US History/US History (Bureau Development Inc.)(1991).ISO/dp/0115/01152.txt

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$Unique_ID{USH01152}
$Pretitle{103}
$Title{The Senate - 1789-1989
Chapter 8   The Senate Censures Andrew Jackson:  1833-1837}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Byrd, Robert C.}
$Affiliation{US Senate}
$Subject{senate
president
jackson
clay
bank
benton
censure
states
senator
webster}
$Volume{Vol. 1}
$Date{1989}
$Log{Champion of the Bank of U.S.*0115201.scf
A Man for All Issues*0115202.scf
}
Book:        The Senate - 1789-1989
Author:      Byrd, Robert C.
Affiliation: US Senate
Volume:      Vol. 1
Date:        1989

Chapter 8   The Senate Censures Andrew Jackson:  1833-1837

March 15, 1982.

     Mr. President, the Constitution clearly defines the Senate's impeachment
role, as well as its power to discipline its own members.  In 1868, the Senate
sat as a court of impeachment for President Andrew Johnson and acquitted him
by only one vote.  Again, in 1974, the Senate prepared to exercise its powers
as an impeachment court for Richard Nixon, prior to his resignation.  With
regard to its own members, since 1789, this body has chosen to discipline
eight senators by means of censure.  The censure of a president, however,
lacks a constitutional basis.  Nonetheless, on March 28, 1834, for the first
and only time in its history, the Senate voted to censure President Andrew
Jackson.  The dramatic story of how this censure came about, its equally
dramatic conclusion, and its historical significance will be the subject of my
remarks today in my continuing series of addresses on the history of the
United States Senate.

     The censure of President Jackson was a momentous occasion in the birth of
the Whig party and the reuniting of three of the most famous United States
senators:  Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and
Daniel Webster of Massachusetts.  The issue behind the censure was the Bank of
the United States, about which I spoke at length during my last address.  To
briefly recapitulate, President Jackson had vetoed the rechartering of the
Second Bank of the United States in 1832 on the grounds that the bank was
unconstitutional, aristocratic, and had failed to establish a sound and
uniform currency.  The Senate attempted and failed to override Jackson's veto.
Later that year, the bank issue played a leading part in the presidential
election in which President Jackson won a decisive victory in his contest
against the National Republican candidate, Henry Clay.

     After the election, the president met with his cabinet to discuss the
government's deposits in the bank.  Jackson announced that he believed the
bank to be insolvent and that the government should withdraw its funds - both
to protect the public money, and to prevent the bank from using the funds in a
lobbying attempt to influence Congress to override the presidential veto.  The
president then asked Congress to investigate the safety of the government's
deposits in the bank, but when the House of Representatives conducted an
investigation and reported back that the deposits were indeed safe, Jackson
simply ignored their unwanted conclusion.

     Since Treasury Secretary Louis McLane opposed the transfer of government
funds on the grounds that Congress would not support the idea, Jackson
appointed him secretary of state and named a new treasury secretary, William
J. Duane, a staunch anti-bank man.  But Jackson soon discovered that Duane,
too, opposed removal of the government's deposits, because he believed the
action would shake the public's confidence and cause an economic downswing;
thus, President Jackson, strong-willed as he was, removed a second treasury
secretary.  This time, he appointed his trusted attorney general, Roger Taney,
who, he was confident, would carry out presidential orders.  The government
began to withdraw its funds from the national bank and deposit them in a
variety of state banks.

     As Jackson and Taney were implementing this policy, the equally
strong-willed president of the Bank of the United States was carrying on his
own plan of economic sabotage.  Nicholas Biddle conducted a policy of
restricting credit and calling in the bank's loans, calculated to cause an
economic contraction that would arouse the public against Jackson's program.
At one time, historians attributed the depression that followed solely to the
clash between Jackson and Biddle over the bank.  More recent studies have
found the American depression of the 1830's to have been part of a world-wide
depression, made all the worse in the United States by the political crises
over the nation's banking system.  But whether Nicholas Biddle was a major
cause of, or merely a contributor to, the economic collapse, certainly he and
his political allies, Clay and Webster, believed that the hard times would
work in their favor and to Jackson's detriment.  President Jackson, for his
part, refused to move an inch.  "I never will recharter the United States
Bank, or sign a charter for any other bank, so long as my name is Andrew
Jackson," he told one group of businessmen.

[See Champion of the Bank of U.S.: Nicholas Biddle, president of the Bank of
the United States, clashed with Jackson over its future.]

