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Thomas Hart Benton

by Theodore Roosevelt · English · Gutenberg #37656 · 517,286 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Thomas Hart Benton

Author: Theodore Roosevelt


        
Release date: October 7, 2011 [eBook #37656]

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Julia Neufeld, Curtis Weyant and the Online
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOMAS HART BENTON ***




Produced by Julia Neufeld, Curtis Weyant and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)





Transcriber's Note: Passages in italics are indicated by _underscores_.
Small caps have been replaced by ALL CAPS.

  American Statesmen

  EDITED BY

  JOHN T. MORSE, JR.




  American Statesmen

  THOMAS HART BENTON

  BY

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT



  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
  HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
  The Riverside Press, Cambridge
  1890



  Copyright, 1886,
  BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

  _All rights reserved._


  FIFTH EDITION.

  _The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
  Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.




CONTENTS.


  CHAPTER I.
                                                           PAGE

  THE YOUNG WEST                                             1

  CHAPTER II.

  BENTON'S EARLY LIFE AND ENTRY INTO THE SENATE             23

  CHAPTER III.

  EARLY YEARS IN THE SENATE                                 47

  CHAPTER IV.

  THE ELECTION OF JACKSON, AND THE SPOILS SYSTEM            69

  CHAPTER V.

  THE STRUGGLE WITH THE NULLIFIERS                          88

  CHAPTER VI.

  JACKSON AND BENTON MAKE WAR ON THE BANK                  114

  CHAPTER VII.

  THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE SURPLUS                          143

  CHAPTER VIII.

  THE SLAVE QUESTION APPEARS IN POLITICS                   157

  CHAPTER IX.

  THE CHILDREN'S TEETH ARE SET ON EDGE                     184

  CHAPTER X.

  LAST DAYS OF THE JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY                    209

  CHAPTER XI.

  THE PRESIDENT WITHOUT A PARTY                            237

  CHAPTER XII.

  BOUNDARY TROUBLES WITH ENGLAND                           260

  CHAPTER XIII.

  THE ABOLITIONISTS DANCE TO THE SLAVE BARONS' PIPING      290

  CHAPTER XIV.

  SLAVERY IN THE NEW TERRITORIES                           317

  CHAPTER XV.

  THE LOSING FIGHT                                         341




THOMAS HART BENTON.




CHAPTER I.

THE YOUNG WEST.


Even before the end of the Revolutionary War the movement had begun
which was to change in form a straggling chain of sea-board republics
into a mighty continental nation, the great bulk of whose people would
live to the westward of the Appalachian Mountains. The hardy and
restless backwoodsmen, dwelling along the eastern slopes of the
Alleghanies, were already crossing the mountain-crests and hewing their
way into the vast, sombre forests of the Mississippi basin; and for the
first time English-speaking communities were growing up along waters
whose outlet was into the Gulf of Mexico and not into the Atlantic
Ocean. Among these communities Kentucky and Tennessee were the earliest
to form themselves into states; and around them, as a nucleus, other
states of the woodland and the prairie were rapidly developed, until, by
the close of the second decade in the present century, the region
between the Great Lakes and the Gulf was almost solidly filled in, and
finally, in 1820, by the admission of Missouri, the Union held within
its borders a political body whose whole territory lay to the west of
the Mississippi.

All the men who founded these states were of much the same type; they
were rough frontiersmen, of strong will and adventurous temper,
accustomed to the hard, barren, and yet strangely fascinating life of
those who dwell as pioneers in the wilderness. Moreover, they were
nearly all of the same blood. The people of New York and New England
were as yet filling out their own territory; it was not till many years
afterwards that their stock became the predominant one in the
northwestern country. Most of the men who founded the new states north
of the Ohio came originally from the old states south of the Potomac;
Virginia and North Carolina were the first of the original thirteen to
thrust forth their children in masses, that they might shift for
themselves in the then untrodden West.

But though these early Western pioneers were for the most part of
Southern stock, they were by no means of the same stamp as the men who
then and thereafter formed the ruling caste in the old slave-holding
states. They were the mountaineers, the men of the foot-hills and
uplands, who lived in what were called the backwater counties. Many of
them were themselves of northern origin. In striking contrast to the
somewhat sluggish and peaceful elements going to make up the rest of its
heterogeneous population, Pennsylvania also originally held within its
boundaries many members of that most fiery and restless race, the
Scotch-Irish. These naturally drew towards the wilder, western parts of
the state, settling along the slopes of the numerous inland mountain
ridges running parallel to the Atlantic coast; and from thence they
drifted southward through the long valleys, until they met and mingled
with their kinsfolk of Virginia and the Carolinas, when the movement
again trended towards the West. In a generation or two, all, whether
their forefathers were English, Scotch, Irish, or, as was often the
case, German and Huguenot, were welded into one people; and in a very
short time the stern and hard surroundings of their life had hammered
this people into a peculiar and characteristically American type, which
to this day remains almost unchanged. In their old haunts we still see
the same tall, gaunt men, with strongly marked faces and saturnine,
resolute eyes; men who may pass half their days in listless idleness,
but who are also able to show on occasion the fiercest intensity of
purpose and the most sustained energy of action. We see them, moreover,
in many places, even across to the Pacific coast and down to the Rio
Grande. For after thronging through the gaps and passes of the
Appalachians, and penetrating the forest region to the outskirts of the
treeless country beyond, the whilom mountaineers and woodsmen, the
wielders of the axe and rifle, then streamed off far to the West and
South and even to the Northwest, their lumbering, white-topped wagons
being, even to the present moment, a familiar sight to those who travel
over the prairies and the great plains; while it is their descendants
who, in the saddle instead of afoot, and with rope and revolver instead
of axe and rifle, now form the bulk of the reckless horsemen who spend
their lives in guarding the wandering cattle herds that graze over the
vast, arid plains of the "Far West."

The method of settlement of these states of the Mississippi valley had
nothing whatever in common with the way in which California and the
Australian colonies were suddenly filled up by the promiscuous overflow
of a civilized population, which had practically no fear of any
resistance from the stunted and scanty native races. It was far more
closely akin to the tribe movements of the Germanic peoples in time
past; to that movement, for example, by which the Juttish and Low Dutch
sea-thieves on the coast of Britain worked their way inland at the cost
of the Cymric Celts. The early settlers of the territory lying
immediately west of the Alleghanies were all of the same kind; they were
in search of homes, not of riches, and their actions were planned
accordingly, except in so far as they were influenced by mere restless
love of adventure and excitement. Individuals and single families, of
course, often started off by themselves; but for the most part the men
moved in bands, with their wives and their children, their cattle and
their few household goods; each settler being from the necessity of the
case also a fighter, ready, and often forced, to do desperate battle in
defense of himself and his family. Where such a band or little party
settled, there would gradually grow up a village or small town; for
instance, where those renowned pioneers and heroes of the backwoods,
Boone and Harrod, first formed permanent settlements after they had
moved into Kentucky, now stand the towns of Boonsboro and Harrodsburg.

The country whither these settlers went was not one into which timid men
would willingly venture, and the founders of the West were perforce men
of stern stuff, who from the very beginning formed a most warlike race.
It is impossible to understand aright the social and political life of
the section, unless we keep prominently before our minds that it derived
its distinguishing traits largely from the extremely militant character
acquired by all the early settlers during the long drawn out warfare in
which the first two generations were engaged. The land was already held
by powerful Indian tribes and confederacies, who waged war after war, of
the most ferocious and bloody character, against the men of the border,
in the effort to avert their inevitable doom, or at least to stem for
the time being the invasion of the swelling tide of white settlement. At
the present time, when an Indian uprising is a matter chiefly of
annoyance, and dangerous only to scattered, outlying settlers, it is
difficult to realize the formidable nature of the savage Indian wars
waged at the end of the last and the beginning of the present centuries.
The red nations were then really redoubtable enemies, able to send into
the field thousands of well-armed warriors, whose ferocious bravery and
skill rendered them quite as formidable antagonists as trained European
soldiers would have been. Warfare with them did not affect merely
outlying farms or hamlets; it meant a complete stoppage of the white
movement westward, and great and imminent danger even to the large
communities already in existence; a state of things which would have to
continue until the armies raised among the pioneers were able, in fair
shock of battle, to shatter the strength of their red foes. The
victories of Wayne and Harrison were conditions precedent to the opening
of the Ohio valley; Kentucky was won by a hundred nameless and bloody
fights, whose heroes, like Shelby and Sevier, afterwards rose to
prominent rank in civil life; and it was only after a hard-fought
campaign and slaughtering victories that the Tennesseeans were able to
break the power of the great Creek confederacy, which was thrust in
between them and what were at that time the French and Spanish lands
lying to the south and southwest.

The founders of our Western States were valiant warriors as well as
hardy pioneers, and from the very first their fighting was not confined
to uncivilized foes. It was they who at King's Mountain slew gallant
Ferguson, and completely destroyed his little army; it was from their
ranks that most of Morgan's men were recruited, when that grizzled old
bush-fighter smote Tarleton so roughly at the battle of the Cowpens.
These two blows crippled Cornwallis, and were among the chief causes of
his final overthrow. At last, during the War of 1812, there was played
out the final act in the military drama of which the West had been the
stage during the lifetime of a generation. For this war had a twofold
aspect: on the sea-board it was regarded as a contest for the rights of
our sailors and as a revolt against Great Britain's domineering
insolence; west of the mountains, on the other hand, it was simply a
renewal on a large scale of the Indian struggles, all the red-skinned
peoples joining together in a great and last effort to keep the lands
which were being wrested from them; and there Great Britain's part was
chiefly that of ally to the savages, helping them with her gold and with
her well-drilled mercenary troops. The battle of the Thames is memorable
rather because of the defeat and death of Tecumseh, than because of the
flight of Proctor and the capture of his British regulars; and for the
opening of the Southwest the ferocious fight at the Horseshoe Bend was
almost as important as the far more famous conflict of New Orleans.

The War of 1812 brought out conspicuously the solidarity of interest in
the West. The people there were then all pretty much of the same blood;
and they made common cause against outsiders in the military field
exactly as afterwards they for some time acted together politically.
Further eastward, on the Niagara frontier, the fighting was done by the
troops of New York and New England, unassisted by the Southern States;
and in turn the latter had to shift for themselves when Washington was
burned and Baltimore menaced. It was far otherwise in the regions lying
beyond the Appalachians. Throughout all the fighting in the Northwest,
where Ohio was the state most menaced, the troops of Kentucky formed the
bulk of the American army, and it was the charge of their mounted
riflemen which at a blow won the battle of the Thames. Again, on that
famous January morning, when it seemed as if the fair Creole city was
already in Packenham's grasp, it was the wild soldiery of Tennessee who,
lolling behind their mud breastworks, peered out through the lifting fog
at the scarlet array of the English veterans, as the latter, fresh from
their long and unbroken series of victories over the best troops of
Europe, advanced, for the first time, to meet defeat.

This solidarity of interest and feeling on the part of the
trans-Appalachian communities is a factor often not taken into account
in relating the political history of the early part of this century;
most modern writers (who keep forgetting that the question of slavery
was then not one tenth as absorbing as it afterwards became) apparently
deeming that the line of demarkation between North and South was at
that period, as it has since in reality become, as strongly defined west
of the mountains as east of them. That such was not the case was due to
several different causes. The first comers into Tennessee and Kentucky
belonged to the class of so-called poor whites, who owned few or no
slaves, and who were far less sectionally southern in their feelings
than were the rich planters of the low, alluvial plains towards the
coast of the Atlantic; and though a slave-owning population quickly
followed the first pioneers, yet the latter had imprinted a stamp on the
character of the two states which was never wholly effaced,--as witness
the tens of thousands of soldiers which both, even the more southern of
the two, furnished to the Union army in the Civil War.

If this immigration made Kentucky and Tennessee, and afterwards
Missouri, less distinctively Southern in character than the South
Atlantic States, it at the same time, by furnishing the first and for
some time the most numerous element in the population of the states
north of the Ohio, made the latter less characteristically Northern than
was the case with those lying east of them. Up to 1810 Indiana kept
petitioning Congress to allow slavery within her borders; Illinois, in
the early days, felt as hostile towards Massachusetts as did Missouri.
Moreover, at first the Southern States west of the mountains greatly
outweighed the Northern, both in numbers and importance.

Thus several things came about. In the first place, all the communities
across the Alleghanies originally felt themselves to be closely knit
together by ties of blood, sentiment, and interest; they felt that they
were, taking them altogether, Western as opposed to Eastern. In the next
place, they were at first Southern rather than Northern in their
feeling. But, in the third place, they were by no means so extremely
Southern as were the Southern Atlantic States. This was the way in which
they looked at themselves; and this was the way in which at that time
others looked at them. In our day Kentucky is regarded politically as
being simply an integral portion of the solid South; but the greatest of
her sons, Clay, was known to his own generation, not as a Southern
statesman, but as "Harry of the West." Of the two presidents, Harrison
and Taylor, whom the Whigs elected, one lived in Ohio and one in
Louisiana; but both were chosen simply as Western men, and, as a matter
of fact, both were born in Virginia. Andrew Jackson's victory over Adams
was in some slight sense a triumph of the South over the North, but it
was far more a triumph of the West over the East. Webster's famous
sneer at old Zachary Taylor was aimed at him as a "frontier colonel;" in
other words, though Taylor had a large plantation in Louisiana, Webster,
and many others besides, looked upon him as the champion of the rough
democracy of the West rather than as the representative of the polished
slave-holders of the South.

Thus, during the first part of this century, the term "Western" was as
applicable to the states lying south of the Ohio as to those lying north
of it. Moreover, at first the Central, or, as they were more usually
termed, the Border States, were more populous and influential than were
those on either side of them, and so largely shaped the general tone of
Western feeling. While the voters in these states, whether Whigs or
Democrats, accepted as their leaders men like Clay in Kentucky, Benton
in Missouri, and Andrew Jackson in Tennessee, it could be taken for
granted that on the whole they felt for the South against the North, but
much more for the West against the East, and most strongly of all for
the Union as against any section whatsoever. Many influences came
together to start and keep alive this feeling; but one, more potent than
all the others combined, was working steadily, and with ever-increasing
power, against it; and when slavery finally brought about a break
between the Northern and Southern States of the West as complete as that
in the East, then the Democrats of the stamp of Jackson and Benton
disappeared as completely from public life as did the Whigs of the stamp
of Clay.

Benton's long political career can never be thoroughly understood unless
it is kept in mind that he was primarily a Western and not a Southern
statesman; and it owes its especial interest to the fact that during its
continuance the West first rose to power, acting as a unit, and to the
further fact that it was brought to a close by the same causes which
soon afterwards broke up the West exactly as the East was already
broken. Benton was not one of the few statesmen who have left the
indelible marks of their own individuality upon our history; but he was,
perhaps, the most typical representative of the statesmanship of the
Middle West at the time when the latter gave the tone to the political
thought of the entire Mississippi valley. The political school which he
represented came to its fullest development in the so-called Border
States of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, and swayed the destinies of
the West so long as the states to the north as well as the states to the
south were content to accept the leadership of those that lay between
them. It came to an end and disappeared from sight when people north of
the Ohio at last set up their own standard, and when, after some
hesitation, the Border States threw in their lot with the other side and
concluded to follow the Southern communities, which they had hitherto
led. Benton was one of those public men who formulate and express,
rather than shape, the thought of the people who stand behind them and
whom they represent. A man of strong intellect and keen energy, he was
for many years the foremost representative of at least one phase of that
thought; being, also, a man of high principle and determined courage,
when a younger generation had grown up and the bent of the thought had
changed, he declined to change with it, bravely accepting political
defeat as the alternative, and going down without flinching a hair's
breadth from the ground on which he had always stood.

To understand his public actions as well as his political ideas and
principles it is, of course, necessary to know at least a little of the
men among whom he lived and from whom he sprang: the men who were the
first of our people to press out beyond the limits of the thirteen old
states; who filled Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri, and who
for so long a time were the dominant class all through the West, until,
at last, the flood of Northeastern immigration completely swamped their
influence north of the Ohio, while along the Gulf coast the political
control slipped from their hands into the grasp of the great planter
class.

The wood-choppers, game-hunters, and Indian-fighters, who first came
over the mountains, were only the forerunners of the more regular
settlers who followed them; but these last had much the same attributes
as their predecessors. For many years after the settlements were firmly
rooted, the life of the settlers was still subject to all the perils of
the wilderness. Above all, the constant warfare in which they were
engaged for nearly thirty-five years, and which culminated in the battle
of New Orleans, left a deep and lasting imprint on their character.
Their incessant wars were waged almost wholly by the settlers
themselves, with comparatively little help from the federal government,
and with hardly any regular troops as allies. A backwoods levy, whether
raised to meet an Indian inroad or to march against the disciplined
armies of the British, was merely a force of volunteers, made up from
among the full-grown male settlers, who were induced to join either from
motives of patriotism, or from love of adventure, or because they felt
that their homes and belongings were in danger from which they could
only extricate them by their own prowess. Every settler thus became more
or less of a soldier, was always expert with the rifle, and was taught
to rely upon his own skill and courage for his protection. But the
military service in which he was from time to time engaged was of such a
lawless kind, and was carried on with such utter absence of discipline,
that it did not accustom him in the least to habits of self-command, or
render him inclined to brook the exercise of authority by an outsider;
so that the Western people grew up with warlike traditions and habits of
thought, accustomed to give free rein to their passions, and to take
into their own hands the avenging of real or supposed wrongs, but
without any of the love for order and for acting in concert with their
fellows which characterize those who have seen service in regular
armies. On the contrary, the chief effect of this long-continued and
harassing Border warfare was to make more marked the sullen and almost
defiant self-reliance of the pioneer, and to develop his peculiarly
American spirit of individual self-sufficiency, his impatience of
outside interference or control, to a degree not known elsewhere, even
on this continent. It also gave a distinct military cast to his way of
looking at territory which did not belong to him. He stood where he was
because he was a conqueror; he had wrested his land by force from its
rightful Indian lords; he fully intended to repeat the same feat as soon
as he should reach the Spanish lands lying to the west and southwest; he
would have done so in the case of French Louisiana if it had not been
that the latter was purchased, and was thus saved from being taken by
force of arms. This belligerent, or, more properly speaking, piratical
way of looking at neighboring territory, was very characteristic of the
West, and was at the root of the doctrine of "manifest destiny."

All the early settlers, and most of those who came after them, were
poor, living narrow lives fraught with great hardship, and varying
between toil and half-aimless roving; even when the conditions of their
life became easier it was some time before the influence of their old
existence ceased to make itself felt in their way of looking at things.
The first pioneers were, it is true, soon followed by great
slave-owners; and by degrees there grew up a clan of large landed
proprietors and stock-raisers, akin to the planter caste which was so
all-powerful along the coast; but it was never relatively either so
large or so influential as the latter, and was not separated from the
rest of the white population by anything like so wide a gap as that
which, in the Southern Atlantic and Gulf States, marked the difference
between the rich growers of cotton, rice, and sugar, and the squalid
"poor whites" or "crackers."

