Chapter Ten: The Monster's Death

Scene 1

The Louisville returns were in front of him when Blair arrived, the columns swimming in the lamplight as Jackson's eyes moved down the figures for the third time. Numbers that would not hold still — not from the hour, which was late but not unreasonably so, nor from the pipe, gone cold again in his hand — but from what the columns described, which was impossible to look at steadily and think well of.

He set the pipe on the desk and pressed one finger to the line he had been reading. The room smelled of Virginia leaf and camphor, the camphor rising from the poultice at his chest in dense, medicinal waves. Outside, the wind off the river pressed against the glass in long, low pulses.

"Come."

Blair entered with his folio under his arm. Jackson had come to know that look over four years — the rehearsed beginning, the second beginning held in reserve.

"The Senate figures from Benton?" Jackson asked.

"Those too." Blair took the chair across the desk without waiting to be offered it, which was his habit and his right. He opened the folio and extracted a sheaf of dispatches bound with a length of twine. "But I should like the General's attention on these first, if he will give it."

"Give it, then."

Blair untied the twine and sorted the pages with a deliberateness that was itself a form of argument. He selected the uppermost sheet. "Cincinnati, from a postmaster who has been reliable since thirty-one." He cleared his throat. "He writes that the land office on Fifth-street received, in the month of March alone, notes from eleven separate institutions, of which he could locate seven in the published directories. The remaining four he could not find under any name he searched."

Jackson said nothing. He picked up the pipe and tamped the tobacco with slow deliberateness, pressing the bowl down with his thumb.

"He writes further," Blair continued, "that buyers at the office paid in notes printed on paper so thin that one clerk held them to the window to check for watermarks and could see his own hand through them." Blair looked up. "His phrase, not mine."

"Read the next."

Blair set down the Cincinnati dispatch and took up the one beneath it. A land agent in Indiana — a man whose name Jackson did not know — described a town platted six weeks prior in which every transaction had been conducted in notes from an institution incorporated the previous Thursday. No specie in the county that the agent could discover. Not a coin to be found from the courthouse to the river.

The cough came on without warning, deep and tearing, doubling Jackson forward over the desk, his free hand gripping its edge while the spasm ran its course. When he straightened he pressed the handkerchief briefly to his mouth and set it face-down on the corner of the desk.

Blair had stopped reading. He waited.

"Go on," Jackson said.

"There are four more."

"I heard you the first time."

Blair read them. Missouri, then Kentucky, then a second Missouri dispatch considerably worse than the first — a land office accepting notes from a bank whose listed address was a dry-goods store in a town that had burned the previous autumn. Jackson lit his pipe on the second attempt, the sulphur match flaring in the close air, its sharp chemical smell cutting briefly through the camphor.

"How many of these do you intend to print?" he asked.

Blair set the dispatches on the desk and folded his hands on top of them. "That depends on what the General instructs."

Jackson drew on the pipe, held it, released the smoke slowly toward the ceiling. The Cincinnati dispatch was the mildest of the five. The Missouri dispatches were the sort of thing Clay would read aloud from the Senate floor with the satisfaction of confirmed prophecy — and if Clay obtained them before the Globe printed a single word, the story would belong to the opposition entire.

"Print the Cincinnati one," Jackson said. "Without editorial comment — just the postmaster's letter, nothing added."

"And the others?"

"Keep them in your keeping. I may want them later."

Blair wrote something in his notebook. He did not look up when he said, "If the rival sheets obtain them before we publish—"

"I heard that concern before you opened your mouth." Jackson set the pipe down and pulled a fresh sheet of paper toward him. "Fetch Donelson. I want a memorandum drafted tonight — to go out under Treasury's seal. Every deposit bank will provide weekly returns of their note circulation against specie on hand. Any bank whose paper exceeds four times its coin will be reported to Treasury by name." He paused. "By name, Blair."

Blair closed his notebook. He sat for a moment with the dispatches still beneath his hands. "Those banks will not thank us for it. Several of them are already writing to Woodbury."

