Democratick Editorials: Essays in Jacksonian Political Economy
By William Leggett
Ten years after Thomas Jefferson’s death in 1826, an outspoken young editor in New York City was reformulating and extending the Jeffersonian philosophy of equal rights. William Leggett, articulating his views in the columns of the New York
Evening Post,Examiner, and
Plaindealer, gained widespread recognition as the intellectual leader of the
laissez-faire wing of Jacksonian democracy…. [From the Foreword by Lawrence H. White.]
Translator/Editor
Lawrence H. White, ed.
First Pub. Date
1834
Publisher
Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc. Liberty Press
Pub. Date
1984
Comments
Essays first published 1834-1837.
Copyright
Portions of this edited edition are under copyright. Picture of William Leggett courtesy of United States Library of Congress. Original contains the inscription: "Engraved by Sealey, from a Painting by T. S. Cummings, N A." and includes Leggett's signature below.
- Foreword by Lawrence H. White
- Part I, 1. True Functions of Government
- Part I, 2. The Reserved Rights of the People
- Part I, 3. Objects of the Evening Post
- Part I, 4. Reply to the Charge of Lunacy
- Part I, 5. The Legislation of Congress
- Part I, 6. Religious Intolerance
- Part I, 7. Direct Taxation
- Part I, 8. The Course of the Evening Post
- Part I, 9. Chief Justice Marshall
- Part I, 10. Prefatory Remarks
- Part I, 11. The Sister Doctrines
- Part I, 12. The True Theory of Taxation
- Part I, 13. Strict Construction
- Part I, 14. Legislative Indemnity for Losses from Mobs
- Part I, 15. The Despotism of the Majority
- Part I, 16. Morals of Legislation
- Part I, 17. The Morals of Politics
- Part II, 1. Bank of United States
- Part II, 2. Small Note Circulation
- Part II, 3. The Monopoly Banking System
- Part II, 4. Uncurrent Bank Notes
- Part II, 5. Fancy Cities
- Part II, 6. Causes of Financial Distress
- Part II, 7. Why Is Flour So Dear
- Part II, 8. Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents
- Part II, 9. Strictures on the Late Message
- Part II, 10. The Value of Money
- Part II, 11. The Way to Cheapen Flour
- Part II, 12. The Money Market and Nicholas Biddle
- Part II, 13. The Pressure, the Cause of it, and the Remedy
- Part II, 14. Connexion of State with Banking
- Part II, 15. The Crisis
- Part II, 16. The Bankrupt Banks
- Part II, 17. What We Must Do, and What We Must Not
- Part II, 18. The Foresight of Individual Enterprise
- Part II, 19. The Safety Fund Bubble
- Part II, 20. Separation of Bank and State
- Part II, 21. The Remedy for Broken Banks
- Part II, 22. Blest Paper Credit
- Part II, 23. Questions and Answers
- Part II, 24. The True and Natural System
- Part II, 25. The Bugbear of the Bank Democrats
- Part II, 26. Bank and State
- Part II, 27. Theory and Practice
- Part II, 28. Separation of Bank and State
- Part II, 29. Specie Basis
- Part II, 30. The Natural System
- Part II, 31. The Credit System and the Aristocracy
- Part II, 32. The Divorce of Politicks and Banking
- Part III, 1. Riot at the Chatham-Street Chapel
- Part III, 2. Governor McDuffie's Message
- Part III, 3. The Abolitionists
- Part III, 4. Reward for Arthur Tappan
- Part III, 5. The Anti-Slavery Society
- Part III, 6. Abolitionists
- Part III, 7. Slavery No Evil
- Part III, 8. Progress of Fanaticism
- Part III, 9. An Argument Against Abolition Refuted
- Part III, 10. Commencement of the Administration of Martin Van Buren
- Part III, 11. The Question of Slavery Narrowed to a Point
- Part III, 12. Abolition Insolence
- Part IV, 1. Despotism of Andrew Jackson
- Part IV, 2. The Division of Parties
- Part IV, 3. Rich and Poor
- Part IV, 4. The Street of the Palaces
- Part IV, 5. American Nobility
- Part IV, 6. The Inequality of Human Condition
- Part IV, 7. A Bad Beginning
- Part IV, 8. The Whig Embassy to Washington, and Its Result
- Part IV, 9. Right Views Among the Right Sort of People
- Part IV, 10. Newspaper Nominations
- Part IV, 11. Foreign Paupers
- Part V, 1. Monopolies: I
- Part V, 2. A Little Free-Trade Crazy
- Part V, 3. Asylum for Insane Paupers
- Part V, 4. Monopolies: II
- Part V, 5. Revolutionary Pensioners
- Part V, 6. Joint-Stock Partnership Law
- Part V, 7. The Ferry Monopoly
- Part V, 8. Free Trade Post Office
- Part V, 9. Stock Gambling
- Part V, 10. Weighmaster General
- Part V, 11. State Prison Monopoly
- Part V, 12. Corporation Property
- Part V, 13. Regulation of Coal
- Part V, 14. Free Ferries and an Agrarian Law
- Part V, 15. Thanksgiving Day
- Part V, 16. Municipal Docks
- Part V, 17. Associated Effort
- Part V, 18. The Coal Question
- Part V, 19. The Corporation Question
- Part V, 20. Free Trade Weights and Measures
- Part V, 21. Associated Effort
- Part V, 22. Sale of Publick Lands
- Part V, 23. Manacles Instead of Gyves
- Part V, 24. The Meaning of Free Trade
- Part V, 25. Gambling Laws
- Part V, 26. Free Trade Post Office
- Part V, 27. Free Trade, Taxes, and Subsidies
- Part V, 28. Meek and Gentle with These Butchers
- Part V, 29. The Cause of High Prices, and the Rights of Combination
- Part V, 30. Omnipotence of the Legislature
- Part VI, 1. Rights of Authors
- Part VI, 2. The Rights of Authors
- Part VI, 3. Right of Property in the Fruits of Intellectual Labour
“BLEST PAPER CREDIT”
Plaindealer, June 10, 1837.
