US History/US History (Bureau Development Inc.)(1991).ISO/dp/0115/01153.txt

Text File | 1990-12-23 | 58KB | 918 lines

$Unique_ID{USH01153}
$Pretitle{103}
$Title{The Senate - 1789-1989
Chapter 9   Boom and Bust, Slavery and France:  1833-1840}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Byrd, Robert C.}
$Affiliation{US Senate}
$Subject{senate
jackson
president
clay
congress
new
van
calhoun
house
senator}
$Volume{Vol. 1}
$Date{1989}
$Log{Jackson's Luck*0115301.scf
A Checkered Senator*0115302.scf
The Bachelor President*0115303.scf
The Sly Fox Wins Again*0115304.scf
}
Book:        The Senate - 1789-1989
Author:      Byrd, Robert C.
Affiliation: US Senate
Volume:      Vol. 1
Date:        1989

Chapter 9   Boom and Bust, Slavery and France:  1833-1840

December 3, 1982.

     Mr. President, it is hard to imagine that there could have been issues
under consideration in the Senate during the Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth
congresses as monumental as the censure of President Jackson and the equally
dramatic expunging of the censure.  But a host of other matters engaged the
Senate, demanding its close attention.  Major crises arose during Andrew
Jackson's second term and the four years that followed under his political
heir, Martin Van Buren.  They involved troubles with France and Texas; a
serious financial panic that sent businessmen and farmers reeling in all
sections of the country; and problems with the treasury, set in motion over
the issue of the Bank of the United States.  These and the slavery issue would
require long and intense Senate sessions.

     Giants - like Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina,
and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts - still strode these halls during this
period.  I have spoken often of these men and their genius; their quarrels
will infuse today's statement as well.

     It always helps to make historical figures come alive if we can turn to
some of the Senate's fine art work, because, without our even realizing it,
these men stare down upon us every day.  We have only to step out into the
adjacent Reception Room to feel the presence of all three of these Senate
giants, peering at us from their medallion portholes.

     Each time we enter this chamber through the main corridor, we also must
pass muster before the keen eyes of this triumvirate.  Senators, next time,
before opening the swinging doors, glance to the right toward the Democratic
Leader's office, and you will find that Calhoun, looking every bit the Iron
Man, with his mane of steely hair; Clay, Harry of the West, looking
deceptively benign; and the Magnificent Daniel are watching from their frames
high on the east wall.  Webster, in fact, also stands guard in all his
sartorial splendor over the staircase right outside the President's Room off
the Senate chamber.  Calhoun keeps an even closer eye on us.  There he is up
there, the last statue on the west wall right where it joins the north wall,
scowling above us, filling his niche by virtue of having been a vice president
- a most unhappy vice president under Andrew Jackson.  These are just some of
the likenesses of the men of this era with which we live every day.  Keep in
mind their stern gaze as you pass before them as they are our senatorial
forefathers and surely they are watching us.

     In 1833, these men sparred with one another in the old Senate chamber
down the hall.  In the Senate, the first session of the Twenty-third Congress
was totally absorbed with the bitter effort to censure the president for
removing federal deposits from the bank.  The House, however, had its own
moment of drama, which I mention only because it involved a notable former
senator whom we have met before in one or more of my earlier statements.
Eccentric John Randolph of Roanoke - once the scourge of the Senate - though
racked by illness, had been elected to the House for the Twenty-third
Congress.  He died, however, on May 24, 1833, before the Congress convened.
Shortly after the House next met, Randolph's successor, fifty-two-year-old
Thomas Bouldin, arose to announce Randolph's death.  He had uttered only a few
words when, as the Register of Debates reports, Representative Bouldin
"swooned, fell, and in a few minutes after expired" on the floor of the House.
It was almost as if Nature, herself, had been thrown into perturbation by the
final disappearance of so great and untrammeled a natural force as John
Randolph once had been.

     After the drama of the censure debates, the final days of the
Twenty-third Congress were relatively colorless.  No Senate session, however,
with Thomas Hart Benton still smarting over the censure of his friend,
President Andrew Jackson, could be entirely lackluster.  Earlier in the year,
Benton's nemesis, Henry Clay, had demanded from Secretary of the Treasury
Roger Taney a full report of the nation's finances.  At the time, Clay and his
pro-bank cohorts were deluging their Senate colleagues with doleful
descriptions of the wrack and ruin brought on by the president's actions, and
Clay was certain that the report would back them up.  Unfortunately for him,
the facts set forth stood in startling contrast to the grim picture he and his
followers had painted.  Even more unfortunately for Clay, the administration
decided that this report to the Senate deserved the greatest possible
publicity.

     Taney and Benton conferred at the treasury and worked on a speech for
Benton to deliver when the report was introduced.  As could be expected, the
reading of the secretary's report had not proceeded far when an embarrassed
Daniel Webster, the bank's staunchest friend, arose to move that further
reading be dispensed with and that the report be sent to the Finance
Committee.  Benton, of course, objected.  The report was read, and the
Missourian, at his flamboyant best, arose to give his speech.

     "Well, the answer comes," he exclaimed.  "It is a report to make the
patriot heart rejoice! . . . replete with rich information, pregnant with
evidences of national prosperity.  How is it received - how received by those
who called for it?  With downcast looks and wordless tongues!  A motion is
made to stop the reading!"  He went on, ". . . a pit was dug for Mr. Taney;
the diggers of the pit have fallen into it; the fault is not his; and the
sooner they clamber out, the better for themselves."  Regardless of any
embarrassment to the conspirators, Benton declared his determination to let
the country know that "never, since America had a place among nations, was the
prosperity of the country equal to what it is this day!"

     At the end of the first session of the Twenty-third Congress, President
Jackson, with his customary confidence in the people, set off for the
Hermitage and a much needed rest.  His friends, however, were not so
complacent and had given orders to take nothing in the fall elections for
granted.  Their purpose was twofold:  to at least hold the line in the Senate
and to defeat, wherever possible, any senatorial enemies who were candidates
for reelection.

