three millions of dollars were required to pay them, and be believed in 1833, it was near four millions. Who opened this fountain of executive patronage; this prolific source of expenditure and of revolutionary hero resurrection, which, at the end of half a century, is exhibiting a larger army on the pension roll than ever Washington saw, at any one time, on the muster roll; which furnishes the author of this report with upwards of one-third of his hundred thousand men: which is now making the Revolution cost more money than it cost while it was existing and raging; and which has produced a demoralization of morals, and a perpetration of crimes, as revolting to the mind as it is humiliating to the country? Who produced all this? Certainly not President Jackson! but the action of Congress, under executive recommendations, commencing at a period with which the author of this report must be most familiar, and carried on to the year 1832, when the system of pensioning received its climax in the law of that year, and in the production of consequences which astonish and afflict the country.

[SENATE.

both, and ready, at the census of 1840, to present six or eight members on the floor of the House of Representatives, where, until lately, she had but one member, and now has but two. More! The graduation principle, by treaty, is adopted for the sale of the newly-acquired lands, descending down through successive gradations from $1 25, to six and a quarter cents per acre! So that this State has acquired, by treaty, under the auspices of President Jackson, the justice and the boon which her elder sisters have been in vain soliciting from Congress for so many years. For all this, that noble State is indebted to President Jackson; and it is as honorable to the inhabitants of that State, as it is just and right in itself, that the throb of gratitude beats in the hearts, and the sentiment of affectionate respect glows in the bosoms of almost the whole of her entire population. And shall the expense of these measures, the expensé of freeing not only Mississippi, but the whole South, and the entire Northwest, from the encumbrance of an Indian population, be now set down, without explanation, in a grave report on executive patronage, as one of the wasteful extravagances of the day, which portends the decline and fall of the Republic, and calls for the trenchant hand of cutting reform, and the indignant verdict of public reprobation?

full price, now for the first time allowed for them, and that by an administration depicted as the destroying angel of the red race; the consequent increase of surveyors and land offices, and the additional expense resulting from all these wise and patriotic operations. They, too, belong to President Jackson's administration; and Mr. B. claimed the honor of them for him, instead of confounding the increased expenditure resulting from them, and the increased number of persons employed to execute them, in the indiscriminate mass of extravagances denounced.

The removal of the Indians was the next source of increased expenditure, and increased agents, which Mr. B. adverted to; and on this head, far from disclaiming, he claimed the merit of it almost exclusively for President Jackson. It was he who had stood forth the Closely allied to this head, that of removal of Indians, true friend of the Indians, the true advocate and asserter was another, which Mr. B. would mention, and which of State rights, in relieving the Southern States of their was too intimately connected with that head to require Indian population, at the same time that he provided for the detail of explanation. It was the great acquisition these Indians themselves permanent, tranquil, unmolest-of lands, by the extinction of Indian titles; the fair and ed, and far more desirable homes, in the rich and extended plains of the far West. In executing this policy, Congress acted under his recommendation; and to him the long-neglected and injured South-the States of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and the new States of the Northwest, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, are all, all indebted, for the advantages and blessings which they now enjoy in their freedom from the incubus of a useless and inimical population within their borders. The exodus of the Indians from the east to the west of the Mississippi-from the land of the white man to the land of the red man-under the guiding and protecting hand of President Jackson, has been to both parties, to the white race and to the red race, an auspicious and delightful consummation, on which Heaven has shed its benignant blessing, and which calls for the grateful emotions of every heart, white or red, civilized or savage, which can rejoice in the prosperity of the human race, and feel gratitude and thankfulness to its greatest and most eminent benefactor. But, above all, and more than all put together, should the State of Mississippi feel that gratitude. Hard was her fate until President Jackson ascended the presidential chair. The oldest Territory in the Union, a State for almost twenty years, a delicious climate, ample boundaries, lands adapted to the production of the richest staple, noble rivers-with all these advantages, her population remained a speck in the corner of her own extended map. The Chickasaws and Choctaws occupied the finest portions of her soil, and seemed destined to occupy them for ever under the abetment of a great [political party, then called national republicans, now whigs, whose policy was as cruel to the Indians as it was unjust to the people, and subversive of the rights of the States. President Jack son appeared at the head of the national affairs. He was the slave of no selfish or ambitious policy; the hunter of no factitious and delusive popularity. He was the friend of the whites and of the reds; he spoke the language of truth, justice, wisdom, to both; and the long-depressed and obscure State of Mississippi finds herself, as if by magic, in the possession of all her rights, and all her soil, advancing with rapid strides to wealth and population, displaying a prodigious expansion of VOL. XI.-24

