[figure description] Page 043.[end figure description]

In the course of the first year after The Removal, or as I
should say, in the year One,—speaking after our manner in
Quodlibet,—the bank made itself very agreeable to every
body. Mr. Flam came home from congress after the end
of the long session and found every thing prospering beyond
his most sanguine expectations. Nicodemus Handy
had put a new weather-boarded room to the back of his
office for the use of the Directors, and the banking business
was transacted in the front apartment where Nicodemus
used to sell lottery tickets. There was one thing that
strangers visiting Quodlibet were accustomed to remark upon
in a jocular vein, regarding the bank—and that was the
sign which was placed, as it were parapet-wise, along the
eaves of the roof, and being of greater longitude than the
front of the building, projected considerably at either end.
Quipes has been held responsible for this, but I know that
he could not help it, on account of the length of the name,
which, nevertheless, it is due to him to say he endeavored,
very much to my discontent, to shorten, both by orthographical
device and by abbreviation, having printed it thus—

[figure description] Page 044.[end figure description]

The PatriotiC CoperplatE Bank of Quodlibet;
notwithstanding which, it overran the dimensions of the
tenement to which it was attached.—I say strangers sometimes
facetiously alluded to this discrepancy, by observing
that the bank was like the old Hero himself, too great for
the frame that contained it. And, truly, the bank did a
great business! Mr. Handy, who is acknowledged to be a
man of taste, procured one of the handsomest plates, it is
supposed, that Murray Draper and Fairman ever executed,
and with about six bales of pinkish silk paper, and a very
superior cylinder press, created an amount of capital which
soon put to rest old Mr. Grant's grumbling about the want
of solidity in the bank, and fully justified the Secretary's declaration
of his confidence in its “established character as
affording a sufficient guaranty for the safety of the public
money entrusted to its keeping.”

As a proof how admirably matters were conducted by
Mr. Handy, the Directors soon found no other reason
to attend at the Board, than now and then, to hold a chat
upon politics and smoke a cigar; and the president, the
Honorable Middleton Flam, having his October election on
hand, was so thoroughly convinced of Nicodemus's ability
that I do not believe he went into the Bank more than half a
dozen times during the whole season.

It was in the course of this year, and pretty soon after the
Bank got the deposites, that Mr. Handy began his row of
four story brick warehouses on the Basin, which now goes
by the name of Nicodemus's Row. He also laid the foundation
of his mansion on the hill, fronting upon Handy
Place; and which edifice he subsequently finished, so much
to the adornment of our Borough, with a Grecian portico
in front and an Italian verandah looking towards the garden.
As his improvements advanced in this and the next

[figure description] Page 045.[end figure description]

year, he successively reared a Temple of Minerva on the
top of the ice-house, a statue of Apollo in the centre of the
carriage-circle, a sun-dial on a marble pillar where the garden
walls intersect, and a gilded dragon weathercock on the
cupola of the stables. The new banking house was commenced
early in the summer and has been finished of very
beautiful granite, being in its front, if I am rightly informed
by Mr. Handy, an exact miniature copy of the Tomb of
Osymandias: it is situated on Flam street, the first after you
leave the Basin, going northward. All the Directors, except
Fog, followed the footsteps of their illustrious predecessor,
Mr. Handy, and went to work to build themselves
villas on the elevated ground back of the Borough, now
known by the name of Copperplate Ridge,—which villas
were duly completed in all manner of Greek, Roman and
Tuscan fashions. These being likewise imitated, in turn,
by many friends of the bank who migrated hither from all
parts and cast their lines in our Borough, Quodlibet hath
thereby, very suddenly, grown to be, in a figurative sense,
a pattern card of the daintiest structures of the four quarters
of the world. Perhaps I may be too fast in making so
broad an assertion—cupio non putari mendacem—I am not
quite sure, that, as yet, we have any well ascertained specimen
of the Asiatic: but if Nicodemus Handy's pagoda,
which he talked of building on the knoll in the centre of his
training course, had not been interrupted by an untoward
event of which it may become my duty to speak hereafter,
I should, in that case, have made no difficulty in reiterating,
with a clear conscience and without reservation, the remark
which distrustfully and with claim of allowance I have ventured
above.

