The Forgotten Man, and Other EssaysSumner, William Graham
Science
The Forgotten Man, and Other Essays
Sumner, William Graham
Economics; Social sciences
Jackson opened the war on the Bank publicly in his first message.
Sharp correspondence had been going on already between the Secretary
of the Treasury and the Bank, which had reached such a point that the
Secretary had referred to the removal of the deposits as a power in his
hands to coerce the Bank. Generally speaking, the state of the Bank
and the state of the currency were satisfactory in 1830, but the Bank
had begun in 1827 to issue branch drafts which stimulated credit and
soon produced mischief. Of the war on the Bank it is not necessary to
speak in detail. In December, 1831, Clay was nominated for President by
the National Republicans, and he and his friends determined to bring
on the question of the re-charter of the Bank as a campaign issue.
The re-charter was passed by Congress and vetoed by the President in
1832. The issue in the campaign was thus made up between the personal
popularity of Jackson and of the Bank. The former won an overwhelming
victory which he construed to mean that the people had weighed the
question of re-chartering the Bank and had decided against it.
In September, 1833, he removed the deposits from the National Bank
on his own responsibility, and placed them in selected state banks
which would agree to keep one-third of their note circulation in coin,
redeem all notes on demand, and issue no notes under a five-dollar
denomination. This was to be an experiment. In the meantime the
administration was eagerly pressing on the extinction of the public
debt. The consequences were such as to prove that, however popular
such a policy may be, it may easily be carried too far. The public
deposits were loaned by the Bank to merchants, then recalled and paid
to the public creditors, and then reinvested by them, so that the money
market was subjected to recurrent and sudden shocks. The withdrawal and
transfer of the deposits constituted another and more violent operation
of the same kind, so that there was a crisis and panic in the spring of
1834. The eight or nine millions of public deposits were a continual
source of mischief to the money market. By the contraction of the Bank
of the United States to pay the deposits, and the contraction of the
state banks to put themselves within the rule for receiving the same,
the currency, in the summer of 1834, was perhaps better than ever
before. The coinage act of June, 1834, turned the standard over from
silver to gold.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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