Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [457]
Since his accession to power in 1823, Nicholas Biddle, the bank’s brilliant and wellborn president, had skillfully forged a reliable national currency, sustained an ample but controlled growth of credit, and provided some security against economic fluctuations by acting as lender of last resort. These accomplishments—and the prosperity associated with them—had won him many supporters.
They had also won him enemies. Westerners and southerners seeking rapid development disliked his tight control over credit, and President Andrew Jackson saw in Biddie’s bank a Money Power that menaced the republic. In 1829, though the bank’s federal charter still had seven years to run, Jackson announced his preference for having a publicly owned and treasury-operated institution at the helm of the country’s finances. New York City’s leading Tammany politicians quickly concurred, as did upstate Democrats led by Martin Van Buren.
Many Wall Street financiers were also vexed by the Philadelphia institution. They bristled at what James Hamilton (Alexander’s son) called its ability “to exercise a dangerous power over the monied and mercantile operations of the great city of New York.” Wall Streeters also resented competition from the BUS, which had a branch in Manhattan itself. It galled them, too, that as the federal government’s official depository, its coffers and profits were swelled by customs revenues extracted from New York merchants. A lot of money was at stake. In 1828 New York custom duties paid all federal expenses apart from interest on the debt, and receipts were rapidly increasing. The Custom House staff was growing rapidly, and in 1834 the U.S. government would break ground for a grand Greek Revival headquarters, designed by Town and Davis at Nassau and Wall (today’s Federal Hall). Leading bankers, it was reported to Jackson, were unhappy at “the wrong done to New York in depriving her of her natural advantages by the legislation of Congress, which undertook to make Philadelphia the financial centre of the Union.”
Nevertheless, the Bank of the United States had powerful supporters in New York City—bankers, politicians, and conservative businessmen who had developed ties to Biddle’s operation because it was an inescapable fact of financial life, and who applauded Biddle’s demonstrated wizardry at stabilizing national money markets. Some key journalists backed Biddle too, in part because he lucratively backed them. After receiving a “loan” from Biddle, James Watson Webb of the Jacksonian flagship Courier and Enquirer took his paper into the camp of those supporting the bank. Tammany Hall denounced Webb as a traitor, and William Leggett, an assistant editor of the Democratic Evening Post, approached him on Wall Street, saying, “Colonel Webb, you are a coward and a scoundrel, and I spit upon you.” They exchanged blows until a crowd pulled them apart, but not before Leggett scored with another gob. Political editors were a truculent breed. Leggett’s boss, William Cullen Bryant, took a cowskin whip to William Leete Stone of the Commercial Advertiser in 1831, who riposted with a sword cane, a thrust Bryant parried with his whip until onlookers broke them apart. In 1836 James Watson Webb would assault James Gordon Bennet in the middle of Wall Street.
By 1831 Jackson’s various opponents had coalesced into a new political party, the National Republicans, which nominated Henry Clay to run against the president in 1832. Clay got Biddle to apply for an early recharter, which Congress granted, only to have the president veto it. In New York, Tammany firmly supported the veto and held an enormous antibank rally on Jackson’s behalf. George Henry Evans and former members of the Workingmen’s Party supported the president