[March 15th
marks the 250th anniversary of Andrew
Jackson’s birth. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five sides to this controversial,
influential figure and president,
leading up to a special weekend post on Jackson and Trump!]
On three
lesser-remembered moments in Jackson’s
long, ultimately successful crusade against Nicholas
Biddle and the Second Bank of
the United States.
1)
James Madison and James Monroe: That the Second
Bank existed at all was due to the efforts of the fourth president and his
Secretary of State. Alexander
Hamilton’s founding Bank of the United States had failed a recharter
vote (by a single vote) in Congress in 1811, but the War of 1812 and
concurrent high inflation rates made clear the benefits of having a stable
national banking system. Yet the same opposition that had derailed the 1811
recharter remained, and an 1815 push to establish a Second Bank failed. Madison
and (especially) Monroe remained committed to the idea, though—Monroe argued to
his boss that “this is the great desideratum of our system”—and succeeded at
gaining Congressional support for the Second Bank in 1816. It’s easy, and as I
wrote in Monday’s post not inaccurate, to see the Jacksonian era as a radical
shift from the founding period, but these Early Republic origins for the Second
Bank remind us of how close together—not only chronologically, but in terms of
many of the key figures and factors—the founding and Jackson’s era really were.
2)
The Veto and Louis McLane: Jackson’s opposition
to the bank is most closely associated with his July
1832 veto of a Congressional reauthorization vote, a veto he accompanied
with an
extended message aimed to convince not only Congress but also the public of
the reasons for his opposition. After that veto the bank become a central topic
of the 1832 presidential election,
with Jackson and his anti-bank message soundly defeating Congressman Henry Clay
(an ardent bank supporter). But only a year earlier, during his 1831 reorganization
of his administration and cabinet, Jackson appointed as Treasury Secretary Louis McLane,
a friend of Nicholas Biddle’s and an advocate for restructuring rather than eliminating
the bank. As late as December 1831, in his annual address to Congress, McLane
was still arguing for the bank’s necessity and continued existence, making
clear that Jackson’s administration was not yet fully determined to eliminate the
bank. As is often the case, the arc of history makes it difficult to remember
the contingencies of it, and how many different paths any particular moment
might have taken—so it’s vital to remember McLane, and recognize that the bank
battle could have played out very differently if he had kept the upper hand in
Jacksonian finance policy.
3)
Henry Clay and Daniel Webster: There were many
factors that contributed to the change in Jackson’s position from early December
1831 to July 1832, but high on the list would be the National Republican party’s
December 16th nomination (at the
first national political convention!) of Clay to be their presidential
candidate. The Kentucky Senator was, along with his fellow National Republican Senator Daniel
Webster of Massachusetts, one of the bank’s chief national advocates, and
the pair worked to make the bank the central issue of the 1832 campaign, introducing
the recharter bill among many other steps. Which is to say, it’s easy to see
Jackson as a towering influence over this period and all of its issues, but in
this moment it seems more accurate that these two long-serving Senators—and the
opposition party they were leading—were the driving forces behind pushing
Jackson away from McLane’s compromise position and toward a more definitive
stance against the bank. It would be four more years before the bank became a private
corporation (in February 1836), but it was the 1832 election which truly
decided its fate—and Clay and Webster were at least as central to that turning point
as was the bank’s presidential adversary.
Next
JacksonStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Jackson histories or contexts you’d highlight?
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