     These elections in the fall of 1834 were the first in which the
opposition to the Jacksonian Democrats would fight under its new party name of
Whig.  In an earlier statement, I discussed the birth of this new party,
essentially an uneasy alliance of old National Republicans, southern States'
Righters, bank supporters like Webster, and disgruntled westerners held
together by their hatred of "King Andrew."  It was John Forsyth, the caustic
senator from Georgia whose services as the administration's floor leader had
been of immense value, who said, when he learned of the new party's title, "It
is a glorious name, and I have no doubt they will disgrace it."

     Let us look at a few of these Senate elections where the bank issue still
burned, because this was the era of what historian Claude Bowers calls
"political hydrophobia," when elections were vicious affairs.  The elections
in New Jersey and Pennsylvania were held in October, a month before most
others, and they brought the Whigs their first shocks.  They had rightly
expected little success in Pennsylvania, but much was expected from New Jersey
where Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen was up for reelection.  Frelinghuysen had
consistently voted on the side of the bank.  When the New Jersey legislature
adopted resolutions commending the president's actions and urging its senators
to support him too, Frelinghuysen and his colleague, Samuel Southard, chose to
ignore them.  Frelinghuysen even boasted that he and Southard had "dared to
meet the frowns of their constituents," and would not "bow the knee to these
instructions."  Now, he was before these constituents for reelection.  Their
verdict was unmistakable.  New Jersey swept into the Jackson column with a
substantial majority; Frelinghuysen was retired in favor of Democrat Garret
Wall.

     Two of the most bitter Senate fights that fall were waged in Virginia and
Mississippi.  Virginia was anti-bank but also anti-Jackson.  The Democrats'
strategy was to make the most of the unpopularity of Benjamin Leigh, the Whig
candidate.  Leigh had been widely disliked since his bitter fight in the state
constitutional convention against the extension of the suffrage.  He was also
as strongly for the bank as the voters were against it.  Every poll and
canvass revealed a majority of the people were against him.  But the Whigs
pulled off his election in the state legislature, reflecting a flagrant
disregard for the will of the people.  Newspapers were flooded with
resolutions and letters protesting Leigh's victory.  The battle from the
Democrats' point of view, however, was only half lost, for they were supplied
with ammunition proving the Whigs callous disdain for the masses - potent
ammunition that they would use to drive both of Virginia's anti-Jackson
senators, Leigh and John Tyler, from office in little more than a year.

     In Mississippi, the Jacksonians were determined to prevent the reelection
of Senator George Poindexter, once the idol of Mississippi Democrats.
Poindexter had turned on Jackson with a virulence scarcely equaled in any
old-line Federalist and cast his lot with Clay.  With the adjournment of
Congress, Poindexter hastened home where the Whigs had planned a series of
banquets at which he was to denounce the president.  The Democrats, delighted
with a slashing and brilliant assault on Poindexter by young lawyer Robert J.
Walker, put him up as their candidate.  Within a week, Walker was engaged in
one of the most spectacular canvasses Mississippi had ever known, stirring up
enormous meetings of frenzied Jacksonians.  The outcome was the election of
Walker - a victory sweet to Jackson, and all the more so since Poindexter had
not only supported Clay on the bank, but had also supported Calhoun on
nullification.

     Thus, the elections of 1834 were more than pleasing to the Democrats and
the president.  Two of Jackson's strongest senatorial foes, Frelinghuysen and
Poindexter, had been swept away because of their opposition, and Leigh, who
had been saved by an action in clear defiance of the popular will, would not
remain in the Senate for long.  The administration's forces were clearly
strengthened in the Senate.  In the House, Democratic dominance was reduced by
eight votes, but that party still held a majority of 46 in the 242-member
body.

     Daniel Webster accepted the verdict of the election as the final
statement on the bank issue and, much to the distress and indignation of bank
president Nicholas Biddle, announced that he was through with it.  Henry Clay,
whose own political interests had forced Biddle into making early recharter an
issue in the first place, was also glad to dump the bank from his shoulders.
Most of their colleagues were ready to join them in abandoning the bank as
dead, but one last unfortunate incident at the very end of the Twenty-third
Congress proved that the issue was still very much alive.

     The event was the attempt on the life of President Jackson at the Capitol
on January 30, 1835.  No other incident so well illustrates the venomous
hatreds engendered by the struggles of the preceding years.  Senators,
editors, and the president himself were sullied in the aftermath.

     Jackson had visited the House chamber to attend funeral services for the
late Representative Warren R. Davis of South Carolina.  The chaplain's sermon
spoke to the fact that life is uncertain, particularly for the aged.  "There
sat the gray-haired president," wrote English visitor Harriet Martineau,
"looking scarcely able to go through this ceremonial."  The discourse
finished, Jackson filed past the casket and then walked to the Rotunda of the
Capitol.

     As Jackson entered the Rotunda, a young stranger, his face covered with a
thick black beard, stood six feet away.  No one noticed him draw a small,
bright pistol or aim it at the president, until they heard the shot ring
through the stone chamber.  Calmly, the man produced another pistol and fired
again.  Jackson raised his cane and started for his assailant, but an army
officer reached him first.  The president was unharmed.  By some miracle, only
the caps of the pistols had exploded, the charges failing to go off.

[See Jackson's Luck: An eyewitness sketched Richard Lawrence's attempt to
assassinate President Jackson inside the Capitol Rotunda in 1835. Jackson was
the first American president threatened by an assassination attempt.]

     The assailant was Richard Lawrence, an unemployed house painter, who
claimed to be the rightful heir to the British throne and blamed Jackson's
opposition to the bank for his difficulty in finding work.  When Lawrence was
quickly dispatched to a lunatic asylum, partisans on both sides objected to
the undramatic disposition of the case.  Francis Preston Blair, the rabidly
Jacksonian editor of the Washington Globe, hinted strongly that Lawrence was
the tool of Jackson's enemies, and part of a conspiracy.  In opposition to
that view, Senator John Tyler saw things in an even more sinister light and
suggested that the assassination attempt may have been staged for "political
effect" by Jackson's own supporters in an effort to create popular sympathy
for the president.