"I know it." Jackson set the pen down and looked at Blair directly. "If we do not move before the spring land sales, there will be nothing left to move against. The notes will have multiplied past any remedy we possess. That is the cost of waiting. Write that in your notebook."

Blair wrote it.

"They will not thank us," Jackson said. "No."

---

Scene 2

The funeral had been a small, grey affair, the kind Washington produced without effort — a body carried through corridors where men stood with their hats held to their chests and their eyes on the middle distance, thinking of other things. Warren Davis had been a South Carolinian, which meant that half the chamber had mourned him with the particular intensity of men calculating what his empty seat would cost them in the next session, and the other half had mourned him not at all.

Jackson came down the Capitol's east steps in a column of three, Benton at his left shoulder and young Donelson a half-step behind, the crowd parting before him the way it always did — not from affection, not from fear exactly, but from the habitual recognition of a figure who did not alter his course. The January air was raw and damp, carrying the smell of wet stone and the faint sweetness of horse dung from Pennsylvania Avenue below. The overcast sat low and uniform, the colour of old pewter, pressing the cold down onto the steps.

He was thinking about Woodbury.

The Treasury figures from that morning had not left him. He was arranging them, marshalling them into their proper order, when the sound reached him — a sharp, flat crack from his left, very close, and then nothing. Not the roar of a discharged pistol but something drier, a cap detonating without purchase, and the crowd's sudden intake of breath was louder than the shot that had not come.

He turned.

The man was perhaps six feet away, stepping out from behind one of the portico's columns — slight, with a fixed expression rehearsed past the point of feeling real. The second pistol was already raised.

Another crack. Another failure.

Jackson did not stop to reckon it.

He raised the hickory cane and went forward.

The man had not expected this. His mouth opened. He had time for nothing else. The first blow caught him across the shoulder and drove him sideways; the second, Jackson aimed for the head and struck the raised forearm instead, and the pistol went skittering across the stone. He wheezed between blows, the cold air searing down into his damaged lungs with each swing, each effort costing him breath he could not spare, but his arm kept moving, the cane rising and falling with the relentless insistence of something that had not yet decided to stop.

Then hands were on him — Benton's voice somewhere, saying his name — and other hands had the assailant pinned against the column, and someone was shouting for the watch. Jackson felt the grip at his elbow, felt it tighten, and did not move.

He did not release the cane. His knuckles stayed white around the hickory shaft, his arm still raised, the tip hovering over the man's hunched form even after Benton had stepped between them and the fellow was already down, bleeding from his brow, two of the Capitol's attendants sitting on his arms.

The crowd had contracted into a ring of open mouths and white faces. Somewhere behind him, a woman was weeping.

Benton turned. His face had gone very still.

"Two pistols," he said. "At six feet."

Jackson looked at the man on the ground. Then at the cane in his own hand.

"Both misfired," Benton said.

The cold worked through Jackson's coat. He breathed. Around him the crowd pressed closer, murmuring, and the sound of it rose against the stone and the low sky and went nowhere.

---

Scene 3

They had him back in the President's House within the hour, and Blair had built the grate too high, as he always did when his anxiety required an outlet — the room close to suffocation, the candles throwing Jackson's shadow up the wall in a shape that did not resemble him. He sat still wearing the black coat from Warren Davis's funeral, the wool carrying the smell of the Capitol steps: wet stone, crowd-breath, the ghost of powder.

Taney stood near the window. Blair sat against the far wall, notebook open, pen uncapped.

"There is no thread," Taney said — not as apology, not as consolation, but as a measurement set down before a jury. "Every person who spoke with Lawrence has been identified, so far as the city marshal's inquiry extends. His landlord. A woman on the street where he lodged. A barber who cut his hair in November. None of these persons has any connexion to any organised political interest. His letters indicate a disordered understanding of his own identity — he appears to have believed himself possessed of a royal claim."

"A royal claim." Jackson opened and closed his right hand on the chair arm. The knuckles were swollen at the ridge, the skin split in two places from the cane work on the steps.

