Page:A History of Banking in the United States.djvu/242

 between him and the banks which was then published, it is plain that the chief argument which was used to support an application for a share of the deposits or other favor was political; above all, devotion to Jackson and hatred of the Bank of the United States.

Taney assumed that the Bank of the United States would make a spiteful attempt to injure the deposit banks by calling on them to pay balances promptly. He therefore placed some large drafts on the Bank of the United States in the hands of officers of the deposit banks at New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, so that they might offset any such malicious demand. Otherwise the drafts were not to be used. The Bank took no steps which afforded even a pretext for using these drafts, but the president of the Union Bank of Maryland cashed one of them for one hundred thousand dollars a few days after he got it, and used the money in stock speculations. For fear of scandal this act was passed over by the Executive, but it led to an investigation by Congress. Taney was a stockholder in the Union Bank. The Manhattan Company also used one of these drafts for five hundred thousand dollars. Here, then, at the very outset, experience was made of the reliance which could be placed on the "pet banks" in confidential dealings with them.

Taney claimed the right to give these transfer drafts, by way of arbitration between the banks, by virtue of the precedent set by Crawford. Here we have a full-fledged administrative abuse, the steps of whose growth we have noticed all the way down from its beginning by Alexander Hamilton.

By a resolution of the House of Representatives of Pennsylvania, December 20, 1833, the Committee on Ways and Means were directed "to inquire how far the public interests might be promoted by the continuation of the operations of the Bank of the United States under a charter from this Commonwealth, should its present charter not be renewed by the United States." In their report on this resolution the Committee expressed the opinion that the Bank, under a State charter, would speedily run down into a mere State bank, as the Bank of North America had done. They thought that it was essential to a national bank that it should be under the federal courts, which a State bank would not be; that it should be charged with the collection of the revenue, because otherwise it could not regulate the local banks; and that it should have branches. While they did not report against the proposal, they gave the weight of argument against it.

The session of 1833 and 1834 was the most excited that took place before the civil war. Of course the President's message and the report of the Secretary of the Treasury must justify what had been done. The President threw the justification of it chiefly on the report of the government directors of the Bank, which showed, as he said, that the Bank had been turned into an electioneering engine. This referred to the documents which it had distributed