     When the Twenty-third Congress met in December 1833, the Democrats had a
comfortable majority of 147 members in the House as opposed to 113 members
representing the National Republicans, the Anti-Masons, the Nullifiers, and
the States' Rights parties (all of which would soon loosely combine to make up
the Whig party).  In the Senate, however, the Clay, Calhoun, and Webster
combination counted 28 senators on their side, while the Democrats had only
20.

     With this margin behind him, the masterful Henry Clay rose in the Senate
to challenge Jackson on the bank issue.  On December 10, 1833, Clay called his
colleagues' attention to "a subject perhaps exceeding in importance any other
question likely to come before the present Congress."  By this, he meant
Jackson's removal of the government deposits from the bank.  The time had now
come, said Clay, for Congress to examine the secretary of the treasury's
reasons for removing the funds and to determine whether his stated reasons
were fully justified.  Clay then offered the following resolution:

Resolved, That the President of the United States be requested to inform the
Senate whether a paper, under the date of the 18th day of September, 1833,
purporting to have been read by him to the heads of the several departments,
relating to the deposit[s] of the public money in the treasury of the United
States, and alleged to have been published by his authority, be genuine or
not; and, if it be genuine, that he be also requested to cause a copy of the
said paper to be laid before the Senate.

     Mr. President, on December 11, 1833, after a heated debate, the Senate
adopted Clay's resolution by a vote of 23 to 18; however, the next day,
President Jackson sent a message flatly declining to comply with the
resolution:

The Executive is a co-ordinate and independent branch of the Government
equally with the Senate; add I have yet to learn under what constitutional
authority that branch of the Legislature has a right to require of me an
account of any communication, either verbally or in writing, made to the heads
of departments acting as a cabinet council.

     Although Jackson did not use the phrase, he was invoking what we today
would call executive privilege.

     John Quincy Adams, former president and, at that time, a member of the
House of Representatives, noted in his diary that there was a tone of
"insolence and insult" in Jackson's messages to Congress, particularly his
response to the Senate's resolution, and that this tone had increased since
Jackson's reelection.  The legislature, Adams noted, had never witnessed such
treatment.  "The domineering tone has heretofore been usually on the side of
the legislative bodies to the Executive, and Clay has not been sparing in the
use of it.  He is now paid in his own coin."

     Jackson's refusal to comply with the resolution led Clay to escalate his
offensive.  On the day after Christmas in 1833, Clay introduced two
resolutions of censure against the president.  One was based on his dismissal
of Treasury Secretary Duane, and the other on the grounds that Jackson's
stated reasons for withdrawing government deposits from the bank were
"unsatisfactory and insufficient."

     Clay defended these resolutions in one of the most famous of his Senate
speeches.  "We are," he said, "in the midst of a revolution, hitherto
bloodless, but rapidly tending towards a total change of the pure republican
character of the Government, and to the concentration of all power in the
hands of one man."  Jackson had "paralyzed" Congress by his unprecedented use
of the veto, particularly of the pocket veto which did not permit a
congressional override.  Jackson was undermining the Senate's authority to
approve nominations by his constant removal of officers and by his
reappointment of persons whom the Senate had already rejected.  Worst of all,
the president was seeking to seize Congress' power of the purse, thus
combining "the two most important powers of civil government":  the sword and
the purse.

     With wit, eloquence, logic, and appeals to reason and to passion, Clay
verbally assaulted the president and his actions.  Clay's speech lasted three
days and filled eighteen pages of the Register of Debates.  The president had
assumed a dangerous and unconstitutional power, said Clay, for which the
Senate must censure him:

The eyes and the hopes of the American people are anxiously turned to Congress
. . . .  The premonitory symptoms of despotism are upon us; and if Congress
does not apply an instantaneous and effective remedy, the fatal collapse will
soon come on, and we shall die - ignobly die - base, mean, and abject slaves;
the scorn and contempt of mankind; unpitied, unwept, unmourned!

     With these words, Clay concluded his speech, and the Register of Debates
reported that his remarks were followed "by such loud and repeated applause
from the immense crowd which thronged the galleries and lobbies" that Vice
President Van Buren ordered the galleries cleared.

     Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and other Jacksonian Democrats then rose
to the president's defense.  The debate over the removal of the deposits and
the censure of Jackson lasted for the remainder of the first session of the
Twenty-third Congress, from January through March 1834.  This was the longest
period the Senate had devoted itself to a single subject up to that time.
Henry Clay noted that "the period which had elapsed was long enough for a
vessel to have passed the Cape of Good Hope, or to have made a return voyage
from Europe."  Page after page of the Register of Debates is devoted entirely
to the deposits issue, the bank, and the "public distress" caused by the
economic uncertainties.  Memorials were received from states, citizens, and
private interest groups.  Senators on both sides amassed impressive and
intricate statistics to buttress their arguments.

     Of the three Senate giants lined up against the president - Clay,
Calhoun, and Webster - each had different reasons for supporting the
resolutions.  Henry Clay wanted to embarrass Jackson and Van Buren politically
and to set the stage for a new political coalition to challenge them.  John C.
Calhoun cared little about the bank as an issue.  He could just as well have
supported Jackson's position, except for his total hostility toward the
president.  In his speeches in the Senate, Calhoun used the bank issue
primarily as an example of the correctness of his own earlier break with
Jackson over tariff and nullification issues.  Daniel Webster at first
attempted to assume the statesman's role by seeking a compromise among Clay,
Calhoun, and Jackson.  Webster, as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee,
proposed a six-year extension of the bank's charter to allow it to wind up its
business and for the redepositing of government funds in the bank.  Webster's
compromise, however, satisfied neither side.  Finally, Webster, too, chose
sides with the anti-Jacksonians and supported the censure resolution.

     Mr. President, the coming together of these three senators was the first
step in the formation of a new American political party, the Whig party, which
would soon absorb the old National Republicans, the Anti-Masons, and the
States' Righters, as well as a few Democratic converts.  The term Whig came
from British politics and was popular in America during the time of the
Revolution.  It signified opposition to the crown and to the Tories who
supported the king - in this case, King Andrew.  The Whigs, however, were
reluctant to allow Jackson's supporters to claim a monopoly on the coveted
term Democrats, and, at least until 1840, they called themselves Democratic
Whigs.  But, for the most part, after 1834, the American political scene was
divided between Democrats and Whigs.

     The bank war and the depression that followed caused American political
leaders to choose sides between the two parties.  Historian Michael Holt has
pointed out that twenty-eight of the forty-one Democrats who voted for
rechartering of the bank in 1832 had become Whigs by 1836.  Even Jackson's
trusted friends and lieutenants from Tennessee - such as John Overton, John
Eaton, and Hugh Lawson White - split with the president on the issue of
removing government deposits from the bank.  North Carolina Democrat Willie P.
Mangum, of whom the Senate recently acquired a handsome portrait which hangs
in the corridor just outside the Senate chamber, bolted from the Democratic
party over this issue and joined the Whigs.

     That old Jacksonian, Thomas Hart Benton, commented on the uniting of "Mr.
Clay, Mr. Calhoun, and Mr. Webster . . . with all their friends, and the Bank
of the United States," against General Jackson.  In a very shrewd analysis,
Benton wrote that "public men continue to attack their adversaries in power,
and oppose their measures, while having private griefs of their own to
redress, and personal ends of their own to accomplish."  Henry Clay, Benton
pointed out, was responding to his defeat in the last presidential election by
Jackson.  Calhoun was still quarreling with the president over Jackson's
discovery that Calhoun had sided against his raid of Florida during the Monroe
administration.  "Their movements all took a personal and vindictive, instead
of a legislative and remedial, nature."

     Benton did not add Daniel Webster to this list, but we know that Webster
also had "personal ends" to accomplish.  At the very time that Senator Webster
was chairing the Finance Committee and leading the struggle against Jackson's
bank plans, Webster was under retainer to the Bank of the United States!  In a
letter to Nicholas Biddle on December 21, 1833, Webster reminded Biddle that
his retainer had not been "renewed, or refreshed, as usual.  If it is wished
that my relation to the Bank should be continued, it may be well to send me
the usual retainer."  This surely was one of the most egregious breaches of
ethics in the history of the Senate, and one which will ever stain the
reputation of Daniel Webster.

     There was, indeed, a strange paradox about Daniel Webster - the "Godlike
Daniel," whose speeches schoolboys of the nineteenth century memorized, whose
prodigious efforts helped hold this nation together in the perilous years
before the great Civil War; and "Black Dan," whose personal weaknesses,
particularly over money, kept him from the presidency he sought.  The two
sides of Daniel Webster have been admirably presented in Irving Bartlett's
recent biography, Daniel Webster, and in Senator John F. Kennedy's stirring
book, Profiles in Courage.

