Van Buren's bearing in the crisis was admirable. Even those who have treated him with animosity or contempt do not here refuse him high praise. "In this one question," says Von Holst, "he really evinced courage, firmness, and statesmanlike insight.... Van Buren bore the storm bravely. He repelled all reproaches with decision, but with no bitterness.... Van Buren unquestionably merited well of the country, because he refused his coÖperation, in accordance with the guardianship principle of the old absolutisms, to accustom the people of the Republic also to see the government enter as a saving deus ex machina in every calamity brought about by their own fault and folly.... Van Buren had won a brilliant victory and placed his countrymen under lasting obligations to him."[13]

Van Buren met the extra session with a message which marks the zenith of his political wisdom. It is one of the greatest of American state papers. With clear, unflinching, and unanswerable logic he faced the crisis. There was no effort to evade the questions put to him, or to divert public attention from the true issue. The government could not, he showed, help people earn their living; but it could refuse to aid the deception that paper was gold, and the delusion that value could arise without labor. The masterly argument seems long to a sauntering reader; but it treated a difficult question which had to be answered by the multitudes of a democracy many of whom were pinched and excited by personal distresses and anxiety and who were sure to read it. Few episodes in our political history give one more exalted appreciation of the good sense of the American masses, than that, in this stress of national suffering, a skillful politician should have appealed to them, not even sweetening the truth, but resisting with direct and painful sobriety their angry and natural impulses; this, too, when most of the talented and popular leaders were promoting, rather than reducing or diverting the heated folly of the time.

Van Buren quietly began by saying that the law required the secretary of the treasury to deposit public moneys only in banks that paid their notes in specie. All the banks had stopped such payment. It was obvious therefore that some other custody of public moneys must be provided, and it was for this that he had summoned Congress. He then began what was really an address to the people. He pointed out that the government had not caused, and that it could not cure, the profound commercial distemper. Antecedent causes had been stimulated by the enormous inflations of bank currency and other credits, and among them the many millions of foreign loans, and the lavish accommodations extended "by foreign dealers to our merchants." Thence had come the spirit of reckless speculation, and from that a foreign debt of more than thirty millions; the extension to traders in the interior of credits for supplies greatly beyond the wants of the people; the investment of thirty-nine and a half millions in unproductive public lands; the creation of debts to an almost countless amount for real estate in existing or anticipated cities and villages; the expenditure of immense sums in improvements ruinously improvident; the diversion to other pursuits of labor that should have gone to agriculture, so that this first of agricultural countries had imported two millions of dollars worth of grain in the first six months of 1837; and the rapid growth of luxurious habits founded too often on merely fancied wealth. These evils had been aggravated by the great loss of capital in the famous fire at New York in December, 1835, a loss whose effects, though real, were not at once apparent because of the shifting and postponement of the burdens through facilities of credit, by the disturbance which the transfers of public moneys in the distribution among the States caused, and by necessities of foreign creditors which made them seek to withdraw specie from the United States. He pointed out the unprecedented expansion of credit in Great Britain at the same time, and, with the redundancy of paper currency[14] there, the rise of adventurous and unwholesome speculation.

To the demand for a reËstablishment of a national bank, he replied that quite a contrary thing must be done; that the fiscal concerns of the government must be separated from those of individuals or corporations; that to create such a bank would be to disregard the popular will twice solemnly and unequivocally expressed; that the same motives would operate on the administrators of a national as on those of state banks; that the Bank of the United States had not prevented former and similar embarrassments, and that the Bank of England had but lately failed in its own land to prevent serious abuses of credit. He knew indeed of loud and serious complaint because the government did not now aid commercial exchange. But this was no part of its duty. It was not the province of government to aid individuals in the transfer of their funds otherwise than through the facilities of the post-office. As justly might the government be asked to transport merchandise. These were operations of trade to be conducted by those who were interested in them. Throughout Europe domestic as well as foreign exchanges were carried on by private houses, and often, if not generally, without the assistance of banks. Our own exchanges ought to be carried on by private enterprise and competition, without legislative assistance, free from the influence of political agitation, and from the neglect, partiality, injustice, and oppression unavoidably attending the interference of government with the proper concerns of individuals. His own views, Van Buren declared, were unchanged. Before his election he had distinctly apprised the people that he would not aid in the reËstablishment of a national bank. His conviction had been strengthened that such a bank meant a concentrated money power hostile to the spirit and permanency of our republican institutions.