"That is the substance of what the letters contain."

"And you find that sufficient."

"I find it the evidence as it presently stands." Taney moved from the window — a deliberate step, placing himself where Jackson could not avoid his face. "General. Were I to present to any court of competent jurisdiction the proposition that Richard Lawrence acted at the direction of the Bank's allies or of the Whig opposition, I could not construct a case. There is no instrument by which that proposition may be demonstrated, and in the absence of demonstration, the public assertion of it will be received not as accusation but as—" He paused. "As the expression of a mind disposed toward persecution."

"The Bank has paid legislators." Jackson leaned forward, and the old wound in his chest sent a lance of pain through his ribs. He pressed his palm flat against his side and continued as though nothing had occurred. "The Bank has paid journalists. The Bank has called in every credit it could reach to bring this government to its knees. You will tell me such men are incapable of sending one disordered fool with two pistols?"

"I will tell you that incapability and guilt are distinct categories, and that the distinction matters in a republic."

"Then explain to me the misfires."

Taney was quiet.

"Two pistols. Six feet. The caps discharged. Explain to me, Mr. Taney — as a man of reason — by what natural accounting both charges fail."

"Humidity. The dampness of the morning. The quality of the powder. Any of these—"

"You will attribute it to damp air."

"The alternative," Taney said, and his voice dropped to its most careful register, "is that Providence has already argued your case more forcefully than any editorial could. The misfires are known. Every man in this country has heard of them. The double failure of a loaded weapon at six feet requires no elaboration from the Globe." He did not look at the notebook. He looked at Jackson. "Providence needs no editorial assistance, General. And if you instruct Mr. Blair to print what cannot be proved, you give your enemies not a wound but a gift."

A silence. The fire cracked behind Blair's shoulder, a log settling deeper into the grate.

Jackson turned to Blair. "You have heard Mr. Taney's counsel."

"I have, sir."

"And if I instruct you to print the connexion regardless — what then?"

Blair did not answer at once. The heat from the over-built grate pressed against the back of his neck. "Then I print it," he said. "And we lose the argument before the week is out. Every sheet in the country that is not ours will reprint the accusation alongside the evidence against it, and the General will have furnished them the occasion." He paused. "Mr. Taney is right."

Jackson's gaze settled on the notebook in Blair's lap. The pen uncapped. The page blank.

He turned back to Taney. "You are telling me that the man who has spent six years trying to destroy this government sent a lunatic with two pistols, and I am to accept damp air as my answer."

"I am telling you," Taney said, "that what you believe and what you can prove are two different things, and that a president who cannot distinguish between them has handed his enemies the one weapon they have not yet possessed."

The fire gave heat. The room was close. Jackson sat with it.

"Put the pen away," he said.

Blair capped it.

---

Scene 4

The Cabinet room in February: cold despite the fire, the grey light coming flat through the tall windows and dying before it reached the table's centre. Jackson sat at the head with his coat on, hands flat on the mahogany, and the chill worked at the joints of his fingers where the swelling from the Capitol steps had not yet fully subsided.

Woodbury stood at the far end with the estimates before him in three neat columns. He had brought two clerks to carry the ledgers; they stood against the wall, having long since understood that what they carried was not the point.

"The figures are not mine, General," Woodbury said. "They are the returns from Cincinnati, from Louisville, from the St. Louis land office and four others I have named in the summary. The western banks hold, in aggregate, something under nine hundred thousand dollars in specie against note circulation that exceeds six million. If we refuse paper at the land offices—"

"Read me the Cincinnati figure."

Woodbury looked at the page. "Forty-one thousand, four hundred dollars in coin."

"Against how much paper outstanding?"

"Against three hundred and eighty thousand."

The fire snapped. A log shifted. Benton, standing at Jackson's right, did not look at Woodbury. He looked at the wall.

"Mr. Secretary," Woodbury continued, his voice carrying the quality of a man crossing a floor he has reason to distrust, "the Circular, as presently drafted, will not slow speculation. It will end the land market entirely. Men who have contracted for parcels in good faith, with notes they received in good faith, will find their transactions void. The courts will be—"

"The courts will hear what they hear."

