ilton rendered to his country. With the Bank of England as an example, that created by him was a vast improvement upon the model. The latter, in theory at least, cannot convert that part of its capital represented by the public debt. A large portion of its means, consequently, are not available when most needed. If, instead of this stock, it held a corresponding amount of good bills, it would be absolutely beyond the reach of harm; the causes or occasions of the monetary crises now so frequently happening could not exist. They did not exist until after the Bank got into the clutches of the government, —an embrace, unfortunately, as advantageous to it as it is disastrous to the general welfare. The government is too good a customer not to be preferred to the public. The Bank of the United States was wholly free from such an entangling alliance. After its organization, it speedily converted its government debt into money, and consequently had at all times its capital in hand. As a consequence, the period of its existence was the brightest one in the whole financial or monetary history of the country. It was the Golden Age, soon to be overwhelmed by one of barbarism, which in its ignorance, intolerance and ferocity, carries us back a thousand years. At the time the first Bank went into operation, there were only three State Banks, the Bank of North America, at Philadelphia; the Massachusetts Bank, at Boston; and the Bank of New York, at New York City. The aggregate capital of these, when organized, equalled $1,650,000. In 1792, the number of State Banks had increased to eleven, with an aggregate capital of $8,935,000. In 1801, the number had increased to thirty-two, whose joint capital equalled $23,500,000. In 1805, there were seventy-five State Banks, with a capital of $40,493,000,- an amount exceeding four times the capital of the United States Bank. The excellence of the system of Hamilton was, that while it created a Bank whose operations extended to every part of the country, and by means of which the revenues were collected and disbursed, it allowed the creation of State or local Banks, by means of whose issues the greater part of the exchanges must always be effected. The system was ideally as well as practically perfect in all its parts. A currency adapted to local exchanges must be locally supplied, for the reason that it can be properly issued only by parties possessing a competent knowledge of the means and character of the applicants for loans. It will yet be found that the only possible mode of retrieving our condition, and securing a currency uniform in amount and value, will be a return to the financial system of Hamilton; just as a return to the maxims and policy of Washington will be the only safe guarantee for the domestic peace and order of the country. The approval of the Bank by all the departments of government, and by the Supreme Court as soon as the question could be presented to that tribunal, only served to increase and imbitter the hostility of Jefferson to a construction so opposed to all his theories, and, in his estimation, so fraught with danger to that portion of the country with which, not only as a citizen, but from his training, habits, and ideas, he was so closely identified. The Bank, indeed, seemed beyond his reach. To claim such a measure as this to be sufficient ground for breaking up the government would only expose him to ridicule and contempt; and he patiently bided his time. This was not long in coming. Washington in due time was succeeded by Mr. Adams, whose great personal unpopularity exposed him to constant and virulent attacks from newspapers and foreigners in the interest of France. To protect him, as well as the government, were passed the famous "Alien and Sedition Laws," enacted to punish libellers, and foreigners who used the asylum offered by the country for the purpose of embroiling it in war. The laws were very probably illadvised and inopportune, although Washington did not so regard them. They were Jefferson's great occasion. In opposition to them, he immediately drafted the celebrated resolutions which were passed by the legislature of the State of Virginia in 1798, and by that of Kentucky in 1799; and which, among other things, declared: "That the several States composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government, but that, by a compact under the style and title of the Constitution of the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes; delegated to that government certain definite powers; reserving, each State to itself, the residuary measure of right to their own self-government; and that, whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and JEFFERSON'S CONSTRUCTION OF THE CONSTITUTION. 477 of no force; that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party: that the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions, as of the mode and measure of redress, and that a nullification by those sovereignties of all unauthorized acts done under the color of that instrument is the rightful remedy." These resolutions embodied in a most complete and perfect form Jefferson's construction of the Constitution as opposed to that of Hamilton, who insisted that it united the people not as a confederacy, but as a nation. They took the whole question out of the arena of the National Legislature and of the courts, and submitted it to the opinions and judgment of the whole people; by whom, or by a great majority of whom, at least so far as their decision could be gathered from the expressions of their popular assemblies, they were accepted as the cardinal rule for the construction of the Constitution, and as justifying the destruction of the