discretionary authority to receive the notes of specie paying banks in revenue payments, gave him also the right to reject them. The number of these banks had now become so great, the quantity of notes issued so enormous, the facility of obtaining loans so universal, and the temptation to converting shadowy paper into real estate, so tempting, that the rising streams of paper from seven hundred and fifty banks took their course towards the new States, seat of the public domain-discharging in accumulated volume there collected torrents upon the different land-offices. The sales were running up to five millions a month, with the prospect of unbounded increase after the rise of Congress; and it terest on them for years before they had to re- was this increase from the land sales which made Having exposed the evil, and that to the country generally as well as to the federal treasury, Mr. B. went on to give his opinion of the bene of his cabinet. Before the adjournment of Congress, and in concert with the President, the author of this View had attempted to get an act of Congress to stop the evil; and in support of his motion to that effect gave his opinion of the evil itself, and of the benefits which would result from its suppression. He said: "He was able to inform the Senate how it happened that the sales of the public lands had deceived all calculations, and run up from four millions a year to five millions a quarter; it was this speculators went to banks, borrowed five, ten, twenty, fifty thousand dollars in paper, in small notes, usually under twenty dollars, and engaged to carry off these notes to a great distance, sometimes five hundred or a thousand miles; and there laid them out for public lands. Being land-office money, they would circulate in the country; many of these small notes would never return at all, and their loss would be a clear gain to the bank; others would not return for a long time; and the bank would draw in "It would put an end to every complaint now connected with the subject, and have a beneficial effect upon every public and private interest. Upon the federal government its effect would be to check the unnatural sale of the public lands to speculators for paper; it would throw the speculators out of market, limit the sales to settlers and cultivators, stop the swelling increases of paper surpluses in the treasury, put an end to all projects for disposing of surpluses; and relieve all anxiety for the fate of the public moneys in the deposit banks. Upon the new States, where the public lands are situated, its effects would be most auspicious. It would stop the flood of paper with which they are inundated, and bring in a steady stream of gold and silver in its place. It would give them a hard-money currency, and especially a share of the gold currency; for every emigrant could then carry gold who wished to purchase land its effect would be to the country. Upon the settler and cultivator peculiarly advantageous. He would be relieved from the competition of speculators; he would not have to contend with those who received undue accommodations at banks, and came to the land-offices loaded with bales of bank notes which they had borrowed upon condition of carrying them far away, and turning them loose where many would be lost, and never get back to the bank that issued them. All these and many other good effects would thus be produced, and no hardship or evil of any kind could accrue to the meritorious part of the country; for the settler and cultivator who wishes to buy land for use, or for a settlement for his children, or to increase his farm, would have no difficutly in getting hard money to make his purchase. He has no undue accommodations from banks. He has no paper but what is good; such as he can readily convert into specie. To him the exac tion of specie payments from all purchasers would be a rule of equality, which would enable him to purchase what he needs without competition with fictitious and borrowed capital." in the discovery of the fact, that some tens of millions of this bank paper was on its way to the land-offices to be changed into land-when overtaken by this fatal "Specie Circular," and turned back to the sources from which it came. CHAPTER CXLVII. DEATH OF MR. MADISON, FOURTH PRESIDENT He died in the last year of the second term of the presidency of General Jackson, at the ad active to the last, and greatly occupied with He Mr. B. gave a view of the actual condition of the paper currency, which he described as hideous and appalling, doomed to a catastrophe; and he advised every prudent man, as well as the government, to fly from its embrace. His voice, and his warning, answered no purpose. He got no support for his motion. A few friends were willing to stand by him, but the opposition "senators stood out in unbroken front against it, reinforced largely by the friends of the administration but it is in vain to attribute the whole opposition to the measure merely to the mis-vanced age of eighty-six, his mind clear and taken opinions of friends, and the resentful policy of foes. There was another cause operating to the same effect; and the truth of history requires it to be told. There