He then turned to those state banks which had held government deposits. At all times they had held some of the federal moneys, and since 1833 they had held the whole. Since that year the utmost security had been required from them for such moneys; but when lately called upon to pay the surplus to the States, they had, while curtailing their discounts and increasing the general distress, been with the other banks fatally involved in the revulsion. Under these circumstances it was a solemn duty to inquire whether the evils inherent in any connection between the government and banks of issue were not such as to require a divorce. Ought the moneys taken from the people for public uses longer to be deposited in banks and thence to be loaned for the profit of private persons? Ought not the collection, safe-keeping, transfer, and disbursement of public moneys to be managed by public officers? The public revenues must be limited to public expenses so that there should be no great surplus. The care of the moneys inevitably accumulated from time to time would involve expense; but this was a trifling consideration in so important a matter. Personally it would be agreeable to him to be free from concern in the custody and disbursement of the public revenue. Not indeed that he would shrink from a proper official responsibility, but because he firmly believed the capacity of the executive for usefulness was in no degree promoted by the possession of patronage not actually necessary. But he was clear that the connection of the executive with powerful moneyed institutions, capable of ministering to the interests of men in points where they were most accessible to corruption, was more liable to abuse than his constitutional agency in the appointment and control of the few public officers required by the proposed plan.

Thus was announced the independent treasury scheme, the divorce of bank and state, the famous achievement of Van Buren's presidency. He argued besides elaborately in favor of the specie circular. An individual could, if he pleased, accept payment in a paper promise or in any other way as he saw fit. But a public servant should in exchange for public domain take only what was universally deemed valuable. He ought not to have a discretion to measure the value of mere promises. The $9,367,200 in the treasury for deposit with the States in October, or rather for a permanent distribution to them, he desired to retain for federal necessities. This would doubtless inconvenience States which had relied on the federal donation; but as the United States needed the money to meet its own obligations, there was neither justice nor expediency in generously giving it away. Van Buren here left the defensive with a menace to the banks that a bankruptcy law for corporations suspending specie payment might impose a salutary check on the issues of paper money.

The President finally spoke in words which seem golden to all who share his view of the ends of government. "Those who look to the action of this government," he said, "for specific aid to the citizen to relieve embarrassments arising from losses by revulsions in commerce and credit, lose sight of the ends for which it was created, and the powers with which it is clothed. It was established to give security to us all, in our lawful and honorable pursuits, under the lasting safeguard of republican institutions. It was not intended to confer special favors on individuals, or on any classes of them; to create systems of agriculture, manufactures, or trade; or to engage in them, either separately or in connection with individual citizens or organizations.... All communities are apt to look to government for too much.... We are prone to do so especially at periods of sudden embarrassment and distress.... The less government interferes with private pursuits, the better for the general prosperity. It is not its legitimate object to make men rich, or to repair by direct grants of money or legislation in favor of particular pursuits, losses not incurred in the public service." To avoid unnecessary interference with such pursuits would be far more beneficial than efforts to assist limited interests, efforts eagerly, but perhaps naturally, sought for under temporary pressure. Congress and himself, Van Buren closed by saying, acted for a people to whom the truth, however unpromising, could always be spoken with safety, and who, in the phrase of which he was fond, were sure never to desert a public functionary honestly laboring for the public good.

