And the son of Alexander Hamilton read the brief paragraph challenging the constitutionality and the expediency of the Bank his father had created, and declaring that it had “failed in the great end of establishing a uniform and sound currency.” “Do you think that is all I ought to say?” asked Jackson. “I think you ought to say nothing about the Bank at present,” was the response. “Oh, but, my friend, I am pledged against the Bank, but if you think that is enough, so let it be.”[416] Some students of the period are prone to ascribe Jackson’s hostility to the Bank to a personal grievance of Isaac Hill. The flimsy assumption that the President’s Bank policy was born of the quarrel of the Concord editor with Biddle, because of the retention in the presidency of the Portsmouth branch of Jeremiah Mason, is unimpressive. Equally absurd to deny that the Mason incident played no part. According to some, Hill, in his attempt to force the removal of Mason, was wholly actuated by a desire to get political control of the institution; to others, to the inability of the editor-politician to get a loan. The truth is that the hostility to Mason was not confined to politicians, but was shared by many of the merchants of New Hampshire. This hostility was due to Mason’s austere action, on discovering that some bad loans had been made on speculative ventures, in exacting hard terms of the local merchants. The petition sent to Biddle by Hill contained the names of sixty members of the legislature, and most of the business men of Portsmouth, of both parties.[417] The president of the Portsmouth branch was a great lawyer, a statesman of reputation, an orator of power, and a partisan as bitter and intolerant as ever breathed the proscriptive air of New Hampshire. In the correspondence which followed between Secretary Ingham, who is said to have had a personal grievance,[418] and Nicholas Biddle, the president of the Bank, who has been variously described according to the bias of the writer, was unquestionably flippant and intolerant of suggestions from the Administration. While his position in the Mason incident can be justified, he was unnecessarily arrogant and tactless; but quickly realizing his mistake, he thereafter changed his tone, and throughout the summer and autumn of 1829 made every effort to conciliate the President. His letters of this period to the heads of the various branches insisting that the Bank be kept out of politics smack of sincerity.[419] But the harm had been done, and there is every reason to conclude that Amos Kendall was deeply concerned in the President’s decision to attack the Bank in his first Message. Certain it is that a letter from Kendall to Noah in November led the “New York Courier and Enquirer” to launch its editorial campaign against the institution. This letter, announcing the presidential decision to attack in his first Message, and presenting an argument in support of the position he was to