     Both sides deeply resented any suggestion of complicity or motive in the
near tragedy.  None could escape the fact that this was the first time an
attempt had been made upon the life of a president, and it was a president who
had been intemperately denounced as a tyrant, despot, and wrecker of American
institutions and liberties.  Soon the capital was further shocked by the
linking of the name of Senator Poindexter, about to leave the Senate in
defeat, with that of the assailant.  On the slimmest of evidence, the idea
grew in Jackson's mind that his Mississippi enemy had instigated the
assassination attempt, and he spoke of his suspicions to many visitors to the
White House.

     Hearing of Jackson's charges, Poindexter wrote him that he would
discredit the reports unless confirmed by the president but that a failure to
reply would be accepted as a confirmation.  Jackson made no response.  To
understand the bitterness behind the feud, let us look a bit more closely at
this departing senator.

     George Poindexter was a genius and, before his break with Jackson, the
idol of all of Mississippi, the leader of the state's Democrats, and its
former governor and representative.  One who knew him in his early days noted
that "his mind was logical and strong; his conception was quick and acute; his
powers of combination and application were astonishing; his wit was pointed
and caustic, and his sarcasm overwhelming."  All of these qualities made him
an awesome stump speaker.  He had further endeared himself to Mississippians
during the War of 1812 with his patriotic appeals for preparation, and, after
he had aroused the people to fever heat, his volunteering as an aide to
General Jackson.  Along the way, it was inevitable that such a charismatic man
should make enemies.  So unscrupulous were his speeches and so bitter his
denunciations of his political enemies that, at one time, a conspiracy was
formed to force him into a duel and kill him.

     Nowhere in the presidential campaign of 1828 did Jackson receive more
ardent support than in Mississippi where his old comrade-at-arms directed his
forces.  A year after Jackson's inauguration, Poindexter was in the Senate
where he was expected to be a loyal supporter.  Unfortunately, the feud
between the erstwhile friends began almost immediately.  Jackson wanted to
appoint a Tennessean, a neighbor of the Hermitage, to the land office of
Mississippi.  Poindexter protested that this patronage belonged to him.
Jackson refused to yield.  Poindexter prevented the confirmation.  Jackson
made a recess appointment, and, from then on, the old comrades were at swords'
points.  Poindexter abandoned not only the president but also all the
principles he had previously embraced.  He stood with the bank, favored the
censure, sided with Clay, and espoused nullification.  Had his personal life
been irreproachable, Poindexter might have been immune from the barbs of his
new enemies, but his domestic relations had become the scandal of Mississippi.
He had divorced his wife, denied the paternity of his children, and plunged
into a life of reckless dissipation.  His indecent remarks about the purity of
his former wife drove her family, which was rich and powerful, into the hands
of his enemies as well.  At the time of Richard Lawrence's attack on the
president, Poindexter was preparing not only to leave the Senate but, with his
second wife, to leave Mississippi as well.

[See A Checkered Senator: During his term in the Senate, George Poindexter of
Mississippi feuded bitterly with Jackson.]

     Despite Poindexter's sullied reputation, no one except Jackson seriously
suspected him of conspiring to assassinate the president.  In February, only a
few days before the expiration of his term and that of the Congress,
Poindexter asked the Senate to investigate the charges being made in the White
House against him.  Three days later, a committee exonerated him from
suspicion.  Webster asked for the yeas and nays on accepting the committee's
verdict; every senator voted yea.  No matter what his personal reputation,
Poindexter left the Senate with this blot on his record removed.

     At the end of the Twenty-third Congress in March 1835, a long-simmering
dispute with France came to a head, and its peaceful resolution marked a major
victory for Henry Clay over President Jackson.

     On July 4, 1831, a treaty had been signed in Paris by which France had
agreed to pay 25 million francs for outrages committed upon American commerce
during the Napoleonic wars.  The payments were supposed to have begun in 1832,
and King Louis Philippe was most anxious to carry out the agreement.
Unfortunately, the French chambers were less than anxious to make the
necessary appropriations.  President Jackson waited almost two years, his
anger mounting all the while, and then he ordered his secretary of state, John
Forsyth, the former senator from Georgia, to call the French minister to the
State Department.  The minister nervously asked if Forsyth expected a
"collision," a diplomatic euphemism for war, over the issue.  Forsyth said he
wouldn't doubt it.  Jackson ordered the navy to prepare for sea duty and wrote
a strong message to Congress on the subject.

     Congress received Jackson's message on December 2, 1834.  It began calmly
enough, restating the history of the case, but then it turned belligerent.
The United States, he claimed, should insist upon "prompt execution" of the
treaty and, in case it be refused or longer delayed, "take redress into our
own hands."  He recommended that provisions be passed authorizing the seizure
of French property for the amount of the debt, in case the next session of the
French chambers refused once again to pass the appropriation.

     Couriers spurred their horses, and perspiring firemen piled wood beneath
the boilers of locomotives and steamboats to speed the message abroad in the
nation.  A flurry swept the commercial world.  Marine insurance companies
refused to assume risks resulting from a rupture with France.  France recalled
its minister.

     Jackson's message was sent to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of
which Clay was the chairman.  Clay had not been averse to reprisals against
France when he was secretary of state but now viewed the situation with alarm.
While political considerations probably influenced him (they were never far
from Clay's mind), he seems also to have been sincerely alarmed over the
possibility of war.  He wrote his son, Henry Clay, Jr.:

The most engrossing subject of the Session is likely to be the President's
Message relative to our French affairs.  His rashness, in advising a war-like
measure, without waiting for the decision of the French chambers . . . seems
to be generally condemned . . . .  Irritation begets irritation, and I should
not be surprised if, in the sequel, two gallant nations, hitherto entertaining
for each other the greatest respect, shall be found unexpectedly engaged in
War.

