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|143| THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES.
ITS JUDGES AND JURISDICTION.

The late renovation in the constitution of this august body, by the creation of seven of its nine members under the auspices of the present democratic ascendency, may be regarded as the closing of an old, and the opening of a new, era in its history. And certainly to those who have looked on, for so many a weary year, in sorrow and almost in despair, at the career of high-handed judicial legislation, which it was so proudly pursuing, this correction—salutary, however tardy—of the anti-democratic tone of principle that has so long characterized it, affords a subject of sincere congratulation. The new cycle, then, that has just dawned, presents a fit occasion for a retrospect of the past measures, which we will intersperse with a few characteristic sketches of the men and manners, of that dignified banc. By establishing in the public mind, at this time, distinct ideas of the errors of the past, we shall most effectually guard against their possible recurrence for the future.

We are aware of the blind veneration which has heretofore sealed the eyes of a very large proportion of the public, whenever their looks have been directed towards that sacro-sanct tribunal, in prostrate submission to its presumed infallibility ; and, in discussing our subject with the freedom which it demands, many a reader may perhaps hold up his hands in holy horror at the impious temerity. But this abject mental subjection to authority and assumption is unworthy equally of our country and age. We despise that timid prudery in politics which has become too much in vogue. It is high time to print what has been often and earnestly spoken, and what everyone ought to know. Freedom of discussion, of all subjects within the range of human ken, from highest to lowest, is the vital principle of American liberty. The noblest and best of institutions can be preserved in their purity only by the perpetual vigilance |144| of public opinion. Their best friends are those who most frankly and freely agitate the frequent discussion of the first principles on which they are founded, and by which their conduct should be ever jealously judged ; and those who would inculcate that blind veneration and submission to which we have alluded, and thus leave free scope to the gradual developement of those abuses which seem inseparable front the practical working of all human institutions, are in truth their most dangerous enemies.

We certainly are not aware that this humble deference, which those who affect to be most shocked at the reckless boldness of democratic free inquiry claim for all those existing powers, privileges and dignities, to the evils or abuses of which that spirit might be presumed to menace possible danger, has been, or is, exhibited by themselves, in any very remarkable manner, towards those things and persons which the votaries of the democratic faith, in our conflicts of party creeds, have been wont to regard as their dearest objects of reverence. To say nothing of the licentiousness of a party press, by which language is habitually exhausted for the vilification of the best and purest of men, and the wisest and most honest of measures, have we not heard, for instance, of a President, whose wont it was, open-mouthed, at his presidential dinners, to speak of “that old fool, Franklin ?” The practice, once universal among the members of the political school of that President, of unreserved execration of two of the brightest luminaries of American democracy, Jefferson and Madison, has not yet entirely died away ; though, as against the former, but a feeble echo yet lingers on our ears ; and of the latter, many of those same gentry have by this time become not less zealous in panegyric, than they were erst in abuse.

We cannot but acknowledge a lamentable deficiency of real moral independence too extensively pervading our society—especially, we think, on our sea-board—notwithstanding the peculiar boast of our national anthem. Above all, the professional bigotry and subserviency of lawyers are the most inveterate. State, church, medicine, science, and the useful arts—all these are to a greater or less extent Americanized ; but jurisprudence remains still almost stationary at the old Blackstone moorings. The peerage of the bar yet stickles for exclusive privilege and foreign precedent ; and to read the fulsome and foolish post-obit ‘orations’ of some of these legal peers on each other, no wonder that foreigners undervalue us as the most clannish, hyperbolical, and gasconading of mankind.

We shall, then, speak freely and candidly of these grave and potent dignities. It is our opinion that the judiciary system of the United States is based on false principles. The entire omission, in its organization, of the element of responsibility to public opinion—that great conservative principle on which the health and vitality of every other department of our system depends—the neglect of the |145| essential distinction between judicial independence and judicial irresponsibility, which had its origin in a deceptive analogy between our system of national, and the English system of monarchical, sovereignty, we look upon as a fatal error. And we see not less clearly an illustration of the correctness of this view in the history of the highest tribunal of the Federal Judiciary, than in most of the minor courts of the respective States.

Our review of so large a subject must necessarily be cursory ; it shall at least be honest and true, though it may strike many readers as bold ; though we shall nought extenuate, we shall set down nought in malice ; and though we may condemn past abuses, it shall be with a single view to their future remedy. Whatever may be our ideas of the proper theory on which our American judiciary system should be modelled, we acquiesce in it as established ; and are only anxious to sustain, exalt and improve it, in common with all our other American institutions. To preserve, we would purify. We would thus vindicate and guard its constitutional and legitimate jurisdiction ; its real, lasting usefulness and dignity ; together with that respect of the bar, and confidence of the community, which we would sedulously cultivate, for what ought to be the cheap, prompt, impartial and independent administration of justice—and nothing more.

It is a curious fact, which no where distinctly appears, either in the Federalist, the lectures of Wilson, the notes of Tucker, the commentaries of Kent or Story, or, as far as we recollect, in any American history—it is nevertheless a fact, that the creation of the Federal Judiciary was partly owing to foreign influence—to British debt—and that ascendency, which launched our American Government on a sea of troubles, in the midst of such rocks of the British channel as a funding system, national bank, internal taxation, soon stranding Washington’s administration on the quicksands of civil war—“malum extremum discordia,” saith that gloomy but profound teacher, Tacitus—dreadful warning, which all the modern history of Spanish America should fearfully impress upon us ! English creditors, wanting confidence in American State courts, succeeded in procuring the establishment of Federal courts, that they might in them enforce the collection of those debts, the justice of much of which one of Jefferson’s most elaborate and masterly state papers, while Secretary of State, goes to disprove. English debt !—that king’s-evil of these United States, by which we are now again cancered and convulsed—whose contractors and advocates are, as then, and always, chiefly found among those friends of funding, banking, incorporating, speculating and taxing, among whom but few friends are to be found to the principles of Jeffersonian republicanism.

No act of Congress carries into complete effect the full constitutional grant of jurisdiction to the Federal courts. The Supreme |146| Court declares emphatically, in one of its didactic decrees, (what would be thought of a judgment of the Court of King’s-Bench that should lecture Parliament on what it must enact !) that the language of the Constitution is mandatory, as respects that court, and that Congress cannot lawfully refuse to vest in it the whole constitutional jurisdiction. Such are the language, tone and temper of the belligerent strain of judgment in the case of Martin against Hunter. But be that as it may, enough jurisdiction has been either granted or assumed, to render the Federal Courts important auxiliaries, as they are in some instances the supreme executors of the law of the land. And though a judge of the Federal Court of Louisiana (once the representative in Congress, and then governor of that State) used to tell suitors surlily, that there is no right to sue in a Federal Court whenever State courts have jurisdiction—yet that was but a rare instance of self-denial. We have, on the other hand, seen the Federal Judiciary grasping at jurisdiction with a covetous eagerness, and a wide stretch of embrace, which could never be satisfied within any limits short of universal dominion. This is the great abuse against which we would direct our efforts. The action of this branch of our political system has tended more fatally than any other towards that federal centralization of power deprecated by the State-Rights and Democratic school of politics ; while by its lavish use of the judicial Veto it has gradually erected itself into a high political and legislative power—never contemplated by its founders—stretching its potent sceptre over sovereign States and nations, the monarch of all it surveys. We repeat that we are anxious to exalt and strengthen this institution in the discharge of its legitimate functions. We consider it a wise provision for most revenue, all admiralty, much maritime and constitutional, and some other jurisdiction, besides its criminal cognizance—always preserving trial by jury, where it can be done. It is only against its inordinate extension of jurisdiction and usurpation of political power, that our censure is directed. We trust that all its sincere and considerate friends will read this review with that conviction.

None of the Chief Justices, and but few of the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court, have been mere lawyers,—that caste on whose “trades’-union” some of Burke’s bitterest invectives are bestowed,—the pekins of the French revolution, as the robe of France were nicknamed by the military ; whose science is not apt, saith Burke, except in persons most happily born, to open and liberalize the mind, exactly in the proportion it sharpens the wit and invigorates the understanding ; whose vocation it is to work with such tools as belluinas, atque ferinas, immanesque leges—so the civilians stigmatize the feudal laws—such laws as make up that most complicated and irrational of all modem jurisprudence, the land tenures of England, the delight of so many American legists, and |147| from which we have been with difficulty and but partially emancipated.

At the head of the nobles of the profession at the same time in England, France, and this country, were lately Chancellor Brougham, Baron Dupin, and Chief Justice Marshall—neither of them a mere lawyer. It has been the uniform practice of our Presidents to appoint distinguished statesmen to judicial stations ; from which cause as much perhaps as any other, (for nil est ab omni beatum,) American judicial proneness has constantly been to the exercise of political as much as mere civil jurisdiction. From the personal training of American judges, and the nature of American institutions, our courts have become so political, as to deem meum and tuum subordinate if not irksome matters ; while the delight and glory of the Supreme Court has been, fomented by ardent advocates, surrounded by brilliant auditories, to pass upon the laws and rights, the interests and liberties, of sovereign States ; to sit in judgment upon the acts of presidents and governors, charters of banks and universities, treaties, creation, existence, and intercourse of nations, rights of war, and other such ambitious topics, seldom elsewhere the province of judicature ; not only to interpret and enforce laws, but to annul them. Written constitutions may be said to lay triple tiers of law : first, fundamental and supreme, the constitutional ; secondly, the legislated ; and, lastly, the unwritten ; unavoidably begetting the necessity to some extent of political as well as civil jurisdiction ; which our complex government of State and Federal sovereignties aggravates. But the immense and unexampled prepotency of putting judicial vetoes on laws, not when about to be enacted, but after they have been long in force—this vast constructive faculty, unknown in any other age or nation, has become of late the ordinary, the favorite occupation of the Supreme Court of the United States ; and, after their example, all other courts and judges throughout the country ; so that it is the assumed function of all this magistracy to invalidate whatever act of State or sovereignty lawyers denounce to judicial repeal. A French court has lately exercised something like it, by the abrogation of a royal ordinance declaring martial law in Paris ; and we are not to be understood as arraigning the jurisdiction itself, while earnestly calling attention to the fact of its towering, tremendous, teeming, and perennial exercise. Scarce a year passes, or a court sits, without this prodigious incubation. The Supreme Court is always big with it. Every provincial tyro in his teens just learning to spoil a suit, is encouraged to flesh his maiden sword on this ultima ratio judicii, by some puisné judge sitting irresponsibly during what is technically called good behaviour ; who, after premising what reporters and editors will be sure to extol as a most learned and eloquent homily, on legislative and executive usurpation, and regretting his painful duty to correct such abuses, calls down |148| the Goddess of Reason, that lately set up idol of jacobin law, to interpose and cut the knot of naughty legislation.

No veto power, ancient or modern, has existed, so formidable as this constructive judicial authority to abolish laws, to abate them, like nuisances, festino remedio. Every day ministration, as it has become, instead of merely the ‘extreme unction’ of judgment, to be resorted to only in case of imminent danger—and without that American panacea, the oil of European sanction—standing alone, as our courts do, on this modern pyramid which they have erected for themselves, without the prop of their darling “stare decisis”—having, by this species of innovation, revolutionized the law, and amalgamated all departments of government, which Montesquieu and Blackstone proclaim it as the first principle of free institutions to keep inviolably distinct and separate—no apology can be needed, with judicious and reflecting friends of free institutions, for earnestly endeavoring to fix attention, nay more, to fasten apprehension, upon the judicial Veto. We are among the most steadfast friends of a government of law. There can be no good government without its supremacy. While law is wisely and impartially administered, other operations of government may almost stand still, without much private wrong or public suffering. Let justice be faithfully administered, without sale, denial, or delay, and the entire apparatus of Presidents, Secretaries, Generals, Post-captains, Foreign Ministers, Members of Congress, and other functionaries, with armies, navies, fortifications, appropriations, &c. &c. may almost be dispensed with and we confidently believe that a century hence will exhibit such an approximation towards this state of things, and with it a yet unknown degree of social well-being and improvement, as would astonish the present generation, were such a glimpse possible behind the curtain of the yet unborn future.

An old French gentleman, who was once, fifty years by-gone, Secretary of Legation in this country, and has since held office, with all the pliant tenacity of the Vicar of Bray, under Emperor, King by the grace, and King without grace—the Marquis de Marbois, after dedicating a book to that sovereign dolt, my lord the Dauphin, with many encomiums on the wisdom and virtues which he poetically attributes to his royal highness, in his preface to his pleasant history of Louisiana, thus describes the Supreme Court of the United States :

“Il existe à Washington une puissance qui n’a ni gardes, ni palais, ni trésors : elle n’est ni entourée de commis, ni surchargée de registres. Elle n’a pour armes que la vérité, et la sagesse. Sa magnificence consiste dans la justice, et la publicité de ses actes. Cette puissance est appelée la Cour Suprême des Etats Unis. Elle exerce le pouvoir judiciaire en ce qui concerne les intérêts généraux des Etats Unis,—entr’ eux et avec les puissances étrangères. Les |149| membres de ce tribunal ne peuvent être privés de leur office, que pour cause d’inconduite, et par jugement. Leur inamovibilité est une guarantie de vertu, et d’une instruction qui croît d’année en année. Leur jurisdiction est immediate, lorsque les ambassadeurs, ministres, et consuls, ou les états, sont partis. Dans les autres cas, ils sont juges d’appel. Ces cas sont particulièrement ceux ou des étrangers sont partis contre des Etats, ou des citoyens. Cette cour a d’autres attributions, qui dejà alarment quelques amis de la liberté. Mais qu’a-t-on a redouter d’un pouvoir dont la justice fait toute la force ; qui peut, il est vrai, réduire les autres pouvoirs a l’inaction, en déclarant qu’ils agissent contre les lois constitutionnelles ; mais qui souleverait toute la république contre lui-même, si sa déclaration n’était pas conforme a l’évidente vérité.”

We cheerfully subscribe to this glowing panegyric. May its beau ideal of fond foreign fancy be always a reality !—But the glorious truth is beginning to prevail, that the most dangerous, and the weakest of all governments, is over-government. It may be still believed in the old world, and the heresy yet lingers even in the new, that, to be strong, government must be arbitrary,—like the exploded maxim of the law, that it is the part of a good judge to enlarge jurisdiction. We abjure all such heresies. The only strong and durable government is that which is mild and representative ; understood and shared by the community, yea by the commonalty ; and of all branches, that most needing to be strengthened by moderation, engaging the sympathy of the people—the weakest of all, in which the people share only as jurors—is the judiciary. In no part of the world is there such popular reverence for it, as in the United States of America, which it would be infatuation to impair by usurpation or excess. Let the majesty of the law always be upheld by the confidence of the people, and never endangered by professional encroachment. We desire to make the Federal Government strong in every department, especially the judiciary, by rooting it in the strength of universal veneration, well assured that power by compulsion, power of prerogative, and above all constructive power, are but vanity and vexation. It is false to every patriotic emotion, not to use plain language—the language of real affection—if this vital function is distempered—

It was in 1798 that the Supreme Court for the first time sat in judgment upon the act of a sovereign State, a law of Connecticut ; when the judges, Chase, Paterson, Iredell, and Cushing, not only shrank from the exercise of a power since become so cheap, but the boldest of them, Chase, closes his opinion by saying : “I will not go farther than I feel myself bound to go ; and if I ever exercise the |150| jurisdiction, I will not decide any law to be void but in a very clear case.”^*|150|

We here see the almost imperceptible source where this overwhelming cataract, as it has since become, of jurisdiction, just oozes from the earth. It shall be our task to trace it onward, till we shall find it swelling to a flood, and sweeping all obstacles before its mighty way.

But before proceeding in this duty we may pause awhile by the way, to indulge in a few of the many reminiscences and personal sketches of the men and manners of the olden time of the court which crowd on our memory.

The first judges of the Supreme Court of the United States were Jay, Cushing, Wilson, and Blair. Soon after came Iredell and Thomas Johnson. In 1793, Paterson succeded Johnson, and in 1796, Chase was appointed in the place of Blair. Rutledge, nominated Chief Justice in the place of Jay, never took his seat. The present is the only Chief Justice of the United States who has not been on foreign service. Chief Justice Marshall, like ancient Glanville and modern Erskine, marshalled squadrons before he marshalled pleadings. Three of the first judges, Wilson, Blair, and Paterson, were framers. Another, Chase, was a signer. Massachusetts has never been without a judge of the Supreme Court ; and the two from the same corner of that State have been on the bench nearly half a century. New Hampshire, Delaware, Vermont, and Rhode Island have never had a judge. New York and Maryland have each had three, Virginia four, and for thirty years two at a time. North Carolina and Georgia have each had one. South Carolina two, but Chief Justice Rutledge never took his seat. Of the two appointed from Pennsylvania, Wilson was a native of Scotland, and Judge Baldwin is of Connecticut. Judge McLean, named of Ohio, was born in New Jersey ; from which State also was Paterson. Judges Todd and Trimble, of Kentucky, were both, we believe, originally of Virginia.

