Kitabı oku: «Thirty Years' View (Vol. I of 2)», sayfa 115

From President Jackson, the country has first learned the true theory and practical intent of the constitution, in giving to the Executive a qualified negative on the legislative power of Congress. Far from being an odious, dangerous, or kingly prerogative, this power, as vested in the President, is nothing but a qualified copy of the famous veto power vested in the tribunes of the people among the Romans, and intended to suspend the passage of a law until the people themselves should have time to consider it. The qualified veto of the President destroys nothing; it only delays the passage of a law, and refers it to the people for their consideration and decision. It is the reference of a law, not to a committee of the House, or of the whole House, but to the committee of the whole Union. It is a recommitment of the bill to the people, for them to examine and consider; and if, upon this examination, they are content to pass it, it will pass at the next session. The delay of a few months is the only effect of a veto, in a case where the people shall ultimately approve a law; where they do not approve it, the interposition of the veto is the barrier which saves them the adoption of a law, the repeal of which might afterwards be almost impossible. The qualified negative is, therefore, a beneficent power, intended, as General Hamilton expressly declares in the 'Federalist,' to protect, first, the executive department from the encroachments of the legislative department; and, secondly, to preserve the people from hasty, dangerous, or criminal legislation on the part of their representatives. This is the design and intention of the veto power; and the fear expressed by General Hamilton was, that Presidents, so far from exercising it too often, would not exercise it as often as the safety of the people required; that they might lack the moral courage to stake themselves in opposition to a favorite measure of the majority of the two Houses of Congress; and thus deprive the people, in many instances, of their right to pass upon a bill before it becomes a final law. The cases in which President Jackson has exercised the veto power has shown the soundness of these observations. No ordinary President would have staked himself against the Bank of the United States, and the two Houses of Congress, in 1832. It required President Jackson to confront that power – to stem that torrent – to stay the progress of that charter, and to refer it to the people for their decision. His moral courage was equal to the crisis. He arrested the charter until it could go to the people, and they have arrested it for ever. Had he not done so, the charter would have become law, and its repeal almost impossible. The people of the whole Union would now have been in the condition of the people of Pennsylvania, bestrode by the monster, in daily conflict with him, and maintaining a doubtful contest for supremacy between the government of a State and the directory of a moneyed corporation.

To detail specific acts which adorn the administration of President Jackson, and illustrate the intuitive sagacity of his intellect, the firmness of his mind, his disregard of personal popularity, and his entire devotion to the public good, would be inconsistent with this rapid sketch, intended merely to present general views, and not to detail single actions, howsoever worthy they may be of a splendid page in the volume of history. But how can we pass over the great measure of the removal of the public moneys from the Bank of the United States, in the autumn of 1833? that wise, heroic, and masterly measure of prevention, which has rescued an empire from the fangs of a merciless, revengeful, greedy, insatiate, implacable, moneyed power! It is a remark for which I am indebted to the philosophic observation of my most esteemed colleague and friend (pointing to Dr. Linn), that, while it requires far greater talent to foresee an evil before it happens, and to arrest it by precautionary measures, than it requires to apply an adequate remedy to the same evil after it has happened, yet the applause bestowed by the world is always greatest in the latter case. Of this, the removal of the public moneys from the Bank of the United States is an eminent instance. The veto of 1832, which arrested the charter which Congress had granted, immediately received the applause and approbation of a majority of the Union: the removal of the deposits, which prevented the bank from forcing a recharter, was disapproved by a large majority of the country, and even of his own friends; yet the veto would have been unavailing, and the bank would inevitably have been rechartered, if the deposits had not been removed. The immense sums of public money since accumulated would have enabled the bank, if she had retained the possession of it, to have coerced a recharter. Nothing but the removal could have prevented her from extorting a recharter from the sufferings and terrors of the people. If it had not been for that measure, the previous veto would have been unavailing; the bank would have been again installed in power; and this entire federal government would have been held as an appendage to that bank; and administered according to her directions, and by her nominees. That great measure of prevention, the removal of the deposits, though feebly and faintly supported by friends at first, has expelled the bank from the field, and driven her into abeyance under a State charter. She is not dead, but, holding her capital and stockholders together under a State charter, she has taken a position to watch events, and to profit by them. The royal tiger has gone into the jungle; and, crouched on his belly, he awaits the favorable moment for emerging from his covert, and springing on the body of the unsuspicious traveller!