The Senate has placed me at the head of the Com[mittee] of F[oreign] Affairs -
the most responsible situation of the Session.  I shall endeavor to discharge
my duty, but I confess I have less heart than ever to exert myself in public
business.

     Despite this weary disavowal, Clay appears to have been delighted to have
a hand in such an important issue.  On January 6, 1835, Clay reported the
committee's resolution stating "that it is inexpedient at this time to pass
any law vesting in the President authority for making reprisals upon French
property" and accompanied it with a report devoid of partisan animus.  Clay
was gratified that his mild report was accepted without a dissenting vote.

     The House was in a far more belligerent mood, however, and went so far as
to appropriate $3 million for the president's use in defending the country.
When this came to the Senate, a storm predictably broke out.  Webster and
Calhoun wanted the Senate to disagree.  Benjamin Leigh averred that to pass
such a bill would be the equivalent of saying "that the President should be
made Consul for life, or Emperor of the American people."  Silas Wright of New
York and James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, on the other hand, painted the horror
of a French attack upon our defenseless shores.  Calhoun retorted that there
was about as much danger of the Capitol's being swallowed by an earthquake
before Congress met again!  Clay counseled against the measure, and it went
down to defeat.

     In April 1835, the French chambers finally passed the necessary
appropriation, but with a proviso that it not be paid unless some satisfactory
explanation could be given for Jackson's harsh language.  This only angered
Jackson more.  He recalled our minister to France and drew up another
bellicose message to Congress.  Forsyth and Van Buren succeeded in softening
his language a bit and worked in a denial of any intention to menace or insult
France.  At this juncture, England offered mediation to smooth the path, the
French professed themselves satisfied, and the long-awaited payments, with
interest, began in the spring of 1836.

     The crisis was over, and Henry Clay, according to his biographer, Glyndon
Van Deusen, felt proud of his unselfish role in averting a costly war.  His
committee report had been spread abroad in France, where it was taken as
evidence that the United States was not bent on a fight, and thus it helped
keep open the pathway of negotiation.

     From the adjournment of the Twenty-third Congress in March 1835 until the
Twenty-fourth Congress convened in December, its members were preoccupied with
presidential politics.  The struggle for position was desperate and
unscrupulous.  Within the Democratic party, it eventually pitted President
Jackson against another former friend, Hugh Lawson White of Tennessee, who had
succeeded Jackson in the Senate when he resigned in 1825.  Though obscure
today, White was familiarly known to his own generation as the Cato of the
Senate.  Though he lacked sparkle and magnetism, the purity of his character
and his fidelity to duty commanded great respect.  His senatorial speeches
were noteworthy for their temperate tone - rare in his generation.  Always
heard with attention, he was attentive to others and was frequently the one
listener to other senators' routine speeches.  No member of the Senate more
impressively looked the part.  Tall, slender, and well-proportioned with a
broad forehead and deep-set, serious, penetrating blue eyes, he was the
embodiment of senatorial dignity.  With long gray hair brushed back from his
forehead and curling at some length on his shoulders, he appeared every inch
the patriarch.  This was the man who was to give Jackson, in the election of
his successor, his only uneasy hours.

     From the beginning of Jackson's first administration, when the president,
fearing an early death, had expressed a preference for Van Buren as his
successor, the latter had been looked upon as the crown prince.  By 1834, it
was clear to the White House that the most serious challenge to these plans
would come from Hugh Lawson White, considered a renegade from the Jackson
camp.  The once-close attachment of the president and his Senate successor had
cooled perceptibly in the years following the 1829 inauguration.  White had
become estranged by his old friend's growing intimacy with the new school of
practical politics.  First, White had drifted into a position as independent
supporter of the administration, but, by 1834, his position was one of open
hostility.

     By the spring of 1834, White had announced his candidacy for the 1836
Democratic presidential nomination, throwing down the gauntlet to Jackson and
Van Buren in Tennessee which became the battleground.  Though James K. Polk
marshalled the support of his Tennessee newspapers behind Jackson, White
embarrassed the president by convincing the state legislature to nominate him
(White) for the presidency.  But this would be the last of his successes.  The
Van Buren steamroller would prove too powerful for the renegade White or any
other upstart Democrat for that matter.

     When the Twenty-fourth Congress convened in December 1835, the slavery
issue reemerged with renewed vehemence.  The establishment in 1831 of William
Lloyd Garrison's Liberator in Boston had revived the abolition movement, which
got another boost in 1833 when Great Britain emancipated her West Indian
slaves.  At the opening of the new Congress, its members were apprehensive
because of the anti-slavery and anti-abolition riots of the year before.
Adding to the turmoil was the American Anti-Slavery Society, which began to
deluge the South with abolitionist circulars calculated to arouse the slaves
to insurrection.

     It was specifically those abolitionist tracts that precipitated the
renewed fight in the Senate over slavery in the winter of 1835.  In July, the
citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, raided the post office, stole and
burned a sack of the pamphlets, and informed the postmaster in New York not to
forward any more to them or they would suffer the same fate.  The New York
postmaster laid the matter before Amos Kendall, postmaster general and
Jackson's close friend.  Kendall expressed his belief that the federal mails
could not carry any matter prohibited by state laws, thus opening the door to
the wholesale destruction of the incendiary documents.  Though Kendall acted
without legal authority, he did act with the president's blessing.  In his
message to Congress that December, Jackson denounced abolitionists as plotters
of a civil war with all its horrors and asked that Kendall's fait accompli be
legalized by the passage of a law prohibiting the circulation of publications
intended to incite slaves to insurrection.

