who fought for
"freedom."

While the President was seeking to reform the national currency and
restrain the imperialistic tendencies of his countrymen, one great
State, New York, under the leadership of Silas Wright, was showing the
country what could be done locally to make banking safe. In 1829 a law
was enacted compelling every newly chartered bank to contribute a
certain percentage of its income to a common safety fund. The disasters
of 1837 showed these reserves to be too small, and in 1839 every bank in
the State was required to deposit with the Treasury securities enough to
protect all notes to be put into circulation. At the same time any group
of capitalists who would conform to the law might open a bank without
let or hindrance, which had the effect of putting financial operations
on simple business principles, removing the political motive which had
wrought so much damage to innocent depositors. During the next decade
the New York example had great influence, and Massachusetts, Maryland,
South Carolina, and other older States instituted safe and conservative
banking systems.

But while these communities learned slowly the lesson of careful
finance, Michigan, Mississippi, and other States, East and West, hard
pressed by their circumstances and the overwhelming debts which they
piled up till about 1840, repudiated or failed to meet their
obligations. And when suits were brought by domestic or foreign
creditors, state legislatures simply declined to pay and claimed
immunity from federal pressure under the Eleventh Amendment to the
National Constitution. Nor were the resources of the Western communities
equal to the discharge of their onerous burdens. To have attempted to
force upon the people the payment of the debts their leaders had fixed
upon them would have caused wholesale migrations to Wisconsin, Iowa, and
Texas. The people of the West, of the country as a whole, perhaps, were
still in the position of frontiersmen as compared to Europeans. They
needed all the time more capital than they could repay in many years,
and they were not as yet disciplined to the point of bearing heavy
burdens.

With so much distress in the country and with the Administration
overburdened with problems, Clay, Adams, and Webster organized the
opposition in Congress and throughout the country very much as Van
Buren, Calhoun, and Jackson had done in 1826-28. The President, they
said, was no friend of the people; he had not so m