     As Clay, Calhoun, and Webster flailed at Jackson, and Benton and other
Democrats stood in his defense, another figure - a surrogate for the president
- watched the scene with some bemusement.  This was Vice President Martin Van
Buren, the "Little Magician," who had helped put together the Democratic
coalition which elected Jackson, and who had succeeded Calhoun in the vice
presidential chair.  Jackson, in his second term, was an old and ill man, who,
at that point, was unlikely to run for a third term.  Van Buren was then his
probable successor, and Henry Clay went out of his way to draw Van Buren into
the fray.  At one point during the debate over Jackson's censure, Clay rose in
the Senate and addressed himself directly to Van Buren, the presiding officer.
Clay urged Van Buren to intercede with Jackson to persuade him to "abandon his
fatal experiment."

     "Go to him," Clay implored, "and tell him, without exaggeration, but in
the language of truth and sincerity, the actual condition of his bleeding
country.  Tell him it is nearly ruined and undone by the measures which he has
been induced to put in operation."  Clay was playing to the galleries - both
those present in the Senate chamber and those who would read his speech
reprinted in their newspapers.  Indeed, there were loud sobbings heard from
the ladies in the galleries by the time Clay had finished.  We may assume that
his object was to tie Van Buren more closely in the public's mind to Jackson's
anti-bank activities and to have him share the blame for the existing economic
crisis.  Van Buren, clever politician that he was, clearly recognized what
Clay was up to.  According to Senator Benton's Thirty Years' View, Van Buren
"maintained the utmost decorum of countenance, looking respectfully, and even
innocently at the speaker, all the while, as if treasuring up every word he
said to be faithfully repeated to the President."  But when Clay had finished,
Van Buren motioned to another senator to take his seat as presiding officer.
The vice president then approached Senator Clay, but, instead of responding to
his oratory, Van Buren merely asked for a pinch of Clay's fine maccaboy snuff
and, having taken it, turned and nonchalantly walked away.

     Finally, on Friday, March 28, 1834, the Senate was ready to vote on
Clay's resolutions.  Former President Adams, viewing the scene from the House,
was greatly opposed to the censure of his nemesis and successor, Andrew
Jackson, and lobbied with friends in the Senate against it.  However, he
noted, they voted for the censure "under the domineering influence of Mr.
Clay."  By a vote of 28 to 18, the Senate found the reasons given by the
secretary of the treasury for removal of government funds from the bank to be
unsatisfactory.  Then, by a vote of 26 to 20, the United States Senate
resolved that "the President, in the last executive proceedings in relation to
the public revenue, has assumed upon himself authority and power not conferred
by the constitution and laws, but in derogation of both."  Clay, Calhoun, and
Webster all voted in favor of censuring President Andrew Jackson.

     Senator Benton found this resolution to be "nothing but an empty
fulmination - a mere personal censure - having no relation to any business or
proceeding in the Senate."  From the moment of its passage, Senator Benton
vowed not only to repeal the offensive resolution but also to have it stricken
from the Senate Journal.  Vowing to keep the matter alive, Benton would bring
the motion up at the start of each session of Congress.

     For his part, President Jackson rejected the resolution as illegal and
unconstitutional and refused to accept its rebuke or allow it to change his
policies.  On April 17, he sent the Senate a lengthy protest, filling ten
pages o the Register of Debates.  The Constitution, said Jackson, provided for
the possible impeachment of a president by the House and conviction by the
Senate, but not for his censure by a single body of Congress.  "The resolution
in question was introduced, discussed, and passed, not as a joint, but as a
separate resolution," Jackson's protest went on.  "It asserts no legislative
power; proposes no legislative action; and neither possesses the form nor any
of the attributes of a legislative measure."  After defending his policies
concerning the bank, Jackson concluded, "The resolution of the Senate contains
an imputation upon my private as well as upon my public character; and as it
must stand forever on their Journals, I cannot close this substitute for that
defence which I have not been allowed to present in the ordinary form, without
remarking, that I have lived in vain, if it be necessary to enter into a
formal vindication of my character and purposes from such an imputation."
Jackson scoffed at the charge that he was motivated by ambition:

No; the ambition which leads me on, is an anxious desire and a fixed
determination, to return to the people, unimpaired, the sacred trust they have
confided to my charge - to heal the wounds of the constitution and preserve it
from further violation; to persuade my countrymen, so far as I may, that it is
not in a splendid Government, supported by powerful monopolies and
aristocratical establishments, that they will find happiness, or their
liberties protection, but in a plain system, void of pomp - protecting all,
and granting favors to none - dispensing its blessings like the dews of
heaven, unseen and unfelt, save in the freshness and beauty they contribute to
produce.

