Richmond Enquirer

We comply with the request of several friends of Mr. H. B. Grigsby, in giving a place to the following remarks made by him at the Meeting of the friends of Gen. Jackson, held at the Town Hall in this Borough, on Saturday evening last, Mr. Grigsby having consented to their publication at the solicitation of his friends.—Norfolk Beacon.

SUBSTANCE OF THE REMARKS OF MR. GRIGSBY In support of his Resolution on the subject of the Bank of the U. States, made at the meeting of the friends of Gen. Jackson, held at the Town Hall on Saturday evening, 6th October, 1832.

MR. CHAIRMAN: I rise to propose a resolution, which I hope—which I believe—will command the unanimous assent of this numerous assembly. From the foundation of this government to the present moment, the United States' Bank has truly been a vexed question. "Is it constitutional? Is it expedient?" The changes on this subject have been rung, by the wise and otherwise, by great and small, year after year, in the Halls of Legislation, and in the Sanctuaries of Justice, from the shores of our own Atlantic to the remotest tributaries of the Mississippi. I have not the vanity to believe that any remark of mine could change a single sentiment, or shake a single conclusion which any individual may have formed upon it. Yet, sir, the Bank is the subject-matter of the resolution, which I now hold in my hand. And I call upon you, sir—not to pronounce the bank constitutional or unconstitutional, expedient or inexpedient,—but to shield yourself, if you can, from the missiles of party spirit which are hurling about us, and to pause awhile to contemplate with me a moral picture, which, would to God, I could draw with a pencil worthy the occasion.

