Cato V, Part XXX: The Same Causes, contd.

Two things needed to happen, by and large, if Andrew Jackson’s plan to destroy the Second Bank of the United States in the aftermath of his reelection in 1832 was going to come to pass. First, the government would need to find a group of state banks willing to accept custodianship of federal deposits. This, it turned out, was rather easily done. Over the course of the spring and summer of 1833, two of the foremost anti-Bank stalwarts in Jackson’s cabinet, Postmaster General Amos Kendall (1789-1869) and Attorney General Roger Taney (1777-1864), managed to compile a list of over twenty state banks they deemed suitably trustworthy. All things going to plan, these institutions would split the governments deposits between them one they were removed from the possession of the Second Bank, thus decentralizing access to credit and eliminating a proven source of financial and political mischief. In order to complete this objective, however, Jackson would also need to find a Treasury Secretary willing to give the requisite orders. Louis McLane, who had been serving in the post since the summer of 1831, had always been a public supporter of the Second Bank, and unsurprisingly recoiled at the idea of removing the federal deposits suddenly and carelessly. Congress had only just declared that the federal government’s funds were completely secure, he protested at the time, and it seemed likely to him that tampering with the deposits would trigger another economic crisis. Jackson, of course, had already made up his mind, and so he replaced McLane at the Treasury with an Irish-born Pennsylvanian named William J. Duane (1780-1865). Duane was not as ardently anti-Bank as Taney or Kendall but had nonetheless made clear his dislike for the institution. He was regarded accordingly as a dependable compromise amongst the divided members of Jackson’s cabinet.

As it turned out, Duane was not quite as dependable as Jackson had been led to believe. On June 1^st, 1833, he was sworn in as the 11^th United States Secretary of the Treasury. On June 3^rd, he met with Jackson in the White House, where he was told of the President’s intention to remove the federal deposits. When Duane protested that Congress needed to be consulted before such an action could be taken by the Department of the Treasury, Jackson responded by explaining what he felt to be the true stakes of the situation. Congress, he asserted, could not be trusted to resist the corrupting influence of the Second Bank, and unless action was taken in the immediate Nicolas Biddle would simply buy himself a veto-proof majority and initiate another re-charter effort. Duane disagreed with this assessment, in no small part because it offended his sense of pride to be given so little latitude as the head of a government department, and the two men argued back and forth over the course of the summer over the propriety and the implications of each of their preferred strategies. On September 19^th, having seemingly had enough, Jackson sent Duane what amounted to an ultimatum. Order the removal of the deposits, he declared, or refuse; it was Duane’s prerogative, after all. Either way, an announcement would be printed in the next day’s paper serving notice that the funds would begin to be transferred no later than October 1^st. When Duane failed to act and the threatened announcement was indeed printed in the administration-friendly Washington Globe, everyone involved saw clearly what was to follow. Duane was removed from his post on September 22^nd – less than four months after being sworn in – Attorney General Taney was tapped to be his replacement, and an order went out declaring an official shift in federal policy. The United States would no longer utilize a national bank. Thereafter, and in perpetuity, all federal funds would be held by state banks.

Biddle, his allies in the National Republican Party, and the members of the Democratic Party who continued to favor the Second Bank reacted to this seeming defeat in ways that were both varied and variously effective. Clay and Webster, while reluctant to pursue a joint resolution of Congress demanding the restoration of the deposits – in the knowledge, no doubt, that Jackson would likely veto that as well – did express support for a second re-charter bill in the event that a compromise might be reached between Congress and the White House. John C. Calhoun, who had helped secure passage for the original charter bill in 1816 – and who was now a Senator representing South Carolina following his replacement as Jackson’s Vice President by Martin Van Buren – was of like mind, though he could not manage to strike an agreement with Webster and Clay. In contrast to these rather lukewarm efforts, Biddle’s response to the imminent destruction of the Second Bank was both vigorous and vindictive. Not only did his efforts to raise interest rates, call in loans, and generally stockpile monetary resources represent sound fiscal policy if the Second Bank was to survive long enough to successfully secure re-charter, but they also contributed to exactly the kind of financial disaster Jackson had feared Biddle would someday unleash. As credit contracted, businesses failed, and people were thrown out of work, Biddle’s intention was for those effected to identify Jackson’s war against the Second Bank as the cause of their woes and to petition their elected representatives for some form of relief. Writing to a business contact in Massachusetts in January of 1843, Biddle summed up his strategy thusly: “Nothing but the evidence of suffering abroad will produce any effect in Congress [...] I have no doubt that such a course will ultimately lead to the restoration of the currency and the recharter of the Bank.”

For a time, as the economy indeed began to suffer, Biddle’s plan appeared as though it would produce the desired result. Congress was flooded with petitions demanding the Second Bank’s re-charter, Jackson’s advisors began to speak with concern of the economic downturn beginning to grip states like New York and Massachusetts, and certain of Jackson’s fellow Democrats began to decry his recent behavior as unconstitutional and lament his clear ignorance of finance and economics. But Jackson, as ever, was far cannier than he appeared. Pressed again and again by delegations from hard-hit regions as to how he planned to respond to the loss of American jobs and the destruction of American businesses, his response was always the same. “Go to Nicholas Biddle,” he said, in this case to group representing distressed New York merchants.

We have no money here, gentlemen. Biddle has all the money. He has millions of specie in his vaults, at this moment, lying idle, and yet you come to me to save you from breaking. I tell you, gentlemen, it's all politics.

In time, after it became clear that there was nothing more to be gained from making requests of the President, people instead began to take his advice. Not only did they seek out Biddle, who was either consistently absent or alarmingly unsympathetic, but they ultimately determined to place the blame for their predicament squarely on his shoulders. Many members of Jackson’s own Democratic Party remained unsure as to the wisdom of removing the federal deposits without the approval of Congress, even to the point of questioning the legality of the same. But steadily, consistently, public opinion won out.

The last gasp of resistance to Jackson’s war on the Second Bank came in the form of a political gesture bearing hardly any material consequences. Jackson had won reelection in 1832, it was true, and his fellow Democrats had maintained their majority in the House of Representatives. But the National Republicans succeeded in taking control of the Senate by a margin of 26 to 20, at long last permitting them the opportunity to express their displeasure through the medium of institutional power. They couldn’t simply vote to restore the federal deposits, of course. The Democrats in the House would never approve such a measure. And it would have been entirely pointless for them to expect the House to send over articles of impeachment based on Jackson’s recent actions. But they could refuse to ratify certain of Jackson’s cabinet appointments, many of which, during the re-shuffle that accompanied the closing act of the “Bank War,” had been made on an ad-hoc, acting basis. And they could, for what it was worth, vote to censure the President. What this amounts to, in practice, has never been all that clear. Unlike impeachment or expulsion, both of which are mentioned in the Constitution as punishments Congress may enact against such officers of the federal government as the majority therein feels are deserving, censure is a power that Congress had to grant itself in the absence of some form of official condemnation more severe than a reprimand and less drastic than removal. By a simple majority vote, either the House or the Senate may censure an individual, thus signifying the displeasure of the relevant body towards the individual in question and establishing the same as a matter of public record.

Jackson had most definitely earned the displeasure of the men who came to control the Senate majority in the aftermath of the Election of 1832. It accordingly stood to reason, in the absence of a more effective form of rebuke, that the National Republicans would seek to use what little power they had gained to make it known to all concerned that Andrew Jackson had behaved in a manner they considered to be unbecoming of the President of the United States. Jackson, Senator Henry Clay thereby asserted, was little more than a, “Backwoods Caesar” whose administration was tantamount to a, “Military dictatorship [.]” By removing the federal deposits from the possession of the Second Bank of the United States without the approval of Congress, he had dangerously overstepped his authority as President, made a mockery of the balance of federal authority crafted by the Framers, and threatened to transform the United States of America in a despotic autocracy wherein the only will that warranted being expressed was that of the Commander-in-Chief. Democrats allied to Jackson – particularly in the House – protested by drawing attention to the fact that the President had but recently been elected by the majority of the whole electorate of the American republic while the Senators who sought to pass judgement upon his behavior had been selected by the various state legislatures. Since the President accordingly possessed a much closer relationship to the American people than the Senate, and the American people have just reelected him by a wide margin, it stood to reason that the actual mood of the country was very much in Jackson’s corner. Undaunted, the National Republicans in the Senate countered by reminding their Democratic colleagues that the President had in fact been chosen by the majority of the members of the Electoral College rather than by a simple majority of the popular vote. The Senate, therefore, had as much right to claim to speak for the American people as did the President. In the end, notwithstanding this rather petty exchange, the final tally – as recorded on March 28^th, 1834 – conformed exactly to the extant partisan makeup of the Senate. Twenty Senators voted against censure, twenty-six voted in favor.

And that, in essence, was that. Jackson’s opponents had more or less reached the limit of their formal ability to resist or oppose his conflict with the Second Bank. Censure carried with it no more severe a penalty than having the incident recorded in the annals of Congress. It represented something of an indignity, to be sure, for a man like Jackson to have his name at all blackened in the eyes of the American people. Having participated in many a duel in his younger days over slights that were far less public, Old Hickory was not one simply to shrug and let matters rest as they might when aspersions were cast upon his honor or integrity. In the moment, however, the censure vote caused few ripples, if any. The Democrats controlling the House held a vote of their own in April, affirming by two separate resolutions that the Second Bank should not ever be re-chartered and that the deposits should not ever be restored. The House leadership doubtless would have preferred to formally ratify Jackson’s decision to remove the deposits, but this was impossible without the concurrence of the Senate. The President, for his part, was nevertheless quite pleased. Having thus, in his estimation, sealed the Second Bank’s fate for good and all, Jackson regarded the aforementioned resolutions as a, “Glorious triumph [.]” By 1835, with the economy having substantially recovered from Biddle’s engineered crisis, Jackson succeeded in paying off the entirely of the national debt. In 1836, in anticipation of the expiration of its federal charter, the Second Bank was re-established as a private corporation in the state of Pennsylvania. And by 1837, the Democrats having taken back control of the Senate in 1834, the upper house of Congress voted by a margin of 25 to 19 to expunge Jackson’s censure from the record. A banquet was held shortly thereafter in celebration. Jackson left office as President scarcely two months later. 