     Immediately after Jackson's protest was read to the Senate, Senator
George Poindexter of Mississippi stood up indignantly to denounce the message
and to move that the Senate refuse to receive it.  Thus, while one may find
Jackson's protest in the Register of Debates, a forerunner of the
Congressional Record, the Senate Journal merely states:  A message, in
writing, from the President of the United States by Mr. Donelson, his
Secretary, was communicated to the Senate; which, having been read, a motion
was made by Mr. Poindexter that the paper be not received; and, after debate,
on motion by Mr. Leigh, "The Senate adjourned."

     Four days later, the Senate again debated Poindexter's motion.  On this
occasion, it voted to reject the message on the grounds that the president

assumes powers in relation to the Senate not authorized by the constitution,
and calculated in its consequences to destroy that harmony which ought to
exist between the coordinate departments of the General Government, to
interfere with the Senate in the discharge of its duties, to degrade it in the
public opinion, and, finally, to destroy its independence, by subjecting its
rights and duties to the determination and control of the Chief Magistrate.

     I think it is safe to say that never before in the history of the United
States had relations between the president and the Senate sunk to such depths.
Perhaps only during the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson,
thirty-four years later, were executive legislative relations strained to such
a point of total alienation.

     The House of Representatives with its solid Democratic majority refused
to endorse the Senate's censure of the president, nor would it support Clay's
motion to restore government deposits to the bank.  The congressional
elections of 1834 also demonstrated that Henry Clay had misread the American
mood.  Instead of rallying to the support of the Whigs and driving the
Jacksonians from power, the voters increased the Democratic margin in the
House to 145 to 98.  The Whigs also lost their majority in the Senate, with
only 25 senators to the Democrats 27.  Even more significantly, several state
legislatures which had elected Whig senators switched to Democratic control.
These legislatures now voted to instruct their senators to vote to expunge the
censure resolution from the Senate Journal.  This matter of instruction proved
embarrassing to a number of Whigs who endorsed instruction as a matter of
principle but who could not bring themselves to vote in Jackson's favor under
any circumstance.

     It is important to remember that United States senators in the nineteenth
century, and until the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, were
elected by state legislatures rather than directly by the people.  Having
appointed their senators, many of these legislatures then felt they had a
right to instruct them how to vote on certain issues.  Some senators rejected
the right of instruction on the grounds that their offices were created by the
federal Constitution and, therefore, not controlled by the state governments.
The states, particularly those in the South, argued, in the words of the
Virginia legislature, that "the people are acknowledged to be the only
legitimate source of all legislation," and that instruction was the essence of
representative government.

     The North Carolina legislature instructed its senators to vote to expunge
the censure resolution, but Whig Senator Willie Mangum refused to comply with
their instructions.  The Virginia legislature also instructed its two
senators, but William C. Rives and John Tyler resigned rather than comply.
Tyler - a future president of the United States - felt he had no other choice
but to resign, since his first political action had been to vote to censure
Senator William Branch Giles for failing to follow the Virginia legislature's
instructions.  Tyler could not reverse himself now in good conscience.  After
Senator Rives resigned, the Virginia legislature elected Benjamin Watkins
Leigh in his place.  Leigh had been the principal author of the Virginia claim
to instruct its senators, but, ironically, he also strongly opposed tampering
with the Senate Journal.  Leigh then informed the legislature that he would
not obey their instruction because he believed expunging the Journal to be
unconstitutional; however, after he stood his ground on this issue, he
resigned from the Senate a few months later.

     Today, Mr. President, Benjamin Leigh is a little known United States
senator from a distant past.  We gain a colorful word picture of the man from
an account by an eyewitness, Henry A. Wise.  In his book, Seven Decades of the
Union, Wise described Senator Leigh's attack upon Thomas Hart Benton and his
expunging resolution in a Senate speech which ended with the words, "And Mr.
President, in that catechism which I learned at my mother's knee, I was taught
'to keep - to keep - to keep' my hands from picking and stealing, and my
tongue from evil speaking!"  Wrote Wise:

He was not a vehement orator in tone, but he was most earnest in utterance and
manner.  He had a soft, clear, flutelike voice, but it was not loud . . . .
He was a small man, yet in speaking seemed large, so elevated was he by his
theme, and so gallant and game was his mien.  He was lame, one leg shortened,
and wore a cork sole on one of his boots.  When about to be emphatic, he
usually caught his left wrist in his right hand and sank back on his lame leg,
pausing to poise himself, and, as he rose to the climax of what he was about
to utter, would bear upon his sound leg and rise on it with his hands free.

