Remarks to the United States Senate
"ON THE EXPUNGING RESOLUTION"
U.S. Senate, January 12, 1837
by
Thomas Hart Benton
Mr. President:
It is now three years since the resolve was adopted by the Senate,
which it is my present motion to expunge from the journal. At the
moment that this resolve was adopted, I gave notice of my intention to
move to expunge it; and then expressed my confident belief that the
motion would eventually prevail. That expression of confidence was
not an ebullition of vanity, or a presumptuous calculation, intended to
accelerate the event it affected to foretell. It was not a vain boast, or
an idle assumption, but was the result of a deep conviction of the
injustice done President Jackson, and a thorough reliance upon the
justice of the American people. I felt that the President had been
wronged; and my heart told me that this wrong would be redressed!
The event proves that I was not mistaken. The question of expunging
this resolution has been carried to the people, and their decision has
been had upon it. They decide in favor of the expurgation; and their
decision has been both made and manifested, and communicated to us
in a great variety
of ways. A great number of States have expressly instructed their
Senators to vote for this expurgation. A very great majority of the
States have elected Senators and Representatives to Congress, upon
the express ground of favoring this expurgation. The Bank of the
United States, which took the initiative in the accusation against the
President, and furnished the material, and worked the machinery
which was used against him, and which was then so powerful on this
floor, has become more and more odious to the public mind, and
musters now but a slender phalanx of friends in the two Houses of
Congress. The late Presidential election furnishes additional
evidence of public sentiment. The candidate who was the friend of
President Jackson, the supporter of his administration, and the avowed
advocate for the expurgation, has received a large majority of the
suffrages of the whole Union, and that after an express declaration of
his sentiments on this precise point. The evidence of the public will,
exhibited in all these forms, is too manifest to be mistaken, too explicit
to require illustration, and too imperative to be disregarded. Omitting
details and specific enumeration of proofs, I refer to our own files for
the instructions to expunge--to the complexion of the two Houses for
the temper of the people--to the
denationalized condition of the Bank of the United States for the
fate of the imperious accuser--and to the issue of the Presidential
election for the answer of the Union.
All these are pregnant proofs of the public will, and the last
pre-eminently so: because, both the question of the expurgation, and
the form of the process, were directly put in issue upon it....
Assuming, then, that we have ascertained the will of the people on
this great question, the inquiry presents itself, how far the expression
of that will ought to be conclusive of our action here. I hold that it
ought to be binding and obligatory upon us; and that, not only upon
the principles of representative government, which require obedience
to the known will of the people, but also in conformity to the principles
upon which the proceeding against President Jackson was conducted
when the sentence against him was adopted. Then everything was
done with especial reference to the will of the people. Their impulsion
was assumed to be the sole motive to action; and to them the ultimate
verdict was expressly referred. The whole machinery of alarm and
pressure--every engine of political and moneyed power--was put in
motion, and worked for many months, to excite the people against the
President; and to stir up meetings, memorials, petitions, travelling
committees, and distress deputations against him; and each symptom
of popular
discontent was hailed as an evidence of public will, and quoted here
as proof that the people demanded the condemnation of the President.
Not only legislative assemblies, and memorials from large assemblies,
were then produced here as evidence of public opinion, but the
petitions of boys under age, the remonstrances of a few signers, and
the results of the most inconsiderable elections were ostentatiously
paraded and magnified, as the evidence of the sovereign will of our
constituents. Thus, sir, the public voice was everything, while that
voice, partially obtained through political and pecuniary machinations,
was adverse to the President. Then the popular will was the shrine at
which all worshipped. Now, when that will is regularly, soberly,
repeatedly, and almost universally expressed through the ballot-boxes,
at the various elections, and turns out to be in favor of the President,
certainly no one can disregard it, nor otherwise look at it than as the
solemn verdict of the competent and ultimate tribunal upon an issue
fairly made up, fully argued, and duly submitted for decision. As such
verdict, I receive it. As the deliberate verdict of the sovereign people,
I bow to it. I am content. I do not mean to reopen the case nor to
recommence the argument. I leave that work to others, if any others
choose to perform it. For myself, I am content; and, dispensing with
further argument, I shall call for judgment, and ask to have execution
done, upon that unhappy journal, which the verdict of millions of
freemen finds guilty of bearing on its face an untrue, illegal, and
unconstitutional sentence of condemnation against the
approved President of the Republic.
