What The Experts Say...

HT 64, Low 68

"Bentonian Currency" was hard money as opposed to paper. The friends of the United States Bank who favored the issue of Govenment paper for circulation, were constantly ridiculing their opponents by squbs in the newspapers of the day. The Virginia Advocate , for example, had the following in an article headed. "Who would not be a Jackson man?" - "Have you been seven times spurned by the people when you offered to serve you country, and are you in want of the wherewithal to make the pot boil? - try the hard money tack, and jungle a few Benton yellow jackets at everybody but your creditors, and it's odds if you don't rise to an embassy or a department. It is the short cut frame, to wealth and power; and one has hardly time to put on a clean shirt... before he writes his name... on the milky way of 'glory'... This Jacksonism is a crucible which like that of the astrologer, turns all baser metals to gold... Oh, what it is to be a Jackson man!" On the other side, Benton, in a letter written from St. Louis, in August, 1937, praised Jackson for accumulating eighty million of hard money in the country - enabling the Government to be independent, raising prices for farm products and prohesied good times, etc. He quoted Jefferson as having, in 1792, charged the Federalists with a scheme to banish gold and silver from circulation and deluge the States with paper money - which would have been accomplised in 1837 were it not that "Jackson's policy balked this system in the moment of its anticipated triumph," and he closed his letter by saying, "I think his successor (Van Buren) is 'made of the stuff' to sustain that policy, etc." Only a few months later, the policy of Jackson and Van Buren, or rather the heroic methods by which its supporters attempted to carry it out, regardless of the laws of business, - for the policy itself was sound - with other causes, brought the entire country to the verge of ruin. But the crash of 1837 and the Hard Times which followed were by no means solely due as the Whig leaders would have it believed - to the overthrow of their policy and the "mint drops" or hard money of Jackson and Van Buren; they were only the culmination of evils which had long been threatening disaster. The wild speculations which accompanied the rapid development of Western lands from 1820 onward, intensified by the building of railroads, as Fiske tells us: the miserable banking system of the period: the inflation of the currency by the issue of worthless bills and "shinplasters," were all potent causes. When speculation was checked, and "cheap money" abolished, prosperity returned. for this the Whigs claimed the glory, but it was due nevertheless to the "experiments" which they satirized so severely.

(Rulau 9th Edition)