Page:A History of Banking in the United States.djvu/235

 that a mass of accommodation bills were chasing each other from branch to branch in the years 1832 and 1833 and that they formed a mass of debt which the Bank could not, for the time, control.

On the same day on which Polk's supplementary report was presented, and without giving any consideration to it, the House adopted a resolution, 109 to 46, that the deposits might safely be continued in the Bank. The Bank question was now a party question, and men voted on it according to party, not according to evidence. Whatever force might be attributed to any of the facts brought out by Polk in the minority report, it does not appear that anybody in Congress really thought that the Bank was insolvent and the deposits in danger. Polk himself did not propose to withdraw the deposits. He wanted to avoid any positive action for the time being, and have a still more searching investigation. "Nothing short of a personal, impartial, and thorough examination of the books and papers of the principal Bank and many of its branches can develop its policy and management, the security of its debt, and the soundness of its condition." McDuffy objected that if Congress took no action before it adjourned, Jackson would remove the deposits on the principle that silence gives consent.

Although the House of Representatives had thus answered the exhortation of the President to find out whether the deposits were safe by categorically declaring that they were, the wish and purpose to remove them was not checked in the least. On the contrary a new line of attack was opened in April by obtaining a report from the government directors of the Bank. Three of them complained that they were excluded from a knowledge of what was being done. They declared that the Exchange Committee had taken control of the Bank, and they reported especially large loans to Gales and Seaton. In August, four of them joined in a second report in which further stress was laid on the large expenditures for printing, that is, for what the antiBank men construed as corrupt efforts to win political influence. They considered the inference direct that the public money, which was, perhaps, what was being used for this purpose, should be removed from the Bank. Everything which touches upon the history of the Exchange Committee demands our attention on account of the great part which that organization played in the final catastrophe of the Bank. The government directors, in the former of the above reports, say that the directors had condemned this arrangement, and that, by votes of October 31, 1823, and February 20, 1830, they had forbidden the branches to make use of it.

The question naturally presents itself: who were the prime movers in the desperate and useless enterprise of the removal? William B. Lewis said that he did not know who first proposed the removal of the deposits, but that it began to be talked about in the inner administration circles soon after Jackson's second election. In the cabinet, McLane and Cass were so earnestly opposed to the project that it was feared that they would resign.