The Treasury order for excluding paper money from the land offices is another wise measure, originating in enlightened forecast, and preventing great mischiefs. The President foresaw the evils of suffering a thousand streams of paper money, issuing from a thousand different banks, to discharge themselves on the national domain. He foresaw that if these currents were allowed to run their course, that the public lands would be swept away, the Treasury would be filled with irredeemable paper, a vast number of banks must be broken by their folly, and the cry set up that nothing but a national bank could regulate the currency. He stopped the course of these streams of paper; and, in so doing, has saved the country from a great calamity, and excited anew the machinations of those whose schemes of gain and mischief have been disappointed; and who had counted on a new edition of panic and pressure, and again saluting Congress with the old story of confidence destroyed, currency ruined, prosperity annihilated, and distress produced, by the tyranny of one man. They began their lugubrious song; but ridicule and contempt have proved too strong for money and insolence; and the panic letter of the ex-president of the denationalized bank, after limping about for a few days, has shrunk from the lash of public scorn, and disappeared from the forum of public debate.

The difficulty with France: what an instance it presents of the superior sagacity of President Jackson over all the commonplace politicians who beset and impede his administration at home! That difficulty, inflamed and aggravated by domestic faction, wore, at one time, a portentous aspect; the skill, firmness, elevation of purpose, and manly frankness of the President, avoided the danger, accomplished the object, commanded the admiration of Europe, and retained the friendship of France. He conducted the delicate affair to a successful and mutually honorable issue. All is amicably and happily terminated, leaving not a wound, nor even a scar, behind – leaving the Frenchman and American on the ground on which they have stood for fifty years, and should for ever stand; the ground of friendship, respect, good will, and mutual wishes for the honor, happiness, and prosperity, of each other.

But why this specification? So beneficent and so glorious has been the administration of this President, that where to begin, and where to end, in the enumeration of great measures, would be the embarrassment of him who has his eulogy to make. He came into office the first of generals; he goes out the first of statesmen. His civil competitors have shared the fate of his military opponents; and Washington city has been to the American politicians who have assailed him, what New Orleans was to the British generals who attacked his lines. Repulsed! driven back! discomfited! crushed! has been the fate of all assailants, foreign and domestic, civil and military. At home and abroad, the impress of his genius and of his character is felt. He has impressed upon the age in which he lives the stamp of his arms, of his diplomacy, and of his domestic policy. In a word, so transcendent have been the merits of his administration, that they have operated a miracle upon the minds of his most inveterate opponents. He has expunged their objections to military chieftains! He has shown them that they were mistaken; that military men were not the dangerous rulers they had imagined, but safe and prosperous conductors of the vessel of state. He has changed their fear into love. With visible signs they admit their error, and, instead of deprecating, they now invoke the reign of chieftains. They labored hard to procure a military successor to the present incumbent; and if their love goes on increasing at the same rate, the republic may be put to the expense of periodical wars, to breed a perpetual succession of these chieftains to rule over them and their posterity for ever.

To drop this irony, which the inconsistency of mad opponents has provoked, and to return to the plain delineations of historical painting, the mind instinctively dwells on the vast and unprecedented popularity of this President. Great is the influence, great the power, greater than any man ever before possessed in our America, which he has acquired over the public mind. And how has he acquired it? Not by the arts of intrigue, or the juggling tricks of diplomacy; not by undermining rivals, or sacrificing public interests for the gratification of classes or individuals. But he has acquired it, first, by the exercise of an intuitive sagacity which, leaving all book learning at an immeasurable distance behind, has always enabled him to adopt the right remedy, at the right time, and to conquer soonest when the men of forms and office thought him most near to ruin and despair. Next, by a moral courage which knew no fear when the public good beckoned him to go on. Last, and chiefest, he has acquired it by an open honesty of purpose, which knew no concealments; by a straightforwardness of action, which disdained the forms of office and the arts of intrigue; by a disinterestedness of motive, which knew no selfish or sordid calculation; a devotedness of patriotism, which staked every thing personal on the issue of every measure which the public welfare required him to adopt. By these qualities, and these means, he has acquired his prodigious popularity, and his transcendent influence over the public mind; and if there are any who envy that influence and popularity, let them envy, also, and emulate, if they can, the qualities and means by which they were acquired.

Great has been the opposition to President Jackson's administration; greater, perhaps, than ever has been exhibited against any government, short of actual insurrection and forcible resistance. Revolution has been proclaimed! and every thing has been done that could be expected to produce revolution. The country has been alarmed, agitated, convulsed. From the Senate chamber to the village bar-room, from one end of the continent to the other, denunciation, agitation, excitement, has been the order of the day. For eight years the President of this republic has stood upon a volcano, vomiting fire and flames upon him, and threatening the country itself with ruin and desolation, if the people did not expel the usurper, despot, and tyrant, as he was called, from the high place to which the suffrages of millions of freemen had elevated him.

