Ост. 14, 1837.] Accounts of the Deposite Banks. [H. of R. so voted, as he declared at the time, for the express purpose of moving a reconsideration of the vote, which he immediately did. The real vote, therefore, was a tie, 118 to 118; and if the bill was to be carried at all, it could only be by the casting vote of the Speaker. The chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means did not venture upon that experiment. He voted against the reconsideration himself, but he suffered it to be carried by his friends. My amendment, which was nothing more than a pledge that the bill, as amended by the gentleman from South Carolina, should be executed in good faith, he still refused to accept. Ninety-four members of the House voted for my amendment. I cannot vouch that every one of them would have voted for the bill if the amendment had been adopted, but I would have voted for it myself. I have reason to believe that a majorlty, if not all, of my colleagues would have voted for it, and I have no doubt that sixy or more affirmative votes would have been for the passage of the bill, beyond the meager majority of twelve, which was secured only by accepting, as a forlorn hope, the previously reject-off from the New York deposite banks the balances due by ed amendment of the gentleman from South Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I impeach the sincerity of no man upon this floor. But when I saw the chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means cling so tenaciously to that bill as it came from the Senate; when I saw him, at the last gasp, permit the amendment of the gentleman from South Carolina to be carried against his own vote, to save the life of the bill; and when I saw him still inflexibly excluding my amendment, and spurn a majority of four-fifths of the House on the passage of a bill so immensely important to the administration as that was, it was impossible for me to divert my own mind from the inquiry why it was that so feeble a majority, purchased by so humiliating a concession as had been extorted by the gentleman from South Carolina, should have been preferred to an almost unanimous vote, obtained by the mere mite of additional concession, yielded by a pledge of faith that the promise of that amendment should be performed; and I could account for this prefer ence no otherwise than by the belief that it is still not intended that the fourth instalment shall ever be paid; that the promise to pay it on the 1st of January, 1839, is a deception, and that the amendment of the gentleman from South Carolina will fare no better than the 13th and 14th sections of the deposite law of June 23, 1836. How far this apprehension is prophetic, we shall see in the course of the ensuing year; and I now predict that the present postponement will be succeeded by another. That, as the 1st of January, 1839, shall approach, new discoveries will be made of the ragged nakedness of the Treasury; and then the argument, now merely fictitious, may be urged in sad reality, that the instalment cannot be paid without a new tax upon the people. If the money now in the defaulting deposite banks should be collected by the Government, and applied to other purposes; to be sure, in that case, the fourth instalment cannot be paid without taxing anew the people to raise the money; and that is precisely the reason why I anxiously wished to appropriate the money while it was there. Was it the reason why the appropriation was so stubbornly refused by the chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means? Sir, we have been told, over and over, that the late deposite banks in Louisiana, in Alabama, in Mississippi, in Ohio, in Kentucky, in Indiana, are all sound, all solvent, all able and willing to pay every dollar of their debt, give them but reasonable time. Then the money is there. The balances in those States due from those banks is amply sufficient, and more than sufficient, to pay the fourth instalment due to themselves, and that due to all the other States. Let us now resume the comparison in this tabular statement between the amount which by law, that is, by the act of 23d June, 1836, should have been deposited in each of the several States, and the amount which was actually deVOL. XIV.-106 posited in the same States at the commencement of the present session of Congress and on the 4th of October, one month later. We have gone through the New England States, and have there found the deposites de jure more than a million and a half of dollars; the deposites de facto less than a tenth of that sum-less than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. We next come to New York—the Empire State; her proportion of the fourth instalment would have been one million three hundred and thirty-eight thousand one hundred and seventy-three dollars fifty-seven cents. The sum which her banks actually had in deposite at the commencement of the session was one million three hundred and eighty-six thousand nine hundred and nineteen dollars and eighty-two cents. There, sir, was something like a set-off; no injustice was done to the great State of New York. The deposite of fact was about fifty thousand dollars more than the deposite of the law. But the Secretary of the Treasury has been most industriously occupied during the