The difference between what Jackson did in 1832 when he vetoed the Second Bank’s re-charter bill and what he did in 1833 when he ordered the federal deposits to be removed – notwithstanding the protests of his supporters – was in point of fact rather substantial. Vetoing a bill – any bill, for any reason – fell well within the purview of the President of the United States. Custom may have expected him to exercise this particular power only in such circumstances as the constitutionality of the relevant legislation remained generally ambiguous, but the law of the land demanded no such discretion. What it did demand was that the President of the United States respect the authority and the prerogatives of Congress in such areas as the Constitution declared the latter to be solely responsible. Congress had not formally been allocated the power to charter a national bank in the text of that document, it was true. But the Supreme Court had ruled in 1819 that the Necessary and Proper Clause permitted exactly that measure to be taken, since it served to further other responsibilities that the Constitution did denote. When Congress approved the bill chartering the Second Bank of the United States in 1816, therefore, and when President Madison signed it into law, the action being undertaken accordingly represented a wholly valid exercise of congressional authority. Congress could charter a national bank, and in so doing could specify how and under what circumstances it would perform its intended function.

This, indeed, is exactly what Congress did. A group of private shareholders was incorporated, operating procedures were set in place, administrative offices were described and empowered, and the exact nature of the relationship between the Second Bank and the federal government was defined and established. For the most part, as relates to the events that followed, this was all rather pro forma. The Second Bank, in essence, behaved like the First Bank, and was seen as no more or less objectionable to those who rejected the very concept out of hand. Of particular significance to the events of the Bank War, however, was the text of Section 16. The clause in question stated – excerpted here almost in its entirety – that,  

The deposits of the money of the United States, in places in which the said bank and branches thereof may be established, shall be made in said bank or branches thereof, unless the Secretary of the Treasury shall at any time otherwise order and direct; in which case the Secretary of the Treasury shall immediately lay before Congress, if in session; and if not, immediately after the commencement of the next session, the reasons of such order or direction.

Evidently, when Congress set about re-establishing a national bank in the aftermath of the War of 1812, the Representatives and Senators responsible wished to ensure that the federal funds deposited therein could not be tampered with on the unilateral authority of the Executive Branch. Perhaps they feared, in light of the controversy that had dogged the First Bank over the whole course of its existence, that some President at some point might try to engineer its destruction. Or perhaps they simply felt that removing the federal deposits for any reason entailed such drastic potential consequences that it was only prudent for the most representative branch of the national government to be included in the process. In either case, the law was clear. The President could, on his own authority, order the Treasury Secretary to remove the federal deposits. But the Treasury Secretary could not, on his own authority, remove the federal deposits without first consulting with Congress.

Naturally, President Jackson would claim that this restriction was not a binding one. Congress, he avowed time and time again, did not have the authority to charter a national bank. And while the Supreme Court may have disagreed – again, see McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) – it just so happened Jackson also believed that the Supreme Court was likewise devoid of any authority over the other branches of the federal government. He had said as much in his veto message in 1832 – that each of the three branches were independently responsible for evaluating the constitutionality of a given object – and here, in 1833, he put his words into action. Who could argue? If neither Congress nor the Supreme Court could legitimately countermand the President, then Jackson’s word was as good as constitutional law. In point of fact, Congress and the Supreme Court could and did argue, but to little practical avail. Jackson’s fellow Democrats agreed with the leader of their party and prevented any action from being taken against him in the House. And the American people, in 1832, expressed their own support by re-electing Jackson and sending another Democratic majority to the lower house of Congress. Even if Jackson had broken the law, who would punish him? Who could? The answer to both questions, in practice, was no one. Old Hickory had the cards; the game was his.

This isn’t to say that there wasn’t some degree of ambiguity surrounding Jackson’s actions towards the Second Bank even within the framework of constitutional government he himself had described. Granting, for the moment, that Jackson was right, and that the President could judge independently of the Legislative or Judicial branches whether an object, action, or law was constitutional, did it therefore stand to reason that the sitting Chief Executive could countermand the judgement of a previous Chief Executive? President Madison, recall, had given his assent to the bill that first established the Second Bank when it was submitted to him by Congress in 1816. In so doing, he thus theoretically gave the stamp of constitutionality which Jackson insisted he possessed. Did this not mean that the entire bill was constitutional? Or were subsequent occupants of the office of President perfectly free to countermand, modify, or rescind the orders of their predecessors? What if the order in question contained a qualifying protection against modification? The bill that established the Second Bank was by its own terms set to expire no earlier than the year 1836. By putting his name to it, didn’t President Madison thus bind the Executive Branch to these terms in perpetuity? And if he didn’t – if Jackson could still choose to ignore them at his leisure – why were such terms made explicit at all? If the President of the United States was indeed free to interpret the Constitution as he saw fit, what possible limits did his authority really have?

Though Jackson was most definitely responsible for creating the circumstances in which disquieting question like these might naturally arise, it bears acknowledging that he almost certainly never intended to empower the office of President to a wholly unlimited degree. He was, after all, a self-avowed strict constructionist whose dislike of the Second Bank stemmed in large part from his belief that a close reading of the Constitution simply did not grant Congress the ability to create such an institution. From Jackson’s view, while his claim that the President was free to evaluate the constitutionality of a given law on his own authority represented a potentially drastic enlargement of the powers available to the Chief Executive of the American republic, his stated purpose was to force Congress to adhere more closely to the text of the Constitution rather than to create opportunities for himself to do the opposite. The problem – the reason that he met with so much resistance – is that he went about realizing his intended objective in a completely backwards and counter-intuitive fashion. In order to promote closer adherence to the plain text of the Constitution, he undertook to empower the office of President to a degree that the Constitution came nowhere close to permitting. Any reasonable observer can see quite plainly how little sense this makes. And yet there is almost no cause to doubt that it made perfect sense to Andrew Jackson. Why? Well, as far as he was concerned, that’s just how Presidents did it.

Recall, for a moment, the events of George Washington’s tenure as President as discussed in the present series. When seeking to accomplish a particular objective and faced with a degree of uncertainty as to his ability to achieve the same, what did Washington do? In both of the cited cases – i.e. the passage of the Jay Treaty (1795) and the events of the Whiskey Rebellion (1794) – he brushed aside any doubts to the contrary, grabbed firm hold of the power he felt he needed, and didn’t look back. Granted, in neither instance could anyone unambiguously establish that Washington was guilty of violating the Constitution, but a precedent to that end was seeded all the same. When President Jefferson next sought to purchase and incorporate foreign territory into the United States of America and then attempted to severely regulate American trade by way of placing a tremendous amount of power at the disposal of the office of Chief Executive, there was thus already a model in place which he could follow. He may have railed against the notion during the years he led the Democratic-Republicans in opposition, but once in power Jefferson seemed to change his tune fairly quickly. Ideological convictions to the contrary be damned, he realized that the office of President could practically achieve a great deal more than the Framers had intended, and at times it even should. In the end, what mattered more than the strict constitutionality of the Chief Executive’s every action was what James Madison memorably described as, “The magnitude of the object,” and, “The candor of the country.” If the American people accepted it, in essence, then the Constitution could go hang.

If this was the attitude of the party that controlled the office of President for the entire period between the years 1801 and 1825, it should accordingly come as no surprise that Andrew Jackson’s election brought on only more of the same. For the whole of his public career up to the time that he entered the White House – a span of some forty years – he had watched how successive American presidents behaved. He saw them brush aside doubts, seize the power they felt the situation demanded they wield, and time and again have their actions ratified by success. Why, then, should he have behaved otherwise once in office himself? Indeed, given his military background and the success he had enjoyed as a result of his own aggressive style of command, why shouldn’t he have tried to push the envelope further still? He had always been rewarded when overstepping his stated authority in the past, and so had many of the men who occupied the office of Chief Executive. To be President, it seemed, was to be bold, aggressive, and somewhat cavalier as to the limits of one’s power. And so, in his own inimitable fashion, this is precisely what Jackson did. It wasn’t that he followed the examples of Washington and Jefferson exactly. For all that these men did to enlarge the practical power of the Executive Branch, neither of them could be said to have unambiguously violated the reigning constitutional order. Rather, it was that Jackson embraced the sense of certainty that had come to characterize presidential power in the contemporary United States. He was decisive, confident, and forceful. He worried less about upsetting the existing balance of federal power than simply taking what it was he wanted. He relied on the American people to validate his actions after the fact. He behaved as though he alone knew what was best for the American people.

Returning – at long, long, long last – to the prognostications offered by George Clinton in the text of Cato V, the evolutionary process which ultimately gave rise to the likes of Andrew Jackson would once more seem to align quite neatly with the example he put forward from the history of ancient Rome. As Julius Caesar gave way to Caligula, who led to Nero, who paved the way for Domitian, so Washington opened the door for Jefferson, who made possible the emergence of the likes of Andrew Jackson. From the perspective of the first step, the last might seem wholly impossible. From Caesar, who maintained most of the mechanisms of the Roman state as they were, recognized many of the traditional prerogatives of the Senate, and never questioned the paramount importance of the city of Rome itself, how could the Romans have ever allowed themselves to make obeisance to the likes of Nero or Domitian? To the likes of men who spat on the traditions of the Senate, dismantled the traditional bureaucracy, and made Rome little more than an expensive bauble in their personal collections? Just so, from the sober, judicious leadership of George Washington, how could the American people ever bring themselves to elevate a man like Andrew Jackson to the highest office in the land? Washington was thoughtful, restrained, and sensible. Certainly, he expanded the definition of executive power beyond what the Framers had likely intended, but infrequently, and in small, subtle ways. Jackson was conversely a brash, assertive, braggart of a man whose conception of the power at his disposal was often alarmingly expansive. How was it possible for the American people, like the Romans before them, to alter their conception of political leadership so completely in so short an amount of time?