But, while declining to reopen the argument of this question, and
refusing to tread over again the ground already traversed, there is
another and a different task to perform; one which the approaching
termination of President Jackson's administration makes peculiarly
proper at this time, and which it is my privilege, and perhaps my duty,
to execute, as being the suitable conclusion to the arduous contest in
which we have been so long engaged. I allude to the general tenor of
his administration, and to its effect, for good or for evil, upon the
condition of his country. This is the proper time for such a view to be
taken. The political existence of this great man now draws to a close.
In little more than forty days he ceases to be an object of political hope
to any, and should cease to be an object of political hate, or envy, to
all. Whatever of motive the servile and time-serving might have found
in his exalted station for raising the altar of adulation, and burning the
incense of praise before him, that motive can no longer exist. The
dispenser of the patronage of an empire, the chief of this great
confederacy of States, is soon to be a private individual, stripped of all
power to reward, or to punish. His own thoughts, as he has shown us
in the concluding paragraph of that message which is to be the last of
its kind that we shall ever receive from him, are directed to that
beloved retirement from which he was drawn by the voice of millions
of freemen, and to which he now looks for that interval of repose
which age and infirmities require. Under these circumstances, he
ceases to be a subject for the ebullition of the passions, and passes into
a character for the contemplation of history. Historically, then, shall
I view him; and limiting this view to his civil administration, I
demand, where is there a Chief Magistrate of whom so much evil has
been predicted, and from whom so much good has come? Never has
any man entered upon the Chief Magistracy of a country under such
appalling predictions of ruin and woe! never has any one been so
pursued with direful prognostications! never has any one been so beset
and impeded by a powerful combination of political and moneyed
confederates! never has any one in any country where the
administration of justice has risen above the knife or the bowstring,
been so lawlessly and shamelessly tried and condemned by rivals and
enemies, without hearing, without defence, without the forms of law
and justice! History has been ransacked to find examples of tyrants
sufficiently odious to illustrate him by comparison.
Language has been tortured to find epithets sufficiently strong to paint
him in description. Imagination has been exhausted in her efforts to
deck him with revolting and inhuman attributes. Tyrant, despot,
usurper; destroyer of the liberties of his country; rash, ignorant,
imbecile; endangering the public peace with all foreign nations;
destroying domestic prosperity at home; ruining all industry, all
commerce, all manufactures; annihilating confidence between man
and man; delivering up the streets of populous cities to grass and
weeds, and the wharves of commercial towns to the encumbrance of
decaying vessels; depriving labor of all reward;
depriving industry of all employment; destroying the currency;
plunging an innocent and happy people from the summit of felicity
to the depths of misery, want, and despair. Such is the faint outline,
followed up by actual condemnation, of the appalling denunciations
daily uttered against this one MAN, from the moment he became an
object of political competition, down to the concluding moment of
his political existence.
The sacred voice of inspiration has told us that there is a time for
all things. There certainly has been a time for every evil that human
nature admits of to be vaticinated of President Jackson's
administration; equally certain the time has now come for all rational
and well-disposed people to compare the predictions with the facts,
and to ask themselves if these calamitous prognostications have been
verified by events? Have we peace, or war, with foreign nations?
Certainly, we have peace with all the world! peace with all its benign,
and felicitous, and beneficent influences! Are we respected, or
despised abroad? Certainly the American name never
was more honored throughout the four quarters of the globe than in
this very moment. Do we hear of indignity or outrage in any quarter?
of merchants robbed in foreign ports? of vessels searched on the high
seas? of American citizens impressed into foreign service? of the
national flag insulted anywhere? On the contrary, we see former
wrongs repaired; no new ones inflicted. France pays twenty-five
millions of francs for spoliations committed thirty years ago; Naples
pays two millions one hundred thousand ducats for wrongs of the
same date; Denmark pays six hundred and fifty thousand rix-dollars
for wrongs done a quarter of a century ago; Spain engages to pay
twelve millions of reals vellon for injuries of fifteen years' date; and
Portugal, the last in the list of former aggressors, admits her liability
and only waits the adjustment of details to close her account by
adequate indemnity. So far from war, insult, contempt, and spoliation
from abroad, this denounced administration has been the season of
peace and goodwill and the auspicious era of universal reparation. So
far from suffering injury at the hands of foreign powers, our merchants
have received indemnities for all former injuries. It has been the day
of accounting, of settlement, and of retribution. The total list of
arrearages, extending through four successive previous
administrations, has been closed and settled up. The wrongs done to
commerce for thirty years back, and under so many different
Presidents, and indemnities withheld from all, have been repaired and
paid over under the beneficent and glorious administration of President
Jackson. But one single instance of outrage has occurred, and that at
the extremities of the world, and by a piratical horde, amenable to no
law but the law of force. The Malays of Sumatra
committed a robbery and massacre upon an American vessel.