An angry and almost terrible outburst received this plain, honest, and wise declaration that the people must repair their own disasters without paternal help of government; and that, rather than to promote the extension of credit with public moneys, the crisis ought to afford means of departing forever from that policy. Most of the able men who to this generation have seemed the larger statesmen of the day, joined with passionate declamation in the furious gust of folly. It was a favorite delusion that government was a separate entity which could help the people, and not a mere agency, simply using wealth and power which the people must themselves create. Webster, in a speech at Madison, Indiana, on June 1, 1837, professed his conscientious convictions that all the disasters had proceeded from "the measures of the general government in relation to the currency." He ridiculed the idea that the people had helped cause them. The people, he thought, had no lesson to learn. "Over-trading, over-buying, over-selling, over-speculation, over-production,"—these, he said, were terms he "could not very well understand." In his speech of December, 1836, on the specie circular, he had given a leonine laugh at the idea of there being inflation. If he were asked, he said, what kept up the value of money "in this vast and sudden expansion and increase of it," he should answer that it was kept up "by an equally vast and sudden increase in the property of the country." That this amazing utterance upon the dynamics of national economy might be clear, he added that the vast and sudden increase was "in the value of that property intrinsic as well as marketable." No speculator of the day said a more foolish thing than did this towering statesman. There were, he admitted, "other minor causes," but they were "not worth enumerating." "The great and immediate origin of the evil" was "disturbances in the exchange ... caused by the agency of the government itself." At the extra session Webster described the shock caused him by the President's "disregard for the public distress," by his "exclusive concern for the interest of government and revenue, by his refusal to prescribe for the sickness and disease of society," by the separation he would draw "between the interests of the government and the interests of the people." For his part he would be warm and generous in his statesmanship. He resisted the bill to suspend the "deposit" with the States; he would in the coming October pay out the last installment, stricken though the treasury was. He would again sweeten the popular palate with government manna, bitter as it had proved itself to the belly. It was the duty of the government, he said, to aid in exchanges by establishing a paper currency; he and those with him preferred the long-tried, well-approved practice of the government to letting Benton, as he said, "embrace us in his gold and silver arms and hug us to his hard money breast." As if this were not a time for soberness over its shameful abuses, credit, and the banks and bank-notes which aided it were almost apotheosized. At St. Louis in the summer, Webster, in a speech which he did not include in his collected works, said that help must come "from the government of the United States, from thence alone;" adding, "Upon this I risk my political reputation, my honor, my all.... He who expects to live to see all these twenty-six States resuming specie payments in regular succession once more, may expect to see the restoration of the Jews. Never! He will die without the sight."

John Quincy Adams had told his friends at home that the distribution of the public moneys among the state banks was the most pernicious cause of the disaster, although, differing from Webster, he admitted that "the abuse of credit, especially by the agency of banks," and the unrestrained pursuit of individual wealth, were the proximate causes of the disaster, for history had testified

"Peace to corrupt, no less than war to waste."

He would punish suspension of specie payments by a bank with a forfeiture of its charter and the imprisonment of its president and officers. A national bank, he said, was "the only practicable expedient for restoring and maintaining specie payments." In the extra session he showed that the deposit banks of the South already held more money of the government than their States would receive, if the last installment of distribution should be paid, while the Northern banks held far less of that money than the Northern States were to receive. He denounced as a Southern measure the proposition to postpone this piece of recklessness. Should the Northern States hail with shouts of Hosanna "this evanescence of their funds from their treasuries," or be "humbugged out of their vested rights by a howl of frenzy against Nicholas Biddle," or be mystified out of their money and out of their senses by a Hark follow! against all banks, or by a summons to Doctors' Commons for a divorce of bank and state?

That skillful political weathercock, Caleb Cushing, told his constituents at Lowell that private banking was the "shinplaster system;" and asked whether we wished to have men who, like the Rothschilds, make "peace or war as they choose, and wield at will the destiny of empires." The plan of the administration was like that of "a cowardly master of a sinking ship, to take possession of the long boat and provisions, cut off, and leave the ship's company and passengers to their fate." To the plausible cry of separating bank and state he would answer, "Why not separate court and state ... or law and state ... or custom-house and state." It was "the new nostrum of political quackery." Clay delivered a famous speech in the Senate on September 25, 1837. He was appalled at the heartlessness of the administration. "The people, the States, and their banks," he said in the favorite cant of the time, "are left to shift for themselves," as if that were not the very thing for them to do. We were all, he said,—"people, States, Union, banks, ... all entitled to the protecting care of a parental government." He cried out against "a selfish solicitude for the government itself, but a cold and heartless insensibility to the sufferings of a bleeding people." The substitution of an exclusive metallic currency was "forbidden by the principles of eternal justice." For his part he saw no adequate remedy which did "not comprehend a national bank as an essential part of it." In banking corporations, indeed, "the interests of the rich and poor are happily blended;" nor should we encourage here private bankers, Hopes and Barings and Rothschilds and Hottinguers, "whose vast overgrown capitals, possessed by the rich exclusively of the poor, control the destiny of nations."

