Already were a private nonprofit educational organization. The mission of the place and it has been for a long time is to enhance the understanding and appreciative of the executive mansion. A long, long time means 56 years at this point. Its 1961. This is during the kennedy administration, and first Lady Jacqueline kennedy founded the association and its purpose was to help the white house to collect and exhibit the very best of American History and culture, but underscoring all of that, to inform and excite the public about the history of the executive mansion. So today, fast forwarding all these years, were still doing this. Acquisiti acquisition, preservation, research, education efforts that continue through the sale of our books, our products. Ill tell you more about that in a sec. The official white house ornament and then also in recent years from private and corporate donations. To strengthen our goal, the overarching goal to widely share white house history with the public, last year we created this lecture series. Its purpose is to bring, pointing at dr. Feller over here wellknown authors and historians to the association to share knowledge and insight with the public. And top humanize the white house, its inhabitants and things that happen there. Were delighted to have professor feller with us tonight to speak about Andrew Jackson and the white house but also the origins and the events and the enduring legacy of Jacksons Bank war and then taking that a step further, the impact of that on the role of the president in later generations. It does bear noting because we do anniversaries. I was thinking through the lecture series that 2017, this year is also a benchmark because jackson was born in 1767. So that makes it 250 years. That one, that box is being checked, as well. Before turning the podium over, its important to share a few salient elements about his really impressive and far reaching background. Hes a professor at the university of tennessee and he will tell you more about this momentarily. Hes also the editor of the papers of Andrew Jackson. And on the sort of curriculum part, prior to joining the tennessee fact, he was at a niece place, the university of new mexico albuquerque and before that at north land college until wisconsin and his connection with the papers of Andrew Jackson goes all the way back in time to that period. He has contributed to numerous historical publications. We wen over this together. The new Oxford University press volume which is a very cool title called when life strikes the president. His critical essays and articles have appeared in many, many scholarly publications and hes been on television shows. Hes been on many shows including history detectives, who do you think you are, and cnns race for the white house. He continues to carry out Scholarly Research that contributes in terms of all of us to our understanding and appreciation of americas history. Now in closing, a little tiny moment of bookkeeping. I think some of you may have gotten these on the way in. Were offering the association a 10 discount on everything over there in the store. Its going to be open till 6 00. It encompasses the totality of the event. There is this wonderful Andrew Jackson ornament and it comes in a boxed set. There are a couple others that come with it. Thats a thought, as well among our many, many White House Christmas ornaments. On that note, please join me in very warmly welcoming professor daniel feller. [ applause ] thank you, curtis. And thank you all for being here. For me, this is a very timely visit as curtis said, im the editor of the papers of Andrew Jackson. At that project, we are publishing all of his papers, at least all the surviving ones in chronological order. And our last volume covered the year 1832. Im going to draw on that in what i tell you in a few minutes. In 1833, which is the year were working on now as it happened just last week, i was sitting at my desk editing and preparing for publication the letters that susan key indicator limping in the Decatur House wrote to jackson in may, 1833 saying we just auctioned off all my furniture and im still broke. Would you buy for me out of charity all of my table ware and silver and plate which jackson did and then went down to the hermitage. Im not sure where the stuff is now. Anyway, my suggest today is president Andrew Jacksons bank war but im going to begin by asking a favor. You have perhaps heard or read something about jackson of late. Hes been very much in the news. And that something may have left an impression in your mind about his character and presidency. Please put it aside because it may be wrong. We seem to be engaged today in a kind of public war on many fronts between loud fictions and quiet facts. And at least in jacksons case, the fictions seem to be winning. They come from all sides, everyone from the president of the United States and his acolytes at one side to his severest critics on the other have joined in propounding an image of jackson as a kind of bumpious cowboy in the white house. An image that lies somewhere between tan dengsiously misleading and plain false. As example, President Trump at the hermitage laying a wreath on jacksons birthday for the 250th anniversary said that tough guy jackson laid tariffs on foreign imports. The truth of that is exactly the reverse. The National Review called a highly nationalistic even menacing president ial address on Foreign Relations a few weeks ago in its words a