Great is the confidence which he has always reposed in the discernment and equity of the American people. I have been accustomed to see him for many years, and under many discouraging trials; but never saw him doubt, for an instant, the ultimate support of the people. It was my privilege to see him often, and during the most gloomy period of the panic conspiracy, when the whole earth seemed to be in commotion against him, and when many friends were faltering, and stout hearts were quailing, before the raging storm which bank machination, and senatorial denunciation, had conjured up to overwhelm him. I saw him in the darkest moments of this gloomy period; and never did I see his confidence in the ultimate support of his fellow-citizens forsake him for an instant. He always said the people would stand by those who stand by them; and nobly have they justified that confidence! That verdict, the voice of millions, which now demands the expurgation of that sentence, which the Senate and the bank then pronounced upon him, is the magnificent response of the people's hearts to the implicit confidence which he then reposed in them. But it was not in the people only that he had confidence; there was another, and a far higher Power, to which he constantly looked to save the country, and its defenders, from every danger; and signal events prove that he did not look to that high Power in vain.

Sir, I think it right, in approaching the termination of this great question, to present this faint and rapid sketch of the brilliant, beneficent, and glorious administration of President Jackson. It is not for me to attempt to do it justice; it is not for ordinary men to attempt its history. His military life, resplendent with dazzling events, will demand the pen of a nervous writer; his civil administration, replete with scenes which have called into action so many and such various passions of the human heart, and which has given to native sagacity so many victories over practised politicians, will require the profound, luminous, and philosophical conceptions of a Livy, a Plutarch, or a Sallust. This history is not to be written in our day. The cotemporaries of such events are not the hands to describe them. Time must first do its office – must silence the passions, remove the actors, develope consequences, and canonize all that is sacred to honor, patriotism, and glory. In after ages the historic genius of our America shall produce the writers which the subject demands – men far removed from the contests of this day, who will know how to estimate this great epoch, and how to acquire an immortality for their own names by painting, with a master's hand, the immortal events of the patriot President's life.

And now, sir, I finish the task which, three years ago, I imposed on myself. Solitary and alone, and amidst the jeers and taunts of my opponents, I put this ball in motion. The people have taken it up, and rolled it forward, and I am no longer any thing but a unit in the vast mass which now propels it. In the name of that mass I speak. I demand the execution of the edict of the people; I demand the expurgation of that sentence which the voice of a few senators, and the power of their confederate, the Bank of the United States, has caused to be placed on the journal of the Senate; and which the voice of millions of freemen has ordered to be expunged from it.

CHAPTER CLXI.
EXPUNGING RESOLUTION: MR. CLAY, MR. CALHOUN, MR. WEBSTER: LAST SCENE: RESOLUTION PASSED, AND EXECUTED

Saturday, the 14th of January, the democratic senators agreed to have a meeting, and to take their final measures for passing the expunging resolution. They knew they had the numbers; but they also knew that they had adversaries to grapple with to whom might be applied the proud motto of Louis the Fourteenth: "Not an unequal match for numbers." They also knew that members of the party were in the process of separating from it, and would require conciliating. They met in the night at the then famous restaurant of Boulanger, giving to the assemblage the air of a convivial entertainment. It continued till midnight, and required all the moderation, tact and skill of the prime movers to obtain and maintain the union upon details, on the success of which the fate of the measure depended. The men of conciliation were to be the efficient men of that night; and all the winning resources of Wright, Allen of Ohio and Linn of Missouri, were put into requisition. There were serious differences upon the mode of expurgation, while agreed upon the thing; and finally obliteration, the favorite of the mover, was given up; and the mode of expurgation adopted which had been proposed in the resolutions of the General Assembly of Virginia; namely, to inclose the obnoxious sentence in a square of black lines – an oblong square: a compromise of opinions to which the mover agreed upon condition of being allowed to compose the epitaph – "Expunged by the order of the Senate." The agreement which was to lead to victory was then adopted, each one severally pledging himself to it, that there should be no adjournment of the Senate after the resolution was called until it was passed; and that it should be called immediately after the morning business the Monday ensuing. Expecting a protracted session, extending through the day and night, and knowing the difficulty of keeping men steady to their work and in good humor, when tired and hungry, the mover of the proceeding took care to provide, as far as possible, against such a state of things; and gave orders that night to have an ample supply of cold hams, turkeys, rounds of beef, pickles, wines and cups of hot coffee, ready in a certain committee room near the Senate chamber by four o'clock on the afternoon of Monday.

