the purpose in view, he certainly entrapped Biddie as if he had known the deepest weaknesses of the latter's character. After Biddle's troubles came, somebody said that he should never have been anything but a professor of belles lettres. He wrote with great facility and good literary skill, but his great weakness was to write too much. In his first reply to Ingham he wrote a long letter, without apparently imagining that he had to deal with any active hostility, opening points at which his enemies could attack him. He said that Mason had been appointed to a vacancy caused by the resignation, not by the removal, of his predecessor; that the salary of the position had not been increased for Mason; that after Mason's appointment Webster had been asked to persuade him to accept. He quoted a letter from Woodbury to himself in July in which Woodbury said that Mason was as unpopular with one party as the other, from which Biddle inferred, no doubt correctly, that Mason, as banker, had done his duty by the Bank without regard to politics. Biddle further explained that the branch had previously not been well managed and that Mason had been appointed as a competent banker and lawyer to bring about necessary reforms. It is easy to see that Mason, in this attempt to reform the bank, had to act in a manner which, in those days, was considered severe, and that he disappointed those who, on account of political sympathy, expected favors but did not get them.
Biddle had thus played directly into the hands of his enemies in his first letter. "I chose," says Ingham, "rather than leave suspicion to interpret my silence, to make a frank avowal of the principles which, it appeared to me, ought to regulate the actions of the Bank." Every one of the suggestions which he put in stung Biddle to controversy. The latter even was compelled to write a second letter, in which he recurred more fully to the point about politics, declaring that the bank had nothing to do with politics; that people were all the time trying to draw it into politics; but that it always resisted.
To this Ingham replied, July 23, insisting that there must be grounds of complaint and that exemption from party preference was impossible. He added that he represented the views of the administration. Ingham says that this letter unfortunately fell into the hands of General Cadwallader, the acting president, who, instead of strengthening the case of the Bank by furnishing Ingham with some reply by which he could silence its enemies, made it weaker by still more positive asseverations that the Bank had never meddled with politics, which, says Ingham, was far beyond what he could know, in view of the number of branches and officers scattered all over the country, while Ingham supposed that he had positive knowledge that at least one such case had occurred.
In the midst of this correspondence, in August, the Secretary of War ordered the pension agency transferred from the Portsmouth branch to the bank at Concord, of which Isaac Hill had been president. The parent Bank forbade the branch to comply with this order on the ground that it was illegal. The order was revoked.