The Chief Justices were Jay, of New York, Rutledge, of South Carolina, Ellsworth, of Connecticut, Marshall, of Virginia, and Mr. Chief Justice Taney, of Maryland. Of the thirteen Attorney Generals, |151| two, Edward Randolph and Robert Smith, became Secretaries of State ; and Robert Smith also Secretary of the Navy ; three, Cæsar A. Rodney, William Pinckney, and Richard Rush, foreign ministers ; two, Richard Rush and Roger B. Taney, Secretaries of the Treasury ; one, William Bradford, died in the office ; and only one, Roger B. Taney, has been made a judge. It was Mr. Pinckney’s oft expressed opinion, that the office of Attorney General of the United States is the most laborious and responsible of all our public stations. Yet, if we mistake not, he and one other are the only two who performed the uncommon exploit of voluntary resignation. The present excellent incumbent is well known to have anxiously desired it, and to have been hitherto kept in the office, against his will, only by a high sense of duty, to the great detriment of private interests. Of the reporters, Dallas was afterwards a distinguished Secretary of the Treasury ; Mr. Cranch has been, almost for a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, Chief Judge of the court for the District of Columbia ; and Mr. Wheaton is now the American Minister Plenipotentiary in Prussia. The marble bust of Jay in the massive hall of the Supreme Court in the crypt of the capitol, is a tolerable likeness of that honest Huguenot, remarkable for his directness and purity of character, honorably employed in many important public services, both at home and abroad, but who was said not to have had the gift of second-sight of the destinies of that stupendous Southwest, which (let all travellers by steam on the western waters recollect) it was long contemplated to surrender, with the navigation of the Mississippi and all its magnificent valley, to Spanish, which would have been to Bonapartean, possession. Instead of conquering Africa, from the point d’appui of Algiers, French armies might now be entrenched at Cincinnati and Louisville, living on tamarinds, which Chateaubriand, by poetic license, says, grow on the banks of the Méchacébé, and debating, at the cannon’s mouth, with our Kentucky Gascons, the liberty of being blown up by steam or snagged upon sawyers. Chief Justice Jay and Chief Justice Ellsworth were both diverted from the bench to foreign missions. Jay’s treaty with England, and Ellsworth’s embassy to France, made as much sensation in their days as the removal of the deposites, nullification, the suspension, or any of the volcanoes that have burst in ours. In the late treaty with France, which for a while was also the great lion in our path, there is acknowledgement by supreme law that the people were right in one at least of their objections to Jay’s treaty ; for even Washington himself, like the gallant Decatur, always stood by his country, right or wrong. Ellsworth is understood to have been largely instrumental in framing the original judiciary acts (one of which smacks a little of Connecticut) and other primeval laws of our present Government. He was a calm but powerful debater in Congress, remarkable abroad for unadulterated ‘Americanism’, and on |152| the bench a most inflexible chief. He instructed a jury that the English common law is the common law of the United States. An error almost venial when English ascendency was universal in this country, and with lawyers especially omnipotent. Even one of the present judges of the Supreme Court has betrayed a strong hankering after that flesh-pot of Egypt, and been mainly instrumental in fixing the odor of its sanctity by legal fiction on the good Creoles of Louisiana, who regard the English common law with more aversion than that learned judge can the blue laws of New England.

In those ‘good old times’ when the Supreme Court sat under the régime of the English Common Law, instead of mean black sophomore gowns, (last and sorry remnant—the mere administration de bonis non—of the judicial robe !) the judges were dressed in stately scarlet and ermine. Revolutionary madness had indeed, even then, inflicted on those learned heads a deplorable privation, and on the commonwealth the fearful innovation—

of stripping them of the judicial wig, that best and most authentic absurdity of form, to quote Burke once more ! Till then, venerable magistrates were not entirely bareheaded, like an excellent judge, Brockholst Livingston, whose finely shaped head was almost entirely bald. Powder, however, when flour and tallow were cheap, was still in vogue. The bar, although unfrocked, appeared always in banc, in full suit of black, with variegated queues, tight small clothes, buckles and ruffles. The ‘lean and slippered pantaloon’ was not then in esse, as Shakespeare imagined it in posse. If we are not mistaken, Mr. Taney is the first Chief Justice of these United States, who ever so far departed from precedent, (most portentously, we submit,) as to give judgment in trowsers ! The spirit of modern sans-culotte-ism had not then overthrown all the good old landmarks and dignified fashions ; a round hat was altogether extra-judicial ; and a judge in a hat, not only round but white, would have been guilty of an offence more effectually punishable, than any misdemeanour in office is by impeachment ; and lawyers in whiskers, or boots and black stocks, would have been committed till well purged of such outrageous contempts of court. Judges were not then drawn, like money from the Treasury, by specific appropriation to particular circuits ; but, by a system of exchanges at par, each judge in turn perambulated the whole United States. Judge Cushing always travelled in an open phaeton and pair, and was of course many weeks industriously driving, without per diem, from Boston to Savannah. Judge Wilson rode the circuits in his dashing coach and four, with out-riders. At a later period, Judge Todd, the first trans-Alleghanian member of the Supreme Court, performed three thousand miles of his duty, per annum, on horseback. We may add, (in parenthesis,) |153| that then, before innovation by steam, on boat and car, had annihilated the American magnificence of distance, and lent congressional magnificence to distant per-diems, we have seen in this metropolis, a young lady, daughter of a Senator, who rode on horseback, (and without per diem,) all the way from Chilicothe to Washington ; nay more, a matron, wife of another Senator, who not only rode on horseback, but often camped out in the Indian country, during the journey from New Orleans, and nothing the worse for the wear and tear. Such historical reminiscences may be thrown in to admonish modern degeneracy of its decline from, not only the days ‘that tried men’s souls,’ but even from those of later date, when ladies were often exercised far more severely than their lords could now endure, by that talent which the Fairy Queen mentions as marking the difference between base and noble blood,—

Judge Paterson, a small man, of rather insignificant appearance, and unassuming address, was remarkable for the dignity of his deportment on the bench. In a tavern, among lawyers, suitors, witnesses, et id genus omne, he was but one of the rest—but no sooner was the Court opened, and all cleared for action, than they who but a little while before supposed him one of themselves, found, sometimes to their cost, that he was not the man they had taken him for, but every inch a judge. He was the first judge to broach eloquent and excellent anathemas on retroactive and unjust legislation ; in which, however, he has not been seconded by his brother judges ; for his elaborate argument in the first judicial condemnation of a law as unconstitutional, pronounced in the year 1795, far from receiving sanction by the Supreme Court, has been suffered to ‘waste its sweetness on the desert air’ of the Wyoming settlement, like much of the admiralty and maritime law since uttered in Eyre on the first circuit, and some of the western districts, budding and blooming with great beauty, through the cultivated parterre of many pages, but dying without fruit. Judge Chase, we believe, was never till the day of his death, seen in Court without a three cornered hat and a profusion of ruffles. He was in the habit of telling the New England bar, that their appeals from one jury to another, for the trial of facts, made every case a rubber ; so that the winning party must gain two out of three games, or he lost the stake.

Judge Washington, in 1798, succeeded Judge Wilson, with whom he had studied law. He was of rather small stature, negligent of dress, deprived of the sight of one eye by severe study, and addicted to the |154| immoderate use of tobacco, in all its trinoda necessitas. Like his peerless uncle, he had the uncommon faculty of holding his judgment perfectly in abeyance, till he heard all that could be said pro and con, and then forming it with inflexible firmness. No man ever feared responsibility less, in what he thought right, than this upright Judge—none could be more imperturbable, impenetrable, silent, patient and abstracted, during an argument, until it was his cue to speak ; it was impossible to foretell what his opinion would be ; but when he charged a jury, no judge could be more explicit or authoritative. He was inimitable in condensing and clarifying a subject, so as to drive his judgment home in the convictions of others. Perfect impartiality, great decision, magnanimous candour, and capacity for labor, strongly characterized him. He was known to sit sixteen successive hours without leaving the bench ; and on the trial of General Bright, for defending Mrs. Sergeant’s house with a military guard, by order of the Governor of Pennsylvania, against the Marshal of the United States, in the Olmstead case, Judge Washington evinced as much unaffected courage and self-possession, as General Washington did in his best fought battles. Judge Washington’s worthy associate, on that circuit, for more than thirty years, was Judge Peters ; a man of infinite humor, great mother wit, and one of the fathers of admiralty law in America. Judge Washington was a strict disciplinarian, adhering with rigid precision to rules and doctrines. His associate on the contrary, (although Secretary of War in the Revolution,) was habitually inclined to lenity, and even laxity ; so that he would say, “my brother is the strict Judge—I am only the district Judge.” It was a curious circumstance, that while Judges Washington and Peters were trying a suit, in which the King of Spain was plaintiff, and his minister, Don Onis, obliged to waive diplomatic etiquette, and give testimony on the question, whether Ferdinand the Seventh, or Joseph Bonaparte was King, the judges were in the habit of sometimes meeting the latter, then lately arrived in this country, at entertainments to which they were invited.

This personality may enliven and even explain the dry record by some glimpses of its framers ; and we will not resume the main argument without a few more portraits episodical of the most conspicuous actors on this high forensic theatre.

Early in the elder Adams’ administration, John Marshall was elected to Congress ; and, after a brief but distinguished service there, translated to a special embassy, and the Department of State ; from which, when Jefferson was elected, but not yet inaugurated, he was promoted to the high—there is no higher—office of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, which he filled with uninterrupted sway for thirty-four years. During that period Kenyon, Ellenborough, Tenterden and Denman, four Chief Justices followed each other in the English King’s-Bench ; four successive |155| Chancellors, Eldon, Erskine, Lyndhurst and Brougham, occupied the woolsack ; and hosts of other Judges rose and fell throughout the wide realms of English and American jurisprudence. In this long tract of time, one third of a century, while numerous Judges were passing over the law’s disk, one superior luminary, not culminating till meridian age had matured his powers, was perpetually radiating the light of his powerful mind and peculiar temper upon the virgin soil of the uncultivated law of a new country. When Erskine, the greatest advocate that ever lived, took leave of the bar, on his appointment as Chancellor, he boasted that in seven-and-twenty years, he had never been kept from court by indisposition. Marshall never boasted ; but it is a memorable fact, that for thirty-three years, he was scarcely ever absent from the bench, from any cause whatever ; but almost always at his post, with wonderful capacity of body and mind ; which happy conformation is itself no small talent. Boyish buoyancy of spirits, simple and almost rustic bonhommie of manner, a tall muscular and robust frame, playful, convivial and kind, delighting in a hearty laugh, as much as in a deep constitutional discussion, never perplexed by difficulties of judgment, which terrified bookworms exhausted learning to unravel, Marshall studied during a long walk at the dawn of some bitter cold day. When more than seventy-five years old, he still relished with undiminished zest the pleasures of the table or the club ; and his right hand to the last never forgot its cunning at quoits and billiards. The physique of such a man was a a guaranty of the felicity of his morale. Captain Jack Marshall walking ten long miles to drill a company of militia, and after a fatiguing drill, ten miles home again, with a buck’s-tail in his hat, and the old Chief ringing the hob at quoits, and being rewarded for it by exaltation to the shoulders of some stout companions, with boisterous meriment, in which he was as free and loud as any one, are characteristics, which elaborate eulogists of a great Chief Justice seem afraid to allude to ; but which we delight to bring forward, with other native realities—the constitutional basis of natural and solid worth—more truly indicative of the man than more celebrated performances. With a body of Mohawk make and vigor, spirit of perpetual elasticity and masculine understanding, he united that genius for logical argument and illustration, which in the Assembly and Conventions of Virginia, in Congress, and as Chief Justice of the United States, always placed him in the front rank of advocates, statesmen and magistrates, and left his impression on the age in which he lived. Perhaps he was even greater at the bar and in Congress, than on the bench. His speech in the case of Nash and Robbins is a monument.

Ten years after the advent of Chief Justice Marshall, the deaths of Judges Cushing and Chase called on the President, Madison, to supply their places. Judge Duvall, then First Comptroller of the |156| Treasury, throughout long life an honest man and faithful magistrate—who crowned his work by the rare merit of resignation—was appointed to succeed Chase. But it proved a difficult matter to find a successor to Cushing. He must be from New England, and he should be of the right politics. The appointment was first bestowed on Mr. Quincy Adams, who had been residing sometime as Minister at St. Petersburgh, when the vacancy occurred in the Supreme Court. Mr. Adams’ particular friends having solicited the President to transfer him to some other mission, as the expenses of that of Russia were said to require the relief of another outfit, Mr. Madison, thinking that Mr. Adams would prefer a place on the bench, nominated him to the place of Cushing ; and, we believe, his nomination as such was ratified in Senate. But when made known to him, having the Presidency in view, he declined it ; and it was necessary to cast about for another incumbent. After no little difficulty and hesitation, the choice at last fell on a very young man, Joseph Story, of Salem, who had been, for part of one session, in Congress, and was speaker of that host in itself, the innumerable and then democratic House of Representatives of Massachusetts, (whose modern successors lately outvoted Governor Everett’s veto on the great and trying point of fifty cents additional per diem ;) for Mr. Speaker Story would never have been Mr. Justice Story but for his well ascertained, as was then thought, root-and-branch democracy. Judge Story accordingly took his seat not long before the war of 1812, in the court of which, from the start, he has been a leading member. Learned, indefatigable and enthusiastic, no man living has contributed more to the literature of the law, and no member of the Supreme Court has, for twenty-five years, left his impression more distinctly on the proceedings of that court,—not to mention his numerous elaborate adjudications on a prolific circuit, many of which stand unappealed from. His works have wrought the miracle of converting English and European contempt, into admiration of American law-learning. The practice of courts, admiralty, revenue, prize and common law, equity, the lesser law of nations, as well as international law, constitutional law, in short, almost all the departments of jurisprudence have been cultivated by Judge Story with most praiseworthy labor and flattering success. As professor and lecturer at Cambridge, as the deliverer of occasional public addresses, even as the author of a volume of poetry, and of extensive commentaries on the Constitution, his industry and learning are conspicuous.

Soon after his accession came war, bellum, as Lucan truly has it, multis utile. Franklin, whose treaty of Versailles is a nobler conquest, than even the victory of Saratoga which led to it, endeavoured to liberalize war and mitigate its ruffian code by some Christian mellowing. Monroe afterwards attempted the same melioration, and Madison had it much at heart ; and although they did not succeed, |157| yet, surely, this is the country whose greatest interest it is, and whose truest glory it would be, to soften the rigors and abridge the atrocities of that infernal suspension of all justice, mercy and reason—martial law. The Supreme Court were of a different opinion. Not a cunning device or harsh test of British prize law, but, by its eager adjudications, were ground into the law of this country. Pinckney, freshly descended, as it were, from the high lineage of London—the greatest if not the only American master of that law, as adulterated by Scott’s captivating sophistry—in all the sensation of his much favored descent from abroad, upon the Supreme Court—novus hospes, as he would say—with astonishing power of rhetoric, beauty of diction, and compass of learning, wit, sarcasm and overbearing fascination—taught the judges prize law, and found willing pupils in most of them. It was one of his side-bar, saucy speeches, that the Chief Justice had a marvellous incapacity for admiralty law. For Marshall’s kindly nature revolted at the barbarous axioms of a bloody code, which he had never studied, and could not be reconciled to. In vain did he, and one other judge well versed in it, protest against its American naturalization. The other judge was that humane and accomplished gentleman, Brockholst Livingston, the best informed marine lawyer of the court, and for that reason most averse to it. In spite of all, however, English prize law became our law, prescribed by a superior, as Blackstone defines law, and it is, and we presume must now ever be our law. The colonial rule of ’56, against which this country almost took up arms, the reverse of that excellent law of nations, that free ships make free goods—the most inhuman and anti-American of the English doctrines of domicile, migration, commercial and national intercourse, in contradiction to which all our institutions are founded, and the very war itself was declared—the hardest English regulations of search, seizure, capture, and almost torture, by standing interrogatories, violative of the cardinal principles of our system of evidence—nay, we incline to think that even the enormities of paper blockade, all—we believe we tell truth when writing all—the monstrous inflictions of that odious perversion of justice, which immolates the blessed rights of pre-existing peace on the diabolical shrine of supervening war, yes, all are now the adjudged law of our America ; all let loose—

—not forgetting the fiery tail of costs and charges, admiralty droits, commissions, fees and extortionate taxation—

All this is the law of a land of peace, freedom and economy, by recorded and irretrievable judgments of the Supreme Court of the |158| United States, couched in grandiloquent language, of which the taste is as false as the law and the logic. The most felonious of grand larcenies is that vulture freebooting, which is, by a worse piracy than that of Algiers, is licensed to pounce on unsuspecting wayfarers by sea, rifle their papers and baggage, pinion and imprison their persons, and send them bound hand and foot to the cruel mercy of hostile-courts, whose vulpine craving for condemnations is fomented by land pirates more ravenous for prey than even the spoilers who vex the caverns of the great deep in quest of it. It is much to be regretted, that so great a passion for prizes, the charming novelty of prize law, and the step-mother influence of the nation against whom we were at war, fascinated and seduced a court composed of statesmen, and contaminated our mild code with the feudal ferocities of sea-chivalry. I feel strong, said Montesquieu, when the Romans are with me ; as Chancellor Kent hugs the idea that American judges ought to feel strong when they have English authorities on their side. But English prize law is not the law of nations, much less fit for America. Its chains were fabricated by a country toto orbe divisos, whose insular policy, as settled by the dictator Chatham, with a preponderant war-marine, and sea-girt security, was (for even Great Britain is sick of it) to carry on hostilities with one arm, while trading with the other. Whereas, this country with no such position or policy, and the destiny of neutrality and peace, was infatuated when it forged such rules, to be visited upon ourselves by every petty sovereignty involved in war. Ask any one of our diplomatic agents in any part of South America, and he will say that the greatest difficulty our commerce has to contend with in that hemisphere is—the law of this country, as perpetually brought to bear upon it by the agents of all other nations. We are, then, reduced back to our colonial condition, by the law of our own courts, in matters of prize, revenue and foreign intercourse generally. The governments estop us with our own decrees. The very ships of other nations open this broadside upon us in every misunderstanding. And it is the deplorable, too often desperate duty of our own officers, civil and military, to contend in vain against our own most short-sighted adoption of the worst, least legitimate, and often superannuated European, especially English, dogmas of pseudo jurisprudence.

