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
Sir, the honest commercial banks have resumed, or mean to resume.
They have resumed, not upon the fictitious and delusive credit
of legislative enactments, but upon the solid basis of gold and
silver. The hundred millions of specie which we have accumulated
in the country has done the business. To that hundred millions
the country is indebted for this early, easy, proud and glorious
resumption!--and here let us do justice to the men of this
day--to the policy of General Jackson--and to the success of
the experiments--to which we are indebted for these one hundred
millions. Let us contrast the events and effects of the stoppages
in 1814, and in 1819, with the events and effects of the stoppage
in 1837, and let us see the difference between them, and the causes
of that difference. The stoppage of 1814 compelled the government
to use depreciated bank notes during the remainder of the war, and
up to the year 1817. Treasury notes, even bearing a large interest,
were depreciated ten, twenty, thirty per cent. Bank notes were at an
equal depreciation. The losses to the government from depreciated
paper in loans alone, during the war, were computed by a committee
of the House of Representatives at eighty millions of dollars.
Individuals suffered in the same proportion; and every transaction
of life bore the impress of the general calamity. Specie was not
to be had. There was, nationally speaking, none in the country.
The specie standard was gone; the measure of values was lost; a
fluctuating paper money, ruinously depreciated, was the medium of
all exchanges. To extricate itself from this deplorable condition,
the expedient of a National Bank was resorted to--that measure of so
much humiliation, and of so much misfortune to the republican party.
For the moment it seemed to give relief, and to restore national
prosperity; but treacherous and delusive was the seeming boon. The
banks resumed--relapsed--and every evil of the previous suspension
returned upon the country with increased and aggravated force.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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