The answer, by and large, would seem to take the form of a fairly durable axiom. Over a sufficient period of time, with reasonable inducements along the way, people can grow accustomed to almost anything. On one hand, this is rather a comforting thing. Destructive attitudes can successfully be eliminated, and constructive habits can successfully be embraced. People are not doomed to a static existence. On the other hand, however, it is a potentially terrifying prospect. Even a people renowned for their virtue can come to accept iniquity. Time, if permitted, erodes even the best morals. This latter dimension seems to be what Clinton was most eager that his countrymen keep in mind. It might indeed have seemed impossible to quite probably the majority of Americans in the late 1780s that the ratification of the proposed constitution would someday lead to the expansion of executive power eventually heralded by the rise of Andrew Jackson. In truth, of course, there was every reason to fear such an outcome. The Romans, who had for generations prided themselves on being virtuous, and prudent, and distrustful of power, eventually came to accept the rule of supreme egotists like Nero and unrepentant autocrats like Domitian. Why should the American people think themselves immune from this same course of degeneration? Indeed, they were not immune. The creation of a unitary chief executive under the auspices of the Constitution opened the door for this same transformation to occur once more in America. What seemed impossible became simply what was. 
         

  None of this is to say, mind you, that Clinton – and, by extension, the Founders – were always right whenever they held for in such a manner. Putting aside the fact that various members of the Founding Generation were astoundingly wrong about a great many things – not the least of which was the notion that owning human beings is in any way acceptable – it bears noting that Clinton was not trying to warn his fellow countrymen in the text of Cato V of what would inarguably come to pass if they consented to ratify the proposed constitution. On the contrary, far from being certain as to the fate that awaited them all, he was profoundly uncertain. He did not know, any more than anyone could know, what would come to pass in the event that the American republic adopted a more centralized form of government. But he was an intelligent man, and he knew his history. And what he knew made him afraid. He feared what might become of the nation he and his cohorts had helped to create; that it might unravel or succumb to corruption. And he wrote about these fears, tried to turn them into a warning. We might look back on the attempt as being hopelessly naïve. What could this man have known of what America would become? Even as long ago as the 1830s, this same sentiment seemed to be in common circulation. Having survived for nearly fifty years under the auspices of the Constitution, it doubtless appeared to even the most clear-eyed statesmen of that now far-distant era that the American republic was as robust and as durable as any nation ever created by man. Far from being in danger of dissolution or corruption, it was a country on the rise; powerful, vigorous, and hungry. What could such a nation possibly have to fear? Nothing, Andrews Jackson most assuredly would have answered. The United States of America had nothing to fear at all.

Was Clinton wrong to be afraid, then? Were his fears wholly unfounded? No. It’s just that he viewed the United States of America from a wholly different perspective than anyone one else ever could. He and his colleagues stood in the midst of a pivotal moment in the history of the world and gazed down the river of time at all the possible futures that suddenly lay before them. There was greatness to be had, and glory, and fame, and wealth. America might someday become the greatest empire in the history of human civilization. But there also lay a great darkness in the future. The American people might feel their newfound potential too keenly and grasp it too greedily. They might sacrifice all that their forebears had left them for more and greater power. Who could say which of these fates would come to pass? And how much difference was there between one and the other? The American people might proceed down one path, assured in their choice by the prosperity that came with it, only to realize too late that they had strayed from the course of virtue and destroyed all that they professed to cherish. Caution would seem to be the only contraceptive: extreme caution, prudence, and respect for the wisdom of the past. This, in essence, is what the Founders teach and what the Founders embody. Were they always right? Of course not. But sometimes, in some things, they knew more than anyone else could.  

         

Anyway, that’ll do me. Decide for yourself, by all means.             

Cato V, Part XXIX: The Same Causes, contd.

Jackson’s expected veto of the re-charter bill came three days after its approval in the House on July 10^th, 1832. The plain fact of it was not in the least bit surprising. Notwithstanding the earlier assurances of people close to Jackson that he was unlikely to attempt completely destroying the Bank given its widespread popularity, his ideological opposition to the very concept of central banking had never really been in doubt. What was surprising – from the perspective of constitutional law, at least – was the explanation he offered in addition to his stamp of denial. Previous presidents, when they made use of the veto power granted to them by Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution, did so explicitly out of concern that the legislation in question was unconstitutional. This was originally made explicit by George Washington when he vetoed the first version of the Apportionment Act in April of 1792 and was repeated most recently by James Monroe when he vetoed the Cumberland Road Bill in March of 1822. Jackson himself had initially followed this example when he vetoed two other road bills in May of 1830, but his approach to negating the Second Bank re-charter bill was markedly novel. He did believe, for the record, that the creation of the Second Bank of the United States by Congress in 1816, and its attempted re-charter by Congress in 1832, were unconstitutional. Congress may indeed have possessed the theoretical authority to create a national bank, he wrote, but nothing in the Constitution gave a particular group of legislators the right to prevent their successors from either dissolving that same institution or chartering additional banks as they saw fit.

Where the logic of Jackson’s veto message ultimately differed from the norm was in his assertion as to why his opinion of a given law’s constitutional legitimacy should have made any difference at all to its coming into force. The Supreme Court had already ruled in its decision in MuCulloch v. Maryland (1819) that Congress did indeed possess the constitutional authority to charter a national bank. The implications of the Necessary and Proper Clause granted it this power, the majority opinion declared, and it made no difference if the states took issue with the result or not. But while the authority of the Supreme Court to make such declarations had by that time been well established – pursuant, of course, to the principle of judicial review as established in Marbury v. Madison (1803) – Jackson nevertheless proceeded to affirm a different doctrine altogether in his message accompanying the veto of the Bank bill. “The Congress, the Executive, and the Court [,]” he asserted,

Must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them for passage or approval as it is of the supreme judges when it may be brought before them for judicial decision. The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both. The authority of the Supreme Court must not, therefore, be permitted to control the Congress or the Executive when acting in their legislative capacities, but to have only such influence as the force of their reasoning may deserve.

There would seem to be at least two points particularly worth noting from within this bizarre interpretation of American constitutionalism. The first is Jackson’s apparent disregard for the relationships which then existed between the various branches of the contemporary federal government. Since Marbury v. Madison, every Congress and every President had acknowledged and respected the unique authority of the Supreme Court to review state and federal legislation for their conformity to the text of the United States Constitution. More to the point, no Congress and no President since Marbury had ever attempted to assert that their interpretation of the Constitution was as valid and as binding as that of the Supreme Court. Jackson’s assertion to the contrary – that Congress and the President could determine for themselves whether a given law was constitutional or not – was accordingly lacking in any kind of precedent. Given that the United States follows the English Common Law tradition – wherein precedent is paramount – this presented something of a quandary. If Jackson was right, and the various branches of the federal government had always been free to interpret the Constitution on their own initiative, why had the Supreme Court alone exercised the authority to do so? Given the preponderance of examples whereby the Court invalidated a state or federal law and Congress and the President abided by the result, why should anyone call into question the concomitant balance of authority? What did Jackson have on his side that might have shed light on the origins of his conviction besides a vested interest in the outcome of the present struggle? In point of fact, the President could produce no evidence at all to support his extraordinary claim, nor give any reason at all why the present instance should have given rise to such a drastic reform of constitutional procedure while no past instance ever had.     

  

The second element of the cited passage from Jackson’s veto message whose implications ought to give anyone pause was the President’s alarmingly use of an otherwise innocuous phrase. Affirming, as seemed to be his primary objective, the supposedly equal right of Congress and the President to judge of the constitutionality of a given piece of federal legislation, Old Hickory notably declared that, “The authority of the Supreme Court must not […] be permitted to control the Congress or the Executive when acting in their legislative capacities [.]” The term “legislative capacities” is the object at issue. The United States Congress naturally possesses a number of legislative responsibilities. Not only is it responsible for passing regular statutes – i.e. laws regulating this, defining that, or generally permitting or prohibiting a given individual or corporate action – but it may also levy taxes, establish government departments, and conduct investigations. The Executive, by contrast, isn’t traditionally thought of as a legislative body. On the contrary, and by most conventional interpretations, the Executive Branch is not supposed to attempt to accomplish anything more beyond executing the laws of the land. Presidents that meddle in the prerogatives of Congress accordingly tend to be stoutly rebuffed, such attempts being roundly declared to be unconstitutional. The presidential veto might perhaps be interpreted as something of an exception, allowing a President, as it does, to weigh in on the legislative process in a very profound sort of way. Upon consideration, there would indeed seem to be arguments on both sides.

On one hand, because the President is subject to election by the American people as a whole while the various members of Congress stand for election in discreet districts or within the states, it might reasonably be argued that the presidential veto represents a third layer of legislation discretion beyond that offered by the House and the Senate. Whereas the House stands in for the American people as members of specific geopolitical communities, and the Senate stands in for the American people as organized into the various states, the President might conceivably be said to stand in for the American people as an undifferentiated mass. Indeed, the President would seem to be the only office within any branch of any government in the United States of America that could reasonably claim to perform this function. Bearing this in mind, it might in fact be the case the that Executive Branch of the United States government does – and did, in 1832 – possess at least one “legislative capacity,” to be exercised with as much discretion as those of the House or the Senate. The only problem with this interpretation of the significance of the presidential veto, of course, is that it is plainly not what the Framers intended.

