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inevitably convert it into a monarchy. The first of these, and it was a favorite principle with him, was, that the executive department should be regarded as a unit. By this principle of unity, he meant and intended that all the executive officers of government should be bound to obey the commands and execute the orders of the President of the United States, and that they should be amenable to him, and he be responsible for them. Prior to his administration, it had been considered that they were bound to observe and obey the constitution and laws, subject only to the general superintendance of the President, and responsible by impeachment, and to the tribunals of justice for injuries inflicted on private citizens.

But the annunciation of this new and extraordinary principle was not of itself sufficient for the purpose of President Jackson; it was essential that the subjection to his will, which was its object, should be secured by some adequate sanction. That he sought to effect by an extension of another principle, that of dismission from office, beyond all precedent, and to cases and under circumstances which would have furnished just grounds for his impeachment, according to the solemn opinion of Mr. Madison and other members of the first Congress under the present constitution.

Now, if the whole official corps, subordinate to the President of the United States, are made to know and to feel that they hold their respective offices by the tenure of conformity and obedience to his will, it is manifest that they must look to that will, and not to the constitution and laws, as the guide of their official conduct. The weakness of human nature, the love and emoluments of office, perhaps the bread necessary to the support of their families, would make this result absolutely certain.

The development of this new character to the power of dismission, would have fallen short of the aims in view, without the exercise of it were held to be a prerogative, for which the President was to be wholly irresponsible. If he were compelled to expose the grounds and reasons upon which he acted, in dismissals from office, the apprehension of public censure would temper the arbitrary nature of the power, and throw some protection around the subordinate officer.

Hence the new and monstrous pretension has been advanced, that although the concurrence of the Senate is necessary by the constitution to the confirmation of an appointment, the President may subsequently dismiss the person appointed, not only without communicating the grounds on which he has acted to the Senate, but without any such communication to the people themselves, for whose benefit all offices are created! And so bold and daring has the executive brance of the government become, that one of its cabinet ministers, himself a subordinate officer, has contemptuously refused to members of the House of Representatives, to disclose the grounds on which he has undertaken to dismiss from office persons acting as deputy postmasters in his department.

As to the gratuitous assumption made by President Jackson, of responsibility for all the subordinate executive officers, it is the merest mockery that was ever put forth. They will escape punishment by pleading his orders, and he by alledging the hardship of being punished, not for his own acts, but for theirs. We have a practical exposition of this principle in the case of the two hundred thousand militia. The Secretary of War comes out to screen the President, by testifying that he never saw what he strongly recommended; and the President reciprocates that favor by retaining the Secretary in place, not withstanding he has proposed a plan for organizing the militia, which is acknowledged to be unconstitutional. If the President is not to be held responsible for a cabinet minister, in daily intercourse with him, how is he to be rendered so for a receiver in Wisconsin or Iowa? To concentrate all responsibility in the President, is to annihilate all responsibility. For who ever expects to see the day arrive when a President of the United States will be impeached or if impeached, when he cannot command more than one-third of the Senate to defeat the impeachment ?

But to construct the scheme of practical despotism, while all the forms of free government remained, it was necessary to take one further step. By the constitution, the President is enjoined to take care that the laws be executed. This injunction was merely intended to impose on him the duty of a general superintendence; to see that offices were filled, officers at their respective posts in the discharge of their official functions, and all obstructions to the enforcement of the laws were removed, and when necessary for that purpose, to call out the militia. No one ever imagined, prior to the administration of President Jackson, that a President of the United States was to occupy himself with supervising and attending to the execution of all the minute details of one of the hosts of offices in the United States.

Under the constitutional injunction just mentioned, the late President put forward that most extraordinary pretension, that the constitution and laws of the United States were to be executed as he understood them; and this pretension was attempted to be sustained by an argument equally extraordinary, that the President, being a sworn officer, must carry them into effect according to his sense of their meaning. The constitution and laws were to be executed not according to their import, as handed down to us by our ancestors, as interpreted by contemporaneous expositions, as expounded by concurrent judicial decisions, as fixed by an uninterrupted course of Congressional legislation, but in that sense which a President of the United States happened to understand them!

To complete this executive usurpation, one further object remained. By the constitution, the command of the army and the navy is conferred on the President. If he could unite the purse with the sword, nothing would be left to gratify the insatiable thirst for power. In 1833 the President seized the treasury of the United States, and from that day to this it has continued substantially under his control. The seizure was effected by the removal of one Secretary of the Treasury, understood to be opposed to the measure, and by the dismissal of another, who refused to violate the law of the land, upon the orders of the President.

