SENATE.] Bank of the United States-Illegal Currency. [JANUARY, 1832. ter into the revenues of the Union, and extend | This contrivance, sir, is of European origin. It themselves to every moneyed transaction between man and man. This is the case of violated law which stands before you; and if it goes unpunished, then do I say, the question of political power is decided between the bank and the Government. The question of supremacy is at an end. Let there be no more talk of restrictions or limitation in the charter. Grant a new one. Grant it upon the spot. Grant it without words! Grant it in blank! to save the directors from the labor of re-examination! the court from the labor of constructions! and yourselves from the degradation of being publicly trampled under foot! I do insist, Mr. President, that this currency ought to be suppressed for illegality alone, even if no pernicious consequences could result from its circulation. But pernicious consequences do result. The substituted currency is not the equivalent of the branch bank notes, whose place it has usurped; it is inferior to those notes in vital particulars, and to the manifest danger and loss of the people. In the first place, these branch bank orders are not payable in the States in which they are issued. Look at them! they are nominally payable in Philadelphia! Look at the law! It gives the holder no right to demand their contents at the branch bank, until the order has been to Philadelphia, and returned. I lay no stress upon the insidious circumstance that these orders are now paid at the branch where issued, and at other branches. That voluntary, delusive payment may satisfy those who are willing to swallow a gilded hook; it may satisfy those who are willing to hold their property at the will of the bank. For my part, I want law for my rights. I look at the law, to the legal rights of the holder, and say that he has no right to demand payment at the branch which issued the order. The present custom of paying is voluntary, not compulsory; it depends upon the will of the bank, not upon law; and none but tyrants can require, or slaves submit to, a tenure at will. These orders, even admitting them to be legal, are only payable in Philadelphia; and to demand payment there, is a delusive and impracticable right. For the body of the citizens cannot go to Philadelphia to get the change for the small orders; merchants will not remit them; they would as soon carry up the fire of hell to Philadelphia; for the bank would consign them to ruin if they did. These orders are for the frontiers; and it is made the interest and the policy of merchants to leave them at home, and take a bill of exchange at a nominal premium. Brokers alone will ever carry them, and that as their own, after buying them out of the hands of the people at a discount fixed by themselves. This contrivance, Mr. President, of issuing bank paper at one place, payable at another and a distant place, is not a new thing under the sun; but its success, if it succeeds here, will be a new thing in the history of banking. began in Scotland some years ago, with a banker in Aberdeen, who issued promissory notes payable in London. Then the Bank of Ireland set her branches in Sligo, Cork, and Belfast, at the same work, and they made their branch notes payable in Dublin. The English country bankers took the hint, and put out their notes payable in London. The mass of these notes were of the smaller denominations, one and two pounds sterling, corresponding with our five and ten dollar orders; such as were handled by the laboring classes, and who could never carry them to London and Dublin to demand the contents. At this point the British Imperial Parliament took cognizance of the matter; treated the issue of such notes as a vicious practice, violative of the very first idea of a sound currency, and particularly dangerous to the laboring classes. The parliament suppressed the practice. This all happened in the year 1826; and now this practice, thus suppressed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, is in full operation in our America! and the directors of the Bank of the United States are celebrated, as the greatest of financiers, for picking up an illegal practice of Scottish origin, and putting it into operation in the United States, and that, too, in the very year in which it was suppressed in Great Britain! In the next place, these orders are impoverishing and destructive to the States in which they are issued, because they lead to the abduction of its gold and silver. If notes are issued, they are payable at the branch bank, and an adequate supply of gold and silver must be kept on hand to redeem them; but these orders being drawn on Philadelphia, the gold and silver of the State must be sent there to meet them. This is the clear undoubted theory of this new-fangled currency; it is also the proved established practice and effects of it. Everybody in the South and West knows that the hard money of the country is constantly disappearing; but those only who have observed the working of the machinery of the Bank of the United States, can tell where all this hard money is gone. The monthly statements of the bank will tell this secret. They will show that the gold and silver of the South and West go to the Northeast; and that the branches are the channels of collection and remittance. Here are some items from the returns of the year 1830, the last which have been yet printed, and which will throw a little light upon this subject: JANUARY, 1832.] Bank of the United States-Illegal Currency. [SENATE. supply of paper. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, | remedied, to be trusted to any but the very fifty to one is our proportion of paper to silver. highest officers of the bank-those whose charAnd for all this paper the country is in debt, acter and station would afford the strongest and pays interest (bank interest) to non-resi- guaranties to the public for the fair exercise of dents and foreigners! Gentlemen of the South a power so delicate and responsible. Congress complain of the tariff, and doubtless with much refused to pass the bill. What next? Why, reason; but the day is at hand when every eye sir, Mr. Cheves and his directory submitted; shall see, and every tongue shall confess, that but a new directory came in, and what did the tariff is not the only, nor the largest, nor they do? They re-examined the constitution the most voracious vampire which sucks at of the bank, and discovered the means of overtheir veins! The Bank of the United States coming the difficulty. They substituted branch divides that business with the tariff, and, like bank orders for branch bank notes; and set, the stronger brother, takes the largest share to not two, but fifty signers and one hundred and herself. She furnishes her brood of these in- fifty endorsing clerks at work upon these satiable suckers. She hangs them on every orders. What is the consequence? Countervein of gold and silver which the South and feiting to an excess, and audacity never paralWest exhibit. They gorge to repletion, then leled before! I saw in Missouri, before I left vomit their load into the vast receptacles of home, a descriptive list of ninety-nine varieties the Northeast, and gorge again. The hard of counterfeits on the Bank of the United money of the country, that money which pays States and its branches alone; most of them of no interest, is sucked up and sent away; the the class of these five and ten dollar orders. paper money of a company, for which bank This list was contained in a periodical sheet, interest is exacted, takes its place. The people called "Counterfeit Detector;" a work wholly of the country are in debt for this paper, the given up to describing counterfeits on the greater part of them at second and third hand, United States Bank and its branches; for to borrowers from borrowers, paying rack-interest such excess has this crime arisen, as to give to the intermediate lenders. The labors of the birth to a new species of literary publication; year barely suffice for the payment of the sixty a periodical newspaper wholly devoted to the days' collection of all this interest. The prin- description and detection of counterfeit paper cipal is still behind, to come upon these ex- currency. The remedy only announces the exhausted countries when delayed payment has tent of the evil; it does not cure it. None but doubled the difficulty of making payment. business men in cities, and a few official charWhen that dread day comes, and come it will, acters, can afford to buy and study these periand nothing is gained by putting it off, the odicals; the body of the people have no benefit towns and cities of the South and West-the from them. After all, the Detector is no fairest farms and goodliest mansions-will be guide; the marks of a counterfeit detected and set up at auction, to be knocked down to the described in one number of the periodical, are bank agent, at the mock prices fixed in the corrected and amended in the next edition of counting room of the bank itself. the counterfeits. They instruct the counterfeiters how to amend their work. The fact is, nobody can tell the good from the bad. Brokers and bank officers assume to do it; but they had as well assume to be conjurors and astrologers; they had as well practise incantations, and deliver oracles in convulsions and contortions, as to look at this paper, and pronounce judgments; they had as well gaze at the stars, and judge by the motions of the heavenly bodies, as to look at these orders, and judge from the writing and engraving; they had as well do as the soothsayers of old-go out upon a high hill-watch the flight of birds In the third place, the emission of these orders has deluged the country with counterfeits. The evils of counterfeiting was one of the objections made to the application of the bank for the leave to appoint an agent and register to sign the five and ten dollar notes. The danger was so obvious and imminent, that the memorial of the directors candidly admitted it, and entered into the suggestion of many precautionary measures to prevent it. They admitted that if the signers were numerous or temporary, the danger of counterfeiting would be excessive and destructive; but declared that the bank, with a view to its own interest, would not suffer them to be either numerous or temporary, although the act might not limit the number. The directors proposed, however, to limit the number to two; to make them permanent officers in the bank; and to publish their appointment in the Washington city gazettes before they should begin to act. A bill with all these provisions was reported; but Congress refused to pass it, and for this reason, among others, that the power of signing the notes involved the power of judging their genuineness; and this power was too high and dangerous-too easily abused-and too hardly and then prognosticate that the order is good or bad, as the bird chances to fly, dexter or sinister, as it passes the hill. Far from knowing the handwriting, they hardly know of the existence of the writers! Yet these solemn judges condemn, and condemn irrevocably, the property of the people! They all know how to draw the sign of St. Andrew's cross; and that fatal sign, drawn through the face of an order, is decisive of its fate. True or false, good or bad, from that moment it falls into the receptacle of things; not lost, but damned, on earth. I do not stand here, Mr. President, to en SENATE.] Bank of the United States-Illegal Currency. [JANUARY, 1832. arrived at in England: this is the point to which the forgery of these branch bank orders is rapidly carrying the American people. And for all the crime and misery which has grown out of the counterfeiting of these