be a subject for the ebullition of the passions, and passes into a character for the contemplation of history. Historically, then, shall I view him; and, limiting this view to bis civil administration, I demand where is there a chief magistrate of whom so much evil has been predicted, and from whom so much good has come? Never has any man entered upon the chief magistracy of a country under such appalling predictions of ruin and wo! never has any one been so pursued with direful prognostications! Never has any one been so beset and impeded by a powerfu! combination of political and moneyed confederates! Never has any one in any country, where the administration of justice has risen above the knife or the bow-string, been so lawlessly and shamelessly tried and condemned by rivals and enemies, without hearing, without defence, without the forms of law or justice! History has been ransacked to find examples of tyrants sufficiently odious to illustrate him by comparison. Language has been tortured to find epithets sufficiently strong to paint him in description. Imagination has been exhausted in her efforts to deck him with revolting and inhuman attributes. Tyrant, despot, usurper; destroyer of the liberties of his country; rash, ignorant, imbecile; endangering the public peace with all foreign nations; destroying domestic prosperity at home; ruining all industry, all com merce, all manufactories; annihilating confidence between man and man; delivering up the streets of populous cities to grass and weeds, and the wharves of commercial towns to the encumbrance of decaying vessels, depriving labor of all reward; depriving industry of all employment; destroying the currency; plunging an innocent and happy people from the summit of felicity to the depths of misery, want, and despair. Such is the faint outline, followed up by actual condemnation, of the appalling denunciations daily uttered against this one man, from the moment he became an object of political competition, down to the concluding moment of his political existence.

[SENATE.

and of retribution. The long list of arrearages, extending through four successive previous administrations, has been closed and settled up. The wrongs done to commerce for thirty years back, and under so many different Presidents, and indemnities withheld from all, have been repaired and paid over under the beneficent and glorious administration of President Jackson. But one single instance of outrage has occurred, and that at the extremities of the world, and by a piratical horde, amenable to no law but the law of force. The Malays of Summatra committed a robbery and massacre upon an American vessel. Wretches! they did not then know that Jackson was President of the United States! and that no distance, no time, no idle ceremonial of treating with robbers and assassins, was to hold back the arm of justice. Commodore Downes went out. His cannon and his bayonets struck the outlaws in their den. They paid in terror and in blood for the outrage which was committed; and the great lesson was taught to these distant pirates-to our antipodes themselves-that not even the entire diameter of this globe could protect them! and that the name of American citizen, like that of Roman citizen in the great days of the republic and of the empire, was to be the inviolable passport of all that wore it throughout the whole extent of the habitable world.

At home the most gratifying picture presents itself to the view: the public debt paid off; taxes reduced one balf; the completion of the public defences systematically commenced; the compact with Georgia, uncomplied with since 1802, now carried into effect, and her soil ready to be freed, as her jurisdiction has been delivered from the presence and encumbrance of an Indian population. Mississippi and Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas, in a word, all the States encumbered with an Indian population, have been relieved from that encumbrance; and the Indians themselves have been transferred to new and permanent homes, every way better adapted to the enjoyment of their existence, the preservation of their rights, and the improvement of their condition.

The currency is not ruined! On the contrary, seventy-five millions of specie in the country is a spectacle never seen before, and is the barrier of the people against the designs of any banks which may attempt to suspend payments, and to force a dishonored paper currency upon the community. These seventy-five mil lions are the security of the people against the dangers of a depreciated and inconvertible paper money. Gold, after a disappearance of thirty years, is restored to our country. All Europe beholds with admiration the success of our efforts, in three years, to supply ourselves with the currency which our constitution guaranties, and which the example of France and Holland shows to be so easily attainable, and of such incalculable value to industry, morals, economy, and solid wealth. The suc cess of these efforts is styled, in the best London papers, not merely a reformation, but a revolution in the currency! a revolution by which our America is now regaining from Europe the gold and silver which she has been sending to them for thirty years past.