whole month of September, in drawing them. By the last returns of the Treasurer's accounts, it appears that on the fourth of October there remained of balances due from all the deposite banks of the State of New York only eight hundred and three thousand five hundred and seventy dollars and seventy cents: nearly six hundred thousand dollars has been drawn from them in the month of September. And, further, I have seen a series of resolutions very recently adopted by a highly respectable and numerous assembly of citizens of that city, in one of which it is asserted that the banks of that State have paid off almost the whole of the balances due by them. Sir, our compassion has been appealed to in behalf of these Southwestern banks. We have been told it would be cruel to exact payment from those banks; that it would be an ex post facto law to charge them with interest for the public moneys which they have received in deposite, and refuse to pay at the requisition of the Treasury Department; that they cannot themselves pay without exacting payment from their debtors; and that indulgence must be granted to them, that they may be enabled to grant indulgence to the people. Sir, how stands this argument, in its application to the banks and people of the North? They, too, were and are indebted to their banks. Were they not in need of indulgence as much as the people of Louisiana, of Mississippi, of Alabama, of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and Michigan? But what has the Secretary of the Treasury been doing with them? Has he not been draining them almost to their last dollar, as long as he could claim a dollar of balance from them? And have they not been obliged to put the screws upon their debtors, that they might be enabled to pay the balances due by them, at the requisition of the Secretary of the Treasury? Sir, the people of the North have endured, they are now enduring, that very cruelty and oppression which you are told the people of the Southwest and the West cannot bear. You are straining from them their last cent to pay their balances, while at the same time you have wrested from them their fourth instalment, which your Secretary of the Treasury has transferred to the State banks of the Southwest and the West, there to be locked up for nine, fifteen, and twenty-one months, without payment of interest, because it would be a cruel cx post facto law to call upon them for any consideration for the use of the money. Let us pass over the State of New Jersey-no longer a doubtful State-and come to the Keystone State of Pennsylvania. The portion of the instalment which she ought on the first of this month to have received was nine bundred and fifty-five thousand eight hundred and thirty-eight dollars and twenty-six cents. The sum actually deposited in all her deposite banks, at the commencement of the session, was $255,445 92; and, on the 4th of this month, it had been reduced to $131,857 17. Eight hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars is the tribute of Pennsylvania to the State banks of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, to promote the multiplication of the blessings of slavery and the cultivation of sugar and cotton. Great and glorious as have been the exertions and sacrifices of the State of Pennsylvania in the cause of internal improvement, and in that career she has not been surpassed by any State in the Union, not even by the Empire State, yet, if I understand the character of her hardy yeomanry aright, not even their partiality to the democracy of numbers will reconcile them to the application of her property to the multiplication of slaves and slavery, for the cultivation of sugar and cotton, by abstracting it from the appropriations of her own Legislature to internal improvements within her own domain, rather more congenial to the principles of her heraldic motto-Virtue, Liberty, and Independence. Maryland! Your own State, Mr. Chairman. The sum which on the first of this month she was entitled to receive was $318,619 75. The sum which her deposite banks held in deposite at the commencement of the session was $280,198 25; which, on the 4th of this month, was reduced to $212,102 58. Your State, Mr. Chairman, has been marvellously well treated, for one of the old thirteen. Her contribution to the Southwestern State banks is not much more than 106,000 dollars. But ah! Virginia! Old Virginia! The Ancient Dominion! Beware, Mr. Financier of the Treasury, how you tread upon her toes! She has no fancy for a divorce of bank and State. Her State banks are bone of her bone, and flesh of her flesh; and when she releases them from the payment of their debts, she only releases herself from the performance of her own engagements. Deal tenderly with her, Mr. Secretary, or, like Hannibal, she will carry the war into Africa. Sir, on the 1st of this month, the State of Virginia was, by the deposite act of 23d June, 1836, entitled to receive seven hundred and thirty-two thousand eight hundred and nine dollars and thirty-three cents. At the commencement of the present session, the whole amount of balances due from her deposite banks to the Treasury of the United States was 403, 136 dollars and 97 cents. This was not enough, sir; and, accordingly, on the 4th of this month, the balance due from her