The bill for the independent treasury was firmly pressed by the administration. It did not deceive the people with any pretense that banks and paper money would stand in lieu of industry, economy, and good sense. The summer elections, then far more numerous than now, had, as Clay warningly pointed out, gone heavily against Van Buren. The bill passed the Senate, 26 to 20. In the House it was defeated. Upon the election of speaker, the administration candidate, James K. Polk, had had 116 votes to 103 for John Bell. But this very moderate majority was insecure. A break in the administration ranks was promptly shown by the defeat, for printers to the House, of Francis P. Blair and his partner, who in their paper, the "Washington Globe," had firmly supported the hard money and anti-bank policy. They received only 107 votes, about fifteen Democrats uniting with the Whigs to defeat them. Van Buren was unable to educate all his party to his own firm, clear-sighted views. There was formed a small party of "conservatives," Democrats who took what seemed, and what for the time was, the popular course. The independent treasury bill was defeated in the House by 120 to 106.

Van Buren's proposal was carried, however, to postpone the "deposite," as it was called, the gift as it was, of the fourth installment of the surplus. On October 1, Webster and Clay led the seventeen senators who insisted upon the folly of the national treasury in its destitution playing the magnificent donor, and further debauching the States with streams of pretended wealth. Twenty-eight senators voted for the bill; and in the House it was carried by 118 to 105, John Quincy Adams heading the negative vote.

The administration further proposed the issue of $10,000,000 in treasury notes. It was a measure strictly of temporary relief. Gold and silver had disappeared; bank-notes were discredited. The government, whose gold and silver the banks would not pay out, was disabled from meeting its current obligations; and the treasury notes were proposed to meet the necessity. They were not to be legal tender, but interest-bearing obligations in denominations not less than $50, to be merely receivable for all public dues, and thus to gain a credit which would secure their circulation. This natural and moderate measure was assailed by those who were lauding a paper currency to the skies. The radical difference was ignored between a general currency of small as well as large bills, without intrinsic value, adopted for all time, and a limited and perfectly secure government loan, to be freely taken or rejected by the people, in bills of large amounts, to meet a serious but brief embarrassment. "Who expected," said Webster in the Senate, "that in the fifth year of the experiment for reforming the currency, and bringing it to an absolute gold and silver circulation, the Treasury Department would be found recommending to us a regular emission of paper money?" He voted, however, for the bill, the only negative votes in the Senate being given by Clay and four others. In the House it was carried by 127 to 98.

Such was the substantial work of the extra session. To the experience of that crisis and the wisdom with which it was met may not improbably be ascribed the hard-money leaven which, thirty or forty years later, prevented the great disaster of further paper inflation, and brought the country to a currency which, if not the best, is a currency of coin and of redeemable paper, whose value, apart from the legal-tender notes left us by the war and the decision of the Supreme Court, depends upon the best of securities, coin or government bonds, deposited in the treasury, and a currency whose amount may therefore safely be left to the natural operations of trade.

Clay's appeal for a great banking institution, which should accomplish by magic the results of popular labor and saving, was met by a vote of the House, 123 to 91, that it was inexpedient to charter a national bank, many voting against a bank who had already voted against an independent treasury. The Senate also resolved against a national bank by 31 to 14, six senators who had voted against an independent treasury voting also against a bank. The temporary expedient adopted by the treasury on the suspension of the banks was therefore continued, and public moneys were kept in the hands of public officers.

Calhoun now rejoined the Democratic party. It was only the year before he had denounced it as "a powerful faction held together by the hopes of public plunder;" and early in this very year he had referred to the removal of the deposits as an act fit for "the days of Pompey or CÆsar," and had declared that even a Roman Senate would not have passed the expunging resolution "until the times of Caligula and Nero." But Van Buren, Calhoun now said, had been driven to his position; nor would he leave the position for that reason. He referred to the strict construction of the powers of the government involved in the divorce of bank and state. There was no suggestion that Van Buren had become a convert to nullification. But Calhoun could with consistency support Van Buren. The independent treasury scheme was plainly far different from the removal of the deposits from one great bank to many lesser ones. The reasons for political exasperation had besides disappeared. Van Buren was chief among the beati possidentes, and could not for years be disturbed. His tact and skill left open no personal feud; he had not yet conferred the title of CÆsar; no successor to himself was yet named by any clear designation. Calhoun joined Silas Wright and the other administration senators; but he still maintained a grim and independent front.

The extra session ended on October 16. Besides the issuance of $10,000,000 in treasury notes and the postponement of the distribution among the States, the only measure adopted for relief was a law permitting indulgence of payment to importers upon custom-house bonds. As those payments were to be made in specie, and as specie had left circulation, it was proper that the United States as a creditor should exhibit the same leniency which was wise and necessary on the part of other creditors.

