INDIAN REMOVAL. 677 XXXI. ships-of-the-line after states, frigates after rivers, and CHAPTER sloops-of-war after cities; another, giving the printing of Congress to printers to be elected by the two Houses re- 1819. spectively-a means subsequently of great party favoritism; an act fixing the salaries of heads of departments at $6000; of the judges of the Supreme Court at $4500, the chief justice to have $5000; of the Attorney General at $3500, and of the Postmaster General and his assistants at $4000 and $2500 respectively-compensations exceedingly moderate, if compared with those of many inferior officers of the government. The tide of emigration from Europe, interrupted by the commercial restrictions and the war, had now again begun to set in, and an act was passed to regulate passenger vessels. These immigrants, of which the flow has ever since grown stronger and stronger, and indeed, we may say, Europe herself, had an interest in the pending Missouri question almost equal to that of America. The numerous bankruptcies which had already begun to take place, and the loud complaints of frauds and unjust preferences under the state insolvent laws of Pennsylvania and New York, and especially a recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, that discharges obtained under these laws were not binding as against creditors residing in other states, had led to great efforts, during the session, to carry through a bankrupt law. But objection on the part of the planters and farmers to be subjected to any system of compulsory liquidation, to any thing more, in fact, than a mere insolvent act, of which they might take advantage at pleasure, defeated the bill. Among the appropriations of the session was one of $10,000 annually toward the civilization of the Indians. Some progress had begun to be made in the project, long CHAPTER entertained, of inducing the Indian tribes east of the XXXI. Mississippi to remove west of that river. For $6000 1819. down, and an annuity of $2000 for ten years, in lieu of their former perpetual annuity of half that sum, the Kickapoos had agreed to cede all their lands in Illinois, and to remove to a tract which the government were to provide on the river Osage. A like arrangement, embodied in a treaty with the Cherokees of prior date (July Feb. 27. 8, 1817), was now matured by a second treaty, a cer tain number of the Cherokees having been induced in the meanwhile to remove to the West. In exchange for the lands furnished to these emigrants, the Cherokees now ceded all their territory north of the Tennessee and of the lower course of the Hiwassee; also all east of the Chestatee, a western tributary of the Upper Chattahoochee. Of all their once vast ancient possessions, they retained only a mountainous tract of some eight or nine thousand square miles, principally within the nominal limits of Georgia, but extending also into Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama. This tract, nearly square, was included between the Chestatee and Chattahoochee on the east, the Hiwassee on the north, the Tennessee on the northwest, and on the southwest the territory of the Creeks. The annuities due to the nation were to be divided, the Western Cherokees to receive one third. A portion of the proceeds of the ceded lands were to be invested as a Cherokee school fund. So began an arrangement which finally resulted, some twenty years af terward, in the reluctant and forced emigration of all the Cherokees to their present country west of the Mississippi -not that assigned them in this treaty (which was in the centre of the present State of Arkansas), but a still more western district. BANK OF THE UNITED STATES. 679 CHAPTER XXXII. BANK OF THE UNITED STATES. GREAT FINANCIAL CRISIS. CHEVES, XXXII. June 4. on taking his seat as president of the Board CHAPTER of Directors of the Bank of the United States, had found that institution very hard pressed, indeed, just upon 1819. the verge of a stoppage. Nothing but the most stringent measures could save it, and those he did not hesitate to adopt. One of the first steps of the new board was to remove M'Culloch, the cashier of the Baltimore branch, a removal soon followed by the resignation of Buchanan, the president, and by the development of a system of fraud and plunder, in the withdrawal from that office of large sums, either without any security, or upon wholly insufficient pledges of stock, resulting in an ultimate loss to the bank of about two millions of dollars, squandered by the borrowers in wild speculations. The downfall of Buchanan and M'Culloch led to that of other speculators, and to the disclosure of similar robberies, in which some of the leading firms of the city were involved, perpetrated on one of the local banks. Baltimore had enjoyed under the system of the suspension of specie payments and by bank facilities since, an appearance of high prosperity, now suddenly overcast by almost uni XXXII. CHAPTER versal bankruptcy. The Western branches of the National Bank, sustained by the redemption of their bills at 1819. the Eastern offices, had run into a similar course of extravagant issues and loans; and the system of curtailment insisted on by Cheves involved in the West much the same results as at Baltimore. The cry raised against the bank, since the abandonment of the late system of exchanges, now rose higher than ever. Just before the adjournment of Congress, the Supreme Court of the United States, upon a suit brought to enforce the Maryland tax, had decided that all such attempts against an institution chartered by Congress were unconstitutional. Yet notwithstanding this decision, the state authorities of Ohio persisted in collecting a tax of $100,000, levied upon the two branches in that state, for the avowed pur pose of compelling them to close their business. An in junction from the Circuit Court of the United States was disregarded, and the amount was taken by force, under state warrants, from the vaults of the Chilicothe branch; a proceeding to which the bank responded by prosecutions, both civil and criminal, against the agents in this procedure. The Kentucky Court of Appeals exhibited a spirit not less hostile by deciding that the bank could sustain no action on promissory notes held by it, since the charter spoke only of bills of exchange and specie as things in which the bank might deal. In spite of the execrations with which Cheves was overwhelmed, and the charge of seeking to subject the whole monetary concerns of the country to the arbitrary power of the bank, to which even the national treasury was said to have become but a mere appendage, he steadily persevered in his system of retrenchment; and, before the close of the year, a committee of stockholders was able to report that, although the ascertained losses GREAT FINANCIAL CRISIS. 681 XXXII. exceeded three millions, so that no dividends could be CHAPTER made for two years, yet that the bank, at last, was out of danger of stoppage, and its affairs under prudent and 1819 safe management. The bank was saved, and specie payments maintained at the principal centers of commerce, but the currency out of New England was left in a very dilapidated condition. A large portion of the country banks found it impossible to resume; yet, so great were the debts owing to them, that their paper still continued to circulate, and, in the more remote states of the South and West, years elapsed before this evil was entirely got rid of. The war, as having produced the original stoppage of specie payments, had laid the foundation of this mischief, aggravated, indeed, by the misconduct and mismanagement as well of the local banks as of the new National Bank, and by the vast importations subsequent to the war, which were only paid for at last by the transfer to Europe of a large proportion of the war stocks. More general causes contributed, also, not a little to increase the evil. The termination of that artificial commercial monopoly enjoyed during the European war, and the cessation of the vast war expenditures, had overturned the whole industrial system of England, and had brought on a financial crisis, attended with a general fall of all prices. This state of things reacted powerfully on America; and the Middle States, most involved in the recent bank expansions, were now reduced, by the loss of their foreign market for provisions, as well as of that domestic market which the war had created, to a condition approaching that which New England had experienced under the embargo and the war. That late much-enduring portion of the Union, having kept a sound currency throughout, found new resources in the |