Thomas Hart Bentons Remarks to the Senate | Page 6

they do not approve it, the
interposition of the veto is the barrier which saves them the adoption of
a law, the repeal of which might afterward be almost impossible. The
qualified negative is, therefore, a beneficent power, intended as General
Hamilton expressly declares in the "Federalist," to protect, first, the
executive department from the encroachments of the legislative
department; and, secondly, to preserve the people from hasty,
dangerous or criminal legislation on the part of their representatives.
This is the design and intention of the veto power; and the fear
expressed by General Hamilton was, that Presidents, so far from

exercising it too often, would not exercise it as often as the safety of the
people required; that they might lack the moral courage to stake
themselves in opposition to a favorite measure of the majority of the
two Houses of Congress; and thus deprive the people, in many
instances, of their right to pass upon a bill before it becomes a final law.
The cases in which President Jackson has exercised the veto power
have shown the soundness of these observations. No ordinary President
would have staked himself against the Bank of the United States and
the two Houses of Congress in 1832. It required President Jackson to
confront that power--to stem that torrent--to stay the progress of that
charter, and to refer it to the people for their decision. His moral
courage was equal to the crisis. He arrested the charter until it could be
got to the people, and they have arrested it forever. Had he not done so,
the charter would have become law, and its repeal almost impossible.
The people of the whole Union would now have been in the condition
of the people of Pennsylvania, bestrode by the monster, in daily
conflict with him, and maintaining a doubtful contest for supremacy
between the government of a State and the directory of a moneyed
corporation....
Sir, I think it right, in approaching the termination of this great question,
to present this faint and rapid sketch of the brilliant, beneficent, and
glorious administration of President Jackson. It is not for me to attempt
to do it justice; it is not for ordinary men to attempt its history. His
military life, resplendent with dazzling events, will demand the pen of a
nervous writer; his civil administration, replete with scenes which have
called into action so many and such various passions of the human
heart, and which has given to native sagacity so many victories over
practiced politicians, will require the profound, luminous, and
philosophical conceptions of a Livy, a Plutarch, or a Sallust. This
history is not to be written in our day. The contemporaries of such
events are not the hands to describe them. Time must first do its
office--must silence the passions, remove the actors, develop
consequences, and canonize all that is sacred to honor, patriotism, and
glory. In after ages the historic genius of our America shall produce the
writers which the subject demands--men far removed from the contests
of this day, who will know how to estimate this great epoch, and how
to acquire an immortality for their own names by painting, with a

master's hand, the immortal events of the patriot President's life.
And now, sir, I finish the task which, three years ago, I imposed on
myself. Solitary and alone, and amid the jeers and taunts of my
opponents, I put this ball in motion. The people have taken it up, and
rolled it forward, and I am no longer anything but a unit in the vast
mass which now propels it. In the name of that mass I speak. I demand
the execution of the edict of the people; I demand the expurgation of
that sentence which the voice of a few Senators, and the power of their
confederate, the Bank of the United States, has caused to be placed on
the journal of the Senate; and which the voice of millions of freemen
has ordered to be expunged from it.

END OF PROJECT GUTENBERG ETEXT "ON THE EXPUNGING
RESOLUTION" by Thomas Hart Benton


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