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Throughout this period there has been no regular, legalized and organized system in existence. The public finances have been kept and administered almost wholly at the discretion and under the responsibility of the Executive, who has in vain repeatedly sought to be relieved from the burthen. The former system, resting upon the banking system of the States, had exploded, from the internal action of its own vicious principles, and only encumbered the country and the Government with its ruins. By the universal suspension of the banks, in May, 1837, not only did the Government find itself suddenly cut off from all the existing provision for its support and for its immense expenditure, of which it was impossible to arrest the progress, but all the existing law for the custody of its accruing revenue suddenly expired by its own limitation; and upon the Executive was thrown the vast responsibility of organizing a new system on the spur of the occasion, and of administering it, in the midst of all the clamor of faction, and the all but revolutionary agitation of panic with which the country was filled, at its own discretion and its own peril, unaided by any other checks of legal provision but its own special regulations, and its own unresting and, so far as possible under such circumstances, omnipresent vigilance.

The events of that memorable year of the suspension are already history. No Administration under our Government has ever been subjected to so severe an ordeal. It met fearlessly and firmly all the responsibility of the crisis. It never yielded or quailed an instant. It never suffered itself to be forced or tempted to recognize any other than the specie standard of value, as designed by the sagacious founders of our institutions. The Post Office Department, in despite of "mobs of gentlemen," headed by distinguished members of Congress, resolutely adhered to the determination promptly announced by it, to receive and disburse gold and silver alone in its transactions. And the Treasury Department, by the expedient of receiving in payment its own protested drafts on the deposite banks, and by making the most of the small stock of specie on hand, was enabled successfully to resist the powerful pressure that was made upon it, to compel it to admit into its operations the paper of the suspended banks; until the convocation of Congress, at the Extra Session, relieved it by the issue of Treasury notes, at the same time that it relieved the institutions and individuals indebted to the Government by liberal allowances of time.

But it is not to be denied that during that period, faithful as was the Administration to itself, to its cause and its creed, its party at large throughout the country became dreadfully confused and disorganized. The great majority of the old local leaders upon whom it had been long accustomed to rely, whether from having had the foundations of their democracy sapped by the long possession of party ascendancy and power, or corrupted by prosperity and by the

seductive blandishments of "the Credit System,' either openly fell away from the simple and pure original principles of their political faith, or by their indecision and doubting lukewarmness produced no less injurious an effect on the public sentiment of their respective spheres of local influence. Great numbers also of the incumbents of office under the Administration, misunderstanding the crisis and mistaking its probable issue, were seen to imitate the instinct of the rats that abandon the falling house; and either openly or indirectly were able by their very official positions to do it incalculable injury, in sowing dissension, distraction and panic, at the very moment when, most of all, all should have been union, firmness and courage.

The Opposition, on the other hand, were full of confidence and energy. The fate of the Administration was regarded by them as sealed-the Latium of power, their promised land, flowing with milk and honey, now full in view! Here was the legitimate result of its "experiments," of its "tampering with the currency,"-here the fulfilment of every prediction of disaster,-here the practical evidence and illustration, equally of its political profligacy, and of its ignorant incompetence for the responsibilities of government! Their press surpassed itself in thundering daily against it the most vehement philippics of denunciation, mingled with the most exulting pæans of triumph. Election after election brought up against it overwhelming majorities; and on the part of the Opposition the only question was, which of their leaders was to be rewarded, for their long struggle in minority, with the Presidential nomination, as their party candidate—such nomination being regarded as but the formal preliminary to the popular election which was to be carried, as matter of course, almost by default.

On the assemblage of Congress the eyes of the country were turned with intense anxiety upon the seat of government,—when the President's Message went forth, with an electric effect, through the length and breadth of the land. It cut a clean swathe as it went, fat and wide, through the midst of the parties. It was immediately recognized by the Democratic party as a sign of power, which could not fail to lead them again to victory. Bold and strong as it was, it was promptly responded to, as an appeal that touched the very inner heart of the Democracy; and though a very small proportion hesitated and wavered for a time, and hung back in the rear of the great popular movement of opinion of which it was at the same time a representative and a guide, yet as a whole the immense majority of that party accepted it immediately, as the true basis for that reorganization rendered necessary by the recent political earthquake. It effected, too, another important object. The unnatural and ill-omened union, which had grown out of peculiar causes to which it is unnecessary here to refer, between Northern Federalism,

with its National Bank, its Internal Improvements, its Tariff and its high notions of strong and splendid consolidated government, and the Southern ultra State-Rights school of politics, which could approach the former only on the principle of the meeting of extremes, that incongruous union was instantly broken by it, as by some potent spell-word which it had long been awaiting. The eminent individual who stood before the country as peculiarly representing and embodying the political creed of that school, instantly was seen to feel and recognize its power; and promptly, and in manner worthy the magnanimity of the man and of the act, gave in his adhesion to the principles of that document, and his powerful support to the policy which it recommended, in timely anticipation. of that general movement of Southern opinion which the eagle eye of his intellectual vision could not but foresee as an inevitable certainty.