This isn’t to say, of course, that the meaning intended by the Framers should in all cases override the meaning held by those of us who yet live and breathe. A wise man – albeit one who did not always heed his own advice – once keenly observed on this very subject that, “It is ultimately the provisions of our laws, rather than the principal concerns of our legislators, by which we are governed.” That being said, where the intentions of the Framers as to a given aspect of their work are clear and explicable, prudence would seem to dictate that they be afforded their just and proper weight. Bearing that in mind, certain excerpts from the debates which took place over the course of the Philadelphia Convention on the subject of the executive veto – as recorded by Virginia delegate James Madison, no less – would seem to warrant consideration. Specifically, it is the debate that took place on September 12^th, 1787 which merits scrutiny at the present moment. The discussion at hand between the assembled delegates concerned the relative strengths and weaknesses of either a 2/3 or a 3/4 majority for the purpose of overriding an executive veto. Some, like New Yorkers Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804) and Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816), believed that 2/3 was insufficient to prevent Congress from coming to dominate the office of President. Others, like South Carolina’s Charles Pinckney (1757-1824) and the aforementioned James Madison, held to the opposite view, arguing that a threshold of 3/4 would place too much power in the hands of too few people to impede the proper function of the proposed national government. In the end, of course, the issue was settled in favor of a 2/3 majority, at which point the discussion moved on. But in the moment, as each side sought to clarify their respective positions, two delegates in two separate comments made it known quite clearly the specific functions which they intended the existence of the veto to perform.

The first of these comments was submitted by Massachusetts delegate Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814), future Vice-President and namesake of the term “Gerrymander.” Evidently seeking to remind his colleagues of the nature of the object over which they disagreed, he helpfully explained to all those present that, “The primary object of the revisionary check of the President is not to protect the general interest, but to defend his own department.” The second comment, offered shortly thereafter by Madison himself, echoed this sentiment while adding an additional stipulation. “The object of the revisionary power is twofold [,]” Madison affirmed. “1. to defend the Executive Rights 2. to prevent popular or factious injustice.” Granting that the discussion at hand was not concerned with the nature and purpose of the executive veto as much as it was with the conditions under which the same might be overturned, it is nonetheless worth remarking upon that no one present disagreed with either of these descriptions. In consequence, while there might not have existed a consensus amongst the assembled delegates as to the mechanics by which the executive veto was bound to operate, there seems to have been complete agreement as to the functions that it was supposed to perform. On the one hand, as per Gerry and Madison, it was intended to aid the Executive Branch in protecting itself from having its rights and responsibilities eroded or destroyed by the Legislative Branch. And on the other, as per Madison alone, it was supposed to offer the Executive Branch some means of countering the influence of majority factions within the Legislative Branch bent on subverting the basic principles of justice. 

       

Returning to the subject of Jackson’s veto message of July 10^th, 1832, his assertion that the Chief Executive possessed a “legislative capacity” which should have been free to operate independently of the judgement handed down by the Supreme Court should now appear to be especially curious. As the records of the Philadelphia Convention debates make quite clear, the Framers did not intend for the executive veto to in any way constitute a legislative function. Jackson seemed intent on denying this, claiming as he did that it was the responsibility of the President to weigh in on the constitutionality of all laws submitted for his signature. But as Elbridge Gerry noted – and as none of his colleagues denied – “The primary object of the revisionary check of the President is not to protect the general interest, but to defend his own department.” As Jackson was not endeavoring to protect the rights of his office when he vetoed the re-charter of the Second Bank of the United States, he must therefore have been inventing a responsibility which the Founders never intended. In light of his established convictions, this was a strange position to take.

Jackson claimed to be a strict constructionist in the mold of Thomas Jefferson. He claimed to favor the rights of the states over those of the federal government. Both of these aspects of his character would seem to preclude articulating a much broader vision of executive responsibility than any of his predecessors had every attempted. But Jackson was also an ardent critic of the Supreme Court as it then existed. Like Jefferson, he was not amenable to the notion of unelected jurists striking down laws enacted by the elected representatives of the American people. Better, he seemed to believe, that such power lay in the hands of the President, being the only office in the whole of the American republic which, by definition, possessed the confidence of the whole of the American electorate. Perhaps this conviction did put a gloss on certain aspects of the Constitution which the Framers had never intended, and perhaps it did lend the Executive Branch a scope of action far beyond its established limits. But Jackson – again, like Jefferson – didn’t seem to be the kind of person who worried very much about the means he was forced to utilize if he believed that the ends were suitably justified. He knew what needed to be done, and damned if he was going to let anything stop him from doing it.

The broader philosophical implications of Jackson’s veto message were something of an academic point at the time of its publication, of course. As the President of the United States, pursuant to Article I, Section 7, he could veto legislation submitted by Congress based on whatever criteria he deemed relevant. The text in question makes this clear enough. “Before the Same shall take Effect,” it says, referring to bills approved by both houses of Congress, they “Shall be approved by him, or being disapproved by him, shall be repassed by two thirds of the Senate and House of Representatives [.]” The Framers certainly had a specific meaning in mind when they devised this procedure – as the discussion above should have made clear – but this meaning is entirely absent from the Constitution itself. Jackson’s veto of the Bank bill, therefore, while philosophically at odds with the principles held by the Framers, was nonetheless entirely in keeping with the law of the land. The supporters of the re-charter effort naturally claimed otherwise. Daniel Webster maintained that Jackson’s assertion that the President could declare a law that had been passed by Congress and approved by the Supreme Court unconstitutional was wholly without basis in law or fact, while Henry Clay went so far as to assert that such arbitrary interference by the Executive Branch into the work of the national legislature represented an imminent threat to representative government in America. But while their outrage was loudly and emphatically expressed, Jackson’s opponents behaved as though they had no choice but to abide by the aforementioned constitutional procedure. Jackson’s veto having sent the re-charter bill back to Congress, the supporters of the Second Bank worked tirelessly to amass the requisite 2/3 majority in each house. By July 13^th, however, with nothing more than a simple majority in the Senate to show for their efforts, Jackson’s veto was formally sustained. The Second Bank of the United States was effectively dead in the water.

The general election that followed at the end of 1832 was unsurprisingly characterized by both the Democrats and the National Republicans as a referendum on Jackson’s treatment of the re-charter bill and the Second Bank. As far as Jackson and his supporters were concerned, the contest at hand was one between Jacksonian democracy and the rule of bankers and financiers. Biddle and the Second Bank were decried in Democratic newspapers as purveyors of corruption whose only aim was to enrich a handful of well-placed individuals while the American people at large worked themselves ragged just to survive. By stymieing the re-charter effort, these publications went on to declare, Andrew Jackson had thus struck a blow for the liberty of the common man and demonstrated once again his dedication to equality and his abiding disdain for special interests. Notwithstanding the advice he received to the contrary, Biddle provided ample fodder for these efforts by spending widely and generously in an attempt to secure Jackson’s defeat. No longer having to rely on mere rumors of malfeasance, Jackson was accordingly furnished with all the evidence he could ever have desired that the Second Bank really was being used by its directors to interfere in the democratic process.

The National Republican response to these accusations – substantially convincing as they were – was comparatively somewhat dry and academic. Clay and his fellow partisans made as much hay as they could of Jackson’s often imperious behavior, his evident disregard for the precedents of his office, and the implications which seem to accompany the sentiments expressed in his aforementioned veto message. The National Republican press depicted Jackson as a tyrant, and political cartoons portrayed his as a scepter-wielding monarch. In the end, however, these kinds of accusations could only go so far. At the time that Jackson was running for re-election in the waning months of 1832, all that he had done to cause his opponents to declare him a despot was veto a piece of federal legislation. The accompanying rationale was certainly worrying, particularly as it threatened to make the Executive Branch substantially immune from having its authority checked or curtailed, but the President’s actions were thus far entirely in keeping with the law of the land. Jackson could, at his own discretion, veto any bill that was placed before him. The Constitution gave him that power. And while it had become customary that the Chief Executive only deploy the veto when they believed a proposed law to be unconstitutional, the Constitution itself offered no instruction either way.

The Second Bank, by contrast – and specifically under the leadership of Nicolas Biddle – had interfered repeatedly in American domestic politics. Bank loans and donations had financed the political campaigns of a number of its supporters, members of Congress had been cajoled into publicly defending its record, and tremendous amounts of its operating capital had been spent on trying to defeat the candidate for President most hostile to its continued existence. Jackson’s claims as to the powers of his office may indeed have present the greater threat to American liberty if they were ever acted upon, but thus far the Second Bank had already shown itself to be a significant threat in practice. After first having bungled their response to the Panic of 1819, thus worsening and lengthening the economic downturn that inevitably followed, its directors had had the temerity to attempt to buy the political support which they felt would be needed in order to keep their prerogatives from being compromised or curtailed. Did the American people ever benefit from all this political wheeling and dealing? Well, yes and no. The Second Bank had played a significant role in stabilizing the American economy in the 1810s and in the latter half of the 1820s. This was no mean feat, to be sure, and one which its supporters were right to point out. That being said, the Second Bank had also often tended to function as an instrument of wealth perpetuation for the lucky few who owned shares or had access to its capital. That the democratic process suffered along the way did not speak well for the Bank’s continued existence, regardless of the associated advantages to which its supporters were quick to point.

The Democrats, in the end, won the war of words. Notwithstanding all of the money that Biddle had spent trying to convince the American people of the necessity of the Second Bank or the latent tyranny of Jackson – or indeed, perhaps precisely because of it – the President was re-elected to a second term in office. Nor was his victory a near thing, it bears adding. Of the 286 electoral votes up for grabs, the victorious candidate needed 144. The fringe Anti-Masonic and Nullifier candidates – each highly regional in their respective appeals – collectively secured eighteen electoral votes. Henry Clay, carrying six states, took 49 electoral votes. Jackson, with sixteen states and over 700,000 popular votes – 54.2% of all votes cast – came away with 219 electoral votes. As far as the Democrats were concerned, this overwhelmingly positive result constituted a ratification of Jackson’s veto of the Second Bank re-charter bill. And as far as Jackson was concerned, it constituted a popular mandate to dissolve the Second Bank well in advance of its pending expiration.