The people of the Border States were thus mainly composed of small
land-owners, scattered throughout the country; they tilled their small
farms for themselves, were hewers of their own wood, and drawers of
their own water, and for generations remained accustomed to and skillful
in the use of the rifle. The pioneers of the Middle West were not
dwellers in towns; they kept to the open country, where each man could
shift for himself without help or hindrance from his neighbors, scorning
the irksome restraints and the lack of individual freedom of city life.
They built but few cities of any size; the only two really important
ones of whose inhabitants they formed any considerable part, St. Louis
and New Orleans, were both founded by the French long before our people
came across the mountains into the Mississippi valley. Their life was
essentially a country life, alike for the rich and for the bulk of the
population. The few raw frontier towns and squalid, straggling villages
were neither seats of superior culture nor yet centres for the
distribution of educated thought, as in the North. Large tracts of land
remained always populated by a class of backwoodsmen differing but
little from the first comers. Such was the district from which grand,
simple old Davy Crockett went to Washington as a Whig congressman; and
perhaps there was never a quainter figure in our national legislature
than that of the grim old rifleman, who shares with Daniel Boone the
honor of standing foremost in the list of our mighty hunters. Crockett
and his kind had little in common with the men who ruled supreme in the
politics of most of the Southern States; and even at this day many of
their descendants in the wooded mountain land are Republicans; for when
the Middle States had lost the control of the West, and when those who
had hitherto followed such leaders as Jackson, Clay, and Benton, drifted
with the tide that set so strongly to the South, it was only the men of
the type of dogged, stubborn old Crockett who dared to make head against
it. But, indeed, one of the characteristics of the people with whom we
are dealing was the slowness and suspicion with which they received a
new idea, and the tenacity with which they clung to one that they had at
last adopted.

They were above all a people of strong, virile character, certain to
make their weight felt either for good or for evil. They had many
virtues which can fairly be called great, and their faults were equally
strongly marked. They were not a thrifty people, nor one given to
long-sustained, drudging work; there were not then, nor are there now,
to be found in this land such comfortable, prosperous homes and farms as
those which dot all the country where dwell the men of Northeastern
stock. They were not, as a rule, even ordinarily well educated; the
public school formed no such important feature in their life as it did
in the life of their fellow-citizens farther north. They had narrow,
bitter prejudices and dislikes; the hard and dangerous lives they had
led had run their character into a stern and almost forbidding mould.
They valued personal prowess very highly, and respected no man who did
not possess the strongest capacity for self-help, and who could not
shift for himself in any danger. They felt an intense, although perhaps
ignorant, pride in and love for their country, and looked upon all the
lands hemming in the United States as territory which they or their
children should some day inherit; for they were a race of masterful
spirit, and accustomed to regard with easy tolerance any but the most
flagrant violations of law. They prized highly such qualities as
courage, loyalty, truth, and patriotism, but they were, as a whole,
poor, and not over-scrupulous of the rights of others, nor yet with the
nicest sense of money obligations; so that the history of their state
legislation affecting the rights of debtor and creditor, whether public
or private, in hard times, is not pleasant reading for an American who
is proud of his country. Their passions, once roused, were intense, and
if they really wished anything they worked for it with indomitable
persistency. There was little that was soft or outwardly attractive in
their character: it was stern, rude, and hard, like the lives they led;
but it was the character of those who were every inch men, and who were
Americans through to the very heart's core.

In their private lives their lawless and arrogant freedom and lack of
self-restraint produced much gross licentiousness and barbarous cruelty;
and every little frontier community could tell its story of animal
savagery as regards the home relations of certain of its members. Yet in
spite of this they, as a whole, felt the family ties strongly, and in
the main had quite a high standard of private morality. Many of them, at
any rate, were, according to their lights, deeply and sincerely
religious; though even their religion showed their strong,
coarse-fibred, narrow natures. Episcopalianism was the creed of the rich
slave-owner, who dwelt along the sea-board; but the Western settlers
belonged to some one or other of the divisions of the great Methodist
and Baptist churches. They were as savagely in earnest about this as
about everything else; meekness, mildness, broad liberality, and gentle
tolerance of difference in religious views were not virtues they
appreciated. They were always ready to do battle for their faith, and,
indeed, had to do it, as it was quite a common amusement for the wilder
and more lawless members of the community to try to break up by force
the great camp-meetings, which formed so conspicuous a feature in the
social and religious life of the country. For even irreligion took the
form of active rebellion against God, rather than disbelief in his
existence.

Physically they were, and are, especially in Kentucky, the finest
members of our race; an examination of the statistics relating to the
volunteers in the Civil War shows that the natives of no other state,
and the men from no foreign country whatsoever, came up to them in
bodily development.

Such a people, in choosing men to represent them in the national
councils, would naturally pay small heed to refined, graceful, and
cultivated statesmanship; their allegiance would be given to men of
abounding vitality, of rugged intellect, and of indomitable will. No
better or more characteristic possessor of these attributes could be
imagined than Thomas Benton.




CHAPTER II.

BENTON'S EARLY LIFE AND ENTRY INTO THE SENATE.


Thomas Hart Benton was born on March 14, 1782, near Hillsborough, in
Orange County, North Carolina,--the same state that fifteen years
before, almost to a day, had seen the birth of the great political chief
whose most prominent supporter he in after life became. Benton, however,
came of good colonial stock; and his early surroundings were not
characterized by the squalid poverty that marked Jackson's, though the
difference in the social condition of the two families was of small
consequence on the frontier, where caste was, and is, almost unknown,
and social equality is not a mere figure of speech--particularly it was
not so at that time in the Southwest, where there were no servants,
except black slaves, and where even what in the North would be called
"hired help" was almost an unknown quantity.

Benton's father, who was a lawyer in good standing at the North Carolina
bar, died when the boy was very young, leaving him to be brought up by
his Virginian mother. She was a woman of force, and, for her time, of
much education. She herself began the training of her son's mind,
studying with him history and biography, while he also, of course, had
access to his father's law library. The home in which he was brought up
was, for that time and for that part of the country, straightlaced; his
mother, though a Virginian, had many traits which belonged rather to the
descendants of the Puritans, and possessed both their strength of
character and their austerely religious spirit. Although living in a
roistering age, among a class peculiarly given to all the coarser kinds
of pleasure, and especially to drink and every form of gambling, she
nevertheless preserved the most rigid decorum and morality in her own
household, frowning especially upon all intemperance, and never
permitting a pack of cards to be found within her doors. She was greatly
beloved and respected by the son, whose mind she did so much to mould,
and she lived to see him become one of the foremost statesmen of the
country.

Young Benton was always fond of reading. He began his studies at home,
and continued them at a grammar school taught by a young New Englander
of good ability, a very large proportion of the school-teachers of the
country then coming from New England; indeed, school-teachers and
peddlers were, on the whole, the chief contributions made by the
Northeast to the _personnel_ of the new Southwest. Benton then began a
course at Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina, but broke off
before completing it, as his mother decided to move her family westward
to the almost unbroken wilderness near Nashville, Tennessee, where his
father had left them a large tract of land. But he was such an
insatiable student and reader that he rapidly acquired a very extensive
knowledge, not only of law, but of history and even of Latin and English
literature, and thus became a well-read and cultivated, indeed a
learned, man; though his frequent displays of learning and knowledge
were sometimes marked by a trace of that self-complacent, amusing
pedantry so apt to characterize a really well-educated man who lives in
a community in which he believes, and with which he has thoroughly
identified himself, but whose members are for the most part below the
average in mental cultivation.

The Bentons founded a little town, named after them, and in which, of
course, they took their position as leaders and rich landed proprietors.
It lay on the very outskirts of the Indian country; indeed, the great
war trail of the Southern Indians led right through the settlement, and
they at all times swarmed around it. The change from the still somewhat
rude civilization of North Carolina to the wildness on the border was
far less abrupt and startling then than would be the case under similar
circumstances now, and the Bentons soon identified themselves completely
with the life and interests of the people around them. They even
abandoned the Episcopalianism of their old home, and became Methodists,
like their neighbors. Young Benton himself had his hands full, at first,
in attending to his great backwoods farm, tilled by slaves, and in
pushing the growth of the settlement by building first a rude log
school-house (he himself taught school at one time, while studying law),
and a meeting-house of the same primitive construction, then mills,
roads, bridges, and so forth. The work hardened and developed him, and
he readily enough turned into a regular frontiersman of the better and
richer sort. The neighboring town of Nashville was a raw, pretentious
place, where horse-racing, cock-fighting, gambling, whiskey-drinking,
and the various coarse vices which masquerade as pleasures in frontier
towns, all throve in rank luxuriance. It was somewhat of a change from
Benton's early training, but he took to it kindly, and though never a
vicious or debauched man, he bore his full share in the savage brawls,
the shooting and stabbing affrays, which went to make up one of the
leading features in the excessively unattractive social life of the
place and epoch.

At that time dueling prevailed more or less throughout the United
States, and in the South and West to an extent never before or since
attained. On the frontier, not only did every man of spirit expect now
and then to be called on to engage in a duel, but he also had to make up
his mind to take occasional part in bloody street-fights. Tennessee, the
state where Benton then had his home, was famous for the affrays that
took place within its borders; and that they were common enough among
the people at large may be gathered from the fact that they were of
continual occurrence among judges, high state officials, and in the very
legislature itself, where senators and assemblymen were always becoming
involved in undignified rows and foolish squabbles, apparently without
fear of exciting any unfavorable comment, as witness Davy Crockett's
naive account of his early experiences as a backwoods member of the
Tennessee assembly. Like Jackson, Benton killed his man in a duel. This
was much later, in 1817, when he was a citizen of Missouri. His
opponent was a lawyer named Lucas. They fought twice, on Bloody Island,
near St. Louis. On the first occasion both were wounded; on the second
Lucas was killed. The latter came of a truculent family. A recent
biographer of his father, Judge John R. Lucas, remarks, with refreshing
unconsciousness of the grotesque humor of the chronicle: "This gentleman
was one of the most remarkable men who ever settled west of the
Mississippi River.... Towards the close of his life Judge Lucas became
melancholy and dejected--the result of domestic affliction, for six of
his sons met death by violence." One feels curious to know how the other
sons died.

But the most famous of Benton's affrays was that with Jackson himself,
in 1813. This rose out of a duel of laughable rather than serious
character, in which Benton's brother was worsted by General Carroll,
afterwards one of Jackson's lieutenants at New Orleans. The encounter
itself took place between the Benton brothers on one side, and on the
other, Jackson, General Coffee, also of New Orleans fame, and another
friend. The place was a great rambling Nashville inn, and the details
were so intricate that probably not even the participants themselves
knew exactly what had taken place, while all the witnesses impartially
contradicted each other and themselves. At any rate, Jackson was shot
and Benton was pitched headlong down-stairs, and all the other
combatants were more or less damaged; but it ended in Jackson being
carried off by his friends, leaving the Bentons masters of the field,
where they strutted up and down and indulged in a good deal of loud
bravado. Previous to this Benton and Jackson had been on the best of
terms, and although there was naturally a temporary break in their
friendship, yet it proved strong enough in the end to stand even such a
violent wrench as that given by this preposterously senseless and almost
fatal brawl. They not only became completely reconciled, but eventually
even the closest and warmest of personal and political friends; for
Benton was as generous and forgiving as he was hot-tempered, and
Jackson's ruder nature was at any rate free from any small meanness or
malice.

In spite of occasional interludes of this kind, which must have given a
rather ferocious fillip to his otherwise monotonous life, Benton
completed his legal studies, was admitted to the bar, and began to
practice as a frontier lawyer at Franklin. Very soon, however, he for
the first time entered the more congenial field of politics, and in 1811
served a single term in the lower house of the Tennessee legislature.
Even thus early he made his mark. He had a bill passed introducing the
circuit system into the state judiciary, a reform of much importance,
especially to the poorer class of litigants; and he also introduced, and
had enacted into a law, a bill providing that a slave should have the
same right to the full benefit of a jury trial as would a white man
suffering under the same accusation. This last measure is noteworthy as
foreshadowing the position which Benton afterwards took in national
politics, where he appeared as a slave-holder, it is true, but as one of
the most enlightened and least radical of his class. Its passage also
showed the tendency of Southern opinion at the time, which was
undoubtedly in the direction of bettering the condition of the blacks,
though the events of the next few years produced such a violent
revulsion of feeling concerning the negro race that this current of
public opinion was completely reversed. Benton, however, was made of
sturdy stuff, and as he grew older his views on the question did not
alter as did those of most of his colleagues.

Shortly after he left the legislature the War of 1812 broke out, and its
events impressed on Benton another of what soon became his cardinal
principles. The war was brought on by the South and West, the Democrats
all favoring it, while the Federalists, forming the then
anti-Democratic party, especially in the Northeast, opposed it; and
finally their more extreme members, at the famous Hartford Convention,
passed resolutions supposed to tend towards the dissolution of the
Union, and which brought upon the party the bitter condemnation of their
antagonists. Says Benton himself: "At the time of its first appearance
the right of secession was repulsed and repudiated by the Democracy
generally.... The leading language in respect to it south of the Potomac
was that no state had a right to withdraw from the Union, ... and that
any attempt to dissolve it, or to obstruct the action of constitutional
laws, was treason. If since that time political parties and sectional
localities have exchanged attitudes on this question, it cannot alter
the question of right." For, having once grasped an idea and made it his
own, Benton clung to it with unyielding tenacity, no matter whether it
was or was not abandoned by the majority of those with whom he had been
in the habit of acting.

Thus early Benton's political character became moulded into the shape
which it ever afterwards retained. He was a slave-holder, but as
advanced as a slave-holder could be; he remained to a certain extent a
Southerner, but his Southernism was of the type prevalent immediately
after the Revolution, and not of the kind that came to the fore prior to
the Rebellion. He was much more a Westerner in his feelings, and more
than all else he was emphatically a Union man.

Like every other hot spirit of the West--and the West was full of little
but hot spirits--Benton heartily favored the War of 1812. He served as a
colonel of volunteers under Jackson, but never saw actual fighting, and
his short term of soldiership was of no further account than to furnish
an excuse to Polk, thirty-five years later, for nominating him
commanding general in the time of the Mexican War,--an incident which,
as the nomination was rejected, may be regarded as merely ludicrous, the
gross impropriety of the act safely defying criticism. He was of genuine
use, however, in calling on and exciting the volunteers to come forward;
for he was a fluent speaker, of fine presence, and his pompous
self-sufficiency was rather admired than otherwise by the frontiersmen,
while his force, energy, and earnestness commanded their respect. He
also, when Jackson's reckless impetuosity got him into a snarl with the
feeble national administration, whose imbecile incapacity to carry on
the war became day by day more painfully evident, went to Washington,
and there finally extricated his chief by dint of threatening that, if
"justice" was not done him, Tennessee would, in future political
contests, be found ranged with the administration's foes. For Benton
already possessed political influence, and being, like most of his
class, anti-Federalist, or Democratic, in sentiment, was therefore of
the same party as the people at Washington, and was a man whose
representations would have some weight with them.

During his stay in Tennessee Benton's character was greatly influenced
by his being thrown into close contact with many of the extraordinary
men who then or afterwards made their mark in the strange and
picturesque annals of the Southwest. Jackson even thus early loomed up
as the greatest and arch-typical representative of his people and his
section. The religious bent of the time was shown in the life of the
grand, rugged old Methodist, Peter Cartwright, who, in the far-off
backwoods, was a preacher and practical exponent of "muscular
Christianity" half a century before the day when, under Bishop Selwyn
and Charles Kingsley, it became a cult among the most highly civilized
classes of England. There was David Crockett, rifleman and congressman,
doomed to a tragic and heroic death in that remarkable conflict of which
it was said at the time, that "Thermopylae had its messengers of death,
but the Alamo had none;" and there was Houston, who, after a singular
and romantic career, became the greatest of the statesmen and soldiers
of Texas. It was these men, and their like, who, under the shadow of
world-old forests and in the sunlight of the great, lonely plains,
wrought out the destinies of a nation and a continent, and who, with
their rude war-craft and state-craft, solved problems that, in the
importance of their results, dwarf the issues of all European struggles
since the day of Waterloo as completely as the Punic wars in their
outcome threw into the shade the consequences of the wars waged at the
same time between the different Greek monarchies.

Benton, in his mental training, came much nearer to the statesmen of the
sea-board, and was far better bred and better educated, than the rest of
the men around him. But he was, and was felt by them to be, thoroughly
one of their number, and the most able expounder of their views; and it
is just because he is so completely the type of a great and important
class, rather than because even of his undoubted and commanding ability
as a statesman, that his life and public services will always repay
study. His vanity and boastfulness were faults which he shared with
almost all his people; and, after all, if they overrated the
consequence of their own deeds, the deeds, nevertheless, did possess
great importance, and their fault was slight compared to that committed
by some of us at the present day, who have gone to the opposite extreme
and try to belittle the actions of our fathers. Benton was deeply imbued
with the masterful, overbearing spirit of the West,--a spirit whose
manifestations are not always agreeable, but the possession of which is
certainly a most healthy sign of the virile strength of a young
community. He thoroughly appreciated that he was helping to shape the
future of a country, whose wonderful development is the most important
feature in the history of the nineteenth century; the non-appreciation
of which fact is in itself sufficient utterly to disqualify any American
statesman from rising to the first rank.

It was not in Tennessee, however, that Benton rose to political
prominence, for shortly after the close of the war he crossed the
Mississippi and made his permanent home in the territory of Missouri.
Missouri was then our extreme western outpost, and its citizens
possessed the characteristic western traits to an even exaggerated
extent. The people were pushing, restless, and hardy; they were lawless
and violent to a degree. In spite of the culture and education of some
families, society, as a whole, was marked by florid unconventionality
and rawness. The general and widespread intemperance of the judges and
high officials of state was even more marked than their proclivities for
brawling. The lawyers, as usual, furnished the bulk of the politicians;
success at the bar depended less upon learning than upon "push" and
audacity. The fatal feuds between individuals and families were as
frequent and as bloody as among Highland clans a century before. The
following quotations are taken at random from a work on the Bench and
Bar of Missouri, by an ex-judge of its supreme court: "A man by the name
of Hiram K. Turk, and four sons, settled in 1839 near Warsaw, and a
personal difficulty occurred between them and a family of the name of
Jones, resulting in the death of one or two. The people began to take
sides with one or the other, and finally a general outbreak took place,
in which many were killed, resulting in a general reign of terror and of
violence beyond the power of the law to subdue." The social annals of
this pleasant town of Warsaw could not normally have been dull; in 1844,
for instance, they were enlivened by Judge Cherry and Senator Major
fighting to the death on one of its principal streets, the latter being
slain. The judges themselves were by no means bigoted in their support
of law and order. "In those days it was common for people to settle
their quarrels during court week.... Judge Allen took great delight in
these exhibitions, and would at any time adjourn his court to witness
one.... He (Allen) always traveled with a holster of large pistols in
front of his saddle, and a knife with a blade at least a foot long."
Hannibal Chollop was no mere creature of fancy; on the contrary, his
name was legion, and he flourished rankly in every town throughout the
Mississippi valley. But, after all, this ruffianism was really not a
whit worse in its effects on the national character than was the case
with certain of the "universal peace" and "non-resistance" developments
in the Northeastern States; in fact, it was more healthy. A class of
professional non-combatants is as hurtful to the real, healthy growth of
a nation as is a class of fire-eaters; for a weakness or folly is
nationally as bad as a vice, or worse; and, in the long run, a Quaker
may be quite as undesirable a citizen as is a duelist. No man who is not
willing to bear arms and to fight for his rights can give a good reason
why he should be entitled to the privilege of living in a free
community. The decline of the militant spirit in the Northeast during
the first half of this century was much to be regretted. To it is due,
more than to any other cause, the undoubted average individual
inferiority of the Northern compared to the Southern troops; at any
rate, at the beginning of the great war of the Rebellion. The
Southerners, by their whole mode of living, their habits, and their love
of out-door sports, kept up their warlike spirit; while in the North the
so-called upper classes developed along the lines of a wealthy and timid
bourgeoisie type, measuring everything by a mercantile standard (a
peculiarly debasing one if taken purely by itself), and submitting to be
ruled in local affairs by low foreign mobs, and in national matters by
their arrogant Southern kinsmen. The militant spirit of these last
certainly stood them in good stead in the Civil War. The world has never
seen better soldiers than those who followed Lee; and their leader will
undoubtedly rank as without any exception the very greatest of all the
great captains that the English-speaking peoples have brought forth--and
this, although the last and chief of his antagonists may himself claim
to stand as the full equal of Marlborough and Wellington.