deposite banks was 739,302 dollars and 19 cents, not quite seven thousand dollars more than she was entitled to receive for the fourth instalment. She loses nothing by the postponement, and this bill gives her the use of the money for a term at least equivalent to the loss by the delay of the postponement to the 1st of January, 1839. Virginia, therefore, is propitiated to secure the suffrage of her members in Congress for the passage of both the bills-the postponement bill and this bill; and you find most of them voting accordingly. By what art magic it has happened that, while the balances of all the other old thirteen but one were, between the commencement of the session and the 4th of October, so severely reduced, hers were so largely increased as to be nearly doubled, I know not, and am only left to conjecture. My table is taken from the returns of the Treasurer's accounts, communicated to this House by the Secretary of the Treasury himself. I merely state the facts as I find them. But North Carolina has not been so favored. Her portion of the fourth instalment, payable on the 1st of this month, was 477,919 dollars and 13 cents. The balance due from her one solitary deposite bank at the commencement of the session, was 146,030 dollars and 12 cents, which, on the 4th of this month, was reduced to 64,638 dollars and 61 cents. The loss of Virginia, by these two bills-these Siamese twins-is nothing. The loss of North Carolina, like that of the six New England States, is almost total. South Carolina and Georgia are not much better treated, though with this difference: the sum that each of them [Oct. 14, 1837. was entitled to receive was the same, three hundred and fifty thousand four hundred and seventy-four dollars and three cents. The balances due from the South Carolina ex-deposite banks, at the commencement of the session, were one hundred and eleven thousand five hundred and ninety dollars and one cent; those from the banks of Georgia were one hundred and seventy-two thousand two hundred and sixty-nine dollars and sixty-nine cents. On the 4th of this month the balances of South Carolina had increased to one hundred and twenty-five thousand four hundred and thirty-three dollars and eighty nine cents, while those of Georgia had diminished to one hundred and nineteen thousand seven hundred and six dollars and fortyone cents. The banks of South Carolina, like those of Virginia, have enjoyed the special privilege of increasing their balances of debt, while all the rest of the old thirteen have been inexorably held to contract theirs. The increase of the South Carolina balances is not large. It discloses only a relaxation of the rigor of exactions, and was, happily, simultaneous with a conciliatory settlement of old political balances here at the seat of Government, which, to those who look a good deal ahead, has furnished the materials for much speculative animadversion. And now, sir, that we have seen how, by the postponement, which was intended to have been, and still threatens to be, the repeal of the fourth instalment, the old thirteen States have been, with the single exception of Virginia, stripped of the spoils of the public Treasury which had been allotted to them-now that we have seen how, with the same exception of Virginia, they have been, during the month of September, fleeced by Treasury drafts, like sheep in the hands of the shearer, of their remaining balances, let us look beyond the borders of the old thirteen, to that teeming mother of nations, the valley of the Mississippi, and that storehouse of embyro republics bordering on our Mediterranean seas-the Northern lakes. We be gin with the State of Alabama, geographically the first, and entitled, further, to the distinction, inasmuch as her deposite bank is wholly the property of the State, and the debts of the bank are the debts of the State. The portion of the fourth instalment payable on the first of this month to her was, as I have already stated, two hundred and twenty-three thousand twenty-eight dollars and ninetytwo cents, the same with that of the States of New Hampshire and of Vermont. But the sum which her bank at Mobile had in actual deposite, at the commencement of the present session, was one million and twenty thousand eight hundred and fifty-six dollars and twenty-six cents; and, on the 4th of this month, it was still nine hundred and six thousand three hundred and seventy-nine dollars and twenty-three cents. The portion of the State of Mississippi of the fourth instalment was one hundred and twenty-seven thousand four hundred and forty-five dollars and ten cents, the same as that of Rhode Island. The balances due from her banks, at the opening of the session, were one million seven hundred and forty-four thousand three hundred and seventy-three dollars and seventy-one cents; and, on the 4th of this month, they were still one million six hundred and fifty-six thousand three hundred and sixty-seven dollars and thirty-three cents. The sum to which the State of Louisiana was entitled for the fourth instalment was one hundred and fifty-nine thousand three hundred and six dollars and thirty-seven cents. The debt of her banks, at the commencement of the session, was one million four hundred and fifty thousand and twenty-three dollars and three cents, and, on