The motion to take up the subject was made at the appointed time, and immediately a debate of long speeches, chiefly on the other side, opened itself upon the question. It was evident that consumption of time, delay and adjournment, was their plan. The three great leaders did not join in the opening; but their place was well supplied by many of their friends, able speakers – some effective, some eloquent: Preston of South Carolina; Richard H. Bayard and John M. Clayton of Delaware; Crittenden of Kentucky; Southard of New Jersey; White of Tennessee; Ewing of Ohio. They were only the half in number, but strong in zeal and ability, that commenced the contest three years before, reinforced by Mr. White of Tennessee. As the darkness of approaching night came on, and the great chandelier was lit up, splendidly illuminating the chamber, then crowded with the members of the House, and the lobbies and galleries filled to their utmost capacity by visitors and spectators, the scene became grand and impressive. A few spoke on the side of the resolution – chiefly Rives, Buchanan, Niles – and with an air of ease and satisfaction that bespoke a quiet determination, and a consciousness of victory. The committee room had been resorted to in parties of four and six at a time, always leaving enough on watch: and not resorted to by one side alone. The opposition were invited to a full participation – an invitation of which those who were able to maintain their good temper readily availed themselves; but the greater part were not in a humor to eat any thing – especially at such a feast. The night was wearing away: the expungers were in full force – masters of the chamber – happy – and visibly determined to remain. It became evident to the great opposition leaders that the inevitable hour had come: that the damnable deed was to be done that night: and that the dignity of silence was no longer to them a tenable position. The battle was going against them, and they must go into it, without being able to re-establish it. In the beginning, they had not considered the expunging movement a serious proceeding: as it advanced they still expected it to miscarry on some point: now the reality of the thing stood before them, confronting their presence, and refusing to "down" at any command. They broke silence, and gave vent to language which bespoke the agony of their feelings, and betrayed the revulsion of stomach with which they approached the odious subject. Mr. Calhoun said:

"No one, not blinded by party zeal, can possibly be insensible that the measure proposed is a violation of the constitution. The constitution requires the Senate to keep a journal; this resolution goes to expunge the journal. If you may expunge a part, you may expunge the whole; and if it is expunged, how is it kept? The constitution says the journal shall be kept; this resolution says it shall be destroyed. It does the very thing which the constitution declares shall not be done. That is the argument, the whole argument. There is none other. Talk of precedents? and precedents drawn from a foreign country? They don't apply. No, sir. This is to be done, not in consequence of argument, but in spite of argument. I understand the case. I know perfectly well the gentlemen have no liberty to vote otherwise. They are coerced by an exterior power. They try, indeed, to comfort their conscience by saying that it is the will of the people, and the voice of the people. It is no such thing. We all know how these legislative returns have been obtained. It is by dictation from the White House. The President himself, with that vast mass of patronage which he wields, and the thousand expectations he is able to hold up, has obtained these votes of the State Legislatures; and this, forsooth, is said to be the voice of the people. The voice of the people! Sir, can we forget the scene which was exhibited in this chamber when that expunging resolution was first introduced here? Have we forgotten the universal giving way of conscience, so that the senator from Missouri was left alone? I see before me senators who could not swallow that resolution; and has its nature changed since then? Is it any more constitutional now than it was then? Not at all. But executive power has interposed. Talk to me of the voice of the people? No, sir. It is the combination of patronage and power to coerce this body into a gross and palpable violation of the constitution. Some individuals, I perceive, think to escape through the particular form in which this act is to be perpetrated. They tell us that the resolution on your records is not to be expunged, but is only to be endorsed 'Expunged.' Really, sir, I do not know how to argue against such contemptible sophistry. The occasion is too solemn for an argument of this sort. You are going to violate the constitution, and you get rid of the infamy by a falsehood. You yourselves say that the resolution is expunged by your order. Yet you say it is not expunged. You put your act in express words. You record it, and then turn round and deny it.

"But why do I waste my breath? I know it is all utterly vain. The day is gone; night approaches, and night is suitable to the dark deed we meditate. There is a sort of destiny in this thing. The act must be performed; and it is an act which will tell on the political history of this country for ever. Other preceding violations of the constitution (and they have been many and great) filled my bosom with indignation, but this fills it only with grief. Others were done in the heat of party. Power was, as it were, compelled to support itself by seizing upon new instruments of influence and patronage; and there were ambitious and able men to direct the process. Such was the removal of the deposits, which the President seized upon by a new and unprecedented act of arbitrary power; an act which gave him ample means of rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Something may, perhaps, be pardoned to him in this matter, on the old apology of tyrants – the plea of necessity. But here there can be no such apology. Here no necessity can so much as be pretended. This act originates in pure, unmixed, personal idolatry. It is the melancholy evidence of a broken spirit, ready to bow at the feet of power. The former act was such a one as might have been perpetrated in the days of Pompey or Cæsar; but an act like this could never have been consummated by a Roman Senate until the times of Caligula and Nero."