During the Extra Session one of the finest debates of modern parliamentary history took place in Congress, in both of its branches, but more particularly in the Senate; and the movement of the waters, begun there, extended itself in every direction, like the spreading ripple, throughout the country. The lawyers of the Opposition had a strong prima facie case against the Administration. The suspension, the distress, the panic, were in full vogue, and supplied the amplest materials of denunciation and plausible argument, against the party whose policy, it was maintained, had naturally developed itself to these consequences. Relief was the cry-regulation of the currency-a National Bank! The bank alone-with the expulsion of the party in power-could afford the panacea which was to heal all the disorders and sufferings of the times. It alone could bring back a resumption of specie payments-it alone restore order to the deranged foreign and domestic exchanges of the country-it alone reanimate its paralyzed industry and commerce! Meantime it were indeed the unpardonable sin to refuse the moral sanction of the Government to the suspension of the banks, by withdrawing from them the use of the public revenues, and the agency for the custody and disbursement of them, and by attempting to make any tyrannical distinction between their depreciated paper currency and real substantial money!

On the other hand, the position and policy of the Administration were admirably sustained in argument by its friends, sorely at disadvantage as they were placed by the circumstances of the times. We need not here retrace the grounds of the argument, which was carried on with unrelaxing vigor through both sessions of Congress. Towards the close of the latter, its influence and the effects of the firm attitude pursued by the Democratic party, began already to make themselves apparent. In spite of the most strenuous efforts to resist it on the part of the paper money interest, under the espe

cial guidance of the Bank of the United States, the public opinion thus generated and stimulated forced the banks to resume specie payments; which movement, commencing in New York, gradually extended itself over other parts of the country. The natural and usual tendency to increased excess of issues, during a period of pressure and suspension, was effectually checked. Specie poured into the country. Its foreign debt, contracted by excess of importation and luxurious consumption, gradually liquidated itself by the exportation of its natural products; and pari passu with that process the foreign exchanges rectified themselves with the certainty with which, by the great laws of nature, water when left free to flow will find its own level; while the continued disorder of the domestic exchanges so manifestly resolved itself into the difference of credit of the different local paper currencies, which required only the extension of the resumption to rectify, that this soon ceased to be an available topic of argument in favor of a National Bank. The conduct of that institution itself during the suspension -its interference in and monopoly of certain important branches of mercantile business, especially its cotton speculations-its palpably illegal and fraudulent reēmission of floods of the notes of the old bank-its strenuous but fruitless struggle to prolong the suspension, with all its incalculable evils, to continue the golden harvest which it was enabled to reap from the general derangement and disaster the coolly unblushing insensibility evinced by it to the ordinary laws of honesty and morality, in the most unfortunate public letters of its President-these causes cooperated effectively with the others we have alluded to, and with the daily reviving industry and business of the country, in dispelling much of the delusion with which a large portion of the public mind had been so long possessed in favor of a National Bank, and especially of that one which had heretofore become so closely identified with the cause of the Whig party, as to render their political destinies necessarily inseparable.

By this time the process of reaction in the public mind, from the state of opinion hostile to the Administration which the crisis and panic of the preceeding year had caused, was manifestly going steadily forward. The reorganization of the Democracy was rapidly completing and consolidating itself. All distrust and fear had long since vanished; while they began unequivocally to manifest themselves on the side of our adversaries, as, one after another, the progress of time and the event swept away the foundations of their old arguments and popular appeals, and as they marked the hourly ebb of that tide of public excitement which their ill-omened efforts of panic-making, effective only in the hour of their country's suffering and shame, had been able to lash up

"To such a sudden flood of mutiny."

The fall elections-with but one or two exceptions, which it was easy to explain by adequate peculiar causes-soon following the adjournment of Congress, bore signal and overwhelming evidence of the truth of this representation of the progress of opinion. We need not here dwell upon them. One after another, the deep voices of the people came up from the different States, in accents that well rewarded the long patient endurance of those who had listened unmoved through the preceding year to all the clamor of faction and panic-with their verdict, on their sober second-thought, of "Well done, thou good and faithful servant!" There was this peculiarity in that crisis, that the long-protracted struggle between the two parties had at length reached an issue the decision of which must be final and conclusive of their political fate. With the Opposition all was staked upon it; and if the Administration should weather such a storm, they might well indeed abandon all hope or thought of prevailing over it. If the infatuated people would not be convinced of the truth of the charges so long and loudly thundered against it, by the events of that year—and, à fortiori, if, after at first rashly condemning it, under the influence of the panic, distress, and party clamor, they should retract the error of that first delusion, and come back to its support in daily swelling majoritiesthen well indeed might they conclude, that they would not believe "though one should rise from the dead." Accordingly, such were manifestly seen to be the effects of the elections of last fall, upon the Whig party itself. The increased majority in Missouri-the reaction in Maine, from the Whig majority of the preceding year to a large Democratic majority-the conversion of Maryland, from its ancient time-honored Federalism, to the election of a Democratic Governor, who had especially identified himself with the "odious Sub-Treasury" question-the recovery of the popular vote of New Jersey-the decisive triumph in the old Keystone State of Pennsylvania, contrary to the sanguine anticipations of the Whigs-the diminished Whig majority in Massachusetts-the manly and magnanimous accession, to the support of the Administration, of the gallant chivalry of South Carolina-the unanimity of the majority of both parties in Georgia in favor of the great cardinal measure by which the classification of parties was now every where adjusting itself—and, above all, the astonishing revolution of Ohio, by the conversion of the strong Whig majority of a recent period to a stronger majority in favor of the Administration, not only a great event in itself, but portentously symptomatic,-these were, one and all, evidences against which no blindness of partizanship could close the eyes of any save the most infatuate and bigoted of our opponents, of a grand popular movement to the support of the principles and policy of the Administration, arising up out of the very lower depths of the public mind,-of precisely

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