My valuable patron not being resident actually within
the Borough, and being, as I have said, very busy in the
matter of his election during the greater part of the first

[figure description] Page 046.[end figure description]

year of the bank, had not much opportunity to devote himself
to its concerns. But the directors, partly aware of their
own knowledge, how valuable was his influence with the
Secretary, and partly persuaded thereof by the Cashier,
established, with a liberality which Mr. Handy remarked
at the time was exceedingly gentlemanlike, his salary as
President at three thousand dollars a year,—which sum, Mr.
Flam himself has, more than once in my hearing, averred
upon his honor, he did not consider one cent too much.
And indeed, I feel myself bound to express my concurrence
in this opinion, when I reflect upon the weight of his character,
the antiquity of his family, the preponderance of his
strong democratic sentiments, and the expenses to which,
as President, he was exposed in looking after the interests
of the bank,—more especially in the journies to Washington,
whereof I have heard him speak, for the purpose of explaining
matters to the Secretary.

Connected with this matter of salary, and as having a
natural propinquity to the subject, I may here cursorily, for
I design to be more particular on this point hereafter, claim
the privilege to enter a little into the family matters of my
patron. And on this head, I would observe that the household
of Mr. Flam is large. Of a truth, as some philosopher
has remarked, mouths are not fed, nor bodies clad,
without considerable of the wherewithal! There is Mrs.
Flam, the venerated consort of our representative—a lady
most honorably conducive to the multiplication of the
strength and glory of this land: there is, likewise, Mr.
Flam's sister Janet,—truly an honor to her sex for instructive
discourse and exemplary life; and there is Master Middleton,
Junior, with his four sisters and three brothers, who
may be all ranged into the semblance of a stepladder. Great
is Mr. Flam's parental tenderness towards this happy progeny—
the reduplication and retriplication, if I may so

[figure description] Page 047.[end figure description]

express it, of himself and their respectable mamma. Yielding
to the solicitude inspired by this tenderness, almost
the first thing which our representative did, after the establishment
of the bank,—the means having thereby come the
better to his hand,—was to send Master Middleton, Junior,
who was very urgent in his entreaties to that point, to
Europe, that the young gentleman, by two or three years
travel, might witness the distresses and oppressions of
monarchical government, and become confirmed in his
democratic sentiments. A refinement of sensibility in Mr.
Flam, which I might almost denominate fastidious, has also
operated with him to require the education of his daughters
to be conducted under his own roof. He would never hear,
for one moment, any persuasion to trust them even at their
earliest age, in the public school,—considerately fearful lest
they might form intimacies unbecoming the station to which
he destined them in after life. They have consequently
been placed under the special tuition of a most estimable
lady, Madamoiselle Jonquille, a resident governess, who is
enjoined to speak to them nothing but French. This lady,
among other things, teaches them music, and is aided in the
arduous duties allotted to her, by a drawing master of acknowledged
ability in water colors, and a very superior
professor of dancing, who instructs them in the elegant accomplishment
of waltzing and galloping, which, Mr. Flam
says, is now-a-days held to be indispensable in the first
Democratic circles at Washington, where it has always been
his design to introduce the young ladies into high life.

It will not be out of place here to mention that the worthy
subject of this desultory memoir, my patron and former
pupil, inherited a large fortune from his father, the late
Judge Flam, who was especially honored by old John
Adams, or as the better phrase is, the elder Adams, with an
appointment to the bench on the night of the third of March

[figure description] Page 048.[end figure description]

Anno Domini 1801: and I have often heard Mr. Middleton
say that his father had up to the day of his lamented departure
from this world, which melancholy event happened in the
year of our Lord 1825, the greatest respect for General
Jackson; which liking for the Old Hero descended to his
son, along with the family estate, and serves satisfactorily
to account for my former pupil's ardent attachment to democratic
principles, as in the sequel I shall make appear.