The sacred voice of inspiration has told us that there is a time for all things. There certainly has been a time for every evil that human nature admits of to be vaticinated of President Jackson's administration; equally certain, the time has now come for all rational and well-disposed people to compare the predictions with the facts, and to ask themselves if these calamitous prog nostications have been verified by events? Have we peace, or war, with foreign nations? Certainly, we have peace! peace with all the world! peace with all its benign, and felicitous, and beneficent influences! Are we respected or despised abroad? Certainly the American name never was more honored throughout the four quarters of the globe, than in this very moment. Do we hear of indignity or outrage in any quarter? of merchants robbed in foreign ports? of vessels searched on the high scas? of American citizens impressed into foreign service? of the national flag insulted any where? On the contrary, we see former wrongs repaired; no new ones inflicted. France pays twenty-five millions of francs for spoliations committed thirty years ago; Naples pays two millions one hundred thousand ducats for wrongs of the same date; Denmark pays six hundred and fifty thousand rixdollars for wrongs done a quarter of a century ago; Spain engages to pay twelve millions of reals velon for Domestic industry is not paralyzed, confidence is not injuries of fifteen years' date; and Portugal, the last in destroyed, factories are not stopped, workmen are not the list of former aggressors admits her liability, and mendicants for bread and employment, credit is not exonly waits the adjustment of details to close her account tinguished, prices have not sunk, grass is not growing by adequate indemnity. So far from war, insult, con- in the streets of populous cities, the wharves are not tempt, and spoliation, from abroad, this denounced ad- lumbered with decaying vessels, columns of curses, rising ministration has been the season of peace and good will, from the bosoms of a ruined and agonized people, are and the auspicious era of universal reparation. So far not ascending to heaven against the destroyer of a nafrom suffering injury at the hands of foreign Powers, our tion's felicity and prosperity. On the contrary, the remerchants have received indemnities for all former in- verse of all this is true! and true to a degree that astonjuries. It has been the day of accounting, of settlement,ishes and bewilders the senses. I know that all is not

VOL. XIII.-25

gold that glitters; that there is a difference between a specious and a solid prosperity. I know that a part of the present prosperity is apparent only, the effect of an increase of fifty millions of paper money forced into circulation by one thousand banks; but after making due allowance for this fictitious and delusive excess, the real prosperity of the country is still unprecedently and transcendently great. I know that every flow must be followed by its ebb, that every expansion must be followed by its contraction. I know that a revulsion in the paper system is inevitable; but I know, also, that these seventy-five millions of gold and silver is the bulwark of the country, and will enable every honest bank to meet its liabilities, and every prudent citizen to take care of himself.

[JAN. 12, 1837.

and, secondly, to preserve the people from hasty, dangerous, or criminal legislation on the part of their representatives. This is the design and intention of the veto power; and the fear expressed by General Hamilton was, that Presidents, so far from exercising it too often, would not exercise it as often as the safety of the people required; that they might lack the moral courage to stake themselves in opposition to a favorite measure of the majority of the two Houses of Congress, and thus deprive the people, in many instances, of their right to pass upon a bill before it becomes a final law. The cases in which President Jackson has exercised the veto power has shown the soundness of these observations. No ordinary President would have staked himself against the Bank of the United States, and the two Houses of Congress, in 1832. It required President Jackson to confront that power-to stem that torrent-to stay the progress of that charter, and to refer it to the people for their decision. His moral courage was equal to the crisis. He arrested the charter until it could go to the people, and they have arrested it forever. Had he not done so, the charter would have become law, and its repeal almost impossible. The people of the whole Union would now have been in the condition of the people of Pennsylvania, bestrode by the monster, in daily conflict with him, and maintaining a doubtful contest for supremacy between the Government of a State and the directory of a moneyed corporation.

Turning to some points in the civil administration of President Jackson, and how much do we not find to admire! The great cause of the constitution has been vindicated from an imputation of more than forty years' duration. He has demonstrated, by the fact itself, that a national bank is not "necessary" to the fiscal operations of the Federal Government, and in that demonstration he has upset the argument of General Hamilton, and the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and all that ever has been said in favor of the constitutionality of a national bank. All this argument and decision rested upon the single assumption of the "necessity" of that institution to the Federal Government. He has shown it is not "necessary;" that the currency of the To detail specific acts which adorn the administration constitution, and especially a gold currency, is all that of President Jackson, and illustrate the intuitive sagacity the Federal Government wants, and that she can get of his intellect, the firmness of his mind, his disregard that whenever she pleases. In this single act he has of personal popularity, and his entire devotion to the vindicated the constitution from an unjust imputation, public good, would be inconsistent with this rapid and knocked from under the decision of the Supreme sketch, intended merely to present general views, and Court the assumed fact on which it rested. He has pre- not to detail single actions, howsoever worthy they may pared the way for the reversal of that decision; and it is a be of a splendid page in the volume of history. But how question for lawyers to answer, whether the case is not can we pass over the great measure of the removal of the ripe for the application of that writ of most remedial na- public moneys from the Bank of the United States in the ture, as Lord Coke calls it, and which was invented lest autumn of 1833? that wise, heroic, and masterly measin any case there should be an oppressive defect of jus-ure of prevention, which has rescued an empire from tice-the venerable writ of audita querela defendentis-to the fangs of a merciless, revengeful, greedy, insatiate, ascertain the truth of a fact happening since the judg-implacable, moneyed power! It is a remark for which I ment, and upon the due finding of which the judgment will be vacated. Let the lawyers bring their books, and answer is if there is not a case here presented for the application of that ancient and most remedial writ.

