[457] "The Democratic presses ... have ... teemed with the most scurrilous abuse against every member of Congress who has dared to utter a syllable in favor of the renewal of the bank charter." Any member supporting the bank "is instantly charged with being bribed, ... with being corrupt, with having trampled upon the rights and liberties of the people, ... with being guilty of perjury." According to "the rantings of our Democratic editors ... and the denunciations of our public declaimers," the bank "exists under the form of every foul and hateful beast and bird, and creeping thing. It is an _Hydra_; it is a _Cerberus_; it is a _Gorgon_; it is a _Vulture_; it is a _Viper_.... "Shall we tamely act under the lash of this tyranny of the press?... I most solemnly protest.... To tyranny, under whatever form it may be exercised, I declare open and interminable war ... whether the tyrant is an irresponsible editor or a despotic Monarch." (_Annals_, 11th Cong. 3d Sess. 145.) [458] _Annals_, 11th Cong. 3d Sess. 826. [459] _Ib._ 347. [460] Pitkin, 430. [461] Adams to Rush, Dec. 27, 1810, _Old Family Letters_, 272. [462] Sumner: _Andrew Jackson_, 229. [463] Dewey, 145. [464] Twenty-one State banks were employed as Government depositories after the destruction of the first Bank of the United States (_Ib._ 128.) [465] Dewey, 127. [466] Adams to Rush, July 3, 1812, _Old Family Letters_, 299. [467] William Faux's Journal, _E. W. T._: Thwaites, XI, 207. [468] Speech of Hanson in the House, Nov. 28, 1814, _Annals_, 13th Cong. 3d Sess. 656. [469] Catterall: _Second Bank of the United States_, 13-17. [470] Calhoun's bill. [471] Webster to his brother, Nov. 29, 1814, Van Tyne, 55. [472] Webster's bill. [473] _Annals_, 13th Cong. 3d Sess. 189-91; Richardson, I, 555-57. [474] Richardson, I, 565-66. Four years afterwards President Monroe told his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, that Jefferson, Madison, and himself considered all Constitutional objections to the Bank as having been "settled by twenty years of practice and acquiescence under the first bank." (_Memoirs, J. Q. A.: Adams_, IV, 499, Jan. 8, 1820.) [475] _Annals_, 14th Cong. 1st Sess. 280-81. [476] _Annals_, 1st Cong. 2d and 3d Sess. 2375-82; and 14th Cong. 1st Sess. 1812-25; also Dewey, 150-51. [477] Catterall, 22. [478] Dewey, 144. [479] Sumner: _Hist. Am. Currency_, 70. [480] In November, 1818, Niles estimated that there were about four hundred banks in the country with eight thousand "managers and clerks," costing $2,000,000, annually. (Niles, XV, 162.) [481] "The present multitude of them ... is no more fitted to the condition of society, than a long-tailed coat becomes a sailor on ship-board." (_Ib._ XI, 130.) [482] King to his son, May 1, 1816, King, VI, 22. [483] King to Gore, May 14, 1816, _Ib._ 23-25. [484] Niles, XIV, 109. [485] _Ib._ XVI, 257. [486] Niles, XVI, 257. [487] _Ib._ XIV, 110. [488] _Ib._ 195-96.