Free Almost President by Scott Farris

not for nearly another decade. He thought this would appease the North because another ten years of protective tariffs would buy Northern industries time to grow and strengthen their position against foreign competition. He thought this would appease the South because it acknowledged the justness of their grievances and made the end of protectionist policies by a specific date certain. It took an enormous amount of work to lobby the two sides, including Clay’s dramatic offer (not accepted) to resign permanently from public life if only Congress would adopt his compromise, but Clay’s proposal was adopted and the crisis averted.
    Jackson then instigated another crisis. His successful veto of the re-charter of the Second Bank of the United States still left four more years to go on its existing charter. The president wanted its death to come quickly. He directed his secretary of the treasury William Duane to remove United States government deposits from the bank and to put them in state banks operated by men who supported Jackson. Duane refused, so Jackson sacked him and replaced him with longtime aide Roger Taney, who had helped author the re-charter veto and who now began the process of deposit removal. In retaliation, Biddle tightened credit and called in loans in hopes of creating an economic crisis that would force Jackson to back off. Business conditions were awful in much of the country, but Jackson would not relent. “The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me. But I will kill it!” he told his new vice president.
    Clay and his allies were apoplectic. “We are in the midst of a revolution,” Clay told the Senate, “hitherto bloodless, but rapidly tending towards a total change of the pure republican character of the Government, and to the concentration of all power in the hands of one man.” Jackson countered with his belief that the president should have more authority than Congress because only the president was “the direct representative of the American people” and because only the president was voted on by all voters.
    Clay and his allies in the Senate were unable to stop Jackson’s deposit removal plan, but they were successful in approving a censure motion of Jackson’s conduct by a vote of 26-20. Clay pursued censure because impeachment must originate in the House, where Jackson’s supporters held a majority. No president had ever been censured by the Senate before and none have been since. Jackson was furious and said of Clay, “Oh, if I live to get these robes of office off me, I will bring that rascal to a dear account!” Two years later, Jackson’s supporters were successful in expunging the censure from the Senate record. Clay and Jackson never did fight a duel.
    It was during debate on deposit removal that Clay borrowed a phrase he had heard used in local elections in the South and in New York to describe all those opposed to the concentration of power in the hands of the president: “patriotic whigs.” In Britain, “Whig” had described those opposed to the Restoration of the monarchy by Charles II, so it seemed an especially appropriate label for those who expressed concern that Jackson intended to become “King Andrew the First.” Such was Clay’s influence that within weeks Whig replaced National Republican as the common term nationally for those allied in opposition to Jackson.
    Democrats immediately sought to label the Whigs as elite, unreconstructed Federalists. The Richmond Whig newspaper complained that Democrats “have classified the rich and intelligent and denounced them as aristocrats,” when in reality Whigs came from all classes of society and all areas of the country. Reflecting Clay’s call for a new definition of freedom that included freedom of opportunity, Whigs challenged the branding of their party by Democrats as the party of the rich by asserting that the rich could be anyone