     Thus, when Leigh launched into his attack on Benton, he dropped back on
his lame leg, took his left wrist in his right hand, and gazed intensely at
Benton.

     Senator Leigh began low, uttered softly as far as the words "my mother's
knee," raised his voice at the words "I learned," and, pronouncing the words
"to keep" three times, each time louder and louder, he rose upon his sound
leg, loosed his wrist, and putting forward both hands, exclaimed, "My hands
from picking and stealing, and my tongue from evil speaking."

     According to Wise, a pin could have been heard to drop on the floor as
Leigh spoke.  Senator Benton sat back looking towards the wall, swinging his
leg over his chair, and avoiding Leigh's glare.

     With the Democrats in the majority in the Senate during the Twenty-fourth
Congress, Benton was determined to have his way and strike out the censure of
Jackson.  This was not strictly a pro- or anti-Jackson issue.  Some senators
opposed any changes made to the Senate Journal for any reason.  Benton had
lost a chance to expunge the Journal in 1835, when some Whig senators tried to
soften his resolution to "rescind, reverse, make null and void" the censure
rather than actually to remove it from the Journal.  Benton had reluctantly
gone along with his colleagues at first, but then Daniel Webster had risen to
crow, "Men may change, opinions may change, power may change, but, thanks to
the firmness of the Senate, the records of this body do not change."  Webster
charged that Benton had attempted to falsify the record, and moved to have
Benton's resolution tabled, which the Senate did by a vote of 27 to 20.
Immediately, Benton was on his feet.  "The exulting speech of Mr. Webster
restored me to my courage - made a man of me again," Benton later reported.
He submitted his resolution anew and once again pressed for ridding the record
of the censure.

[See A Man for All Issues: Senator Thomas Hart Benton fought to expunge
Jackson's censure.]

     Benton's long fight ended at the conclusion of the second session of the
Twenty-fourth Congress in 1837.  On Saturday evening, January 14, 1837, the
Democratic members of the Senate caucused at a Washington restaurant.  Martin
Van Buren had been elected president in November, defeating the primary Whig
candidate, William Henry Harrison.  Van Buren would be inaugurated on March 4.
An old and ill Andrew Jackson was preparing to leave the White House to return
to the Hermitage in Tennessee, and the Senate Democrats were determined that
Old Hickory should not retire with the blot of censure upon his name.  Their
meeting that night, Benton reported, had an "air of convivial entertainment."
Around midnight, they decided upon a method of procedure.  An oblong block of
black lines would be drawn around the original censure in the Journal with the
words:  "Expunged by order of the Senate."  Each Democratic senator then
pledged himself to support it, and agreed that there would be no adjournment
of the Senate after the resolution was introduced until it was passed.
Expecting a long and arduous session, the Democrats gave orders to have an
ample supply of cold ham, turkey, beef, pickles, wines, and cups of hot coffee
ready in a committee room off the Senate floor to last them through the
debate.

     As could be expected, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster all spoke out against
the measure.  Webster reminded the Senate of "its constitutional duty to keep
a journal and insisted that a record which is expunged, is not a record which
is kept, any more than a record which is destroyed can be a record which is
preserved."  Despite Webster's eloquence and his vehemence, the Democrats
would not be moved.  Democratic senators, knowing they had the votes to win,
came and went from the Senate chamber during the proceedings, helping
themselves to the feast they provided in the nearby committee room and
inviting their Whig colleagues to join them.  The Whigs, it appears, had lost
their appetites.

     By the time Webster had finished speaking, it was near midnight.  "The
dense masses which filled every inch of the room in the lobbies and the
galleries remained immovable," wrote Benton.  "No one went out:  no one could
get in.  The floor of the Senate was crammed with privileged persons, and it
seemed that all Congress was there."  When Benton called for the yeas and
nays, the vote was 24 to 19 to expunge the record.