This, however, is not the worst of our disgraceful dilemma. The tendency of all Christendom is to liberal and benignant foreign relations. Continental Europe is, and was then, all alive to the rallying cry of maritime melioration and the liberty of the seas. We were the first nation to display that standard, and are the elder of all nations that bear it, at the head of a hemisphere where kings and wars cannot be perpetuated. It was a glorious occasion, therefore, for the Supreme Court to establish an American law of nations.|159| It had a moral force at command stronger, cheaper, and more irresistible than armies and navies, with banners and broadsides. It might have formed a character for itself, the perfection of that ascribed to it by Marbois, and a power for the country which the combined navies of the world could neither give nor take away. But, instead of this, it fell behind in the miry ruts of the car of conquest ; and, as we shall presently show, the effect of this irreparable retrograde is felt not alone in maritime law, but extended its baneful influence to the higher regions of constitutional law. The blast of war, which stiffened the sinews of the court for conflict with foreign enemies, seems to have inflamed their lust of dominion for subjugating the States of our own confederacy. Its worst consequence was not confined to the high seas, but felt at home ; and the regret we express for the first result is far less than every true American should feel for the latter.

The first cycle of American nationality was rounded off before the Supreme Court pronounced any formidable judgment on constitutional law, save that which, by the large majority of, however, a divided bench, asserted the suability of States. Maryland was first brought to the bar. Soon afterwards the Marshal of Georgia, Robert Forsyth, father of the present Secretary of State, (who lost his life in serving process,) having cited that State by a writ served on the Governor and Attorney General, she sent her protest and submitted it, but without an appearance against the jurisdiction. That transcendant contrivance as Wilson styled a State, was overcome, however, by the argument, that the people of the United States form a nation, on which radical question this great cause turned,—these are Judge Wilson’s words, italics and capitals. This judgment was given in 1793 ; but in 1796 an amendment to the Constitution put an end to its alarming consequences. With this single exception, the Federal Judiciary at first was forbearing of jurisdiction, and over persons particularly so. The terms citizen and alien were so literally construed as to exclude cognizance which was perhaps fairly granted by act of Congress. In respect to the citizenship of corporators, and of the inhabitants of Districts also, as well as in some other respects, the early adjudications were so abstemious and punctilious, as to cause subsequent judges to regret the timid prudery of their predecessors. The attempt upon the law of Connecticut, which ended as before stated in 1798, is the only other solemn and heralded war upon the States, during the first seventeen years of the present government ; for the single-handed incursion of Judge Paterson, on his circuit in 1795, gallant and eloquent as was that demonstration, was never supported by the main body. The Supreme Court far from sustaining that praiseworthy and constitutional attack on retroactive and unjust legislation, left it to its solitary fate, and have gravely resolved that laws may be retrospective, |160| unjust and despotic, ad libitum—ad deliquium—ad nauseam ; yet are they valid, unless ex post facto, (meaning criminal law only,) or unless impairing inexplicable obligation of incomprehensible contract. Paterson’s law is left all alone in its glory, doomed to die, like Gertrude of Wyoming, deserted in a lone valley, reduced to mere blank verse, more evanescent than Campbell’s poetry, of which a line runs thus appropriately :

Honest John Taylor of Caroline, and all the Macon school, (whose much ridiculed frugality of centralism is becoming every day much more acceptable than judicial ultraism, that school deny the constitutional right of the Federal Judiciary to review at all a State law or judgment ; and, surely, Federal judgments reversing laws ought to be at least consistent with the first principles of unquestionable justice. Jay, Wilson, Blair, Thos. Johnson, Iredell, Ellsworth, Paterson, all that primitive category passed away ; the Georgia case was reversed by constitutional amendment ; the Connecticut case was innocent of the crime of striking down a sovereign State ; and the Pennsylvania circuit case ended, as we have seen, in smoke among the coal mines of the Wyoming valley. The administration of Washington and John Adams had closed, and that of Jefferson was in full tide of successful experiment, before the States had occasion to be alarmed for their sovereignty, or the people for the constitutional distribution of the powers of government. This long period (seventeen years) of abstinence from the exercise of the formidable powers of jurisdiction since assumed, is no small proof of what the law was supposed to be by its first interpreters, the men who lived nearest to its constitutional source, and may be presumed to have best understood the character and direction which its authors had designed to give it. Abuse of the judicial veto began in after times, with the ascendency of the late eminent Chief Justice, to whose honored memory we are far from designing any disrespect, when we canvass freely the consequences of that decided federal tone of political principles with which, unfortunately, his great mind was too deeply imbued.

In 1806 the Supreme Court, grown wiser in its generation than its predecessors, for the first time broke a law, in the well known Yazoo affair. Pressed as we are for space, intending on a future occasion to analyse the power of courts of justice to repeal whatever laws they may deem contracts, we shall not at present essay much more than an historical outline, as preliminary to the more particular examination of the class of cases following in the footsteps of that giant judgment. Let it suffice now to say that it was given by but three of the six judges—William Johnson not concurring, and predicting the disastrous consequences that have ensued—Cushing and Chase both absent. After that adjudication, the temple of Janus was closed ; and |161| reposing on the laurels of the conquest of Georgia,—whose hard lot it has been to be so often overrun—the Supreme Court fell back, and contented itself with the exercise of its former accustomed functions of adjudicating questions of simple meum and tuum, for six years of truce. The law abrogated was so like an individual contract for specific grant of real estate, that we believe the country acquiesced in that first of the series of similar judgments ; nor are we to be understood as gainsaying any case exactly like it. The power and duty of the Supreme Court to interdict State laws, impairing the obligation of contracts, or of a clear ex post facto character, as the Constitution of the United States gives such power, and enjoins the duty, are the doctrine of Mr. Madison, and all his school. We do not design here to deny the power, but deal only with what we denounce as its abuse. But readers disposed to read its denial, with great ability and excellent temper, are referred to the Views of honest John Taylor of Caroline—an original, and most able, argument, which denies altogether the right of Congress to give the Federal judiciary revision of either State laws or State adjudications. We will not here question the power ; but cannot concede it, at all, without protesting against the doctrine that the judiciary is the sole and exclusive judge of constitutional difficulties. Since the first exercise of this power, however, the Court themselves have confessed the obvious impropriety of fulminating these anathemas, without, at any rate, the concurring opinions of a larger number of the judicial hierarchy. That, and the next similar case, Fairfax’s, were neither of them judgments of even a majority of the court.

In 1812, a law of New Jersey, taxing land which before the revolution was granted to Indians free of taxation, was unceremoniously repealed by the Supreme Court, without argument at the bar, or reason by the court, further than summarily to rule that this case falls under the principle settled in that of Georgia six years before.

The judgment in the case of Fairfax was pronounced in 1813, in the absence of Chief Justice Marshall and Judge Washington, by Judge Story,—William Johnson dissenting,—rashly, therefore, (whether right or wrong) reversing a decree of the highest court of Virginia, without the presence of the two judges from that State. It resulted, as was to be expected, in an angry controversy between the Court and the State of Virginia ; which brought the case again before the Supreme Court of the United States in 1816, when Judge Story once more, as the organ of the Court, then all present, but Johnson strenuously dissenting—in a peremptory and profuse argument of forty pages—commanded execution.

In 1815, Virginia State laws, repealing colonial laws concerning church glebes, were declared void by a judgment pronounced by Judge Story, as the opinion, he says, of a majority of the court ; who that majority was, does not appear ; but as Johnson and Todd |162| were absent, it is certain that it must have been a bare majority ; at which can there be any wonder, when we find this growing power already applied to annihilate a State law reforming a colonial law concerning church property ! During the same session, in another opinion of the court delivered by Mr. Justice Story, also concerning church lands, disputed by the town of Paulett in Vermont, a State grant of such lands was declared to be irrepealable.

Thus stood the supreme law as made by judgments breaking laws of Georgia, Virginia, New Jersey, and Vermont, and so far it might perhaps be yet tolerated, if the evil had proceeded no further.

But now commences that series of high-handed judicial usurpations, which have ultimately rectified themselves by the very impracticable confusion into which the whole law of the land was thrown by them—leading to results even more to be deplored than in the case of the American naturalization of English prize law, which has been already noticed and condemned.

Next in order, then, comes the famous Dartmouth College case. If we have called the Georgia case a giant judgment, this may be styled a very Cyclops of jurisprudence—monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademtum.

Again we acknowledge that the community once more submitted, though it did not acquiesce, while too many of the profession were delighted with a triumph which gave them the mastery of all the States, and repealed the Revolution. It is the usual bigotry of lawyers, Mr. Hallam ventures to assert in his Constitutional History, to defend every pretension or abuse to which their received standard of authority gives a sanction ; and it is part of our Declaration of Independence, that all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are yet sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

A large part of the community never have, and never will, yield to the authority of that disastrous judgment, which has done so much to embolden mercenary men to unhinge the Constitution whenever a corporate privilege conflicts with sovereign legislation, or post-revolution right attempts to rectify ante-revolution wrong. Argument against it, on its principles, is now rendered unnecessary by the practical demonstration of its immediate results. The kindred cases in the same volume of Wheaton’s Reports, comprising the whole conspiracy of such radical reversals of the Constitution and the Revolution, soon worked out in confusion their own refutation. We need not, therefore, now analyse the English authorities paraded as precedents for the Dartmouth College decision ; but ask of the reader to collate that case with those in which laws of New York and Louisiana, respectively, were vacated by judgments of the same court at the same sessions ; and then to reconcile the whole, if he can, with the consummation of the doctrine in 1827 in Ogden’s case, |163| that crowning result of judicial darkness visible—that total eclipse of the light of law. We defy ancient or modern learning to produce one hundred and fifty pages of more recondite and irreconcilable contradiction, obscuris vera involvens, than the judgment in that case. There is not a judge in America who knows how to rule by it ; not a lawyer who can advise clients to suit it. What is a contract ? Who knows ?—What is an obligation ? Who can tell ?—What laws are ex post facto ? How shall we learn ?—What is right, and what remedy ? Can any one say ?—Let those who doubt turn to the case of Zacharie in the sixth volume of Mr. Peters’ Reports, and there read Chief Justice Marshall’s confession that the minority of the judges, who concurred in the opinion of Mr. Justice Johnson in Ogden’s case, settled the law of the court no longer open for controversy ! After five years of interregnum, without any law at all, the Chief Justice was constrained to explain that the minority of the court, headed by Judge Johnson, who, from 1806 to the last, protested against making contracts of laws, and foretold the consequences—that the minority, thus headed, gives the law of the land ! Is this the law—the supreme law—by which State judges, statesmen, States, and the people are to be convinced and satisfied as well as governed ? Certainly not. The Supreme Court themselves virtually and actually reverse their own judgments ; and it is the duty, as it is fortunately the easy office, of the present court, who are perfectly free, to make and act upon their own interpretation of the Constitution. They have no other alternative. The old court, but not the first, put the judiciary on a construction that would not work, would not go at all. The machine was then tinkered to no purpose. It was obviously out of joint, on the high-pressure principle : and the constructors were obliged to acknowledge it.

This is our present argument against the Dartmouth College case and all its legal affiliations. Impracticable construction was put by them on the Constitution, making every law a contract, before the Revolution or since, public or private, as any judge might choose. It is futile and arbitrary to attempt to save limitation laws, marriages, divorces, salaries, or any other contracts, from this all grasping construction, which leaves all enactment to the discretion of every judge. The same judges who arrogate this despotic discretion, show by their own predicament, in the practical working of their wisdom, that discretion is a most uncertain standard for constructive authority. The United States are now without law as to one of the most important conservative interdicts of their great charter : reduced to this condition by no popular misrule, no executive or legislative misconduct, but by their higher judiciary, in the construction of a plain phrase conferring indispensable power. As the law now stands, State legislation may perpetrate any outrage that party phrenzy or personal corruption shall incite, provided it does not impair |164| the obligation of a contract, while what either contract or obligation means, learned judges, one and all, are unable to inform the people. They have left us in this respect no government—not even their own. Nothing could be worse than their rule, except their own exceptions to it. Applying technical meaning to national compact, with both over-precision and over-latitude—turning politics into law, and all laws into private contracts—such nisi prius manipulation of a constitution inevitably brought on confusion. One of the greatest of the late Chief Justice’s undoubtedly great merits was, that he was not overlearned in the law : nor was it till a young and emulous judge came from the East, laden with law authorities, fresh from Great Britain, that construction ran riot with

Did not Mansfield once say that he would not take the law from Keble or Siderfin ? By authorities, for aught we know, it may be shown that the Dartmouth College Cyclops is not deprived of its only eye by subsequent adjudication. But to plain folks, who regard things more than words, and principles more than precedents, that half-blind monster has been put hors de combat by the very champions who brought him forward. The superfœtation which, it appears by Wheaton’s Reports, was held up in grœmio legis [sic] during a most unnatural gestation, and at last delivered in 1827 by the Cæsarean operation, piecemeal, not only seriatim, but summa ope, with the assistance of a multitude of counsellors, Messieurs Wheaton, Webster, Wirt, Livingston, Clay, Jones, Sampson, and Haines, settled the long agony. Ogden’s case marks an epoch in our constitutional and judicial history. Painfully convinced that their constructive bow had been shot with vigor beyond the law, the Supreme Court, de guerre lasse, made a halt ; and soon afterwards began retreat and atonement.

During the first seventeen years there was but one judicial demolition of State sovereignty. During the second age they were so numerous that every session was signalized by them. During a third epoch a counter current set in—until at last, as we trust, there is an end of all such experiments. For our authority as to the contrariety of sentiment, and the colonial adoption of English authority so deplorably misapplied to American constitutional doctrine, we vouch Judge Baldwin’s late publication, which goes far beyond our power of proof and strength of assertion. This review is less professional, and perhaps more poetical, than his protest : but that abounds with the poetry of strong feeling roused to strenuous exertion by dangerous encroachment ; and its research into American authorities may well vie with the hosts of such as are brought upon us from abroad.

Next session, 1828, Judge Washington, who sided with the conquering |163| minority, led by Judge Johnson, against the Chief Justice’s division, gave the Court’s opinion in Satterlee’s case, devastating all Paterson’s law in the valley of Wyoming ; and determining, not only that retroactive legislation is constitutional, but that it may divest vested rights, and even adjudicate individual controversies with impunity. The reader will find in the second volume of Mr. Peters’ Reports, page 412, the new principles that overthrow their forerunners, detrimental atonement for foregone error. Let all candid men say whether the Supreme Court’s supreme law, is what the forecast of the Constitution anticipated, either as to the thus unbridled license of States to perpetrate retroactive laws, and the impotence of the judiciary to prevent such injustice, on the one hand ; or the palsy of States to enact any laws, no matter what, which, by equally unbridled license of courts, they may arbitrarily resolve into something impairing contracts, on the other hand. State laws are contracts whenever the Federal judiciary say so ; yet State laws, however retrospective, ex post facto, unjust, odious, judicial, individual, and abominable, are beyond constitutional control, because no retroactive State laws are prohibited but only such as merely punish ; States are chartered libertines for mischievous laws, and courts for mischievous construction ; but both States and courts are impotent for any good. To this condition we were never reduced by the Federal Constitution, but by judicial legislation and ambitious construction. Politics are not like law, reducible to consistent certainty ; and the great error of the judiciary has been, in trying to adjudicate what is insusceptible of adjudication. The consequence is confusion. Either of the other departments of Government, or even a popular assembly, is a better forum for political law, than courts of justice. Contracts and ex post facto laws, as contemplated by the Constitution, are obvious enough. But by giving technical meaning to the term contract, no meaning to the term obligation, and false meaning to the term ex post facto, the Supreme Court got into a predicament from which extrication became indispensable.

It began, in 1830, in Lampshire’s case, when Judge Baldwin, Judge Washington’s successor, who knows the meaning of State rights, and knowing dares maintain them, delivered an opinion of the Court, upholding a law of New York, which at any time in the strong reign from 1812 to 1820, would have been cut down remorselessly by simple fiat et ruat. In 1833, Nicholson’s case was determined, unanimously sanctioning a State law confessedly judicial and individual. Finally, in 1834, Judge Story himself affirmed in Mercer’s case, all the confessions of contrition. And at last, in 1835, the Chief Justice gave out the glad tidings, that, the Court not being full, no constitutional cases would be taken up.

Nearly every State of the Union, in turn, had been brought up for sentence, Georgia, New Jersey, Virginia, New Hampshire, Vermont, |166| Louisiana, Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, Massachusetts, South Carolina, (Delaware just escaped over Black-bird creek,) and perhaps others not within our memory, all passed under the Caudine forks of a subjugation which has more than revived the suability of States ; concentrating in its prepotency all the distributed energies of legislative, executive, and judicial government. Beginning with Madison’s case, there are near forty of these political fulminations from 1803 to 1834, viz : one in 1806, 1812, and 1813, each session, two in 1815, one in 1816, four in 1819, three in ’20, two in ’21, two in ’23, two in ’24, one in ’25, four in ’27, five in ’29, three in ’30, two in ’32, two in ’33, and one in ’34 ; a great fabric of judicial architecture stupendous as the pyramids of Egypt, and as inexplicable. The cry of Executive usurpation is shouted to rouse resistance almost to violence against the merely suspensive Veto of one ‘tyrant,’ strictly accountable every four years to a sovereign people, while the absolute veto of seven, no one of whom is, or can be, brought to the judgment of the ballot-box, is fortified with more than Tribunitian sanctity and might.

No such formidable power is known to any representative government as the American republican irresponsible judicial veto ; a power to dismiss laws, as the President may dismiss officers, without question. The taxing power, the currency, and impost, the process power, municipal police, the militia power, commerce and intercourse at home as well as abroad, the purse and the sword, : church and state, all power in fine, is to be concentrated in the judicial focus. Having noticed some, it is hardly necessary to swell this review, with even short references to the whole catalogue of judicial vetoes. Besides those mentioned, there might be added the two in 1817 and in 1824, when the States of Maryland and Ohio, were reduced to mere corporations, subordinate to the corporation of the Bank of the United States ; a third in 1829, when the city of Charleston was forbid by the Supreme Court to tax by ordinance the loans of the United States ; and a fourth, when the city of Baltimore was, in like manner, prohibited from taxing imported merchandise. To the cases on insolvent laws, might be added those of Pennsylvania, abrogated in 1821, and Rhode Island ; to those on police regulation, the law of Virginia against those nuisances, foreign lotteries, unhesitatingly vacated, the present Judge Barbour, then at the bar, protesting for the State, but in vain.