I do not desire to conceal the fact that Judge Flam, and
even Mr. Middleton himself, for some years after he came
to man's estate, were both reputed to belong to what was
generally, at that time, denominated and known by the appellation
of the Old Federal party, and what, in common
parlance, has been sometimes scoffingly termed, The Black
Cockade; and that the Judge, who was always noted for
being very stiff in his opinions, maintained his connection
nominally with that party until the day of his death. I
mention this not in derogation of Mr. Middleton our representative,
but rather in the way of commendation, because I
am by this fact the more strongly confirmed in my admiration
of the greatness of his character,—seeing that his conversion
to Democracy is the pure result of reflection and
conviction, which is more laudable, in my humble thinking,
than to be a born veteran democrat, as I once heard a great
man boast himself.

Now this conversion being a notable matter, I can by no
means pretermit a veritable account of it, which happens to
be fully within my power to disclose, I being, as I may say,
a witness to the whole course of it.

Every body remembers that most signal of all the literary
productions of General Jackson's various and illustrious
pen, his letter to Mr. Monroe dated the 12th of November
Anno Domini 1816. It came—in the language of my venerated
friend Judge Flam,—like the sound of a trumpet upon

[figure description] Page 049.[end figure description]

the ears of all of the Old Federalists. “Now is the time,”
says General Jackson, in that immortal letter, which I transcribed
as soon as I saw it in print, into my book of memorable
things, and which I now quote verbatim et literatim:

“Now is the time to exterminate that monster called Party
Spirit. By selecting characters most conspicuous for their probity,
virtue, capacity and firmness, (wise and patriotic man!)
without any regard to party, (how disinterested!) you will go far
to, if not entirely, eradicate those feelings which, on former occasions,
threw so many obstacles in the way, and perhaps have
the pleasure and honor of uniting a people heretofore politically
divided. The Chief Magistrate of a great and powerful nation
should never (mark that!) indulge in party feelings. His conduct
should be liberal and disinterested, always bearing in mind
that he acts for the whole, and not a part of the community.”

This letter of the last of the Romans, was published in
the National Intelligencer, and I happened to be with Judge
Flam when it first met his eye. He was sipping his tea.
The venerable Judge read it twice; took up the cup and, in
a musing thoughtful mood, burnt his mouth with the hot
liquid so badly that he was obliged to call for cold water.—
Just at that moment, Middleton, his son, came into the parlor:
he had been out shooting partridges.

“My dear Middleton, read that”—said the Judge.

Middleton sat down and read it; and then looked intently
at his father, waiting to hear what he would say.

“Middleton my son,” said he in a very deliberate and emphatic
manner, “There's our man. General Jackson has
been called a Hero—he's a Sage—a wise man, a very wise
man. We have been kept in the mire too long: these Jeffersons
and Madisons and Nicholases and Randolphs and all
that Virginia Junto (I think that was the very word he used)
have trodden us in the dust. They, with all the Democracy
at their back, have lorded it over us for sixteen years. We

[figure description] Page 050.[end figure description]

owe them an old grudge. But our time is coming: (this expression
he repeated twice). Remember, my son, if ever you
get into a majority, stick to it. Bring up your children to it.
You have a long account to settle:—I shall bequeath to you
the Vengeance of the Federal party. We must rally at once
upon Andrew Jackson. He will bring us what it is fashionable
to call “the People”—We shall bring him the talent,
the intelligence and the patriotism of the land. In such an
alliance how can it be otherwise but that we shall have all
the power?—and then, if we fail to play our cards with
skill, we shall deserve to lose the game. Let Jackson be
our candidate for the next Presidency, and let our gathering
word be, in the sentiment of this memorable letter, “The
Union of the People and the extermination of the Monster
of Party.” Do not slumber, my son, but give your energies
to this great enterprise.”

Mr. Middleton took this advice of his venerable father
greatly to heart. “Up with Jackson, and down with
Party—” said he after a long rumination—“good, excellent—
nothing can be better!” And several times that night,
before he went to bed, he audibly uttered the same words
as he walked backward and forward across the room.

