complaint and ignorant criticism successfully refuted, except when we touch the branch drafts. If we sum up all the points made by the majority of the Committee, they appear to maintain that the Bank ought to lend the public deposits liberally, and draw them in promptly, when needed, in order to pay the public debt, yet refuse no accommodation (especially to any one who was embarrassed), not sell its public stocks, not increase its circulation, not draw in its loans, not part with its specie, not draw on the debtor branches in the West, not press the debtor local banks, and not contract any temporary loan. The student of the evidence and reports of 1832, if he believes the Bank's statements in the evidence, will say that it was triumphantly vindicated. Such was the verdict of the reading and thinking public of the day, almost without exception, if persons with a political bias are left out of account. The verdict of the investing public was unanimous and enthusiastic. If this was all that malevolence, armed with the most powerful means of attack, could bring out to the injury of the Bank, it was exactly the investment which they were all seeking. They fixed their confidence on it with a tenacity which in the end became one of the most notable facts in the history of credit; for neither incidental evidence, which should have awakened their alarm, nor positive events, which should have given them warning, availed to do so.
We are forced to distrust the apparent result of the investigation of 1832, because of the light which is thrown back upon it by the history of the last years of the Bank. The very things which it was charged with doing in 1832, and of which it seemed to be acquitted, were the things which it did do, between 1836 and 1840, and which produced its ruin. These were the things mentioned under the second charge, involving Whitney's veracity, and the fourteenth charge, which the bank denied. Was it not guilty on these points in 1832, and did it not successfully conceal the facts?
Furthermore we know that in the matter of the three per cents Biddle was guilty of a plausible perversion of the truth. He wanted to defer the payment for the sake of the Bank, and for no other reason, and he had recourse to his masterly skill in decking out plausible pretexts in fine rhetoric, in order to make it appear that the Bank was acting only from benevolence to the merchants and loyalty to the government. The position in which the Bank found itself was a result of the working of the branch drafts. Their effect was just beginning to tell seriously, and it was cumulative in a high ratio.
We have already seen that there was a great movement of free capital in the form of specie to this country in 1830,[1] and that in that and the following year the United States paid its stock note in the capital of the Bank. Capital was easy to borrow until October, when a certain stringency set in. The branch drafts were transferring the capital of the Bank to the western branches, and locking it up there in accommodation paper indefinitely
- ↑ See page 181.
