus of fiscal agent--the bill to commence the career of civil pensions and family gratuities--the inquisitorial committee, modelled on the plan of Sir Robert Walpole's committees of secrecy, now sitting in the custom-house of New York, the terror of the honest and the hope of the corrupt--the ex post facto edict for the creation of political offences, to be punished on suspicion in exparte trials--the schemes for the infringement of the liberty of speech, and for the suppression of freedom of opinion, and for the encouragement and reward of debaters and informers: if such schemes and measures as these are to come to pass, then do I say that all the guards and limitations upon our government are broken down! that our limited government is gone! and a new, wild, and boundless authority, substituted in its place. The new triumvirate--Bank, Congress, and President--will then be supreme. Fraud and corruption, more odious than arms and force, will rule the land. The constitution will be covered with a black veil: and that derided and violated instrument will never be referred to, except for the mock sanction of a fraudulent interpretation, or the insulting ceremony of a derisory adjuration."
Mr. Tyler had delivered a message: Mr. Clay virtually delivered another. In the first week of the session, he submitted a programme of measures, in the form of a resolve, to be adopted by the Senate, enumerating and declaring the particular subjects, to which he thought the attention of Congress should be limited at this extra session. The following was his programme:
"Resolved, as the opinion of the Senate, That at the present session of Congress, no business ought to be transacted, but such as being of an important or urgent nature, may be supposed to have influenced the extraordinary convention of Congress, or such as that the postponement of it might be materially detrimental to the public interest.
"Resolved, therefore, as the opinion of the Senate, That the following subjects ought first, if not exclusively, to engage the deliberation of Congress, at the present session--
"1st. The repeal of the sub-treasury.
"2d. The incorporation of a bank adapted to the wants of the people and of the government.
"3d. The provision of an adequate revenue for the government by the imposition of duties, and including an authority to contract a temporary loan to cover the public debt created by the last administration.
"4th. The prospective distribution of the proceeds of the public lands.
"5th. The passage of necessary appropriation bills; and
"6th. Some modification of the banking system of the District of Columbia, for the benefit of the people of the District.
"Resolved, That it is expedient to distribute the business proper to be done this session, between the Senate and House of Representatives, so as to avoid both Houses acting on the same subject, and at the same time."
It was, probably, to this assumption over the business of Congress--this recommendation of measures which Mr. Clay thought ought to be adopted--that Mr. Cushing alluded in the House, when, in urging the instant repeal of the sub-treasury act, he made occasion to say that he recognized no administration but that of John Tyler. As for the "public debt," here mentioned as being "created by the last administration," it consisted of the treasury notes and loans resorted to to supply the place of the revenue lost under the descending scale of the compromise, and the amount taken from the Treasury to bestow upon the States, under the fraudulent name of a deposit.
LXIV. REPEAL OF THE INDEPENDENT TREASURY ACT
This was the first measure of the new dominant party, and pursued with a zeal that bespoke a resentment which required gratification, and indicated a criminal which required punishment. It seemed to be considered as a malefactor which had just fallen into the hands of justice, and whose instant death was necessary to expiate his offences. Mr. Clay took the measure into his own charge. It was No. 1, in his list of bills to be passed; and the bill brought in by himself, was No. 1, on the Senate's calendar; and it was rapidly pushed on to immediate decision. The provisions of the bill were as summary as the proceedings upon it were rapid. It provided for instant repeal--to take effect as soon as passed, although it was in full operation all over the United States, and the officers at a distance, charged with its execution, could not know of the repeal until ten or twelve days after the event, and during all which time they would be acting without authority; and, consequently, without official liability for accident or misconduct. No substitute was provided; and when passed, the public moneys were to remain without legal guardianship until a substitute should be provided--intended to be a national bank; but a substitute which would require time to pass it, whether a bank or some other measure. These considerations were presented, but presented in vain to an impatient majority. A respite of a few days, for the act to be known before it took effect, was in vain urged. In vain was it urged that promulgation was part of a law: that no statute was to take effect until it was promulgated; and that time must be allowed for that essential formality. The delay of passing a substitute was urged as certain: the possibility of not passing one at all, was suggested: and then the reality of that alarm of danger to the Treasury--the union of the purse and the sword--which had so haunted the minds of senators at the time of the removal of the deposits; and which alarm, groundless then, was now to have a real foundation. All in vain. The days of the devoted act were numbered: the sun was not to set upon it alive: and late in the evening of a long and hot day in June, the question was called, with a refusal upon yeas and nays by the majority, to allow a postponement until the next day for the purpose of debate. Thus, refused one night's postponement, Mr. Benton, irritated at such unparliamentary haste, and at the unmeasured terms of abuse which were lavished upon the doomed act, rose and delivered the speech, of which some extracts are given in the next chapter.