In 1822, the process law of Kentucky was whistled down the wind by one of those unannealed judgments, pronounced without hearing (we will not say without taking) counsel, so doubtful, that Mr. Clay, as amicus curia, and truly such, solicited another hearing. In 1824, Fulton’s privilege for steamboat navigation on the waters of New York was destroyed, as is well known, Judge Johnson alone dissenting. In 1832, the Empire State was compelled, after protest, to |167| appear and answer the complaint of New Jersey, although there is no legislation to regulate this constitutional power. That session, Georgia was once more vexed in a most irritating quarrel with her Indian inmates, the Cherokees—Judges Johnson and Baldwin stoutly dissentient against a minatory opinion, which rather brandished than hurled the veto ; but next session the lightning went with the thunder, striking a sovereign State lifeless, at the feet of a savage tribe adjudged a nation, as several States had been before paralyzed at the footstool of a banking corporation. The two Missouri cases, of 1830 and 1834, are the last we shall notice in this formidable list ; in the first of which, after an earnest protest by a distinguished Senator, the bitter pill of judgment was gilded by saying :

“In the argument we have been admonished, by one side, of the dignity of a sovereign State, of the humiliation of her submitting herself to this tribunal ; of the dangers that may result from inflicting a wound on that dignity ; by the other, of the still superior dignity of the people of the United States, who have spoken their will in terms which we cannot misunderstand. To these admonitions, we can only answer, that this department can only listen to the mandates of law, and tread only in that path which is marked out by duty.”

Yet although three of the judges read the ‘mandate’ differently from the Chief Justice, and trod a ‘path of duty’ different from that he marked out, the judgment in the second Missouri case, is a simple fiat on the bare authority of the first, adjudged by a bare majority of the divided court. Dissension on the bench, ill-will of the States, and discontent of the people, must be the bitter fruits of such administration of the law and justice. American pride is humbled, to compare the solid brevity of English adjudications with the prolixity of inordinate political disquisitions, begetting angry misunderstanding, in our Supreme Court. The Vicar of Wakefield might call many a one of our judicial arguments a treatise on matters and things in general. In the six hundred and fifty pages of the eleventh volume of Mr. Peters’ reports, there are only about twenty cases, mainly owing to political diversities of opinion. In the Dartmouth College volume of Wheaton’s reports, there are some thirty cases, expatiating over seven hundred and fifty pages—of which no less than four hundred pages and more are consumed with political speculations, in three cases. Habits of amplifying conflicting opinions and jurisdiction grow on judges who indulge them. In all the Georgia cases, Yazoo and Cherokee, in the Missouri cases, the bank cases, the militia case, the lottery case, the steamboat case, the police cases and the insolvent cases above all, political disquisition inevitably brought on contradiction, gradually exacerbated to habits of dissension—malum extremum discordia—which like opium-eating, increased till debility, discredit and prostration ensued, when the majority became a minority, and the minority gave the law.

|168| Dissension has done its mischief in a remarkable manner. Judge Johnson disagreed from most of the over-wrought judgments. Judge Baldwin has been also a frequent dissentient. Except Chief Justice Marshall, every other judge on the bench has recorded his disagreement to some of the constitutional doctrines adjudged by the court,—in the Baltimore case, Judge Thompson ; in the Rhode Island insolvent case, Judge Washington ; in the Dartmouth College case, Judge Duvall ; in the Charleston case, Judges Johnson and Thompson ; in the militia case, Judge Story ; and in several of the latter cases, Judge McLean. In the very first case, that of the suability of a State, Iredell dissented. From first to last, politics have produced division of the court, so that not one of the judgments annulling State laws has been clear enough to carry unanimity, without which such judgments should never be made. How can we forbear adding, that even the purity of such administration is brought into question, when lawyers of one political party generally appear as the advocates of high-toned decisions pronounced by the judges of the same party ; thus tarnishing with suspicion of party and personal partiality what ought to be above all suspicion. The stimulating effect of these deplorable judgments, in emboldening the bar continually to question the constitutionality of whatever State laws it may be the interest of clients to dispute, is but too palpable. It has rendered this American peerage, like the British House of Lords, to the manifest detriment of their order—we mean the American bar—unreasonably unpopular.

When the late Chief Justice at his last session, just before his shining light was quenched forever, announced ex cathedra, that no constitutional cases would be taken up, the Court not being full, and Goliath’s sword, thus wrapped up, was put away in the temple, as we trust for a long rust,—it was a melancholy hour for that potent and dignified bench. A change came over the spirit of its dream. The Venerable Deans of the faculty, the old Chief and Judge Duvall, octogenarians, invincibly jocund and boon, might still relish existence ; but junior brothers now opened their cards of invitation, at the opening of the court, with listless indifference ; the crowded sofas were no longer garnished with feather-headed beauty, assembled to listen to eloquent political forensic arguments ; nor was the heavy colonnade of background to the tableau darkened by lawyers, with bowels yearning each in his turn to bring up States to devour. The reporter fears his forthcoming volume must be a mere drug ; its dry bones marrowless, the unsaleable sorry record of only life, liberty, reputation and property protected. After two insupportable hours of dull debate, adjournment becomes as constitutionally necessary for the Court, as a bank, in its judgment, to the Government ; and, on motion of a judge who has now read all his newspapers and written all his letters, it is ordered that court be adjourned—to prepare for dinner. But what attraction has ministerial dinner or Presidential drawing-room |169| for magistrates, undistinguished by recent political exploit ? Instead, of that conscious and elevated dignity, by which a judge fresh from the overthrow of a State, vies with a belle who that morning jilted her suitor too, and towers above the herd of Secretaries, Senators and Members, taking his soup with delightful superiority at dinner, and his ice with a glow at night, the unhappy man, dyspeptic and even taciturn, can eat only of one simple dish of each of the six courses at dinner, and after an indigestible day, weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, sinks at night into a corner of the drawing-room, unobserved, till at last, almost sneaking to his hack, he goes to bed, repining that he has done nothing for immortality.

To do them one and all no more than justice, it was but ambition, that universal throb of the American heart, and life-blood of American enterprise, vitium propius virtuti, which urged the judges to overaction ; and our only object, not detracting from their talents, learning and integrity, is, with becoming deference, to indicate the true and only highway of judicial usefulness and renown. We must, however, charge the whole panel to

We have no wish—far from it—to discredit the professors of a science, which, according to its great English commentators, employs in its theory the noblest faculties of the soul, and exerts in its practice the cardinal virtues of the heart ; nor to mortify even their judicial ambition. There are fifteen thousand of that profession in the United States ; many of them liberal, enlightened and patriotic ; the infusion of whose sentiments into both the enactment and the administration of American laws is so deep and pervading, that he cannot be an American, who does not desire to see the corps chastened by love of the Constitution, and the true principles of the institutions of our common and glorious country. Brought painfully to the conviction that the judicial department has arrogated political authority, not belonging, and extremely injurious, to it, we desire to see this usurpation laid down, only that its legitimate jurisdiction may be more firm, unquestionable and useful. In the session of 1836, when the Supreme Court of the United States had no Chief Justice de jure, (owing to senatorial demur, to which history will do justice,) the senior Associate, Mr. Justice Story, presided, as chief de facto ; and all to be desired is, that he and his brethren may condescend always to discharge their high duties with the same ability, which during that session distinguished the Court, when States and Constitutions were let alone, but ample fields of jurisdiction spread before it, enough

|170|—the admiralty, maritime, commercial, landed, chancery, common law, revenue and other cognizance, which, every session, brings persons, property, life and death, charters, States and foreign suitors without number, to their bar. We ask them, with sincere regard and respect, to ponder this. Whenever a State law unconstitutionally impairing the obligation of a contract, or clearly ex post facto, whether civilly or criminally, comes before them, if right to do so, they should not hesitate in its revocation. But we must deplore and deprecate that false vision which descries the mirage of constitutional mountains in every molehill of legislation, while it regards the most dangerous reefs and rocks of ex post facto laws with indifference and apathy. We call upon them anxiously, not to rend the married calm and unity of States, but unite dispassionately, as a replenished court, by simple and mild restoration, to open a new era for the judiciary, such as all considerate ministers of law, and patriots of every party, should wish to see perpetuated. The cases of the Kentucky bills of credit, the Massachusetts bridge, and the New York passenger vessels—held up for that constitutional vexation, that had become so common and hurtful to the Court, the Constitution, and the country—were disposed of, in 1837, by judgments which at least nine-tenths of the intelligence of the community will approve. Can the recalcitrant judges in all these cases flatter themselves that the country, or even the profession, will uphold gratuitous, querulous and detrimental divergence ? The judgment in the New York case delivered by Mr. Justice Barbour sustains the plainest, the most vital State rights—such as never should be disputed by any judge in the Union, and of which Judge Story’s denial is greatly to be regretted. Such arguments, instead of putting an end to litigation, open its very floodgates. They make the law, which it is the province of judges only to interpret. Of the Kentucky case, we can testify that, just before he expired, the father of the Constitution, Mr. Madison, among his last aspirations for that charter and the much loved nation it created, declared that its framers contemplated, as bills of credit, such as the Court has adjudged, and not such as Judge Story, and, he says, the late Chief Justice, held them to be, from the mere dry language of the Constitution.

Finally—is it not a reproach to justice that the piepoudre litigation of the Charleston bridge affair, should be for several sessions of the Supreme Court the cud chewed for a maw become rabid for such food ? That bastard of the Cyclops judgment, spurious offspring of the Dartmouth College dogmas, still-born, and the last of the race ! The very rudiments of mere municipal law bloated into a constitutional dropsy, to be tapped by learned doctors ! The ferriage of a two-penny bridge, rocked by exaggeration into the passage of another Red Sea ! Like the ten-cent revolution at Faneuil Hall—that ne plus ultra of the ridiculous sublime—this collegiate |171| tempest in a teapot might serve for the lads of the University to moot ; but, surely, was unworthy the solemn adjudication attempted for it. Most fervently do we hope that the youth of that and all other American seminaries of learning may be brought up in the nurture and admonition of that patriotism which inculcates independence—that we are a world by ourselves, disdaining the cloistered and cast-away prejudices of the old one ! Otherwise our courts of justice are

In conversation lately with Mr. Livingston, Lord Durham expressed his amazement at this Ostrogothic halt in our march, falling into the rear of the onward intelligence of Europe, and the spirit of the age, in which we have all the right of seniority. While British good sense, of all parties and professions, is pushing jurisprudence forward, in imitation of ours, there are those among our statesmen and barristers who strain every nerve to carry it back to what they preposterously worship as the ancient shrine. Instead of taking the lead, which belongs to us, they would fall behind and flounder in the mire. Preceptors we might be, but pupils we must be. This lamentable idolatry appears to be a malaria of the sea-board, where every arrival from abroad brings further trammels of colonial servitude. The distinguished advocate of Dartmouth College, a gentleman of superior powers, and Pinkney’s legitimate successor, certainly, by this unworthy surrender of American independence, sacrifices his natural right to that high forensic eminence which his talents claim.

From the auspices of the first session of the renovated Supreme Court, we anticipate better things ; the restoration of the Constitution ; without shocks or reversals, by such quiet, conciliatory and unassailable adjudications as those pronounced in the cases just mentioned. True conservatives, we maintain original and practical authorities, and condemn only such abuses as have sufficiently exposed themselves by their consequences. But may we not without umbrage submit, that reconsideration has become indispensable of that series of judicial enactments by which private contracts, tax laws, church and police regulations, charter and other State rights were engulfed in a whirlpool deeper than ever plummet sounded, from which nothing but a change of pilots could save the vessel ?

We are in the midst of a revolution. To be sure we are—when, since the Declaration of Independence have we not been so ? Executive, legislative, popular and judicial revolution ; progress is the necessary condition of American republicanism ; but bloodless as yet—and like to be—the alter et idem of our peaceable but constant |172| agitation. What American would live out of it, or could live without it ? Our whole system is a great perpetual experiment.

And with much satisfaction do we see the harmonious operation by which the Supreme Court, the President, as dedicated by his first imperishable message, Congress and the States, and the people of the States, are devoted to the great and glorious cause of reducing government and enlarging freedom as much as possible. May the experiment be constantly but fearlessly carried to the uttermost !

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|331| THE LAST CHIEF EXECUTIVE.

We had determined to say nothing of the dead Administration. We had wished that so weak and wicked a career should pass at once and utterly into oblivion, and the nation forget that they had ever made so sad an experiment of being governed by Chance. Forever to bury its memory—this, we felt, would be most desirable to all ; for as very few were found to follow it to the grave, so none, we were persuaded, could wish hereafter to know its ghost.

But an Olympiad of guilt and folly is not so easily forgotten. An entire people betrayed, befooled and insulted, for a period of four years, cannot fail to carry with them a bitter remembrance. It can be none the less bitter and abiding, that a universal and profound contempt has long taken the place of indignation ; since men had far rather be angry with their government, than blush for it. In view, therefore, of this—that the faith, so sacredly and deeply pledged to the strong necessities of the country, was summarily broken, like a rotten staff ; that the great measures of relief for which the People had so sternly struggled, were by him—a leader !—contemptuously snatched from their victorious hands ; that all the cherished principles, by proclaiming which he had alone dared to creep into a position to stumble upon power, were one by one blown away, like words spoken upon the wind ; that rapidly, beyond all precedent, the floodgates of corruption were thrown open—the Curule Chair surrounded by unblushing claimants for offices not yet empty, quick credence given to every tale that could please the ‘Roman’s’ | ear, men thrust from their seats without fault, to make room for others that came without merit, and power and place everywhere bought and sold, openly, as money in the Jewish Temple ;—that his own provident cupidity, meanwhile, grew rich from sales, and contracts, and other public services ; that—worse than this—the ancient dignity of the Commonwealth was constantly and recklessly violated, and the lustre of the national name began to sully, so that no citizen of this Republic could for years, at home or abroad, speak of its Chief Ruler without a feeling of shame ; and—more than all—that he dared to encroach upon the sacred Constitution, and paid his hollow court to a hollow party, only less unprincipled than himself—grasping idly at still larger power, like an infant for added baubles which it has not skill to hold :—in view of these things, and remembering that no keeping of silence can avail to blot them from the Records of History, it seemed well not to appear to other nations and other times insensible, at least, to our disgrace—and with hasty justice, as the public career of this man closed—how differently from its beginning !—we sat down with an indignant pen, and this line from the Great Dramatist before us—

“We are peremptory to destroy this traitorous viper.”

But while our pen yet lingered on the bitter words of our motto, still another mood came over us. We were struck with profound sorrow, that any man |332| should, for any object, so utterly fling away the heritage of a fair fame, and almost every better trait of a once estimable public character. We felt, moreover, a species of apprehension for the future of our country, where such vast means of corruption, such manifold temptations to the corruptible, exist in the appliances of executive patronage ; and where the possession of such appliances in a single hand, may, at any time, lead one—too weak to control himself, or too despotic to forbear the control of others—into grasping at unlimited power. We were filled, too, with the deepest regret, that the Whig party should ever have been the means, however inadvertently, of raising such a man to so responsible and dangerous a post ;—with admiration, also, that in his total abandonment of all faith, and principle, and decent doctrine, he should have found so ready and warm a welcome in the bosom of the Democracy. Towards even the recreant himself, we began to experience a kind of relenting, as for one who had been the peculiar spoiled pet of Circumstances—always tumbling, by some hap-hazard felicitous rap from one or another of them, into some marvellous good fortune, till at last he had fallen upon a position for which he was hopelessly unfit.

With such a blending of feelings, then, do we proceed with a short, unembellished narrative respecting the late Chief Executive. In a simple statement of even a few facts, at such a period, some useful lessons may be learned : certainly we have far other motives than merely to vituperate one who has once been at the head of the nation.

We have no personal animosity to gratify, nor have we a feeling on this subject that is not entertained, to a greater or less degree, by nearly all men of all parties. We do not pray for any interposition of Providence, as a punishment upon the head of an unfaithful servant ; on the contrary, we desire him to have “time and space for repentance ;” and to refresh his memory, and aid him in this pious undertaking, we design to “set his sins in order before him.”

In the month of December, 1839, there was assembled at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a National Whig Convention, composed of delegates from every Congressional District in the Union, to discharge the important duty of selecting candidates for the office of President and Vice President. There had been no merely | political convention for many years, to the proceedings of which the people looked with greater anxiety. They were the representatives of a constituency numbering a large majority of the American people. The dynasties of Jackson and Van Buren had been grievous and oppressive ; the will of the people had been disregarded ; the Constitution and the laws had been wantonly violated ; all classes had suffered, and men of business looked with dismay at the prospects before them. Corruption and peculation had been suffered to grow into a system, until at length a man of reasonably honest character was looked upon with distrust. In this state of things, the people sought for a change both of men and measures ; and this reformation was to be effected by a change in the executive station. The convention was a Whig convention ; its political character was decided ; its objects and aims were of a positive character ; and no man of however mean a capacity could mistake their purposes. For the principles of this party were no secret ; from Maine to Georgia they had been proclaimed on the house-tops ; there was not an orator or a newspaper by whom, or through which their distinctive doctrines had not been again and again promulgated. Many of the prominent leaders of the Whig party were in attendance as delegates at that convention ; many who had grown gray in the public service, and whose commanding abilities and high standing had pointed them out as fit representatives of a great party. Amongst these delegates, and by no means the least vociferous for Whig measures, was John Tyler, of Virginia.

