remiah
Mason, an old Federalist, who was president of the Branch Bank at
Portsmouth. Their charges were various, but they and others gave Jackson
the idea that the Branch Bank in New Hampshire had used its power to
oppose his friends and to help the Adams men. Biddle was called on to
investigate. He did so, and defended Mason against all the charges. A
long correspondence ensued, and Biddle went from Philadelphia, where the
head Bank was, and made a visit to Portsmouth. His letters to the
Secretary of the Treasury were courteous, well written, but also
defiant. It was the Jackson men, he said, who were trying to draw the
Bank into politics, and the Bank had constantly refused to go into
politics in any way. He made out a very good case indeed, but the longer
the correspondence lasted the stronger grew Jackson's conviction that
the Bank was in politics, that it was fighting him, that it was corrupt,
that it was dangerous to the liberties of the plain people who had sent
him to the White House. Congress took up the matter, and committees of
both Houses reported in favor of the Bank. The Supreme Court had already
decided that the act establishing it was constitutional.

Clay boldly determined to force the fighting both on the tariff and on
the Bank. The great measures of the Congress of 1831-2 were a new tariff
law and a new Bank charter. The public debt was now nearly extinguished,
and it was clearly advisable to reduce the revenue; but Clay and his
followers made the reductions almost entirely on articles not produced
in America, and so, in defiance of the nullifiers, made the new tariff
as protective as the old. Jackson had gradually given up most of his
protection ideas, and so the tariff did not please him. Clay, in fact,
declared that for his "American system," as he called it, "he would defy
the South, the President, and the Devil." Jackson was further defied by
the Senate when it refused to confirm the nomination of Van Buren to be
minister to Great Britain. The struggle raged through the whole session.
Benton sturdily defended the President; Clay, Webster, and Calhoun were
all, in one way or another, against him. It was a great session for the
orators, and so far as Congress was concerned Clay had his way. But
Lewis and Kendall were not idle; they were working not on Congress but
on the people. In May, the Democrats nominated Jackson for President and
Van Buren for Vice-President. In July, Congress finished its wor