General Character of the Acts of the Fourteenth Congress--Madison's Message of December 5th, 1815--Change in the Principles of the Republican Party--The United States Bank Act of 1816--Report of the Bank Bill by Mr. Calhoun--Mr. Calhoun's Argument in Favor of the Bill--Webster's Objections to the Bank Bill--Mr. Clay's Support of the Bank Bill--Passage of the Bank Bill by the House of Representatives--The Passage of the Bank Bill by the Senate--The United States Bank of 1816 a Southern Measure--The Tariff Bill Framed by the Committee on Ways and Means--The Tariff Bill Reported--The Character of the Tariff Bill--Mr. Calhoun's Speech upon the Tariff Bill--The Passage of the Tariff Bill--The Army and Navy Bills--The Bill for National Improvements--Mr. Calhoun's Advocacy of this Bill--The Opposition to the Internal Improvements Bill--Passage of the Bill by Congress--Veto of the Bill by the President--The Failure of Congress to Override the Veto. It is no part of my task to relate the events of the War of 1812-15. That has already been sufficiently done in the preceding volume of this series. I take up the threads of the narrative at the beginning of the year 1816, and my problem in this chapter will be to expound the acts and policies of the Fourteenth Congress in the light of the experiences of that War. {2} [Sidenote: General character of the acts of the Fourteenth Congress.] Those acts and policies were shaped and adopted under the influence of those experiences, and this influence was so predominant, at the moment, in the minds of the leading men in the Government and throughout the country as to exclude, or at least to overbalance, all other influences. This is especially manifest in the attitude of the statesmen of the slave-holding Commonwealths, and most especially in the attitude of their great leader, Mr. Calhoun, who was the chief champion of some of the most national measures voted by that Congress. A clear appreciation of his views and his acts at that period of his career will enable us far better than anything else to understand the terrible seriousness of the slavery question, which subsequently drove him into lines of thought and action so widely divergent from those upon which he set out in early life. [Sidenote: Madison's message of December 5th, 1815.] It was the President himself, however, one of the chief founders of the "States' rights" party, Mr. Madison, who set the direction toward centralization in the Congressional legislation of 1815-17. In his annual message of December 5th, 1815, he recommended the increase and better organization of the army and the navy, the enlargement of the existing Military Academy and the founding of such academies in the different sections of the country, the creation of a national currency, the protection of manufactures, the construction of roads and canals, and the establishment of a national university.