A History of the American People

credit, that access to be maintained by strict fiscal and financial probity. Jackson did not care a
damn about that. Marshall had supported the SBUS in one of his most important decisions and
Jackson did not care a fig' for the reasons he advanced for his ruling. When Marshall finally died in 183 5-not before time in Jackson's view-the President appointed as his successor his Attorney-General and crony Rogert Brooke Taney (1777-1864), who conducted his court for thirty years on principles diametrically opposed to Marshall's." When the Senate and the House both reported favorably on the Bank and proposed to renew its charter even before it ran out, Jackson used his veto. The fact that the three greatest orators in the Senate, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster, all pronounced at length and with ornate circumlocution on its merits only reinforced Jackson's determination to destroy it. Brilliant orators they might be, he noted, but they were always on the losing side.'
Jackson was one of those self-confident, strong-willed people (one thinks of Ronald Reagan
and Margaret Thatcher in our own time) who are not in the least disturbed if the overwhelming
majority of expert opinion,' theright-thinking,' and the intelligentsia are opposed to their own
deep-felt, instinctive convictions. He simply pressed on, justifying his veto by producing a
curious constitutional theory of his own: Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others ... The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both.',' The fury
of the right-thinking was unbounded. Biddle himself described Jackson, in his stupidity and
ignorance giving vent to the fury of a chained panther biting the bars of his cage.' His statement wasa manifesto of anarchy such as Marat or Robespierre might have issued to the mobs.' The
Jacksonian press hailed it as a Second Declaration of Independence' and his organ, the Globe, said,It is difficult to describe in adequate language the sublimity of the moral spectacle now
presented to the American people in the person of Andrew Jackson.'
With the election confirming and endorsing Jackson's standpoint (as he saw it), he proceeded
to the next step-withdrawing all federal funds from the SBUS and ending its connection with
central government. Whether this act was strictly constitutional was a matter of opinion, but Van
Buren (now vice-president) warned him against it on prudential grounds. The SBUS was
primarily a Philadelphia financial institution, which performed a useful national role balancing
the growing money power of New York. If Jackson pulled the government out of Philadelphia,
wasn't he in danger of falling into the hands of Wall Street? But Jackson brushed that aside too,
and set Amos Kendall, of all people, busily to work finding alternative banks with which the
administration could do business. Kendall fed him the rumor, which Jackson readily believed,
that the SBUS's vaults were, in fact, empty of bullion, and that it was not a safe bank to do
business with anyway. The fact that Senators Clay and Calhoun put together a committee to
inspect the vaults and reported them full did not convince the President, coming from such a
source. (He thereby inaugurated an American tradition which continues to this day: every year,
the Daughters of the American Revolution send a committee of ladies to visit the vaults of Fort
Knox, to ensure that America's gold is still in them.) Nor was Jackson impressed when two
Treasury secretaries in turn flatly refused to carry out his orders to remove the deposits. He
dismissed them both. Kendall, after a trawl through the financial community, came up with a list
of banks willing to dare Biddle's wrath and take the SBUS's place. Jackson acted. And when, as a
result, there were rumblings of trouble in the American economy-more pronounced after its
federal charter ran out in 1836 and it was obliged to go private'-Jackson was adamant, rejecting Van Buren's plea forcaution' with a gloriously characteristic reply: `Were all the worshipers of