Page:A History of Banking in the United States.djvu/155

 provided they would endorse on writs to collect their loans that they would receive Commonwealth notes. One point in the endorsement law of December 25, 1820, which provided that no fee bill should be put in execution within two years after it became due, unless endorsed to receive Bank of Kentucky and Commonwealth notes, remained in effect until February 22, 1834.

December 6, 1824, the Legislature appointed a Committee of Investigation to find out the character of the debts to the Bank of the Commonwealth, and report how many of them were bad. They also stated in their resolution that some directors of the Bank had not complied with the law to pay their debts to it.

At the State election of 1824, the struggle was to elect a Legislature, two-thirds of which would address the Governor for the removal of the Judges who had decided the relief laws unconstitutional. A majority was obtained, but not two-thirds.

Another course was therefore adopted. November 13, 1824, a select committee on the behavior of the Judges was raised, which made an elaborate report to the effect that the Legislature ought to be supreme, and ought not to be ruled by the judiciary. Resolutions were reported that the decision under review encroached on the field of the Legislature and the rights of the people. This led up to a law of December 24th, by which all the laws organizing the Court of Appeals were repealed, and a new court was organized.

The old court denied the constitutionality of the repeal and of the new court, and continued its existence; so that there were two courts. The new court ordered Achilles Sneed, clerk of the old court, to deliver the records to Francis P. Blair, clerk of the new court. Upon Sneed's refusal, he was fined and his papers were seized. A war of vituperative pamphlets ensued. It is said that Blair and Kendall were amongst the pamphleteers on the new court side. Kendall had described the relief system very justly in 1821. His biographer says that he never doubted the constitutionality of the relief measures, and so was driven to defend them. As a director of the Bank of the Commonwealth, he insisted on a conservative policy in that institution. There is a gap in his autobiography from 1823 to 1829, and it is unfortunately impossible to trace the influences which moulded his feelings and opinions. All the leading men on the new court side imbibed the intensest animosity against the Bank of the United States, Blair and Kendall perhaps more than any others.

When Kendall went to Washington, in 1829, he became responsible for a positive and circumstantial assertion that the Bank of the United States gave pecuniary aid to the old court party in the election of 1825; which statement became of the very first importance in the Bank war. When Kendall was called on for his proofs, he could only repeat the assertion from hearsay, but