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little doubt that the bank of the United States, under Nicholas Biddle, concentrated in itself an enormous power; and it spent in four years, by confession of its directors, $58,000 in what they called "self-defence" against "politicians." When, on July 10, 1832, General Jackson, in a message supposed to have been inspired by Amos Kendall, vetoed the bill renewing the charter of the bank, he performed an act of courage, taking counsel with his instincts. But when in the year following he performed the act known as the "removal of the deposits," or, in other words, caused the public money to be no longer deposited in the National Bank and its twenty-five branches, but in a variety of State banks instead, then he took counsel of his ignorance.

The act originally creating the bank had, indeed, given the Secretary of the Treasury authority to remove these deposits at any time, he afterwards giving to Congress his reasons. The President had in vain urged Congress to order the change; that body declined. He had in vain urged the Secretary of the Treasury to remove them, and on his refusing, had displaced the official himself. The President at last found a Secretary of the Treasury (Roger B. Taney) to order the removal, or rather cessation, of deposits. The consequence, immediate or remote, was an immense galvanizing into existence of State banks, and ultimately a vast increase of paper-money. The Sub-Treasury system had not then been thought of; there was no proper place of deposit for the public funds; their possession was a direct stimulus to speculation; and the President's cure was worse than the disease. All the vast inflation of 1835 and 1836 and the business collapse of 1837 were due to the fact not merely that Andrew Jackson brought all his violent and persistent will to bear against the United States Bank, but that when he got the power into his own hands he did not know what to do with it. Not one of his biographers-hardly even a bigoted admirer, so far as I know-now claims that his course in this

respect was anything but a mistake. "No monster bank," says Professor W. G. Sumner, "under the most malicious management, could have produced as much havoc, either political or financial, as this system produced while it lasted." If the bank was, as is now generally admitted, a dangerous institution, Jackson was in the right to resist it; he was right even in disregarding the enormous flood of petitions that poured in to its support. But to oppose a dangerous bank does not necessarily make one an expert in banking. The utmost that can be said in favor of his action is that the calamitous results showed the great power of the institution he overthrew, and that if he had let it alone the final result might have been as bad.

Two new States were added to the Union in President Jackson's time-Arkansas (1836) and Michigan (1837). The popu lation of the United States in 1830 had risen to nearly thirteen. millions (12,866,020). There was no foreign war during his administration, although one with France was barely averted, and no domestic contest except the second Seminole war against the Florida Indians-a contest in which these combatants held their ground so well, under the half-breed chief Osceola, that he himself was only captured by the violation of a flag of truce, and that even to this day, as the Indian Commissioners tell us, some three hundred of the tribe remain in Florida. The war being equally carried on against fugitive slaves called Maroons, who had intermarried with the Indians, did something to prepare the public mind for a new agitation which was to remould American political parties, and to modify the Constitution of the nation.

It must be remembered that the very air began to be filled in Jackson's time with rumors of insurrections and uprisings in different parts of the world. The French revolution of the Three Days had roused all the American people to sympathy, and called forth especial enthusiasm in such cities as Baltimore, Richmond, and Charleston. The Polish revolution had excited

universal interest, and John Randolph had said, "The Greeks are at your doors." All these things were being discussed at every dinner-table, and the debates in Virginia as to the necessity of restricting the growing intelligence of the slaves had added to the agitation. In the session of 1829-30 a bill had passed the Virginia Assembly by one majority, and had failed in the Senate, prohibiting slaves from being taught to read or write; and the next year it had passed almost unanimously. There had been, about the same time, alarms of insurrection in North Carolina, so that a party of slaves were attacked and killed by the inhabitants of Newbern; alarms in Maryland, so that fifty blacks had been imprisoned on the Eastern Shore; alarms in Louisiana, so that reinforcements of troops had been ordered to Baton Rouge; and a traveller had written even from Richmond, Virginia, on the 12th of February, that there were constant fears of insurrections and special patrols. Then came the insurrection of Nat Turner in Virginia-an uprising described minutely by myself elsewhere; the remarkable inflammatory pamphlet called "Walker's Appeal," by a Northern colored man-a piece of writing surpassed in lurid power by nothing in the literature of the French Revolution; and, more potent than either or both of these, the appearance (January 1, 1831) of the first number of the Liberator in Boston. When Garrison wrote, "I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard," Andrew Jackson for once met a will firmer than his own, because more steadfast, and moved by a loftier purpose. Thenceforth, for nearly half a century, the history of the nation was the history of the antislavery contest.

The administration of Jackson will thus be most remarkable, after all, not because of any triumph of his will, but because of something that arose in spite of it-an agitation so far opposed to his wishes, in fact, that he wished for the passage of a law excluding antislavery publications from the mails. It was an

agitation destined to draw new lines, establish new standards, and create new reputations; and it is to be remembered that the Democratic President did not abhor it more, on the one side, than did his fiercest Federalist critics on the other. One of the ablest of them, William Sullivan, at the close of his "Familiar Letters on Public Characters," after exhausting language to depict the outrages committed by President Jackson, points out as equally objectionable the rising antislavery movement, and predicts that, if it has its full course, "even an Andrew Jackson may be a blessing." But of the wholly new series of events which were to date from this agitation neither Sullivan nor Jackson had so much as a glimpse. These pages may well close, for the present, with the dawn of that great revolution.

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