the 4th of October, nine hundred and eighteen thousand seven hundred and forty-nine dollars and three cents. And so it was with all the Southwestern and Western States, excepting Arkansas, which, having no deposite banks, could have no debt; and excepting Illinois, for what reason I know not, unless it was to secure the fidelity of Missouri at her expense. The share of Missouri of [H. OF R. of this month it was within a few hundreds of the same, the fourth instalment would have been one hundred and But, lastly, Michigan is a prodigious favorite. Kentucky and Tennessee were entitled to the same sum for the fourth instalment, $477,919 13. Neither of them loses any thing by the postponement; but their profits by the withholding of the instalment from the Northern and Eastern States are not exactly the same. Tennessee is, indeed, something of a loser by the alacrity with which the Secretary of the Treasury has withdrawn from her banks the balances due by them at the commencement of the present session. They were then $514,516 48. On the 4th of October they were reduced to $182,932 18; while those of the banks of Kentucky, which, at the commencement of the session, were $843,246 78, on the 4th October had increased to $845,053 31. What is it that has procured this remarkable good fortune? Is it that she is a daughter of the Old Dominion? Or that she has a representative supernumerary in another part of this Capitol ? Ohio, too, has shared largely in this bounty of the Secre tary of the Treasury, to one section of the Union at the expense of the other. Her portion of the fourth instalment, rightfully paid on the first of this month, would have been $669,086 78. At the commencement of the present session, her banks held in deposite, without charging to them the balance of the agency at St. Louis, (Missouri,) one million one hundred and twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine dollars and fifty cents, and on the 4th of October they still held $960,061 98-still three hundred thousand dollars beyond her rightful instalment. Can we wonder that most of her representatives have been willing to postpone it? There is, however, one consolation, which is, that we have the warrant of the members from that State that all their banks are safe, sound, solvent, and able to pay all their balances in reasonable time, though it is admitted that their bills are at a discount of from ten to fourteen per cent. Then, again, Indiana was entitled to receive for her fourth instalment $286,751 48. At the commencement of the session her banks had in deposite seven hundred and forty-three thousand one hundred and twenty-nine dollars and sixty-three cents; and on the 4th of October they were $660,723 57. As to Illinois, I think the Secretary must have mistaken her for a New England State. She has at least the same step-mother's fare. She was entitled to receive for her portion of the fourth instalment $159,306 37. The balance due from her single deposite bank was, at the commencement of the session, $39,795 90; and on the 4th When the Secretary of the Treasury, in his report to Congress, of the 3d of January last, announced the amount of the surplus in the Treasury two days before, and the proportional sums in which it was to be deposited among the several States, he intimated no inconsiderable doubt whether Michigan was entitled to any proportion of the deposite at all, and he declared that he had postponed the payment of the first instalment of her portion for the final decision of Congress upon her right. Harshly, indeed, had Michigan been treated in the terms prescribed for her admission into the Union. I had fought her battles, and maintained her rights upon this floor, till she deserted her own banners. I had raised my voice to claim justice in her behalf till she accepted, however reluctantly, an equivWhile her fate was pending, this rod was held over her head by the Secretary of the Treasury, as if her right to the deposite of her portion, among her sisters, of the public treasure, was to be purchased by her unconditional submission to the most humiliating terms prescribed by power, forgetful of right. Sir, she did submit, and accepted the proffered equivalent; that was her concern, not mine. But did that equivalent still not heal the wound that had been inflicted upon her; and is this gushing torrent of the public moneys poured out at her feet, as the gorgeous East showers upon her kings barbaric pearls and gold; was this profusion of the public funds substituted for the stingy doubt whether she was entitled to receive of the public deposites any portion whatever; was it to appease her anger, to soothe her resentments, to implore her forgiveness, to court her favor? If so, there may be some excuse for the partiality; a tarnished atonement for a purer tribute that was due. Sir, we have gone through, with a few exceptions, the detail of this comparative statement between the amount of deposites which the law had prescribed should be committed to each of the States of the Union, and the amount of deposites which the Secretary of the Treasury had actually made among the same States when the fourth instal ment should have been paid. Such is the detail; and was ever such a monstrous scene of partiality and inequality beheld among men? The late