In the progress of this bill a clause was proposed by Mr. Benton to exclude the Bank of the United States from becoming a depository of public moneys, under the new order of things which the repeal of the Sub-treasury system would bring about; and he gave as a reason, her criminal and corrupt conduct, and her insolvent condition. The clause was rejected by a strict party vote, with the exception of Mr. Archer--who voted for the exclusion. The repeal bill was carried in the Senate by a strict party vote:
YEAS--Messrs. Archer, Barrow, Bates, Bayard, Berrien, Choate, Clay of Kentucky, Clayton, Dixon, Evans, Graham, Henderson, Huntington, Ker, Mangum, Merrick, Miller, Morehead, Phelps, Porter, Prentiss, Preston, Rives, Simmons, Smith of Indiana, Southard, Tallmadge, White, and Woodbridge--29.
NAYS--Messrs. Allen, Benton, Calhoun, Clay of Alabama, Fulton, King, McRoberts, Nicholson, Pierce, Sevier, Smith of Connecticut, Sturgeon, Tappan, Walker, Williams, Woodbury, Wright, and Young--18.
In the House the repeal was carried by a decided vote--134 to 87. The negative voters were:
Messrs. Archibald H. Arrington, Charles G. Atherton, Linn Banks, Henry W. Beeson, Benjamin A. Bidlack, Samuel S. Bowne, Linn Boyd, Aaron V. Brown, Charles Brown, Edmund Burke, Sampson H. Butler, William O. Butler, Green W. Caldwell, Patrick C. Caldwell, George B. Cary, Reuben Chapman, Nathan Clifford, James G. Clinton, Walter Coles, Edward Cross, John R. J. Daniel, Richard D. Davis, John B. Dawson, Ezra Dean, William Doan, Andrew W. Doig, John C. Edwards, Joseph Egbert, Charles G. Ferris, John G. Floyd, Charles A. Floyd, Joseph Fornance, William O. Goode, Samuel Gordon, Amos Gustine, William A. Harris, John Hastings, Samuel L. Hays, Isaac E. Holmes, George W. Hopkins, Jacob Houck, jr., George S. Houston, Edmund W. Hubard, Robert M. T. Hunter, Charles J. Ingersoll, Wiliam Jack, Cave Johnson, John W. Jones, George M. Keim, Andrew Kennedy, Dixon H. Lewis, Nathaniel S. Littlefied, Joshua A. Lowell, Abraham McClellan, Robert McClellan, James J. McKay, Albert G. Marchand, Alfred Marshall, John Thompson Mason, James Mathews, William Medill, John Miller, William M. Oliver, William Parmenter, Samuel Patridge, William W. Payne, Francis W. Pickens, Arnold Plumer, John R. Reding, Lewis Riggs, James Rogers, James I. Roosevelt, John Sanford, Romulus M. Saunders, Tristram Shaw, Benjamin G. Shields, John Snyder, C. Sprigg, Lewis Steenrod, Hopkins L. Turney, John Van Buren, Aaron Ward, Harvey M. Watterson, John B. Weller, John Westbrook, James W. Williams, Fernando Wood.