     The howls from northern liberals against this proposal were loud and
immediate, but the proposal was even too drastic for southerners like Calhoun,
whose interpretation of the Constitution guaranteed his fiery opposition.  To
those who accused Calhoun of opposing the measure simply because his enemy,
Jackson, supported it, he bitterly replied, "I have too little regard for the
opinion of General Jackson and . . . his character, too, to permit his cause
to influence me in the slightest degree."  Whatever his reasons, Calhoun led
the debate that dragged on for months.  In the end, the measure went down to
defeat with even Henry Clay and Thomas Hart Benton, for once, voting on the
same side.

     The issue of the mails proved to be only the opening trumpet of the
divisive slavery issue before this Congress.  It was followed by a chorus of
dissent on the issue of abolitionist petitions.  The question was not a new
one.  The usual practice had been to receive the petitions and to table them
instantly.  But in January 1836, Calhoun decided that he had had enough.
When, on January 7, an abolition petition was presented by some Ohio citizens,
Calhoun moved that it not be received and supported his motion with such an
intemperate speech that even pro-slavery senators were alarmed.  "We must meet
the enemy on the frontier - on the question of receiving," he thundered.  "We
must secure that important pass - it is our Thermopylae."

     By 1836, Calhoun was far more than merely the aspiring politician who had
feuded with Jackson in 1830.  Personal ambition was now increasingly submerged
in a cold monomania for South Carolina and for slavery.  His friends, like
Harriet Martineau, found they could no longer communicate with Calhoun.  "He
felt," says historian Arthur Schlesinger, "so deeply that he rarely heard
argument, so passionately that he never forgot his responsibility."  "There is
no relaxation with him," cried his devoted friend, Representative and later
Senator Dixon Lewis of Alabama.  He appeared to many to exist in an
unimaginable intellectual solitude, his mind committed to his interminable
obligation, focusing forever on a single shining point.  He was, said Miss
Martineau, "the cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born, and
never could be extinguished."

     Colleagues and observers testified that Calhoun was still a startling
figure when he rose to speak in the Senate, with eyes burning like live coals
in his pale face, hair bristling and erect, skin loose over his prominent
bones, words pouring out in a closely reasoned flow.  His voice was metallic
and harsh, his gestures monotonous; yet, his commanding eye, grim earnestness,
and utter integrity held the galleries in anxious attention.  When standing in
the narrow aisle of the Senate, bracing himself against the desks, he averaged
perhaps 180 words a minute of terse and unconquerable argument.

     Calhoun was still the supreme intelligence among the statesmen of his
day.  Clay relied on richness and audacity of feeling, Webster on mellifluous
rhetoric, Benton on the sheer weight of facts, and all indulged in shameless
orgies of verbiage.  But Calhoun's speeches were stripped bare, arguing the
facts alone with an iron logic.  Nourished on Aristotle, Machiavelli, and
Burke, he displayed the uncanny ability to cut quickly through to the
substance of the issues before the Senate.

     This was the man whose proposal for rejecting abolition petitions still
hung fire when, four days later, James Buchanan presented a petition even more
odious to him.  Buchanan stepped forward to offer a memorial from a group of
Quakers in Pennsylvania praying for the abolition of slavery in the District
of Columbia - an extremely delicate matter because it lay entirely within the
power of the Congress to act in this case.  Buchanan made it quite clear that
he dissented from the opinion which the Quakers expressed but urged that the
memorial from his constituents deserved to be received.  Calhoun, however,
plunged the Senate into a heated two-month debate on whether it should be
received at all.

     Calhoun ultimately lost again (though the request contained in the
petition was rejected), but the intensity of the debate stirred new fears on
both sides and widened the gap between supporters and opponents of slavery.
Abolition entreaties had flooded the House as well, but there, efforts like
Calhoun's met with more success.  The result was the infamous gag rule banning
all such petitions, and the beginning of the courageous crusade for free
speech by sixty-nine-year-old John Quincy Adams, who, two years after his term
as president had ended, returned to Washington to represent Massachusetts in
the House of Representatives for the next seventeen years.

     I have mentioned James Buchanan several times thus far and would like to
take a closer look at the freshman senator from Pennsylvania.  Buchanan
arrived in the Senate after serving ten years in the House and two years as
minister to Russia.  During his first four terms in the House, Buchanan had
been a Federalist, and many of the Jacksonians, whom he joined in 1828,
doubted the sincerity of his conversion to the Democratic faith.  During the
Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth congresses, however, Buchanan proved himself a
loyal Democrat by joining Senators Wright of New York, William King of
Alabama, and Benton as defenders of the president in the Senate.

[See The Bachelor President: A former Federalist, Pennsylvania James Buchanan
supported Democratic policies in the Senate.]

     At forty-two, Buchanan was a heavyset bachelor - the only bachelor, in
fact, to become president.  The story goes that, in 1819, while still a
struggling young lawyer, Buchanan had become engaged to a belle whose father
was one of this country's first millionaires.  A combination of the father's
objections, gossip that Buchanan was interested chiefly in her fortune, and
the young swain's apparent neglect of his fiancee in favor of clients led to a
broken engagement, followed by the young lady's sudden death.  Heartbroken,
Buchanan resolved to honor her memory by remaining a bachelor for the rest of
his days.

     Buchanan had a large head and pudgy features.  He usually wore a
high-collared coat to conceal a neck scar.  An eye defect caused him to tilt
his head slightly forward and to one side so that he always seemed to be
listening intently and with great concern.  His oddly cocked head sometimes
got him into trouble.  As one of his biographers noted, his "mere appearance
conveyed so definite an impression of assent and approbation that many people,
on early acquaintance, sincerely believed that they had completely captivated
James Buchanan and reciprocated by attentions to him which he attributed to
traits more complimentary to him than a wry neck."

     Still another dimension was added to the increasingly volatile slavery
issue in the final days of the Twenty-fourth Congress.  Though the question of
Texas would chiefly preoccupy future congresses, Calhoun used an early
reference to the turmoil in the Southwest to further alienate North and South.
(Texas, under the presidency of Sam Houston, friend of both Jackson and
Benton, had declared its independence from Mexico after Houston's decisive
victory at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836.)  Calhoun enraged
abolitionists and frightened many lukewarm northerners by calling for the
immediate annexation of the Texas republic in order to extend the reach of
slavery.  Though immediately pounced upon by Benton, and though Calhoun's
motion lost, a new and troubling dimension had been added to the festering
slavery question.