The reasoning for Jackson’s particular conclusion was in many ways as pragmatic as it was principled. Biddle had already demonstrated his willingness to use the resources of the Second Bank to influence popular opinion and swing popular elections. It was accordingly thought likely by Jackson and some of his more ardently anti-Bank supporters that Biddle would respond to the defeat of his electioneering efforts by essentially triggering a financial crisis for which Jackson would receive the blame. Understandably desirous of preventing such an outcome, Jackson accordingly included a request in his fourth State of the Union Address – delivered in December of 1832 – that Congress investigate whether the federal government’s deposits were truly safe in the hands of the Second Bank of the United States. The House of Representatives responded in the affirmative, conducted its investigation, and submitted a report for general approval in March of 1833. According to the Democratic-controlled committee tasked with carrying out the inquiry by the Democratic-controlled House – by a vote, it’s worth noting of 4-3 in favor – the deposits were in fact perfectly and completely secure. Many Democrats dissented from this finding, both from within the relevant committee and from within the Democratic caucus more generally, but not to the extent that it was in much danger of being rejected. Indeed, by a vote of 109-46, it was overwhelmingly approved. This result understandably left Jackson both incensed and newly determined. He was infuriated that his fellow Democrats should have failed to grasp the opportunity to destroy the object whose continued existence – or rather the threat thereof – had helped to secure their own elections. But he was also now quite resolute in his conviction that this problem in particular required his personal attention. Come hell or high water, he would destroy the Bank himself.

Cato V, Part XXVIII: The Same Causes, contd.

            Aside from the Nullification Crisis (1828-1833) – and quite probably the passage of the Indian Removal Act (1830) – the event for which the presidency of Andrew Jackson is probably best remembered is the crisis which unfolded in the middle 1830s concerning the re-chartering and ultimate dissolution of the Second Bank of the United States. One of Jackson’s most steadfast political convictions – aside from his unshakable belief in the moral superiority of the office of President – was his virulent opposition to the very concept of centralized banking. Like Jefferson before him, Old Hickory was of the considered opinion that granting public sanction to a group of private shareholders simply because their wealth might theoretically be put to public use constituted an encouragement of iniquity wholly incompatible with the republican form of government. Possessed of privileges, influence, and resources denied to the American people at large, Jackson was of the conviction that these shareholders would effectively constitute a kind of financial aristocracy. Where the supporters of central banking saw economic stability, he saw the entrenchment of vested interests. Where they saw the growth of industry, he saw the growth of corruption. Nothing good could come from allowing a small number of wealthy men whom the American people did not elect to shape the American economy as they saw fit, he maintained. And if it fell to him to rescue the United States from becoming little more than a tool in the hands of profligates and speculators, he would not hesitate to do what needed to be done.  

   

            Ironically enough, the Second Bank of the United States had originally been chartered in 1816 at the behest of President Madison and Jackson’s fellow Democratic-Republicans in Congress mainly in response to the financial hardships that the United States had experienced during the War of 1812. Though the party of Jefferson had previously established its vehement opposition to the very concept of central banking during the debate which led to the establishment of the First Bank of the United States in the 1790s – and had earlier in the 1810s foiled the Federalist attempt at re-chartering that very same institution – the dire financial situation that the American republic found itself in at the close of its war with Great Britain primed the governing Republicans for a reconsideration of a number of their fundamental principles. This sense of financial desperation fortuitously coincided with a swelling of national pride engendered by Jackson’s own victory at the Battle of New Orleans in January of 1815 and the waning support enjoyed by the Federalists to produce a political environment ideally suited to radical change. Having previously denied even the constitutionality of a national bank, Madison and his supporters were now both willing and able to concede that the United States might in fact have stood to benefit from the existence of such an instrument of economic stabilization. The resulting institution would not precisely replicate every aspect of the First Bank of the United States – the Republicans yet reserved the right to decry “Hamiltonian” elitism and advocate for more generous access to credit – but it would nonetheless serve the same essential function. The national debt would be funded, loans would be secured, and private enterprise would be encouraged.

But while most of the extant Republican party – including such notables as former Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, Secretary of State James Monroe, and South Carolina Congressman John C. Calhoun – broadly supported this ideological about-face, a handful of its members remained stubbornly opposed to any deviation from established Jeffersonian dogma. Virginia Congressman John Randolph of Roanoke (1773-1833), whose bellicose temper and uncompromising disdain for all forms of nationalism made him simultaneously an object of ridicule and admiration, was by far the most prominent member of this latter group, but Jackson was assuredly among their number as well. His military career certainly led him to adopt a number of blatantly nationalist positions, not the least of which was the idea of using protective tariffs to promote domestic manufacturing. But central banking never seemed to achieve this level of acceptance with Old Hickory, notwithstanding the support it enjoyed among his fellow Republicans in Congress and the White House. Granted, he did not make his dislike of the Second Bank a major feature of his campaign for President in 1828 or declare at any point that he intended to see it dismantled. But his antipathy remained latent, like that of a significant number of Americans whose livelihoods had been injured by the Bank’s fumbling responses to the Panic of 1819, and it was arguably only a matter time until something fanned the embers of Jackson’s resentment into a fierce and spiteful flame.

To the credit of the Second Bank and its directors, its reputation had recovered significantly by the late 1820s from the missteps which had followed the Panic of 1819. By the time that Jackson was inaugurated as President in March of 1829, public confidence in the Bank was in fact relatively high. A sustainable balance had been struck under the leadership of Nicolas Biddle (1786-1844) between maintaining suitable reserves of hard currency, printing suitable quantities of paper money, establishing branch offices in the states, and making credit widely available. Even Jackson’s winning coalition seemed more or less to have made peace with its existence. Certain members of the newly established Democratic Party, it was true, remained critical of what they perceived to be the Bank’s excessive printing of paper bills and the inability of small-scale farmers to gain easy access to loans. But they could see as well as anyone that the Bank was too popular to attack in the immediate, and certainly not on the grounds that it had failed to serve the needs of the public. Fortunately for these skeptics – with Jackson chief among them – an opportunity presented itself soon enough to attack the Bank from a different avenue entirely. Over the course of the year 1829, rumors – as they have a habit of doing – began to circulate among certain interested parties that the Second Bank had attempted to interfere in the Election of 1828 to the supposed benefit of Jackson’s opponent. Branch offices in several states were said to have loaned more readily to those who pledged to support incumbent President John Quincy Adams, a disproportionate number of Adams supporters were said to have been appointed to the Bank’s board of directors, and Bank capital was said to have been contributed directly to the Adams campaign. There was little evidence to support any of these allegations, and a number of people close to the President actively denied that they could be true, but such things were only of passing importance. The spark of Jackson’s distrust had been successfully re-kindled. The Second Bank of the United States was unofficially on watch.

The saga that followed, between 1829 and 1834, began like something akin to a very clumsy game of chess. Biddle, conscious of the need to secure the cooperation of Jackson and his supporters if the Second Bank was going survive a vote on its re-charter in 1836, made the first move. Seeking to mollify the President, he accordingly put forward a proposal in November of 1829 whereby the resources at the Bank’s disposal could be directed towards the full retirement of the extant national debt. Jackson reacted positively to the overture. The national debt, as it happened, was the other core aspect of the Hamiltonian financial apparatus which he particularly disliked. But while Biddle’s plan was appreciated, he replied, and would surely be recommended to Congress at the first possible opportunity, the constitutionality of the Bank yet remained an open question. This was followed in December by a request in Jackson’s first State of the Union Address that Congress make a point of reconsidering the Bank’s legitimacy. Said institution having, “Failed in the great end of establishing a uniform and sound currency,” Jackson declared, it was accordingly unclear whether it was strictly necessary to maintain a national bank or if the Treasury Department might handle matters on its own. This was, in point of fact, a highly specious claim, the Bank having done much to stabilize the value of its notes by the latter half of the 1820s. As with the rumors of the Bank’s supposed political activities, however, the veracity of the accusation mattered little in the short-term. Jackson wasn’t reacting in the present to clearly demonstrable facts so much as he was laying the groundwork for the actions he fully intended to take in the future.

Biddle was understandably alarmed and dismayed when he heard tell of the President’s patently slanderous evaluation of the institution he was running. The re-charter vote, it was true, was over six years away, and it was possible that Jackson might not even be President when it finally arrived. But just as Jackson seemed to have been spurred to aggressive action by the evident popularity of his foe, so Biddle appeared to take Old Hickory’s re-election as a given and sought to confront, head-on, the probable consequences thereof. The first step, and probably the most involved, was to initiate a kind of public relations campaign whereby, over the course of several years and by way of personal appearances all over the United States, Biddle might manage to convince both the American people and their representatives in Congress that the Bank was as essential to the nation’s economic stability. A great deal of print media accompanied this effort, in the form of articles, essays, pamphlets, testimonials, stockholders’ reports, and petitions, with the Bank’s supporters in Congress making their own contribution by conducting investigations and submitting official accounts of the Bank’s soundness. This effort, once it got underway in the opening months of 1830, had the dual effect of both raising public awareness of the potential threat facing the Bank and restoring stockholder confidence following a serious decline brought on by Jackson’s aforementioned address. Since the President had yet to offer a more cohesive critique since then, or anything on the order of a potential plan of action – the events of the Nullification Crisis having quite successfully diverted his attention – matters thus appeared to have settled more or less in the Bank’s favor.