very jacksonian speech. There was nothing whatsoever jacksonian about it. On the other side of the political fence, on atlantic magazine cover story declared that jackson fought at least 14 duals. Newsweek magazine not to be outdone upped that number to 100, 100 duals. You know how many duals Andrew Jackson actually fought . One. Count them, one. The New York Times declared a little while back that jackson and this is its forward, annihilated the southeastern indians. Not expelled, not deported. Not evicted but annihilated which last i looked at a dictionary meant he killed them all. To top it all off just days ago, a Washington PostSenior National security correspondent named karen de younging in an article about president ial insults or political insults reported that jackson said to his Vice President , john c. Calhoun, if you see screed from my nation, i will see cede your head from your body. Which is charming and completely false, fake. Even jon meachams Time Magazine special issue on jackson which is otherwise very good concludes with a page of bold quotations several of which are dubious or just plain madeup. And one of the madeup ones is the very first one on the page, take time to deliberate but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in. We are in short regrettably bombarded from all sides by fake history on Andrew Jackson, much of it going to suggest that jackson as president was impull sib and uncontrollably violent. Now, im not here to defend jackson. But i am going to tell you a story which i think challenges that perception, one that is closely grounded in contemporary sources, the ones that i work with, especially in jacksons own surviving papers. In other words, a story that is, to the best of my knowledge, actually true. On july 5th, 1832, martin van buren, who had been jacksons secretary of state and now is his running mate in the 1832 president ial election, arrived at the white house at midnight. He had just the day before that landed in new york city after almost a year abroad and he had rushed down to washington and one day at jacksons urgent summons. He found the president sprawled out on a sick bed and jackson took his hand and said, and these are van burens words describing it, with the clearest indications of a mind composed and in a tone entirely devoid of passion or bluster, he said, the bank, mr. Van buren, is trying to kill me. But i will kill it. Well, van buren first told this story many years later in his auto biography and explained had he kept it secret till then for the fear that in his words casual hearers would misinterpret it to mean jackson had acted against the banking from again van burens words offended personal feelings, which van buren said was without the slightest foundation in truth. Well, van buren was right to worry because from his day to our own, Andrew Jacksons destruction of the bank of the United States has been denounced by critics as reckless and vin dicktive, an act of private peevish spleen for which the nation was made to pay dearly. Calling for jacksons eviction from the 20 bill in 2015, by the way, i have no opinion on that, no opinion on it. They want to change the faces, thats fine with me. But calling for jacksons eviction, the New York Times charged him with wantonly and outrageously destroying the bank which was after all as the times pronounced a bred ses her of the Federal Reserve. Now, im not going to try to convince you that killing the bank was wise. Im not sure that it was. Im going to try to persuade you it was by no means hasty or impulsive and that the concerns that motivated were far from merely personal. At the heart of jacksons socalled bank war were issues that were serious and weighty, serious and weighty then perhaps serious and weighty still today. So let me begin by setting the stage. In 1816, congress had chartered or incorporated the second bank of the United States for 20 years. Till 1836. Remember that year. The bank was headquartered in philadelphia with power to establish branches wherever it wanted to. By 1832, four years before that charter was going to run out, the bank had 25 branches in 20 different states and the district of columbia. The banks Capital Stock was set at 35 million. At a time when the annual entire federal budget was about 20 billion. The bank was neither simply a private concern nor was it an arm of government but it was a hybrid of both. The United States owned onefifth of its Capital Stock, 7 million and the president of the United States with Senate Consent appointed five of the banks 25 Board Members of the board of directors. The bank was to be the federal governments own banker. It performed some of the functions of todays Federal Reserve and also some functions of todays Treasury Department. It brokered federal loans, received stored, transported and paidout Government Funds, and it issued bank notes which were the countrys only legal tender paper currency. But the bank was also with all of this a commercial business. It loaned money in competition with other banks. It made profits, and it paid dividends. Clothed by its charter with, and these words are in the charter, exclusive privileges and benefits, operating throughout the land when every other bank in the country was confined to a single state and most of them to a single city, at a time when the Treasury Department itself consisted of a few dozen washington clerks and scatterings of custom offices throughout the country, the bank of the United