passed the Senate June 11, 1832, by 28 to 20, and the House July 3, by 109 to 76. It looked like a great victory; it was only the prelude to a crushing defeat.
If Jackson had ever been inclined to drop his attack on the bank, that inclination vanished the moment the National Republican Convention made the bank question an issue in the presidential canvass. From that hour he saw in the bank his personal enemy — that is to say, an enemy of the country, whose destruction was one of the duties he had to perform. His combativeness became aroused to its highest energy. But there was his Cabinet divided, the Secretary of the Treasury having in his official report made an elaborate argument in favor of the bank; there was his party divided, some of its leading men in and out of Congress being warm friends of the bank; there was his faithful Pennsylvania, the seat of the bank, and more than any other state under its influence, likely to be turned away from him by that influence; there was Congress, with Democratic majorities in both houses, yet both houses having emphatically declared for rechartering the bank. Could he, in the face of these facts, continue the fight? He did not hesitate a moment. The bill to renew the bank charter, as passed by both houses, was presented to him on July 4, 1832, and on July 10 came his veto.
As a legal, financial, and historical argument, that veto presented many vulnerable points; but