The brief period of détente that followed was effectively shattered by a series of events that took place between December of 1830 and February of 1831. On December 7^th, as had been the case the year prior, Jackson once more called into question the constitutionality of the Bank in his State of the Union Address. “Nothing has occurred,” he declared, “To lessen in any degree the dangers which many of our citizens apprehend from that institution as at present organized.” In consequence, Jackson continued, it seemed only prudent that, “I should again call the attention of Congress to the subject.” The following February, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton (1782-1858) responded to this call to action by delivering a speech critical of the Bank’s legitimacy and calling for an open debate on its pending re-charter. Supporters of the Bank, led by National Republican Senator Daniel Webster (1782-1852), managed to stymie Benton’s initiative by calling a vote to end the discussion, but their margin of victory (32-20) was uncomfortably slim. Jackson thereafter offered public praise for Benton’s speech and announced shortly thereafter that he intended to run for re-election in 1832. In all, it had become quite clear quite quickly the Bank was well and truly in danger for its life. The period of temporizing that followed – wherein Jackson appeared to reach a compromise with his pro-Bank Treasury Secretary only to pull back at the last second at the behest of his anti-Bank Attorney General – was little more than a smokescreen. The President’s anti-Bank convictions had become well and widely known.

The response of the opposition National Republicans was more or less to cease dallying and proceed full force in favor of the Bank and its re-charter. First, at their national convention in Baltimore in December of 1831, the assembled delegates selected long-serving Senator and ardent nationalist Henry Clay as the party’s nominee for President. Clay had been a supporter of the Bank since its original charter was approved by Congress in 1816, and his belief in the efficacy of protective tariffs, central banking, and infrastructure spending was at the core of his public profile. Then, doubtless seeking to draw out the true extent to which the American people approved of the Bank or not, the National Republicans called for that same institution to be re-chartered well in advance of the established date in 1836. In the estimation of party leaders like Clay and Webster, the fate of the Bank was the ideal issue by which they embarrass Jackson and take control of the White House. Though anti-Bank Democrats were certainly prominent in the President’s cabinet and counted prominent members of Congress among their number, the National Republicans were nonetheless convinced that a sufficient percentage of Old Hickory’s own party were quietly in favor of the institution’s continued existence. Not only that, they further avowed, but the majority of the American people had already been convinced that the relative health and stability of the contemporary American economy was due to the Bank’s influence on credit markets and the currency supply. By making the Bank an election issue, they accordingly hoped to split the Democrats, undermine the otherwise unassailable popularity of Andrew Jackson, and score a resounding victory for their chosen nominee.

Nicolas Biddle, it turned out, was not so sure about any of this. On one hand, he had become increasingly convinced that Jackson was in no way inclined to compromise on the issue of the Bank. Old Hickory appeared to oppose its very existence on principle and seemed unlikely to settle for anything less than its complete dissolution. On the other hand, Biddle had also received numerous assurances from people with close connections to the Jackson Administration that the President was not prepared to veto a bill mandating the re-charter of the Bank if such legislation was duly approved by Congress. The key, these sources agreed, was to wait until after the election of 1832. “If you apply now," Treasury Secretary Louis McLane (1786-1857) thus wrote to Biddle, "you assuredly will fail,—if you wait, you will as certainly succeed.” Upon reflection, the Bank’s director decided, if possible, to postpone the re-charter effort until some point closer to the extant charter’s statutory expiration. Jackson remained an exceptionally popular figure, and it no doubt seemed wiser to avoid antagonizing him unnecessarily by potentially threatening his re-election. Unfortunately for Biddle, however, there were more things that warranted consideration than just his own inclinations. The National Republicans seemed willing to put the whole of their weight behind the re-charter effort only if it was launched in advance of the coming election, several of his fellow directors were anxious to take advantage of favorable support in the House, and the Bank’s shareholders expressed concern at the prospect of attempting to secure a re-charter bill closer to the date when the original 1816 authorization was set to expire. Hemmed in, as it were, on multiple sides, Biddle thus had little choice but to agree to pursue re-charter in the early months of 1832. The requisite bills were introduced in the House and the Senate in January of that year with respectable support among key groups of Democrats and every prospect of a safe passage.

Jackson and his allies did not react well to the introduction of the Bank issue into the context of the 1832 presidential election. While quite possibly inclined to let the matter lie fallow for a time until all concerned parties were able to have their particular grievances aired and addressed, the emergence of a partnership between the National Republicans under Henry Clay and the leadership of the Bank under Nicolas Biddle could only have been intended to thwart Jackson’s political prospects by driving a wedge between himself and his fellow partisans in the Democratic Party. The result, as it played out over the course of the year that followed, was exactly what Daniel Webster had eagerly tried to avoid in the early months of 1831: a public debate on the usefulness, necessity, and constitutionality of the Second Bank of the United States. Jackson gathered his allies – the aforementioned Thomas Hart Benton, Tennessee Congressman James K. Polk (1795-1849), newspaper editor Francis Preston Blair (1791-1876), and Attorney General Roger Taney (1777-1864) – Biddle marshaled his resources, and the battle, before long, was well and truly joined. Jackson, for his part, came to understand fairly quickly that his side was likely to fail. Support in Congress for the re-charter of the Bank was simply too strong to hope for a favorable legislative outcome. Having thus determined to veto the bill once it came to him for his signature, the President and his allies instead directed their efforts towards drawing out the conflict and polarizing the electorate. If being pro-Jackson could successfully be fused with the idea of being anti-Bank, Old Hickory felt that his freedom of action might be substantially widened at the same time that his re-election was substantially guaranteed. The key, he and his cohorts understood, was to make Biddle and the Bank look as corrupt and untrustworthy as humanly possible.

Luckily for Jackson, Biddle was only too eager to oblige. During the six-month period leading up to the re-charter vote in the summer of 1832, he worked ceaselessly to both demonstrate the public’s support for the Bank’s continued existence to Congress and show Congress’s support for the Bank to the public at large. The former effort was harmless enough, taking the form, as it did, of public petitions gathered by branch managers and submitted to Congress for entry into the record of debate. The latter, however, strayed dangerously close to exactly the kind of political interference that Jackson and his allies had been actively decrying. Keen, as ever, to make use of every resource at his disposal, Biddle solicited pro-Bank articles from numerous members of the House of Representatives and had them printed and distributed as widely as he could afford. Whether or not this really convinced anyone whose opinion wasn’t already set of the legitimacy of the Bank and its positive effect on the American economy, it most certainly provided the Democratic press with ample fodder for claiming that Biddle and his pet institution were too willing and too able to bend the legislative process to their own selfish ends. Little harm was ultimately done to the prospects of the re-charter bill – it was approved by the Senate in June by a margin of 28 to 20 and by the House in July by a margin of 107-85 – but much harm was done to the public image of the Bank.

Cato V, Part XXVII: The Same Causes, contd.

            Unfortunately for John C. Calhoun and the disgruntled inhabitants of South Carolina, Andrew Jackson was more a devotee of Jefferson as President than as the radical, insurgent ideologue who had authored the Kentucky Resolutions. He was perhaps less of a nationalist than the last three of his predecessors, having strong negative feelings about the 2^nd Bank of the United States, the national debt, and concept of internal improvements. But Jackson also remained a military man at heart, and like Jefferson himself he showed a willingness to ignore certain of his own professed convictions if the outcome was something that he particularly desired. Bearing these traits in mind, the Tariff of 1828 was not something Jackson felt that he needed to oppose. As the War of 1812 had shown, the United States suffered from a lack of domestic manufacturing which could very easily prove its downfall in the event of a sustained armed conflict. A protective tariff which promoted manufacturing was an obvious preventative measure, and one which the soldier in Jackson accordingly supported. The other aspect of the tariff legislation – the federal revenue it would generate – also appealed to the newly-minted Commander-in-Chief, though arguably for less practical reasons. Unlike many prominent voices in the contemporary Democratic-Republican party who had come to see the utility of the financial system originally devised by Alexander Hamilton – former Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, and former Presidents James Madison and James Monroe, to name only a few – Jackson was steadfastly of the opinion that a national debt could only ever be a source of public corruption. A government which was perpetually in hock to bankers and financiers, foreign governments, and speculators, he asserted, would never be at liberty to act in the best interests of its constituents. Eliminating the national debt, therefore, was absolutely essential if the American republic were ever to fulfill the promise of its founding. Since the Tariff of 1828 would serve to generate the revenues which would help to make this outcome possible, Jackson was perfectly willing to let it remain in force.

   

            The so-called “Nullifiers” in South Carolina – so named for their belief in the right of the states to effectively “nullify” federal laws which they found to be invalid – were understandably displeased at Jackson’s opposition to their cause as his position became clearer over the next several years. In April 1830, at a function honoring the birthday of Thomas Jefferson hosted by what was now being called the Democratic Party – as compared to the opposition National Republican Party – dueling toasts from supporters and opponof the Tariff and South Carolina’s response to the same led Jackson to declare his support for, “Our Federal Union: It must be preserved.” Calhoun, also in attendance and evidently still holding out hope for some manner of compromise, responded by raising his glass to, “The Union. Next to our liberty, the most dear.” While this exchange, in itself, might not have seemed like much cause for concern, Jackson escalated matters somewhat precipitously a few days later during an exchange at the White House with a visitor from South Carolina. Asked if there were any words which the President would like his guest to convey to any of his friends or acquaintances living in the Palmetto State, Jackson purportedly replied that there most certainly were. “Please give my compliments to my friends in your State [,]” he declared,  

And say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.

Notwithstanding his Vice-President’s own best intentions, it seemed, a confrontation between President Jackson and the Nullifiers was evidently in the offing.