Sir, you are to suppose that the Bank bill has passed both Houses of Congress, and is unrolled before the President for his signature. What a moment for deep deliberation! if he rejected it, he saw on the one hand, the wonderfully minute yet powerful ligaments with which the Bank had ingeniously bound itself about the general heart of the community; even of friends who had perilled all in his support—and which, when sundered, would bleed, freely bleed, and that blood, however unjustly, would cry out against him; when he saw the gigantic power of the Bank—a Briareus with more than a hundred hands, a Samson yet unshorn, that this immense power, frenzied by the exquisite agony of alternate hope and fear—the strongest stimuli of the purposes of man, would rend earth and sky to destroy him; when he saw, on the other hand, if he approved the bill, the almost impenetrable barrier of plausibilities, behind which he might safely entrench himself,—the example of Washington—a name above all other names; of a Jefferson, whose name is so nearly allied with Liberty, that men seem to have agreed that a political sentiment was just or unjust, accordingly as he may have approved or condemned it; and which name was appended to a bill establishing a Branch of the U. S. Bank at New Orleans, the field of the glory alike of Jefferson and Jackson;—of a Madison, in whose breast, in all their highest perfections, virtue and philosophy, which the world has so often wept to see asunder, have found a worthy shrine; of a Marshall, whose comprehensive intellect, aided by all the lights which a Pinckney, a Webster and a Wirt had shed upon this subject, had approved it; when he likewise saw that his arch-enemy with sparkling delight, had fixed his hopes on the rejection of this bill as a fulcrum on which he would rest his lever for the two-fold purpose of expelling his enemy from the Chair of the Presidency, and seating himself therein: and that by a single dash of the pen, he could scatter the calculations of his rival to the winds and the woods: in fine, when he saw, that by signing the bill, he would throw to the great mastiff a comfortable crust, which, if it did not produce an occasional growl in his behalf, would leave it very little time to bark at him, and when he might allege that, whatever his private opinions were, the decision was demanded by the representatives of the people, fresh from the wheels, and who might be supposed to reflect their will; and then the tide of popularity, almost without a ripple on its breast, would bear him again to the highest station in the world. What an alternative was here? What a temptation? and let me add, what a TRIUMPH! But, sir, you know the man; need I say that that heart which has so often bounded to the impulses of patriotism—that American heart still beats true to its country. He deemed the charter violative of the Constitution; and honor, power, fame, purchased at such a sacrifice, was unworthy of him, and of the station which he filled. Sir, if I were disposed to envy such a man the loftiest feelings which ever animated his bosom, it would be those feelings which he experienced when he had signed that bill. There are acts in his life of a far more specious and dazzling appearance, acts which singly would build the fabric of the fame of ordinary men, and the feelings, which prompted and followed them, were fine and noble. You remember well, sir, the dark days of the year 1814, when the arms of our enemies had been successful against us, and our own government was paralyzed by the opponents of the war; when the women and children from our frontiers—the fathers and the sons lay on the field of battle—were flying from the Indian Tomahawk and the British Bayonet; when the myrmidons of Wellington, flushed with success, were marching against New Orleans, with "beauty and booty" inscribed on their banners;—Sir, if there has been a dark day in our history since the darkest days of the Revolution, that was the day. You know what followed; you can never forget how beautifully the glory of New Orleans, that beautiful Queen of the South and the West, burst upon us, and dispelled the gloom that surrounded us; what shouts of joy rent the air; how the old and the young, the beautiful and the brave, throughout the land, pronounced with joy the name of their generous defender, and, as these sounds of a grateful nation, reverberated from mountain and valley, fell upon his ears, what sensations must have filled his bosom! 'sensations of joy which soldiers have toiled for in vain, orators and poets have praised, but never dreamed of enjoying, and philosophers have spent, and been content to spend, days and nights in merely analyzing. But, sir, the victory of New Orleans vies not in splendour with those of Blenheim and Marengo, and the voices of a grateful nation have filled the ears of a Caesar and a Napoleon. However delightful the sensations on such occasions may be, I deem those which he felt on the occasion to which I allude, higher, purer, loftier. There is another event in the life of Jackson, which, although hitherto unnoticed, has struck me as exhibiting feelings of the most honorable kind, and worthy of our admiration; when he saw the will of the people outraged in his own person, and that honor which they decreed for him, had been wrested away by the united efforts of two distinguished politicians from the North and the West;—when he saw the wave of public indignation mounting higher and higher, and he might have rode on the rising whirlwind and ruled the storm, he assuaged the tempest, and with his own hand poured oil upon the troubled waters. The feelings that prompted such an act, were the surest vouchers of the glory of the retirement which he voluntarily imposed on himself. Again, when the freemen of the country called, in due course of time, to pass judgment upon those who wronged him, hurled them from the high places of power, and placed him there with uplifted arms and echoing voices; when he saw a great nation, with unparalleled unanimity, place him in the seat of Washington: he felt all that such an honor, conferred by such a people, under such circumstances, would inspire in the heart of a patriot. But, sir, the feelings which prompted the deed to which I have alluded, are higher still. 'There is a moral beauty in them, beside which, the feelings, however refined and delightful, that animate men on the ordinary occasions of life, sink into seeming insignificance. I love to contemplate such feelings. "I may be told by the cold, calculating logician, that every act is either right or wrong; if wrong, the agent should suffer; if right, he merely did his duty. This, sir, is not the language of one who knew our natures, and who spake as never man spake; "he that conquereth himself is greater than he who taketh a city." it is the triumph of virtue over vice, truth over falsehood, the sacrifice of self at the shrine of duty, which, whenever and wherever it occurs, should receive the applauses of men. It may be, sir, that the superiority of such triumph over other noble and honorable actions may consist, in some degree, in their rarity; just as we see the traveller satisfied in merely casting his eye over the surface of the gentle Ohio, or the Mississippi, or the Missouri, yet linger to gaze again, and again, and again at the cataract of the solitary Niagara However this may be, the act of the President in rejecting the Bank, under the circumstances which I have detailed, was an act seldom surpassed and rarely equalled Such acts add new glory to the character of man, however exalted, however glorious. I will not detain you farther, I will only say, that I rejoice that the day on which it was done, as it revolves the anniversary of one of the noblest acts of the past century, so it will also revolve that of one of the finest and most beautiful moral actions of our own

Mr. Grigsby then offered the following resolution:

Resolved, That the act of Gen Jackson, vetoing the bill to renew the charter of the Bank of the United States, was an act of noble self-devotion, and worthy of being recorded on the brightest page of the history of our Republic