Commercial distress had now materially abated, although many of its wounds were still deep and unhealed. Before the regular session began in December, substantial progress was made towards specie payments. The price of gold in New York, which had ruled at a premium of eight and seven eighths per cent., had fallen to five. On October 20 the banks of New York, after waiting until Congress rose, to meet the wishes of the United States Bank and its associates in Philadelphia, now invited representatives from all the banks to meet in New York on November 27 to prepare for specie payment. At this meeting the New York banks proposed resumption on March 1, 1838, but they were defeated; and a resolution to resume on July 1 was defeated by the votes of Pennsylvania and all the New England States except Maine (which was divided), together with New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, South Carolina, and Indiana. Virginia, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and the District of Columbia, with New York, made the minority. An adjournment was taken to the second Wednesday in April, the banks being urged meanwhile to prepare for specie payments.

The fall as well as the summer elections had been most disastrous for the Democrats. New York, which the year before had given Van Buren nearly 30,000 plurality, was now overwhelmingly Whig. The Van Buren party began to be called the Loco-focos, in derision of the fancied extravagance of their financial doctrines. The Loco-foco or Equal Rights party proper was originally a division of the Democrats, strongly anti-monopolist in their opinions, and especially hostile to banks,—not only government banks but all banks,—which enjoyed the privileges then long confirmed by special and exclusive charters. In the fall of 1835 some of the Democratic candidates in New York were especially obnoxious to the anti-monopolists of the party. When the meeting to regularly confirm the nominations made in committee was called at Tammany Hall, the anti-monopolist Democrats sought to capture the meeting by a rush up the main stairs. The regulars, however, showed themselves worthy of their regularity by reaching the room up the back stairs. In a general scrimmage the gas was put out. The anti-monopolists, perhaps used to the devices to prevent meetings which might be hostile, were ready with candles and loco-foco matches. The hall was quickly illuminated; and the anti-monopolists claimed that they had defeated the nominations. The regulars were successful, however, at the election; and they and the Whigs dubbed the anti-monopolists the Loco-foco men. The latter in 1836 organized the Equal Rights party, and declared it an imperative duty of the people "to recur to first principles." Their "declaration of rights" might well have been drawn a few years later by a student of Spencer's "Social Statics." The law, they said, ought to do no more than restrain each man from committing aggressions on the equal rights of other men; they declared "unqualified hostility to bank-notes and paper money as a circulating medium," and to all special grants by the legislature. A great cry was raised against them as dangerous and incendiary fanatics. The Democratic press, except the "Evening Post," edited by William Cullen Bryant, turned violently upon the seceders. There was the same horror of them as the English at almost the very time had of the Chartists, and which in our time is roused by the political movements of Henry George. But with time and familiarity Chartism and Loco-focoism alike lost their horrid aspect. Several of the cardinal propositions of the former have been adopted in acts of Parliament without a shudder. To the animosity of the Loco-focos against special legislation and special privileges Americans probably owe to-day some part of the beneficent movement in many of the States for constitutional requirements that legislatures shall act by general laws.

The Equal Rights party, though casting but a few votes, managed to give the city of New York to the Whigs, a result which convinced the Democrats that, dangerous as they were, they were less dangerous within than without the party. The hatred which Van Buren after his message of September, 1837, received from the banks commended him to the Loco-focos; and in October, 1837, Tammany Hall witnessed their reconciliation with the regular Democrats upon the moderate declaration for equal rights. The Whigs had, indeed, been glad enough to have Loco-foco aid and even open alliance at the polls. But none the less they thought the Democratic welcome back of the seceders an enormity. From this time the Democrats were, it was clear, no better than Loco-focos, and ought to bear the name of those dangerous iconoclasts.

Van Buren met Congress in December, 1837, with still undaunted front. His first general review of the operations of the government was but little longer than his message to the extra session on the single topic of finance. He refused to consider the result of the elections as a popular disapproval of the divorce of bank and state. In only one State, he pointed out, had a federal election been held; and in the other elections, which had been local, he intimated that the fear of a forfeiture of the state-bank charters for their suspension of specie payments had determined the result. He still emphatically opposed the connection between the government and the banks which could offer such strong inducements for political agitation. He blew another blast against the United States Bank, now a Pennsylvania corporation, for continuing to reissue its notes originally made before its federal charter had expired and since returned. He recommended a preËmption law for the benefit of actual settlers on public lands, and a classification of lands under different rates, to encourage the settlement of the poorer lands near the older settlements. There was a conciliatory but firm reference to the dispute with England over the northeastern boundary. He announced his failure to adjust the dispute with Mexico over the claims which had been pressed by Jackson. The Texan cloud which six years later brought Van Buren's defeat was already threatening.