It is indeed said, that not a dollar in the treasury can be touched without a previous appropriation by law, nor drawn out of the treasury without the concurrence and signature of the Secretary, the Treasurer, the Register, and the Comptroller. But are not all these pretended securities idle and unavailing forms? We have seen that, by the operation of the irresponsible power of dismission, all those officers are reduced to mere automata, absolutely subjected to the will of the President. What resistance would any of them make with the penalty of dismission suspended over their heads, to any orders of the President, to pour out the treasure of the United States, whether an act of appropriation existed or not? Do not mock us with the vain assurance of the honor and probity of a President, nor remind us of the confidence which we ought to repose in his imagined virtues. The pervading principles of our system of government of all free government is not merely the possibility, but the absolute certainty of infidelity and treachery, with even the highest functionary of the State; and hence all the restrictions, securities, and guaranties, which the wisdom of our ancestors, or the sad experience of history had inculcated, have been devised and thrown around the Chief Magistrate.

Here, friends and fellow-citizens, let us pause and contemplate this stupendous structure of executive machinery and despotism, which has been reared in our young republic. The executive branch of the government is a unit; throughout all its arteries and veins there is to be but one heart, one head, one will. The number of the subordinate executive officers and dependents in the United States has been estimated in an official report, founded on public documents, made by a Senator from South Carolina, (Mr. Calhoun,) at one hundred thousand. Whatever it may be, all of them, wherever they are situated, are bound implicitly to obey the orders of the President. An absolute obedience to his will is secured and enforced by the power of dismissing them at his pleasure, from their respective places. To make this terrible power of dismission more certain and efficacious, its exercise is covered up in mysterious secrecy, without the smallest responsibility. The constitution and laws of the United States are to be executed in the sense in which the President understands themalthough that sense may be at variance with the understanding of every other man in the United States. It follows, as a necessary consequence, from the principles deduced by the President from the constitutional injunction as to the execution of the laws, that, if an act of Congress be passed, in his opinion, contrary to the constitution, or if a decision be pronounced by the courts, in his opinion, contrary to the constitution or the laws, that act or that decision the President is not obliged to enforce, and he could not cause it to be enforced, without a violation, as is pretended, of his official oath. Candor requires the admission, that the principle has not yet been pushed in practice in these cases; but it manifestly comprehends them; and who doubts, that if the spirit of usurpation is not arrested and rebuked, they will be finally reached? The march of power is ever onward. As times and seasons admonish, it openly and boldly in broad day makes its progress; or if alarm be excited by the enormity of its pretensions, it silently and secretly, in the dark of the night, steals its devious way. It now storms and mounts the ramparts of the fortress of liberty; it now saps and undermines its foundations. Finally, the command of the army and navy being already in the President, and having acquired a perfect control over the treasury of the United States, he has consummated that frightful union of purse and sword, so long, so much, so earnestly deprecated by all true lovers of civil liberty. And our present Chief Magistrate stands solemnly and voluntarily pledged, in the face of the whole world, to follow in the footsteps and carry out the measures and the principles of his illustrious predecessor !

The sum of the whole is, that there is but one power, one will in the State. All is concentrated in the President. He directs, orders, commands the whole machinery of the State. Through the official agencies, scattered throughout the land, and absolutely subjected to his will, he executes, according to his pleasure or caprice, the whole power of the commonwealth, which has been absorbed and engrossed by him. And one sole will predominates in, and animates the whole of this vast community. If this be not practical despotism, I am not capable of conceiving or defining it. Names are nothing. The existence or non-existence of arbitrary government does not depend upon the title or denomination bestowed on the chief of the State, but upon the quantum of power which he possesses and wields. Autocrat, sultan, emperor, dictator, king, doge, president, are all mere names, in which the power respectively possessed by them is not to be found, but is to be looked for in the constitution, or the established usages and practices of the several States which they govern and control. If the Autocrat of Russia were called President of all the Russias, the actual power remaining unchanged, his authority under his new denomination, would continue undiminished; and, if the President of the United States were to receive the title of Autocrat of the United States, the amount of his authority would not be increased, without an alteration of the constitution.

General Jackson was a bold and fearless reaper, carrying a wide row, but he did not gather the whole harvest; he left some gleanings to his faithful successor, and he seems resolved to sweep clean the field of power. The duty of inculcating on the official corps the active exertion of their personal and official influence was left by him

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