Financial History Issue 132 (Winter 2020) | Page 40

BOOK REVIEW  BY MICHAEL A. MARTORELLI
The Bank War and the Partisan Press:
Newspapers, Financial Institutions and
the Post Office in Jacksonian America
Stephen W. Campbell
University Press of Kansas, 2019
222 pages
Readers who appreciate a new inter-
pretation of a familiar event in America’s
financial history will welcome The Bank
War and the Partisan Press. As noted in
the subtitle, Stephen W. Campbell’s deeply
researched work illuminates the role of
newspapers, financial institutions and the
US Post Office in the argument over the
continued existence of the Second Bank
of the United States (BUS). No author
can dispute the outcome of the struggle
between President Andrew Jackson and
BUS President Nicholas Biddle. But this
one views their dueling statements and
actions through a different lens than those
who have focused only on the differences
between those two stubborn men. He sup-
plements the traditional version of the story
by delving into each man’s use of emerging
national institutions to communicate his
points of view. Using some unusual aspects
of newspapers and the post office, each was
able to spread his arguments in favor of—
or in opposition to—the re-charter of the
BUS to readers and voters across the coun-
try. Campbell believes that gaining a better
understanding of this “Second Bank War”
will enhance our knowledge about both
this classic struggle and the widespread
contemporaneous conflicts between people
with differing views of the government’s
role in the financial system.
The author devotes a good percentage of
his narrative to examinations of both news-
papers and the post office in the 1830s. Pri-
vately financed newspapers relied on sub-
scriptions and advertising for much of their
revenue. Campbell describes how most of
them also depended on federal subsidies
to make ends meet. Much of that funding
consisted of printing contracts from Con-
gress and a variety of executive department
agencies. He also tells how the post office
provided newspapers with additional fund-
ing. This help took the form of advertise-
ments describing the creation of new postal
routes, the extension of the franking privi-
lege to members of Congress, subsidized
costs for delivering newspapers and the free
exchange of published articles among edi-
tors in various locations. That government
agency also granted lucrative mail deliv-
ery contracts to favored editors and even
appointed some of them as postmasters.
Reading that history enables the reader
to appreciate more fully Campbell’s story
of two newspapers that spent much of
1831–1833 endorsing and communicating
the arguments against (the Globe) and in
support of (the National Intelligencer) the
continued existence of the BUS. He pres-
ents those papers’ interactions with Jack-
son and Biddle as examples of the inter-
mingling of public and private interests
in fostering arrangements that benefitted
all parties. Many editors were currying
favor with politicians whose ideas they
favored; and many politicians responded
by enhancing the business opportunities
available to those supportive editors.
President Jackson first articulated his
belief that the BUS was both unconstitu-
tional and ineffective in December 1829; he
repeated those assertions more forcefully in
December 1830. Almost from its inception
38    FINANCIAL HISTORY  |  Winter 2020  | www.MoAF.org
around that time, the Globe’s founding edi-
tors—Amos Kendall and Francis Preston
Blair—devoted their Washington-based
paper to spreading President Jackson’s
arguments against the continued existence
of the “monster” that was the BUS. Jackson
appreciated Kendall’s and Blair’s endorse-
ment of his opinions and welcomed them
as members of his so-called Kitchen Cabi-
net of unofficial advisors. Campbell sprin-
kles several chapters with the details of the
favors the president awarded the Globe and
its editors from 1831 until 1835.
Meanwhile, BUS President Nicholas
Biddle was using the Philadelphia-based
National Intelligencer to transmit his own
arguments in favor of the bank’s continued
existence. In one of the earliest examples of
an intensive business lobbying campaign,
he used the ability to send reprints of
favorable articles about the BUS to news-
paper editors across the country. Biddle
also made great use of the bank’s network
of 25 branch offices, which served not only
as banks, but as public places for sharing
news and shaping public opinion.
After detailing many techniques the
Globe and the National Intelligencer used
to transmit and publicize the arguments
over the BUS, Campbell faithfully reports
these familiar outcomes of the bank war:
• In 1832, Congress approved Biddle’s
request to extend the bank’s charter
long before it would expire in 1836.
• President Jackson vetoed that bill.
• During the next 14 months, Jackson
and Biddle continued to battle over the
nature of the bank’s functions.
• In September 1833, the President began
transferring the government’s depos-
its from BUS branches to state banks
whose owners supported his policies.
• The emasculated BUS existed for several
more years, but it never again acted like
a de facto national bank.
Even while relating these outcomes, the
author reiterates his main thesis; histo-
rians have not given sufficient attention
to the way both Jackson and Biddle used
their levers of authority and power to dis-
seminate their messages of support and
opposition to the existence of the BUS.