It was here that this gentleman was first brought within the distinct purview of the American people, by the accident of his nomination for Vice-President of this Convention. Prior to that time, it was known to the more intelligent that he had been, at different times, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates and of Congress, Governor of the State, and Senator of the United States. The peculiar circumstances under which the more important of these stations had been conferred on him, and which had won for him a popular notoriety in Virginia as the luckiest of living men, were but imperfectly understood beyond the limits of that State. Many steadfast opponents of Jacksonism,—not remembering that he had been elected to the U. S. Senate by a combination |333| of all the anti-Jackson force in the Virginia Legislature, with a small portion of the Jackson party, thus securing him a small majority over John Randolph, who then labored under a suspicion of insanity, and a conviction of utter unfitness for the Senatorial dignity—had a grateful recollection of his votes against some of the most exceptionable of Jackson’s nominations, and his sturdy resistance, at a late period, to the removal of the deposites. From this time (1834) Mr. Tyler had been generally regarded as a Whig, though indulging vagaries, pardonable only in a Virginian of the ‘State Rights’ School. It was not known, out of the State, that he, then a Member of the State Legislature, had incurred the just displeasure and forfeited the confidence of the Whigs of Virginia, by consenting to be proposed and supported by their opponents, aided by a few nominal whig Abstractionists, known as ‘the Impracticables,’ against William C. Rives, the candidate for reelection of nearly the entire Whig force in the Legislature, and who must have been elected but for the conduct of the half dozen ‘Impracticables’ before mentioned.

But Mr. Tyler appeared in the Harrisburg convention an uncompromising Whig, and an ardent supporter of Mr. Clay as the Whig candidate for President. We are assured, indeed, that it was for this reason he was appointed a delegate by his constituents. The majority of the convention, after some three days deliberation, decided to place General Harrison in nomination. This was a sore decision for the supporters of Mr. Clay, numbering nearly half the convention, comprising a very great preponderance of its most able and eminent^*|333| members, and undoubtedly backed by the feelings and wishes—apart from considerations of prudence and policy—of nine-tenths of the entire majority. Nearly the whole public expected the nomination of Mr. Clay by that body. His eminent services in public life for more than a quarter of a century, his commanding abilities, his liberal and manly views on all the great questions of the day, and the warm attachment felt for him personally in every part of the land, all conduced to render him acceptable as a candidate for the Presidency. But we | do not censure the convention for selecting another in his place ; its action was the result of careful and grave deliberation, and an earnestness of purpose moving straight onward to one great object—the relief of the country.

Among those, however, most deeply aggrieved by the preference of General Harrison, was John Tyler, who, by virtue of his being an Ex-Governor, was one of the Vice Presidents for the occasion. The convention adjourned for the night (Thursday) immediately upon the annunciation that General Harrison had been nominated for President. It is understood that Mr. Tyler passed a good part of the ensuing night, in weeping over the decision just made, and in counselling with others of like faith, in the hope of discovering some means by which it might be set aside and Mr Clay still nominated. The project was at length found hopeless, and abandoned.

The selection of a candidate for Vice President to be placed on the same ticket with General Harrison was now an object of deep solicitude. The friends of General Harrison apprehending disaffection, to some extent, among the friends of the great statesman, whose claims to the highest place had been deferred, in obedience to a supposed necessity, insisted that the nomination to the second post should be tendered to and accepted by a known and ardent Clay man. To this end, the Kentucky delegation were asked to permit the nomination of their distinguished compatriot, John J. Crittenden. They declined, having no time to communicate with Mr. Crittenden, and feeling unauthorized to pledge his assent. The North Carolina delegation were then urged to present a fellow citizen for the Vice Presidency, and, on their declining, the names of Governor Dudley and Ex-Goveror Owen of their State were successively suggested to them, but to no purpose. Benjamin Watkins Leigh, a name which recalls the noblest days and the noblest men of Virginia, was likewise pressed to accept the nomination, (being present,) but peremptorily declined it. Last of all, John Tyler was proposed, and, on inquiry, it appeared that no consideration of delicacy, growing out of his position as a delegate to the Convention, and a Vice President of that body, would |334| bar his acceptance. The proposition was rapidly concurred in, those who had suggested other names withdrew them, and John Tyler was unanimously nominated as the Vice President of the United States.

These facts are here stated to refute the utterly baseless, but incessantly reiterated falsehood, that Mr. Tyler was selected as the candidate because of his notorious hostility to a United States Bank. There exists no shadow of foundation for it. True, there was no nomination of Vice President prior to that of Mr. T.—there was no formal tender of the nomination to any other person. Time was precious and events pressing on that fatal morning, when the delegates were required to select a candidate for the second office, to which hardly a thought had been given during the intensely excited canvass of the preceding three days. But had there been grounds for anticipating an acceptance from either of the other Statesmen already named, or John Bell, of Tennessee, who was also suggested, but abandoned because (in the absence of a Tennessee delegation) no one could say that he would not decline the honor, Mr. John Tyler and his anti-Bank notions, if he then entertained any, would never have been put in requisition. None of the statesmen suggested before him was known as an adversary, some of them were prominent advocates, of a Bank. But in truth their opinions on this point were not at all canvassed or considered material. Had the selection of an anti-Bank candidate for Vice President been deemed essential, he would hardly have been looked for in a devoted supporter of Mr. Clay for the Presidency.

General Harrison and Mr. Tyler were chosen President and Vice President by an overwhelming majority. General Harrison died, thirty days after his inauguration, and Mr. Tyler succeeded to the Presidency. He thereupon issued an Address to the People, which was plainly and generally understood to indicate his resolution to unite in such measures with regard to the currency, as the new Whig Congress (which General Harrison had called to meet in extra session, at an early day,) should deem advisable. A variety of circumstances concur to evince that such was at that time his intention.

But the tenor of his Message, on the assembling of Congress, gave indications of a change—or rather of a disposition to hold himself in reserve on this subject, and watch the chances which might turn | up in the course of the inevitable struggle. He spoke of the Sub-Treasury and an old-fashioned Bank, as having been alike condemned by the public voice, and indicated the expediency of adopting some third or intermediate plan, which was very vaguely ‘shadowed forth.’ Plain men were puzzled to divine what was meant by this. Obviously, there were just two principles on which the fiscal affairs of the nation could be conducted—the one, that of the Sub-Treasury, making the Government its own banker, exclusively ; the other, that preferred by ninety-nine in every hundred business men, who seek out the best bank within a convenient distance, collect through it, deposit with it, and buy from it. Other modes than these two we do not know ; and it would puzzle the subtlety of an Abstractionist to devise another. To any but an Abstractionist it must appear evident that a bank of a large capital, chartered by the general government, but managed by the leading business men of the several States, with offices in each, and issuing a currency every where equal to specie, would be far safer, more convenient, more useful as a depository and fiscal agent of that government, than could any number or aggregation of State Banks, limited in their capital and sphere of operations, issuing notes which they would not even receive uniformly of each other, nor of the government, and not amenable to the laws and the supervision of the government, but subject to the capricious legislation and policy of their several States. It was not surprising, therefore, that a decided majority of the new Congress, considering themselves instructed and deputed by the people to take efficient action on the subject of the currency, not merely to repeal the Sub-Treasury act, but to provide a practical substitute, believed that they could in no way so readily and thoroughly effect this important end as by chartering, under some form, a new United States Bank.

But it was not because he differed with the mass of the Whigs on this subject, that Mr. Tyler found it expedient to abandon the party which elected him, and take refuge in the open arms of their deadly antagonists. The Bank rupture was not the cause but the consequence of that change—a plainly foregone conclusion. Had he desired to retain the confidence and fellowship of the party to which he owed his election—had he not been tempted by flatterers and time-servers |335| to indulge a longing for that reelection, which the principles and the affections of the Whigs alike sternly forbade—there would have been no trouble with regard to a Bank. He would have called around him the leading Whigs in Congress, frankly stated to them his difficulty and his anxiety to have it obviated, and a few hours would have served to devise some compromise on which all could have united. But the case was far otherwise. Congress passed one Bank | bill, moulded on its own convictions of the wants of the country, and the duty of the government. Mr. Tyler vetoed it. Having now, as was fairly presumed, a distinct statement, in the Veto Message of the President’s ground of objections Congress passed another Bank bill, expressly framed to obviate those objections, and this was in like manner vetoed, although it had been submitted beforehand to Mr. Tyler and amended at his own suggestion,^*|335| so as (it was sup-posed) |336| to ensure his assent. There was a most anxious desire on the part of the Whigs in Congress, to conform to his views and feelings so far as it was possible to ascertain them. It only failed to do this because nothing less than a second veto would forward Mr. Tyler’s design of carrying over a portion of the Whig party to its adversaries, winning the fervent gratitude of those adversaries for his persistent and successful resistance to that great object of their hatred, a National Bank, and thus placing himself at the head of a new combination which would be constrained to support him for re-election^*|336| as, for once, (to use a phrase of the Madisonian,) ‘President in his own right.’

This project was successful in its first stages, as treachery mainly is ; it failed utterly to secure the coveted reward, in its consummation, as treachery always does. Those who at first were loudest in laudation of the ultra Roman virtue and disinterested patriotism of the Executive, were in due time found among the most fluent and the coarsest in their reproaches of the traitorous simpleton who had idly imagined that he could gain the confidence of his adversaries by an infamous betrayal of his supporters. So long as they were only required to give empty compliments in return for substantial service|—so long as they were asked but to cavil and to toast the Whig elevé who was vetoing Whig measures and proscribing those who had aided his elevation, to give their places to those who had opposed it to the utmost—the price of treachery was paid without stint or scruple. But when the time at length came for the substantial requital of his perfidy—when Mr. Tyler made his appeal to his new allies for their voices and their votes in aid of his re-election, a universal shout of derision gave their only answer. Here and there a solitary office-holder or office-seeker, was found to set up a faint and hypocritical cry for ‘justice to John Tyler’ ! How utterly hollow, forced and awkward ! Two Tyler Democrats, engaged in manufacturing public sympathy or party support for the National Calamity, if by any chance they had been brought to look each other full in the face, must have yielded to a more imperative necessity for laughter than ever constrained two Roman augurs.

At last, when the time came for testing the sincerity of words by deeds, even the empty vanity of lip-service was refused, or very grudgingly given. Mr. Tyler’s office-holders and Treasury-fed presses kept up a fussy show of activity and zeal in his cause, which had no other effect than that of proving his utter destitution of the confidence or good will |337| of any part of the American people. History has no parallel for the pungency of this man’s rebuke, for the depth of his humiliation. A President in secure and undisputed possession of the patronage and power of the Government, holding and exercising the power to dismiss at pleasure, some twenty or thirty thousand functionaries distributed through every township of the Union, who had abandoned the party which elevated him, and | thrown himself and all he had into the arms of its deadly antagonist, because the former would not and the latter did^*|337| flatter him with hopes and promises of a reelection, was unable to obtain a single vote, for a nomination even, in the National Convention of that party for whose deceitful smiles he had sacrified [sic] truth, fidelity, character, the hope of honorable renown—in short, all that a good man holds dear, and a bad man cannot affect to |338| despise. He had ‘filed his mind’ to make everything else subservient to this consuming passion for a second term, and his Postmasters, Revenue Officers, Land Officers, and every species of Executive pensioners, had strained or seemed to strain every nerve to secure ‘Justice to John Tyler !’ Many of the States had chosen their delegates by Congress Districts, so as to afford the most liberal opportunity for the play of intrigue and the force of accident. One must have anticipated that amid the fierce, though subdued, struggles of the friends of Van Buren, Calhoun, Cass, Buchanan, at least one Tyler delegate might have been slipped in, by playing off one strong faction against another, and so securing the vote to a man so weak as to be feared by neither, as a sort of compromise or drawn battle. Aaron Burr, in his most obnoxious days, with Mr. Tyler’s position and patronage, would have secured a fair show of strength in a Democratic Nominating Convention. But the convention met ; the satellites of the Executive also held a convention at the same time and place ! They would exert a happy influence by their presence ! They would designate by their prompt unanimity the man best calculated to heal the fierce discord which reigned in the camp of the Democracy. All labor lost ! The real convention quarreled and struggled for days, unhorsed the old party leaders, and considered the claims of many aspirants to the succession, but never gave a thought to those of John Tyler. Many persons were proposed for President, many voted for, but John Tyler was never among them. From first to last, in calm or in storm, in days when all was hopeless anarchy, and in hours of relative harmony, nobody condescended to throw away a vote on John Tyler. And when the nomination was made, though the name of the candidate was a revelation to most of those who finally supported him, and many were at first disposed to rebel against a choice so strange and unexpected, none of them contemplated the desperate alternative of supporting John Tyler. Yes : after a brief interval had been allowed for the expression of public sentiment, the unwelcome, but indisputable truth overcame even the stubborn infatuation of this man himself. He found that he had no strength, no popularity, no party, not even a faction. Beyond his own office-holding dependents, nobody | talked of supporting him, and these did not mean it. They were even now speculating on the relative chances of the two real candidates, and taking their positions respectively according to their predictions of the result. They alone labored under the necessity of preserving a show of regard for him, and they alone did it. Through the long agony of the succeeding desperate struggle, every man who possessed any power, moral or intellectual, of influencing the opinions or the conduct of men, was eagerly pressed into the arena—was called out by letters, his views solicited, his sayings repeated, his judgment relied on—but who asked, who thought, of the opinions of Mr. Tyler ? And when the struggle was over, and the election of Polk proclaimed, there were cheers and congratulations for all the leaders and champions of the victorious host—there was an almost universal and profoundly sincere sympathy for the great statesman, who, by calumny and fraud, by concealment and evasion, by falsehood and misrepresentation, had been overborne in the vehement contest. Thousands of determined adversaries, now that the struggle was over, bore a cheerful and hearty testimony to his loftiness of character, unequaled practical ability, and chivalrous magnanimity of soul. But who congratulated, who condoled with, President Tyler ? Who but his valiant trencher-men wished that the fortune of the victor, or the honor of the vanquished, had been his ? Who cared whether he grieved or rejoiced at the issue ?

The closing scene of his miserable public life—the gradual wasting away of the ravenous crowd which so recently besieged the portals of the Executive Mansion—the shameless transfer of their sycophancy to the prospective dispenser of Treasury manna—the solitude (save when entertainment was provided) of those dreary hours of waning, vanishing greatness—why should we attempt to portray ? Personally, Mr. Tyler has passed into a fitting obscurity, which his friends must hope may be disturbed by no future accident. Be reflection and penitence the companions of his future years.

The moral of this strange, instructive history is one which cannot be too early or too deeply impressed on the understandings and hearts of our aspiring, eager youth. From the grave of Mr. Tyler’s reputation there rises a warning |339| voice, which says to every attentive soul, “Be True !” Falsehood, unfaithfulness, dissimulation, treachery—these may seem to prosper for the moment, but the eternal laws of the Universe are against them and must prevail. A brief hour of hollow and tottering triumph is all that the most brilliant and perfect success in ill-doing can hope for.

Had Mr. Tyler been a true man, he could not have overruled and defeated the action of Congress on nearly every important measure, except on the most imperative and powerful convictions of duty. He must have realized that the representatives of the People, (not by accident, but by deliberate selection,) elected either simultaneously or subsequently to the choice of President and Vice President, were far more likely to understand the wants and requirements of the country than he alone could be. He must have felt that the unprecedented manner of his unexpected elevation to the Presidency, instead of the man designated for that post by the People, and who stood publicly pledged^*|339| to unite in perfecting such measures, with regard to the currency, as the wisdom of Congress should devise, furnished a strong additional reason for his forbearing the exercise of the extreme power of the Veto. He must have been tortured by the thought that the act which he meditated was certain to send a pang of disappointment and chagrin to nearly every heart that had beat with joy at the tidings of his election, and be hailed with shouts of exultation and delight by every relentless adversary of that cause which had so honored him, and to which he had professed devotion. He must have known that wherever his Vetoes should reach a rude opening in the wilderness, a saw-mill, or a shingle shanty, the ready instinct of every Whig, however unversed in public affairs or the verbal plausibilities whereby infidelity to lofty trusts may be varnished, would proclaim him a designing traitor. Must not an upright man have shrunk from the confusion of his friends, and the exultation of his adversaries, thus foreshadowed, as more to be dreaded than death ? Must he not have sought, if need were, in the resignation of his accidental position an escape from an alternative so full of horror ?

But admit that the Veto of the first Bank bill was impelled by Mr. Tyler’s cherished convictions—admit that he knew | not what he did, when, in the terror excited by the first appalling burst of popular indignation, he urged the preparation and dictated the provisions of a Bank bill which he would assent to—(and this is to stretch charity beyond the bounds of possibility)—admit that the second Bank Veto may in some way be justified—who can attempt to justify his Veto of that most important and patiently elaborated measure, the first Tariff bill of 1842, because it provided for the continuance of the Land distribution to the States ? That Land distribution had formed one of the great practical tests of party affinity for the preceding ten years. The Distribution was originated, and ably, untiringly advocated by Mr. Clay, whom Mr. Tyler had professed so zealously to support in 1839 ; it had been advocated by Mr. Tyler himself, in a Report to the Virginia Legislature ; in his letter (1840) to Mr. Robinson, jun., of Pittsburg, Pa., and at other times. The Whig party and he were alike committed to that measure ; and his letter to Mr. Robinson, rebutting a charge preferred against him of Anti-Tariffism, plainly set forth the entire Whig doctrine on the subject, viz : sufficient Revenue to be raised by means of a Tariff exclusively, and the Land proceeds to be fairly and permanently divided among the States of the Union. And yet this same John Tyler vetoed the great beneficent measure of the Whig Congress, solely on the ground of its providing for this distribution ! and Congress was compelled to surrender it, or leave the Government without the means of subsistence. This was the second time that this benign measure of harmony and peace with regard to the Public Lands has been crushed beneath the weight of a Presidential Veto, purely because its author was Henry Clay.