States was literally the only National Financial institution in the country. It held immense power over the functions of government, the solvency of other banks, the stability of the nations Economic System, and the welfare of the citizens. Well, this mix of private and public and the Banks Organization had been a deliberate feature of Alexander Hamiltons design for the second bank of the United Statess predecessor. The first bank of the United States which had already been chartered for 20 years from 1791 and allowed to expire in 1811. And hamilton deliberately mixed public and private interests in the bank because he thought it was necessary to fortify confidence in the soundness of the new governments finances. But by the time Andrew Jackson took the ninaugural oath in 192, the ability of the United States and willingness of the United States to pay its bills which is what hamilton was concerned about was no longer in question. And the banks hybrid private public nature stood out as we shall see for other reasons. Now, the origins of jacksons hostility to the bank are obscure. They are sometimes attributed to my mind a very unpersuasively to an early financial disaster of his own where he had been burned by endorsing another mans bad notes. Jackson purportedly said during his presidency that he had always opposed all banks. But as we have learned in the jackson papers, jackson had a notoriously pliant memory and a pronounced habit of believing he had always believed what he happened to believe at the current moment. There were at any rate plenty of good reasons to distrust banks. Banking was not in the early republic as we hope it is today. A staid and upright profession operating on wellknown principles and accepted standards. It was at best a half understood, half mysterious trade and at worst, banking was something close to a con game. Bank charters were produced from state legislatures throughout the country through political influence, often the people seeking those charters were not men with money to lend but in pen cunious and ambitious men who wanted to create banks so they could borrow from them. The hard capital with which banks supposedly started was often fictitious kissing of ious with the idea you would be able to redeem the ious from the profits that the bank would make after you set it up. Selfdealing among Bank Officers was routine, corruption not uncommon and failures were frequent. Even the second bank of the United States itself chartered back in 1816 had begun its career with a spree of speculation, embezzlement and fraud by 1820 had brought it to the edge of insolvency and required a wholesale purge of its management. Given what we know of Thomas Jeffersons politics, it would be no surprise to learn that he condemned all chartered banking as, and this is a quotation, a sacrifice of public and private interests to a few aristocrat cal friends and favorites. Except that jefferson didnt say that. The man who said that was jeffersons federalist opponent and later friend federalist john adams of massachusetts. Bank of the United States kept a low and competent profile through the 1820s under the deft management of its president , a man named Nicolas Biddle. It was not an issue in the storied 1828 president ial campaign when jackson defeated the son of old john adams, john quincy adams. And jackson said nothing about it in his inaugural address march 4th, 1829. The first inklings of trouble came afterwards when reports reached jackson that certain branches of the bank had tried to wield their influence against him in the 1828 election. Again, he heard about this afterwards. Now, given jacksons sense of grievance over that election, an election in which jackson believed and these are all his words, the virtuious yeomanry of the United States had sustained him against more jacksons words all the tore renes of slander, the corruption and wickedness could invent circulated through subsidized presses in every way inspired by the patronage of the government. Given that sense, if you look at the election that way, learning that the bank of the United States was part of that torrent of wickedness and abuse would be enough by itself to set you off against it. Already by 1829, june of 129 he would have been president all of three months, jackson was writing friends that the only thing that can prevent our liberties to be crushed by the bank and its influence would be to kill the bank itself. Well, jackson challenged both the constitution alt and the efficacy, the financial efficacy, the competence you might say of the everything of the United States in his first annual message to congress in december, 1829. This attack came out of the blue and startled his audience, went against the advice of several members of his cabinet. Jackson got backing from his confidential inner circle, including a treasury auditor and president ial wordsmith named amos kendall. And the District Attorney whom jackson appointed for the Southern District of new york, named james a. Hamilton who was Martin Van Burens political sidekick and also as it happened a son of the former secretary of the treasure treasury secretary alexander hamilton. The language of jacksons official criticism of the bank in his first annual message was somewhat restrained but his private words were not. He wrote hamilton that he was being opposed by, these are jacksons words, all the sordid and interested who prize selfinterest more than the perpetuity of our liberty