     In the midst of this turmoil, the presidential elections had taken place
in the fall of 1836 between the first and second sessions of the Twenty-fourth
Congress.  After all the preelection jockeying, the actual campaign was hardly
as exciting as that of 1832.  The Whigs were still only a loose coalition and
could not choose a single candidate.  Instead, various elements selected a
number of candidates such as Senators White and Webster, and General William
Henry Harrison, with strong followings, hoping to throw the election into the
House.

     None of these candidates had a chance.  The Democrats met in Baltimore
and unanimously chose Jackson's handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren.  As
the results began to come in that fall, it was clear that the Sly Fox would
accede to the White House.

[See The Sly Fox Wins Again: Martin Van Buren of New York was picked by
President Jackson to be his successor.]

     Van Buren was content with his victory margin of forty-six electoral
votes, and Andrew Jackson, whose long reign was now nearly over, was content
as well.  He finally had the satisfaction of seeing Senator Benton's annual
resolution to expunge the 1834 censure vote of the president succeed at last.
Clay, Calhoun, and Webster fought against it to the end, as I noted in my
last statement, but the tide of Jackson's popularity had finally engulfed
even the Senate.

     Andrew Jackson left his protege, Martin Van Buren, and his other
followers with a warning:  "Of all things, never once take your eyes off
Texas."  Both the South and the Southwest would, indeed, prove troublesome
in the years to come, but Jackson badly misjudged the real and nearest threat
to national stability.  The nation was then poised on the brink of financial
disaster.  Unfortunately, Jackson would have to own up to the fact that his
real legacies to his friend Van Buren were the makings of the worst
depression in the nation's sixty-year history and a hopeless mire of monetary
problems.

     The financial bubble that burst during the Twenty-fifth Congress had
been building for at least two years.  On June 23, 1836, after Nicholas
Biddle's Bank of the United States had finally become merely a state bank,
the Senate and House had passed the Deposit Act, requiring the secretary of
the treasury to select one or more banks in each state and territory to
receive federal deposits and perform the services previously provided by the
Bank of the United States.  The stability of the country's economy, however,
had been gravely shaken by the disappearance of the old national bank, and,
with government money pouring into a wide variety of local banks, an
uncontrolled inflation began.

     These banks began to issue huge amounts of paper money against the new
funds in their vaults, and prices began to skyrocket.  Hoping to curb the
spiral, Jackson had issued the Specie Circular, drafted for him by Senator
Benton, whose hard-money views were soon to win him the name Old Bullion
Benton.  The Specie Circular announced that, from that point on, to curb the
"ruinous extension" of paper money, the government would accept only specie -
gold or silver - in payment for public lands.

     The circular did burst the inflationary bubble but started, in its
place, a financial panic.  State banks did not have enough specie to cover the
paper money; loans could not be covered; land prices plummeted.

     All this had happened while Congress was out of session.  When it
returned in December 1836, the Senate Whigs put forth a resolution demanding
repeal of the circular.  By March 1, 1837, that measure had passed both
houses, but Jackson, with only three days left in office, used a pocket veto
to kill it.  Jackson, by the way, was the first president to veto bills of
Congress for other than constitutional reasons.

     Thus, the stage was set for financial disaster.  Eight weeks after Van
Buren entered the White House, the panic of 1837 exploded with full fury.  On
the morning of May 10, 1837, a card was pinned to the door of a New York bank
reading simply, "Closed Until Further Notice."  By afternoon, New York Whig
Philip Hone, watching the gathering mob, heard the screams of trampled women
and curses against Jackson and Van Buren.

     The panic of 1837 was not a slump of a year's duration.  It was the
depression of an era.  It was not national; it was world-wide.  The depression
in England drastically lowered the price paid for American cotton, for
example.  It climaxed the dizziest, fastest, richest boom era the young
Republic had ever known.  Slowly, the great, evil flood moved over America.
It took almost a year for this tide of woe to spread across the southern back
country, but, when it did, the ruin was complete.  It engulfed the Mississippi
delta country, leaving behind a trail of empty plantation houses and barns
and crudely lettered signs flapping from trees, "Gone to Texas."  It ravaged
the country from New Orleans to Cincinnati, where hungry mobs smashed down
doors, tore apart furniture, and looted the strongboxes of banks and
brokerage offices.  Bankruptcies multiplied, unemployment rose, and interest
rates mounted.  Eight hundred fifty banks were closed; 343 never to reopen
again.

     The cries of the ruined were not long in reaching Washington.  Van Buren
reluctantly called Congress into session three months early.  Henry Clay, like
the other Whigs, was convinced that the distress was the result of the
Democrats' policies, and, thus, that it was up to the Democrats, not the
Whigs, to furnish a program of relief.  They expectantly awaited the new
president's economic proposals.  When the Sly Fox sent his message up to the
Hill, he attributed the hard times primarily to undue business expansion,
distribution of the surplus, and the drain of gold abroad.  Van Buren flatly
refused to consider reestablishing a national bank.  The main feature of the
message was the proposal that the treasury keep its own money in its own
hands - the so-called subtreasury or independent treasury plan.  Other than
this, Van Buren urged the lawmakers to allow the depression to run its
course.

     Clay and the Senate Whigs pronounced the program barren.  Daniel Webster
accused the president of "leaving the people to shift for themselves."  While
many of Van Buren's measures were essential to staunch the flow of money, the
Whigs, in a purely partisan move, refused to support them.  They took their
main stand against the subtreasury bill and were joined by conservative
Democrats such as Nathaniel Tallmadge of Van Buren's own state of New York
and William Rives of Virginia.  But since the regular Democrats still
controlled the Senate, they were able, under the leadership of party stalwart
Silas Wright, New York's other senator, to beat back the forces of Clay and
Webster.  The House, however, due to a combination of Whigs and conservative
Democrats, voted down the bill and a long struggle began.

