American Eloquence, Volume 1: Studies In American Political History (1896)
History
American Eloquence, Volume 1: Studies In American Political History (1896)
Speeches, addresses, etc., American; United States -- History; United States -- Politics and government
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 have 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 be got 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.
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 history. His military life, resplendent with dazzling
events, will demand the pen of a nervous writer; his civil
administration, 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 profound, luminous, and philosophical conceptions of a Livy,
a Plutarch, or a Sallust. This history is not to be written in our day.
The contemporaries 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 historic 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 immortal events of the patriot
President's life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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