Another subject he would mention, the great increase of the tariff in 1824 and 1828, on the eve of presidential elections, and the complicated nature of their provisions to prevent evasions, detect smuggling, give the full benefit of their enactments to the manufacturers, and to carry out the protective principle in the living bodies of revenue officers to defend it, as well as in the ramparts of parchments, intrenching it to the teeth, which Congress was piling up around it. Here was a great source of additional expense; additional officers and agents employed, and additional patronage conferred; and which now has brought the collection of the custom-house revenue to the inordinate expense of nine per centum. But who did all this? Not the administration; and therefore the remedy does not lie in the change of the administratration; but Congress-Congress did it; and therefore the evil lies in the conduct of the immediate representatives of the people, and the remedy lies in the hands of the people themselves.

Mr. B. repeated, he concurred with the general purport and the general object of the report, in the great and striking augmentation which it presented, of money expended, and men employed or fed by the federal Government; and the necessity of great and real retrenchment in both particulars, especially as many of the ob jects for which they were incurred were temporary in their nature, and evanescent in their existence. Yes, said Mr. B., the augmentations have been great; but so far as they are of questionable propriety, they have had their root in previous administrations, some of them in the administration of Mr. Monroe, when the author of this report was a distinguished member of that adminis

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Executive Patronage.

tration; others of these questionable measures had originated under Mr. Adams's administration, or in Congress itself, and under the high-pressure speeches, reports, and motions of gentlemen opposed to the administration of President Jackson. Try them, said Mr. B., examine them in detail, and you will find the great expenditures for objects of questionable propriety originated with others, while those of real expediency, of beneficial ob ject, and clear constitutional propriety, owed their origin to the administration of President Jackson; and, what should never be forgotten, it was the exercise of the veto power by President Jackson which checked these extrav agant expenditures of questionable objects, for which he received unmeasured denunciation! And let the people now mark it! This same President is now blamed just as much for not stopping, as he was blamed for stopping those wild expenditures.

But, Mr. B. said, while agreeing to much that was in the report, and agreeing that there was not only room but necessity for retrenchment, it would be unjust to the people, who have no means of detecting the delusive and fallacious statements which go forth with the high sanction of the Senate's approbation, to let this report go forth among them, to startle, alarm, disquiet, and amaze them with the idea that the expenses of the Government had doubled in nine years, from 1825 to 1833. Never was a wilder proposition presented to the intelligence of a rational people; not that the quantity of money paid out in the last of those two years, and that exclusive of the public debt in both instances, was not in reality double that of the former, but the fallacy and delusion lay in this: that those great additional payments were not for the expenses of the Government, not for ordinary, usual, current, and progressive expenditures, but for unusual, extraordinary, individual, isolated, and anomalous objects, occurring once, and but once, finished for ever when paid one time; some of them impossible, and others improbable to occur again; and therefore not fit to be held up among the current expenses and progressive extravagance of the Govern

ment.

The report, said Mr. B., assumes the years 1825 and 1833 for the comparison and contrast which it exhibits; the expenditure of the former being $11,500,000, that of the latter $22,750,000, and both exclusive of pay. ments on account of the public debt; and this, as the reports affirms, "during a period of profound peace, when no event had occurred calculated to warrant any unusual expenditure." Now, said Mr. B., let us see what extraordinary expenditure fell upon that year 1833. First, there was the Black Hawk war, on the Upper Mississippi, which, though the fighting was done in 1832, yet the payments fell chiefly upon the ensuing year. Under this head alone there were payments in that year to near $900,000,* namely: to the militia and volunteers of Illinois, $442,000; for their subsistence, $186,000; for the conversion of rangers into a regiment of dragoons, $274,000. Then there was paid for duties refunded on merchandise to importing merchants, the sum of $701,760; then there was paid to claimants under the convention with Denmark, the sum of $663,000; and this was money not expended, nor even paid, in the

* Precise sums are here substituted in the published speech for the general statements made in the speech when delivered. Mr. B. had heard the report read but once in the committee, and had not obtained, when he spoke, the precise detail of sums above enumerated. He obtained them afterwards, and produced, read, and commented upon them in the Senate; and therefore feels justifiable in substituting precise sums for the general statements which he could only make at this part of the spoken speech.

[FEB. 9, 1835.

sense of payment, but merely delivered to these claimants, the Government having received it from Denmark, for their use, some years ago, and now delivered it to those to whom a commission had awarded it. Then there were extraordinary Indian treaties that year for the purchase of land, for which $735,000 were paid; and removal of Indians, and subsisting them after they got to their new homes, the sum of $368,000. But the greatest extraordinary payment of the whole year was that of revolutionary pensions, under the fatal act of 1832. That act originated in Congress, and carried back its loose and wild provisions to take effect from the 4th of March, 1831. This threw the accumulated payments under that most unfortunate act, upon the year 1833; for all the remainder of the year 1832, in which the act was passed, was taken up in establishing the claims of persons to the benefit of the act. Thus the payments of 1832 were but $355,686, while, in 1833, they were ten times that sum, amounting, in fact, to $3,507,484. Putting these extraordinary payments together, said Mr. B., and you have a sum of about $7,000,000 at once to be deducted from the grand aggregate of $22,750,000, and he had no doubt but that a research into the whole list of extraordinaries for the same year would produce $1,000,000 more. Be that as it may, here is a sum of $7,000,000, not belonging to the current and progressive expenses of the Government, carried forward to the gross amount of such expenditure, and made the means of exhibiting a duplication of the expenses of the Gov ernment in the short space of eight years. Here is the fallacy, here the delusion; and hence the injustice of basing upon this duplication a cry of such enormous extravagance as to justify revolution, if we cannot get ref ormation. For reformation there is room; for revolu tion there is no pretext: and the reformation of the ballot-box, Mr. B. confidently hoped, would answer the exigency, and bring down the expenses of the Govern ment, properly so called-the expenses necessarily incurred in working the machinery of the Governmentto a sum much below what it would be, even after de ducting the seven or eight millions of extraordinaries from the gross expenditure of twenty-two millions and three-quarters in 1833.

To confirm his view, and to show that those seven or eight millions of extraordinaries ought not to be added to the ordinary expenditures of the Government, much less to be charged to its extravagance, and indicating a progressive expenditure which ought to rouse and alarm the country, Mr. B. would advert to the amount of the ex penditures for the whole eight years comprehended in the report, premising that payments on account of the public debt are in all cases excluded. The successive annual expenditures then stand thus:

would represent. For the first year of the term the increase was about a million and a half; for the next five years there was no increase of any moment, and twice there was a diminution. The years 1832 and 1833 had run up to large amounts, and that by the means which he had shown; so that if the author of the report had taken for the basis of his comparison the seven years of regular expenditure, he would have found an increase of about two millions only, instead of a duplication of eleven millions; a result which, while it would have presented something for reformation, would have presented nothing for revolution, or even for turning out the party in power, and putting in their opponents, who are the real authors of every thing which requires reform.

Having shown the fallacy of the report in its exhibit of the extravagance of the Government; having shown its enormous error in stating that this great increase had taken place during a period of profound peace, when in fact there was an Indian war in the Upper Mississippi; and when not an event occurred to warrant unusual expenditure, when in fact $7,000,000 of the expenditures were for objects, not only unusual, but never existing before or since. Mr. B. would say a word, and but a word, upon its correlative part, the increase of persons paid by the Government or fed by its bounty. in 1825, the whole number was $55,777; in 1833, $107,073. This (said Mr. B.) is almost double; but how did it happen? Why, from carrying the pensioners up from about 17,000 to about 40,000! adding multitudes for internal improvement and custom-houses, in consequence of the two tariffs of 1824 and 1828; requiring many persons to superintend the removal of Indians; many to survey and sell the newly-acquired lands; and a whole regiment of dragoons for the defence of the Western frontier. In these items, and others, the source of the increased numbers will be found; some few of them necessary and indispensable, as that of the dragoons; some necessary and temporary, as those for removal of Indians and internal improvement; some lawful, though the expediency of the law questionable, as those for carrying into effect the complex provisions of the new tariff laws; some amazing, and almost incredible, as the increase of pensioners, the bare state7 ment of whose numbers announces a fraud of stupen dous magnitude, and implies a demoralization of public morals of frightful emormity.

The dismissions from office next engaged Mr. B's attention. The affected moderation of language under which this topic was brought forward in the report, and the violence with which it concluded, were particularly pointed out. Remarks of a party character were disclaimed, and the disclaimer was instantly followed by a series of the most violent and offensive remarks of a party character. The present administration was charged with having reduced to a system the practice of removing from office for opinion's sake. The assertion, though veiled, and slightly made to wear the form of hypothesis, was nevertheless clear and explicit in the report, that the honest and capable were dismissed to make room for the base and corrupt; that offices were the spoils of victory, the rewards of partisan service, and the means of substituting man-worship for patriotism, encouraging vice and discouraging virtue, preparing for the subversion of liberty and the establishment of despotism, and converting the entire body of office-holders into corrupt and supple instruments of power. Such, said he, was the language of a report which set out with a formal disclaimer of party spirit and partisan remarks. In defending the administration from such flagrant charges, Mr. B. would first discriminate between terms which had been much confounded and abused, and then show that the removals made by President Jackson, like those

