Democratick Editorials: Essays in Jacksonian Political Economy
By William Leggett
Ten years after Thomas Jefferson’s death in 1826, an outspoken young editor in New York City was reformulating and extending the Jeffersonian philosophy of equal rights. William Leggett, articulating his views in the columns of the New York
Evening Post,Examiner, and
Plaindealer, gained widespread recognition as the intellectual leader of the
laissez-faire wing of Jacksonian democracy…. [From the Foreword by Lawrence H. White.]
Translator/Editor
Lawrence H. White, ed.
First Pub. Date
1834
Publisher
Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc. Liberty Press
Pub. Date
1984
Comments
Essays first published 1834-1837.
Copyright
Portions of this edited edition are under copyright. Picture of William Leggett courtesy of United States Library of Congress. Original contains the inscription: "Engraved by Sealey, from a Painting by T. S. Cummings, N A." and includes Leggett's signature below.
- Foreword by Lawrence H. White
- Part I, 1. True Functions of Government
- Part I, 2. The Reserved Rights of the People
- Part I, 3. Objects of the Evening Post
- Part I, 4. Reply to the Charge of Lunacy
- Part I, 5. The Legislation of Congress
- Part I, 6. Religious Intolerance
- Part I, 7. Direct Taxation
- Part I, 8. The Course of the Evening Post
- Part I, 9. Chief Justice Marshall
- Part I, 10. Prefatory Remarks
- Part I, 11. The Sister Doctrines
- Part I, 12. The True Theory of Taxation
- Part I, 13. Strict Construction
- Part I, 14. Legislative Indemnity for Losses from Mobs
- Part I, 15. The Despotism of the Majority
- Part I, 16. Morals of Legislation
- Part I, 17. The Morals of Politics
- Part II, 1. Bank of United States
- Part II, 2. Small Note Circulation
- Part II, 3. The Monopoly Banking System
- Part II, 4. Uncurrent Bank Notes
- Part II, 5. Fancy Cities
- Part II, 6. Causes of Financial Distress
- Part II, 7. Why Is Flour So Dear
- Part II, 8. Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents
- Part II, 9. Strictures on the Late Message
- Part II, 10. The Value of Money
- Part II, 11. The Way to Cheapen Flour
- Part II, 12. The Money Market and Nicholas Biddle
- Part II, 13. The Pressure, the Cause of it, and the Remedy
- Part II, 14. Connexion of State with Banking
- Part II, 15. The Crisis
- Part II, 16. The Bankrupt Banks
- Part II, 17. What We Must Do, and What We Must Not
- Part II, 18. The Foresight of Individual Enterprise
- Part II, 19. The Safety Fund Bubble
- Part II, 20. Separation of Bank and State
- Part II, 21. The Remedy for Broken Banks
- Part II, 22. Blest Paper Credit
- Part II, 23. Questions and Answers
- Part II, 24. The True and Natural System
- Part II, 25. The Bugbear of the Bank Democrats
- Part II, 26. Bank and State
- Part II, 27. Theory and Practice
- Part II, 28. Separation of Bank and State
- Part II, 29. Specie Basis
- Part II, 30. The Natural System
- Part II, 31. The Credit System and the Aristocracy
- Part II, 32. The Divorce of Politicks and Banking
- Part III, 1. Riot at the Chatham-Street Chapel
- Part III, 2. Governor McDuffie's Message
- Part III, 3. The Abolitionists
- Part III, 4. Reward for Arthur Tappan
- Part III, 5. The Anti-Slavery Society
- Part III, 6. Abolitionists
- Part III, 7. Slavery No Evil
- Part III, 8. Progress of Fanaticism
- Part III, 9. An Argument Against Abolition Refuted
- Part III, 10. Commencement of the Administration of Martin Van Buren
- Part III, 11. The Question of Slavery Narrowed to a Point
- Part III, 12. Abolition Insolence
- Part IV, 1. Despotism of Andrew Jackson
- Part IV, 2. The Division of Parties
- Part IV, 3. Rich and Poor
- Part IV, 4. The Street of the Palaces
- Part IV, 5. American Nobility
- Part IV, 6. The Inequality of Human Condition
- Part IV, 7. A Bad Beginning
- Part IV, 8. The Whig Embassy to Washington, and Its Result
- Part IV, 9. Right Views Among the Right Sort of People
- Part IV, 10. Newspaper Nominations
- Part IV, 11. Foreign Paupers
- Part V, 1. Monopolies: I
- Part V, 2. A Little Free-Trade Crazy
- Part V, 3. Asylum for Insane Paupers
- Part V, 4. Monopolies: II
- Part V, 5. Revolutionary Pensioners
- Part V, 6. Joint-Stock Partnership Law
- Part V, 7. The Ferry Monopoly
- Part V, 8. Free Trade Post Office
- Part V, 9. Stock Gambling
- Part V, 10. Weighmaster General
- Part V, 11. State Prison Monopoly
- Part V, 12. Corporation Property
- Part V, 13. Regulation of Coal
- Part V, 14. Free Ferries and an Agrarian Law
- Part V, 15. Thanksgiving Day
- Part V, 16. Municipal Docks
- Part V, 17. Associated Effort
- Part V, 18. The Coal Question
- Part V, 19. The Corporation Question
- Part V, 20. Free Trade Weights and Measures
- Part V, 21. Associated Effort
- Part V, 22. Sale of Publick Lands
- Part V, 23. Manacles Instead of Gyves
- Part V, 24. The Meaning of Free Trade
- Part V, 25. Gambling Laws
- Part V, 26. Free Trade Post Office
- Part V, 27. Free Trade, Taxes, and Subsidies
- Part V, 28. Meek and Gentle with These Butchers
- Part V, 29. The Cause of High Prices, and the Rights of Combination
- Part V, 30. Omnipotence of the Legislature
- Part VI, 1. Rights of Authors
- Part VI, 2. The Rights of Authors
- Part VI, 3. Right of Property in the Fruits of Intellectual Labour
MORALS OF LEGISLATION
Plaindealer, April 15, 1837.
