should be received in payment for public lands. The resolution had no support. Immediately after the adjournment of Congress, in July, 1836, President Jackson, although knowing that such a measure could not have passed either house of Congress, and also that a majority of his Cabinet was against it, ordered the famous “specie circular” to be issued, — an instruction to the land officers to accept in payment for public lands only gold and silver coin, with an exception in favor of actual settlers until December 15 ensuing. This would have been an excellent measure to restrain the speculation in lands at its beginning. At the time when it came it did, indeed, as Benton said, “overtake some tens of millions of this bank paper on its way to the land offices to be changed into land, — which made the speculators rage.” But it did more. As Clay at a later period said, it expressed the distrust of the Executive in the solvency of the banks, and created an extraordinary demand for specie “at a moment when the banking operations were extended and stretched to their utmost tension,” and when the banks “were almost all tottering and ready to fall, for the want of that metallic basis on which they all rested.” It drew specie from the centres of commerce to transport it to the wilderness, where it found its way through the land offices into Western banks, in some of which, according to Jackson's message, there were already credits to the government “greatly beyond their immediate means of payment.”