            The last straw – the thing that tipped the Nullifiers into formal insurrection – was ironically intended to be an act of conciliation and compromise. Over the course of 1831 and into 1832, various forces within the National Republican Party – led by former Secretary of State Henry Clay (1777-1852) – and the Jacksoninan wing of the Democratic Party sought after and proposed a number of solutions to the ongoing crisis which each of them hoped would settle the matter amicably. Clay called for a reduction in tariff revenues by ten million dollars to be offset by an anticipated budget surplus, Jackson proposed reducing the existing tariffs – set at 38% on imported manufactures and 45% on imported raw materials – to a flat 28%, and former President John Quincy Adams – now a member of the House of Representatives – advocated for a compromise bill that would lower some tariffs, maintain others, and reduce overall revenues by five million dollars. The end result, after a series of negotiations, was the Tariff of 1832. Authored principally by the aforementioned Congressman Adams in his role as Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, this bill proposed to lower federal tariffs across the board to 35%. The Nullifiers in South Carolina remained strongly opposed – and even attempted to forge an alliance with Democrats in certain Western states in exchange for Southern support for free land grants – but the resulting House vote made clear the increasing tenuousness of their position. New England voted overwhelmingly in favor, seeing the compromise as an eminently reasonable one. The Middle Atlantic and the West followed suit. Only the South came out against the measure, and even then, only by four votes (36-32). With a final tally of 132 to 60 – as compared to the Tariff of 1828’s margin of 105 to 94 – the House approved the Tariff of 1832 in the summer of that year. The Senate added their endorsement shortly thereafter and Jackson added his signature on July 14^th.

            Despite his evident hope that matters with South Carolina would thereafter be settled – alongside those of his supporters in Congress and the National Republicans under Clay and Quincy Adams – Jackson’s behavior over the course of the next several months belied a sustained suspicion on his part that some hazard yet remained. Acting on rumors that the Nullifiers were working to convert officers of the Army and Navy stationed in Charleston to their cause, he ordered a rotation of personnel based on avowed loyalty to the federal government. Troops were also prepared, and a naval squadron readied, in case federal forces needed to be rushed to the Palmetto State’s capital. And by October of 1832, writing to Secretary of War Lewis Cass (1782-1866), Jackson’s level of concern had risen to the point that he appeared to expect a resort to arms. “The attempt will be made to surprise the Forts and garrisons by the militia,” he cautioned accordingly, “And must be guarded against with vestal vigilance and any attempt by force repelled with prompt and exemplary punishment.” In seeming answer to these actions – and just in time to coincide with Jackson’s landslide reelection – the South Carolina legislature released an ordinance formally nullifying both the Tariff of 1828 and the Tariff of 1832 on the 24^th of November. The President, one can well imagine, did not respond with equanimity.

The actual wording of the nullification ordinance, it should come as no surprise, was both blunt in its tone and inflammatory in its effect. Congress, it asserted, in laying tariffs upon certain imported commodities for the supposed purpose of protecting and promoting domestic manufactures, had done so, “At the expense and to the injury and oppression of other classes and individuals [.]” In so doing, the federal legislature,

Exceeded its just powers under the constitution, which confers on it no authority to afford such protection [and] which provides for equality in imposing the burdens of taxation upon the several States and portions of the confederacy [.]

Bearing this purported fact in mind, it accordingly stood to reason that the tariffs in question, approved by Congress in the years 1828 and 1832 were,

Unauthorized by the constitution of the United States, and violate the true meaning and intent thereof and are null, void, and no law, nor binding upon this State, its officers or citizens; and all promises, contracts, and obligations, made or entered into, or to be made or entered into, with purpose to secure the duties imposed by said acts, and all judicial proceedings which shall be hereafter had in affirmance thereof, are and shall be held utterly null and void.

Practically speaking, these few lines of text represented a massive assumption of authority on the part of the government of South Carolina. Not only was the Palmetto State claiming the right to declare such federal law invalid as it determined to have violated the terms of the Constitution, but to likewise nullify all contracts and judicial proceedings which appeared either to proceed from or to affirm the same. Against such claimed prerogatives, by what means could the federal government ever hope to assert itself? What law could Congress pass that South Carolina couldn’t nullify? What ruling could the federal courts hand down that the Palmetto State couldn’t claim the right to invalidate?

The Nullifiers doubtless felt that their actions were entirely justified; nay, that the principle of state sovereignty demanded such a defense. But the implication of what they were attempting was potentially disastrous. The balance of state and federal responsibilities that had been established upon the ratification of the Constitution in 1789 – a balance which had thereafter sustained the American republic through two disputed elections and a years-long war with one of the Great Powers of the day – was likely to be thrown into chaos. As more states followed the path set out by South Carolina and began nullifying such legislation as their governments found disagreeable, federal authority would practically cease to exist. Each state would claim sole authority to interpret the Constitution for itself and its citizens, leading inevitably to conflicts between states over the “true” meaning of significant articles and clauses. States that chose to accept federal authority in most cases might maintain a sense of national cohesion, but those who continually nullified federal law and federal jurisprudence were bound to drift further and further from their more obedient counterparts until such time as they might claim total independence. Over a long enough period, if this assumption of power remained unchallenged, it was conceivable that the United States of America might even cease to exist.

The Nullifiers, it bears noting, likely didn’t have this particular aim in mind. Calhoun, for his part, had spent most of his political career until at least the 1820s as an ardent nationalist. In Congress he had worked to strengthen and centralize the American military establishment after its middling performance during the War of 1812. In 1816 he supported the chartering of the 2^nd Bank of the United States. And in 1817 he became James Monroe’s Secretary of War. The impact of the Panic of 1819 and the Tariff of 1828 on the fortunes his home state clearly changed his focus as a public servant away from national concerns and towards those of South Carolina, but not to the point of desiring the dissolution of the American republic.  Nevertheless, the position which he had adopted as to the very nature of the union of American states – and which his fellow Nullifiers adopted in turn – undeniably tended in that exact direction. Jackson appeared to perceive this more clearly than his opponents and expressed himself accordingly to his constituents and fellow countrymen.

Issued on December 11^th, 1832, Jackson’s proclamation denouncing South Carolina’s ordinance of nullification made the stakes of the present crisis as clear as anyone was likely to manage. “The power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State,” he declared, was,

Incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which It was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.

The President’s rationale, as he went on to explain it, was as much moral as it was rigorously legal or practical. On one hand, in light of South Carolina’s evident claim that the unconstitutionality of the relevant tariffs derived in part from their supposed purpose rather than the mechanism employed, he countered that it would be virtually impossible to ascertain the intentions of every legislator responsible for crafting and approving every piece of federal legislation. “Who is to make the scrutiny? How often may bad purposes be falsely imputed? In how many cases are they concealed by false professions? In how many is no declaration of motive made?” There could be no sensible answers to these questions, Jackson avowed; no satisfaction to be derived from inquiring into the purposes harbored by the people’s representatives while engaged in their lawful duties.

On the other hand, evidently seeking to arouse the pride that his countrymen had come to invest in their collective sense of nationhood, he asked them what sense it would make for the states to be able to nullify laws that “operated unequally” when no law ever conceived by man had ever, or would ever, meet that criteria. Why would the Framers have constructed a plan of government so completely and fatally flawed as to permit any and every law passed thereby to be rendered null and void at the pleasure of the states? The Constitution was surely worth more than that. Indeed, Jackson declared, it was worth more than that; American had made it so, by their actions and their faith. “We have trusted to it,” he rhapsodized,

As to the sheet-anchor of our safety in the stormy times of conflict with a foreign or domestic foe. We have looked on it with sacred awe as the paladium of our liberties, and with all the solemnities of religion, have pledged to each other our lives and fortunes here, and our hopes of happiness hereafter, in its defence and support […] Did we pledge ourselves to the support of an airy nothing, a bubble that must be blown away by the first breath of disaffection? […] Did the name of Washington sanction, did the States deliberately ratify such an anomaly in the history of fundamental legislation? No. We were not mistaken.

Jackson’s tactic – and indeed it was a tactic, whether he believed what he was saying or not – was an exceptionally canny one. Whereas Calhoun and his allies were asking their countrymen to essentially forget all that had transpired between the ratification of the Constitution in 1789 and the present moment in 1832 which had served to strengthen the authority of the federal government – and further to imagine that the states had always possessed the means of invalidating federal legislation – the President grounded his position on no such flight of fancy. On the contrary, all that he asked of his fellow Americans was that they remember what had actually happened in the preceding forty years.

The Constitution had been drafted and ratified at the end of the 1780s precisely because the inability of Congress to make binding demands of the states had proven to be an untenable and unmanageable arrangement. If the United States was to survive beyond its infancy – if the unity of purpose which had sustained the American people through the horrors and trials of war was to endure – then the national authority would need to be raised in some areas above that of the states. The Framers knew this to be true, the majority of the delegates to the various ratifying conventions knew this to be true, and at no point did anyone assert that the states in fact retained the right to upend the resulting balance of power at the pleasure of their governments. As made explicit in the original text of the Constitution, and pursuant to the terms of the supplementary Bill of Rights, the Government of the United States possessed sole authority in a number of foreign and domestic policy areas within which the states were forbidden to intrude and whose validity the states had no means to question. Not only had this been the case in the early 1790s upon the election of the first President and the seating of the first Congress, but it had continued to be so through all the years since. And in all that time, the American people had largely come to embrace what the Framers had devised in their name. They celebrated the Constitution, honored its authors, lionized the first holders of the great offices of state, and pledged themselves, as Jackson observed, to defend the legacy that their forebears had left them. By attempting to deny this state of affairs – by effectively endeavoring to claim that all was not in fact as it seemed – the Nullifiers were thus in essence pushing against the substance of the history of the nation in which they lived. It was not an enviable position, to be sure, and one which left them at a distinct disadvantage.

  

Their opponent, after all, was the President of the United States. Even if the individual in question hadn’t been a belligerent egotist who famously detested having his authority called into question, the office itself had come to be associated with a great deal of power. As Jefferson had shown during the tortured life of the Embargo Act (1807), the President’s role as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States placed a great deal of coercive power at his disposal in the event that a piece of federal legislation was being actively defied. Provided the requisite Congressional approval – and sometimes even in the absence of the same – the Chief Executive could conceivably order the Army, the Navy, and the Revenue-Marine to secure federal property and protect federal personnel, detain and search suspected violators, and generally seek to intimidate all those who might otherwise consider breaking the law. Washington provided a similar example over a decade prior. Confronted with what appeared to be a nascent insurrection in Western Pennsylvania – the result of local refusals to adhere to a federal tax on whiskey – the former Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army asserted his authority to call the state militias into national service for the purpose of enforcing the offending excise and arresting those who had led the campaign of resistance. Backed by these precedents, and with the aid of an increasingly cooperative Congress, Jackson was accordingly well-equipped to confront the Nullifiers and not the slightest bit squeamish of doing so. If Washington and Jefferson had behaved in such a manner, what reason had Old Hickory to fear recrimination for doing the same?

