Zero
Today the national debt hit $38.56 trillion. In 1835 it was zero. One president did that.
The national debt is $38.56 trillion.
It went up $4.5 million while you read that sentence.
In 1835, it was zero. Every bond redeemed. Every obligation met. The books balanced to the last copper cent. The first and only time in American history.
One president did that. The same one who killed the central bank. The same one who survived two point-blank gunshots from an assassin and beat the man with his cane on the steps of the Capitol.
The Second Bank of the United States was the most powerful financial institution in the Western Hemisphere. A private company with a government charter. A machine that could expand or contract the entire nation’s credit supply at the decision of one man.
That man was Nicholas Biddle. Forty-six years old. Read Homer in the morning and balance sheets in the afternoon. He ran the Bank from a marble temple on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. The columns were Greek Revival. The floor echoed like a courtroom. The silence in that building had weight.
Biddle believed democracy was a disease and banking was the cure. He called himself a surgeon. The Bank was his scalpel. The common people were the patients who needed his steady hand.
Thirty percent of the Bank’s stock was held by foreign investors. Baring Brothers of London, seven percent. Rothschild Frères of Paris, four percent. Various European nobility made up the rest.
The same British Empire that Jackson had fought at New Orleans, with muskets, bayonets, and Tennessee rifles, owned nearly a third of the institution that controlled American credit.
The muskets failed at New Orleans. So they bought shares instead.
In 1832, Biddle forced the Bank’s charter renewal vote four years early. An election-year trap. If Jackson signs, he looks like a puppet of capital. If he vetoes, Biddle crashes the economy. Either way the Bank wins.
Jackson vetoed it.
The Veto Message is one of the most explosive documents in American history. Jackson took it straight to the people. Bypassed the telegraph wires Biddle controlled, bypassed the respectable press in every city from Boston to Baltimore, and sent riders with copies to every county broadsheet and frontier newsletter in the country.
The key passage:
It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.
Then the kicker.
More than eight million dollars of Bank stock was held by foreigners.
Is there no danger to our liberty and independence in a bank that in its nature has so little to bind it to our country?
Then Biddle did exactly what he promised.
He contracted credit. Called in loans. Shut down lending from Portland to New Orleans. The orders were simple.
Your note is due.
Payment in full.
No extensions.
In Massachusetts, two thousand mill girls were turned out of the textile factories. In Ohio, a farmer with chest-high corn watched a sheriff auction his land because the Bank required “liquidity.” In Baltimore, three hundred shipbuilders lost their jobs. Half-finished hulls sat in dry dock, skeletal and still.
The newspapers, most financed by Biddle’s advertising money, ran the headlines he wanted:
JACKSON’S VETO CRUSHES THE NATION.
THE TYRANT’S ECONOMIC WAR.
WHO WILL SAVE US FROM THE PRESIDENT?
A delegation of New York merchants came to the White House to beg. Jackson received them standing. Did not offer them seats.
When they finished, he pointed his cane north toward Philadelphia.
“He is burning your livelihoods to smoke me out. He is breaking you to break me. Go to the man who holds your fate in his ledger. Ask him why he is willing to ruin you to win a point of pride.”
Then he said the line that still echoes:
The Bank must die.
Or it will own this country forever.
Jackson didn’t stop at the veto.
He pulled the federal deposits. Twenty million dollars ($700 million in today’s money), the lifeblood of Biddle’s power, transferred out of the Bank and into state institutions.
Two Treasury Secretaries refused the order. Jackson fired both.
The third, Roger Taney, carried it out in one night.
The Senate censured him.
First and only sitting president in American history to receive formal congressional censure. Jackson wrote a Protest, sent it to the newspapers, and went back to work.
His line:
Words don’t stop bullets. And they don’t move twenty million dollars back into Biddle’s vault.
The Bank died quiet.
The charter expired in June 1836. Henry Clay didn’t bring renewal to the floor. Daniel Webster, whose retainer from Biddle had become a political brand of Cain, said nothing.
Biddle tried to resurrect the corpse under a Pennsylvania charter. Fraud investigations followed. His reputation crumbled. He was arrested. The charges were eventually dropped because no prosecutor wanted to chase a man already destroyed.
His final journal entry was an unfinished sentence:
The error was not in the numbers. The error was...
The pen trailed off. He died in 1844. Alone in his country estate.
But here’s the number that matters.
January 8, 1835. A Treasury report landed on Jackson’s desk.
National debt of the United States: $0.00.
Zero.
The first and only time in the history of the Republic. Every bond redeemed. Every obligation satisfied. A nation that owed nothing to no one.
Jackson pulled out a bottle of Tennessee whiskey, poured two glasses, one for himself, one for his Treasury Secretary, and said:
To the Republic.
May she never again be owned.
Three weeks later, a man named Richard Lawrence stepped out of a crowd in the Capitol Rotunda.
Two pistols. Point-blank range.
Both misfired.
Jackson beat him with his hickory cane.
They asked Lawrence who sent him.
“The Bank.”
The Monster, dying, had coughed up one last mechanic. And the mechanic’s weapons had failed the same way the Monster’s weapons always failed against this particular man.
I wrote a book about this.
JACKSON: BLOOD VETO is the full story. The duels. The Bank War. The assassination attempt. The political machine. The human cost. It reads like a thriller.
But here’s what I keep thinking about.
Jackson killed the Bank. Paid the debt to zero. Survived the assassin. And then he died in 1845 in a plain room in Tennessee. A hickory cane in the corner and a bullet still lodged near his heart.
The Federal Reserve was created in 1913. A private institution with a government charter. Foreign shareholders. The power to expand or contract credit at will.
Same machine. New address.
The national debt is $38.56 trillion. Nearly 200 years ago it was zero. The distance between those two numbers is the story of what happened after Jackson died and nobody replaced him.
Draw your own conclusions.
<3 EKO
JACKSON: BLOOD VETO is available now on Amazon.
Avoid Amazon? Same deal as always. Just email me, and I’ll send you the PDF.
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I love you.
You make things so clear, so easy. I wish you had been my history teacher, wait, I guess you are my history teacher! Thank you for all of your writings. You are AWESOME and I love you!
EKO your writing and research continues to amaze and educate me. Keep it coming!!