in reserve, which would be far better, and it denounced Gallatin as a traitor for defending the Bank. Its ideas were those which had already begun to find expression in the great banks of the States. "To any banking institution not founded on the landed security o the United States, we are hostile."
Atwater's pamphlet[1] echoes the same notions and prejudices, of which the strongest is the hostility to foreigners. "Think of the locusts of Egypt. These were to the people precisely what banks are to our farmers." The Bank is aristocratic and federal. "One bank like that of the United States will destroy the industrious habits of a thousand families annually." Niles, in his reminiscences of political history, says that the federalists regarded the first Bank of the United States as their "sheet-anchor," and the democrats "deprecated it as an oppression, unconstitutional in its organization, and pernicious in its operation."[2] "The time has been that a man, who did not wear a black cockade might as well have offered up his prayers to the father of mischief for a benefit (as some savages do) as have asked an accommodation of the Bank of the United States."[3]
The Legislature of Virginia, at the session of 1810-11, instructed their Senators and requested their Representatives to vote against the renewal, because the use of the power to pass an act of incorporation by Congress was unconstitutional and "an encroachment on the sovereignty of the States. The Pennnsylvania House of Representatives adopted resolutions against the Bank, December 13, 1810, which were based on the doctrine of the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798. In the debate on these resolutions, Nicholas Biddle took a most prominent part. All these expressions taken together show the social and political animosities which were awakened and developed in connection with this institution; but we have very little means of learning what truth there was in the assertions. In a speech in the House of Representatives, in January, 1834, Horace Binney, who had, as a young man, been a director of the Bank, in the last years of its existence, spoke with great feeling and eloquence in defense of the men who had at that time been directors, and against the old imputations against the first Bank, which had been renewed in the war against the second: "The directors of the parent Bank were a body of as honorable men, as impartial, and as faithful to their trust, as any men that ever lived. There was not a politician at their board, nor a man who gave himself up to anything but the performance of duty to his trust."
The debate in Congress on the renewal of the charter added very little to these arguments. The petition of the Bank for a renewal was presented March 26, 1808, but no action was taken upon it. December 4, 1809, Nicholas of Va. moved that "provision be made by law for a general national establishment of banks throughout the United States, and that the profits arising from the same, together with such surplusses of revenue as may accrue, be appropriated for the general welfare, in the construction of public roads and canals, and