President of the United States had made it a charge against the deposite law of the 23d of June, 1836, which he himself had signed, that the principle of its apportionment was not perfectly equal. I admit that it was not so: an apportionment according to the representation of the people in this House would have been more equal as well as more favorable to the Commonwealth, a part of whose people I have the honor to represent. But the apportionment according to the number of electoral votes was more favorable to the small and to the new States, and I thought there were considerations of equity, and even of justice, to sanction this, which I trusted my constituents would approve, although it might diminish to some extent their own portion. I said so at the time on this floor, and accordingly voted for the bill. But if there was inequality in that apportionment, in the name of the Heavenly Balance, what is there in this? Look at this tabular statement; take the fifteen Northern Statesthat is, the old thirteen, with the addition of Maine and Vermont, which in the revolutionary times composed a part of them; take them on one side, and the ten new Southern and Western States on the other, and what a comparison have we! By the deposite act of 26th June, 1836, the fifteen Northern, being the thirteen original, States were, on the first day of this month, entitled to receive on deposite, $6,467,838 29 2,899,376 07 $9,367,214 99 $12,275,302 67 And on the first of October, the day when the fourth instalment was by the law required to be paid to all, how stood the account? Making in the whole [Oct. 14, 1837. Commons for a divorce of bank and State? It may be so; but it shall not be with my consent. Here are fifteen, or rather fourteen, creditor States and ten debtor States, as my friend and colleague [Mr. LINCOLN] has justly denominated them-made so by the Secretary of the Treasurymade so by an unwarrantable transfer of the funds devoted to the payment of the fourth instalment. The ten debtor States have received not only their own portion of the fourth instalment, but the whole portion of the fourteen creditor States. 3,201,002 91 And you are now passing two laws-one to withhold from the fourteen creditor States the moneys 9,071,299 76 which you had solemnly promised to deposite with them; and the other to authorize the debtor States, not only to retain the fourth instalment promised them, and which they have received, but to keep for nine, fifteen, and twenty-one months, the fourth instalment due to their creditor sister States. Such is unquestionably, such will be under these two acts, their relative condition towards each other. By the fiscal incantations of the Secretary of the Treasury, consummated by these two bills, reeking from his Department, the State of Mississippi is indebted to the six New England States in the sum of nearly one million and a half of dollars; the State of Louisiana is indebted to the State of Pennsylvania nearly eight hundred thousand dollars; the State of Alabama owes to the State of New York from six to seven hundred thousand dollars; the State of Ohio owes to the State of North Carolina three hundred thousand dollars; and the whole ten Southmost and Western States are indebted to the fourteen Northern and Atlantic States the whole of the fourth instalment, which they were by law entitled to receive. The postponement law has no operation in the ten debtor States; they have received in advance, not only their own fourth instalment, but that of all the others; and so unequivocally are the ten States indebted to the fourteen, that, if the same transactions had happened between individuals, there is no question that the fourteen could recover, by process of law, their fourth instalment, by the common action for moneys had and received to their use. $2,394,056 18 7,407,865 31 $9,801,921 49 So you see, Mr. Chairman, there were, on the 1st of October, in actual deposite with the States, upwards of four hundred and thirty thousand dollars more than enough to have paid the fourth instalment to them all-every dollarevery cent. But observe that, through the whole month of September, although the deposite act of 23d June, 1836, was in full force, the Secretary of the Treasury continued to draw from the banks of the North to the amount of more than eight hundred thousand dollars of those balances which ought to have been applied towards the payment of the fourth instalment to the States of the North; while, at the same time, he left in the hands of the Southmost and Western States nearly seven millions and a half, nearly five millions more than the fourth instalment which they were entitled to receive. And, throughout all these transactions, is it not worthy of the highest admiration to remark with what address the single State of Virginia, of the old thirteen, is the only one shielded from all inconvenience by the postponement of the instalment. The payment of the fourth instalment is not postponed for her. She has it already, and seven thousand dollars more, in her banks; and while the postponement act now puts her off, as it does her Northern sisters, till the 1st of January, 1839, to receive the instalment, this act gives her an average of precisely the same time to pay the balances already in her banks-and without