From President Jackson the country has first learned the true theory and practical intent of the constitution, in giving to the Executive a qualified negative on the legislative power of Congress. Far from being an odious, dangerous, or kingly prerogative, this power, as vested in the President, is nothing but a qualified copy of the famous veto power vested in the tribunes of the people among the Romans, and intended to suspend the passage of a law until the people themselves should have time to consider it. The qualified veto of the President destroys nothing; it only delays the passage of a law, and refers it to the people for their consideration and decision. It is the reference of the law, not to a com. mittee of the House, or of the whole House, but to the committee of the whole Union. It is a recommitment of the bill to the people, for them to examine and consider; and if, upon this examination, they are content to pass it, it will pass at the next session. The delay of a few months is the only effect of a veto in a case where the people shall ultimately approve a law; where they do not approve it, the interposition of the veto is the barrier which saves them the infliction of a law, the repeal of which might afterwards be almost impossible. The qualified negative is, therefore, a beneficent power, intended, as General Hamilton expressly declares in the Federalist, to protect, first, the executive department from the encroachments of the legislative department;

case.

am indebted to the philosophic observation of my most esteemed colleague and friend, (pointing to Dr. LINN,) that, while it requires far greater talent to foresee an evil before it happens, and to arrest it by precautionary measures, than it requires to apply an adequate remedy to the same evil after it has happened, yet the applause bestowed by the world is always greatest in the latter Of this the removal of the public moneys from the Bank of the United States is an eminent instance. The veto of 1832, which arrested the charter which Congress had granted, immediately received the applause and approbation of a majority of the Union; the removal of the deposites, which prevented the bank from forcing a recharter, was disapproved by a large majority of the country, and even of his own friends; yet the veto would have been unavailing, and the bank would inevi tably have been rechartered, if the deposites had not been removed. The immense sums of public money since accumulated would have enabled the bank, if she had retained the possession of it, to have coerced a recharter. Nothing but the removal could have prevented her from extorting a recharter from the sufferings and terrors of the people. If it had not been for that measure, the previous veto would have been unavailing; the bank would have been again installed in power, and this entire Federal Government would have been held as an appendage to that bank, and administered according to her directions, and by her nominees. That great measure of prevention, the removal of the deposites, though feebly and faintly supported by friends at first, has expelled the bank from the field, and driven het into abey

JAN. 12, 1837.]

Expunging Resolution.

ance under a State charter. She is not dead, but, holding her capital and stockholders together under a State charter, she has taken a position to watch events, and to profit by them. The royal tiger has gone into the jungle! and, crouched on his belly, he awaits the favorable moment for emerging from his cover, and springing on the body of the unsuspicious traveller!

[SENATE.

fear into love. With visible signs they admit their error, and, instead of deprecating, they now invoke the reign of chieftains. They labored hard to procure a military successor to the present incumbent; and if their love goes on increasing at the same rate, the republic may be put to the expense of periodical wars, to breed a perpetual succession of these chieftains to rule over them and their posterity forever.

The Treasury order for excluding paper money from the land offices is another wise measure, originating in an enlightened forecast, and preventing great mischiefs. The President foresaw the evils of suffering a thousand streams of paper money, issuing from a thousand different banks, to discharge themselves on the national domain. He foresaw that if these currents were allowed to run their course, that the public lands would be sweptica, which he has acquired over the public mind. And away, the Treasury would be filled with irredeemable paper, a vast number of banks must be broken by their folly, and the cry set up that nothing but a national bank could regulate the currency. He stopped the course of these streams of paper, and, in so doing, has saved the country from a great calamity, and excited anew the machinations of those whose schemes of gain and mischief have been disappointed, and who had counted on a new edition of panic and pressure, and again saluting Congress with the old story of confidence destroyed, currency ruined, prosperity annihilated, and distress produced, by the tyranny of one man. They began their lugubrious song; but ridicule and contempt have proved too strong for money and insolence; and the panic letter of the ex-president of the denationalized bank, after limping about for a few days, has shrunk from the lash of public scorn, and disappeared from the forum of public debate.

The difficulty with France: what an instance it presents of the superior sagacity of President Jackson over all the common-place politicians who beset and impede his administration at home! That difficulty, inflamed and aggravated by domestic faction, wore, at one time, a portentous aspect; the skill, firmness, elevation of purpose, and manly frankness, of the President, avoided the danger, accomplished the object, commanded the admiration of Europe, and retained the friendship of France.