were many members of Congress engaged in these land speculations, upon loans of bank paper; and who were unwilling to see a sudden termination of so profitable a game. The rejection of the bill it was thought would be sufficient; and on the news of it the speculation redoubled its activity. But there was a remedy in reserve for the cure of the evil which they had not foreseen, and which was applied the moment that Congress was gone. Jackson was still President! and he had the nerve which the occasion required. He saw the public lands fleeting away-saw that Con-eminent patriots and sages of our revolution, gress would not interfere-and knew the majority of his cabinet to be against his interference. He did as he had often done in councils of war --called the council together to hear a decision. He summoned his cabinet-laid the case before them-heard the majority of adverse opinions: --and directed the order to issue. His private Secretary, Mr. Donelson, was directed to prepare a draught of the order. The author of this View was all the while in the office of this private Secretary. Mr. Donelson came to him, with the President's decision, and requested him to draw up the order. It was done the rough draught carried back to the council-put into official form-signed-issued. It was a second edition of the removal of the deposits scene, and made an immense sensation. The disappointed speculators raged. Congress was considered insulted, the cabinet defied, the banks disgraced. But the vindication of the measure soon came, always delighted in bearing testimony to the excellency of his character at that early stage of his career; and said to Thomas Jefferson long afterwards, when they were all colleagues in the revolutionary Congress, that in the whole career of Mr. Madison at Princeton, he had never known him say, or do, an indiscreet thing." So wrote Mr. John Quincy Adams in his discourse upon the "Life of James Madison," written at the request of the two Houses of Congress: and in this germ of manhood is to be seen all the qualities of head and heart which mature age, and great events, so fully developed. and which so nobly went into the formation of national character while constituting his own: the same quick intellect, the same laborious application, the same purity of morals, the same decorum of deportment. He had a rare combination of talent-a speaker, a writer, a counsellor. In these qualites of the mind he classed with General Hamilton; and was, perhaps, the only eminent public man of his day who so classed, and so equally contended in three of the fields of intellectual action. Mr. Jefferson was accustomed to say he was the only man that could answer Hamilton. Perspicuity, precision, closeness of reasoning, and strict adherence to the unity of his subject, were the characteristics of his style; and his speeches in Congress, and his dispatches from the State Department, may be equally studied as models of style, diplomatic and parliamentary as sources of information, as examples of integrity in conducting public questions: and as illustrations of the amenity with which the most earnest debate, and the most critical correspondence, can be conducted by good sense, good taste, and good temper. Mr. Madison was one of the great founders of our present united federal government, equally efficient in the working convention which framed the constitution and the written labors which secured its adoption. Co-laborer with General Hamilton in the convention and in the Federalist—both members of the old Congress and of the convention at the same time, and working together in both bodies for the attainment of the same end, until the division of parties in Washington's time began to estrange old friends, and to array against each other former cordial political co-laborers. As the first writer of one party, General Hamilton wrote some leading papers, which, as the first writer of the other party, Mr. Madison was called upon to answer: but without forgetting on the part of either their previous relations, their decorum of character, and their mutual respect for each other. Nothing that either said could give an unpleasant personal feeling to the other; and, though writing under borrowed names, their productions were equally known to each other and the public; for none but themselves could imitate themselves. [Purity, modesty, decorum-a moderation, temperance, and virtue in every thing-were the characteristics of Mr. Madison's life and manners; and it is grateful to look back upon such elevation and beauty of personal character in the illustrious and venerated founders of our Republic, leaving such virtuous private characters to be admired, as well as such great works to be preserved. The offer of this tribute to the memory of one of the purest of public men is the more gratefully rendered, private reasons mixing with considerations of public duty. Mr. 2 Madison is the only President from whom he ever asked a favor, and who granted immediately all that was asked-a lieutenant-colonelcy in the army of the United States in the late war with Great Britain. CHAPTER CXLVIII.. DEATH OF MR. MONROE, FIFTH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. He