Congress seemed to agree with Jackson’s accordant sense of resolution. Certain of its members still held out hope for a negotiated settlement, of course, and pursued the same through the end of winter and the beginning of spring in 1833. But the President’s request for an authorization of force was likewise given a full and fair hearing. The text of the resulting “Force Bill” – formally titled “An Act further to provide for the collection of duties on imports” – was submitted by Jackson to Congress on January 16th, 1833. Broadly speaking, it proposed to accomplish three essential objectives by way of expanding executive authority. First, in order better to, “Execute the revenue laws, and collect the duties on imports in the ordinary way,” authority was to be granted to the President to transfer the custom-house of a given district to, “Any secure place within some port or harbour of such district, either upon land or on board any vessel [,]” and at the same time, “To employ such part of the land or naval forces, or militia of the United States, as may be deemed necessary for the purpose of preventing the removal of such vessel or cargo” as were due to be inspected and upon which taxes were due to be paid. Second, in the event that the laws or judicial proceedings of the United States were interfered with or obstructed, “By the employment of military force, or by any other unlawful means, too great to be overcome by the ordinary course of judicial proceeding, or by the powers vested in the marshal by existing laws,” the President was thereby authorized to issue a proclamation, “Requiring all such military and other force forthwith to disperse,” and, should it furthermore become necessary, “To employ such means to suppress the same, and to cause the said laws or process to be duly executed [.]” And third, in the event that a state refused to allow persons charged with federal offenses to be jailed therein, it was to be deemed lawful, “For any marshal, under the direction of the judge of the United States for the proper district, to use other convenient places, within the limits of said state [.]”

In practice, it bears noting, hardly any of the powers allocated by the terms of the Force Bill to the office of President fell much outside of the authority already known to be possessed by the same. Between the established constitutional role of the Chief Executive to, “Take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” and the cited examples by which certain of Jackson’s predecessors had sought to accomplish the same, there couldn’t have been much doubt, circa 1833, that he indeed possessed broad discretionary authority over the lawful application of coercive force. The fact that he nevertheless sought out the approval of Congress – as did Washington and Jefferson – was therefore likely a strategic decision rather than one which the law explicitly required. Under the circumstances, with Congress itself divided over the various issues at hand – protectionism, unequal taxation, the very nature of federalism, etc. – it doubtless seemed a more prudent approach on the part of the President to request an authorization of force – thus allowing Congress to have its say – than to assert the attendant powers unilaterally and risk widening the scope of the present crisis. Jackson’s waning belief in the necessity of protectionism and his simultaneous amenability to a peaceful settlement did much to help this strategy along. So long as the President made clear his willingness to support the passage of a new compromise tariff – which he did – then Congress was evidently willing to approve his desired assertion of executive authority.

In the end, thanks in large part to the efforts of Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun – the latter now representing South Carolina in the Senate – the Nullification Crisis did not devolve into an armed internecine conflict. Seeking, in large part, to save the very concept of protectionist tariffs from being forever stained with the iniquity of having rent the union asunder, Clay endeavored to reach a compromise with the Nullifiers that would preserve the principle of using trade regulations to promote domestic manufacturing while lessening the practical impact in economically disadvantaged states. The resulting proposal, when he finally presented it in the Senate in February of 1833, thus embodied a very gradualist approach to alleviating the controversy at hand. Using an earlier plan that had been introduced in the House but failed to gain traction as a starting point, Clay’s bill recommended the reduction of all duties mandated by the Tariff of 1832 above the rate of 20% by one-tenth every two years. At the end of nine years – in 1842, that is to say – this would leave all of relevant duties at a flat rate of 20% across the board, where they would remain unless altered by Congress thereafter. On the whole, it must be said, this did not represent a particularly generous offer. Though the impact of higher prices for imported goods would be steadily lessened in states like South Carolina – to the point of falling below even the rates mandated by the Tariff of 1816 – the principle objections which the Nullifiers had raised did not look as though they were going to be addressed. Protectionism, which they had decried as unconstitutional, remained the principle objective of the adjusted tariff proposal, and the lowered import duties were still going to affect South Carolina differently then Massachusetts, New York, or Pennsylvania. All the same, Calhoun was inclined to accept the terms. The reason, no doubt, lay with Jackson and his Force Bill.

The fact that the fates of the Tariff of 1833 and the Force Bill became so closely intertwined in practice is arguably a testament to the strategic acumen of the Hero of New Orleans. Jackson was certainly willing to compromise. His disenchantment with protectionism had mounted as the Nullification Crisis came to a head in the early 1830s, and he was not so foolish as to imagine that his reputation would emerge unscathed should conflict between the federal government and the state of South Carolina have proven unavoidable. That being said, Old Hickory had never been – indeed would never be – the kind of person who much cared to wait for approval when he believed it was his duty to act. He did ask Congress for an authorization of force, it was true. And he did make it clear that he would support a viable compromise bill in the event that it met with the approval of all those concerned. But what if Congress had rejected the Force Bill? Based on Jackson’s reputation, his prior actions, and the subsequent events of presidency, does it seem likely that he would backed down? He had not done so during the Seminole War (1816-1818) when his generous interpretation of the orders he’d been given very nearly lead to his dismissal from federal service. And what was the result? The annexation of Spanish Florida by the United States of America. And what had the actions of men like Washington and Jefferson made clear about the authority of the President in the context of law enforcement? Washington had called up and commanded the state militias. Jefferson had commanded and directed the arms forces of the American republic. What reason would Jackson have had in 1833 to doubt his own right to do the very same? And what reason did anyone else have to doubt that Jackson wouldn’t inevitably proceed as he saw fit? None at all, on both counts.

In may fairly be said, in consequence, that Congress approved of Jackson’s Force Bill in no small part because Jackson approved of their compromise tariff. And it may likewise be reasonably argued that Calhoun in turn approved of the compromise tariff because on some level he feared what the Force Bill would unleash. Jackson, in essence, had handed to his countrymen a reasonably simple set of alternatives. Either they could find some means of compromise that would settle the tariff issue once and for all, or they could make their peace with the fact that armed force was necessary. For the members of Congress, the correct response was also the most obvious. Compromise is what they wanted, and so much the better if Jackson was willing to support it. And in the event that their efforts failed, it was certainly preferable to have validated the President’s subsequent actions than to have opposed them to no avail. John C. Calhoun, along with his fellow Nullifiers, appeared to come to much the same conclusion in response to Jackson’s tacit ultimatum, though perhaps for different reasons. Notwithstanding the principles which the Nullifiers seemed to want to shine a light on as their case against the federal tariff regime hardened into an outright defiance of federal law, the options laid before them at the beginning of 1833 were regrettably rather stark. Either they could take whatever compromise Congress managed to devise or they could brace themselves for the bloodshed that was sure to follow the deployment of federal troops. No one particularly desired the latter outcome, be they Democrat, Nullifier, or National Republican. And Congress would certainly have objected if the President chose to exercise his authority over the armed forces in the absence of their express authorization. In the end, however, the Nullifiers knew what the Democrats knew, what the National Republicans knew, indeed what everyone knew. Jackson was going to do what Jackson was going to do. Such had ever been the case, and such would ever be the case.

          

This particular aspect of Jackson’s character is a large part of what makes the Nullification Crisis such an interesting example of the evolution of executive authority across the early history of the American republic. Whereas Washington and Jefferson both used their authority as Commander-in-Chief to summon troops and enforce federal law, Jackson only had to indicate his inclination to do so in order to achieve the same final result. To some extent, as aforementioned, this was simply a matter of personality. Jackson had well proven over the course of his career that he was not the sort of person who threatened things that he was not ultimately willing to do. But the actions of these previous Presidents must also have played their parts. George Washington, during the Whiskey Rebellion (1794), and Thomas Jefferson, during the life of the Embargo Act (1807-1809), had both demonstrated that the office of Chief Executive possessed a significant reserve of coercive authority which it could legally deploy in the name of executing the laws of the land. It was true that Congress had in both cases provided its authorization, but what was it that was actually being accomplished? Were the House and the Senate actually giving the President new powers which he did not already possess? Was that something Congress could even do under the Constitution? Or had the assembled representatives merely acknowledged something that already existed?

Jackson, being doubtless personally inclined that way, certainly acted as though he would have answered that last question in the affirmative. Having witnessed, in the course of his own lifetime, more than one of his predecessors assume active command during a moment of national crisis, he had likely internalized the resulting image of the President as a figure possessed of significant resources and substantial discretion. The members of Congress, as seated at the beginning of 1833, doubtless disagreed with this characterization of the office of Chief Executive as a matter of principle, but their actions likewise spoke to the influence that previous Presidents had wrought. If they had truly believed Jackson lacked the authority to deploy the armed forces as mandated by the terms of his Force Bill, they might have demonstrated as much quite easily by rejecting it out of hand and insisting on a seeking a compromise without the Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. They did not, of course. Instead, likely convinced on some level that Jackson already had all the precedent he needed to deploy as much force as he believed the situation required, the assembled Senators and Congressmen signaled their approval. And why not? Why fight a battle that they were more than likely to lose? If Jackson was willing to give them one last chance to arrive at a workable compromise, why anger him needlessly by denying his authority as President? There would have been no sense in it. The President may not have possessed unlimited authority, but as the preceding decades had clearly shown that he had more than enough to put down a rebellion or enforce an unpopular law. Whether the law as written strictly agreed with this arrangement or not, the American people had come to know it for a fact.