He conducted the delicate affair to a successful and mutually honorable issue. All is amicably and happily terminated, leaving not a wound, nor even a scar, be hind-leaving the Frenchman and American on the ground on which they have stood for fifty years, and should forever stand; the ground of friendship, respect, good will, and mutual wishes for the honor, happiness, and prosperity, of each other.

But why this specification? So beneficent and so glorious has been the administration of this President, that where to begin, and where to end, in the enumeration of great measures, would be the embarrassment of him who has his eulogy to make. He came into office the first of generals; he goes out the first of statesmen. His civil competitors have shared the fate of his military opponents; and Washington city has been to the American politicians who have assailed him, what New Orleans was to the British generals who attacked his lines. Repulsed! driven back! discomfited! crushed! has been the fate of all assailants, foreign and domestic, civil and military. At home and abroad, the impress of his genius and of his character is felt. He has impressed upon the age in which he lives the stamp of his arms, of his diplomacy, and of his domestic policy. In a word, so transcendent have been the merits of his administration, that they have operated a miracle upon the minds of his most inveterate opponents. He has expunged their objections to military chieftains! He has shown them that they were mistaken; that military men were not the danger ous rulers they had imagined, but safe and prosperous conductors of the vessel of state. He has changed their

To drop this irony, which the inconsistency of mad opponents has provoked, and to return to the plain delineations of historical painting, the mind instinctively dwells on the vast and unprecedented popularity of this President. Great is the influence, great the power, greater than any man ever before possessed in our Amerhow has he acquired it? Not by the arts of intrigue, or the juggling tricks of diplomacy; not by undermining rivals, or sacrificing public interests for the gratification of classes or individuals. But he has acquired it, first, by the exercise of an intuitive sagacity which, leaving all book learning at an immeasurable distance behind, has always enabled him to adopt the right remedy, at the right time, and to conquer soonest when the men of forms and office thought him most near to ruin and despair. Next, by a moral courage which knew no fear when the public good beckoned him to go on. Last, and chiefest, he has acquired it by an open honesty of purpose, which knew no concealments; by a straight-forwardness of action, which disdained the forms of office and the arts of intrigue; by a disinterestedness of motive, which knew no selfish or sordid calculation; a devotedness of patriotism, which staked every thing personal on the issue of every measure which the public welfare required him to adopt. By these qualities, and these means, he has acquired his prodigious popularity and his transcendent influence over the public mind; and if there are any who envy that influence and popularity, let them envy, also, and emulate, if they can, the qualities and means by which they were acquired.

Great has been the opposition to President Jackson's administration; greater, perhaps, than ever has been exhibited against any Government, short of actual insurrection and forcible resistance. Revolution has been proclaimed! and every thing has been done that could be expected to produce revolution. The country has been alarmed, agitated, convulsed. From the Senate chamber to the village bar-room, from one end of the continent to the other, denunciation, agitation, excitement, has been the order of the day. For eight years the President of this republic has stood upon a volcano, vomiting fire and flames upon him, and threatening the country itself with ruin and desolation, if the people did not expel the usurper, despot, and tyrant, as he was called, from the high place to which the suffrages of

millions of freemen had elevated him.

Great is the confidence which he has always reposed in the discernment and equity of the American people. I have been accustomed to see him for many years, and under many discouraging trials; but never saw him doubt, for an instant, the ultimate support of the people. It was my privilege to see him often, and during the most gloomy period of the panic conspiracy, when the whole earth seemed to be in commotion against him, and when many friends were faltering, and stout hearts were quailing, before the raging storm which bank machination, and senatorial denunciation, had conjured up to overwhelm him. I saw him in the darkest moments of this gloomy period; and never did I see his confidence in the ultimate support of his fellow-citizens forsake him for an instant. He always said the people would stand by those who stand by them; and nobly have they justi fied that confidence! That verdict, the voice of millions,

SENATE.]