If Jeremy Bentham were alive now, the doings of our legislature would furnish him with some fine subjects for an additional chapter to his “Principles and Morals of Legislation.” There is no subject too high or low for the ken of that sapient and potential body. It undertakes to regulate by statute all sorts of business and all sorts of opinions. A man must neither do anything, nor think anything, except as the law provides. We may eat no meat, burn no fuel, chew no tobacco, nor even visit a theatre, unless such meat, fuel, tobacco, and playhouse, are all stamped with the signet of the law. If you offer a banknote of a certain denomination, you violate a law and incur a penalty. If you receive it from another, you are no less guilty. If a friend desires to borrow money from you, and to accommodate him you withdraw it from a business where it is yielding you twenty percent, you must lend it to him at the rate of seven, or otherwise incur the liability of being sent to prison for your kindness. The good old notion that the world is governed too much, is laughed at as an absurdity by our modern Solons, who act upon the converse of the French merchants’ request, to let trade alone, and undertake to regulate it in every particular.
We learn from Albany that Judge Soule’s bill of abominations is likely to be adopted in the Senate by as large a majority, proportionally, as passed it in the other house. By the way, the orthoepy of this wise lawgiver’s name seems to be a matter of dispute, for while some contend that it should be so pronounced as to rhyme with
foul, others think the word
fool presents the proper symphony. These last perhaps are governed by an analogy which has respect to something more than sound. But whatever difference of opinion there may be as to the gentleman’s name, there is none whatever, in this quarter, as to the true character and effect of his proposed law. It is universally execrated by men acquainted with those laws which should alone regulate financial matters.
The motive which we hear alleged for the concurrence this bill is likely to receive in the Senate is a desire
to force capital into the old channel of loans on bonds and mortgages. The forcing system is the only system for which our legislature seems to have any fondness. All its business is conducted on the hothouse plan. It first forces credit out of its natural channel, by suddenly acceding to the wishes of dishonest speculators, and multiplying the fatal brood of specially privileged banks. When the floods of paper money which these institutions force upon the community have produced their inevitable consequence, and forced the attention of the community from the regular modes of business to extravagant schemes of speculation, the legislature then undertakes to force things back again to their old positions, heedless of the ruin and distress which these compulsory and contradictory processes may occasion. We trust the day is at hand when the people will exert their moral force, and force the legislature to confine itself to the few and simple objects which alone properly belong to government, leaving men free to make their own bargains, and follow their own pursuits.
We do not believe that any great practical evil will follow immediately from the passing of Judge Soule’s usury law. It but compels men to do, what the bad state of things brought about by the opposite forcing system of the legislature was already causing them to do, with an obligation stronger than legal compulsion. The bubble of credit had been inflated to bursting by the prodigal creation of bank monopolies, and astounded by its sudden explosion, the confidence of avarice is too much shaken to allow of his being any longer allured by the bait of three per cent a month. They who have money to lend are now afraid to lend it to men who offer to pay large rates of interest, and capital is on the natural reflux to those borrowers who offer smaller profits and larger securities. The proposed law of Judge Draco, therefore, may do little present harm—it may be, to a great extent, practically inoperative. But it is founded on utterly false principles, and on that account deserves the most earnest opposition. It is not the business of the legislature to make laws for the present hour, framed according to the supposed requirements of instant expediency. It is its business to draw up its code in accordance with the eternal principles of right, so that it may apply with equal justice to-day, to-morrow, and forever. This making a law to force capital one way now, and next winter making a new one to force it another, is the height of legislative folly and injustice. Had the wishes of the people, as emphatically expressed “against all monopolies” four years ago, been respected by their servants; had Andrew Jackson’s veto of the charter of the United States Bank been followed, in the principal commercial states, by legislative measures of a kindred spirit; or had this state alone removed the restrictions on trade, and simply instituted a general corporation partnership law instead, leaving the community to pursue what traffick they pleased, to what extent and in what mode they pleased, we should not, at this time, stand amidst such a scene of financial desolation, having nothing but disorder and ruin to contemplate.
We all know and acknowledge the value of political and religious freedom; and we shall yet learn that commercial freedom is the next best blessing that man can enjoy. We shall yet learn, we trust, to practise, as well as to declaim, the noble and just sentiment of Jefferson, that the sum of a good government is to restrain men from injuring one another; to leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement; and not to take from the mouth of labour the bread it has earned.
pure affection, slipped into his hand an order upon the Treasury for 1,000
l., and then went to his chariot. Marvell looking at the paper, calls after the Treasurer “My Lord, I request another moment.” They went up again to the garret, and Jack, the servant boy, was called. “Jack, child, what had I for dinner yesterday?” “Don’t you remember, sir? you had the little shoulder of mutton that you ordered me to bring from a woman in the market.” “Very right, child. What have I for dinner to day?” “Don’t you know, sir, that you bid me lay by the
blade-bone to broil?” ” ‘Tis so, very right, child, go away. My Lord, do you hear that? Andrew Marvell’s dinner is provided; there’s your piece of paper. I want it not. I knew the sort of kindness you intended. I live here to serve my constituents; the Ministry may seek men for their purpose;
I am not one.”
THE MONOPOLY BANKING SYSTEM