he said in his special message, “under what constitutional authority that branch of the legislature [the Senate] has a right to require of me an account of any communication, either verbally or in writing, made to the heads of departments acting as a cabinet council.” He added: “Feeling my responsibility to the American people, I am willing upon all occasions to explain to them the grounds of my conduct,” — a sentiment which, since his reëlection, appeared frequently, and, as we shall see, in a much more significant form. The statesmen of the Senate shook their heads, but Jackson had altogether the best of the encounter in the eyes of the masses.
This, however, was merely a preliminary skirmish. On December 26 Clay introduced two resolutions, one declaring that, by dismissing a Secretary of the Treasury because that officer would not, contrary to his sense of duty, remove the deposits, and by appointing another for the purpose of effecting that removal, the President had “assumed the exercise of a power over the Treasury of the United States not granted to him by the Constitution and laws, and dangerous to the liberties of the people;” and the other declaring that the reasons assigned by the Secretary of the Treasury for the removal of the deposits were “unsatisfactory and insufficient.”
The speech with which he opened the debate on these resolutions deserves to be studied as a piece of good debating, although the constitutional theory