interest, if the amendment of the gentlemen from Louisiana, [Mr. JOHNSON,] to the exclusion of that of the gentleman from New York, [Mr. LooмIS,] should prevail. And is it expected, Mr. Chairman, that the people of the fourteen Northern States (the voice of Virginia being hushed with a sugar plum) will put up with this prodigy of fiscal invention? Is it expected that they will hail with 'shouts of hosanna this expunging of their fourth instalment, this evanescence of their funds from their treasuries; that they are to be humbugged out of their vested rights by a howl of phrensy against Nicholas Biddle and the Pennsylvania Bank of the United States? That they are to be mystified out of their moneys and out of their senses, by a hark follow! against all banks, or a summons to Doctors' And let me now inquire why the Secretary of the Treasury has not seen fit to account for this most extraordinary state of things in his annual, or in any other report to this House. I have asked, why, armed as he was with the specie circular of 11th July, 1836, from the very passage of the deposite act-why, notified as he was from that time that he would be required to have in the fifteen original States, in deposite on the 1st of October, 1837, a sum of six millions and a half of dollars, in readiness to pay the fourth instalment to those States, he had, in fact, on that day, within those States, less than two millions and a half of dollars-four millions less than was required for the fulfilment of the promise and the redemption of the pledge of the public faith to those States by the deposite act. I have inquired why, on that same 1st of October, he had hoarded up in the ten Southernmost and Western States, armed as he had been with the specie circular, seven millions and a half of dollars, when those ten States were entitled to receive, for the fourth instalment, less than three millions of dollars? The excess hoarded up in the ten favored_States was four millions and a half. The deficit in the fourteen despoiled States was four millions. Had the whole sum rquired for the payment of the fourth instalment been deposited in the banks, where it ought to have been, the instalment would have been paid to the last dollar, and half a million of surplus would still have remained in deposite to the credit of the reasurer of the United States in the extreme South and the West. Mr. Chairman, if there be any duty more sacredly incumbent upon the Executive Government of the United States than all the rest, it is, in the execution of the laws, to render equal and impartial justice to the people of all the States. The vitals of the Union are there : legislative partialities in favor of one portion of the Union at the expense of another, if any such should creep in, will never be of long duration. The established equality of representation of the people in this House, and of the States in the other, will soon correct any deviation from the golden rule of right, upon which the obstinacy of party spirit, or the undue influence of individual talent or popularity, may occasionally infringe. The pendulum will range alternately to the right hand and to the left, but will return from short and equal distances to the centre. But if a President of the United States, in the administration of his official trust, divides the people under his care into a best and worst part of the population-if the father of the land has in the common family one set of children favorites, and another set of children castaways-if an avowed principle of ruling by and for the democracy of numbers, a part for the whole-if a jesuitical and sophistical axiom that the end of good government is the greatest good of the greatest number, without regard to the equal rights of the smallest number; I say if these transatlantic, spurious, and heretical creeds of late years are to be substituted for the primitive faith and inalienable rights of the Declaration of Independence, the days of our Union itself are numbered. The people of no one part of this nation will submit, for any length of time, to be the thralls or the dupes of another portion. What could have been the motive for this array of the three geographical divisions of the Union against each other as debtor and creditor States, with that more extraordinary exception of the State of Virginia, is yet to be, and I hope at the next session of Congress will be explained. If the demon of disunion himself had invented and inspired it as an experiment, to excite heart-burnings, ill-will, and hatred between the members of the family, he could not have contrived a device of more odious ingenuity. I had supposed that this enormous accumulation of funds in the extreme South and West had been one of the fruits of the specie circular. But then where was the specie? It was to be supposed that the circular had at least produced that; and what has become of it? It has all vanished; or what is left of it is detained in the vaults of the same deposite banks, which yet refuse to pay in specie the drafts of the Treasury Department upon them. These accumulations in the banks of the South and the West are the more unaccountable, inasmuch as on the 4th of July, 1836, an act of Congress supplementary to the deposite act was passed, expressly authorizing the Secre tary of