What the Democratic-Republicans quite failed to consider when they set about seeking to prevent a repeat of the near-crisis that was the Election of 1800 – principally by drafting the 12th Amendment and thus reducing the likelihood of a tie between victorious candidates for President – was that their seeming monopoly on power as of the early 19th century was nowhere near the guarantee of political stability that they were inclined to imagine it was. The essence of the controversy of 1800/1801 had arguably as much to do with the relationship between Congress and the American people as it did with the mechanism by which votes in the Electoral College were cast and then counted. To be sure, by modifying the text of the Constitution so as to allow for the designation of distinct candidates for President and Vice-President, the Republicans who controlled Congress in 1803 absolutely did reduce the likelihood of future electoral stalemates of the type they had just witnessed. But the emergence, in 1800, of both Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr as potential claimants to the office of President was really only half the cause of the catastrophe that very nearly unfolded in 1801.
If the newly elected House had been
responsible for settling the relevant stalemate, one finds it hard to believe
that anything like what happened would, in fact, have actually happened. The
Republicans knew, to a man, who their candidate for President was supposed to
be, and those of them who were elected to Congress in 1800 would surely have cast
their votes for him in short order if actually given the chance to do so. The
problem, of course, was that these incoming Republicans were not
responsible for settling the stalemate. The outgoing Federalists, in
fact, were tasked with selecting the victor, a charge which they seemed to
seize upon with a kind of bitter, malicious enthusiasm. Eventually, after weeks
of balloting, a small handful of them were convinced to allow Jefferson to take
his rightful place. But while a much more damaging crisis was thus averted, and
while the Republicans were thereafter spurred to make some much-needed
alterations to the Constitution, that party’s membership remained too
complacent to address the entirety of the problem at hand. The issue wasn’t
just that, during a presidential election, a stalemate was more likely than was
either practical or desirable. It was that any stalemate, however rare an
occurrence, would immediately become the responsibility of the group of people least
suited to settling it honestly and efficiently.
The Republicans failed to consider this
almost certainly as the result of hubris. Having “vanquished” their rivals the
Federalists, they doubtless came to the conclusion that any future stalemate
between candidates for the office of President that were accordingly sent to
the House to be settled would result, forever after, in a Republican majority
setting things to rights. In fairness, as things played out, this was a far
from unlikely outcome. The Federalists did continue to field presidential
candidates through 1816, thus making it possible – if not probable – that an
Electoral College tie might have occurred. And in every instance between 1800
and 1824, the Republicans held the majority of seats in both houses of
Congress. If any presidential vote that took place during this era resulted in
some manner of stalemate, therefore, a House dominated by Republicans would
indeed have been called upon to settle it. This, the Republicans doubtless
would have crowed, was only right and fitting, their party having settled the
partisan disputes of the recent past several times over. First after 1800 and
again after 1816, they had conclusively proven that theirs was the only vision
of the country and its future with which the American people truly identified.
The Federalists may have continued to linger in spots, but this did not change
the most essential of facts. By defeating the Federalists time and time again,
the Republicans had validated the Framer’s vision of a non-partisan political
culture. Because truly, what significance could partisan labels possibly hold
when every statesman of note was a self-identified Democratic-Republican?
There is, to be sure, at least one problem
with this kind of thinking. Within the context of a political culture in which
free speech is protected, public disagreement is encouraged, and democratic
expression is the law of the land, single-party governance simply cannot last.
Just as it was arguably inevitable that the self-consciously non-partisan
members of the Founding Generation – who loudly professed to abhor the very
concept of political factionalism – eventually became the progenitors of the
so-called “First Party System” which pitted the centralizing Federalists
against the more radical Democratic-Republicans, the victorious Democratic-Republicans
were likewise doomed to split along ideological lines and in relatively short
order give rise to the Second Party System. Political actors, for better or
worse, will always group together according to shared values and objectives for
the purpose of pooling their strength and making more efficient collective use
of their individual resources. Just so, in a political climate in which a
single party or faction holds a monopoly on power, said party will eventually
attract people of so many different perspectives and belief systems – united
only by their desire to achieve success in the public sphere – that it must, at
some point, tear itself apart. In the event that the single dominant faction
within the single dominant party is willing to use the state security
apparatuses which it controls to effectively suppress all dissent, this outcome
might either be prevented or staved off. But so long as genuine freedom of
expression is the rule of the day, no political party or faction can govern
indefinitely without meeting this fate.
