Belmont chronicle. [volume] (St. Clairsville, Ohio) 1855-1973, 1892-02-25


not run" it as he did the government.
Hid professed TO believe that it was a
Federalist institution. He had all the
prejudice of the Jeffersonian Democrats
against anything which was the handi-
work of Hamilton. In his first annual
message the President indicated his
hostility TO the bank. In 1882 he vetoed
a bill for extending its charter. And on
that occasion Senator Clayton said:
"In less than four years the pecuniary
distress, the commercial embarrasments,
consequent upon the destruction of the
United States Bank, must exceed any
thing that has ever been known in our
history"
But neither the constitutional argu-
ments of Webster nor the prophecies of
Clayton could pass the bill over the
veto. The following year the govern
ment deposits were withdrawn from the
bank by the Presidents order and were
distributed among the State, or 'pet,
banks run by good Jacksonian Demo
Gratis. The withdrawal of the deposits
compelled the United States bank to
stringency in the money market. II
was claimed by the administration that
the bank acted as it did for political
purposes, and the Secretary of the
Treasury directed the ''pet" banks to
make liberal discounts. Jackson wanted
them to tissue notes freely" They did
so gladly and began to
AT,
spurious issues of paper money-those
pictured shadows that bewildered the
brain, intoxicated the hearts of the
people, and drove them into the maddest
scheme of speculation and extraVa,
gance."
Jackson's State sovereignty banking
scheme ran along swimmingly for a
time. Money was abundant, prices were
going up, and all felt rich. Suddenly
the people began to feel uneasy. They
went to the banks, presented notes
which said on their face that they were
redeemable in specie, and asked for the
coin. The banks did not have it. Then
the bubble burst. The banks went
down, those which had the government
deposits included, and the terrible panic
of 1887 began. All the predictions
which Webster had made in the series
of remarkably able speeches which he
delivered in opposition to Jackson's
financial madness were verified.
There must be some of the Alliance
men who are old enough to remember
the panic of 1887 and its commercial,
financial, and political effects. The
country discovered that what it had been
regarding as money was worthless.
Hundreds of thousands of business men
went into bankruptcy. A state of in
tolerable distress existed from Maine to
Louisiana. The political revulsion was
so great that in 1910 General Harrison
carried three-fourths of the States, in
Guiding Mississippi and Georgia.
There were six bitter years of intense
suffering from 1887 to 1843, when the
state of things began to improve. But
from the first-named year, when the
State banks of issue were abolished and
the national banks were established,
the country was afflicted with Jackson's
State sovereignty banks whose notes
were sometimes worth par at home, but
never outside of the State in which they
were issued, and which were worth all
the way from five cents on the dollar up,
their value varying with their prospect
of being redeemed in coin.
President Jackson struck down the
safe, uniform, constitutional currency
which was furnished by the United
States bank and opened the door to the
torrent of shinplasters which bedeviled
the country for quarter of a century.
Bad as that stuff was, it was better than
what the fiatists ask shall be issued, for
some of the old State banks did redeem
in specie But the Alliance people want
the country flooded with paper, not one
piece of which would be redeemed.
Hence the panic and distress which
would follow the issue of fsuch absolutely
irredeemable trash would be far greater
than the United States experience in
1887 and subsequent years.