xtra session of Congress, Van
Buren prepared a message as clear and as unanswerable as the logic of
Hamilton's state papers. The law, he said, required the secretary of
the treasury to deposit public moneys only in banks paying their notes
in specie, and, since all banks had suspended specie payments, it was
necessary to provide some other custody. For this reason, he had
summoned Congress. Then he analysed the cause of the panic, arguing
that "the government could not help people earn a living, but it could
refuse to aid the deception that paper is gold, and the delusion that
value can arise without labour." Those who look to the action of the
government, he declared, for specific aid to the citizen to relieve
embarrassments arising from losses by reverses in commerce and credit,
lose sight of the ends for which government is created, and the powers
with which it is clothed. In conclusion, he recommended the enactment
of an independent treasury scheme, divorcing the bank and the state.

These words of wisdom, often repeated, long ago became the principle
of all administrations, notably of that of President Grant in the
great crisis of 1873; and, except from 1841 to 1846, the sub-treasury
scheme has been a cardinal feature of American finance. But its
enactment was a long, fierce battle. Beginning in 1837, the contest
continued through one Congress and half of another. Clay resisted and
Webster denounced the project, which did not become a law until July
4, 1840--too late to be of assistance to Van Buren in November.
Friends of the New Yorker loved to dwell upon his courage in thus
placing himself in the chasm between failing banks and a patriotic
people, often paralleling it with the historic leap of Marcus Curtius
into the Roman Forum to save the republic. "But with this difference,"
once exclaimed Andrew B. Dickinson, an unlearned but brilliant Steuben
County Whig, generally known as Bray Dickinson: "the Roman feller
jumped into the gap of his own accord, but the people throw'd Van
Buren in!"

On August 12, 1840, the Whigs renominated William H. Seward for
governor, and in the following month the Democrats named William C.
Bouck. There was a rugged honesty and ability about Bouck that
commended him to the people. He was not brilliant; he rarely attempted
to speak in public; and his education had been limited to a few months
of school in each winter; but he was a shrewd, wise Schoharie farmer,
well read in the ways