orders, and all that shall grow out of them, the directors, who violated their charter to do what Congress forbid, are justly accountable to God and man! I have carefully abstained, Mr. President, from the use of any topic of a general or exciting nature. I have confined myself to a mere judicial pleading. But there is one argument against the issue of this currency which goes so directly to the honor, the dignity, the independence of the States, that I cannot forbear to hold it up for an instant, and to pass it as a shadow before you. It is this. We all know the high and responsible nature of the coining power. It is an attribute of national sovereignty; in its nature belonging to the highest authority in every form of Government. The States of this confederacy, each for itself, became invested with this high power the moment they burst the chains of British vassalage. Possessed of the right in full, they divided it, in part, with the Congress of the confederation. The convention of 1789 gave it exclusively to the new Federal Government; and since that time no State can coin money, large upon the general evils of a counterfeit currency, such as belong in common to the forging of all bank papers; but there are evils peculiar to the circulation of these counterfeit orders, which give a distinctive character to the mischiefs which they inflict, and demand a particular animadversion. These evils grow, first, out of the wide extent of the circulation of these counterfeits, which carries the forgeries of every State of the Union into every other State, thus affecting each part with the miseries of the whole-swelling the mass of crime and fraud, and augmenting the difficulties of detection in proportion to the distance from which the intrusive counterfeits came. The next peculiar evil is in the multitude of incompetent judges; already about one hundred and fifty in number, and annually increasing. A third peculiar evil is in the one-sided character of these judges-all appointed at the will of the bank-all holding their appointments at her will-and all feeling it to be their interest to commit no mistakes to her prejudice. The last, and greatest, of these peculiar evils, is in the small size of these orders, which throws their counterfeits upon that class of the community who are least capable to detect the imposition, and least able to bear the loss. The laboring classes, the middle-sized farmers, and the country people, are the peculiar vic-regulate its value, emit bills of credit, or make tims of this species of counterfeits. They han- any thing but gold and silver a tender in disdle small sums, and the small-sized counterfeits charge of debts. Congress alone has the full fall upon their hands. Every counterfeit must power to coin and regulate its value; a disstop somewhere. Sooner or later it must stop puted power to emit bills of credit, and no in somebody's hands; and the mass of these power to make any thing but gold and silver small ones will certainly stop in the hands of a lawful tender. Well, the Bank of the United poor people. Thus it was in England. In the States refers its origin, in the opinion of many, space of six years, from 1812 to 1818, no less to the coining and regulating clause in the conthan 154,454 counterfeit notes were presented stitution. What is admitted by all, is, that and detected at the Bank of England; of Congress has granted to the bank a power to which 128,800 were for one pound, correspond- issue a paper currency far beyond the amount ing with our five dollar orders; and 18,562 of the coined currency in the Union; that this were for two pounds, corresponding with our paper currency is receivable in payment of all ten dollar orders; leaving only about 8,000 dues to the Federal Government; and, being notes out of upwards of 154,000 for all denom-so receivable, thence enjoys a degree of credit inations above two pounds, or ten dollars; thus incontestably proving that the poor were the losers and the victims. This was stated in his place by the honorable Henry Grey Bennet, who stated, at the same time, that out of five hundred and one persons convicted of forging, or passing, or offering counterfeit notes, in the short space of thirteen years, of whom two hundred and seven had been hung, and others deported, the mass of them were poor people; and the notes for which they died, were small ones of one and two pounds, equal to five and ten dollars. And he said, at the same time, that the stockholders of the Bank of England, in this frightful mass of crime, and fraud, and misery, and death, had found their consolation and their profit in dividing among themselves twenty-five millions of pounds sterling! equal to about one hundred and twenty millions of dollars! This is what the counterfeiting part, or forgery department of the banking system, and circulation co-extensive with the limits of the Union. Names, Mr. President, are nothing; substance is every thing. The substantial power of coining, and of regulating the currency, is in the bank; for it issues a currency which exceeds the coin in quantity, and supersedes it in circulation. Congress gave this great power-in effect, one of the highest attributes of national sovereignty-to the company of individuals incorporated under the misnomer of the Bank of the United States; this company has devolved its power, so far as the branch bank orders are concerned, upon their subaltern agencies, called branch banks; and, according to the opinion of the federal court, may devolve it upon whatever agents they please. These subaltern agencies are protruded into the States, and there exercise a power superior to that which the State Governments surrendered to the Federal Government. They issue a paper currency within the JANUARY, 1832.] Bank of the United States-Illegal Currency. [SENATE. State, which supersedes and expels the hard | ment—a forgery of