The other Western States still kept touch on the old colonial
communities of the sea-coast, having a second or alternative outlet
through Louisiana, newly acquired by the United States, it is true, but
which was nevertheless an old settled land. Missouri, however, had lost
all connection with the sea-coast, and though, through her great river
towns, swarming with raftsmen and flat-boatmen, she drove her main and
most thriving trade with the other Mississippi cities, yet her restless
and adventure-loving citizens were already seeking other outlets for
their activity, and were establishing trade relations with the Mexicans;
being thus the earliest among our people to come into active contact
with the Hispano-Indian race from whom we afterwards wrested so large a
part of their inheritance. Missouri was thrust out beyond the
Mississippi into the vast plains-country of the Far West, and except on
the river-front was completely isolated, being flanked on every side by
great stretches of level wilderness, inhabited by roaming tribes of
warlike Indians. Thus for the first time the borderers began to number
in their ranks plainsmen as well as backwoodsmen. In such a community
there were sure to be numbers of men anxious to take part in any
enterprise that united the chance of great pecuniary gain with the
certainty of even greater personal risk, and both these conditions were
fulfilled in the trading expeditions pushed out from Missouri across the
trackless wastes lying between it and the fringe of Mexican settlements
on the Rio del Norte. The route followed by these caravans, which
brought back furs and precious metals, soon became famous under the name
of the Santa Fe trail; and the story of the perils, hardships, and gains
of the adventurous traders who followed it would make one of the most
striking chapters of American history.

Among such people Benton's views and habits of thought became more
markedly Western and ultra-American than ever, especially in regard to
our encroachments upon the territory of neighboring powers. The general
feeling in the West upon this last subject afterwards crystallized into
what became known as the "Manifest Destiny" idea, which, reduced to its
simplest terms, was: that it was our manifest destiny to swallow up the
land of all adjoining nations who were too weak to withstand us; a
theory that forthwith obtained immense popularity among all statesmen of
easy international morality. It cannot be too often repeated that no one
can understand even the domestic, and more especially the foreign,
policy of Benton and his school without first understanding the
surroundings amidst which they had been brought up and the people whose
chosen representatives they were. Recent historians, for instance,
always speak as if our grasping after territory in the Southwest was
due solely to the desire of the Southerners to acquire lands out of
which to carve new slave-holding states, and as if it was merely a move
in the interests of the slave-power. This is true enough so far as the
motives of Calhoun, Tyler, and the other public leaders of the Gulf and
southern sea-board states were concerned. But the hearty Western support
given to the movement was due to entirely different causes, the chief
among them being the fact that the Westerners honestly believed
themselves to be indeed created the heirs of the earth, or at least of
so much of it as was known by the name of North America, and were
prepared to struggle stoutly for the immediate possession of their
heritage.

One of Benton's earliest public utterances was in regard to a matter
which precisely illustrates this feeling. It was while Missouri was
still a territory, and when Benton, then a prominent member of the St.
Louis bar, had by his force, capacity, and power as a public speaker
already become well known among his future constituents. The treaty with
Spain, by which we secured Florida, was then before the Senate, which
body had to consider it several times, owing to the dull irresolution
and sloth of the Spanish government in ratifying it. The bounds it gave
us were far too narrow to suit the more fiery Western spirits, and these
cheered Benton to the echo when he attacked it in public with fierce
vehemence. "The magnificent valley of the Mississippi is ours, with all
its fountains, springs, and floods; and woe to the statesman who shall
undertake to surrender one drop of its water, one inch of its soil to
any foreign power." So he said, his words ringing with the boastful
confidence so well liked by the masterful men of the West, strong in
their youth, and proudly conscious of their strength. The treaty was
ratified in the Senate, nevertheless, all the old Southern States
favoring it, and the only votes at any stage recorded against it being
of four Western senators, coming respectively from Ohio, Kentucky,
Tennessee, and Louisiana. So that in 1818, at any rate, the desire for
territorial aggrandizement at the expense of Maine or Mexico was common
to the West as a whole, both to the free and the slave states, and was
not exclusively favored by the Southerners. The only effect of Benton's
speech was to give rise to the idea that he was hostile to the Southern
and Democratic administration at Washington, and against this feeling he
had to contend in the course of his successful candidacy for the United
States senatorship the following year, when Missouri was claiming
admittance to the Union.

It was in reference to this matter of admitting Missouri that the
slavery question for the first time made its appearance in national
politics, where it threw everything into confusion and for the moment
overshadowed all else; though it vanished almost as quickly as it had
appeared, and did not again come to the front for several years. The
Northerners, as a whole, desiring to "restrict" the growth of slavery
and the slave-power, demanded that Missouri, before being admitted as a
state, should abolish slavery within her boundaries. The South was
equally determined that she should be admitted as a slave state; and for
the first time the politicians of the country divided on geographical
rather than on party lines, though the division proved but temporary,
and was of but little interest except as foreshadowing what was to come
a score of years later. Even within the territory itself the same
contest was carried on with the violence bred by political conflicts in
frontier states, there being a very respectable "restriction" party,
which favored abolition. Benton was himself a slave-holder, and as the
question was in no way one between the East and the West, or between the
Union as a whole and any part of it, he naturally gave full swing to his
Southern feelings, and entered with tremendous vigor into the contest on
the anti-restriction side. So successful were his efforts, and so great
was the majority of the Missourians who sympathized with him, that the
restrictionists were completely routed and succeeded in electing but one
delegate to the constitutional convention. In Congress the matter was
finally settled by the passage of the famous Missouri Compromise bill, a
measure Southern in its origin, but approved at the time by many if not
most Northerners, and disapproved by not a few Southerners. Benton
heartily believed in it, announcing somewhat vaguely that he was
"equally opposed to slavery agitation and to slavery extension." By its
terms Missouri was admitted as a slave state, while slavery was
abolished in all the rest of the old province of Louisiana lying north
and west of it and north of the parallel of 36 deg. 30'. Owing to an
objectionable clause in its Constitution, the admission was not fully
completed until 1821, and then only through the instrumentality of Henry
Clay. But Benton took his seat immediately, and entered on his thirty
years' of service in the United States Senate. His appearance in
national politics was thus coincident with the appearance of the
question which, it is true, almost immediately sank out of sight for a
period of fifteen years, but which then reappeared to stay for good and
to become of progressively absorbing importance, until, combining
itself with the still greater question of national unity, it dwarfed all
other issues, cleft the West as well as the East asunder, and, as one of
its minor results, brought about the political downfall of Benton
himself and of his whole school in what were called the Border States.

Before entering the Senate, Benton did something which well illustrates
his peculiar uprightness, and the care which he took to keep his public
acts free from the least suspicion of improper influence. When he was at
the bar in St. Louis, real estate litigation was much the most important
branch of legal business. The condition of Missouri land-titles was very
mixed, since many of them were based upon the thousands of "concessions"
of land made by the old French and Spanish governments, which had been
ratified by Congress, but subject to certain conditions which the Creole
inhabitants, being ignorant and lawless, had generally failed to
fulfill. By an act of Congress these inchoate claims were to be brought
before the United States recorder of land titles; and the Missouri bar
were divided as to what action should be taken on them, the majority
insisting that they should be held void, while Benton headed the
opposite party, which was averse to forfeiting property on technical
grounds, and advocated the confirmation of every honest claim. Further
and important legislation was needed to provide for these claims.
Benton, being much the most influential member of the bar who had
advocated the confirmation of the claims, and being so able, honest, and
energetic, was the favorite counsel of the claimants, and had hundreds
of their titles under his professional charge. Of course in such cases
the compensation of the lawyer depended solely upon his success; and
success to Benton would have meant wealth. Nevertheless, and though his
action was greatly to his own pecuniary hurt, the first thing he did
when elected senator was to convene his clients, and tell them that
henceforth he could have nothing more to do, as their attorney, with the
prosecution of their claims, giving as his reason that their success
largely depended upon the action of Congress, of which he was now
himself a member, so that he was bound to consult, not any private
interest, but the good of the community as a whole. He even refused to
designate his successor in the causes, saying that he was determined not
only to be quite unbiased in acting upon the subject of these claims as
senator, but not to have, nor to be suspected of having, any personal
interest in the fate of any of them. Many a modern statesman might most
profitably copy his sensitiveness.




CHAPTER III.

EARLY YEARS IN THE SENATE.


When Benton took his seat in the United States Senate, Monroe, the last
president of the great house of Virginia, was about beginning his second
term. He was a courteous, high-bred gentleman, of no especial ability,
but well fitted to act as presidential figure-head during the
politically quiet years of that era of good feeling which lasted from
1816 till 1824. The Federalist party, after its conduct during the war,
had vanished into well-deserved obscurity, and though influences of
various sorts were working most powerfully to split the dominant and
all-embracing Democracy into factional fragments, these movements had
not yet come to a head.

The slavery question, it cannot be too often said, was as yet of little
or no political consequence. The violent excitement over the admission
of Missouri had subsided as quickly as it had arisen; and though the
Compromise bill was of immense importance in itself, and still more as
giving a hint of what was to come, it must be remembered that its effect
upon general politics, during the years immediately succeeding its
passage, was slight. Later on, the slavery question became of such
paramount consequence, and so completely identified with the movement
for the dissolution of the Union, that it seems impossible for even the
best of recent historians of American politics to understand that such
was not the case at this time. One writer of note even goes so far as to
state that "From the night of March 2, 1820, party history is made up
without interruption or break of the development of geographical [the
context shows this to mean Northern and Southern] parties." There is
very little ground for such a sweeping assertion until a considerable
time after the date indicated; indeed, it was more than ten years later
before any symptom of the development spoken of became at all marked.
Until then, parties divided even less on geographical lines than had
been the case earlier, during the last years of the existence of the
Federalists; and what little division there was had no reference to
slavery. Nor was it till nearly a score of years after the passage of
the Missouri Compromise bill that the separatist spirit began to
identify itself for good with the idea of the maintenance of slavery.
Previously to that there had been outbursts of separatist feeling in
different states, but always due to entirely different causes. Georgia
flared up in hot defiance of the federal government, when the latter
rubbed against her on the question of removing the Cherokees from within
her borders. But her having negro slaves did not affect her feelings in
the least, and her attitude was just such as any Western state with
Indians on its frontier is now apt to assume so far as it dares,--such
an attitude as Arizona, for example, would at this moment take in
reference to the Apaches, if she were able. Slavery was doubtless
remotely one of the irritating causes that combined to work South
Carolina up to a fever heat of insanity over the nullification
excitement. But in its immediate origin nullification arose from the
outcry against the protective tariff, and it is almost as unfair to
ascribe it in any way to the influence of slavery as it would be to
assign a similar cause for the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of
1798, or to say that the absence of slavery was the reason for the
abortively disloyal agitation in New England, which culminated in the
Hartford Convention. The separatist feeling is ingrained in the fibre of
our race, and though in itself a most dangerous failing and weakness, is
yet merely a perversion and distortion of the defiant and self-reliant
independence of spirit which is one of the chief of the race virtues;
and slavery was partly the cause and partly merely the occasion of the
abnormal growth of the separatist movement in the South. Nor was the
tariff question so intimately associated with that of slavery as has
been commonly asserted. This might be easily guessed from the fact that
the originator and chief advocate of a high tariff himself came from a
slave state, and drew many of his warmest supporters from among the
slave-holding sugar-planters. Except in the futile discussion over the
proposed Panama Congress it was not till Benton's third senatorial term
that slavery became of really great weight in politics.

One of the first subjects that attracted Benton's attention in the
Senate was the Oregon question, and on this he showed himself at once in
his true character as a Western man, proud alike of every part of his
country, and as desirous of seeing the West extended in a northerly as
in a southerly direction. Himself a slave-holder, from a slave state, he
was one of the earliest and most vehement advocates of the extension of
our free territory northwards along the Pacific coast. All the country
stretching north and south of the Oregon River was then held by the
United States in joint possession with Great Britain. But the whole
region was still entirely unsettled, and as a matter of fact our
British rivals were the only parties in actual occupation. The title to
the territory was doubtful, as must always be the case when it rests
upon the inaccurate maps of forgotten explorers, or upon the chance
landings of stray sailors and traders, especially if the land in dispute
is unoccupied and of vast but uncertain extent, of little present value,
and far distant from the powers claiming it. The real truth is that such
titles are of very little practical value, and are rightly enough
disregarded by any nations strong enough to do so. Benton's intense
Americanism, and his pride and confidence in his country and in her
unlimited capacity for growth of every sort, gifted him with the power
to look much farther into the future, as regarded the expansion of the
United States, than did his colleagues; and moreover caused him to
consider the question from a much more far-seeing and statesmanlike
stand-point. The land belonged to no man, and yet was sure to become
very valuable; our title to it was not very good, but was probably
better than that of any one else. Sooner or later it would be filled
with the overflow of our population, and would border on our dominion,
and on our dominion alone. It was therefore just, and moreover in the
highest degree desirable, that it should be made a part of that
dominion at the earliest possible moment. Benton introduced a bill to
enable the president to terminate the arrangement with Great Britain and
make a definite settlement in our favor; and though the Senate refused
to pass it, yet he had the satisfaction of bringing the subject
prominently before the people, and, moreover, of outlining the way in
which it would have to be and was finally settled. In one of his
speeches on the matter he said, using rather highflown language, (for he
was unfortunately deficient in sense of humor): "Upon the people of
Eastern Asia the establishment of a civilized power on the opposite
coast of America could not fail to produce great and wonderful benefits.
Science, liberal principles in government, and the true religion might
cast their lights across the intervening sea. The valley of the Columbia
might become the granary of China and Japan, and an outlet to their
imprisoned and exuberant population." Could he have foreseen how, in the
future, the Americans of the valley of the Columbia would greet the
"imprisoned and exuberant population" of China, he would probably have
been more doubtful as to the willingness of the latter empire to accept
our standard of the true religion and liberal principles of government.
In the course of the same speech he for the first time, and by what was
then considered a bold flight of imagination, suggested the possibility
of sending foreign ministers to the Oriental nations, to China, Japan,
and Persia, "and even to the Grand Turk."

Better success attended a bill he introduced to establish a trading-road
from Missouri through the Indian country to New Mexico, which, after
much debate, passed both houses and was signed by President Monroe. The
road thus marked out and established became, and remained for many
years, a great thoroughfare, and among the chief of the channels through
which our foreign commerce flowed. Until Benton secured the enactment of
this law, so important to the interests and development of the West, the
overland trade with Mexico had been carried on by individual effort and
at the cost of incalculable hazard, hardship, and risk of life. Mexico,
with its gold and silver mines, its strange physical features, its
population utterly foreign to us in race, religion, speech, and ways of
life, and especially because of the glamour of mystery which surrounded
it and partly shrouded it from sight, always dazzled and strongly
attracted the minds of the Southwesterners, occupying much the same
place in their thoughts that the Spanish Main did in the imagination of
England during the reign of Elizabeth. The young men of the Mississippi
valley looked upon an expedition with one of the bands of armed traders,
who wound their way across Indian-haunted wastes, through deep canyons
and over lofty mountain passes, to Santa Fe, Chihuahua, and Sonora, with
the same feelings of eager excitement and longing that were doubtless
felt by some of their forefathers more than two centuries previously in
regard to the cruises of Drake and Hawkins. The long wagon trains or
pack trains of the traders carried with them all kinds of goods, but
especially cotton, and brought back gold and silver bullion, bales of
furs and droves of mules; and, moreover, they brought back tales of
lawless adventure, of great gains and losses, of fights against Indians
and Mexicans, and of triumphs and privations, which still further
inflamed the minds of the Western men. Where they had already gone as
traders, who could on occasion fight, they all hoped on some future day
to go as warriors, who would acquire gain by their conquests. These
hopes were openly expressed, and with very little more idea of there
being any right or wrong in the matter than so many Norse Vikings might
have felt. The Southwesterners are credited with altogether too complex
motives when it is supposed that they were actuated in regard to the
conquest of northern Mexico by a desire to provide for additional slave
states to offset the growth of the North; their emotions in regard to
their neighbor's land were in the main perfectly simple and purely
piratical. That the Northeast did not share in the greed for new
territory felt by the other sections of the country was due partly to
the decline in its militant spirit, (a decline on many accounts
sincerely to be regretted,) and partly to its geographical situation,
since it adjoined Canada, an unattractive and already well-settled
country, jealously guarded by the might of Great Britain.

Another question, on which Benton showed himself to be thoroughly a
representative of Western sentiment, was the removal of the Indian
tribes. Here he took a most active and prominent part in reporting and
favoring the bills, and in advocating the treaties, by which the Indian
tribes of the South and West were forced or induced, (for the latter
word was very frequently used as a euphemistic synonym of the former,)
to abandon great tracts of territory to the whites and to move farther
away from the boundaries of their ever-encroaching civilization. Nor was
his action wholly limited to the Senate, for it was at his instance that
General Clark, at St. Louis, concluded the treaties with the Kansas and
Osage tribes, by which the latter surrendered to the United States all
the vast territory which they nominally owned west of Missouri and
Arkansas, except small reserves for themselves. Benton, as was to be
expected, took the frontier view of the Indian question, which, by the
way, though often wrong, is much more apt to be right than is the
so-called humanitarian or Eastern view. But, so far as was compatible
with having the Indians removed, he always endeavored to have them
kindly and humanely treated. There was, of course, much injustice and
wrong inevitably attendant upon the Indian policy advocated by him, and
by the rest of the Southern and Western statesmen; but it is difficult
to see what other course could have been pursued with most of the
tribes. In the Western States there were then sixty millions of acres of
the best land, owned in great tracts by barbarous or half-barbarous
Indians, who were always troublesome and often dangerous neighbors, and
who did not come in any way under the laws of the states in which they
lived. The states thus encumbered would evidently never have been
satisfied until all their soil was under their own jurisdiction and open
to settlement. The Cherokees had advanced far on the road toward
civilization, and it was undoubtedly a cruel grief and wrong to take
them away from their homes; but the only alternative would have been to
deprive them of much of their land, and to provide for their gradually
becoming citizens of the states in which they were. For a movement of
this sort the times were not then, and, unfortunately, are not yet ripe.

Much maudlin nonsense has been written about the governmental treatment
of the Indians, especially as regards taking their land. For the simple
truth is that they had no possible title to most of the lands we took,
not even that of occupancy, and at the most were in possession merely by
virtue of having butchered the previous inhabitants. For many of its
actions towards them the government does indeed deserve the severest
criticism; but it has erred quite as often on the side of too much
leniency as on the side of too much severity. From the very nature of
things, it was wholly impossible that there should not be much mutual
wrong-doing and injury in the intercourse between the Indians and
ourselves. It was equally out of the question to let them remain as they
were, and to bring the bulk of their number up to our standard of
civilization with sufficient speed to enable them to accommodate
themselves to the changed condition of their surroundings. The policy
towards them advocated by Benton, which was much the same as, although
more humane than, that followed by most other Western men who have had
practically to face the problem, worked harshly in many instances, and
was the cause of a certain amount of temporary suffering. But it was
infinitely better for the nation, as a whole, and, in the end, was
really more just and merciful, than it would have been to attempt
following out any of the visionary schemes which the more impracticable
Indian enthusiasts are fond of recommending.

It was during Monroe's last term that Henry Clay brought in the first
protective tariff bill, as distinguished from tariff bills to raise
revenue with protection as an incident only. It was passed by a
curiously mixed vote, which hardly indicated any one's future position
on the tariff excepting that of Clay himself; Massachusetts, under the
lead of Webster, joining hands with the Southern sea-coast states to
oppose it, while Tennessee and New York split, and Missouri and
Kentucky, together with most of the North, favored it. Benton voted for
it, but on the great question of internal improvements he stood out
clearly for the views that he ever afterwards held. This was first
brought up by the veto, on constitutional grounds, of the Cumberland
Road bill, which had previously passed both houses with singular
unanimity, Benton's vote being one of the very few recorded against it.
In regard to all such matters Benton was strongly in favor of a strict
construction of the Constitution and of guarding the rights of the
states, in spite of his devoted attachment to the Union. While voting
against this bill, and denying the power or the right of the federal
government to take charge of improvements which would benefit one state
only, Benton was nevertheless careful to reserve to himself the right to
support measures for improving national rivers or harbors yielding
revenues. The trouble is, that however much the two classes of cases may
differ in point of expediency, they overlap so completely that it is
wholly impossible to draw a hard and fast line between them, and the
question of constitutionality, if waived in the one instance, can
scarcely with propriety be raised in the other.

With the close of Monroe's second term the "era of good feeling" came to
an end, and the great Democratic-Republican party split up into several
fragments, which gradually crystallized round two centres. But in 1824
this process was still incomplete, and the presidential election of that
year was a simple scramble between four different candidates,--Jackson,
Adams, Clay, and Crawford. Jackson had the greatest number of votes, but
as no one had a majority, the election was thrown into the House of
Representatives, where the Clay men, inasmuch as their candidate was out
of the race, went over to Adams and elected him. Benton at the time, and
afterwards in his "Thirty Years' View," inveighed against this choice as
being a violation of what he called the "principle demos krateo"--a
barbarous phrase for which he had a great fondness, and which he used
and misused on every possible occasion, whether in speaking or writing.
He insisted that, as Jackson had secured the majority of the electoral
vote, it was the duty of the House of Representatives to ratify promptly
this "choice of the people." The Constitution expressly provided that
this need not be done. So Benton, who on questions of state rights and
internal improvements was so pronounced a stickler for a strict
construction of the Constitution, here coolly assumed the absurd
position that the Constitution was wrong on this particular point, and
should be disregarded, on the ground that there was a struggle "between
the theory of the Constitution and the democratic principle." His
proposition was ridiculous. The "democratic principle" had nothing more
to do with the matter than had the law of gravitation. Either the
Constitution was or it was not to be accepted as a serious document,
that meant something; in the former case the election of Adams was
proper in every aspect, in the latter it was unnecessary to have held
any election at all.

At this period every one was floundering about in efforts to establish
political relations, Benton not less than others; for he had begun the
canvass as a supporter of Clay, and had then gone over to Crawford. But
at the end he had become a Jacksonian Democrat, and during the rest of
his political career he figured as the most prominent representative of
the Jacksonian Democracy in the Senate. Van Buren himself, afterwards
Jackson's prime favorite and political heir, was a Crawford man during
this campaign.

Adams, after his election, which was owing to Clay's support, gave Clay
the position of secretary of state in his cabinet. The affair
unquestionably had an unfortunate look, and the Jacksonians, especially
Jackson, at once raised a great hue and cry that there had been a
corrupt bargain. Benton, much to his credit, refused to join in the
outcry, stating that he had good and sufficient reasons--which he
gave--to be sure of its falsity; a position which brought him into
temporary disfavor with many of his party associates, and which a man
who had Benton's ambition and bitter partisanship, without having his
sturdy pluck, would have hesitated to take. The assault was directed
with especial bitterness against Clay, whom Jackson ever afterwards
included in the very large list of individuals whom he hated with the
most rancorous and unreasoning virulence. Randolph of Roanoke, the
privileged eccentric of the Senate, in one of those long harangues in
which he touched upon everybody and everything, except possibly the
point at issue, made a rabid onslaught upon the Clay-Adams coalition as
an alliance of "the blackleg and the Puritan." Clay, who was susceptible
enough to the charge of loose living, but who was a man of rigid honor
and rather fond than otherwise of fighting, promptly challenged him, and
a harmless interchange of shots took place. Benton was on the field as
the friend of both parties, and his account of the affair is very
amusing in its description of the solemn, hair-splitting punctilio with
which it is evident that both Randolph and many of his contemporaries
regarded points of dueling honor, which to us seem either absurd,
trivial, or wholly incomprehensible.

Two tolerably well-defined parties now emerged from the chaos of
contending politicians; one was the party of the administration, whose
members called themselves National Republicans, and later on Whigs; the
other was the Jacksonian Democracy. Adams's inaugural address and first
message outlined the Whig policy as favoring a protective tariff,
internal improvements, and a free construction of the Constitution
generally. The Jacksonians accordingly took the opposite side on all
these points, partly from principle and partly from perversity. In the
Senate they assailed with turgid eloquence every administration measure,
whether it was good or bad, very much of their opposition being purely
factious in character. There has never been a time when there was more
rabid, objectless, and unscrupulous display of partisanship. Benton,
little to his credit, was a leader in these purposeless conflicts. The
most furious of them took place over the proposed Panama mission. This
was a scheme that originated in the fertile brain of Henry Clay, whose
Americanism was of a type quite as pronounced as Benton's, and who was
always inclined to drag us into a position of hostility to European
powers. The Spanish-American States, having succeeded in winning their
independence from Spain, were desirous of establishing some principle of
concert in action among the American republics as a whole, and for this
purpose proposed to hold an international congress at Panama. Clay's
fondness for a spirited and spectacular foreign policy made him grasp
eagerly at the chance of transforming the United States into the head of
an American league of free republics, which would be a kind of
cis-Atlantic offset to the Holy Alliance of European despotisms. Adams
took up the idea, nominated ministers to the Panama Congress, and gave
his reasons for his course in a special message to the Senate. The
administration men drew the most rosy and impossible pictures of the
incalculable benefits which would be derived from the proposed congress;
and the Jacksonians attacked it with an exaggerated denunciation that
was even less justified by the facts.

Adams's message was properly open to attack on one or two points;
notably in reference to its proposals that we should endeavor to get the
Spanish-American States to introduce religious tolerance within their
borders. It was certainly an unhappy suggestion that we should endeavor
to remove the mote of religious intolerance from our brother's eye while
indignantly resenting the least allusion to the beam of slavery in our
own. It was on this very point of slavery that the real opposition
hinged. The Spanish States had emancipated their comparatively small
negro populations, and, as is usually the case with Latin nations, did
not have a very strong caste feeling against the blacks, some of whom
accordingly had risen to high civic and military rank; and they also
proposed to admit to their congress the negro republic of Hayti. Certain
of the slave-holders of the South fiercely objected to any such
association; and on this occasion Benton for once led and voiced the
ultra-Southern feeling on the subject, announcing in his speech that
diplomatic intercourse with Hayti should not even be discussed in the
senate chamber, and that we could have no association with republics who
had "black generals in their armies and mulatto senators in their
congresses." But this feeling on the part of the slave-holders against
the measure was largely, although not wholly, spurious; and really had
less to do with the attitude of the Jacksonian Democrats than had a mere
factious opposition to Adams and Clay. This was shown by the vote on the
confirmation of the ministers, when the senators divided on party and
not on sectional lines. The nominations were confirmed, but not till
after such a length of time that the ministers were unable to reach
Panama until after the congress had adjourned.

The Oregon question again came up during Adams's term, the
administration favoring the renewal of the joint occupation convention,
by which we held the country in common with Great Britain. There was
not much public feeling in the matter; in the East there was none
whatever. But Benton, when he opposed the renewal, and claimed the whole
territory as ours, gave expression to the desires of all the Westerners
who thought over the subject at all. He was followed by only half a
dozen senators, all but one from the West, and from both sides of the
Ohio--Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi; the Northwest and
Southwest as usual acting together.

The vote on the protective tariff law of 1828 furnished another
illustration of the solidarity of the West. New England had abandoned
her free trade position since 1824, and the North went strongly for the
new tariff; the Southern sea-coast states, except Louisiana, opposed it
bitterly; and the bill was carried by the support of the Western States,
both the free and the slave. This tariff bill was the first of the
immediate irritating causes which induced South Carolina to go into the
nullification movement. Benton's attitude on the measure was that of a
good many other men who, in their public capacities, are obliged to
appear as protectionists, but who lack his frankness in stating their
reasons. He utterly disbelieved in and was opposed to the principle of
the bill, but as it had bid for and secured the interest of Missouri by
a heavy duty on lead, he felt himself forced to support it; and so he
announced his position. He simply went with his state, precisely as did
Webster, the latter, in following Massachusetts' change of front and
supporting the tariff of 1828, turning a full and complete somersault.
Neither the one nor the other was to blame. Free traders are apt to look
at the tariff from a sentimental stand-point; but it is in reality
purely a business matter, and should be decided solely on grounds of
expediency. Political economists have pretty generally agreed that
protection is vicious in theory and harmful in practice; but if the
majority of the people in interest wish it, and it affects only
themselves, there is no earthly reason why they should not be allowed to
try the experiment to their hearts' content. The trouble is that it
rarely does affect only themselves; and in 1828 the evil was peculiarly
aggravated on account of the unequal way in which the proposed law would
affect different sections. It purported to benefit the rest of the
country, but it undoubtedly worked real injury to the planter states,
and there is small ground for wonder that the irritation over it in the
region so affected should have been intense.

During Adams's term Benton began his fight for disposing of the public
lands to actual settlers at a small cost. It was a move of enormous
importance to the whole West; and Benton's long and sturdy contest for
it, and for the right of preemption, entitle him to the greatest credit.
He never gave up the struggle, although repulsed again and again, and at
the best only partially successful; for he had to encounter much
opposition, especially from the short-sighted selfishness of many of the
Northeasterners, who wished to consider the public lands purely as
sources of revenue. He utterly opposed the then existing system of
selling land to the highest bidder--a most hurtful practice; and
objected to the establishment of an arbitrary minimum price, which
practically kept all land below a certain value out of the market
altogether. He succeeded in establishing the preemption system, and had
the system of renting public mines, etc., abolished; and he struggled
for the principle of giving land outright to settlers in certain cases.
As a whole, his theory of a liberal system of land distribution was
undoubtedly the correct one, and he deserves the greatest credit for
having pushed it as he did.




CHAPTER IV.

THE ELECTION OF JACKSON, AND THE SPOILS SYSTEM.


In the presidential election of 1828 Jackson and Adams were pitted
against each other as the only candidates before the people, and Jackson
won an overwhelming victory. The followers of the two were fast
developing respectively into Democrats and Whigs, and the parties were
hardening and taking shape, while the dividing lines were being drawn
more clearly and distinctly. But the contest was largely a personal one,
and Jackson's success was due to his own immense popularity more than to
any party principles which he was supposed to represent. Almost the
entire strength of Adams was in the Northeast; but it is absolutely
wrong to assume, because of this fact, that the election even remotely
foreshadowed the way in which party lines would be drawn in the coming
sectional antagonism over slavery. Adams led Jackson in the two slave
states of Maryland and Delaware; and in the free states outside of New
England Jackson had an even greater lead over Adams. East of the
Alleghanies it may here and there have been taken as in some sort a
triumph of the South over the North; but its sectional significance, as
far as it had any, really came from its being a victory of the West over
the East. Infinitely more important than this was the fact that it
represented the overwhelmingly successful upheaval of the most extreme
democratic elements in the community.

Until 1828 all the presidents, and indeed almost all the men who took
the lead in public life, alike in national and in state affairs, had
been drawn from what in Europe would have been called the "upper
classes." They were mainly college-bred men of high social standing, as
well educated as any in the community, usually rich or at least
well-to-do. Their subordinates in office were of much the same material.
It was believed, and the belief was acted upon, that public life needed
an apprenticeship of training and experience. Many of our public men had
been able; almost all had been honorable and upright. The change of
parties in 1800, when the Jeffersonian Democracy came in, altered the
policy of the government, but not the character of the officials. In
that movement, though Jefferson had behind him the mass of the people as
the rank and file of his party, yet all his captains were still drawn
from among the men in the same social position as himself. The
Revolutionary War had been fought under the leadership of the colonial
gentry; and for years after it was over the people, as a whole, felt
that their interests could be safely intrusted to and were identical
with those of the descendants of their revolutionary leaders. The
classes in which were to be found almost all the learning, the talent,
the business activity, and the inherited wealth and refinement of the
country, had also hitherto contributed much to the body of its rulers.

The Jacksonian Democracy stood for the revolt against these rulers; its
leaders, as well as their followers, all came from the mass of the
people. The majority of the voters supported Jackson because they felt
he was one of themselves, and because they understood that his election
would mean the complete overthrow of the classes in power and their
retirement from the control of the government. There was nothing to be
said against the rulers of the day; they had served the country and all
its citizens well, and they were dismissed, not because the voters could
truthfully allege any wrong-doing whatsoever against them, but solely
because, in their purely private and personal feelings and habits of
life, they were supposed to differ from the mass of the people. This
was such an outrageously absurd feeling that the very men who were
actuated by it, or who, like Benton, shaped and guided it, were ashamed
to confess the true reason of their actions, and tried to cloak it
behind an outcry, as vague and senseless as it was clamorous, against
"aristocratic corruption" and other shadowy and spectral evils. Benton
even talked loosely of "retrieving the country from the deplorable
condition in which the enlightened classes had sunk it," although the
country was perfectly prosperous and in its usual state of quiet,
healthy growth. On the other hand, the opponents of Jackson indulged in
talk almost as wild, and fears even more extravagant than his
supporters' hopes; and the root of much of their opposition lay in a
concealed but still existent caste antagonism to a man of Jackson's
birth and bringing up. In fact, neither side, in spite of all their loud
talk of American Republicanism, had yet mastered enough of its true
spirit to be able to see that so long as public officers did their whole
duty to all classes alike, it was not in the least the affair of their
constituents whether they chose to spend their hours of social
relaxation in their shirt-sleeves or in dress coats.

The change was a great one; it was not a change of the policy under
which the government was managed, as in Jefferson's triumph, but of the
men who controlled it. The two great democratic victories had little in
common; almost as little as had the two great leaders under whose
auspices they were respectively won,--and few men were ever more unlike
than the scholarly, timid, and shifty doctrinaire, who supplanted the
elder Adams, and the ignorant, headstrong, and straightforward soldier,
who was victor over the younger. That the change was the deliberate
choice of the great mass of the people, and that it was one for the
worse, was then, and has been ever since, the opinion of most thinking
men; certainly the public service then took its first and greatest step
in that downward career of progressive debasement and deterioration
which has only been checked in our own days. But those who would,
off-hand, decry the democratic principle on this account would do well
to look at the nearly contemporaneous career of the pet heroes of a
trans-Atlantic aristocracy before passing judgment. A very charming
English historian of our day[1] has compared Wellington with Washington;
it would have been far juster to have compared him with Andrew Jackson.
Both were men of strong, narrow minds and bitter prejudices, with few
statesmanlike qualities, who, for brilliant military services, were
raised to the highest civil positions in the gift of the state. The
feeling among the aristocratic classes of Great Britain in favor of the
Iron Duke was nearly as strong and quite as unreasonable as was the
homage paid by their homelier kinsfolk across the Atlantic to Old
Hickory. Wellington's military successes were far greater, for he had
more chances; but no single feat of his surpassed the remarkable victory
won against his ablest lieutenant and choicest troops by a much smaller
number of backwoods riflemen under Andrew Jackson. As a statesman
Wellington may have done less harm than Jackson, for he had less
influence; but he has no such great mark to his credit as the old
Tennessean's attitude toward the Nullifiers. If Jackson's election is a
proof that the majority is not always right, Wellington's elevation may
be taken as showing that the minority, or a fraction thereof, is in its
turn quite as likely to be wrong.

[1: Justin McCarthy.]

This caste antagonism was the distinguishing feature in the election of
1828, and the partially sectional character of the contest was due to
the different degree of development the caste spirit had reached in
different portions of the Union. In New England wealth was quite evenly
distributed, and education and intelligence were nearly universal; so
there the antagonism was slight, the bulk of the New England vote being
given, as usually before and since, in favor of the right candidate. In
the Middle States, on the contrary, the antagonism was very strong. In
the South it was of but little political account as between the whites
themselves, they all being knit together by the barbarous bond of a
common lordship of race; and here the feeling for Jackson was largely
derived from the close kinship still felt for the West. In the West
itself, where Jackson's great strength lay, the people were still too
much on the same plane of thought as well as of material prosperity, and
the wealthy and cultivated classes were of too limited extent to admit
of much caste feeling against the latter; and, accordingly, instead of
hostility to them, the Western caste spirit took the form of hostility
to their far more numerous representatives who had hitherto formed the
bulk of the political rulers of the East.