The history of paper money is a history of revulsions; of alternate prosperity beyond the natural bounds of health, and adversity as far beyond the ordinary limits of commercial distress. The scenes we are passing through now are but the repetition of scenes that have often been enacted before; and if the ruin occasioned by the present disruption of the paper system is more sweeping and intense than the ruin produced by the same causes on previous occasions, it is only because the business of the country is now conducted on a more extended scale. In 1816 we had but two hundred banks, whereas now we have seven hundred and upwards.
The causes of the terrible revulsion from the effects of which the country is now suffering are the same that produced a similar result in 1816. They may be accurately explained by quoting the very language made use of on that occasion by those who traced the mischief to its proper source. “The evil of the times,” said Mr. Randolph,
*34 in a memorable speech in Congress, when the proposition for establishing a national bank as a remedy for the financial distress then experienced was before that body, “The evil of the times was a spirit engendered in this republick, fatal to republican principles, fatal to republican virtue; a spirit to live by any means but those of honest industry; a spirit of profusion; in other words, the spirit of Cataline himself,
alieni avidus, sui profusus;*35 a spirit of
expediency, not only in publick, but in private life; the system of Diddler in the farce
*36—living any way and well, wearing an expensive coat, and drinking the finest wines, at any body’s expense.”
Who can deny that it is to this same immoral thirst of sudden affluence, and prodigality of ostentatious luxury, to this
alieni avidus, sui profusus, to this insane desire of acquisition and display, the present distress is to be ascribed? And who can deny that the bad desire has been provoked now, as it was then, by the effusion of a too copious flood of paper credit, which has borne men far away from a safe footing, and left them at the sport of the most treacherous sea that ever mocked the struggles of drowning wretches in their death-agony?
Our only remedy for the present evils, and our only true means of avoiding a recurrence of them, is to give freedom to trade—to do away with banking as a matter of legislative control, to take from paper the currency which it has received by being recognized as money by the Government, and leave it to find its own level as the mere evidence of private debt. The exclusively privileged paper money system of this country is the greatest curse which we endure. It is a curse in all its relations and influences, political, financial, and moral. It endangers liberty; it destroys the equilibrium of trade; it induces a gambling spirit, in the place of the better spirit of honest industry, and unsettles all the established ethicks of property.
Mr. Randolph, in the same speech from which we have already quoted, well termed the banking system of this country
a monstrous alliance between bank and state. “We are tied hand and foot,” said he, “and bound to conciliate this great mammoth, which is set up to worship in this christian land. Whilst our Government denounces a hierarchy; whilst it will permit no privileged order for conducting the service of the only true God; whilst it denounces a nobility, it has a privileged order of new men, the pressure of whose feet is upon our necks.”
Now is the most favourable opportunity we can ever hope to have for crushing this terrible evil. There is no intermediate ground of safety. We must either crush it, or it will crush us. We must either abolish exclusive privileges, or exclusive privileges will abolish freedom. Let us not be misunderstood, nor misrepresented, as we often are. We neither express nor entertain any desire to abolish banking. We desire merely to separate it from legislation, and to abolish the restraints which shut it up from the salutary influence of enterprise and competition. We desire to take from it every thing of a political character, and restore it to its proper field as a branch of private traffick. When this is done, when banking is left to the laws of trade, and the Government ceases to know anything as money but the money of the Constitution, we shall be a happy and a prosperous people, and not till then.
SEPARATION OF BANK AND STATE
“BLEST PAPER CREDIT”
Raising the Wind (1803), continually contrives to borrow money.—Ed.
THEORY AND PRACTICE