This Day in Presidential History (Clay Introduces Censure Resolutions Against Jackson)

December 26, 1833—The stakes in Andrew Jackson’s struggle against the Second Bank of the United States escalated, as Senator Henry Clay, a longtime enemy of the President, introduced two resolutions censuring him for his conduct in the affair. The occasion marked the first—and even until today, the only—occasion in which Congress has censured a Chief Executive for his conduct while in office.

“I was born for a storm and a calm does not suit me,” Jackson once told a visitor, and seldom did he prove it more than in the controversy over the bank—a private enterprise in which the U.S. government held stock.

The bank had been re-chartered in 1816 after its temporary absence had severely handicapped the nation during the War of 1812. Since then, it had been instrumental in keeping the nation on an even financial keel.

The problem with the bank was twofold: 1) As operated by its head, Nicholas Biddle, a Philadelphia aristocrat, the bank had quickly become deeply elitist; and 2) Biddle, a child genius who had attended the University of Pennsylvania at age 10, was too clever by half, and had offered financial inducements to numerous lawmakers on Capitol Hill to retain support. As Arthur M. Schlesinger noted in The Age of Jackson: “It enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the currency and practically complete control over credit and the price level.”

Having run into problems with banks early in his career because of speculation issues, Jackson was predisposed anyway against powerful financial interests. He found ready political support for his position among debtor interests of the West, local banking interests of the East who resented Biddle’s heavy-handed domination, Eastern workingmen and traditional Jeffersonians. The bank’s bid to have its charter renewed brought Jackson into battle.

Aligned against him in the Senate were “The Great Triumvirate”—Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun. Like just about every Senator before or since—and certainly including the two nominees in this past year’s Presidential race—they took a look at the incumbent and swore that they could do a better job. But each had his own reasons for supporting the bank and/or opposing Jackson.

Let’s deal with Calhoun first. Coincidentally—and uncomfortably for the South Carolinian—that would have been the preference of Jackson, too, who had gone from having him as a running mate to expressing a desire to hang him from the nearest tree. The President did not appreciate his advocacy of nullification, which Jackson correctly believed to be a threat to the Union. Additionally, in the Peggy Eaton affair, Calhoun, by siding with his wife and other spouses of Cabinet members, made himself persona non grata with a President who had resolved to defend the honor of a woman he believed had been sullied, like his beloved, deceased wife Rachel, with baseless accusations of sexual misconduct. Isolated, Calhoun had become the first and (aside from Spiro Agnew) only Vice President in our nation’s history to resign.

Like Calhoun, Webster very much wanted to become President; unlike him, the Massachusetts senator was one of the people who had accepted retainers from Biddle. He believed firmly in a strong national government, but he was still not above reminding Biddle that if he wanted his continued eloquent support, he’d better make sure he was paid, and promptly.

But the prime mover in the censure resolution was Clay, seen by Jackson in the 1824 Presidential election as the man who, through a “corrupt bargain” with John Quincy Adams, had become Secretary of State—unlike now, a steppingstone to the Presidency—by throwing his support in the House of Representatives to the New Englander. The two men also courted the same electoral base in the West. Clay, in turn, despised Jackson as a “military chieftain.”

Jackson’s decision to withdraw the government’s deposits from the Bank—and even to accept to replace one Secretary of the Treasury, William Duane, with a more compliant man, Roger B. Taney—led the opposing party, the Whigs, to ponder their options. They couldn’t do anything in the House of Republicans, still under the control of Democrats. But the Senate, in which they had a majority, afforded possibilities.

Clay’s speech in support of censuring the President was so vitriolic that even Adams (now distinguishing himself in the House of Representatives) thought Clay had pushed it too far (though Adams believed that his former opponent and successor in the Oval Office had it coming).

The resolution passed, but by the end of his second term the President’s friend and ally in the Senate, Thomas Hart Benton, was finally able to have it expunged from the Senate records (a prospect that did not at all please Jackson).

In his colorful history Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989, Michael Beschloss included a chapter on the bank fight. While Jackson did defeat an institution growing increasingly corrupt, he left no comparable structure once he destroyed it. Partly as a result, the nation had no major banking institution to help it through bad economic times when the charter was allowed to lapse. The U.S. had to endure several panics, occurring every 20 years or so, before the Federal Reserve System was created in the Progressive Era under Woodrow Wilson.

The bank war figured in Presidential history in other ways through the years. In his autobiography, Theodore Roosevelt hailed the "Jackson-Lincoln theory of the Presidency" that promoted strong executive action. FDR regarded the bank fight as an early example of how the President as tribune of the people could take on what he termed "economic royalists."

More ominously, Jackson's defiance of Clay's request for communications with his Cabinet on the Bank was the opening salvo in the ongoing Presidential-Congressional struggle over executive privilege.

The censure option also came up in the struggle to impeach Bill Clinton in 1998. While Jackson had claimed that the censure resolution named offenses that were impeachable and that, thus, the Senate had no constitutional place in resorting to censure, Democrats during the Clinton impeachment trial brought out a censure as an alternative. After Clinton survived the impeachment vote, his party brought forward a censure resolution, which was defeated by Republicans on a nearly straight-line party vote..