     Van Buren recommended the subtreasury plan again in his December message
to Congress, and, on January 16, 1838, Silas Wright reported it out of the
Finance Committee.  Few positions had been altered in the interval.  Clay
pounced on it immediately, blustering that "all the calamities of war with
the most potent power on earth would be a blessing compared with the
consequences of this measure."  By an amazing feat of mental legerdemain, he
even claimed that it was dangerous because it centralized power, and that it
promoted disunion.

     On February 19, Clay spoke for four and a half hours against the bill.
This speech included a bitter attack on Calhoun, who, to the surprise of
friends and foes alike, had come out in favor of the subtreasury bill.  The
South Carolinian's Whiggery, it seemed, had been based as much upon his
hatred of Andrew Jackson and his hope of dominating the Whig party as it was
on principle.  Dominating Jackson had proved impossible, and now Calhoun could
see that to remain in an uneasy coalition with Clay and Webster would
probably mean his own political annihilation.  Calhoun's support for the bill
signaled his return to the Democratic fold, and the clash between Calhoun and
Clay, which followed hard upon Clay's speech, marked the resumption of
warfare between the two men.

     Despite the vigorous opposition of Clay and Webster, the subtreasury
bill again passed the Senate in March 1838 by a vote of 27 to 25, but, in the
House, it again went down to defeat.  Silas Wright was very depressed.  Even
in January, the bill's chief defender had complained of an unusual visitation
of hypoc[h]ondria" that he was unable to shake off, and, in August after the
session had ended, he wrote:  "I have experienced a sort of mental apathy
. . . .  I have been compelled to devote myself so entirely to the questions
now at issue before the country for more than a year that they have become
sickening almost to disgust and I find it difficult to rouse myself up to the
point of attempting to think upon them."  Other administration defenders were
as tired as Wright.  As James Buchanan said during the spring session, the
endless debate had worn the subject "thread-bare," and most of the senators
left the chamber whenever the sub-treasury bill was being discussed.

     Reintroduced and fought over each year, the Independent Treasury Act
finally became law on July 4, 1840, only to be repealed the next year by a
legislature dominated by Whigs, and then reinstated by the Democrats in 1846.
The scheme established regional subtreasuries with their own vaults,
collecting all federal receipts, disbursing all payments in silver and gold,
and serving the financial needs of the different sections of the country.  It
was retained, essentially unchanged, as the organizational basis of the
nation's fiscal system until the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.

     Before moving on to the raucous election of 1840 that brought to a close
this period in the Senate's history, I would like to pause, as I have
occasionally in previous statements, to look at some of the less monumental,
but perhaps no less important, events in the Senate's own internal
development during this period.  For, while major issues were debated, and
catastrophes like the panic of 1837 were dissected, bills and resolutions
were introduced and rules were adopted and changed that shaped and directed
the day-to-day life of the Senate and affected the lives of our predecessors.

     Physically, the Senate was growing.  Two new states joined the Union
during this period, which raised the number of senators from forty-eight to
fifty-two.  To preserve the delicate balance established in the wake of the
Missouri Compromise, Arkansas, a slave state, had been admitted in 1836,
followed by Michigan, a free state, in 1837.  All four of the new senators
turned out to be faithful Democrats, much to the joy of the administration.

     The Senate chamber was filling up, not only with senators but also with
reporters, the predecessors of our observers in the gallery above.  There was
a great flurry of activity among the scribblers that made its way into the
Senate rules.  In earlier statements, I have discussed the opening of the
Senate chamber to observers, and the first admittance of designated reporters
into its midst to record the Senate's activities in 1802.  During the next few
years, these reporters and those who had come to join their ranks were seated
in the eastern gallery above the presiding officer, and this was the
arrangement in 1835.

     On February 27, 1835, Senator Alexander Porter of Louisiana introduced
a motion that a committee of three be appointed to look into "the expediency
of so arranging the seats in the Senate Chamber as will promote the
convenience of members, and facilitate the dispatch of public business."
Among the eventual recommendations of that committee was the following:  "That
the Reporters be removed from the eastern gallery, and placed on the floor
of the Senate, under the direction of the Secretary."  The proposal was
approved during the Twenty-fourth Congress, and thus, for the first time,
specific provision was made for the press in the Senate's rules.

     This was the situation in 1838 when the Senate was considering changes
in Rule 47, which listed the persons who might be admitted to the Senate
floor.  Buried in the changes was the following provision permitting "two
reporters for each of the daily papers, and one reporter for each tri-weekly
paper published in the City of Washington" to be seated in the chamber.  The
press, both in Washington and the rest of the country, apparently overlooked
this change, which was adopted on the last night of the session in the usual
close-of-session rush.  It slowly dawned on them that all but the Washington
press were to be excluded from the chamber, where, before, many had sat.
Rumor had it that the measure had been slipped through by Senator John Niles
of Connecticut, who loathed the press.

     The out-of-town reporters had mobilized by the second session of the
Twenty-fifth Congress, and they convinced new Senator John Norvell of
Michigan to present their memorial, protesting that

. . . by the rule of the Senate they are deprived of the opportunity and
privilege of obtaining information of Congressional proceedings for their
respective papers; that the provision of the Senate exclusively furnishing the
facilities they ask to city reporters, does not furnish the people of the
country with full reports of what takes place until several days after the
date of such transactions . . . ; and praying that the Senate may assign them
such seats on the floor, or in the galleries, as may enable them to discharge
their duties to those whose agents they are.