But let us imagine that some mind can be found so peculiarly constructed as to find no difficulty in reconciling with integrity and good faith the whole series of Mr. Tyler’s Vetoes—to discover some principle on which he may be justified in accepting a nomination as a Whig, and yet using the power thence resulting to thwart and defeat the Whigs on every important measure on which they had appealed to the country—how shall he, how can he, justify Mr. Tyler’s sweeping removal from office of Whigs to make room for their inveterate opponents ? The |340| Whigs had been rigidly excluded from office during the twelve preceding years ; they had labored faithfully with and for Mr. Tyler in the great contest of 1840 ; they had been appointed to office in part by General Harrison, the remainder by himself. But Mr. Tyler sees fit to differ from the Whig majority of Congress on a most vital administrative measure—crimination and alienation ensue—and he proceeds to remove from office nearly all those who had supported, and put in their places men who had vehemently opposed him, some of whom were the very men he had previously supplanted. Was not here a palpable confession on his part, not merely of treachery, but of conscious treachery !

The character of Mr. Tyler may be read by every one in his actions ; but the following summary, by one of the most able and eloquent political writers of the day, is so pointedly, so tersely, and withal so justly written, we present it as the most fit conclusion of all we could wish to say. We quote from the “Defence of the Whigs, by a Member of the twenty-seventh Congress.”

“His few partisans in the nation are clamorous in demanding justice to John Tyler. Justice, assuredly, he will obtain from the pen of History.

“It will represent him as a President accidentally brought into power, who, while the sudden honors of his station were yet new, manifested a heart full of gratitude to his friends and replete with good resolutions to serve the great public interests which had combined to place him where he was. It will describe him as vainglorious, weak and accessible to any extravagance of flattery ; of a jealousy quickly provoked by the ascendency of superior minds, and nervously sensitive against the suspicion of being under their influence. That, from the fear of such an imputation, he had thrown himself into evil associations, and surrounded himself with private and irresponsible counsellors, who, neither by station nor capacity, were entitled to give him advice, and who fatally drove him into an open rupture with those whom it should have been his pride to call his friends.

“Variable and infirm of purpose, he will be exhibited as ever halting between opposite opinions. Anxious to impress the world with a reputation for inflexibility, he will be shown to be, in fact, without a judgment of his own, and resolute | only in avoiding that obvious road which, with least embarrassment to himself and least difficulty in the selection, it was his plainest duty to pursue. It will be truly said of him, that it cost him more trouble to find the wrong way, than ordinarily perplexes other men to discern the right. That, in seeking excuses to differ from his friends and gratify his enemies, he was perpetually shifting from one awkward and difficult device to another, without the least attention even to the appearance of consistency, until he succeeded, at length, in alienating from his society every man whose support he should have desired ; at the same time imbittering the separation with an unhappy distrust of his fidelity to those principles to which he was bound by plighted honor. That, while he was ever changing his ground, conceding, retracting, affirming, denying, his concessions were made without sincerity, his retractions without excuse, and his conduct in all distinguished for its want of dignity. That, with a fair, though moderate reputation for capacity, before he came to the Presidency, he lost this in the first few months of his service ; disappointed the hopes of his friends ; raised his enemies from the despondency of recent defeat into the highest tone of exultation, and diffused through all ranks of the community an opinion of his want of fitness for the high station to which he had been called. That, emphatically the accident of an accident, without popularity, without a mind to conceive or a heart to execute great undertakings, he had chosen a position of intense responsibility and universal observation, and committed himself to a hazard which even the wisest and boldest might contemplate with apprehension.”

“We may say of this President what Milton has said of another unhappy ruler, whose melancholy fate furnishes the most awful example on record of the danger in a Chief Magistrate violating his promises to the people,—“that for the most part, he followed the worser counsels, and, almost always, of the worser men.”

Enough. This is a melancholy chapter of history ; but it teaches one great lesson, which had better be learned thus early in our national existence—never again to set up for exalted political station any other than thoroughly upright men, whose integrity has stood the test of time and temptation.

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|211| THE LATE ACTING PRESIDENT.

We must be indulged in the harmless anachronism which thus anticipates, by a few days, the period when this agreeable form of expression may be employed, with a more strict accuracy than at the moment at which it is now written. For even though the hour has not yet quite arrived, which is to be brightened by the reflection that Tylerism has ceased to exist, in any other than the past tense, yet, by the time this page shall reach the eyes of most of its readers, they will have ceased to blush for the government of their country.

“It will take the country a long time before the morals of our politics can recover from the bad influence which has been exerted over them by the regime of Tylerism”—was the recent remark of a very eminent statesman, occupying a position entirely aloof from it and disinterested in regard to it ; and who neither in his own person nor that of any friend had been injured or assailed by it, but who had rather been, on the contrary, an object of its good-will and flattering attentions. And the remark was true—so true that we scarcely know when and how to expect the curative influence or recuperative power which shall wholly undo the mischief, wholly atone for the disgrace, so deeply and broadly wrought by the events of the last four years.

Of late, indeed, toward the conclusion of Mr. Tyler’s term, certain events have concurred to produce the effect of | raising a little faint show of factitious popularity—not his own but another’s—which attaches not to his general administration, but partly to his office-dispensing patronage, and partly to a particular measure—and which prevents the full manifestation of that common contempt, which both Whig and Democratic parties vie with each other in entertaining, for that nondescript tertium quid which he and an insignificant band of mercenary adherents have constituted, as a hybrid novelty unimagined before in our political experience. The strong arm of the great Statesman of the South so far upholds him, as to let him down with a decent show of dignity, in his descent from the high place to which accident alone ever raised him ; and the blaze of a “Lone Star” streaming up over our south-western horizon, alone sheds a certain degree of feebly reflected light on his retiring person, to redeem it from the entire darkness in which it would otherwise have gone down.

Men rarely love a treason so well, as to forget to despise the traitor. Nor indeed is it by any means clear, that in his defection from the Whigs, who had placed him in the position which gave him his power to harm, Mr. Tyler is entitled even to the usual good treatment which the policy of war accords to deserters. To desert voluntarily is one thing ; to be fairly scourged out of the ranks and out of camp, and then driven over to the enemy as the only place of |212| refuge, is another, and a very different thing. And when the person thus expelled was himself already a deserter in the enemy’s camp, from the side to which he is thus again ignominiously driven back—when his prolonged continuance there up to the time of that expulsion, has involved in itself the grossest treachery to the side from whom he again supplicates a refuge—it cannot be pretended that any very strong case is made out for a very cordial welcome. This is no overcharged picture for Mr. Tyler’s position.

In the year 1840, what Whig out-Whigged the renegade “Virginia Republican ?” Nay, not only was he a Whig of the intensest sort, but he was peculiarly, and par excellence, a Henry Clay Whig. To be a Harrison Whig, or a Scott Whig, at that time, meant comparatively little or nothing ; to be a Clay Whig was full of the deepest and strongest meaning. There was no non-committalism about the bold Kentuckian. His name, his name alone, constituted as distinct an announcement of a system of political doctrine—and political doctrine of the worst sort—as could have been conveyed in any form of creed or catechism. And in the Convention of 1840, Mr. Tyler was so furiously a friend to the selection of Mr. Clay, to be the Presidential candidate and national representative of the Whig Party, that, as has been subsequently proved, it was to the bitterness of his lamentations for Clay’s failure of nomination that he partly owed his own selection for the Vice-Presidency.

We should not have made this fact alone, “per se,” the foundation of the charge against Mr. Tyler of having been a “renegade Virginia Republican,” if he had not, by the palpable corruption of his subsequent course, reflected back upon his position at that time the clearest of lights by which to read his character and conduct. In his zealous Clayism of that day, there was no honesty of conversion, from what he had of old professed. He was sinning against great light, and he knew it. He has subsequently, when ambitious interest prompted a different course, thrown himself back again, with an ardor of Republicanism re-invigorated by its long intermission of repose, upon the old principles, and the old party, which he was then betraying. With no disposition to withhold from Mr. Tyler a | charitable judgment even, nevertheless the undisguised and unblushing excess of the political corruption which has rioted through his administration—now, happily, exhaling its very last breath—has been such as to compel justice, in the interpretation of former equivocal conduct, to accept in all cases the worst construction as the more probable truth.

The history of Mr. Tyler’s administration may be briefly summed up. Becoming Acting President by accident, his polar star was a second term. With this view he first, in conjunction with Webster, aimed at an amalgamation of parties, until it became evident that neither Whigs nor Democrats would have anything to do with such a scheme. The former fairly scourged him forth from any place among them ; while the latter as sternly and contemptuously denied him admittance even within the outermost verge of their gates. Then, and not till then, did Mr. Tyler adopt, as the next tack of his policy, the effort to force or buy his way into the Democratic party, by patronage and Texas,—discarding Webster, and all things Websterian, excepting faithlessness and recklessness ; and hoping to throw us into such confusion as to create at least a probability, if not necessity, of rallying upon him for reëlection, as the only means of averting the worse evil of the election of Clay. Hence his convention at the same place and day with that of the Democratic party. To this hope he clung long and desperately, till the ridicule of his position became intolerable, even to the proverbial fatuity of himself and his family ; and then, months after the nomination of Mr. Polk, he at last withdraws, only after an absurdly transparent attempt to make, by implied understanding with some of our party, the best terms of capitulation in his power for his office-holders. This is the naked outline of Mr. Tyler’s administration.

Does any reader doubt its truth ? Let it be remembered—the almost suppliant tenacity with which Mr. Tyler during his first year clung to the Whig party. At that time, be it borne in mind, the Whigs were fresh from the late contest, which had placed them in the attitude of an overwhelming ascendency ; while the Democrats were apparently a broken-down party, not only comparatively feeble in force, but containing within themselves many elements of |213| confusion and disorganization. In concert with Mr. Webster, the bitterest enemy Mr. Clay has ever had, Mr. Tyler’s game then was, clearly, to shake off Clay, retain the great bulk of the masses whose rush had borne Harrison and himself into power, trusting afterwards gradually so far to disintegrate the Republican party, as to bring in at least a considerable proportion of them around his administration. Hence, although he vetoed Mr. Clay’s Bank Bill, he offered at the same time a much worse one, and actually clung to the profession and name of a Whig, pleading with them imploringly in one of his Messages on the ground of the number of other Whig bills he had signed, until all hope of success vanished, and Clay’s controlling ascendency in the party succeeded in flinging him forcibly and scornfully off into a portion in which it became acknowledged treason for any Whig to maintain any sort of party communion with him.

Let it be remembered—the manner in which he then proceeded to address himself to his next aim, that of courting the Democratic party. Then was witnessed a spectacle of the corrupt abuse of the patronage power of the Executive, unprecedented, unimagined before. One of Mr. Tyler’s first acts after his entrance into power had been to promulgate a special declaration against the interference of the Federal office-holders in politics. On former occasions, also, Mr. Tyler had in a peculiar manner identified himself with this principle. And yet, as soon as he began the working of this policy, that of worming his way into a position in the Democratic party by means of his offices, systematically and universally throughout the country, they were held up as the bribes for adhesion to him and his interest, and activity in his cause. Every man then in the Democratic party occupying any sort of position capable of being represented as one of influence, had office at his disposal for the mere acceptance of it. Democratic Representatives in Congress had almost unlimited command over the Federal patronage of their districts. Anything to prove himself a Democrat—to get admission as such—recognition as such. In all directions were to be seen Whigs removed from office who had scarcely had time to get adjusted in the seats to which they had been appointed either | by General Harrison or by Mr. Tyler himself—Whigs of unimpeached personal worth and capability—for no other even pretended reason than to confer their offices on Democrats. It was a positive public scandal—undisguised, undissembled. We need not dwell on details—a single prominent fact will suffice to illustrate it. The whole system adopted is typified in Mr. Tyler’s Baltimore Convention, of which body nearly all were already his office holders when they went there, while all the rest, with scarcely an exception, have been made so since !

The direct application of the vast machinery of the Federal patronage to the object of buying a deserter’s way into some kind of welcome or reception by a party on which he seeks to fasten himself, presented a novelty in our politics. It certainly wrought a vast amount of mischief. It scattered broadcast through the land, seeds of demoralization, which could scarcely fail, almost everywhere, to find at least a little soil adapted to their too-ready germination. Everywhere a certain number of persons were to be found, urged perhaps by their necessities, or little disposed to be scrupulous in such matters, whom a little judicious dangling of these baits before their eyes could scarcely fail to attract, with an eagerness little disposed to quarrel with the hand from which they were to drop. Unprincipled men were also at many places to be found, who had little difficulty in palming themselves off upon the facile and foolish confidence of Mr. Tyler and his family as their special friends, and as persons of astonishing zeal, activity, and local importance, in whose hands the local management of their interests might safely be reposed. In general able to get only the lowest and worst to fraternize with them in their loud-mouthed partizanship of Mr. Tyler, this class of persons, at many points,, and especially in the cities, succeeded in getting together miserable little knots of persons, rarely more than sufficient to fill the bar-room of some mean haunt which constituted their head-quarters, and these, in connection with the higher incumbents of the lucrative offices, constituted the “party” worthy of their creation and creator, the Tyler Party. With the aid of a few newspapers, supported by the public patronage and by a heavy system of |214| assessed taxation upon the holders of office, these little pot-house knots of “the friends of John Tyler,” were constantly astonishing the country with “mass meetings,” and “great popular demonstrations,” of which it is needless to say that they rarely in numbers much exceeded that of the officers reported to have presided over them. To what extent this system of humbug the most impudent, succeeded in imposing upon Mr. Tyler, so as to make him actually believe in the existence and growth of a great popular sentiment in his behalf, we have no means of knowing. It is, at any rate, very certain, that even if deceived in regard to the imaginary popular sentiment in his favor, manufactured by these persons, he could not have been ignorant of the great fact which constitutes alike the chief characteristic and the worst evil and disgrace of his administration, that it was mainly, if not wholly, by the active plying of the power of his patronage, that the organization of his friends as a “party” was constituted, and sustained to the point of real or fictitious zeal. And this is the leading feature of his term, the employment of office and every manner of patronage to create a party, and keep it up to the due point of stimulus. We fear that a deeper mischief has been thus wrought to the political morality of the country, than would have attended the signing of fifty charters of banks or banking exchequers.

These people have in general been exceedingly clamorous in behalf of “Polk and Dallas,” since Mr. Tyler’s withdrawal—an event which did not take place till nearly three months after the nomination of the Democratic candidate. We believe they even so far surpass themselves in all those attributes which are the opposites of modesty and veracity, as to claim a large share, if not the whole, of the glory of the Democratic victory. In truth we have from the commencement felt satisfied | that they did more harm than good. Their numbers were utterly insignificant. In point of moral force, they added only a weakness and a weight hard and heavy to be borne. It was felt that they were introducing into the Democratic party, and into a position of self-assumed clamorous prominence, frothing on the surface, a class of persons felt generally to be equally unworthy of personal respect or of political confidence. While it cannot but be a matter of regret, that the country has lost the moral benefit of witnessing that just retribution of rebuke which awaited this weakest and worst of our Presidents, in the utterly insignificant number of popular votes it had the slightest chance of obtaining.

――

We by no means design to include the whole body of Mr. Tyler’s office-holders within the application of the above remarks. A considerable number of gentlemen of the highest political and personal merit, are indeed to be found among them—either selected through the agency of friends,—or by happy chance—or by way of good leaven to leaven the lump, as respectable endorsers to the bankrupt worthlessness of so many of the rest. Still less, of course, will any portion of them be received as applicable to Mr. Tyler’s Cabinet—the members of which have had little—most of them nothing—to do with the meaner matters of party-making management. Mr. Calhoun’s position in it, in particular, is known to all to have been one far aloof from and above anything and everything of this kind. He accepted the State department at the call of the country for a specific object of the highest public importance, with personal reluctance, entire independence of control, and full understanding of his purpose of retiring as soon as he should have completed the Texas and Oregon negotiations.

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POLITICAL PORTRAITS WITH PEN AND PENCIL.
No. XXXIV.
JOHN TYLER.

(With a fine Engraving on Steel.)

The invaluable practical services recently rendered by Mr. Tyler to the cause of those principles which have always been advocated by this Review, and sustained by its political friends, have attached to his position an interest which necessarily extends in no slight degree to his person also. There are probably very few among our readers, who have any idea of the countenance and appearance of a man, who not only fills the most exalted official station in their country, but whose name, for the past year and a half, from the direction of events, has been doubtless more frequently on their lips than that of any other individual. The portraits of Mr. Tyler which have gone abroad into a very limited circulation, are in general the veriest daubs of caricature. A remarkably fine daguerreotype likeness having fallen in our way, we have therefore deemed that an acceptable service would be rendered to our subscribers and the public, by causing it to be engraved for insertion in the series of portraits of which it now constitutes the thirty-fourth Number. A ‘counterfeit presentment’ of any human countenance, prince or peasant, executed by the unflattering fidelity of this process—a process of art which ‘nothing extenuates nor sets down aught in malice,’—needs no endorsement to its accuracy of resemblance. We trust that our Whig friends will be duly grateful for the introduction in the Democratic Review, of a portrait of the Chief Magistrate of their own choice and election ; and spare in future the, reproaches that nave heretofore been sometimes made, against the exclusiveness with which the selection of the subjects of this series has been confined to the prominent men of our own party. We hope that they will appreciate the delicacy of the intended compliment | paid to them, in the fact, that, in taking one of their great men for this purpose, we have selected the particular one whom they themselves took such very extraordinary pains to place in the position from which we did our best to keep him out. And when we add, that this kind and liberal desire to gratify our political opponents, by presenting them the first accurate likeness of their own chosen President, received no inconsiderable stimulus from the circumstance of the patriotic enthusiasm for him and his office, manifested at a recent celebrated dinner to an English lord, we are sure we shall have completed our title to their most grateful acknowledgments.