Mr. Calhoun was right in his taunt about the universal giving way when the resolution was first introduced – the solitude in which the mover was then left – and in which solitude he would have been left to the end, had it not been for his courage in reinstating the word expunge, and appealing to the people.

Mr. Clay commenced with showing that he had never believed in the reality of the proceeding until now; that he had considered the resolution as a thing to be taken up for a speech, and laid down when the speech was delivered; and that the last laying down, at the previous session, was the end of the matter. He said:

"Considering that he was the mover of the resolution of March, 1834, and the consequent relation in which he stood to the majority of the Senate by whose vote it was adopted, he had felt it to be his duty to say something on this expunging resolution; and he had always intended to do so when he should be persuaded that there existed a settled purpose of pressing it to a final decision. But it had been so taken up and put down at the last session – taken up one day, when a speech was prepared for delivery, and put down when it was pronounced – that he had really doubted whether there existed any serious intention of ever putting it to the vote. At the very close of the last session, it will be recollected that the resolution came up, and in several quarters of the Senate a disposition was manifested to come to a definitive decision. On that occasion he had offered to waive his right to address the Senate, and silently to vote upon the resolution; but it was again laid upon the table; and laid there for ever, as the country supposed, and as he believed. It is, however, now revived; and, sundry changes having taken place in the members of this body, it would seem that the present design is to bring the resolution to an absolute conclusion."

Then, after an argument against the expurgation, which, of necessity, was obliged to be a recapitulation of the argument in favor of the original condemnation of the President, he went on to give vent to his feelings in expressions not less bitter and denunciatory of the President and his friends than those used by Mr. Calhoun, saying:

"But if the matter of expunction be contrary to the truth of the case, reproachful for its base subserviency, derogatory from the just and necessary powers of the Senate, and repugnant to the constitution of the United States, the manner in which it is proposed to accomplish this dark deed is also highly exceptionable. The expunging resolution, which is to blot out or enshroud the four or five lines in which the resolution of 1834 stands recorded, or rather the recitals by which it is preceded, are spun out into a thread of enormous length. It runs, whereas, and whereas, and whereas, and whereas, and whereas, &c., into a formidable array of nine several whereases. One who should have the courage to begin to read them, unaware of what was to be their termination, would think that at the end of such a tremendous display he must find the very devil."

And then coming to the conclusion, he concentrated his wrath and grief in an apostrophizing peroration, which lacked nothing but verisimilitude to have been grand and affecting. Thus:

"But why should I detain the Senate, or needlessly waste my breath in fruitless exertions. The decree has gone forth. It is one of urgency, too. The deed is to be done – that foul deed which, like the blood-stained hands of the guilty Macbeth, all ocean's waters will never wash out. Proceed, then, with the noble work which lies before you, and, like other skilful executioners, do it quickly. And when you have perpetrated it, go home to the people, and tell them what glorious honors you have achieved for our common country. Tell them that you have extinguished one of the brightest and purest lights that ever burnt at the altar of civil liberty. Tell them that you have silenced one of the noblest batteries that ever thundered in defence of the constitution, and bravely spiked the cannon. Tell them that, henceforward, no matter what daring or outrageous act any President may perform, you have for ever hermetically sealed the mouth of the Senate. Tell them that he may fearlessly assume what powers he pleases, snatch from its lawful custody the public purse, command a military detachment to enter the halls of the capitol, overawe Congress, trample down the constitution, and raze every bulwark of freedom; but that the Senate must stand mute, in silent submission, and not dare to raise its opposing voice. That it must wait until a House of Representatives, humbled and subdued like itself, and a majority of it composed of the partisans of the President, shall prefer articles of impeachment. Tell them, finally, that you have restored the glorious doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance. And, if the people do not pour out their indignation and imprecations, I have yet to learn the character of American freemen."

Mr. Webster spoke last, and after a pause in the debate which seemed to indicate its conclusion; and only rose, and that slowly, as the question was about to be put. Having no personal griefs in relation to General Jackson like Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Clay, and with a temperament less ardent, he delivered himself with comparative moderation, confining himself to a brief protest against the act; and concluding, in measured and considered language, with expressing his grief and mortification at what he was to behold; thus: