Biddle comes across the pages of history much as Hamilton does: cosmopolitan, intelligent, broad-minded, ahead of his time, and exceedingly arrogant. Both men believed in a natural aristocracy and felt as though they were rightful members of it, and both were, more or less, correct. Unlike his predecessors, Biddle understood the beneficial role the Second Bank could play in the national economy, and he set about realizing that goal. To his everlasting credit, he was quite successful, taking the concept of a central bank farther than had been accepted even in England by that point.43 From the time Biddle took control of the Second Bank in 1823 until Jackson’s reelection in 1832, it expanded its loans many times over, especially in the South and West.44 Even still, it managed successfully to restrain the state banks and even get in front of an economic panic that was brewing in England by 1825.45 Little wonder that, by the time of the Second Bank’s request for recharter in 1832, it had achieved broad popularity. Gallatin, by that point the éminence grise of Republican finance, gave it his blessing.46
Yet Biddle was not above the political fray, even though he personally claimed no interest in partisan gamesmanship. The fact is that Biddle had a lot of friends in high places, in no small part because he purchased them. The case of Webster has been noted above, as were Calhoun and Clay, all of whom Biddle courted assiduously. Various other members of Congress were also lubricated with generous loan terms as well as the privilege of receiving advances on their salaries.47 Newspapermen were also eligible for loans that were not strictly above board.48 Additionally, the primary responsibility of Biddle was to the Second Bank itself, despite his pretensions to being a magnanimous agent of national prosperity. Recent economic scholarship notes that the Second Bank made a tidy sum in the domestic exchange market, and it questions whether it really facilitated it or just profited off this emerging form of commerce.49
Nevertheless, contemporary sentiment regarding the Second Bank was generally positive by the end of the 1820s, and has more or less been vindicated by modern scholarship. Unfortunately for the Second Bank—and, as it turned out, the country at large—there was one implacable foe standing in its path. Jackson—“Old Hickory,” the “Hero of New Orleans,” the “Sharp Knife” as the Native Americans called him—wanted nothing more than to destroy the Second Bank, and as with so much else, he ended up getting his way.
In his three-volume biography of Jackson, Remini sets up his entrance into national politics as a tonic for the “Age of Corruption” we have been discussing. He argues that Old Hickory saw himself fundamentally as a reformer, in the mold of Jefferson and the old guard Republicans (who by that point fancied themselves as the “Quids,” or a third force aligned against the remaining Federalists and the National Republicans), carving out the rot that had grown within the institutions of government. Indeed, examining Jackson’s two most noteworthy policy messages—his vetoes of the Maysville Road spending bill and of the recharter for the Second Bank—it is clear that he saw himself as a Republican committed to limited, constitutional government as a bulwark against corruption.
Yet a fair examination of the historical record demonstrates that, while Jackson may have been reacting to the venality of his age, he approached the office of president with a level of capriciousness that had not been seen before his day, and perhaps not after, either. As we shall see, Jackson’s sins against the republican virtues he presumed to defend were certainly greater than those that got Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton impeached, and his crimes against the Native Americans were far worse than anything Richard Nixon ever did.
Jackson often comes across as a kind of American caesar. Deeply committed to the rule of law and the empowerment of the common folk, he nevertheless conflated, time and again, those virtues with his own interests. Indeed, as historian Daniel Walker Howe ably demonstrates, “It was his personal authority, rather than that of the federal government or even the presidential office, which Jackson zealously maintained.”50
His character was fully evident well before he ever assumed the presidency. His past deeds included holding the city of New Orleans under martial law until well after news of the Treaty of Ghent was made known; extorting fraudulent treaties from the Native Americans, in which the latter were forced to give up tens of thousands of acres; disobeying orders by attacking Spanish positions in Florida, then declaring martial law; and even profiting from his military adventures (his family and friends received advance notice of his Florida conquest, with an advisory that land prices in Florida would soon be going upward).51 As chief executive of the United States from 1829 to 1837, Jackson’s record does not so much justify his self-perception as a Republican reformer combating corrupt practices, but rather portrays a fundamentally lawless ruler using corruption to combat (equally corrupt) politicians whose interests diverged from his own.
At the core of the republican ideology is the idea that similarly situated people should be treated similarly; deviation from this norm suggests the existence of corruption, be it technically legal or not. And on that measure Jackson was enormously deficient, in small ways and large. On the small end of the scale was his hypocrisy on internal improvements. In the statement accompanying his veto of the Maysville Road—a favored project of his political rival Clay—Jackson worries that the Constitution did not permit such an expenditure, which “concedes to the government an unlimited power.”52 Instead, he claims to favor only internal improvements based on the principle that they benefit the nation as a whole. Otherwise, the country ran the risk of
promot(ing) a mischievous and corrupting influence upon elections by holding out to the people the fallacious hope that the success of a certain candidate will make navigable their neighboring creek or river, bring commerce to their doors, and increase the value of their property. It thus favors combinations to squander the treasure of the country upon a multitude of local objects, as fatal to just legislation as to the purity of public men.53
If ever there was a fair articulation of the Republican concern about internal improvements, this was it, but Jackson failed to live up to his own rhetoric. The fact of the matter is that government spending on internal improvements skyrocketed during Jackson’s tenure, reaching an average cost of nearly $0.13 per person, more than any other president in the antebellum period.54 And this spending did not follow pure Republican principle; rather, federal appropriations during this period had the distinct flavor of pork barrel politics to it. Jackson and his party loyalists in Congress often distributed funds for internal improvements based on the political salience of the appropriation.55
Jackson was also an inconsistent advocate of national authority, with the only clear dividing line being what was and was not his political priority. The story of Jackson staring down the South Carolina nullifiers is well known. The Palmetto State’s Ordinance of Nullification of 1832 declared the tariff laws recently passed into law null and void in South Carolina. Jackson—whose political coalition had been responsible for the abusive Tariff of Abomination—reacted with righteous indignation. He warned South Carolina that it had no authority to do that, and promised “that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.”56
Jackson, of course, was right to be outraged by South Carolina’s blatantly illegal actions. What is less known, however, is how happily he excused the equally lawless maneuvers by the states of Georgia and Mississippi in their efforts to oust