New England was not only the most advanced portion of the Union, as
regards intelligence, culture, and general prosperity, but was also most
disagreeably aware of the fact, and was possessed with a self-conscious
virtue that was peculiarly irritating to the Westerners, who knew that
they were looked down upon, and savagely resented it on every occasion;
and, besides, New England was apt to meddle in affairs that more nearly
concerned other localities. Several of Benton's speeches, at this time,
show this irritation against the Northeast, and also incidentally bring
out the solidarity of interest felt throughout the West. In a long and
able speech, favoring the repeal of the iniquitous "salt tax," or high
duty on imported salt (a great hobby of his, in which, after many
efforts, he was finally successful), he brought out the latter point
very strongly, besides complaining of the disproportionate lightness of
the burden imposed upon the Northeast by the high tariff, of which he
announced himself to be but a moderate adherent. In common with all
other Western statesmen, he resented keenly the suspicion with which the
Northeast was then only too apt to regard the West, quoting in one of
his speeches with angry resentment a prevalent New England sneer at "the
savages beyond the Alleghanies." At the time we are speaking of it must
be remembered that many even of the most advanced Easterners were
utterly incapable of appreciating the almost limitless capacity of their
country for growth and expansion, being in this respect far behind their
Western brethren; indeed, many regarded the acquisition of any new
territory in the West with alarm and regret, as tending to make the
Union of such unwieldy size that it would break of its own weight.

Benton was the leading opponent of a proposal, introduced by Senator
Foot of Connecticut, to inquire into the expediency of limiting the
sales of public lands to such lands as were then in the market. The
limitation would have been most injurious to the entire West, which was
thus menaced by the action of a New Englander, while Benton appeared as
the champion of the whole section, North and South alike, in the speech
wherein he strenuously and successfully opposed the adoption of the
resolution, and at the same time bitterly attacked the quarter of the
country from which it came, as having from the earliest years opposed
everything that might advance the interests of the people beyond the
Alleghanies. Webster came to the assistance of the mover of the measure
in a speech wherein, among other things, he claimed for the North the
merit of the passage of the Ordinance of 1787, in relation to the
Northwest Territory, and especially of the anti-slavery clause therein
contained. But Benton here caught him tripping, and in a very good
speech showed that he was completely mistaken in his facts. The debate
now, however, completely left the point at issue, taking a bitterly
sectional turn, and giving rise to the famous controversy between
Hayne, of South Carolina, who for the first time on the floor of the
Senate announced the doctrine of nullification, and Webster, who, in
response to his antagonist, voiced the feeling of the Union men of the
North in that wonderful and magnificent speech known ever since under
the name of the "Reply to Hayne," and the calling forth of which will
henceforward be Hayne's sole title to fame. Benton, though himself a
strong Union and anti-nullification man, was still too excited over the
subject-matter of the bill and the original discussion over it to
understand that the debate had ranged off upon matters of infinitely
greater importance, and entirely failed to realize that he had listened
to the greatest piece of oratory of the century. On the contrary,
encouraged by his success earlier in the debate, he actually attempted a
kind of reply to Webster, attacking him with invective and sarcasm as an
alarmist, and taunting him with the memory of the Hartford Convention,
which had been held by members of the Federalist party, to which Webster
himself had once belonged. Benton afterwards became convinced that
Webster's views were by no means those of a mere alarmist, and frankly
stated that he had been wrong in his position; but at the time, heated
by his original grievance, as a Western man, against New England, he
failed entirely to understand the true drift of Hayne's speech. Much of
New England's policy to the West was certainly excessively
narrow-minded.

Jackson's administration derives a most unenviable notoriety as being
the one under which the "spoils system" became, for the first time,
grafted on the civil service of the nation; appointments and removals in
the public service being made dependent upon political qualifications,
and not, as hitherto, upon merit or capacity. Benton, to his honor,
always stoutly opposed this system. It is unfair to assert that Jackson
was the originator of this method of appointment; but he was certainly
its foster-father, and more than any one else is responsible for its
introduction into the affairs of the national government. Despite all
the Eastern sneers at the "savages" of the West, it was from Eastern men
that this most effective method of debauching political life came. The
Jacksonian Democrats of the West, when they introduced it into the
working of the federal government, simply copied the system which they
found already firmly established by their Eastern allies in New York and
Pennsylvania. For many years the course of politics throughout the
country had been preparing and foreshadowing the advent of the "spoils
system." The greatest single stroke in its favor had been done at the
instigation of Crawford, when that scheming politician was seeking the
presidency, and, to further his ends, he procured the passage by
Congress of a law limiting the term of service of all public officials
to four years, thus turning out of office all the fifty thousand public
servants during each presidential term. This law has never been
repealed, every low politician being vitally interested in keeping it as
it is, and accordingly it is to be found on the statute-books at the
present day; and though it has the company of some other very bad
measures, it still remains very much the worst of all, as regards both
the evil it has done and that which it is still doing. This four years'
limitation law was passed without comment or protest, every one voting
in its favor, its probable working not being comprehended in the least.
Says Benton, who, with all his colleagues, voted for it: "The object of
the law was to pass the disbursing officers every four years under the
supervision of the appointing power, for the inspection of their
accounts, in order that defaulters might be detected and dropped, while
the faithful should be ascertained and continued.... It was found to
operate contrary to its intent, and to have become the facile means of
getting rid of faithful disbursing officers, instead of retaining
them." New York has always had a low political standard, one or the
other of its great party and factional organizations, and often both or
all of them, being at all times most unlovely bodies of excessively
unwholesome moral tone. Aaron Burr introduced the "spoils system" into
her state affairs, and his methods were followed and improved upon by
Marcy, Wright, Van Buren, and all the "Albany Regency." In 1829 these
men found themselves an important constituent portion of the winning
party, and immediately, by the help of the only too willing Jackson,
proceeded to apply their system to affairs at Washington. It was about
this time that, in the course of a debate in the Senate, Marcy gave
utterance to the now notorious maxim, "To the victors belong the
spoils."

Under Adams the non-partisan character of the public service had been
guarded with a scrupulous care that could almost be called exaggerated.
Indeed, Adams certainly went altogether too far in his non-partisanship
when it came to appointing cabinet and other high officers, his views on
such points being not only fantastic, but absolutely wrong. The
colorless character of his administration was largely due to his having,
in his anxiety to avoid blind and unreasoning adherence to party,
committed the only less serious fault of paying too little heed to
party; for a healthy party spirit is prerequisite to the performance of
effective work in American political life. Adams was not elected purely
for himself, but also on account of the men and the principles that he
was supposed to represent; and when he partly surrounded himself with
men of opposite principles, he just so far, though from the best of
motives, betrayed his supporters, and rightly forfeited much of their
confidence. But, under him, every public servant felt that, so long as
he faithfully served the state, his position was secure, no matter what
his political opinions might be.

With the incoming of the Jacksonians all this changed, and terribly for
the worse. A perfect reign of terror ensued among the office-holders. In
the first month of the new administration more removals took place than
during all the previous administrations put together. Appointments were
made with little or no attention to fitness, or even honesty, but solely
because of personal or political services. Removals were not made in
accordance with any known rule at all; the most frivolous pretexts were
sufficient, if advanced by useful politicians who needed places already
held by capable incumbents. Spying and tale-bearing became prominent
features of official life, the meaner office-holders trying to save
their own heads by denouncing others. The very best men were
unceremoniously and causelessly dismissed; gray-headed clerks, who had
been appointed by the earlier presidents,--by Washington, the elder
Adams, and Jefferson,--being turned off at an hour's notice, although a
quarter of a century's faithful work in the public service had unfitted
them to earn their living elsewhere. Indeed, it was upon the best and
most efficient men that the blow fell heaviest; the spies, tale-bearers,
and tricksters often retained their positions. In 1829 the public
service was, as it always had been, administered purely in the interest
of the people; and the man who was styled the especial champion of the
people dealt that service the heaviest blow it has ever received.

Benton himself always took a sound stand on the civil service question,
although his partisanship led him at times to defend Jackson's course
when he must have known well that it was indefensible. He viewed with
the greatest alarm and hostility the growth of the "spoils system," and
early introduced, as chairman of a special committee, a bill to repeal
the harmful four years' limitation act. In discussing this proposed bill
afterwards, he wrote, in words that apply as much at this time as they
did then: "The expiration of the four years' term came to be considered
as the termination and vacation of all the offices on which it fell,
and the creation of vacancies to be filled at the option of the
president. The bill to remedy this defect gave legal effect to the
original intention of the law by confining the vacation of office to
actual defaulters. The power of the president to dismiss civil officers
was not attempted to be curtailed, but the restraints of responsibility
were placed upon its exercise by requiring the cause of dismission to be
communicated to Congress in each case. The section of the bill to that
effect was in these words: _That in all nominations made by the
president to the Senate, to fill vacancies occasioned by an exercise of
the president's power to remove from office, the fact of the removal
shall be stated to the Senate at the same time that the nomination is
made, with a statement of the reasons for which such officer may have
been removed._ This was intended to operate as a restraint upon removals
without cause."

In the "Thirty Years' View" he again writes, in language which would be
appropriate from every advanced civil service reformer of the present
day, that is, from every disinterested man who has studied the workings
of the "spoils system" with any intelligence:--

    I consider "sweeping" removals, as now practiced by both parties, a
    great political evil in our country, injurious to individuals, to
    the public service, to the purity of elections, and to the harmony
    and union of the people. Certainly no individual has a right to an
    office; no one has an estate or property in a public employment; but
    when a mere ministerial worker in a subordinate station has learned
    its duties by experience and approved his fidelity by his conduct,
    it is an injury to the public service to exchange him for a novice
    whose only title to the place may be a political badge or partisan
    service. It is exchanging experience for inexperience, tried ability
    for untried, and destroying the incentive to good conduct by
    destroying its reward. To the party displaced it is an injury, he
    having become a proficient in that business, expecting to remain in
    it during good behavior, and finding it difficult, at an advanced
    age, and with fixed habits, to begin a new career in some new walk
    of life. It converts elections into scrambles for office, and
    degrades the government into an office for rewards and punishments;
    and divides the people of the Union into two adverse parties, each
    in its turn, and as it becomes dominant, to strip and proscribe the
    other.

Benton had now taken the position which he was for many years to hold,
as the recognized senatorial leader of a great and well-defined party.
Until 1828 the prominent political chiefs of the nation had either been
its presidents, or had been in the cabinets of these presidents. But
after Jackson's time they were in the Senate, and it was on this body
that public attention was concentrated. Jackson's cabinet itself showed
such a falling off, when compared with the cabinets of any of his
predecessors, as to justify the caustic criticism that, when he took
office, there came in "the millennium of the minnows." In the Senate, on
the contrary, there were never before or since so many men of commanding
intellect and powers. Calhoun had been elected as vice-president on the
Jacksonian ticket, and was thus, in 1829, presiding over the body of
which he soon became an active member; Webster and Clay were already
taking their positions as the leaders of the great National Republican,
or, as it was afterwards called, Whig party.

When the rupture between Calhoun and the Jacksonian Democrats, and the
resignation of the former from the vice-presidency took place, three
parties developed in the United States Senate. One was composed of the
Jacksonian Democrats, with Benton at their head; one was made up of the
little band of Nullifiers, led by Calhoun; and the third included the
rather loose array of the Whigs, under Clay and Webster. The feeling of
the Jacksonians towards Calhoun and the Nullifiers and towards Clay and
the Clay Whigs were largely those of personal animosity; but they had
very little of this sentiment towards Webster and his associates, their
differences with them being on questions of party principle, or else
proceeding from merely sectional causes.




CHAPTER V.

THE STRUGGLE WITH THE NULLIFIERS.


During both Jackson's presidential terms he and his adherents were
engaged in two great struggles; that with the Nullifiers, and that with
the Bank. Although these struggles were in part synchronous, it will be
easier to discuss each by itself.

The nullification movement in South Carolina, during the latter part of
the third and early part of the fourth decades in the present century,
had nothing to do, except in the most distant way, with slavery. Its
immediate cause was the high tariff; remotely it sprang from the same
feelings which produced the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798.

Certain of the Slave States, including those which raised hemp, indigo,
and sugar, were high-tariff states; indeed, it was not till towards the
close of the presidency of Monroe that there had been much sectional
feeling over the policy of protection. Originally, while we were a
purely agricultural and mercantile people, free trade was the only
economic policy which occurred to us as possible to be followed, the
first tariff bill being passed in 1816. South Carolina then was inclined
to favor the system, Calhoun himself supporting the bill, and, his
subsequent denials to the contrary notwithstanding, distinctly
advocating the policy of protection to native industries; while
Massachusetts then and afterwards stoutly opposed its introduction, as
hostile to her interests. However, the bill was passed, and
Massachusetts had to submit to its operation. After 1816 new tariff laws
were enacted about every four years, and soon the coast Slave States,
except Louisiana, realized that their working was hurtful to the
interests of the planters. New England also changed her attitude; and
when the protective tariff bill of 1828 came up, its opponents and
supporters were sharply divided by sectional lines. But these lines were
not such as would have divided the states on the question of slavery.
The Northeast and Northwest alike favored the measure, as also did all
the Southern States west of the Alleghanies, and Louisiana. It was
therefore passed by an overwhelming vote, against the solid opposition
of the belt of Southern coast states stretching from Virginia to
Mississippi, and including these two.

The states that felt themselves harmed by the tariff did something more
than record their disapproval by the votes of their representatives in
Congress. They nearly all, through their legislatures, entered emphatic
protests against its adoption, as being most harmful to them and
dangerous to the Union; and some accompanied their protests with threats
as to what would be done if the obnoxious laws should be enforced. They
certainly had grounds for discontent. In 1828 the tariff, whether it
benefited the country as a whole or not, unquestionably harmed the
South; and in a federal Union it is most unwise to pass laws which shall
benefit one part of the community to the hurt of another part, when the
latter receives no compensation. The truculent and unyielding attitude
of the extreme protectionists was irritating in the extreme; for cooler
men than the South Carolinians might well have been exasperated at such
an utterance as that of Henry Clay, when he stated that for the sake of
the "American system"--by which title he was fond of styling a doctrine
already ancient in mediaeval times--he would "defy the South, the
president and the devil."

On the other hand, both the good and the evil effects of the tariff were
greatly exaggerated. Some harm to the planter states was doubtless
caused by it; but their falling back, as compared with the North, in
the race for prosperity, was doubtless caused much more by the presence
of slavery, as Dallas, of Pennsylvania, pointed out in the course of
some very temperate and moderate remarks in the Senate. Clay's
assertions as to what the tariff had done for the West were equally
ill-founded, as Benton showed in a good speech, wherein he described
picturesquely enough the industries and general condition of his portion
of the country, and asserted with truth that its revived prosperity was
due to its own resources, entirely independent of federal aid or
legislation. He said: "I do not think we are indebted to the high tariff
for our fertile lands and our navigable rivers; and I am certain we are
indebted to these blessings for the prosperity we enjoy." "In all that
comes from the soil the people of the West are rich. They have an
abundant supply of food for man and beast, and a large surplus to send
abroad. They have the comfortable living which industry creates for
itself in a rich soil, but beyond this they are poor.... They have no
roads paved or macadamized; no canals or aqueducts; no bridges of stone
across the innumerable streams; no edifices dedicated to eternity; no
schools for the fine arts; not a public library for which an ordinary
scholar would not apologize." Then he went on to speak of the commerce
of the West and its exports, "the marching myriads of living animals
annually taking their departure from the heart of the West, defiling
through the gorges of the Cumberland, the Alleghany, and the Appalachian
mountains, or traversing the plains of the South, diverging as they
march, ... and the flying steamboats and the fleets of floating arks,
loaded with the products of the forest, the farm, and the pasture,
following the courses of our noble rivers, and bearing their freights to
the great city" of New Orleans.

Unfortunately Benton would interlard even his best speeches with
theories of economics often more or less crude, and, still worse, with a
series of classic quotations and allusions; for he was grievously
afflicted with the rage for cheap pseudo-classicism that Jefferson and
his school had borrowed from the French revolutionists. Nor could he
resist the temptation to drag in allusions to some favorite hobby. The
repeal of the salt-tax was an especial favorite of his. He was perfectly
right in attacking the tax, and deserves the greatest credit for the
persistency which finally won him the victory. But his associates,
unless of a humorous turn of mind, must have found his allusions to it
rather tiresome, as when, apropos of the commerce of the Mississippi,
and without any possible excuse for speaking of the iniquity of taxing
salt, he suddenly alluded to New Orleans as "that great city which
revives upon the banks of the Mississippi the name of the greatest of
the emperors[2] that ever reigned upon the banks of the Tiber, and who
eclipsed the glory of his own heroic exploits by giving an order to his
legions never to levy a contribution of salt upon a Roman citizen!"

[2: Aurelian.]

It must be admitted that the tariff did some harm to the South, and that
it was natural for the latter to feel resentment at the way in which it
worked. But it must also be remembered that no law can be passed which
does not distribute its benefits more or less unequally, and which does
not, in all probability, work harm in some cases. Moreover, the South
was estopped from complaining of one section being harmed by a law that
benefited, or was supposed to benefit, the country at large, by her
position in regard to the famous embargo and non-intervention acts.
These inflicted infinitely more damage and loss in New England than any
tariff law could inflict on South Carolina, and, moreover, were put into
execution on account of a quarrel with England forced on by the West and
South contrary to the desire of the East. Yet the Southerners were
fierce in their denunciations of such of the Federalists as went to the
extreme in opposition to them. Even in 1816 Massachusetts had been
obliged to submit with good grace to the workings of a tariff which she
deemed hostile to her interests, and which many Southerners then
advocated. Certainly, even if the new tariff laws were ill-advised,
unjust, and unequal in their working, yet they did not, in the most
remote degree, justify any effort to break up the Union; especially the
South had no business to complain when she herself had joined in laying
heavier burdens on the shoulders of New England.

Complain she did, however; and soon added threats to complaints, and was
evidently ready to add acts to threats. Georgia, at first, took the lead
in denunciation; but South Carolina soon surpassed her, and finally went
to the length of advocating and preparing for separation from the Union;
a step that produced a revulsion of feeling even among her fellow
anti-tariff states. The South Carolinian statesmen now proclaimed the
doctrine of nullification,--that is, proclaimed that if any state deemed
a federal law improper, it could proceed to declare that law null and
void so far as its own territory was concerned,--and, as a corollary,
that it had the right forcibly to prevent execution of this void law
within its borders. This was proclaimed, not as an exercise of the right
of revolution, which, in the last resort, belongs, of course, to every
community and class, but as a constitutional privilege. Jefferson was
quoted as the father of the idea, and the Kentucky resolutions of
1798-99, which he drew, were cited as the precedent for the South
Carolinian action. In both these last assertions the Nullifiers were
correct. Jefferson was the father of nullification, and therefore of
secession. He used the word "nullify" in the original draft which he
supplied to the Kentucky legislature, and though that body struck it out
of the resolutions which they passed in 1798, they inserted it in those
of the following year. This was done mainly as an unscrupulous party
move on Jefferson's part, and when his side came into power he became a
firm upholder of the Union; and, being constitutionally unable to put a
proper value on truthfulness, he even denied that his resolutions could
be construed to favor nullification--though they could by no possibility
be construed to mean anything else.