died during the first term of the administration of President Jackson, and is appropriately noticed in this work next after Mr. Madison, with whom he had been so long and so intimately associated, both in public and in private life; and whose successor he had been in successive high posts, including that of the presidency itself. He is one of our eminent public characters which have not attained their due place in history; nor has any one attempted to give him that place but one-Mr John Quincy Adams-in his discourse upon the life of Mr. Monroe. Mr. Adams, and who could be a more competent judge? places him in the first tine of American statesmen, and contributing, during the fifty years of his connection with the public affairs, a full share in the aggrandisement and advancement of his country. His parts were not shining, but solid. He lacked genius, but he possessed judgment: and it was the remark of Dean Swift, well illustrated in his own case and that of his associate friends, Harley and Bolingbroke (three of the rarest geniuses that ever acted together, and whose cause went to ruin notwithstanding their wit and eloquence), that genius was not necessary to the conducting of the affairs of state: that judgment, diligence, knowledge, good intentions, and will, were sufficient. Mr. Monroe was an instance of the soundness of this remark, as well as the three brilliant geniuses of Queen Anne's time, and on the opposite side of it. Mr. Monroe had none of the mental qualities which dazzle and astonish mankind; but he had a discretion which seldom committed a mistake-an integrity that always looked to the public good—a firmness of will which carried him resolutely upon his object-a diligence that mastered every subject—and a perseverance Nothing despairing, he went back to the old that yielded to no obstacle or reverse. He began starting point-served again in the Virginia his patriotic career in the military service, at the general assembly-was again elected Governor: commencement of the war of the revolution- and from that post was called to the cabinet of went into the general assembly of his native Mr. Madison, to be his double Secretary of State State at an early age-and thence, while still and War. He was the effective power in the young, into the continental Congress. There declaration of war against Great Britain. His he showed his character, and laid the foundation residence abroad had shown him that unavenged of his future political fortunes in his uncompro- British wrongs was lowering our character with mising opposition to the plan of a treaty with Europe, and that war with the "mistress of the Spain by which the navigation of the Mississip- seas" was as necessary to our respectability in pi was to be given up for twenty-five years in the eyes of the world, as to the security of our return for commercial privileges. It was the citizens and commerce upon the ocean. He qualities of judgment, and perseverance, which brought up Mr. Madison to the war point. He he displayed on that occasion, which brought drew the war report which the committee on him those calls to diplomacy in which he was foreign relations presented to the House-that afterwards so much employed with three of the report which the absence of Mr. Peter B. Porter, then greatest European powers-France, Spain, the chairman, and the hesitancy of Mr. Grundy, Great Britain. And it was in allusion to this the second on the committee, threw into the circumstance that President Jefferson after- hands of Mr. Calhoun, the third on the list and wards, when the right of deposit at New Orleans the youngest of the committee; and the prehad been violated by Spain, and when a minister sentation of which immediately gave him a nawas wanted to recover it, said, "Monroe is the tional reputation. Prime mover of the war, he man: the defence of the Mississippi belongs to was also one of its most efficient supporters, him." And under this appointment he had the taking upon himself, when adversity pressed, felicity to put his name to the treaty which se- the actual duties of war minister, financier, and cured the Mississippi, its navigation and all the foreign secretary at the same time. He was an territory drained by its western waters, to the enemy to all extravagance, to all intrigue, to all United States for ever. Several times in his life indirection in the conduct of business. Mr. he seemed to miscarry, and to fall from the Jefferson's comprehensive and compendious eutop to the bottom of the political ladder: but logium upon him, as brief as true, was the always to reascend as high, or higher than ever. faithful description of the man-" honest and Recalled by Washington from the French mis- brave." He was an enemy to nepotism, and sion, to which he had been appointed from the no consideration or entreaty-no need of the Senate of the United States, he returned to the support which an office would give, or intercesstarting point of his early career-the general sion from friends-could ever induce him to assembly of his State-served as a member from appoint a relative to any place under the gohis county was elected Governor; and from vernment. He had