throughout its whole career, and it long remained a very general impression that the old Bank of the United States under “Nick Biddle” had always been a very corrupt and corrupting concern.
The contests on the sub-treasury bill and the other so-called relief measures brought into public view a rupture in the Democratic ranks. Several prominent Democrats in the Senate and House (Rives of Virginia, and Tallmadge of New York, and others), who believed that the sub-treasury system would destroy the banking interest, joined the opposition and were called “Conservatives.” But a more exciting event was the final breaking up of that alliance in which Clay and Calhoun had appeared as companions in arms against Jackson. While Jackson was President, Calhoun had zealously coöperated with the Whigs in their resistance to the “dangerous growth of executive power.” Jackson gone, Calhoun appeared as a friend of the Democratic administration. He dissolved the old partnership with a formal manifesto, a public letter, in which he declared that the farther coöperation of those who had been united in opposition to Jackson, namely, the state-rights party and the Whigs, might indeed succeed in overthrowing the administration, but that the victory would redound only to the benefit of the Whigs and their cause; that he and his followers could not consent to be absorbed by an organization “whose principles and policy,” as he expressed it, “are so opposite to ours, and so dangerous to our institutions, as well