At this session the independent or sub-treasury bill was again introduced, and again a titanic battle was waged in the Senate. In this encounter Clay taunted Calhoun for going over to the enemy; and Calhoun, referring to the Adams-Clay coalition, retorted that Clay had on a memorable occasion gone over, and had not left it to time to disclose his motives. Here it was that, in the decorous fury of the times, both senators stamped accusations with scorn in the dust, and hurled back darts fallen harmless at their feet. The bill passed the Senate by 27 to 25; but Calhoun finally voted against it because there had been stricken out the provision that government dues should be paid in specie. The bill was again defeated in the House by 125 to 111. The latter vote was late in June, 1838. But while Congress refused a law for it, the independent treasury in fact existed. Under the circular issued upon the bank suspension, the collection, keeping, and payment of federal moneys continued to be done by federal officers. The absurdity of the declamation about one's blood curdling at Van Buren's recommendations, about this being the system in vogue where people were ground "to the very dust by the awful despotism of their rulers," was becoming apparent in the easy, natural operation of the system, dictated though it was by necessity rather than law. The Whigs, in the sounding jeremiades of Webster and the perfervid eloquence of Clay, were joined by the Conservatives, former Democrats, with Tallmadge of New York and Rives of Virginia at their head. They had retired into the cave of superior wisdom, of which many men are fond when a popular storm seems rising against their party; they affected oppressive grief at Van Buren's reckless hatred of the popular welfare, and accused him of designing entire destruction of credit in the ordinary transactions of business. This silly charge was continually made, and gained color from the extreme doctrines of the Equal Rights movement and the fixing of the Loco-foco name upon the Democratic party.

The sub-treasury bill was again taken up at the long session of 1839-40 by the Congress elected in 1838. Again the wisdom of separating bank and state, again the wrong of using public moneys to aid private business and speculation, were stated with perfectly clear but uninspiring logic. Again came the antiphonal cry, warm and positive, against the cruelty of withdrawing the government from an affectionate care for the people, and from its duty generously to help every one to earn his living. In and out of Congress it was the debate of the time, and rightly; for it involved a profound and critical issue, which since the foundation of the government has been second in importance only to the questions of slavery and national existence and reconstruction. In 1840 the bill passed the Senate by 24 to 18 and the House by 124 to 107. This chief monument of Van Buren's administration seemed quickly demolished by the triumphant Whigs in 1841, but was finally set up again in 1846 without the aid of its architect. From that time to our own, in war and in peace, the independence of the federal treasury has been a cardinal feature of American finance. Nor was its theory lost even in the system of national banks and public depositories created for the tremendous necessities of the civil war.[15]

By the spring of 1838 business had revived during the year of enforced industry and economy among the people. In January, 1838, the premium on gold at New York sank to three per cent.; and when the bank convention met on the adjourned day in April, the premium was less than one per cent. The United States Bank resisted resumption with great affectation of public spirit, but for selfish reasons soon to be disclosed. The New York banks, with an apology to their associates, resolved to resume by May 10, five days before the date to which the State had legalized the suspension. The convention adopted a resolution for general resumption on January 1, 1839, without precluding earlier resumption by any banks which deemed it proper. In April it was learned that the Bank of England was shipping a million sterling to aid resumption by the banks. On July 10, Governor Ritner of Pennsylvania by proclamation required the banks of his State to resume by August 1. On the 13th of that month the banks of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois yielded to the moral coercion of the New York banks, and to the resumption now enforced on the Bank of the United States. By the fall of 1838 resumption was general, although the banks at the Southwest did not follow until midwinter. Confidence was so much restored that "runs" on the banks did not occur. The crisis seemed at an end; and Van Buren not unreasonably fancied that he saw before the country two years of steady and sound return to prosperity. Two such years would, in November, 1840, bring the reward of his sagacity and endurance. But a far deeper draft upon the vitality of the patient had been made than was supposed; and in its last agony, eighteen months later, Biddle's bank helped to blast Van Buren's political ambition.