[SENATE.

made by President Jefferson, were the legitimate results of the previous system of appointments, and were necessary not only to the safety and success of a democratic administration, but due, as an act of justice, to the great democratic party of the Union. Terms, he said, were confounded. When a man had been five, ten, twenty, forty years in office, and failed to be reappointed at the end of his second, third, fourth, or fifth term of four years, it was called a dismission, and the cry of persecution was set up. This, Mr. B. said, might be correct phraseology with those who thought offices ought to be for life, and eventually hereditary, but it was a phraseology repudiated in the democratic school, where the doctrine of right to office was repudiated, and the right of rotation was inculcated. With respect to the fact of dismissions, they resulted in general from appointments. The elder Mr. Adams appointed none but federalists; and Mr. Jefferson had to turn a portion of them out, in order to get in a portion of the republicans; and Mr. Jefferson had told him (Mr. B.) that he had never carried changes far enough; that he had not done justice to his own party. So of President Jackson; the younger Mr. Adams followed the plan of his father, and President Jackson had to follow the course of Mr. Jefferson. Mr. B. said that his recommendation for any office in his own State was worth nothing during the whole administration of Mr. Adams and the latter part of the administration of Mr. Monroe, and the State to this day contained some persons in office, his decided opponents, who were appointed under the two former administrations. Doubtless, said he, President Jackson had made some unfortunate appointments; he himself had made some unfortunate recommendations, though he had made but few; but it was incontestably true that many of those who had been dismissed, or not reappointed, were themselves proscribers of those who were in their power, dismissing not only clerks and under officers for political opinions, but mechanics, workmen, and laborers. Yes, the day-laborer, when he would not prostitute his vote to the national republicans and the bank, has been dismissed from his labor.

Of all the

The unregulated state of the deposite banks was another source of executive patronage which the report had strongly and emphatically dwelt upon. matter contained in the report, nothing, (said Mr. B.,) except one thing, which he would mention in its proper place, had astonished him so much as this. Not that there was not increase of executive patronage from this source, but that the President should be reproached with it in this Senate, by the author of this report, and the majority of the committee from which it came. What is the fact, exclaimed Mr. B. Did not this Senate twice refuse, at their last session, to pass any law to regulate the deposite banks? Did not the majority of this committee twice refuse to pass a bill for that purpose? Did not the author of the report twice refuse to attempt to regulate these banks? Are the votes of these refusals recorded in our journals, preserved in memories, and known to the whole body of the American people? And, after that, is the Senate the place from which a reproach can come, and fearful, trembling, awful apprehensions for the safety of the Republic can be put forth on account of the unregulated condition of these deposite banks, without exciting, in the first place, a feeling of the utmost possible astonishment; and, in the next place, a feeling very different from astonishment, and of which the Senate should never aspire to make itself the object? Mr. B. would dismiss this topic with simply reciting the reminiscences, as the novel writers called it, which belonged to this occasion, and leave it to those who refused-twice refused-only nine months ago, to comply with the executive recommendation to regulate these banks, and now

reproach him because they are not regulated, and shiver with terror at such a state of things; and would leave it to them, and a pretty little task they might find it! to reconcile their conduct then with their conduct

now.

Fifteen or twenty

[FER. 9, 1835.

in exchange for the notes of deposite banks, and demand specie from them; and the exhibition of these drafts in Baltimore and New York had the effect that was intended; it compelled the Bank of the United States and its branches to honor each others' paper, and to desist from that part of their atrocious and diabolical plan to break the deposite banks, and to derange the currency of the country.

Mr. B. said these were the facts which justified Mr. Taney for the use he had made of the transfer drafts; not only justified him, but entitled him to the highest praise. He contented himself now with stating these facts; on another occasion he would prove them. He had certain remarks to make on the report of the Fnance Committee of the Senate, (Mr. TYLER's report on the bank,) in which this proof would find an appropriate place; and he was certain that the Senate would not deny him an opportunity of making his intended remarks. [Looking at Mr. TYLER, he repeated that the Sanate would not deny him that opportunity; and Mr. TYLER was understood to say that certainly he would not be denied.]

