Page:A History of Banking in the United States.djvu/250

 be regarded as only an appropriation of a bonus which was exacted. In any case, the appropriation of it to some purpose which some people had very much at heart was intended to help the bill through. Remission of taxes was the most effective lever of this kind. The Bank was chartered for thirty years. It was to pay a bonus of two and a half million dollars; pay a hundred thousand dollars per year for twenty years for schools; loan the State not over a million dollars a year, in temporary loans at four per cent., and six million dollars on State bonds, payable in at four per cent., and subscribe six hundred and forty thousand dollars to railroads and turnpikes. The lowest note was to be $10, and elaborate rules which the law of the State already contained for enabling note-holders to enforce a remedy for non-redemption were here repeated. Personal taxes were repealed by other sections of the bill, and $1,368,147 were appropriated out of the Bank bonus for various canals and turnpikes. Evidently all the hobbies and local schemes in the State clustered around this big carcass and fought with one another for slices of it. The charter passed the Senate 19 to 12, and the House 57 to 30.

A loud outcry was at once raised that this bill could only have been passed by corruption, because of the democratic majority in the Senate. A member of the House who had made such a statement was, after an investigation, called to the bar of the House and reprimanded for "an attempt to mislead public sentiment at the expense of the character and reputation of the Legislature of the Commonwealth." At the next session the Legislature ordered an investigation of the method by which the United States Bank had obtained its State charter. The majority of the committee reported denying that the letter which had been written to Biddle was intended as an application to him on behalf of the State. A particular question had arisen already with regard to the continued issue of the notes of the old Bank. This the minority of the committee justified. As to the alleged corruption, nothing was discovered.

There was a mysterious item of $400,000 in the accounts at about this date which is often referred to. The only approximate explanation is in the second report of the Committee of 1841. On February 29, 1836, there were in the teller's drawer Biddle's receipts for money received on cashier's checks to the amount of that sum. They were taken out. At the same time a lot of notes of the old Bank were burned, including ten post-notes of $40,000 each, which had never been issued. One of these items was made to cover the other. The clerk, however, later discovered that the account of notes showed more burned than issued. June 27, 1840, the account was balanced by charging $400,000 to the contingent fund as losses.

It was common tea-table gossip in Philadelphia that the State charter was obtained by bribery.

Jackson's chief charge against the Bank at last was that it spent large