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- $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.
-