Mr. B. next came to the proposition in the report to amend the constitution for eight years, to enable Congress to make distribution among the States, Territo ries, and District of Columbia, of the annual surplus of public money. The surplus is carefully calculated at $9,000,000 per annum for eight years; and the rule of distribution assumed goes to divide that sum into as many shares as there are Senators and Representatives in Congress; each State to take shares according to her representation; which the report shows would give for each share precisely $30,405, and then leaves it to the State itself, by a little ciphering, in multiplying the aforesaid sum of $30,405 by the whole number of Setators and Representatives which it may have in Congress, to calculate the annual amount of the stipend it would receive. This process the report extends through a period of eight years; so that the whole sum to be divi ded to the States, Territories, and District of Columbia, will amount to seventy-two millions of dollars.

The transfer drafts, said Mr. B., have claimed the attention of the report. They are proposed to be prohibited in future, except for the bona fide purpose of transferring public moneys from one place to another, for the benefit of the public service. To this Mr. B. had no objection. He was not in favor of using the power or the money of the federal Government to sustain banks in future. Time was when the Government was under a virtual duresse to do it. years ago, for example, when the Government was itself dependant on the paper system, and was obliged to support that system to preserve its own revenues. Time was, also, when it was not only right, but laudable in the Government, to sustain the local banks; and that was at the commencement of the panic operations of the last year, when the explosion of the State banks was the criminal policy of the Bank of the United States; and the success of that policy was frustrated by the interposition of the Secretary of the Treasury, through the instrumentality of transfer drafts. But these times have gone by. They have passed away, and never can return until the federal Government shall commit the consummate folly of creating another mammoth [bank, or entangling itself in the fate of local banks by continuing to treat their notes as money, and receiving the federal revenue in them. It is hoped that this folly will not be perpetrated; that no new bank is to be created to overthrow and to crush at pleasure all others; that the paper of local banks is not to be made the currency of the federal Government; but that the Government will, and that with all convenient speed, return to the currency of the constitution, and to the first act of the first Congress that ever sat under the constitution, and made a provision on the subject of money, and which declared that gold and silver coin only should be received in payments to the United States. For the future, then, Mr. B. was opposed to lending the aid of the federal Government to the support of banks. If they cannot stand, let them fall. Let them blow up if they will, sky-high, if they please; high enough never to fall back to the earth! But, while concurring with the report in the future restriction upon the use of transfer drafts, he took the opportunity, most emphatically, to dissent from the censure which the report, by implication, if not in words, threw upon Mr. Taney for the use be made of these drafts in the fall of 1833. He defended that use; he justified it; he extolled it: he celebrated it above all praise. What was that use? It was to prevent the success of crime, and to compel the observance of justice! to frustrate the conspiracy of the Bank of the United States against the local banks, and to compel her to treat her own notes, and those of her branches, as money. The case was this: Upon the removal of the deposites, many of the branches began to refuse to receive from the deposite banks the notes of the other branches, or of the mother bank, which had been received in payment of duties, and which the deposite banks offered to exchange for their own. Refusing this exchange, and demanding specie from the deposite banks for all their balances, the design of the federal bank was evident; it was to cripple and crush the State banks, destroy their currency, and upon their ruins erect the edifice of her own necessity, and supremacy, and recharter. Mr. Taney interposed to prevent this crime, this ruin, and this result. He gave drafts to the deposite banks, to be used upon condition, and on condition only, that the bank and its branches should continue to refuse to receive each others' notes, received on public account,ginia money.

Of all the propositions which he ever witnessed, brought forward to astonish the senses, to confound recollection, and to make him doubt the reality of a past or a present scene, this proposition, said Mr. B., eclipses and distances the whole! What! the Senate of the United States-not only the same Senate, but the same members, sitting in the same chairs, looking in each others' faces, remembering what each had said only a few short months ago-now to be called upon to make an alteration in the constitution of the United States, for the purpose of dividing seventy-two millions of surplus money in the treasury; when that same treasury was

* Mr. B., in a subsequent speech, told an amusing anecdote to the Senate, of the blunder into which a member had fallen with respect to the distribution of these $30,405. The first time that Mr. B. saw the member, after the report was read, he was violently for it, and wondered that any Senator or Representative should go against it. The next time he saw him, he was indifferent, and even contemptuous, to the report. Mr. B. desired to know the reason of this sudden change, and it was accounted for thus: When the member first heard the report read, he understood these $50,405 annually to be intended for the members themselves; but he now saw that every member would have to divide with his constituents, and he had 40,000 in his district, so that it reduced the thing to nothing; he would get but four shillings and six pence, Virginia money; and then he swore he would not change the constitution of the United States for four shillings and six

pence,