the Treasury to make transfers from the banks in one State to the banks in another, whenever such transfers might be required in order to prevent large and inconvenient accumulations in particular places, or in order to produce a due equality and just proportion, according to the provisions of the said act. Here was a law expressly made to prevent accumulations, to restore proportions; and no small part of the Secretary's annual report in December, 1836, consists in detailing the laborious fidelity with which he had carried that supplementary act into execution. What a commentary upon that law and its execution is my tabular statement, the act for postponing the fourth instalment, and this bill now before the committee. That the transfers might have been made with perfect ease, and the balances in the Southern and Western banks reduced, even after the suspension of specie payments, I will now undertake to prove. It will be recollected that the deposites of the public moneys were removed from the Bank of the United States towards the close of the year 1833. It will also be remembered that this was precisely the time of the extinction of the national debt. Until that time there could be no considerable accumulation of public moneys in deposite, because, whenever any surplus occurred, it was immediately applied by the commissioners of the sinking fund to the [H. of R. purchase of the public debt. The irresponsible agents behind the scenes, who instigated the removal of the deposites, selected with instinctive sagacity their time. They had other passions to gratify besides their vindictive malignity. They saw the uses to be made of large and longcontinued surpluses, and that the moneys of the nation might be lavished for the conjoint and united profligacy of political plunder and private speculation. That they might not want the countenance of the administration in this laudable pursuit, the Secretary of the Treasury spurred them to it with the eagerness of a huntsman panting for his prey. "The deposites of the public money," said the Secretary of the Treasury to the president of the branch of the Bank of the State of Alabama, at Mobile, in his letter selecting that bank as one of the new depositories, "will enable you to afford increased facilities to the commercial and other classes of the community, and the Department anticipates from you the adoption of such a course respecting your accommodations, as will prove acceptable to the people and safe to the Government." The branch of the Bank of the State of Alabama, at Mobile, had been chartered in December, 1832. Its capital of two millions of dollars consists of the proceeds of sales of the bonds of the State, irredeemable for thirty years. Its fourteen directors are all annualy chosen by the Legislature There is no penalty prescribed for their suspension of specie payments, but the faith of the State is pledged for the final payment of their liabilities. This bank, in October, 1833, was selected as one of the depositories of the public funds, instead of the branch of the United States Bank at Mobile. On the 1st day of October, 1833, there were deposited in the Bank of the United States $6,475,495 82, which had been accumulating from the first quarter of the year, some small fragments of public debt still remaining to be paid, but not enough to arrest the tide of the public revenue flowing into the Treasury. On the 1st of January, 1834, this sum had been reduced to less than one million of dollars, and in the mean time the branch of the State Bank of Alabama had become a depository for $231,613 35; which sum continued increasing from quarter to quarter, with one exception, till April, 1835, when the deposite in the State Branch Bank of Alabama, at Mobile, was $',309,738 65. Since which time, that is, for more than two years before the suspension of specie payments, there has been in that bank a permanent average deposite of twelve hundred thousand dollars-never reduced so low as $900,000, and once swelling to upwards of sixteen hundred thousand dollars-little short of the whole capital of the bank. I have been desirous of ascertaining, and shall be obliged to any of the members, especially from the States of Alabama, Louisiana, or Mississippi, if they can inform me what were the semi-annual dividends of the deposite banks in those States, from the time when they became depositories of the public moneys until their suspension of specie payments; but this is a secret. On the 3d of January last, a resolution of this House called on the Secretary of the Treasury for this as well as other information, if within his power; but, on the 12th of that month, he reported that it was not within his power. It seems that the amount of dividends declared, of surpluses retained, and of contingent funds reserved, is not understood to be a part of their condition, of which they are required to give account, from time to time, to the Secretary of the Treasury. He says that, by none of the agreements made with them by him, either before or since the deposite act of the 23d of June, 1836, has it ever been stipulated that they should furnish this specific information, and that they have not furnished it. Sir, it was precisely the most important of all possible information to show their actual condition; |