government, whenever it should suit the interest or caprice of any member of it. It will be proper in this connection to consider further the opinions upon government, and upon the nature of our own, of this extraordinary man, who exerted such a paramount and baleful influence over the nation for the first hundred years of its existence. He was, in fact, opposed to all governments worthy the name. No one had the natural right to bind any generation not a party to it. "Can," he said, "one generation bind another, and all others, in succession for ever? I think not. The Creator has made the earth for the living, not the dead. Rights and powers can only belong to persons, not to things, not to mere matter, unendowed with will. The dead are not even things. The particles of matter which composed their bodies make part now of the bodies of other animals, vegetables, or minerals, of a thousand forms. To what, then, are attached the rights and powers they held while in the form of men? A generation may bind itself as long as its majority continues in life; when that has disappeared, another majority is in place, holds all the rights and powers their predecessors once held, and may change their laws and institutions to suit themselves. Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and inalienable rights of men." 1 1 Letter to Major Cartwright, Jefferson's Works, vol. vii. p. 359. 1 them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and, what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusetts? And can history produce an instance of rebellion so honorably conducted? I say nothing of its motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion! The people cannot be all and always well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had thirteen States independent for eleven years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each State. What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." Jefferson not only most earnestly opposed Washington's principles of government, but he claimed to have been, by his election to the Presidency, the instrument for their complete overthrow. Writing to Judge Roane, under date of September 6, 1819, soon after the famous decision of Judge. Marshall affirming the constitutionality of the United States Bank, he said: 2 "The Revolution of 1800 was as complete a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form; not effected, indeed, by the sword, as that, but by the rational and peaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people. The nation declared its will by dismissing functionaries of one principle, and electing those of another, in the two branches - executive and legislative submitted to their election. Over the judiciary department the Constitution had deposed them of their control. That, therefore, has continued the reprobated system.” The preceding extracts, which might be multiplied in kind, so as to fill a volume, furnish the key, and the only one, by means of which the political as well as the financial history of this country can be made intelligible, not only to foreigners, but to ourselves. Up to 1860, Jefferson was the patron saint of the nation. His teachings in reference to the 1 Letter to Colonel Smith, Jefferson's Works, vol. ii. pp. 318, 319. nature of our government were held to be the sum of political wisdom. Taught only too well, a part of the nation, in anticipation of any overt act or grievance, withdrew from the Union. From opinion, which up to that time had been the arbiter of events, the North took an appeal to a still higher tribunal, — that of the sword. Then flowed like a flood the blood which, with Mr. Jefferson, was "the natural manure of the tree of liberty." In this final appeal he was again overruled, and an emphatic judgment reaffirmed for his great rival. The overthrow of Jefferson was a revolution as much in the literature as in the politics of the country. If his teachings were false, then the works which sought to base upon them its institutions were equally so. Hence the desperate attempt, so late as 1865, of our great historian to impose upon the ignorance and credulity of the nation, that Jefferson was the champion of whatever centralizing tendency our Constitution contained, and that " no man ever contributed so much toward the consolidation of the Union: " "When John Adams," says Mr. Bancroft, "was elected President, before any overt act, before any other cause of alarm than his election, the legislature of Virginia took steps for an armed organization of the State, and old and long-cherished sentiments adverse to union were renewed. The continuance of the Union was in peril. It was then that the great Virginia statesman, now perfectly satisfied with the amended Constitution, came to the rescue. . . . The thought never crossed the mind of Jefferson that the general government had not proper powers of coercion. . . . No one man did so much as he towards consolidating the Union." 1 As Jefferson was the very person through whose influence "the legislature of Virginia took steps for an armed organization of the State," and was himself the author of those "old and long-cherished sentiments hostile to the Union," the assertion, that at the moment when, under the elder Adams, the stability of the government was threatened, — and all know how seriously it was threatened, "he rushed to the rescue," may well excite astonishment. He was the person who, far in advance of all others, developed and proclaimed, in all their length and breadth, the doctrines of nullification. But for him, they might not have been heard of for a half century. So Place of Abraham Lincoln in History, by George Bancroft, Atlantic Monthly, June, 1865. |