On Jackson’s attitude toward the Bank before he became President we have little direct information.  But it is sufficiently clear that eventually he came to share the hostile views of his Tennessee friends and neighbors.  In 1817 he refused to sign a memorial “got up by the aristocracy of Nashville” for the establishment of a branch in that town.  When, ten years later, such a branch was installed, General Thomas Cadwalader of Philadelphia, agent of the Bank, visited the town to supervise the arrangements and became very friendly with the “lord of the Hermitage.”  But correspondence of succeeding years, though filled with insinuating cordiality, failed to bring out any expression of goodwill toward the institution such as the agent manifestly coveted.

Jackson seems to have carried to Washington in 1829 a deep distrust of the Bank, and he was disposed to speak out boldly against it in his inaugural address.  But he was persuaded by his friends that this would be ill-advised, and he therefore made no mention of the subject.  Yet he made no effort to conceal his attitude, for he wrote to Biddle a few months after the inauguration that he did not believe that Congress had power to charter a bank outside of the District of Columbia, that he did not dislike the United States Bank more than other banks, but that ever since he had read the history of the South Sea Bubble he had been afraid of banks.  After this confession the writer hardly needed to confess that he was “no economist, no financier.”

Most of the officers of the “mother bank” at Philadelphia and of the branches were anti-Jackson men, and Jackson’s friends put the idea into his mind that the Bank had used its influence against him in the late campaign.  Specific charges of partizanship were brought against Jeremiah Mason, president of the branch at Portsmouth, New Hampshire; and although an investigation showed the accusation to be groundless, Biddle’s heated defense of the branch had no effect save to rouse the Jacksonians to a firmer determination to compass the downfall of the Bank.

Biddle labored manfully to stem the tide.  He tried to improve his personal relations with the President, and he even allowed Jackson men to gain control of several of the western branches.  The effort, however, was in vain.  When he thought the situation right, Biddle brought forward a plan for a new charter which received the assent of most of the members of the official Cabinet, as well as that of some of the “Kitchen” group.  But Jackson met the proposal with his unshakable constitutional objections and, to Biddle’s deep disappointment, advanced in his first annual message to the formal, public assault.  The Bank’s charter, he reminded Congress, would expire in 1836; request for a new charter would probably soon be forthcoming; the matter could not receive too early attention from the legislative branch.  “Both the constitutionality and the expediency of the law creating this bank,”