Expunging Resolution.

which now demands the expurgation of that sentence
which the Senate and the bank then pronounced upon
him, is the magnificent response of the people's hearts
to the implicit confidence which he then reposed in
them. But it was not in the people only that he had
confidence; there was another, and a far higher Power,
to which he constantly looked to save the country, and
its defenders, from every danger; and signal events
prove that he did not look to that high Power in vain.
Sir, I think it right, in approaching the termination of
this great question, to present this faint and rapid sketch
of the brilliant, beneficent, and glorious administration
of President Jackson. It is not for me to attempt to do
it justice; it is not for ordinary men to attempt its histo-
ry His military life, resplendent with dazzling events,
will demand the pen of a nervous writer; his civil ad-
ministration, replete with scenes which have called into
action so many and such various passions of the human
heart, and which has given to native sagacity so many
victories over practised politicians, will require the pro-
found, luminous, and philosophical conceptions of a
Livy, a Plutarch, or a Sallust. This history is not to be
written in our day. The cotemporaries of such events
are not the hands to describe them. Time must first do
its office-must silence the passions, remove the actors,
develop consequences, and canonize all that is sacred
to honor, patriotism, and glory. In after ages the his
toric genius of our America shall produce the writers
which the subject demands-men far removed from the
contests of this day, who will know how to estimate this
great epoch, and how to acquire an immortality for their
own names by painting, with a master's hand, the im-
mortal events of the patriot President's life.

And now, sir, I finish the task which, three years ago, I imposed on myself. Solitary and alone, and amidst the jeers and taunts of my opponents, I put this ball in motion. The people have taken it up, and rolled it for. ward, and I am no longer any thing but a unit in the vast mass which now propels it. In the name of that mass I speak. I demand the execution of the edict of the people; I demand the expurgation of that sentence which the voice of a few Senators, and the power of their confederate, the Bank of the United States, has caused to be placed on the journal of the Senate, and which the voice of millions of freemen has ordered to be expunged from it.

When Mr. BENTON had concluded,

Mr. DANA commenced a speech in support of the resolution, but, after speaking for about fifteen minutes, without concluding, yielded the floor to

Mr. GRUNDY, on whose motion
The Senate adjourned.

[JAN. 13, 1837.

silent upon it. Maine, sir, is at one extremity of the Union, in a high latitude and cold climate; but, sir, she has a fertile soil, immense forests of timber, with her thousand streams to bear it to the ocean; she is a border State, skirted by the dominion of his Britannic Majesty; she has a large territory (if she was permitted to enjoy it) and a boundless seaboard, indented with numberless bays and harbors, filled with ship yards, ships, and commerce; these lead her citizens to an intercourse with the subjects of their royal neighbor, and by them we are told that we have no Government; that our "King is deposed;" that our President has been tried and condemned by our Senate, and that soon we shall come under the dominion of their King. However gratifying this thought may be to some in our Union, it has but few advocates with us. This leads the hardy, industrious, inquisitive citizens of the East to inquire, what has our beloved President done? Is it true that the Senate have condemed him? Can it be that he, who has triumphantly carried us through so many perils, and always been the people's friend, has betrayed us at last? Let us look into it; let us examine the subject! With this inquiring spirit, so peculiar to the people of the North, my constituents will be satisfied with nothing short of a fair and full investigation of this subject, and a just and impartial decision of the same. And that I may the more readily come to the investigation of it, and not wander from it, I ask permission to have the resolution of March 28, 1834, read from the desk.

This resolution, (in these words: "Resolved, That the President, in the late proceeding in relation to the reve. nue, has assumed on himself authority and power not conferred by the constitution and laws, but in derogation of both,") holds up the President to the people as a usurper; as a violator of that constitution which he has sworn to support.

My first inquiry, Mr. President, is, how was this resolution passed? In what capacity did this honorable Senate act when they passed it? This body has a legislative and executive character, and, in one instance, and in one alone, a judicial character, viz: the trying of impeachments. Although the Senate has a legislative character, yet it is presumed that this body would not act in that capacity only on subjects of legislation. And this surely could not be such; there is no matter on which legislative action could be had. If the President was guilty of a violation of the constitution and laws, if he had committed high crimes and misdemeanors, no legislation would reach him; he must be tried by the constitution and the laws, as they existed at the time of his supposed offence. To me it is clear that this honorable body had no legislative jurisdiction on this subject. Did they then act in their executive capacity? No, sir; for their records show no such proceedings in the executive business. He must have been tried, then, by this honorable Senate in their judicial capacity; and this body has the sole power to try all indictments given it by the constitution, and when sitting for that purpose, in their judicial character. The rules of procedure, as adopted served in cases of impeachment, require "that at 12 December 31, 1804, in this honorable Senate, to be obo'clock of the day appointed for the trial of the impeachsuspended," and the Secretary shall then administer the ment, the legislative and executive business shall be solemnly swear (or affirm) that in all things appertainfollowing oath to the President of the Senate: "You ing to the trial of the impeachment of you will do impartial justice, according to the constitution and laws of the United States; and the President shall administer the said oath to each Senator present." This clearly shows, Mr. President, the views which this honorable body had heretofore entertained of their own powers, and at a time, too, when they were cool and