Thirty Years' View (Vol. 2 of 2): or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850Benton, Thomas Hart
History
Thirty Years' View (Vol. 2 of 2): or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850
Benton, Thomas Hart
United States -- Politics and government -- 1815-1861
These are the reasons! and what becomes now of the Philadelphia
cry, re-echoed by politicians and subaltern banks, against the
ruinous measures of the administration? Not a measure of the
administration mentioned! not one alluded to! Not a word about the
Treasury order; not a word about the veto of the National Bank
charter; not a word about the removal of the deposits from the
Bank of the United States; not a word about, the specie policy of
the administration! Not one word about any act of the government,
except that distribution act, disguised as a deposit law, which
was a measure of Congress, and not of the administration, and the
work of the opponents, and not the friends of the administration,
and which encountered its only opposition in the ranks of those
friends. I opposed it, with some half dozen others; and among my
grounds of opposition, one was, that it would endanger the deposit
banks, especially the New York city deposit banks,--that it would
reduce them to the alternative of choosing between breaking their
customers, and being broken themselves. This was the origin of
that act--the work of the opposition on this floor; and now we
find that very act to be the cause which is put at the head of all
the causes which led to the suspension of specie payments. Thus,
the administration is absolved. Truth has performed its office. A
false accusation is rebuked and silenced. Censure falls where it is
due; and the authors of the mischief stand exposed in the double
malefaction of having done the mischief, and then charged it upon
the heads of the innocent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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