The following sketch of Mr. Tyler, we feel bound to say, was written by a warm friend of that gentleman, to accompany the portrait, at his own earnest desire to be permitted to do so. We have preferred, on the whole, to let it pass unmodified by any of those alterations of the editorial pen, which, if begun, might perhaps run somewhat further than might be agreeable to the author. We have heretofore expressed so distinctly our own impressions in relation to him, his position and course, that we deem it unnecessary to state here more particularly how far we may agree to, and how far dissent from the views urged by the writer, with the zeal of political and personal attachment. For Mr. Tyler’s recent important vetoes we sincerely thank and honor him—at the same time that we feel bound to say, that the general course of his administration in other respects has by no means been what we hoped at the outset it might possibly be. He leaves us yet in no slight degree of doubt, as to the spirit in which his course has had its origin and stimulus. Confidence is a plant of slow growth sometimes in other, also, |503| than aged bosoms. If Mr. Tyler has now done well for one year, he had before done very ill for ten. If his recent deserts have been great, great also was all he had to atone for. An ancient sage would pronounce no man happy in his life, till death had set his seal upon his mortal fate and career. So too do we await a further development of Mr. Tyler’s administration, before deciding on the judgment which should be recorded opposite to his name, in the annals of the great office imposed upon him, by that same fatality of accident which seems to have attended his whole political career.—Ed. D. R.

―――

It has fallen to the lot of but few individuals to exercise so potent an influence on the destinies of their country, as the subject of this sketch. But recently elevated to the office of Vice President of the nation, a post which has heretofore been considered of far less than secondary importance to that of the Chief Magistrate, Mr. Tyler by a solemn dispensation of Providence became invested with the attributes of Executive power on the very threshold of his official career. The death of President Harrison, and his accession thereby to the station of Chief Magistrate, are events of too recent occurrence to require more than a passing notice. The limits assigned to this sketch will not permit an elaborate review of the earlier incidents of his life, and we shall therefore but briefly glance over the more prominent features of his history, and proceed to the discussion of those great measures of public policy which have been agitated since his elevation to the Presidency, and over many of which he has exercised so salutary a control.

John Tyler was born in Charles City County, Virginia, on the 29th of April, 1790, and is now in the fifty-third year of his age. His father for a considerable period held the office of Governor of that ancient Commonwealth, and enjoyed the friendship and esteem of the distinguished statesmen of his day. A neighbor and intimate friend of Thomas Jefferson, he possessed the unreserved confidence of that eminent apostle of Democracy, which continued uninterrupted to the close of his existence. The friendship of the father | was continued to the son, and accordingly, at Mr. Jefferson’s demise, the subject of our sketch was called on to deliver a eulogy on the departed patriot ; a task to the performance of which he brought the whole energies of a cultivated mind, and an ardent admiration of the character of the deceased statesman. This eulogy was delivered at Richmond, and evinces a deep-seated conviction of the importance of Mr. Jefferson’s political principles, and an enthusiastic appreciation of the eminent services he rendered to his country. At the early age of twenty-one years, Mr. Tyler was elected to the Legislature of Virginia, and five years thereafter was placed in Congress. In 1826, he was elevated to the distinguished station of Governor of the State of Virginia, the duties of which he discharged for about one year and a half, when the Legislature selected him to fill a vacancy in the Senate of the United States. Having served in that capacity during one term, he was re-elected, and continued in that office until a difference of opinion arose between General Jackson and himself, on some measures of public policy, when, being instructed by the Legislature of Virginia to vote in their favor, he resigned his seat and went into voluntary retirement. In the various stations thus briefly alluded to, Mr. Tyler’s talents and judgment were called into frequent exercise, and his speeches and written addresses are marked by forcible and brilliant conceptions clothed in language of great beauty and purity.

The Whig Convention which assembled at Harrisburg, in the State of Pennsylvania, selected him as their candidate for Vice President, to which office he was elected in the autumn of 1840. Up to this period the influence of Mr. Tyler’s views was necessarily limited to a comparatively circumscribed sphere of action, but the demise of General Harrison at once placed him on an eminence where the exercise of the legitimate functions of his station involved the most momentous consequences to the well-being of the whole nation.

Flushed with success, the Whig party anticipated no obstacle to the complete triumph of those favorite schemes, which, however veiled from the public eye during the presidential |504| canvass, were not the less cherished by the Federal phalanx throughout all the phases of their ever-shifting career. Hushing to the possession of place and power with an appetite whetted by the protracted struggle which had preceded victory, the wire-pullers found themselves unexpectedly checked by the decision and firmness of an individual elevated by themselves. And here it becomes us to pause and review the position of the Executive at this important crisis.

Having for a long period occupied stations of public trust, which rendered necessary the promulgation of his sentiments on the most grave and weighty subjects connected with our political institutions, he found himself surrounded by influences the most hostile to his pre-conceived and frequently declared principles, and was left the alternative of abandoning the convictions of a long life and falsifying his character for consistency, or of firmly maintaining his fidelity at the cost of encountering the embittered assaults of those who were instrumental in his elevation. Foremost among those important measures of national policy, the question of establishing a moneyed corporation by the General Government stood forth, broad, massive, and overshadowing.

On numerous occasions—in the Senate of the United States—on the hustings in Virginia—in communications to individuals and public bodies, and in casual and private conversations, Mr. Tyler had steadily denied the constitutional right of Congress to charter such an institution.

To fortify this settled conviction, the President found that the evils which the framers of the Constitution had, with far-seeing eye, anticipated from the existence of such a monopoly, were more than verified by the blistering developments that were unfolded in the management of the United States Bank of Pennsylvania, with its admitted “odor of nationality ;” and he wisely determined to stand by his principles without calculating the cost or inconvenience to himself personally. The result is before the country, and we intend briefly to glance at the effects, past, present, and prospective, which have followed and may be expected to follow from his official acts. We are aware, indeed, that Mr. Tyler | has been accused of treachery by a large portion of his Whig allies, but we find the burden of testimony decidedly opposed to such a conclusion. Certain it is, that the settled policy of that party at the late presidential campaign caused them to openly disavow the imputation attempted to be fastened on them by their opponents, that they were the advocates of a National Bank ; and accordingly we find even Henry Clay declaring at a public meeting at Taylorville, Hanover county, Virginia, on the 27th June, 1840, that the question of chartering a National Institution “should be left to the arbitrament of an enlightened public opinion.”

From a published communication of Mr. Henry A. Wise, recently addressed to his constituents in Virginia, the fact is directly asserted, that during the time which elapsed between the nominations at Harrisburg and the election, and while Congress was in session, it was considered necessary that the views of Mr. Tyler upon a National Bank should be obtained. For this purpose Mr. Wise was selected to address Mr. Tyler on that subject, who, in his reply, stated distinctly that his views in relation to such an institution remained unchanged, and that were he the President he could never sign a charter for any such incorporation while the Constitution remained in its present form.

This he plainly and unequivocally stated, that his views might be submitted to the Whigs in Congress, and, through them, to the nation.

This letter was shown by Mr. Wise to Mr. Biddle, of Pittsburgh, and other leading Whig members of Congress at that time, and it was left for them to say whether the letter should be published or not. They decided that Mr. Tyler’s letter should not go before the public ! The above explicit declaration of the honorable member of Congress appears abundantly conclusive, and we are therefore justified in the conclusion that he was selected as the candidate of the Whigs in 1840 for his availability, without regarding the cohesion of his views with their own, or demanding the abandonment or modification of his cherished convictions. Thus, by a Providential dispensation, neither usual nor uninstructive, the temporary ascendency of a deceptive course of policy was overthrown, and the high-priests |505| of Error were stricken with a singular but merited retribution while administering the sacrificial rites at the very altar of their triumph.

On the threshold of his administration the President was brought into official communication with advisers selected by his predecessor, and, nerving himself for the mighty struggle which he foresaw was approaching, he permitted some minor measures to pass without opposition, which under other circumstances he might have opposed.

The passage of the bill to incorporate a Bank of the United States signalized the great crisis, and demanded the exercise of his utmost firmness.

We learn from an eye-witness the extraordinary measures which were adopted at this period to overthrow the President’s settled purpose.

Committees of Congress were in constant attendance at his rooms, assailing him with earnest appeals to his feelings and his interests on the one hand, while on the other the phials of federal wrath were denounced if he continued obdurate. Even the privacy of his bed-chamber was invaded at unseasonable hours by individuals in high station, and the extraordinary expedient was resorted to, of summoning his intimate personal friends from his native State to beseech him to give his sanction to the bill of abominations. To crown the machinations of the federal politicians in and out of Congress, the members of the President’s Cabinet, with an indelicacy and violation of duty unparalleled in the history of our Government, held a secret meeting at the Treasury Department, apart from the President, and without his knowledge, to devise plans to coerce him into submission. While these extraordinary and persevering efforts were in progress, the Democratic members of Congress were naturally suspicious of the fidelity to principle of one who had been elevated to office by the Federal forces, and they consequently declined any interference in the matter. The result was, that Mr. Tyler was left single-handed and alone to combat the powerful influences which were assailing his integrity, and was compelled to rely on the sustaining power of his Maker, and the approving voice of his own conscience.

Fortunately for the country, he planted his foot on the rock of principle, | and on the 16th September, 1841, placed his official veto on the odious law. To properly estimate the value of Mr. Tyler’s firmness, we must review the position of the Democratic party at this eventful crisis. Defeated at all points, and overwhelmed by the force of the political tornado which had swept over the land, they saw before them but a succession of aristocratic usurpations, whose effects would shake the very foundations of our valued institutions. The firmness of Mr. Tyler dispelled the gathering gloom, and the meed of approval awarded him by the patriot at the Hermitage met with a willing response from the Democracy of the whole Union, until its echoes were lost in the caverns of the Rocky Mountains.

The defeat of their darling object induced the Whig party in Congress, and their allies in the Cabinet, to attempt to destroy Mr. Tyler’s influence if they could not bend him to their purpose.

To accomplish this they plied him with artful queries as to the kind of Government Bank or agency he would sanction, noted all his remarks, and husbanded every isolated expression with the intention of instituting a question of veracity between themselves and him. His veto of the second Bank Bill was followed by the resignation of all his Cabinet ministers except the Secretary of State, who, with a lack of delicacy which cannot be too highly censured, issued addresses to the public criminating the President, and accusing him of deception and insincerity. Their statements, however, being inconsistent with each other, failed to effect the object intended, and their manifestoes and themselves are consigned to merited obscurity ; or if remembered, live alone in the contempt of the community.

During the recess between the adjournment of Congress, at its special session, and the commencement of its regular meeting in December last, the impoverished state of the National Treasury induced the President to recommend the repeal of that section of the act to distribute the proceeds of the public lands among the States which authorizes such distribution whenever the duties on imports did not exceed twenty per centum on their value.

|506| This recommendation, although evidently justified by the exigencies of the Government, was assailed with great bitterness by the Whig leaders in Congress, and met with prompt rejection by the federal majority of that body.

The breach between the President and his quondam allies had now evidently become irreparable, and we find the remainder of the session of Congress wasted in fruitless endeavors to place the Executive in a false position. The first movement to effect this object was made by that arch-leader of the Federal forces, Henry Clay, who signalized his withdrawal from the Senate of the United States by an assault on the veto power, in which he advocated such a change in the Constitution as would annul or materially weaken this salutary check on congressional usurpation. His followers in Congress were not, however, exactly prepared to adopt so revolutionary a suggestion, and the resolutions of Mr. Clay quietly repose on the table of the United States Senate, an enduring monument of the folly of which their distinguished author could be capable.

The next scheme to coerce the President, was an attempt to reduce him to a compliance with the wishes of the Whig party, by virtually threatening to cut off the supplies. On the last day of July, the duties on all imported goods were reduced, by the terms of the compromise act, to twenty per cent., but the provisions of the law were couched in language so ambiguous, that doubts were entertained of the power to enforce the collection of the revenue. The passage of “the little Tariff Bill” legalized the provisions of the compromise act, but provided at the same time for the suspension, for thirty days, of that portion of the distribution law which prevented the division of the proceeds of the public lands when the duties on imports exceeded twenty per cent. To sanction this law would have convicted Mr. Tyler of gross inconsistency, while its rejection involved embarrassment to the national finances, and endangered the public credit.

The President promptly vetoed the bill (the veto message was sent to Congress on the 29th of June) having wisely decided that the invasion of a high moral principle is irreparable, while the inconvenience created by a | rigid adherence to right is susceptible of removal or modification. The passage of the second tariff bill, embodying the same unacceptable features as its predecessors, again elicited a presidential veto, and the Federal majority were left the unpleasant alternative of abandoning the ground they had so vauntingly occupied, or of encountering the opposition of the manufacturers, who were clamoring at the doors of the capitol, demanding legislative protection. The indignant rebukes of the people at the reckless conduct of the congressional majority during a session of nearly nine months’ duration, at length forced an unwilling action on the tariff question, which resulted in the passage of the present law. The bill thus enacted in hot haste at the close of the session, although odious in many of its leading provisions, was necessarily approved by the Executive, and became a law. The views of Mr. Tyler, on the subject of revenue, appear, from his published declarations, to be consonant with sound policy, while the principle of indirect taxation continues to be adhered to by our Government. The recent indications of returning sanity on the part of the British Government, in relation to the inexpediency of levying prohibitory duties, warrants the hope, that the day is not far distant when the principles of free-trade will be more generally understood and recognised, and governments will learn that unloosing the shackles of commerce is the most certain method of attaining the highest state of national prosperity. The odious appendage to the apportionment law, which was adopted at the close of the session, and the repeal of the salutary provision of the distribution law before alluded to—followed by the immediate adjournment of Congress,—gave the President an opportunity of withholding his sanction to those bills, and thus defeating them without the necessity of formal vetoes. A brief glance at the tendency of the more important measures adopted by the Whig majority of Congress, and which were disapproved by Mr. Tyler, will not be here out of place.

The country was passing through a financial crisis of unparalleled severity ; and to the social and political evils connected with the establishment of a Bank of the United States, would have |507| been added a return of that undue expansion of the currency, which, in its inevitable re-action, has carried general prostration and ruin to the trading portion of the community. But soaring far above all other considerations in its influence on the welfare of the people, is the moral pestilence which pervades the atmosphere of a gigantic moneyed institution, undermining, as it does, the very foundation of public and private confidence and integrity, and engendering evils which are entailed on succeeding generations. With a steady currency based on the precious metals, of uniform value, and not subject to sudden expansions and contractions, we may confidently anticipate a slow but certain return to a state of permanent prosperity.

Like the law to establish a Government Bank, that which authorizes the distribution of the proceeds of the public domain is fraught with evils of no common magnitude. It is, indeed, an embodiment of that vicious principle in legislation—the distorted child of Federal parentage—which creates gigantic schemes of national extravagance with the view of dazzling the people with the semblance of prosperity, the better to fleece them of their honest earnings.

Thus, the exploded schemes of internal improvement to be carried on by the General Government were attempted to be revived through the agency of the States, and the money of the people was to be squandered indirectly on those objects against which the Democracy of the country have declared an eternal hostility. The demoralization and debasement which have ever followed in the track of similar expedients in all ages and countries should warn the American people of their danger. That system of duties on imports which operates as a bounty to one class of individuals at the cost of the remainder, is equally exceptionable in principle, and scarcely less injurious in practice. Having for its basis the false theory of coercing foreign nations into becoming the tributaries of our own, through a system of prohibitory duties levied on the products and manufactures of those States, it results in chaining down the energies of individual | enterprise, according a premium to the illicit trader at the expense of the honest merchant, and compelling the consumer to pay an unequal tax to benefit a few wealthy manufacturers.

This state of things creates the necessity for an army of official spies to neutralize the efforts of the ingenious evaders of governmental restrictions, thereby increasing the burthens of the producing classes, and withdrawing from the vitals of the community, in a covert manner, the aliment which feeds and pampers a host of greedy stipendiaries.

Thus, step by step, the Federal party were marching onward in their path of encroachment on the liberties of the people, when the unsustained firmness of John Tyler planted an insurmountable barrier to their progress. In the prompt appreciation of purity of purpose and patriotic adherence to right, the Democracy of the country are ever true to their generous impulses. To errors of mere policy they are lenient, while the ground of principle is firmly maintained. They justly appreciate the value of integrity in high station, and are mindful that the day may not be far distant when a new combination of untoward events may again require the exercise of similar firmness to avert the like calamities. Mr. Tyler is now separated from the Federal party by an impassable gulf. To secure the continued approbation of the Republican party his measures must be essentially Democratic, holding no compromise with the enemies of popular rights. The talents and education of Mr. Tyler have qualified him for the proper discharge of the duties of the high trust he has assumed, and his annual and special messages are marked by vigor of thought and felicity of expression. As a debater he possesses easy fluency and a graceful delivery, and his conversational powers are of a high order. To a pleasing but dignified demeanor he unites the frankness and gallant bearing of a Virginia gentleman, and his opinions on all subjects are given with freedom and candor. In person he is tall and rather slightly formed, with prominent features, whose expression is decidedly intellectual.

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|105| COMMERCIAL.—TARIFF AND FINANCES.

It is not a work of much difficulty to write an ordinary commercial article for a magazine. A few of the latest returns from the Banks and the Customs, a stock table, the prices of the great staples of the country, and a slur at the Tariff, constitute the materials with which they are generally made. This is surely not all which merchants, or politicians who watch the progress of the United States, have a right to expect. They want broad views, based upon extended observation of cause and effect in the commercial world. We know better what it is they do want, than how ourselves to furnish it. It requires a combination of materials not always equally at hand, and a power of philosophical deduction which is not the lot of many men to possess. We lay claim to neither, and yet we deem the present position of the country sufficiently interesting to warrant us in throwing out a few general reflections upon its character.