Wretches! they did not then know that JACKSON was President of the
United States! and that no distance, no time, no idle ceremonial of
treating with robbers and assassins, was to hold back the arm of
justice. Commodore Downes went out. His cannon and his bayonets
struck the outlaws in their den. They paid in terror and blood for the
outrage which was committed; and the great lesson was taught to
these distant pirates--to our antipodes themselves --that not even the
entire diameter of this globe could protect them, and that the name of
American citizen, like that of Roman citizen in
the great days of the Republic and of the empire, was to be the
inviolable passport of all that wore it throughout the whole extent of
the habitable world....
From President Jackson, the country has first learned the true
theory and practical intent of the Constitution, in giving to the
Executive a qualified negative on the legislative power of Congress.
Far from being an odious, dangerous, or kingly prerogative, this
power, as vested in the President, is nothing but a qualified copy of the
famous veto power vested in the tribunes of the people among the
Romans, and intended to suspend the passage of a law until the people
themselves should have time to consider it. The qualified veto of the
President destroys nothing; it only delays the passage of a law, and
refers it to the people for their consideration and decision. It is the
reference of a law, not to a committee of the House, or of the whole
House, but to the committee of the whole Union. It is a recommitment
of the bill to the people, for them to examine and consider; and if, upon
this examination, they are content to pass it, it will pass at the next
session. The delay of a few months is the only effect of a veto, in a
case where the people shall ultimately approve a law; where they do
not approve it, the interposition of the veto is the barrier which saves
them the adoption of a law, the repeal of which might afterward be
almost impossible. The qualified negative is, therefore, a beneficent
power, intended as General Hamilton expressly declares in the
"Federalist," to protect, first, the executive department from the
encroachments of the legislative department; and, secondly, to
preserve the people from hasty, dangerous or criminal legislation on
the part of their representatives. This is the design and intention of the
veto power; and the fear expressed by General Hamilton was, that
Presidents, so
far from exercising it too often, would not exercise it as often as the
safety of the people required; that they might lack the moral courage
to stake themselves in opposition to a favorite measure of the majority
of the two Houses of Congress; and thus deprive the people, in many
instances, of their right to pass upon a bill before it becomes a final
law. The cases in which President Jackson has exercised the veto
power have shown the soundness of these observations. No ordinary
President would have staked himself against the Bank of the United
States and the two Houses of Congress in 1832. It required President
Jackson to confront that power--to stem that torrent--to stay the
progress of that charter, and to refer it to the people for their decision.
His moral courage was equal to the crisis. He arrested the charter until
it could be got to the people, and they have arrested it forever. Had he
not done so, the charter would have become law, and its repeal almost
impossible. The people of the whole Union would now have been in
the condition of the people of Pennsylvania, bestrode by the monster,
in daily conflict with him, and maintaining a doubtful contest for
supremacy between the government of a State and the directory of a
moneyed corporation....
Sir, I think it right, in approaching the termination of this great
question, to present this faint and rapid sketch of the brilliant,
beneficent, and glorious administration of President Jackson. It is not
for me to attempt to do it justice; it is not for ordinary men to attempt
its history. His military life, resplendent with dazzling events, will
demand the pen of a nervous writer; his civil administration, replete
with scenes which have called into action so many and such various
passions of the human heart, and which has given to native sagacity
so many victories over practiced politicians, will require the profound,
luminous, and philosophical conceptions of a Livy, a Plutarch, or a
Sallust. This history is not to be written in our day. The
contemporaries of such events are not the hands to describe them.
Time must first do its office--must silence the passions, remove the
actors, develop consequences, and canonize all that is sacred to honor,
patriotism, and glory. In after ages the historic genius of our America
shall produce the writers which the subject demands--men far removed
from the contests of this day, who will know how to estimate this great
epoch, and how to acquire an immortality for their own names by
painting, with a master's hand, the immortal events of the patriot
President's life.
And now, sir, I finish the task which, three years ago, I imposed on
myself. Solitary and alone, and amid the jeers and taunts of my
opponents, I put this ball in motion. The people have taken it up, and
rolled it forward, and I am no longer anything but a unit in the vast
mass which now propels it. In the name of that mass I speak. I
demand the execution of the edict of the people; I demand the
expurgation of that sentence which the voice of a few Senators, and the
power of their confederate, the Bank of the United States, has caused
to be placed on the journal of the Senate; and which the voice of
millions of freemen has ordered to be expunged from it.
The End