"I would counsel postponement, sir. Six months, perhaps eight, to allow the deposit banks to build their reserves to a level that can sustain—"

Jackson pushed back from the table and stood. The sound of the chair on the floorboards stopped Woodbury mid-sentence.

"Mr. Secretary." Jackson moved to the window and turned, so that the grey February light was at his back and Woodbury had to look into it. "You have brought me these figures before. In November you brought them. In December. Each time you have counselled postponement and each time I have asked you: at what point does postponement become permission? What is the figure at which we act? Name it for me. Name the number of dollars in false paper that constitutes the moment at which the Secretary of the Treasury judges the republic sufficiently imperilled to warrant his government's interference."

Woodbury's mouth opened. He did not name the figure.

"Senator Benton."

Benton turned from the wall. "General."

"You have heard the Secretary's recommendation."

"I have." Benton's voice went flat the way it went flat when he was most certain. "And the Secretary is not wrong about the arithmetic. The figures are exactly as he says. A man who buys land in Indiana with paper from an institution incorporated last Thursday has given nothing for that land. He has given a promise made by men with no coin behind it. When that promise fails — and it will fail, Mr. Secretary, it will fail before the year is out — the labourer who took his wages in honest toil and saved his honest coin will find himself neighbour to one who acquired ten times his acreage on nothing but a printer's ink. That is the republic the Secretary proposes to preserve for six more months."

Woodbury's jaw tightened. He did not answer.

Jackson returned to the table. He drew the Circular toward him across the mahogany — he had read it twice that morning and once the night before — and aligned the pen precisely parallel to the document's upper edge. He took it in his right hand and steadied his wrist with his left until the tremor quieted. Then he wrote his name.

He set the pen down.

"The order is issued. Mr. Woodbury, you will transmit it through Treasury channels before the week is out. Your recommendation for postponement will be entered in the record." He looked at the Secretary without heat, without ceremony. "I would rather see the land market stopped than see the republic drowned in false paper. That is my answer to the figures."

Woodbury gathered his estimates. The clerks reached for the ledgers.

"Webster will bring this before the Senate within a fortnight," Woodbury said. Informing, not threatening. "He has the votes to attach a resolution of censure to the appropriations bill. If that resolution passes, the Circular becomes the instrument by which this administration is defined — not the Bank's destruction, not the veto. This." He set one hand flat on the ledger. "A panic authored in the Executive Mansion."

The room was quiet. The fire gave what heat it could.

"Let him bring it," Jackson said. "He has brought worse."

Woodbury picked up the ledger. He did not look at Benton. He did not look at the clerks. He walked to the door, and the clerks followed, and the door closed behind all three of them without a sound worth remarking.

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Scene 5

The charter had expired at midnight, as a lease expires — by the calendar's indifference, without ceremony.

It was past nine in the evening when Jackson finally pushed back from the desk, his eyes burning from the day's correspondence. He had been in the chair since seven that morning. The fire behind him had burned down to a deep red pulse, and the room had cooled considerably in the last hour; he could feel the March chill in his knuckles, in the familiar ache along his left side where the old ball still lodged. He crossed to the window and stood.

Below on Pennsylvania Avenue: a dray horse, a lamplighter making his rounds with his pole and his small flame, two women in heavy cloaks moving briskly past the gate. No bonfires. No bells. The Monster had died and the city had not noticed, being too occupied with its own fevers to attend the burial.

He had expected something. He could admit that now, in the dark, with no one to hear it. Not celebration — he had never required celebration — but some acknowledgment from the air itself, some shift in the quality of the evening, the way the atmosphere changes before a storm breaks or after it passes. Instead: the lamplighter's pole, the clop of hooves on the avenue's packed earth, the distant bark of a dog somewhere toward the river.