opposed the adoption of that post restored by Jefferson to the French the constitution until amendments were obmission, soon to be followed by the embassies tained; but these had, he became one of its to Spain and England. Becoming estranged firmest supporters, and labored faithfully, anxfrom Mr. Madison about the time of that gentle- iously and devotedly, to administer it in its puriman's first election to the presidency, and hav- ty. He was the first President under whom the ing returned from his missions a little mortified author of this View served, commencing his first that Mr. Jefferson had rejected his British treaty senatorial term with the commencement of the without sending it to the Senate, he was again second presidential term of this last of the men at the foot of the political ladder, and apparently of the revolution who were spared to fill the office out of favor with those who were at its top. in the great Republic which they had founded. CHAPTER CXLIX. DEATH OF CHIEF JUSTICE MARSHALL. He died in the middle of the second term of General Jackson's presidency, having been chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States full thirty-five years, presiding all the while (to use the inimitable language of Mr. Randolph), "with native dignity and unpretending grace." He was supremely fitted for high judicial station:-a solid judgment, great reasoning powers, acute and penetrating mind: with manners and habits to suit the purity and the sancity of the ermine:-attentive, patient, laborious grave on the bench, social in the intercourse of life: simple in his tastes, and inexorably just. Seen by a stranger come into a room, and he would be taken for a modest country gentleman, without claims to attention, and ready to take the lowest place in company, or at table, and to act his part without trouble to any body. Spoken to, and closely observed, he would be seen to be a gentleman of finished breeding, of winning and prepossessing talk, and just as much mind as the occasion required him to show. Coming to man's estate at the beginning of the revolution he followed the current into which so many young men, destined to become eminent, so ardently entered; and served in the army, and with notice and observation, under the eyes of Washington. Elected to Congress at an early age he served in the House of Representatives in the time of the elder Mr. Adams, and found in one of the prominent questions of the day a subject entirely fitted to his acute and logical turn of mind-the case of the famous Jonathan Robbins, claiming to be an American citizen, reclaimed by the British government as a deserter, delivered up, and hanged at the yard-arm of an English manof-war. Party spirit took up the case, and it was one to inflame that spirit. Mr. Marshall spoke in defence of the administration, and made the master speech of the day, when there were such master speakers in Congress as Madison, Gallatin, William B. Giles, Edward Livingston, John Randolph. It was a judicial subject, adapted to the legal mind of Mr. Marshall, requiring a legal pleading: and well did he plead it. Mr. Randolph has often been heard to say that it distanced competition-leaving all associates and opponents far behind, and carrying the case. Seldom has one speech brought so much fame, and high appointment to any one man. When he had delivered it his reputation was in the zenith: in less than nine brief months thereafter he was Secretary at War, Secretary of State, Minister to France, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Politically, he classed with the federal party, and was one of those high-minded and patriotic men of that party, who, acting on principle, commanded the respect of those even who deemed them wrong. CHAPTER CL. DEATH OF COL. BURR, THIRD VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. HE was one of the few who, entering the war of independence with ardor and brilliant prospects, disappointed the expectations he had created, dishonored the cause he had espoused, and ended in shame the career which he had opened with splendor. He was in the adventurous expedition of Arnold through the wilderness to Quebec, went ahead in the disguise of a priest to give intelligence of the approach of aid to General Montgomery, arrived safely through many dangers, captivated the General by the courage and address which he had shown, was received by him into his military family; and was at his side when he was killed. Returning to the seat of war in the Northern States he was invited by Washington, captivated like Montgomery by the soldierly and intellectual qualities he had shown, to his headquarters, with a view to placing him on his staff; but he soon perceived that the brilliant young man lacked principle; and quietly got rid of him. The after part of his life was such as to justify the opinion which Washington had formed of him; but such was his address and talent as to rise to high political distinction: Attorney General of New-York, Senator in Congress, and Vice-President of the United States. At the close of the presidential election of 1800, he stood equal with Mr. Jefferson in the vote which he received, and his undoubted |