     This was Benton's great moment of triumph, and he arose from his seat to
accept congratulations from those about him on the Senate floor.  The mood of
the Whigs and bank supporters was grim, and the situation in the chamber was
tense.  Fearing for Benton's life, his colleague from Missouri, Lewis Linn,
had brought pistols into the chamber to protect him.  Benton's wife, also
alarmed, stood at her husband's side, but the ebullient Benton pressed his way
through the crowd.  As Henry Wise, one of Benton's Whig opponents, watched,
Benton "was boisterously moving from man to man, reaching out his hand, until
he came to the Honorable Balie Peyton, of Tennessee, who waited his expected
offer of a touch with such a countenance of contempt and detestation that he
shrunk back, desisting from his gasconading, and resumed his seat."

     The Senate Journal for the Twenty-third Congress was carried into the
Senate chamber and placed on the desk of the secretary of the Senate, Asbury
Dickens, just in front of the presiding officer's desk.  According to Henry
Wise, the book

. . . seemed to resist the opening, the back was stiff, and it shut together
again, until pressed open wide, and the pages so held as to lay upon it the
rule by the straight edge of which the black lines were to be drawn.  We could
not but imagine the book of the journal as resisting the violation.  It seemed
like a living victim on the altar of sacrifice, and the scratch of the pen
alone was heard in the awful silence which prevailed when the gall of party
bitterness drew its lines in the blackness of darkness around the freedom and
independence of the Senate.

Henry Wise, of course, was grossly exaggerating, but his words give testament
to the bitterness the Whigs felt about the incident, which symbolized their
defeat in the bank war, in the struggle with Jackson, and in the presidential
election of 1836.

     No sooner had Secretary Dickens carried out the act, drawn the lines, and
expunged the censure, than the Senate chamber was thrown into turmoil and
uproar.  The Register of Debates records that "hisses, loud and repeated, were
heard from various parts of the gallery."  Senator William R. King of Alabama,
then serving as presiding officer, ordered that the galleries be cleared; but
Senator Benton wanted his supporters in the galleries to witness his triumph
and asked that they be permitted to remain while the "ruffians" who had caused
the disturbance should be ejected.  Benton pointed to a man in the gallery who
had "cried aloud some disorderly response" and ordered the sergeant at arms to
seize him.  "Here is one just above me, that may easily be identified - the
bank ruffian!"

     Senator King revoked his order to clear the galleries, and had the
sergeant at arms, John Shackford, bring forth a tall, well-dressed man in a
black overcoat who seemed to be the ringleader among the hecklers in the
galleries.  After the man was brought to the well of the Senate, Senator
Benton then said that "as the individual [has] been taken from among the
respectable audience in the gallery, and [has] been presented in this public
manner, with all eyes fixed upon him, he [has] perhaps been sufficiently
punished in his feelings."  Benton then moved to discharge the man from
custody, but several Whigs insisted that the man be permitted to speak in his
own defense.  "A citizen [has] been brought to the bar of the Senate," said
Senator Thomas Morris of Ohio, "and not informed for what reason, nor of what
offence he stood charged; and now it [is] moved that, without a hearing, he be
discharged from custody.  Call you this the justice of the Senate of the
United States?"  Senator King in the chair, however, pointed out that the man
had been charged with disorderly conduct in the presence of the Senate, and
that the Senate had the right to protect itself through summary proceedings
against such disruptions "on the evidence of its own senses.  The Register
reports at this time that "some confusion prevailed" - as well we might expect
it would!  The Senate finally took up Benton's motion to discharge the unruly
visitor and passed the motion by a vote of 23 to 1.  Instead of leaving, the
bank supporter advanced to the chair saying, "Mr. President, am I not to be
permitted to speak in my own defence?"  The presiding officer had lost all
patience by that time and shouted to the sergeant at arms, "Take him out!"
The Senate then adjourned after this momentous and tumultuous session.  No one
who was present would ever forget it.

     Throughout these proceedings, Henry Clay had been ostentatiously dressed
entirely in black to mark his mourning for the Constitution of the United
States.  Clay went so far as to refuse a pinch of snuff to one of the
Democratic senators who was planning to vote to expunge, a breach of
senatorial courtesy that was rare for the Kentucky gentleman.  Outside the
Capitol, Senators Clay and Benton came face to face.  The two men were
political enemies but personal friends and were even related by marriage.  On
the street, they vented their steam in verbal abuse on each other until they
calmed down.  Senator Benton insisted on seeing Henry Clay home and then
stayed in conversation until three in the morning.

