cial and
political history of our fifth and sixth decades. It was the bank
issue, more than anything else, that consolidated the new political
parties of the period. It was that issue that proved most conclusively
the hold of Jackson upon public opinion. And it was the destruction of
the Bank that capped the mid-century reaction against the rampant
nationalism of the decade succeeding the War of 1812. The Bank itself
had been well managed, sound, and of great service to the country. But
it had also showed strong monopolistic tendencies, and as a powerful
capitalistic organization it ran counter to the principles and
prejudices which formed the very warp and woof of Jacksonian
democracy.

For more than a decade after the Bank was destroyed the United States
had a troubled financial history. The payment of the last dollar of
the national debt in 1834 gave point to a suggestion which Clay had
repeatedly offered that, as a means of avoiding an embarrassing
surplus, the proceeds of the sales of public lands should be
distributed according to population among the States. One bill on this
subject was killed by a veto in 1832, but another was finally approved
in 1836. Before distribution could be carried far, however, the
country was overtaken by the panic of 1837; and never again was there
a surplus to distribute. For seven years the funds of the Government
continued to be kept in state banks, until, in 1840, President Van
Buren prevailed upon Congress to pass a measure setting up an
independent treasury system, thereby realizing the ultimate purpose of
the Jacksonians to divorce the Government from banks of every sort.
When the Whigs came into power in 1841, they promptly abolished the
independent Treasury with a view to resurrecting the United States
Bank. Tyler's vetoes, however, frustrated their designs, and it
remained for the Democrats in 1846 to revive the independent Treasury
and to organize it substantially as it operates today.

CHAPTER X

THE REMOVAL OF THE SOUTHERN INDIANS

It was not by chance that the Jacksonian period made large
contribution to the working out of the ultimate relations of the red
man with his white rival and conqueror. Jackson was himself an old
frontier soldier, who never doubted that it was part of the natural
order of things that conflict between the two peoples should go on
until the weaker was dispossessed or exterminated. The era was one in
which the West guided public policy