So it was, in 1824, that the
Democratic-Republican Party effectively met its end. While the so-called “Era
of Good Feelings” – described by most historians as taking place between 1817
and 1825 – had witnessed a widespread softening of the partisan rancor that had
characterized the preceding decades, it also gave rise to a general slackening
of party discipline. Policies which were originated and promoted by the
Federalists – national banking, federal tariffs, and the like – were openly
embraced by the governing Republicans, and President James Monroe made a
particular point – though tactics like national goodwill tours in 1817 and 1819
– of allowing former Federalist to feel as though the party of Jefferson was willing
to embrace them as members provided that they repudiated their former partisan
allegiance. Monroe was unwilling, it bears mentioning, to go so far as to
appoint many former Federalists to positions within the national government,
but he nevertheless made a point of balancing the emerging factionalism within
his own party by appointing the leaders of major regional and ideological
divisions as members of his cabinet. John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), for
example, who briefly had been a Federalist while representing
Massachusetts in the Senate, was granted the position of Secretary of State.
Georgia’s William H. Crawford (1772-1834), meanwhile, who had first been
appointed by Monroe’s predecessor Madison, was held over as the Secretary of
the Treasury, while South Carolina firebrand John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) was
granted the post of Secretary of War. Each man represented different facets of
the increasingly disparate Republican platform, and by including all of them in
this circle of advisors Monroe sought to signal to his fellow partisans that
there was room for a multitude of viewpoints within both his administration and
the larger party.
Not all of the major figures within the
contemporary Democratic-Republican party were included in this scheme, however,
and not every member of the same were in a position to be mollified by gestures
at “national unity.” Henry Clay (1777-1852), for one, who was then serving and
would serve again as the Speaker of the House, pointedly declined Monroe’s
invitation to join his cabinet and remained one of the most powerful
Republicans entirely outside the influence of the White House. Similarly
standoffish – albeit for very different reasons – was Congressman John Randolph
of Roanoke (1773-1833), a hot-tempered ideological purist who abhorred the
Monroe Administration’s seeming abandonment of the Jeffersonian ideals of
strict constructionism and state sovereignty and fashioned himself as the
nation’s foremost defender of agrarianism and Southern supremacy. In the
immediate, of course, these men could only be so threatening. So long as the
economy remained strong and Monroe’s cabinet remained supportive, the Era of
Good Feelings showed no signs of suddenly abating. As the 1810s began to
transition into the 1820s, however, issues which had been previously laid aside
amidst the wave of conviviality and conciliation that characterized the
post-war era once more emerged as major flashpoints of ideological and
sectional discord.
The year 1819 alone witnessed at least two
major events which strongly augured the impending collapse of the era’s
non-partisan atmosphere. The first was the Panic of 1819, a nationwide
financial crisis brought about by a combination of post-war European economic
instability, a resulting speculatory boom in American land sales, and
persistent conflict and competition between the 2nd Bank of the
United States and a myriad of regional state-chartered banks. In a nutshell,
the creation of the 2nd BUS in early 1816 almost immediately resulted
in friction between its directors and president and the advocates and backers
of the various state banks that had been created during the “free banking” era
of the early 1810s. Eager to capitalize on soaring global agriculture prices –
the result of several European growing seasons having been disrupted by the
Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) – American speculators wanted access to cheap
credit to continue as the Western frontier was in the process of being settled
and the national government took to selling public land on extremely favorable
terms. As the 2nd BUS and these local interests accordingly began to
negotiate the nature of their prospective relationship, the result was a series
of excessively generous lending policies that vastly over-extended the former’s
credit and set the stage for a major recession. Between 1817 and 1818, the 2nd
BUS racked up enormous debts without also accumulating the specie – i.e. gold
and/or silver – to back them, a state of affairs which nearly collapsed the
national economy – and in certain regions arguably did collapse the local
economy – when, in 1817, European agriculture began to recover. Prices fell,
the 2nd BUS initiated a credit crunch in an effort to avoid
declaring bankruptcy, and thousands of Americans lost either their investments
or their property. The Bank, thanks to the “stern procedures” enacted by
presidents William Jones (1760-1831) and Langdon Cheves (1776-1857), was able
to return to a sound footing by 1821, but the local economies of the West and
Southwest were left substantially in shambles.
Unsurprisingly, this rapid progression of boom
and bust elicited widely varying responses from different regions of the
American republic and from different factions of the dominant party. While New
Englanders in particular – and Northeasterners in general – spared little
sympathy for what they regarded as the reckless borrowing and speculating of
land developers in the West, Southerners and Southwesterners broadly came to
view the restrictive credit policies of the 2nd BUS as the central
cause of their woes rather than any of their own activities. Private baking
interests across the country, despite having helped set the stage for the crisis
by overprinting paper currency which they knew they would be incapable of
honoring, also remained similarly hostile to the Bank and its directors,
accusing them of being anti-republican in their desire to centrally manage the
economy. And while the official policy of the Treasury Department – under the
auspices of Secretary Crawford – was that a general tightening of bank credit
so as to prevent future crises was almost certainly good policy, other voices
within the Republican Party avidly disagreed. Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), for
example, a former Congressman, former Senator, and the great victor of New
Orleans, grew to detest the Bank for what he considered to be its primary role
in causing the panic and destroying the livelihoods of countless Americans.
