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1837 . . . We are not left to conjecture how
the moneyed power, thus organized and with such a weapon in its hands, would
be likely to use it. The distress and alarm which pervaded and agitated the
whole country when the Bank of the If such was its power in a time of
peace, what would it not have been in a season of war with an enemy at your
doors? No nation but the freemen of the United States could have come out
victorious from such a contest; yet, if you had not conquered, the government
would have passed from the hands of the many to the hands of the few; and
this organized money power, from its secret conclave, would have dictated the
choice of your highest officers and compelled you to make peace or war as
best suited their own wishes. The forms of your government might, for a time,
have remained; but its living spirit would have departed from it. . . . Defeated in the general government, the
same class of intriguers and politicians will now resort to the states and
endeavor to obtain there the same organization which they failed to
perpetuate in the Union; and with specious and deceitful plans of public
advantages and state interests and state pride they will endeavor to
establish, in the different states, one moneyed institution with overgrown
capital and exclusive privileges sufficient to enable it to control the
operations of the other banks. Such an institution will be pregnant
with the same evils produced by the Bank of the United States, although its
sphere of action is more confined; and in the state in which it is chartered
the money power will be able to embody its whole strength and to move
together with undivided force to accomplish any object it may wish to attain.
You have already had abundant evidence of its power to inflict injury upon
the agricultural, mechanical, and laboring classes of society, and over those
whose engagements in trade or speculation render them dependent on bank
facilities, the dominion of the state monopoly will be absolute, and their
obedience unlimited. With such a bank and a paper currency, the money power
would, in a few years, govern the state and control its measures; and if a
sufficient number of states can be induced to create such establishments, the
time will soon come when it will again take the field against the United
States and succeed in perfecting and perpetuating its organization by a
charter from Congress. It is one of the serious evils of our
present system of banking that it enables one class of society, and that by
no means a numerous one, by its control over the currency to act injuriously
upon the interests of all the others and to exercise more than its just
proportion of influence in political affairs. The agricultural, the
mechanical, and the laboring classes have little or no share in the direction
of the great moneyed corporations; and from their habits and the nature of their
pursuits, they are incapable of forming extensive combinations to act
together with united force. . . . The planter, the farmer, the mechanic,
and the laborer all know that their success depends upon their own industry
and economy and that they must not expect to become suddenly rich by the
fruits of their toil. Yet these classes of society form the great body of the
people of the United States; they are the bone and sinew of the country; men
who love liberty and desire nothing but equal rights and equal laws and who,
moreover, hold the great mass of our national wealth. . . . Credits: Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address of
Andrew Jackson to the People of the United States and the Inaugural Address
of Martin Van Buren, President of the United States (1837), pp.3-16, in The
Annals of America (Chicago: Encyclopaedia
Britannica, 1968). |