     In January 1839, the committee to which the memorial was referred
proposed that the front seats of the eastern gallery be set apart for the
out-of-town reporters as well as the local ones.  The report generated a
debate that runs for almost four pages of the Congressional Globe and
elicited some rather violent remarks, reported in the third person, from
Senator Niles:

He was somewhat surprised at a proposition that the body should sanction, and
in some manner endorse, the vile slanders that issue daily from these letter
writers by assigning them seats within the chamber.  Who were these persons
who styled themselves reporters.  Why miserable slanderers, hirelings hanging
on to the skirts of literature, earning a miserable subsistence from their
vile and dirty misrepresentations of the proceedings here, and many of them
writing for both sides . . . .  Perhaps no member of that body had been more
misrepresented and caricatured than himself by those venal and profligate
scribblers, who were sent here to earn a disreputable living by catering to
the depraved appetite of the papers they work for . . . .

     Apparently, many senators agreed with Senator Niles.  His motion to table
the memorial finally passed 20 to 17.  The reporters were not about to take
such insults lying down.  Niles and the other supporters of their exclusion
were excoriated in editorial after editorial.  Here is one example:

The bitter hostility of such men as Niles to a Free Press is easily accounted
for as it tears the Lion's Skin from the Jackass, and distinguishes the
braying of that stupid beast from the roar of the Noble Monarch of the Wood.

      Again, another sample of their invective:

. . . then for Doctor Niles of Connecticut.  Nature made him an ostler
[stableboy].  Chance, and his own roguery made him an United States Senator
. . . .  Never was fellow meaner than this same Niles who with the fancies of
a dolt makes pretensions to the intellect of the most talented man in the
country.  His manners are bad, and his breeding worse.

      Yet another indication of their outrage:

On Saturday last the poor reporters who had petitioned for a separate seat in
the eastern gallery of the Senate, were rowed up Salt River by the loco-foco
members [radical Democrats], who seemed to be in a terrible fury with the
letter writers for not allowing them to have more talent and decency than they
possess.

      Despite their outrage, here the matter stood at the end of the
Twenty-fifth Congress.  For the next three years, out-of-town reporters, aided
by local journalists, used all sorts of subterfuges to get around this
exclusionary rule, but the rule stuck.  It was not until 1841, when the Whigs
became a majority in the Senate, that the rule would be changed and the doors
once again opened to the reporters.

      As the 1840 elections approached, the Senate once again became infused
with presidential fever.  Both Clay and Webster hoped to receive their party's
nomination at the Whig Convention in Harrisburg.

      Webster was fifty-seven years old in 1839 and had begun to take on the
appearance of a venerable statesman.  The Webster paunch had become as
noticeable as the famous dome and the fierce brows.  His step was heavier, his
manner even more deliberate.  In his customary dress - the black, long-tailed
coat with gold buttons and buff-colored vest and pantaloons - he moved through
the streets of Washington and Boston like a revolutionary frigate under full
sail.

     Unlike his rival, Clay, whose feelings were always close to the surface
and who was addicted to profane tantrums in times of stress and
disappointment, Webster was sanguine, almost glacial, in his ability to
accept temporary defeat.  As one of his biographers, Irving Bartlett, points
out, even before Van Buren's 1837 inauguration, Webster had begun to plan for
1840.  In a candid letter to a supporter, he outlined his plans for the next
four years.  He would leave the Senate for two years.  (He did not - agreeing
to stay after much imploring by New England businessmen.)  During this period
he would travel, keep himself before the public, and, at the same time, get
his personal financial difficulties under control so that, upon his return to
political life, he would not have to divide his efforts between the Senate
and his very lucrative law pract ce.  Meanwhile, he reasoned, Van Buren would
have revealed enough of the vulnerability of administrative policies to be
effectively attacked.

     Clay, however, was also busy laying his plans.  From the beginning of Van
Buren's administration, he, too, had pictured himself as the Little
Magician's opponent in 1840.  Yearning for the nomination manifested itself
in his letters, and, as the summer of 1837 wore on, he discovered prospects
of being, "again forced into the Presidential arena."  It didn't take much
forcing.  Clay's satisfaction over evidences of support was unconcealed.

     As the Van Buren administration wore on, the Senate Whigs saw abundant
reason to believe that 1840 would be their year.  There was certainly no
better time to be in the opposition, they believed, than in periods of
financial depression.  A Whig victory seemed almost inevitable, but it was not
clear what role the two sparring Whig senators would take.  Their colleagues
looked on with interest as they courteously greeted each other day after day.

     To their tremendous disappointment, Clay and Webster were bypassed at
the Whig Convention in Harrisburg.  Wanting desperately to win, and fearing
that both men were too controversial, the Whigs decided to follow the
Democrats' example of selecting a military hero.  They nominated Ohio's
General William Henry Harrison, of the Battle of Tippecanoe and War of 1812
fame, who had served in the Senate from 1825 to 1828.  Mourned Clay, "I am the
most unfortunate man in the history of parties:  always run . . . when sure to
be defeated, and now betrayed for a nomination when I, or any one, would be
sure of an election."  Both Webster and Clay, their own ambitions thwarted,
might have had excuse for sulking in their separate tents but neither did so.
Both had dreams of leading a Whig-dominated Senate and, like gallant troupers,
toured with the grand Whig bandwagon.

     The campaign of 1840 was the most ludicrous of any in American history
up to that time.  The Whigs presented no platform and carefully hid any views
Harrison might have had on the issues.  Instead, they whipped up an emotional
circus, promoting the myth that Harrison, a man of means whose wealthy father
had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence from Virginia, had been
born in a frontier log cabin and raised on hard cider.  They portrayed him as
more a man of the people than the effete little man in the White House.  As
his partisans sang songs like "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" (John Tyler, recent
senator from Virginia, was Harrison's running mate), Harrison overwhelmed Van
Buren and the Democrats.

     The election of 1840 brought not only the nation's first Whig president,
but also Whig majorities in the Senate and House.  It inaugurated a decade of
national expansion and of increased sectional tensions.  This was to be a
decade of political warfare, between the Whigs and the Democrats, between the
president and the Congress, and, finally, between the North and the South.
The principal battleground was to be the floor of the United States Senate,
as we shall hear in my next statement.