one of the orders against money. They issue a paper currency not pay- which the gentleman had levelled his batteryable within the State, nor within the next State; was not, if genuine, a legal instrument, and nor within five hundred or one thousand miles; could not be made the subject of a criminal nor practicably payable anywhere! and for proceeding. He went upon precisely the same non-payment of which there is neithe. prohibi- course of reasoning as had been heard that tion nor penalty in the charter. This currency morning. It became the duty of the judge necessarily, and practicably, becomes a cur- carefully to consider, and clearly to expound, rency of bills of credit, redeemable at the will the law thus drawn into question. The liberty of the issuer, and not at the will of the holder; of a fellow-citizen was dependent upon his and these bills all people (in the South and opinion. He was about to make it known to West, at least) are under a virtual duresse to the jury: he did so; and this is characterized receive; because all other currency is chased as extra-judicial." away. And thus these bills of credit become a forced and irresistible tender in the payment of debts. Can the States stand this? If they can, they are ripe and ready to sink into the condition, not of provinces of the empire, but of farms the rack-rent farms-of a great moneyed oligarchy. Sir, I stop; not that I have finished, but that every thing must have an end, even the overflowings of grief and indignation at viewing the frightful progress which a great moneyed oligarchy is making over the sinking liberties of the land. The cause demands a different advocate. It calls for that rare man who rebuked and overthrew the audacious enterprise of Walpole who overturned the judgments of the King's court-drove back the royal patent across the Irish channel, and saved the people of Ireland from the evils of an illegal currency, and their Government from the degradation of seeing a private individual exercising the high power of issuing a national currency within her limits. The crisis calls for that man. It calls for the dauntless spirit-the mighty genius -the lofty scorn of hopes and fears, which belonged to the illustrious Dean of St. Patrick's! And, if we are now destined to sink in this contest, (which Heaven of its infinite mercy ayert)—but if we are destined to sink, then do I say it is not for want of a cause less just, less righteous, less national, less holy, than that in which Ireland triumphed, but because the combined powers of all America's patriot sons are unable to write the draper's letters! Mr. DALLAS said: The basis upon which the honorable Senator from Missouri had reared the superstructure of his argument was a printed copy of a charge delivered to a jury by one of the judges of the Supreme Court of the United States, sitting as a circuit judge in the eastern district of Pennsylvania. He (Mr. D.) was well acquainted with the circumstances and occasion of that charge, and deemed it right to vindicate the distinguished and learned magistrate by whom it was pronounced from the idea involved in the epithet "extra-judicial." It was any thing but extra-judicial. The trial was of a man indicted for passing a counterfeit order on the cashier of the Bank of the United States. The counsel for the accused, exercising their professional skill, demanded his acquittal upon the ground (among others) that the paper described in the indict 66 But the honorable Senator further complains that the judge attained his conclusions, as to the intent and meaning of the act of Congress incorporating the bank, by construction." And by what other process could he attain them? It is conceded that no positive and distinct prohibition of these orders or drafts is to be found in the charter: and as if to vindicate by his practice the judge whom he was condemning by his precept, the learned gentleman has ably and indefatigably argued that they are prohibitory by "construction." He takes the very course he disapproves, and denies to others what he cannot himself do without. It was not his intention to follow the able Senator through the labyrinth of objections he had suggested to these orders or drafts. He had certainly anticipated no such studied and prolonged argument as introductory to the present motion, and was alike unwilling and unequal to the labor of a regular reply, which, however proper it might be before a judicial tribunal, he conceived would be misplaced and ill-timed here. But as so much had been so well said, with the view to discredit the opinion of the learned judge, and tending to produce a destructive alarm as to the validity of the currency in question, he would briefly state the impregnable, though simple, course of reasoning by which its legality, under the charter, was maintained. He did this, not because it was essential to the determination of the matter before the Senate, but, if possible, to turn the edge of a weapon, which, if not aimed, was pointing fatally at the interests of the working and poorer classes of his fellow-citizens. In the first place, then, not a syllable prohibitory of these orders could be found in the act of incorporation. The sagacity and perseverance of the Senator from Missouri, great and anxious as they were, had failed to discover a single word upon which he could_pause, and frankly allege their prohibition. Yet he has told us, and told us truly, that this charter was "stuffed and crammed with restrictions and conditions" by those who framed it, with a view to satisfy the republicans of sixteen years ago. It certainly contained many, probably most, if not all, of the securities and guards which wisdom can devise against the mismanagement and misapplication of powers and privileges such as it conferred. No details SENATE.] Bank of the United States-Illegal Currency. [JANUARY, 1832. authorized agent are the contracts