At this time it is not necessary to discuss nullification as a
constitutional dogma; it is an absurdity too great to demand serious
refutation. The United States has the same right to protect itself from
death by nullification, secession, or rebellion, that a man has to
protect himself from death by assassination. Calhoun's hair-splitting
and metaphysical disquisitions on the constitutionality of nullification
have now little more practical interest than have the extraordinary
arguments and discussions of the school-men of the Middle Ages.

But at the time they were of vital interest, for they were words which
it was known South Carolina was prepared to back up by deeds. Calhoun
was vice-president, the second officer in the federal government, and
yet also the avowed leader of the most bitter disunionists. His state
supported him by an overwhelming majority, although even within its own
borders there was an able opposition, headed by the gallant and loyal
family of the Draytons,--the same family that afterwards furnished the
captain of Farragut's flag-ship, the glorious old Hartford. There was a
strong sentiment in the other Southern States in his favor; the public
men of South Carolina made speech after speech goading him on to take
even more advanced ground.

In Washington the current at first seemed to be all setting in favor of
the Nullifiers; they even counted on Jackson's support, as he was a
Southerner and a states'-rights man. But he was also a strong Unionist,
and, moreover, at this time, felt very bitterly towards Calhoun, with
whom he had just had a split, and had in consequence remodeled his
cabinet, thrusting out all Calhoun's supporters, and adopting Van Buren
as his political heir,--the position which it was hitherto supposed the
great Carolina separatist occupied.

The first man to take up the gauntlet the Nullifiers had thrown down was
Webster, in his famous reply to Hayne. He, of course, voiced the
sentiment of the Whigs, and especially of the Northeast, where the high
tariff was regarded with peculiar favor, where the Union feeling was
strong, and where there was a certain antagonism felt towards the South.
The Jacksonian Democrats, whose strength lay in the West, had not yet
spoken. They were, for the most part, neither ultra protectionists nor
absolute free-traders; Jackson's early presidential utterances had given
offense to the South by not condemning all high-tariff legislation, but
at the same time had declared in favor of a much more moderate degree of
protection than suited the Whigs. Only a few weeks after Webster's
speech Jackson's chance came, and he declared himself in unmistakable
terms. It was on the occasion of the Jefferson birthday banquet, April
13, 1830. An effort was then being made to have Jefferson's birthday
celebrated annually; and the Nullifiers, rightly claiming him as their
first and chief apostle, attempted to turn this particular feast into a
demonstration in favor of nullification. Most of the speakers present
were actively or passively in favor of the movement, and the toasts
proposed strongly savored of the new doctrine. But Jackson, Benton, and
a number of other Union men were in attendance also, and when it came to
Jackson's turn he electrified the audience by proposing: "Our federal
Union; it must be preserved." Calhoun at once answered with: "The Union;
next to our liberty the most dear; may we all remember that it can only
be preserved by respecting the rights of the states and distributing
equally the benefit and burden of the Union." The issue between the
president and the vice-president was now complete, and the Jacksonian
Democracy was squarely committed against nullification. Jackson had
risen to the occasion as only a strong and a great man could rise, and
his few, telling words, finely contrasting at every point with Calhoun's
utterances, rang throughout the whole country, and will last as long as
our government. One result, at least, the Nullifiers accomplished,--they
completely put an end to the Jefferson birthday celebrations.

The South Carolinians had no intention of flinching from the contest
which they had provoked, even when they saw that the North and West were
united against them, and though the tide began to set the same way in
their sister states of the South; North Carolina, among the latter,
being the first and most pronounced in her support of the president and
denunciation of the Nullifiers. The men of the Palmetto State have
always ranked high for hotheaded courage, and they soon showed that they
had wills as fiery as that of Jackson himself. Yet in the latter they
had met an antagonist well worthy of any foeman's steel. In declining an
invitation to be present at Charleston, on July 4, 1831, the president
again defined most clearly his position in favor of the Union, and his
words had an especial significance because he let it be seen that he was
fully determined to back them up by force if necessary. But his letter
only had the effect of inflaming still more the minds of the South
Carolinians. The prime cause of irritation, the tariff, still remained;
and in 1832, Clay, having entered the Senate after a long retirement
from politics, put the finishing stroke to their anger by procuring the
passage of a new tariff bill, which left the planter states almost as
badly off as did the law of 1828. Jackson signed this, although not
believing that it went far enough in the reduction of duties.

In the presidential election of 1832, Jackson defeated Clay by an
enormous majority; Van Buren was elected vice-president, there being
thus a Northern man on the ticket. South Carolina declined to take part
in the election, throwing away her vote. Again, it must be kept in mind
that the slave question did not shape, or, indeed, enter into this
contest at all, directly, although beginning to be present in the
background as a source of irritation. In 1832 there was ten-fold more
feeling in the North against Masonry, and secret societies generally,
than there was against slavery.

Benton threw himself in, heart and soul, with the Union party, acting as
Jackson's right-hand man throughout the contest with South Carolina, and
showing an even more resolute and unflinching front than Old Hickory
himself. No better or trustier ally than the Missouri statesman, in a
hard fight for a principle, could be desired. He was intensely national
in all his habits of thought; he took a deep, personal pride in all his
country,--North, South, East, and West. He had been very loath to
believe that any movement hostile to the Union was really on foot; but
once thoroughly convinced of it he chose his own line of action without
an instant's hesitation.

A fortnight after the presidential election South Carolina passed her
ordinance of nullification, directed against the tariff laws generally,
and against those of 1828 and 1832 in particular. The ordinance was to
take effect on February 1st; and if meantime the federal government
should make any attempt to enforce the laws, the fact of such attempt
was to end the continuance of South Carolina in the Union.

Jackson promptly issued a proclamation against nullification, composed
jointly by himself and the great Louisiana jurist and statesman,
Livingston. It is one of the ablest, as well as one of the most
important, of all American state papers. It is hard to see how any
American can read it now without feeling his veins thrill. Some claim it
as being mainly the work of Jackson, others as that of Livingston; it is
great honor for either to have had a hand in its production.

In his annual message the president merely referred, in passing, to the
Nullifiers, expressing his opinion that the action in reducing the
duties, which the extinction of the public debt would permit and
require, would put an end to the proceedings. As matters grew more
threatening, however, South Carolina making every preparation for war
and apparently not being conciliated in the least by the evident desire
in Congress to meet her more than half-way on the tariff question,
Jackson sent a special message to both houses. He had already sent
General Scott to Charleston, and had begun the concentration of certain
military and naval forces in or near the state boundaries. He now asked
Congress to pass a measure to enable him to deal better with possible
resistance to the laws. South Carolina having complained of the
oppressed condition in which she found herself, owing to the working of
the tariff, Jackson, in his message, with some humor, quoted in reply
the last Thanksgiving proclamation of her governor, wherein he dilated
upon the state's unexampled prosperity and happiness.

It must always be kept in mind in describing the attitude of the
Jacksonian Democrats towards the Nullifiers that they were all along,
especially in the West, hostile to a very high tariff. Jackson and
Benton had always favored a much lower tariff than that established in
1828 and hardly changed in 1832. It was no change of front on their part
now to advocate a reduction of duties. Jackson and Benton both felt that
there was much ground for South Carolina's original complaint, although
as strongly opposed to her nullification attitude as any Northerner.
Most of the Southern senators and representatives, though opposed to
nullification, were almost equally hostile to the high tariff; and very
many others were at heart in sympathy with nullification itself. The
intensely national and anti-separatist tone of Jackson's declaration,--a
document that might well have come from Washington or Lincoln, and that
would have reflected high honor on either,--though warmly approved by
Benton, was very repugnant to many of the Southern Democrats, and was
too much even for certain of the Whigs. In fact, it reads like the
utterance of some great Federalist or Republican leader. The feeling in
Congress, as a whole, was as strong against the tariff as it was against
nullification; and Jackson had to take this into account, all the more
because not only was he in some degree of the same way of thinking, but
also many of his followers entertained the sentiment even more
earnestly.

Calhoun introduced a series of nullification resolutions into the
Senate, and defended them strongly in the prolonged constitutional
debate that followed. South Carolina meanwhile put off the date at which
her decrees were to take effect, so that she might see what Congress
would do. Beyond question, Jackson's firmness, and the way in which he
was backed up by Benton, Webster, and their followers, was having some
effect. He had openly avowed his intention, if matters went too far, of
hanging Calhoun "higher than Haman." He unquestionably meant to
imprison him, as well as the other South Carolina leaders, the instant
that state came into actual collision with the Union; and to the end of
his life regretted, and with reason, that he had not done so without
waiting for an overt act of resistance. Some historians have treated
this as if it were an idle threat; but such it certainly was not.
Jackson undoubtedly fully meant what he said, and would have acted
promptly had the provocation occurred, and, moreover, he would have been
sustained by the country. He was not the man to weigh minutely what
would and what would not fall just on one side or the other of the line
defining treason; nor was it the time for too scrupulous adherence to
precise wording. Had a collision occurred, neither Calhoun nor his
colleague would ever have been permitted to leave Washington; and brave
though they were, the fact unquestionably had much influence with them.

Webster was now acting heartily with Benton. He introduced a set of
resolutions which showed that in the matters both of the tariff and of
nullification his position was much the same as was that of the
Missourian. Unfortunately Congress, as a whole, was by no means so
stiff-kneed. A certain number of Whigs followed Webster, and a certain
number of Democrats clung to Benton; but most Southerners were very
reluctant to allow pressure to be brought to bear on South Carolina, and
many Northerners were as willing to compromise as Henry Clay himself. In
accordance with Jackson's recommendations two bills were introduced: one
the so-called "Force bill," to allow the president to take steps to
defend the federal authority in the event of actual collision; and the
other a moderate, and, on the whole, proper tariff bill, to reduce
protective duties. Both were introduced by administration supporters.
Benton and Webster warmly sustained the "Force bill," which was bitterly
attacked by the Nullifiers and by most of the Southerners, who really
hardly knew what stand to take, the leading opponent being Tyler of
Virginia, whose disunion attitude was almost as clearly marked as that
of Calhoun himself. The measure was eminently just, and was precisely
what the crisis demanded; and the Senate finally passed it and sent it
to the House.

All this time an obstinate struggle was going on over the tariff bill.
Calhoun and his sympathizers were beginning to see that there was real
danger ahead, alike to themselves, their constituents, and their
principles, if they followed unswervingly the course they had laid
down; and the weak-kneed brethren on the other side, headed by Clay,
were becoming even more uneasy. Calhoun wished to avert collision with
the federal government; Clay was quite as anxious to avoid an outbreak
in the South and to save what he could of the protective system, which
was evidently doomed. Calhoun was willing to sacrifice some of his
constitutional theories in regard to protection; Clay was ready greatly
to reduce protection itself. Each, of them, but especially Clay, was
prepared to shift his stand somewhat from that of abstract moral right
to that of expediency. Benton and Webster were too resolute and
determined in their hostility to any form of yielding to South
Carolina's insolent defiance to admit any hope of getting them to accept
a compromise; but the majority of the members were known to be only too
ready to jump at any half-way measure which would patch up the affair
for the present, no matter what the sacrifice of principle or how great
the risk incurred for the future. Accordingly, Clay and Calhoun met and
agreed on a curious bill, in reality recognizing the protective system,
but making a great although gradual reduction of duties; and Clay
introduced this as a "compromise measure." It was substituted in the
House for the administration tariff bill, was passed and sent to the
Senate. It gave South Carolina much, but not all, that she demanded.
Her representatives announced themselves satisfied, and supported it,
together with all their Southern sympathizers. Webster and Benton fought
it stoutly to the last, but it was passed by a great majority; a few
Northerners followed Webster, and Benton received fair support from his
Missouri colleagues and the Maryland senators; the other senators, Whigs
and Democrats alike, voted for the measure. Many of the Southerners were
imbued with separatist principles, although not yet to the extent that
Calhoun was; others, though Union men, did not possess the unflinching
will and stern strength of character that enabled Benton to stand out
against any section of the country, even his own, if it was wrong. Silas
Wright, of New York, a typical Northern "dough-face" politician, gave
exact expression to the "dough-face" sentiment, which induced Northern
members to vote for the compromise, when he stated that he was
unalterably opposed to the principle of the bill, but that on account of
the attitude of South Carolina, and of the extreme desire which he had
to remove all cause of discontent in that state, and in order to enable
her again to become an affectionate member of the Union, he would vote
for what was satisfactory to her, although repugnant to himself.
Wright, Marcy, and their successors in New York politics, almost up to
the present day, certainly carried cringing subserviency to the South to
a pitch that was fairly sublime.

The "Force bill" and the compromise tariff bill passed both houses
nearly simultaneously, and were sent up to the president, who signed
both on the same day. His signing the compromise bill was a piece of
weakness out of keeping with his whole character, and especially out of
keeping with his previous course towards the Nullifiers. The position
assumed by Benton and Webster, that South Carolina should be made to
submit first and should have the justice of her claims examined into
afterwards, was unquestionably the only proper attitude.

Benton wrote:--

    My objections to this bill, and to its mode of being passed, were
    deep and abiding, and went far beyond its own obnoxious provisions,
    and all the transient and temporary considerations connected with
    it.... A compromise made with a state in arms is a capitulation to
    that state.... The injury was great then, and a permanent evil
    example. It remitted the government to the condition of the old
    confederation, acting upon sovereignties instead of individuals. It
    violated the feature of our Union which discriminated it from all
    confederacies that ever existed, and which was wisely and
    patriotically put into the Constitution to save it from the fate
    which had attended all confederacies, ancient and modern.... The
    framers of our Constitution established a Union instead of a
    League--to be sovereign and independent within its sphere, acting
    upon persons through its own laws and courts, instead of acting on
    communities through persuasion or force. The effect of this
    compromise legislation was to destroy this great feature of our
    Union--to bring the general and state governments into conflict--and
    to substitute a sovereign state for an offending individual as often
    as a state chose to make the cause of that individual her own.

Not only was Benton's interpretation of the Constitution sound, and one
that by the course of events has now come to be universally accepted,
but his criticisms on the wisdom of the compromise bill were perfectly
just. Had the Anti-Nullifiers stood firm, the Nullifiers would probably
have given way, and if not, would certainly have been crushed. Against a
solid North and West, with a divided South, even her own people not
being unanimous, and with Jackson as chief executive, South Carolina
could not have made even a respectable resistance. A salutary lesson
then might very possibly have saved infinite trouble and bloodshed
thereafter. But in Jackson's case it must be remembered that, so far as
his acts depended purely upon his own will and judgment, no fault can be
found with him; he erred only in ratifying a compromise agreed to by the
vast majority of the representatives of the people in both houses of
Congress.

The battle did not result in a decisive victory for either side. This
was shown by the very fact that each party insisted that it had won a
signal triumph. Calhoun and Clay afterwards quarreled in the senate
chamber as to which had given up the more in the compromise. South
Carolina had declared, first, that the tariff was unconstitutional, and
therefore to be opposed upon principle; second, that it worked injustice
to her interests, and must be abolished forthwith; thirdly, that, if it
were not so abolished, she would assert her power to nullify a federal
law, and, if necessary, would secede from the Union. When her
representatives agreed to the compromise bill, they abandoned the first
point; the second was decided largely in her favor, though protection
was not by any means entirely given up; the third she was allowed to
insist upon with impunity, although the other side, by passing the
"Force bill," showed that in case matters did proceed to extremities
they were prepared to act upon the opposite conviction. Still, she
gained most of that for which she contended, and the victory, as a
whole, rested with her. Calhoun's purposes seem to have been, in the
main, pure; but few criminals have worked as much harm to their country
as he did. The plea of good intentions is not one that can be allowed to
have much weight in passing historical judgment upon a man whose
wrong-headedness and distorted way of looking at things produced, or
helped to produce, such incalculable evil; there is a wide political
applicability in the remark attributed to a famous Texan, to the effect
that he might, in the end, pardon a man who shot him on purpose, but
that he would surely never forgive one who did so accidentally.

Without doubt, the honors of the nullification dispute were borne off by
Benton and Webster. The latter's reply to Hayne is, perhaps, the
greatest single speech of the nineteenth century, and he deserves the
highest credit for the stubbornness with which he stood by his colors to
the last. There never was any question of Webster's courage; on the
occasions when he changed front he was actuated by self-interest and
ambition, not by timidity. Usually he appears as an advocate rather than
an earnest believer in the cause he represents; but when it came to be a
question of the Union, he felt what he said with the whole strength of
his nature.

An even greater meed of praise attaches to Benton for the unswerving
fidelity which he showed to the Union in this crisis. Webster was a
high-tariff man, and was backed up by all the sectional antipathies of
the Northeast in his opposition to the Nullifiers; Benton, on the
contrary, was a believer in a low tariff, or in one for revenue merely,
and his sectional antipathies were the other way. Yet, even when
deserted by his chief, and when he was opposed to every senator from
south of the Potomac and the Ohio, he did not flinch for a moment from
his attitude of aggressive loyalty to the national Union. He had a
singularly strong and upright character; this country has never had a
statesman more fearlessly true to his convictions, when great questions
were at stake, no matter what might be the cost to himself, or the
pressure from outside,--even when, as happened later, his own state was
against him. Intellectually he cannot for a moment be compared to the
great Massachusetts senator; but morally he towers much higher.

Yet, while praising Jackson and Benton for their behavior towards South
Carolina, we cannot forget that but a couple of years previously they
had not raised their voices even in the mildest rebuke of Georgia for
conduct which, though not nearly so bad in degree as that of South
Carolina, was of much the same kind. Towards the close of Adams's term,
Georgia had bid defiance to the mandates of the Supreme Court, and
proceeded to settle the Indian question within her borders without
regard to the authority of the United States, and these matters were
still unsettled when Jackson became president. Unfortunately he let his
personal feelings bias him; and, as he took the Western and Georgian
view of the Indian question, and, moreover, hated the Supreme Court
because it was largely Federalist in its composition, he declined to
interfere. David Crockett, himself a Union man and a nationalist to the
backbone, rated Jackson savagely, and with justice, for the
inconsistency of his conduct in the two cases, accusing him of having,
by his harmful leniency to Georgia, encouraged South Carolina to act as
she did, and ridiculing him because, while he smiled at the deeds of the
one state, when the like acts were done by the other, "he took up the
rod of correction and shook it over her".




CHAPTER VI.

JACKSON AND BENTON MAKE WAR ON THE BANK.


If the struggle with the Nullifiers showed Benton at his best, in the
conflict with the Bank he exhibited certain qualities which hardly place
him in so favorable a light. Jackson's attack upon the Bank was a move
undertaken mainly on his own responsibility, and one which, at first,
most of his prominent friends were alarmed to see him undertake. Benton
alone supported him from the beginning. Captain and lieutenant alike
intensely appreciated the joy of battle; they cared for a fight because
it was a fight, and the certainty of a struggle, such as would have
daunted weaker or more timid men, simply offered to them an additional
inducement to follow out the course they had planned. Benton's
thorough-going support was invaluable to Jackson. The president sorely
needed a friend in the Senate who would uphold him through thick and
thin, and who yet commanded the respect of all his opponents by his
strength, ability, and courage. To be sure, Benton's knowledge of
financial economics was not always profound; but, on the other hand, a
thorough mastery of the laws of finance would have been, in this fight,
a very serious disadvantage to any champion of Jackson.

