them in legal money." The amount which the Bank now had locked up in Savannah was over $400,000.[1]
The Bank and the local banks reached a concordat in January, 1821, the latter agreeing to pay interest on all over a maximum balance, but their notes still continued to accumulate in the Bank. In the followihg summer, the Planters' Bank broke the arrangement, and again entered into open hostility with the Bank. In a letter to Crawford, the president says: "Aided by such an immense capital, and having the additional weapon of the federal revenue, it is impossible to maintain intercourse with such an institution." "A feeling of dissatisfaction or irritation against the government never existed in the banks or in this community, until this mammoth came here to destroy our very substance." "You will perceive readily that our main object is to prevail on the Bank of the United States to refuse our paper and to deal on their own. While they decline issuing their own bills, and none comparatively of the public revenue is expended in this quarter, it is impossible for the State banks located in the same place with it to exist."[2] To this Crawford replied that if the local notes were not received by the Bank, people who had duties to pay would demand specie of the banks, with the same result. "Experience has shown that so long as the notes of the Bank of the United States and its offices are everywhere received in payment to the government, they will circulate only where the principal part of the revenue is disbursed." He explained that the drain of specie from Georgia to the North and East was "in no degree ascribable to the Bank. It is the result of the operations of the government." He tried not to be drawn into the controversy, but put the Planters' Bank entirely in the wrong.[3] In a later letter the president of that Bank regretted that the discretion of the Treasury could not have been "exercised in behalf of the community that has suffered so much as this under the lash of the United States Bank." "Congress can hardly consent to see the southern States torn to pieces and rendered disaffected towards the federal government, which would seem to be the inevitable consequence of the present measures of the United States Bank, which it is enabled to pursue only by the means derived from the collection of the revenue."[4]
During this controversy, the Georgians had made constant threats that they would invoke the interference of their own Legislature.
A Committee on Banks made a report to the Senate of Georgia, November 30, 1821,[5] in which they say that Georgia has aimed to furnish herself with a currency by her own banks, and at the same time to get an investment for her State funds. She has been frustrated in this by the intrusion. of the Bank of the United States which long refused to issue notes. It got posession of the notes of the State banks and by demanding specie for them, drained away specie. The Committee advises against any collision, but recommends that no notes presented by anybody with a demand for