     The next day, Thomas Hart Benton's son John arrived at the White House
with a present for President Jackson:  the pen which had stricken his censure
from the Senate Journal.  Needless to say, Jackson was delighted and deeply
touched.  He kept the pen as a fond remembrance of his triumph and, in his
last will and testament, bequeathed the pen back to Benton "as an evidence of
my high regard, and exalted opinion of your talents, virtue, and Patriotism."
A few weeks later, Jackson gave a grand dinner at the White House for the
"expungers" and their wives.  Being too ill to attend the festivities for more
than a short while, Jackson sat Thomas Hart Benton, the "head-expunger," in
his chair at the head of the table.

     While Benton and the Democrats celebrated, Clay and the Whigs mourned
their loss.  "The Senate is no longer a place for any decent man," Henry Clay
complained.  His weariness in battle was also evident in another letter he
wrote at what was to be the midpoint in a forty-year career in the House and
Senate, "I am truly sick of Congress."  Clay, of course, did not abandon his
career and, indeed, was reelected to the Senate by the Kentucky state
legislature in 1837.  But he had suffered a long string of defeats:  in his
presidential campaign against Jackson; in the bank war; and in his other
legislative proposals for the sale of public lands, internal improvements, and
a protective tariff.

     Mr. President, having recounted the story of the Senate's censure of
President Jackson and of Thomas Hart Benton's triumphant expunging of that
censure from the Journal, I think it only fitting to conclude my remarks with
a few words about the remarkable Henry Clay and the Whig party which he built
and with which his name was so closely associated.  The Whigs are not well
remembered in American history.  They lasted less than thirty years and were
perhaps the unluckiest political party in our nation's history.  Although they
often controlled one or both houses of Congress, they elected only two
presidents:  William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor, both of whom died
early in their presidential terms.  The party which could boast of such giants
as Clay, Calhoun, and Webster could elect none of them president, despite the
prodigious efforts of all three of those men to achieve that honor.

     Some historians, notably Henry Adams, have dismissed the Whig party for
being "feeble in ideas," but this is an unfair assessment of the party which
rallied around Henry Clay's American System.  The Whigs represented the new
commercial and industrial interests of early nineteenth century America.
While they opposed a strong presidency, they were not opposed to an active
federal government.  Indeed, during the panic of 1837, we find the Jacksonian
president, Martin Van Buren, complaining that the people "looked to the
government for too much," and the Whig senator, Henry Clay, responding that
the people were "entitled to the protecting care of a paternal government."
The Whigs thought of themselves as the moral party.  Many Whigs were leaders
in movements for temperance, public education, the abolition of slavery, and
other social reforms.  Senator Clay once introduced a resolution for a day of
national "humiliation and prayer" in response to a cholera epidemic, but the
Jacksonians in the Senate blocked the resolution on the grounds that it
violated the separation of church and state.

     There is obviously much to admire in the programs and principles of the
Whig party, but we must balance this with the observation that the Whigs
tended to be the party of big business and of the more aristocratic forces in
American society.  Clay's protective tariff would protect mostly the textile
manufacturers of New England and the large plantations of the South which
supplied their cotton; so also the Bank of the United States and internal
improvements would benefit the producing class first and foremost.  In his
recent book, The Political Culture of the American Whigs, Professor Daniel
Walker Howe of the University of California at Los Angeles noted that "Whig
policies did not have the object of redistributing wealth or diminishing the
influence of the privileged . . . .  For all their innovations in economic
policy, the Whigs usually thought of themselves as conservatives."  Thus,
while the Whigs represented the dominant groups in society, they failed to
become the dominant party.  They lost critical elections to the Jacksonian
Democrats who had become more clearly identified with labor, small farmers,
immigrants, and the common folk.

     Mr. President, the Whig party, which was born in its opposition to
President Andrew Jackson and his bank policies, came together first in the
efforts of the United States Senate to censure Jackson.  The Whigs lasted
almost another thirty years, during which time its leaders struggled gallantly
to hold this nation together against sectional tensions and powerful forces of
disunity.  When the Whig party finally collapsed, it contributed to a major
realignment in American politics and to the coming of the Civil War.  But the
events of this period between the birth and demise of the Whig party will be
the subjects of later addresses in this series.  These were the turbulent
years when the Senate would grow, in the words of the commemorative booklet on
the old Senate chamber, "from a small council to the primary forum for the
great national debates of the mid-nineteenth century."