The rights and wrongs of this matter have been worn threadbare in
countless discussions. For much of the hostility of Jackson and Benton
towards the Bank, there were excellent grounds; but many of their
actions were wholly indefensible and very harmful in their results to
the country. An assault upon what Benton called "the money power" is apt
to be popular in a democratic republic, partly on account of the vague
fear with which the poorer and more ignorant voters regard a powerful
institution, whose working they do not understand, and partly on account
of the jealousy they feel towards those who are better off than
themselves. When these feelings are appealed to by men who are intensely
in earnest, and who are themselves convinced of the justice and wisdom
of their course, they become very formidable factors in any political
contest.

The struggle first became important when the question of the re-charter
of the Bank was raised, towards the end of Jackson's first term, the
present charter still having three years to run. This charter had in it
many grave faults; and there might well be a question as to whether it
should be renewed. The Bank itself, beyond doubt, possessed enormous
power; too much power for its own or outsiders' good. Its president,
Biddle, was a man of some ability, but conceited to the last degree,
untruthful, and to a certain extent unscrupulous in the use he made of
the political influence of the great moneyed institution over which he
presided. Some of the financial theories on which he managed the Bank
were wrong; yet, on the whole, it was well conducted, and under its care
the monetary condition of the country was quiet and good, infinitely
better than it had been before, or than, under the auspices of the
Jacksonian Democracy, it afterwards became.

The two great reasons for Jackson's success throughout his political
career were to be found in the strength of the feeling in his favor
among the poorer and least educated classes of voters, and in the ardent
support given him by the low politicians, who, by playing on his
prejudices and passions, moulded him to their wishes, and who organized
and perfected in their own and his interests a great political machine,
founded on the "spoils system"; and both the Jacksonian rank and file
and the Jacksonian politicians soon agreed heartily in their opposition
to the Bank. Jackson and Benton opposed it for the same reasons that the
bulk of their followers did; that is to say, partly from honest and
ignorant prejudice and partly from a well-founded feeling of distrust as
to some of its actions. The mass of their fellow party-leaders and
henchmen assailed it with the cry that it was exerting its influence to
debauch politics, while at the same time they really sought to use it as
a power in politics on their own side.

Jackson, in his first annual message in 1829, had hinted that he was
opposed to the re-charter of the Bank, then a question of the future and
not to arise for four or five years. At the same time he had called in
question the constitutionality and expediency of the Bank's existence,
and had criticised as vicious its currency system. The matter of
constitutionality had been already decided by the Supreme Court, the
proper tribunal, and was, and had been for years, an accepted fact; it
was an absurdity to call it in question. As regards the matter of
expediency, certainly the Jacksonians failed signally to put anything
better in its place. Yet it was undeniable that there were grave defects
in the currency system.

The president's message roused but little interest, and what little it
did rouse was among the Bank's friends. At once these began to prepare
the way for the re-charter by an active and extensive agitation in its
favor. The main bank was at Philadelphia, but it had branches
everywhere, and naturally each branch bank was a centre of opposition to
the president's proposed policy. As the friends of the Bank were greatly
interested, and as the matter did not immediately concern those who
afterwards became its foes, the former, for the time, had it all their
own way, and the drift of public opinion seemed to be strongly in its
favor.

Benton was almost the only public man of prominence who tried to stem
this tide from the beginning. Jackson's own party associates were
originally largely against him, and so he stood all the more in need of
the vigorous support which he received from the Missouri senator.
Indeed, it would be unfair in the matter of the attack on the Bank to
call Benton Jackson's follower; he might with more propriety be called
the leader in the assault, although of course he could accomplish little
compared with what was done by the great popular idol. He had always
been hostile to the Bank, largely as a matter of Jeffersonian tradition,
and he had shown his hostility by resolutions introduced in the Senate
before Jackson was elected president.

Early in 1831 he asked leave to introduce a resolution against the
re-charter of the Bank; his purpose being merely to give formal notice
of war against it, and to attempt to stir up a current of feeling
counter to that which then seemed to be generally prevailing in its
favor. In his speech he carefully avoided laying stress upon any such
abstract point as that of constitutionality, and dwelt instead upon the
questions that would affect the popular mind; assailing the Bank "as
having too much power over the people and the government, over business
and politics, and as too much disposed to exercise that power to the
prejudice of the freedom and equality which should prevail in a
republic, to be allowed to exist in our country." The force of such an
argument in a popular election will be acknowledged by all practical
politicians. But, although Benton probably believed what he said, or at
any rate most of it, he certainly ought not to have opened the
discussion of a great financial measure with a demagogic appeal to caste
prejudices. He wished to substitute a gold currency in the place of the
existing bank-notes, and was not disturbed at all as to how he would
supply the place of the Bank, saying: "I am willing to see the charter
expire, without providing any substitute for the present Bank. I am
willing to see the currency of the federal government left to the hard
money mentioned and intended in the Constitution; ... every species of
paper might be left to the state authorities, unrecognized by the
federal government!" Of the beauties of such a system as the last the
country later on received practical demonstration. Some of his
utterances, however, could be commended to the friends of greenbacks and
of dishonest money even at the present day, as when he says: "Gold and
silver are the best currency for a republic; it suits the men of middle
property and the working people best; and if I was going to establish a
workingman's party it should be on the basis of hard money--a hard-money
party against a paper party." The Bank was in Philadelphia; much of the
stock was held in the East, and a good deal was held abroad, which gave
Benton a chance to play on sectional feelings, as follows: "To whom is
all the power granted? To a company of private individuals, many of them
foreigners, and the mass of them residing in a remote and narrow corner
of the Union, unconnected by any sympathy with the fertile regions of
the Great Valley, in which the natural power of this Union--the power of
numbers--will be found to reside long before the renewed term of a
second charter would expire." Among the other sentences occurs the
following bit of pure demagogic pyrotechnics: "It [the Bank] tends to
aggravate the inequality of fortunes; to make the rich richer and the
poor poorer; to multiply nabobs and paupers; and to deepen and widen the
gulf which separates Dives from Lazarus. A great moneyed power is
favorable to great capitalists, for it is the principle of money to
favor money. It is unfavorable to small capitalists, for it is the
principle of money to eschew the needy and unfortunate. It is injurious
to the laboring classes." Altogether it was not a speech to be proud of.
The Senate refused permission to introduce the resolution by the close
vote of twenty-three to twenty.

Benton lived only a generation after that one which had itself
experienced oppression from a king, from an aristocratic legislature and
from a foreign power; and so his rant about the undue influence of
foreigners in our governmental affairs, and his declamation over the
purely supposititious powers that were presumed to be conspiring against
the welfare of the poorer classes probably more nearly expressed his
real feelings than would be the case with the similar utterances of any
leading statesman nowadays. He was an enthusiastic believer in the
extreme Jeffersonian doctrinaire views as to the will of the majority
being always right, and as to the moral perfection of the average
voter. Like his fellow-statesmen he failed to see the curious absurdity
of supporting black slavery, and yet claiming universal suffrage for
whites as a divine right, not as a mere matter of expediency resulting
on the whole better than any other method. He had not learned that the
majority in a democracy has no more right to tyrannize over a minority
than, under a different system, the latter would have to oppress the
former; and that, if there is a moral principle at stake, the saying
that the voice of the people is the voice of God may be quite as untrue,
and do quite as much mischief, as the old theory of the divine right of
kings. The distinguishing feature of our American governmental system is
the freedom of the individual; it is quite as important to prevent his
being oppressed by many men as it is to save him from the tyranny of
one.

This speech on the re-charter showed a great deal of wide reading and
much information; but a good part of it was sheer declamation, in the
turgid, pompous style that Benton, as well as a great many other
American public speakers, was apt to mistake for genuine oratory. His
subsequent speech on the currency, however, was much better. This was
likewise delivered on the occasion of asking leave to present a joint
resolution, which leave was refused. The branch draft system was the
object of the assault. These branch drafts were for even sums of small
denomination, circulating like bank-notes; they were drawn on the parent
bank at Philadelphia to the order of some officer of the branch bank and
were indorsed by the latter to bearer. Thus paper was issued at one
place which was payable at another and a distant place; and among other
results there ensued a constant inflation of credit. They were very
mischievous in their workings; they had none of the marks of convertible
bank-notes or money, and so long as credit was active there could be no
check on the inflation of the currency by them. Payment could be
voluntarily made at the branch banks whence issued, but if it was
refused the owner had only the right to go to Philadelphia and sue the
directors there. Most of these drafts were issued at the most remote and
inaccessible branches, the payment of them being, therefore, much
delayed by distance and difficulty; nor were the directors liable for
excessive issues. They constituted the bulk of all the paper seen in
circulation; they were supposed to be equivalent to money, but being
bills of exchange they were merely negotiable instruments; they did not
have the properties of bank-notes, which are constantly and directly
interchangeable with money. In their issue Biddle had laid himself open
to attack; and in defending them he certainly did not always speak the
truth, willfully concealing or coloring facts. Moreover, his
self-satisfaction and the foolish pride in his own power, which he could
not conceal, led him into making imprudent boasts as to the great power
the Bank could exercise over other local banks, and over the general
prosperity of the country, while dilating upon its good conduct in not
using this power to the disadvantage of the public. All this was playing
into Benton's hands. He showed some of the evils of the branch draft
system, although apparently not seeing others that were quite as
important. He attacked the Bank for some real and many imaginary
wrongdoings; and quoted Biddle himself as an authority for the existence
of powers dangerous to the welfare of the state.

The advocates of the Bank were still in the majority in both houses of
Congress, and soon began preparations for pushing through a bill for the
re-charter. The issue began to become political. Webster, Clay, and most
of the other anti-administration men were for the Bank; and so when the
convention of the National Republicans, who soon afterwards definitely
assumed the name of Whigs, took place, they declared heartily in its
favor, and nominated for the presidency its most enthusiastic
supporter, Henry Clay. The Bank itself unquestionably preferred not to
be dragged into politics; but Clay, thinking he saw a chance for a
successful stroke, fastened upon it, and the convention that nominated
him made the fight against Jackson on the ground that he was hostile to
the Bank. Even had this not already been the case no more certain method
of insuring his hostility could have been adopted.

Still, however, many of Jackson's supporters were also advocates of
re-charter; and the bill for that purpose commanded the majority in
Congress. Benton took the lead in organizing the opposition, not with
the hope of preventing its passage, but "to attack incessantly, assail
at all points, display the evil of the institution, rouse the people,
and prepare them to sustain the veto." In other words, he was preparing
for an appeal to the people, and working to secure an anti-Bank majority
in the next Congress. He instigated and prepared the investigation into
the affairs of the Bank, which was made in the House, and he led the
harassing parliamentary warfare carried on against the re-chartering
bill in the Senate. He himself seems to have superintended the
preparation of the charges which were investigated by the House. A great
flurry was made over them, Benton and all his friends claiming that
they were fully substantiated; but the only real point scored was that
against the branch drafts. Benton, with the majority of the committee of
investigation, had the loosest ideas as to what a bank ought to do, loud
though they were in denunciation of what this particular Bank was
alleged to have done.

Webster made the great argument in favor of the re-charter bill. Benton
took the lead in opposition, stating, what was probably true,--that the
bill was brought up so long before the charter expired for political
reasons, and criticising it as premature; a criticism unfortunately
applicable with even greater force to Jackson's message. His speech was
largely mere talking against time, and he wandered widely from the
subject. Among other things he invoked the aid of the principle of
states'-rights, because the Bank then had power to establish branches in
any state, whether the latter liked it or not, and free from state
taxation. He also appealed to the Western members as such, insisting
that the Bank discriminated against their section of the country in
favor of the East; the facts being that the shrewdness and commercial
morality of the Northeast, particularly of New England, saved them from
the evils brought on the Westerners by the foolishness with which they
abused their credit and the laxness with which they looked on monetary
obligations. But in spite of all that Benton could do the bill passed
both houses, the Senate voting in its favor by twenty-eight ayes against
twenty nays.

Jackson, who never feared anything, and was more than ready to accept
the fight which was in some measure forced on him, yet which in some
degree he had courted, promptly vetoed the bill in a message which
stated some truths forcibly and fearlessly, which developed some very
queer constitutional and financial theories, and which contained a
number of absurdities, evidently put in, not for the benefit of the
Senate, but to influence voters at the coming presidential election. The
leaders of the opposition felt obliged to make a show of trying to pass
the bill over the veto in order to get a chance to answer Jackson.
Webster again opened the argument. Clay made the fiercest onslaught,
assailing the president personally, besides attacking the veto power,
and trying to discredit its use. But the presidential power of veto is
among the best features of our government, and Benton had no difficulty
in making a good defense of it; although many of the arguments adduced
by him in its favor were entirely unsound, being based on the wholly
groundless assumption that the function of the president corresponded
to that of the ancient Roman tribune of the people, and was supposed to
be exercised in the interests of the people to control the
legislature--thus willfully overlooking the fact that the legislature
also was elected by the people. When on his ultra-democratic hobby
Benton always rode very loose in the saddle, and with little knowledge
of where he was going. Clay and Benton alike drew all sorts of analogies
between the state of affairs in the United States and that formerly
prevailing in France, England, and above all in the much-suffering
republics of antiquity. Benton insisted that the Bank had wickedly
persuaded the West to get in debt to it so as to have that section in
its power, and that the Western debt had been created with a view to
political engineering; the fact being that the Westerners had run into
debt purely by their own fault, and that the Bank itself was seriously
alarmed at the condition of its Western branches. The currency being in
much worse shape in the West than in the Northeast, gold and silver
naturally moved towards the latter place; and this result of their own
shortcomings was again held up as a grievance of the Westerners against
the Bank. He also read a severe lecture on the interests of party
discipline to the Democrats who had voted for the re-charter, assuring
them that they could not continue to be both for the Bank and for
Jackson. The Jacksonian Democracy, nominally the party of the multitude,
was in reality the nearest approach the United States has ever seen to
the "one man power;" and to break with Jackson was to break with the
Democratic party. The alternative of expulsion or of turning a
somersault being thus plainly presented to the recalcitrant members,
they for the most part chose the latter, and performed the required feat
of legislative acrobatics with the most unobtrusive and submissive
meekness. The debate concluded with a sharp and undignified interchange
of personalities between the Missouri and Kentucky senators, Clay giving
Benton the lie direct, and the latter retorting in kind. Each side, of
course, predicted the utter ruin of the country, if the other prevailed.
Benton said that, if the Bank conquered, the result would be the
establishment of an oligarchy, and then of a monarchy, and finally the
death of the Republic by corruption. Webster stated as his belief that,
if the sentiments of the veto message received general approbation, the
Constitution could not possibly survive its fiftieth year. Webster,
however, in that debate, showed to good advantage. Benton was no match
for him, either as a thinker or as a speaker; but with the real leader
of the Whig party, Henry Clay, he never had much cause to fear
comparison.

All the state banks were of course rabidly in favor of Jackson; and the
presidential election of 1832 was largely fought on the bank issue. In
Pennsylvania, however, the feeling for the Bank was only less strong
than that for Jackson; and accordingly that Boeotian community sapiently
cast its electoral votes for the latter, while instructing its senators
and representatives to support the former. But the complete and hopeless
defeat of Clay by Jackson sealed the fate of the Bank. Jackson was not
even content to let it die naturally by the lapse of its charter. His
attitude towards it so far had been one for which much could be said;
indeed, very good grounds can be shown for thinking his veto proper. But
of the impropriety of his next step there could be no possible question.
Congress had passed a resolution declaring its belief in the safety of
the United States deposits in the Bank; but the president, in the summer
of 1833, removed these deposits and placed them in certain state banks.
He experienced some difficulty in getting a secretary of the treasury
who would take such a step; finally he found one in Taney.

The Bank memorialized Congress at once; and the anti-administration
majority in the Senate forthwith took up the quarrel. They first
rejected Jackson's nominations for bank directors, and then refused to
confirm Taney himself. Two years later Jackson made the latter Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court, in which position he lived to do even more
mischief than he had time or opportunity to accomplish as secretary of
the treasury.

Benton was the administration champion in the Senate. Opposed to him
were Webster and Clay, as leaders of the Whigs, supported for the time
being by Calhoun. The feeling of Clay and Calhoun against the president
was bitterly personal, and was repaid by his rancorous hatred. But
Webster, though he was really on most questions even more antagonistic
to the ideas of the Jacksonian school, always remained personally on
good terms with its leaders.

Clay introduced a resolution directing the return of the deposits;
Benton opposed it; it passed by a vote of twenty-eight to eighteen, but
was lost in the House. Clay then introduced a resolution demanding to
know from the president whether the paper alleged to have been published
by his authority as having been read to the cabinet, in relation to the
removal of the deposits, was genuine or not; and, if it was, asking for
a copy. Benton opposed the motion, which nevertheless passed. But the
president refused to accede to the demand. Meanwhile the new departure
in banking, inaugurated by the president, was working badly. One of the
main grounds for removing the deposits was the allegation that they were
used to debauch politics. This was never proved against the old United
States Bank; but under Jackson's administration, which corrupted the
public service in every way, the deposits became fruitful sources of
political reward and bribery.

Clay then introduced his famous resolution censuring the president for
his action, and supported it in a long and fiery speech; a speech which,
like most of Clay's, was received by his followers at the time with
rapture, but in which this generation fails to find the sign of that
remarkable ability with which his own contemporaries credited the great
Kentuckian. He attacked Jackson with fierce invective, painting him as
an unscrupulous tyrant, who was inaugurating a revolution in the
government of the Union. But he was outdone by Calhoun, who, with
continual interludes of complacent references to the good already done
by the Nullifiers, assailed Jackson as one of a band of artful, corrupt,
and cunning politicians, and drew a picture even more lurid than Clay's
of the future of the country, and the danger of impending revolution.
Webster's speeches were more self-contained in tone. Benton was the only
Jacksonian senator who could contend with the great Nullifier and the
two great Whigs; and he replied at length, and in much the same style as
they had spoken.

The Senate was flooded with petitions in favor of the Bank, which were
presented with suitable speeches by the leading Whigs. Benton ridiculed
the exaggerated tone of alarm in which these petitions were drawn, and
declared that the panic, excitement, and suffering existing in business
circles throughout the country were due to the deliberate design of the
Bank, and afforded a fresh proof that the latter was a dangerous power
to the state.

The resolution of censure was at last passed by a vote of twenty-six to
twenty, and Jackson, in a fury, sent in a written protest against it,
which the Senate refused to receive. The excitement all over the country
was intense throughout the struggle. The suffering, which was really
caused by the president's act, but which was attributed by his
supporters to the machinations of the Bank, was very real; even Benton
admitted this, although contending that it was not a natural result of
the policy pursued, but had been artificially excited--or, as he very
clumsily phrased it, "though fictitious and forged, yet the distress
was real, and did an immensity of damage." Neither Jackson nor Benton
yielded an inch to the outside pressure; the latter was the soul of the
fight in Congress, making over thirty speeches during the struggle.

