judgment of character, he was probably right in his point of attack. There is little doubt that the bank of the United States, under Nicholas Biddle, concentrated in itself an enormous power; and it spent in four years, by confession of its directors, $58,000 in what they called "self-defence" against “politicians." When, on July 10, 1832, General Jackson, in a long message, vetoed the bill renewing the charter of the bank, he performed an act of courage, taking counsel with his instincts. But when in the year following he performed the act known as the "removal of the deposits," or, in other words, caused the public money to be no longer deposited in the National Bank and its twenty-five branches, but in a variety of State banks instead, then he took counsel of his ignorance.

The act originally creating the bank had, indeed, given the Secretary of the Treasury authority to remove these deposits at any time, he afterwards giving to Congress his reasons. The President had in vain urged Congress to order the change; that body declined. He had in vain urged the Secretary of the Treasury to remove them, and on his refusing, had displaced the official himself. The President at last found a Secretary of the Treasury (Roger B. Taney) to order the removal, or rather cessation, of deposits. The consequence, immediate or remote, was an immense galvanizing into existence of State banks, and ultimately a vast increase of paper-money. The Sub-Treasury system had not then been thought of; there was no proper place of deposit for the public funds; their possession was a direct stimulus to speculation; and the President's cure was worse than the disease. All the vast inflation of 1835 and 1836 and

the business collapse of 1837 were due to the fact not merely that Andrew Jackson brought all his violent and persistent will to bear against the United States Bank, but that when he got the power into his own hands he did not know what to do with it. Not one of his biographers-hardly even a bigoted admirer, so far as I know-now claims that his course in this respect was anything but a mistake. "No monster bank," says Professor W. G. Sumner, “under the most malicious management, could have produced as much havoc, either political or financial, as this system produced while it lasted."

If the bank was, as is now generally admitted, a dangerous institution, Jackson was in the right to resist it; he was right even in disregarding the enormous flood of petitions that poured in to its support. But to oppose a dangerous bank does not necessarily make one an expert in banking. The utmost that can be said in favor of his action is that the calamitous results showed the great power of the institution he overthrew, and that if he had let it alone the final result might have been as bad.

Two new States were added to the Union in President Jackson's time-Arkansas (1836) and Michigan (1837). The population of the United States in 1830 had risen to nearly thirteen millions (12,866,020). There was no foreign war during his administration, although one with France was barely averted, and no domestic contest except the second Seminole war against the Florida Indians--a contest in which these combatants held their ground so well, under the halfbreed chief Osceola, that he himself was only captured by the violation of a flag of truce. The war being equally carried on against fugitive slaves called

Maroons, who had intermarried with the Indians, did something to prepare the public mind for a new agitation which was to remould American political parties and to modify the Constitution of the nation.

It must be remembered that the very air began to be filled in Jackson's time with rumors of insurrections and uprisings in different parts of the world. The French revolution of the Three Days had roused all the American people to sympathy, and called forth especial enthusiasm in such cities as Baltimore, Richmond, and Charleston. The Polish revolution had excited universal interest, and John Randolph had said, "The Greeks are at your doors." At home

the antislavery contest, destined to be for more than thirty years the great issue of American politics, was opening. In Garrison, Jackson for once met a will firmer than his own, because more steadfast and moved by a loftier purpose. Abolition was to draw new lines, establish new standards, and create new reputations; and it is to be remembered that the Democratic President did not abhor it more, on the one side, than did his fiercest Federalist critics on the other. One of the ablest of them, William Sullivan, at the close of his Familiar Letters on Public Characters, after exhausting language to depict the outrages committed by President Jackson, points out as equally objectionable the rising antislavery movement, and predicts that, if it has its full course, “even an Andrew Jackson may be a blessing." But of the wholly new series of events which were to date from this agitation neither Sullivan nor Jackson had so much as a glimpse. The story of that great movement must now be told.

XIX

ABOLITION OF SLAVERY

has more than once been observed that slavery, notwithstanding the flood of writing about it, still remains not only the most interesting but also the most perplexing institution in American history. On no subject, save perhaps the causes of the Revolution, have we been offered more generalization and less fact. The trouble has usually come either from exclusive attention to some one phase of the subject— its territorial aspect, for example-or else from the assumption that slavery itself was as an institution always and everywhere the same. It may well be for most students the beginning of wisdom to remember that slavery, much as we may rejoice at the abolition of it, was, nevertheless, like all social institutions, a growth; that it had many forms and turned to mankind many sides; and that it was a distinct and formative element in American life for more than two hundred years before it came to an end. And through all the many variations-social, economic, political, legal, international-on the theme there sounds the note of conscience, not always clear or strong, but growing mightily in volume and dominance towards the end, until at last the great transformation occurred, and those who were before reckoned as property were at last reckoned as men.

The introduction of African negroes into Virginia, in 1619, was probably somewhat accidental, and it was some years before slavery became of much importance in that colony. Carolina, established nearly sixty years after Virginia, had slavery from the start, an influential element in its population being the disaffected English planters from Barbadoes, who brought their slaves with them. The northern and middle colonies, too, all had negro slaves, though in New England the institution was never of much importance. Some of these colonies were, moreover, trying the unprofitable experiment of Indian slavery as well. In Virginia, however, where the slaves were on the whole best treated, there was throughout the whole colonial period strong opposition to the African slave-trade. Down to 1776 more than thirty acts of the Virginia Assembly, imposing restrictions upon the trade, were set aside by the King in council. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the African trade was mainly in the hands of English merchants and capitalists, who for a long period held it as a monopoly; and the course of the English government, controlled as it was largely by men favorable to this lucrative industry, operated to force African negroes upon the American colonies. One must not be misled, here, however. What Virginia feared, apparently, was not the mere institution of slavery per se, but rather an oversupply of slaves with the consequent cheapening of their price and increased danger of insurrection. There was also a just fear of economic injury to the colony from the discouragement of free labor and of a varied industrial life. Certain it was that free labor, itself always honorable, would not long remain by the side of