Indeed, Jackson would soon enough rise to a position of prominence and power in
large part based on his avowed hatred for central banking, “business
interests,” and the political corruption which he believed must inevitably
accompany them both.
In that same year which saw the outbreak of
a widespread financial recession – the result of which, among other things, was
a splintering of the Republican Party along ideological lines – the Supreme
Court of the United States handed down one of its most notable decisions, the
substance of which also pivoted upon the significance of the 2nd
BUS. In 1818, it seemed, the Maryland General Assembly had passed a law which
applied an annual tax upon any bank operating in the Old-Line State whose
circulating banknotes had not been stamped by the Maryland state treasury.
While this would have applied, in theory, to any bank that was not chartered in
and by the State of Maryland, the only such institution – and accordingly the
intended target – was the 2nd Bank of the US. Consequently, when
cashier James McCulloh (1789-1861) issued 2nd BUS notes to a
Baltimore resident named George Williams, witness John James filed suit – per
the enforcement clause of the relevant legislation – and the resulting case
promptly found its way to the Maryland Court of Appeals. Though defended by
former Congressman and prominent attorney Daniel Webster (1782-1852), the Bank
was ultimately unsuccessful and the aforementioned tax upheld. Because, “The Constitution is
silent on the subject of banks [,]” wrote the court, the 2nd BUS was
unconstitutional and any taxation thereof perfectly valid.
Naturally, the case was appealed to the
Supreme Court of the United States, with former Adams Administration cabinet
secretary John Marshall (1755-1835) presiding as Chief Justice. Marshall
ultimately found the Maryland law to be null and void, the principal reason
being that the power to create the 2nd BUS was indeed
constitutional. Not only, he asserted, had the creation of the 1st
Bank in 1791 – the result of vigorous debate and backed by the signature of a
chief executive, “With as much persevering talent as any measure has ever
experienced” – set the precedent for further acts within the scope of the
powers of Congress, but claims to state sovereignty as being superior to that
of the national government were inevitably trumped by the overriding
sovereignty of the collective American people. The people had not only ratified
the Constitution by their own hand, but they had also elected the legislators
who in turn chartered the 2nd BUS. So long, Marshall continued, as
the means were “necessary and proper” to the ends – in keeping with Article I,
Section 8 of the Constitution – it was thus entirely within the power of
Congress to lay and collect taxes, borrow money, regulate currency, and
establish commercial relations in whatever manner that its members felt was
most expedient. If a national bank was the result, it was not for the states to
disagree. Indeed, according to the Supremacy Clause – which states that, “This
Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in
Pursuance thereof […] shall be the supreme Law of the Land” – the states had no
choice but to acquiesce. The Maryland ruling was thus voided and the offending
tax declared invalid.
At a moment in time in which the 2nd
Bank of the United States had already succeeded in making itself the subject of
passionate disagreements within the governing Republican Party, the decision in
McCulloch v. Maryland could not help but fan the flames. While the likes
of Clay, Adams, and Crawford were all of the opinion that the late recession
had shown the Bank to be a necessary instrument of national economic
regulation, Jackson, Randolph, and Virginia Senator John Taylor of Caroline
(1753-1824) – something of a radical among his contemporaries who maintained an
ardent suspicion of banking, manufacturing, and advanced capitalism in general
– all concluded that efforts to entrench centralized administration of the
economy were bound to lead to tyranny and corruption. By not only affirming the
constitutionality of the 2nd BUS but declaring its precedence over any
state policy to the contrary, the Supreme Court served to exacerbate this
divide while also reviving the old Jeffersonian maxim that the national court remained
the last refuge of the Federalists. If the national government could create a
species of institution that was nowhere described in the Constitution but which
the states could not impede or effect in the slightest, then what, truly, were
its limits? “If Congress could incorporate a bank,” Taylor accordingly
observed, “It might emancipate a slave.” And in this case, what was it that the
Federalist-dominated judiciary was explicitly protecting? A body of investors
whose only purpose seemed to be enriching themselves and their backers, and who
had just lately managed to salvage their various holdings at the expense of
countless landholders whose only crime had been to take advantage of the
generous credit policies offered by the same? Is this whom the Constitution was
intended to serve? The membership of the contemporary Republican Party found
themselves increasingly at odds as to how to answer these kinds of questions.
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