Donelson had left the letter on the writing table before departing, placed apart from the other correspondence. Jackson had seen it when he entered the room that afternoon and had not gone to it immediately — had let it sit there through three hours of dispatches and two cups of cold coffee, the way a man lets a tooth go untouched until he has no further excuse.

He went to it now.

Biddle's hand — that cultivated script, each letter formed without haste, without the least suggestion that any of this had cost its author anything. To His Excellency the President of the United States. The Bank's own seal: the eagle, the shield, the motto. Jackson broke it with his thumb.

The letter was brief. Courteous. Mr. Biddle had the honour to inform the President that the Bank of the United States, pursuant to its charter granted by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, had this day commenced the full exercise of its banking operations under said authority. Mr. Biddle expressed his continued confidence in the institution's capacity to serve the public interest. Mr. Biddle remained, with great respect, the President's obedient servant.

Jackson read it twice. He carried it to the fireplace and dropped it onto the coals.

The paper browned at the edges, then caught — a small, clean flame that consumed the courteous salutation, the elegant assurances, the signature with its composed and certain flourish. He watched until the ash curled inward and fell apart. A log shifted in the grate and sent a shower of sparks across the hearth; he stepped back.

He had won. He knew the weight of that. Six years of war, the censure, the blood coughed into a dozen handkerchiefs, the friends it had cost him, the enemies it had made permanent — and the Bank's federal charter was gone, and the republic stood without that particular Monster at its throat. He had expected to feel the thing settle. He had expected resolution, the way a wound closes after the ball is finally extracted. It did not settle. The fire gave back nothing but heat.

But Biddle had simply changed coats. Not beaten — adapted. He would continue under another name, in another house, with the same purposes and the same serene confidence that his judgment exceeded any government's authority to question it. The letter had said as much, in that courteous register, as though the communication were a courtesy rather than a declaration of continued operations.

And in the West — Jackson had known it since Blair's dispatches, had signed the Circular against it — the notes multiplied regardless. The state-chartered banks, liberated from the old institution's regulatory discipline, were doing precisely what their critics had predicted: issuing paper against coin they did not possess, accepting deposits they could not honour, feeding a land speculation that swelled on its own heat. The Circular would press upon that bubble. Whether it would puncture it cleanly or burst it catastrophically was a question the spring would answer, and the spring was already here.

He turned from the fire.

On the writing table, beneath the correspondence Donelson had left in its ordered stack, the edge of a document was visible — the weekly returns from the Cincinnati depository, the figures he had not yet read. He had been avoiding them, he recognised, the way a man avoids a mirror when he has reason to distrust what it will show him.

He crossed the room and took it up. The paper was cold from lying unattended. He carried it to the window where the lamplight from the avenue gave enough illumination to read by, and he unfolded it, and he read.

The figures were worse than last week's. Considerably worse. The ratio of notes outstanding to coin in the vault had moved from nine to one toward eleven, and the land sales recorded in the attached schedule ran to numbers that made the Indiana dispatch Blair had read him seem, by comparison, almost restrained.

Outside, the lamplighter had finished his work on this stretch of the avenue and moved on; the lamps burned steadily in the dark, each one a small and separate flame, and the spaces between them were very dark indeed.

In the morning the Senate would reconvene. Webster would rise. Somewhere in Philadelphia, Nicholas Biddle was already at his desk — that clean, unhurried hand moving across fresh paper, the next letter already taking shape, the next manoeuvre already in train. He had not been destroyed. He had been redirected, and a man of his resources and his temperament, redirected rather than destroyed, was a different order of danger than the one Jackson had spent six years preparing to meet. The Circular was issued. The order was in the world and could not be recalled. What it would visit upon the spring markets, upon the men in Indiana and Missouri who had staked their acres on paper promises — that accounting had not yet been rendered, and no act of will could hasten or forestall it now.

Jackson folded the Cincinnati returns and set them on the table. He did not reach for the pen.

The lamps burned on the avenue below. The March air pressed cold against the glass. Somewhere toward the river, the dog barked again — once, twice — and then a door opened and shut, and the night was quiet, and the quiet held nothing he had not already reckoned with.