During the debate on receiving the president's protest, Benton gave
notice of his intention at an early day to move to expunge from the
journal the resolution of censure. This idea was entirely his own, and
he gave the notice without having consulted anybody. It was, however, a
motion after Jackson's own heart, as the latter now began to look upon
the affair as purely personal to himself. His party accepted this view
of the matter with a servile alacrity only surpassed by the way in which
its leaders themselves bowed down before the mob; and for the next two
years the state elections were concerned purely with personal politics,
the main point at issue in the choice for every United States senator
being, whether he would or would not support Benton's expunging
resolution. The whole affair seems to us so puerile that we can hardly
understand the importance attached to it by the actors themselves. But
the men who happened at that period to be the leaders in public affairs
were peculiarly and frankly incapable of separating in their minds
matters merely affecting themselves from matters affecting their
constituents. Each firmly believed that if he was not the whole state,
he was at least a most important fraction of it; and this was as plainly
seen in Webster's colossal egoism and the frank vanity of Henry Clay as
in Benton's ponderous self-consciousness and the all-pervading
personality of Andrew Jackson.

Some of the speeches on the expunging resolution show delicious,
although entirely unconscious, humor. If there ever was a wholly
irrational state of mind it was that in which the Jacksonians
perpetually kept themselves. Every canvass on Jackson's behalf was one
of sound, fury, and excitement, of appeal to the passions, prejudices,
and feelings, but never the reason, of the people. A speech for him was
generally a mere frantic denunciation of whatever and whoever was
opposed to him, coupled with fulsome adulation of "the old hero." His
supporters rarely indeed spoke to the cool judgment of the country, for
the very excellent reason that the cool judgment of the country was apt
to be against them. Such being the case, it is amusing to read in
Benton's speech on receiving the protest the following sentences,
apparently uttered in solemn good faith, and with sublime
unconsciousness of irony:--

    To such a community [the American body politic]--in an appeal on a
    great question of constitutional law to the understandings of such a
    people--declamation, passion, epithets, opprobrious language, will
    stand for nothing. They will float harmless and unheeded through the
    empty air, and strike in vain upon the ear of a sober and
    dispassionate tribunal. Indignation, real or affected; wrath,
    however hot; fury, however enraged; asseverations, however violent;
    denunciation, however furious, will avail nothing. Facts, inexorable
    facts, are all that will be attended to; reason, calm and
    self-possessed, is all that will be listened to.

The description of the mass of Jacksonian voters as forming "a sober and
dispassionate tribunal" is an artistic touch of fancy quite unique, but
admirably characteristic of Benton, whose statements always rose
vigorously to the necessities of the occasion.

Webster, in an effort to make the best of untoward circumstances,
brought in a bill to re-charter the Bank for a short period, at the same
time doing away with some of the features that were objectionable in the
old charter. This bill might have passed, had it not been opposed by the
extreme Bank men, including Clay and Calhoun. In the course of the
debate over it Benton delivered a very elaborate and carefully studied
speech in favor of hard money and a currency of the precious metals; a
speech which is to this day well worth careful reading. Some of his
financial theories were crude and confused; but on the main question he
was perfectly sound. Both he and Jackson deserve great credit for having
done much to impress the popular mind with the benefit of hard, that is
to say honest, money. Benton was the strongest hard-money man then in
public life, being, indeed, popularly nicknamed "Old Bullion." He
thoroughly appreciated that a metallic currency was of more vital
importance to the laboring men and to men of small capital generally
than to any of the richer classes. A metallic currency is always surer
and safer than a paper currency; where it exists a laboring man
dependent on his wages need fear less than any other member of the
community the evils of bad banking. Benton's idea of the danger to the
masses from "the money power" was exaggerated; but in advocating a sound
gold currency he took the surest way to overcome any possible dangerous
tendency. A craze for "soft," or dishonest, money--a greenback movement,
or one for short weight silver dollars--works more to the disadvantage
of the whole mass of the people than even to that of the capitalists; it
is a move directly in the interests of "the money power," which its
loud-mouthed advocates are ostensibly opposing in the interests of
democracy.

Benton continued his speeches. The panic was now subsiding; there had
not been time for Jackson's ruinous policy of making deposits in
numerous state banks, and thereby encouraging wild inflation of credit,
to bear fruit and, as it afterwards did, involve the whole country in
financial disaster. Therefore Benton was able to exult greatly over the
favorable showing of affairs in the report of the secretary of the
treasury. He also procured the passage of a gold currency law, which,
however, fixed the ratio of value between gold and silver at sixteen to
one; an improper proportion, but one which had prevailed for three
centuries in the Spanish-American countries, from which he copied it. In
consequence of this law gold, long banished, became once more a
circulating medium of exchange.

The Bank of the United States afterwards was turned into the State Bank
of Pennsylvania; it was badly managed and finally became insolvent. The
Jacksonians accepted its downfall as a vindication of their policy; but
in reality it was due to causes not operative at the time of the great
struggle between the president and the Senate over its continued
existence. Certainly by no possible financial policy could it have
produced such widespread ruin and distress as did the system introduced
by Jackson.

Long after the Bank controversy had lost all practical bearing it
continued to be agitated by the chief parties to it, who still felt sore
from the various encounters. Jackson assailed it again in his message; a
friendly committee of the Senate investigated it and reported in its
favor, besides going out of their way to rake up charges against Jackson
and Benton. The latter replied in a long speech, and became involved in
personalities with the chairman, Tyler of Virginia. Neither side paid
attention to any but the partisan aspect of the question, and the
discussions were absolutely profitless.

The whole matter was threshed over again and again, long after nothing
but chaff was left, during the debates on Benton's expunging resolution.
Few now would defend this resolution. The original resolution of censure
may have been of doubtful propriety; but it was passed, was entered on
the record, and had become a part of the journal of the Senate. It would
have been perfectly proper to pass another resolution condemning or
reversing the original one, and approving the course of the president;
but it was in the highest degree improper to set about what was in form
falsifying the record. Still, Benton found plenty of precedents in the
annals of other legislative bodies for what he proposed to do, and the
country, as a whole, backed him up heartily. He was further stimulated
by the knowledge that there was probably no other legislative act in
which Jackson took such intense interest, or which could so gratify his
pride; the mortification to Clay and Calhoun would be equally great.
Benton's motion failed more than once, but the complexion of the Senate
was rapidly changed by the various states substituting Democratic for
Whig or anti-Jackson senators. Some of the changes were made, as in
Virginia, by senators refusing to vote for the expunging resolution, as
required by the state legislatures, and then resigning their seats,
pursuant to a ridiculous theory of the ultra Democrats, which, if
carried out, would completely nullify the provision for a six year's
senatorial term. Finally, at the very close of Jackson's administration,
Benton found himself with a fair majority behind him, and made the final
move. His speech was of course mainly filled with a highly colored
account of the blessings wrought for the American people by Andrew
Jackson, and equally of course the latter was compared at length to a
variety of ancient Roman worthies. The final scene in the Senate had an
element of the comic about it. The expungers held a caucus and agreed to
sit the session out until the resolution was passed; and with prudent
forethought Benton, well aware that when hungry and tired his followers
might show less inflexibility of purpose, provided in an adjoining
committee-room "an ample supply of cold hams, turkeys, rounds of beef,
pickles, wines, and cups of hot coffee," wherewith to inspirit the
faint-hearted.

Fortified by the refreshments, the expungers won a complete victory. If
the language of Jackson's admirers was overdrawn and strained to the
last degree in lauding him for every virtue that he had or had not, it
must be remembered that his opponents went quite as far wrong on the
other side in their denunciations and extravagant prophecies of gloom.
Webster made a very dignified and forcible speech in closing the
argument against the resolution, but Calhoun and Clay were much less
moderate,--the latter drawing a vivid picture of a rapidly approaching
reign of lawless military violence, and asserting that his opponents had
"extinguished one of the brightest and purest lights that ever burnt at
the altar of civil liberty." As a proper finale Jackson, to show his
appreciation, gave a great dinner to the expungers and their wives,
Benton sitting at the head of the table. Jackson and Benton solemnly
thought that they were taking part in a great act of justice, and were
amusingly unable to see the comic side of their acts. They probably
really believed most of their own denunciations of the Bank, and very
possibly thought that the wickedness of its followers might tempt them
to do any desperate deed. At any rate they enjoyed posing alike to
themselves and to the public as persons of antique virtue, who had
risked both life and reputation in a hazardous but successful attempt to
save the liberties of the people from the vast and hostile forces of the
aristocratic "money power."

The best verdict on the expunging resolution was given by Webster when
he characterized the whole affair as one which, if it were not regarded
as a ruthless violation of a sacred instrument, would appear to be
little elevated above the character of a contemptible farce.




CHAPTER VII.

THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE SURPLUS.


Benton was supremely self-satisfied with the part he had played in the
struggle with the Bank. But very few thinking men would now admit that
his actions, as a whole, on the occasion in question, were to his
credit, although in the matter of the branch drafts he was perfectly
right, and in that of the re-charter at least occupied defensible
ground. His general views on monetary matters, however, were sound, and
on some of the financial questions that shortly arose he occupied a
rather lonely pre-eminence of good sense among his fellow senators; such
being particularly the case as regards the various mischievous schemes
in relation to disposing of the public lands, and of the money drawn
from their sale. The revenue derived from all sources, including these
sales of public lands, had for some years been much in excess of the
governmental expenses, and a surplus had accumulated in the treasury.
This surplus worked more damage than any deficit would have done.

There were gold mines in the Southern States, which had been growing
more and more productive; and, as the cost of freighting the bullion was
excessive, a bill was introduced to establish branch mints at New
Orleans and in the gold regions of Georgia and North Carolina. Benton
advocated this strongly, as a constitutional right of the South and
West, and as greatly in the interest of those two sections; and also as
being another move in favor of a hard-money currency as opposed to one
of paper. There was strong opposition to the bill; many of the Whigs
having been carried so far by their heated devotion to the United States
Bank in its quarrel that they had become paper-money men. But the vote
was neither sectional nor partisan in its character. Clay led the
opposition, while Webster supported Benton.

Before this time propositions to distribute among the states the revenue
from the public lands had become common; and they were succeeded by
propositions to distribute the lands themselves, and then by others to
distribute all the surplus revenue. Calhoun finally introduced an
amendment to the Constitution to enable the surplus in the treasury
during the next eight years to be distributed among the various states;
the estimate being that for the time mentioned there would be about nine
millions surplus annually. Benton attacked the proposal very ably,
showing the viciousness of a scheme which would degrade every state
government into the position of a mendicant, and would allow money to be
collected from the citizens with one hand in order to be given back to
them with the other; and also denying that the surplus would reach
anything like the dimensions indicated. He ridiculed the idea of making
a constitutional amendment to cover so short a period of time; and
stated that he would greatly prefer to see the price paid for public
lands by incoming settlers reduced, and what surplus there was expended
on strengthening the defenses of the United States against foreign
powers. This last proposition was eminently proper. We were then, as
always, in our chronic state of utter defenselessness against any
hostile attack, and yet were in imminent danger of getting embroiled
with at least one great power--France. Our danger is always that we
shall spend too little, and not too much, in keeping ourselves prepared
for foreign war. Calhoun's resolution was a total failure, and was never
even brought to a vote.

Benton's proposed method of using the surplus came in with peculiar
propriety on account of the conduct of the Whigs and Nullifiers in
joining to oppose the appropriation of three millions of dollars for
purposes of defense, which was provided for in the general fortification
bill. The House passed this bill by a great majority. It was eminently
proper that we should at once take steps to provide for the very
possible contingency of a war with France, as the relations with that
power were growing more threatening every day; but the opposition of the
anti-Jackson men to the administration and to all its measures had
become so embittered that they were willing to run the risk of seriously
damaging the national credit and honor, if they could thereby score a
point against their political adversaries. Accordingly, under the lead
of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, they defeated the bill in the Senate, in
spite of all that could be done to save it by Benton, who, whatever his
faults, was always patriotic. The appropriation had been very irregular
in form, and under ordinary circumstances there would have been good
justification for inquiring into it before permitting its passage; but
under the circumstances its defeat at the moment was most unfortunate.
For the president had been pressing France, even to the point of
tolerably plain threats, in order to induce or compel her to fulfill the
conditions of the recent treaty by which she had bound herself to pay a
considerable indemnity, long owing by her to the United States for
depredations on our commerce. Now she menaced war, avowedly on the
ground that we were unprepared to resist her; and this vote in the
Senate naturally led the French government to suppose that Jackson was
not sustained by the country in the vigorous position which he had
assumed. In speaking on the message of the president which alluded to
this state of affairs, Benton strongly advocated our standing firmly for
our rights, making a good speech, which showed much historical learning.
He severely reproached the anti-administration senators for their
previous conduct in causing the loss of the defense appropriation bill,
and for preferring to do worse than waste the surplus by distributing it
among the different states instead of applying it according to the
provisions of that wise measure.

This brought on a bitter wrangle, in which Benton certainly had the best
of it. Calhoun was in favor of humiliating non-resistance; he never
advocated warlike measures when the dignity of the nation was at stake,
fond though he was of threatening violence on behalf of slavery or that
form of secession known as nullification. Benton quoted from speeches in
the French Chamber of Deputies to show that the French were encouraged
to take the position that they did on account of the action of the
Senate, and the disposition shown by a majority among the senators
rather to pull down the president in a party struggle than to uphold him
in his efforts to save the national honor in a contest with France. A
curious feature of his speech was that in which he warned the latter
power that, in the event of a conflict, it would have to do with a
branch of the same race which, "from the days of Agincourt and Crecy, of
Blenheim and Ramillies, down to the days of Salamanca and Waterloo, has
always known perfectly well how to deal with the impetuous and fiery
courage of the French." This sudden out-cropping of what, in Bentonian
English, might be called Pan-Anglo-Saxon sentiment was all the more
surprising inasmuch as both Benton himself and the party to which he
belonged were strongly anti-English in their way of looking at our
foreign policy, at least so far as North America was concerned. In the
end France yielded, though trying to maintain her dignity by stating
that she had not done so, and the United States received what was due
them.

Benton strongly opposed the payment by the United States of the private
claims of its citizens for damages arising from the French spoliations
at the end of the last century. He pointed out that the effort to pay
such claims, scores of years after the time of their accruing, rarely
benefits any of the parties originally in interest, and can only do real
service to dishonest speculators. His speech on this matter would not be
bad reading for some of the pension-jobbing congressmen of the present
day, and their supporters; but as concerned these French claims he could
have been easily answered.

In the controversy over the bill introduced by Clay, to distribute the
revenue derived from the public lands among the states for the next five
years, Benton showed to great advantage compared both to the introducer
of the bill himself, and to Webster, his supporter. He had all along
taken the view of the land question that would be natural to a
far-seeing Western statesman desirous of encouraging immigration. He
wished the public lands to be sold in small parcels to actual settlers,
at prices that would allow any poor man who was thrifty to take up a
claim. He had already introduced a bill to sell them at graduated
prices, the minimum being established at a dollar and twenty-five cents
an acre; but if land remained unsold at this rate for three years it was
then to be sold for what it would bring in the market. This bill passed
the Senate, but failed in the House.

In opposing Clay's distribution scheme Benton again brought forward his
plan of using the surplus to provide for the national defenses; and in
his speech showed the strongly national turn of his mind, saying:--

    In this great system of national defense the whole Union is equally
    interested; for the country, in all that concerns its defenses, is
    but a unit, and every section is interested in the defense of every
    other section, and every individual citizen is interested in the
    defense of the whole population. It is in vain to say that the navy
    is on the sea, and the fortifications on the sea-board, and that the
    citizens in the interior states, or in the valley of the
    Mississippi, have no interest in these remote defenses. Such an idea
    is mistaken and delusive; the inhabitant of Missouri or of Indiana
    has a direct interest in keeping open the mouths of the rivers,
    defending the sea-port towns, and preserving a naval force that will
    protect the produce of his labor in crossing the ocean and arriving
    safely in foreign markets.

Benton's patriotism always included the whole country in spite of the
strength of his local sympathies.

The bill passed the Senate by a rather close vote, and went to the
House, where it soon become evident that it was doomed to failure. There
was another bill, practically of much the same import, before the
Senate, providing for the distribution of the surplus among the states
in proportion to their electoral votes, but omitting the excellent
proviso concerning the defenses. To suit the views of Calhoun and the
sticklers for strict construction generally, the form of this rival bill
was changed, so that the "distribution" purported to be a "deposit"
merely; the money being nominally only loaned to the states, who pledged
their faith to return it when Congress should call for it. As it was of
course evident that such a loan would never be repaid, the substitution
of "deposit" for "distribution" can only be regarded as a verbal change
to give the doctrinaires a loop-hole for escape from their previous
position; they all took advantage of it, and the bill received
overwhelming support, and was passed by both houses.

Benton, however, stood out against it to the last, and in a very
powerful speech foretold the evils which the plan would surely work. He
scornfully exposed the way in which some of the members were trying, by
a trick of wording, to hide the nature of the bill they were enacting
into a law, and thus to seem to justify themselves for the support they
were giving it. "It is in name a deposit; in form, a loan; in essence
and design, a distribution," said Benton. He ridiculed the attitude of
the hair-splitting strict constructionists, like Calhoun, who had
always pretended most scrupulously to respect the exact wording of the
Constitution, and who had previously refused to vote for distribution on
the ground that it was unconstitutional:--

    At the commencement of the present session a proposition was made
    [by Calhoun] to amend the Constitution, to permit this identical
    distribution to be made. That proposition is now upon our calendar,
    for the action of Congress. All at once it is discovered that a
    change of name will do as well as a change of the Constitution.
    Strike out the word "distribute" and insert the word "deposit," and
    incontinently the impediment is removed; the constitutional
    difficulty is surmounted, and the distribution can be made.

He showed that to the states themselves the moneys distributed would
either be useless, or else--and much more probably--they would be
fruitful sources of corruption and political debauchery. He was quite
right. It would have been very much better to have destroyed the surplus
than to have distributed it as was actually done. None of the states
gained any real benefit by the transaction; most were seriously harmed.
At the best, the money was squandered in the rage for public
improvements that then possessed the whole people; often it was stolen
outright, or never accounted for. In the one case, it was an incentive
to extravagance; in the other, it was a corruption fund. Yet the
popular feeling was strongly in favor of the measure at the time, and
Benton was almost the only public man of note who dared to resist it. On
this occasion, as in the closing act of the struggle with the
Nullifiers, he showed more backbone than did his great chief; for
Jackson signed the bill, although criticising it most forcibly and
pungently.

The success of this measure naturally encouraged the presentation of
others. Clay attempted to revive his land-money distribution bill, but
was defeated, mainly through Benton's efforts. Three or four other
similar schemes, including one of Calhoun's, also failed. Finally a
clause providing for a further "deposit" of surplus moneys with the
states was tacked to a bill appropriating money for defenses, thereby
loading it down so that it was eventually lost. In the Senate the
"deposit" amendment was finally struck out, in spite of the opposition
of 

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