A History of the American People

hate Indians: they were simply an anomaly. He did, however, hate banks, and especially the
Second Bank of the United States. That was an anomaly too, and he was determined to remove
it. It is often said that Jackson knew nothing about banks, and that is why he hated them. That is
not true. He is, rather, an example of what Keynes meant when he said that the views of great
men of the world, who believe themselves impervious to theory of any kind, are usually shaped
by the opinions of some defunct economist' which have imperceptibly got into their heads. Jackson once said he had disapproved of banks, and especially central banks, eversince I read a
book about the South Sea Bubble.' He had already read Adam Smith, and misunderstood him,
and Taylor, whom he understood only too well. In the late 1820s his views-and Taylor's-were
reinforced by an anti-banking ideologue called William M. Goude, who wrote widely about
banking in the New York Evening Post and Jackson's favorite paper, the Washington Globe.
Goude's book A Short History of Paper Money and Banking in the United States (1833), which
summed up his theories, became one of the great bestsellers of the time. It was a book written
against the 'city-slickers', the Big Men,' themoney power,' which contrasted the hard-working
farmer, mechanic, and storekeeper with the chartered, privileged banker: The practices of trade in the United States have debased the standards of commercial honesty ... People see wealth passing continuously out of the hands of those whose labor produced it, or whose economy saved it, into the hands of those who neither work nor save.' It was a plea for economic equality before the law, in effect for an end of chartering, and especially of federal chartering. Jackson made ending the SBUS a major issue in the 1832 election and he felt that the landslide result gave him a clear mandate. It is important to grasp that Jackson spoke from his moral heart as well as his bank-hating head. The nation, he said, wascursed' with a bank whose
corrupting influences' fastenedmonopoly and aristocracy on the Constitution' and made
government an engine of oppression to the people instead of an agent of their will.' Only the elimination of theHydra' could restore to our institutions their primitive simplicity and purity.’ So Jackson's love of conspiracy theory and his taste for a moral crusade went hand in hand. There was also a personal element, as there always was in Jackson's campaigns. He was certain-heknew for a fact'-that Clay was paid large sums by the SBUS. So was Daniel Webster,
the sophisticated if long-winded Massachusetts orator who aroused all Jackson's suspicions and
whom he was also certain-'knew for a fact'-was crooked. Not least, Nicholas Biddle (1786-1844),
president of the Bank since 1822, was just the kind of person Jackson feared and despised, a
cultivated, high-minded (that is, humbugging), aristocratic intellectual. Jackson was always wary
of `college men.' Biddle had been to two (University of Pennsylvania and Princeton). He came
from an ancient, posh Quaker family of Delaware, and married into another. He patronized the
arts and not only collected but actually commissioned paintings of naked women of the kind
Amos Kendall felt was an outrage, paying the gifted American artist John Vandelyn (1775-1852)
to do him a lubricious Ariadne. He had edited a literary and artistic magazine called Port Folio,
founded the Athenaeum Library in Philadelphia, and commissioned leading architects-at what
Jackson believed to be vast expense-to design all the SBUS's buildings in Greek Revival granite
and marble. Biddle's favorite architect, Thomas Ustick Walter (1804-87), who built the best of
the banks, was also employed by Biddle to enlarge and classify for him his house, Andalucia, on
the Delaware, making it into one of the lushest and most beautiful homes in America and (to
Jackson) a symbol flaunting the new money power.
Biddle was a first-class central banker, as good at his job as Marshall was at being chief
justice, and the two men had similar ideas about how America should be developed, by a highly
efficient, highly competitive capitalist system with easy access to the largest possible sources of