of the principal; or that the bank, openly, notoriously, avowedly assuming upon itself the payment of these orders, does conclusively make them obligatory contracts to the full extent of their terms and amounts. seem to be avoided, no specification is deemed | liams, to prove that the engagements of an too minute, and no phraseology is left restricted or equivocal, in order to bind the bank, and to guaranty the public. It has often and justly elicited praise; but none more flattering to the republican principles and national objects of those who matured it, than the encomium of the learned gentleman who described it as stuffed and crammed with restrictions and conditions." And yet, though thus "stuffed and crammed," not a sentence is to be detected, which, by any sort of construction, direct or circuitous, natural or strained, can be made to import the prohibition which the Senator would engraft upon it. The wise and upright men of the day on which this instrument bears date, were not apt to overlook plain consequences, or easy means of evasion, nor to make laws so imperfectly as to leave openings into which insects might rush to deface them. They did what they intended to do-and they left undone what they had no intention to do. The seventh section of this charter bestows upon the corporation, in the usual form, its style and legal capacities, and concludes, generally, that it shall "do and execute all and singular the acts, matters, and things which to them it shall or may appertain to do, subject, nevertheless, to the rules, regulations, restrictions, limitations, and provisions hereinafter prescribed and declared." He (Mr. D.) had already said that the orders or drafts were nowhere excluded in any of the rules prescribed and declared; and it could scarcely be expected that before the Senate of the United States he would make a labored effort to show that the drawing and issuing such paper were "matters and things" which it appertained to every trading association, commercial firm, or bank to do. They were embraced in the general grant of powers, and were not excepted from it by any subsequent limitation. All modes of conducting the business and operations of the bank, consistent with its declared purposes and limits, were expressly conferred, and these orders were therefore included. Again: These very orders or drafts are described, totidem verbis, in the eighteenth section of the charter, and are protected, as legal, with the highest sanctions. "If any person shall falsely make, forge, or counterfeit, or cause or procure to be falsely made, forged, or counterfeited, or willingly aid or assist in falsely making, forging, or counterfeiting, any bill or note, in imitation of, or purporting to be, a bill or note issued by orders of the president, directors, and company of the said bank, or ANY ORDER or check on the said bank or corporation, or ANY CASHIER THEREOF;" or "shall falsely alter, &c., ANY ORDER or check on said bank or corporation, or ANY CASHIER THEREOF;" or "shall pass, utter, or publish, &c., as true, any false, forged, or counterfeited ORDER or check upon the said bank or corporation, or ANY CASHIER THEREOF," &c., or shall pass, utter, or publish, &c., any falsely altered ORDER or check on the said bank or corporation, or ANY CASHIER THEREOF," &c., every such person shall be deemed guilty of felony, and, on conviction, must be sentenced to hard labor for a term not less than three, nor more than ten years, or be imprisoned, not exceeding ten years, and fined not exceeding five thousand dollars. Now each of these assailed drafts is neither more nor less, in common sense, or in technical law, than an order on the cashier of the Bank of the United States; whether drawn by one person or by another, by an agent or by a customer, makes here no difference. Why, then, if it be an instrument not authorized by the charter, spurious, illegal, and void, why is it thus anxiously guarded, and its forgery thus severely punished? Why, if not within the contemplation of the rigorous and pure republicans who "stuffed and crammed the act with But this general reasoning became altogether restrictions and conditions," is it merely not irresistible when it was found sanctioned by discountenanced, but specially recognized as a the very letter of the charter. In the eighth favorite, to be shielded from all impurity, and fundamental rule of the eleventh section, in to be vindicated, by penalties involving the inrecapitulating the modes by which the bank carceration and infamy of offenders, from all might become indebted, these words are used-doubt or danger? Differing entirely from the "the total amount of debts which the said corporation shall at any time owe, whether by bond, bill, note, or OTHER CONTRACT." What other contract? Every other contract which it may appertain to a bank to make. These orders? why not? If the Senate can persuade itself they are not contracts, as the honorable Senator has, by the emergency of his case, been driven to assert, then indeed this single phrase furnishes no protection. But it surely can require, in a commercial country, no recurrence to first principles, or to English common law definitions, much less to the venerable antiquities of Coke and Peere Wil honorable Senator from Missouri, he (Mr. D.) would, upon every such question, look with peculiar solicitude to the penal clause of the act of Congress. Other parts may be loosely constructed, and their meaning be left to be ascertained by the ordinary principles and rules of interpretation; but this is uniformly framed with scrupulous exactitude, to be construed strictly, and to be accompanied by such specification as will enable every one to understand what he is to avoid. It is here that we find, more exactly than elsewhere in this charter, the particulars of the currency confided to the control and discretion of the bank-it is here |