The most obvious feature of it, is the absence of any system of regulation of the currency of the country. After a period of severe distress following hard upon the discontinuance of a National Bank, a new period of great ease and prosperity succeeded, and still continues. There are many who, as they despaired of a change from the former, are now correspondingly sanguine of the permanency of the latter state. They suppose that the great problem which has puzzled economists so long is at last solved, and that after all the real way to regulate the financial affairs of a nation, is to let them regulate themselves. It is useless to remark upon this common tendency to look only upon the surface of things. Political economy is to most minds a science of misty theory, because there is a much greater tendency in writers to substitute their hasty conclusions from partial views for the more difficult and labored process of induction that flows from extensive observation of facts. There is moreover a great need of resort to crucial experiments, in order to arrive at any reasonable certainty of the exact connection of cause and effect in events. So great is the number of disturbing forces operating upon them, that it is barely possible for | the calmest judgment to avoid sometimes confounding that relation. There were probably as many men in America who ascribed the derangement of the currency in 1837 to the existence as to the absence of a National Bank ; and neither side was without plausible ground for its view. There are now more persons who consider the present prosperity as the consequence of the freedom from any regulation, than there are who regard that very prosperity as an indication of the necessity of applying in season some sort of control.

In the mean time, the government of the United States remains passive. It is somewhat questionable whether any zealous attempt will be made even to return to the lame expedient of a Sub-Treasury. When in 1837 the Secretary of the Treasury found himself completely paralyzed by the general suspension of specie payments on the part of the Banks, in which thirty millions of the public funds were deposited, he then very naturally turned his attention to some mode of preventing for the future a like embarrassment. The country was fortunate in being in a state of profound peace. What the effect would have been in case of war, it is not easy to say. A national system ought to be predicated as well upon the probability of the one contingency as of the other. Ours is and has been nothing more than a string of expedients. The first National Bank was the offspring of the disorders consequent upon the Revolutionary struggle ; the second grew out of a feebly-conducted war. Each lasted its time, and then there was an eager searching for new experiments. The democracy of President Van Buren and Levi Woodbury, profoundly shocked by the test of the infidelity of the whole brood of rotten Banks, into which they had breathed all of vitality they ever possessed, threw itself for protection upon the reserved powers of the Government itself. They argued as the miser does, that after all there was nothing like the strong box. The result was visible in the Sub-Treasury. But that system, even during the brief period that it lasted, never was in truth what it professed to be. The repeal of it was the work of the Whigs. |106| It remains to be seen whether, now that the Democrats have recovered power, they will restore it. The inaugural address of the President, and the silence of the government press, argue indifference to it, to say the least. There may be many motives which would dictate a formal renewal of the proposition, besides a conviction of its intrinsic merit. It was an expedient, and it had its day. Times have changed, and there appears no present necessity for action upon the subject. It is not to be supposed that the administration which has opened and is pursuing different and more interesting objects, will embarrass itself unnecessarily in taking care of futurity in this particular. If the Sub-Treasury should be adopted, it will be only in form. The Government will continue to use the Banks through its agents, much as it now does directly ; and the present system of currency will be allowed to go on without interruption, just so long as it can go by itself. It will be only an urgent necessity which will give rise to the adoption of any new expedient.

What is then the state of our currency in the United States in 1845 ? It is dependent upon the action of Banks chartered by the several States, just as it was ten years ago. These act without concert with each other, and without responsibility to any common head. The Government of the United States resorts in most cases to them for the transaction of its business, but in some to individuals, having in neither any security for its funds, or control over the agents it employs. The system consists in there being none at all. If it will last forever as it has done now for four years, then is it indeed the euthanasia of a national currency.

In order to form any opinion of its duration, it will be necessary to look back and see where it commenced. Up to the period of the adoption of the Tariff by the Whig party in 1842, there had been no symptom of relief to the distress of the country. Without intending to claim for that measure all of the prosperity that has ensued, we have a right to assume for it that it came in just at the right moment to revive the drooping energy of the people, exhausted by the drain of its resources to foreign countries, which had for years previous been going on under the operation of a scale of prices created by a redundancy of paper money of banks, and raised by it much higher than ruled elsewhere. | It was this which had brought in quantities of wheat to a people able to supply, not themselves alone, but the world besides. It was this which had carried up the value of imports to the enormous amount of one hundred and ninety millions of dollars, in the single year 1836. It was this which gave a great excess of imports over exports during the whole period of the prevalence of what was called the Compromise Act of 1832, down to the year 1840. Even after the scale of artificial prices caused by the expanded currency of the Banks, the original inducement to these excessive imports, had been done away by the failure of those Banks to redeem it, the fatal effect of the system remained. It pressed upon the industry of the people, struggling for the reduced wages of its labor against the competition of great foreign capital, wielding products cheaply wrung from the hands of a needy and starving population in the Old World. It was not so much the payment for goods from abroad which made the paralysis of 1840, as the difficulty of selling anything at a remunerating price at home. The paper circulation of the Banks had been contracted forty-three millions of dollars in three years ; the prices of all commodities had been going down at a corresponding rate ; and yet the stranger had the whole command of the market, because he could afford to sell at the smallest living profit, or at the least sacrifice, whenever a sale could be made at all.

The adoption of the Tariff at that moment, changed the whole face of things. The people began to draw breath. Importations continued for some time, it is true ; but having been made in the face of a low scale of prices, under the delusive idea that the advance of duties would raise those prices, they paid little profits, and inspired no disposition to extend them. The first sensible improvement was in the firmness of the domestic markets. The lowest point of prices had been reached. Trade then began to assume its natural channels. The Banks, which had been busy in contracting all obligations until they had almost put a stop to the formation of new ones, found a farther perseverance in their policy unnecessary. With the returning confidence of the community, their resources became more available. The process of liquidation which had been going on for three years, gradually accumulated a great amount of capital in money unemployed. |107| While in 1836 the community was gorged with paper and yet demanding more, in 1842 and 1843 it had little and wanted little. The wheel had been turning so long that it had got completely round, and the currency was beginning a new career.

If we are correct in our conjecture of the effect of the Tariff of 1842 upon the present state of things, it becomes a matter of some interest to know what the probability is of its continuance. It is well known that the party unfriendly to it is now in possession of power, and that it will modify or repeal as it can hope to be sustained by popular opinion in the act, but not without. Had the revenue from customs been as abundant this year as it was the last, there is no doubt that some modification of its provisions would have been sustained. The contrary is, however, likely to be the case to a sufficient extent to remove all argument of necessity on that account. There will be no great surplus to brag of. From present returns of the first half of the year, it would seem that the receipts for 1845 will be less than those of 1844 by at least one-fifth of the whole amount. It will scarcely be the part of prudence in Government to recommend a measure having in prospect a reduction, in the face of this decline ; more particularly as, if the calculations of the friends and authors of the system itself should prove well-founded, a decline in the import of dutiable goods will hereafter go on in proportion as the manufacture of them becomes established here. This expectation is likely to prove well-founded in the great article of iron, at least. A concurrence of circumstances has had the effect of raising the price of that article so high in Great Britain, as to stimulate to the production of it in America, at least to an extent to supply the domestic market. Considering the peculiar quarter in which this great article is most manufactured, it may admit of a doubt whether the Administration will feel inclined to disturb that interest seriously ; and if it does not, it will not be easy to frame any general modification of the system of which it makes so material a part. Neither does it appear probable, that in the present somewhat confused state of our relations with foreign nations, when the necessity of increased expenses in preparation for any result that may take place is pressing, a material reduction | of the present revenue can with safety be recommended.

Assuming then, for a moment, that the Tariff of 1842 will not be essentially changed, we have the great element upon which the safety of the present no-system of the currency rests, still undisturbed, and the experiment will go on under tolerably fair prospects. We are, nevertheless, entire sceptics of its ultimate success. Without presuming to go over the ground so often trodden in the contests of the last ten or fifteen years, we must yet be permitted to maintain that no experience worth having, in any country, has yet shown that the currency of a country, when made up of paper resting upon credit, can be safely left to regulate itself in irresponsible hands. The progress of the last three or four years proves nothing on one side, any more than the distress of the preceding years does on the other. The excessive revulsion from one to the other, the great swing of the pendulum carrying with it as it does the fortunes of myriads of individuals, proves more than both. It proves that some system should be devised, no matter what it shall be called. Whether it be Bank, Sub-Treasury, or Exchequer, so long as it shall prove effective in bringing the entire circulating medium of the Union to a specie standard, and keeping it there ; the friends of a sound and stable currency ask no more. They ought not to be satisfied with less, or that nothing at all should be proposed, or that what shall be proposed prove little likely to effect any really good end. To them it ought to be no argument, that things are going on well enough of themselves. Supposing, for a moment, that the fact be granted, is the inference also to be conceded, that the virtue of the present “well enough” is in the let- alone policy itself, and not in mere chance ? As well might the captain of a ship argue, that because the helm may be left without a steersman in a time of dead calm at sea, therefore the vessel may be safely trusted to take care of itself in the next storm.

The operations of commerce require periods, of time to develop themselves. From the spring of 1837 to the autumn of 1842, the revulsion consequent upon the suspension of specie payments had its sway. Of the suffering of that time, it is perhaps unnecessary to remind our readers. Its cause lay in the necessity of submitting to a steady contraction of the paper circulating |108| medium until it fell down to the diminished standard of credit existing in the country. With this contraction, prices of all commodities declined, and business was what is called bad ; that is, the falling markets required the exercise on the part of merchants of extraordinary care and foresight in order to escape loss in the transit of goods to the consumer. This care and foresight is attended with advantages which last some time after the necessity for exercising it declines. When the lowest point of contraction of credit was arrived at that part of the commercial community which had survived the trial stood upon a basis little if at all less strong than if the country had possessed no enemy at all but specie. But what a process had been gone through to arrive at this result ! How many men had been ruined—how many families had gone | from luxury to want ! How nearly had been verified that passage of Scripture which declares that to him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.

Under the favorable operation of the Tariff, acting upon a scale of prices adapted to a currency reduced to a very low point, credit and commerce began in 1842-3 to revive ; and with the steady expansion of the circulating medium which has since been gradually going on, a return of prosperity has been experienced everywhere. How far that expansion has been carried all over the country, we have not data sufficiently general to judge. But that it has been carried on very rapidly in some quarters and more especially in New York cannot be doubted. We append a table of the position of the Banks of the State at three periods.

It will be seen that the decline in the loans which took place between the first and second periods is already nearly made up by the third, whilst the relative proportion of specie to circulation is undergoing | a similar, although not quite as rapid a revolution. The returns from Massachusetts have been made only to the middle of the last year. We subjoin a similar table.

It is difficult to form any inferences from these tables as to the condition of the banks throughout the country. Those of the two States named are manifestly enjoying the advantage of a more extended circulation than they have ever had before at any time, even during the era of speculation in 1836. This is partly the consequence of the creditable manner in which they acted in 1838 ; partly of the withdrawal of the circulation of bills of the United States Bank, and resting as it does upon a solid specie basis, we see nothing in it of imprudence or of danger. The probability is also that the Bank circulation in the Western and Southern States has been much reduced rather than increased, owing to the but partial restoration of credit, and partly perhaps to political causes. The late explosion at Detroit sufficiently proves that it is not possible to strain it very far at present. Making | allowances as we are willing to do for all these things, we are nevertheless convinced by the tables, of one fact of great importance to a right judgment of the present, and that is, that the revulsion from 1843 to 1845 is too rapid to bode entire safety for the future. It is as impossible for an expansion of Bank circulation to the amount of ten millions in two years to take place in New York without exciting a spirit of gambling speculation, as it is for a contraction of seven millions not to be attended with wide spread distress and ruin. It is too great a vibration of the pendulum for safety. It is true, we may not be soon again visited by so sweeping a hurricane as was that of 1837, but we are not even preparing ourselves for the smallest gale. The duty of a wise government is to protect the people who live under it in their property as well as their persons. That of the |109| federal government is to supply some mode of general control which can never be punished by that of the states. But as things now stand, neither the one nor the other appears disposed to acknowledge the duty of providence or of necessity of forethought about it. They are willing to try the experiment of letting things take care of themselves. So then let it be. We shall interpose no objection. But whatever may be the result, it is our present duty to declare our conviction,which as the distress of 1838 only confirmed, so the prosperity of 1845 does not in the least shake it ; a conviction formed from an investigation of similar results from similar causes in all times and many countries, namely, that something must sooner or later be done to regulate the currency of the country. This has always been the Whig doctrine heretofore. It is the Whig doctrine yet. It is a doctrine which no statesman will ever deny who has not strong immediate reasons personal to himself for forming an opposite opinion. The people lost the benefit of its last experiment by the unfortunate influence exercised upon the result by the United States Bank of Pennsylvania. We are ourselves prepared to admit that an institution like that, when under the guidance of men heated by political struggles and personal adulation, is not without its dangers. But the propriety of just such an institution makes | one question. The necessity of regulating the currency of the State Banks makes another and a widely different one. Whilst we affirm this necessity to exist, we are nevertheless glad that if a new experiment to prove it must be tried at all, it will be tried without the presence even of a semblance of a United States Bank. Whatever the result may be, it will at any rate be beyond the reach of demagogue clamor on that account, at least. Whether it will lead to a general conviction of the truth of the position we have taken, it is impossible to say. We do not see anything in the present state of the pecuniary affairs of the United States to makes us doubt that it will. Nor do we introduce into our view of the subject, any foreign elements which although fairly within the reach of our argument do not necessarily attach to it. Although the present foreign policy of the administration appears decidely aggressive, we do not descant upon the probable effect of war upon a self-regulated currency. For though we belong to the school which holds that a government properly administered should be equally ready for either fortune, that it should have its resources most of all at hand in the hour of trial, yet we are conscious of the folly of trying by any similar standard an administration like the present, the offspring of expedient, and likely to be the parent of nothing better than a temporary policy.

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|1| OUR POSITION—INTRODUCTORY.

With the present number commences a second volume of the American Review. We embrace the occasion, to speak briefly of our position and prospects. If it is not due to any character which the Magazine has acquired for itself, it is at least due to the cordial interest of those who have aided it in reaching the point it occupies. It is, moreover, necessary that it be at once fully understood, and beyond the possibility of mistake, what were at first, and what must be, with any hope of success, the aims and efforts proposed in its establishment.

The great practical object of this work has always been, that it should be, in the fullest sense, National. It was very clearly seen from the beginning, that on no narrower platform, could it be of the greatest effectual and abiding benefit to the country. And this was to be a nationality, not of mere numerical force, of extended, equal, and permanent circulation, but of universal acceptability and influence. It was not only to go into every part of the Union, but to be received in every part, as a reliable expositor—in politics, in literature, in morals, in social science—of all the great and true interests of the commonwealth, the organ, for the nation, of a just conservative progress. It was evident, indeed, that the former of these great results could not be effected without the latter ; the Review could never attain both an extended and permanent circulation, without rendering itself universally acceptable and influential. | It is from a want of attention to this plain necessity in the case, that every journal of importance, ever started in this country, has fallen in the way—failing, of course, to be generally received, equally as it failed of adapting itself for such reception. So simple a matter of history was not to be disregarded—even if the national influence of the work were not the main consideration, but merly [sic] an extended patronage.

This important object being distinctly before us, several particular positions were evidently to be avoided.

In the first place, wherever located and conducted, the work must be kept very free from all sectional doctrines, and sectional prejudices, that could not be reasonably entertained in other portions of the country. Every one interested in its establishment felt the necessity of this ; the point was fully discussed with, and by experienced and influential men from different parts of the Union, and distinguished persons, representing all sections in the national councils, united their names on the original prospectus, partly for the express purpose of guaranteeing to the community the maintenance of such a course. This course, accordingly, has been kept steadily in view, and is never to be lost sight of.

A second position, as plainly to be avoided, was that of a sectarian bias. Every one perceives at once the strong necessity, in this country, of keeping such an organ well aloof from such a position. The other great interests—of |2| practical government, political morality, true social progress,—literature, science, art,—forbid the introduction of an element which could only breed incessant and ruinous dissension. When, however, this journal fails to support, with whatever power it may possess, the foundations, and pillars and outposts, of that greatest of all elements at once of conservatism and progress—Christianity—it will be time for it to be abandoned of all men as an instrument of danger to the country.

A third position, which, as a political organ, designed to support the broad principles of a portion of the entire community, we were especially to shun, was that of assuming ground in any partisan or personal divisions that might unfortunately arise. The Whig Party is a National party. All its principles, its measures, its tone of feeling, are national. Unlike its opponent, it has nothing to say in one part of the country, which it dares not, and does not, say in any other. It avoids, therefore, not only the sectional and sectarian elements spoken of above, but all the jealousies of favoritism, and the attempts of unprincipled place-hunters—men often without business, without property, without public confidence—seeking to rake together a little political notoriety by creating party dissension. There are enough such troublers of the public—both private writers and conductors of the press—irresponsible persons, accustomed to defend their evil interference on the ground of personal responsibility. They have their reward. But the American Review was established for other objects. It was considered—by ourselves, and by leaders of public opinion in every State of the | Union—that one of the chief of these was to harmonize and unite, since without harmony in a party—or at least a wise forbearance—there can be no union, and without union, no possible strength or prosperity. There is always enough, moreover, to be said on great national topics—practical and general principles, important measures of government and the wisdom that should inform the times—without descending to such materials.^*|2|

To maintain the Review in this course –a national work established for the good of the nation—keeping at a distance from its pages all political adventurers, will be our endeavor so long as we stand connected with it ; and we believe we shall not fail to receive in this effort the general approbation of our supporters. For the just and honorable motives with which the work was begun, for its unwavering maintenance, unaided, notwithstanding the defeat of the best hopes of the country and the temporary disheartening of our well-wishers, and for the equal course—if nothing better—in which it has persevered up to this time, we have nothing more to ask, than that those who read its pages, shall be willing to let its future character decide the question of its final support.

It may be added, in view of the volume begun, that more extended arrangements have been made, by which both political and literary matter of a high order will be regularly furnished to the Review. The political articles, also, will be more frequent, as well as from the ablest pens. Several of the most important national subjects have been advisedly deferred for consideration at the most important time.