From this time Judge Flam wrote many letters to his
friends, disclosing the views he had expressed to Middleton;
and by degrees the matter ripened and ripened, until
things were so contrived as to bring about what Judge
Flam used to smile and say, was “a spontaneous, unpremeditated
burst of popular feeling,” in the nomination of the
General. And the Judge used to laugh outright, when
the papers took strong ground in the General's favor, as the
candidate who was brought out “without intrigue or party
management.” The Old Hero and Sage, we all know, was
cheated out of his first election; which circumstance greatly
embittered his early friends, who, from that time—Mr.

[figure description] Page 051.[end figure description]

Middleton amongst the rest—took a very decided stand for
Reform, Retrenchment, Economy and the Rights of the
People.

The Judge did not live to witness this second effort
which resulted so gloriously for the democratic cause;
but his son stuck close to the Old Hero, and was amongst
his most ardent supporters to the last. When the General
succeeded, his first care was to show his gratitude to that
disinterested band of patriots who so freely surrendered
their old principles and abandoned their old comrades in his
behalf. He brought them into office, just to show that he
was determined to carry out the doctrine of his letter; and
they were loudest in their praise of him for the sake of the
old grudge, of which Judge Flam spoke to his son, and to
indemnify their long suffering in the cause of the country,
in the course of which they had, for so many years, been
strangers to power. So between these two persuasions, it
is not to be wondered at that they should have become the
principal friends and most confidential advisers of the General.

Having thus got upon an elevation, from whence they
could look backwards upon their past errors and forwards
to their future hopes, a new light dawned upon every man
of them; and thereupon they straightway became sick and
sorry for having so long sinned against democracy, and
grew ashamed of that black cockade which George Washington
wore in the Revolution; made open renunciation of
their former pretended attachment to his principles; canonized
Mr. Jefferson as a saint, whom they had formerly
reviled as the chief of sinners; purged out their old Federal
blood; took deep alterative draughts of detergent medicine;
and, finally, like true patriots, came forth regenerated, thorough-bred,
whole-hog Democrats, sworn to follow the new
democratic principle through all its meanderings, traverses,

[figure description] Page 052.[end figure description]

dodgings and duckings to the end. Indeed, Mr. Middleton
Flam, our honorable representative, has more than
once, in some of his later speeches before the people, contended,
that although his father was attached to George
Washington's school of politics, which, as he remarked,
naturally arose out of the prejudices created by the revolutionary
war—in which the old Judge had served as a soldier—
yet, that he, Middleton, never was truly an admirer of
that gentleman's theory of government or system of measures—
but, on the contrary, held them in marked disesteem,
and from his earliest youth had a strong inclination towards
that freedom from restraint, which, in man and boy,
is the best test of the new democratic principle. In proof
of this tendency of his youthful opinions, he mentioned,
with most admirable effect, an exploit in which, when not
more than twelve years of age, he gallantly stood up at the
head of a party of his schoolfellows to bar out the tutor and
take a holiday, on the ground of the indefeasible rights of
man, with a view to attend a great political meeting of the
friends of Jefferson, just previous to the second election of
that Apostle of Democracy.

Be that as it may, our distinguished member of Congress
is now, by force of reflection and conviction, as pure, unadulterated,
and as our people jocularly denote it, as patent a
dyed-in-the-wool democrat as Theodore Fog himself, whose
attachment to popular principles, habits and manners, and
whose unalterable adhesion to the new democratic theory,
are written in every line of his face and in every movement
of his body:—and so, Mr. Flam avers, is every one of his
black cockade friends who have got an office. “Thus it
is,”—if I may be allowed to quote a beautiful sentiment
from one of Fog's speeches—“Thus it is, that by degrees,
the errors of old opinions are washed out by the all-pervading
ablution of the democratic principle following in the footsteps

[figure description] Page 053.[end figure description]

of the march of intellect; and so true is it, that the body
politic, like quicksilver, regurgitates and repudiates the feculence
of Federalism.”

Nicodemus Handy has an attachment for Mr. Flam,
which is truly fraternal. It goes so far as to prevent him from
ever contradicting Mr. Middleton in any fact, or gainsaying
him in any opinion—although I did think at one time, when
Nicodemus was thought to be rich, that he was a little bold in
his sentiments on two or three matters wherein our member
differed from him. One I remember in particular; it was when
the old hero pocketed the Specie Circular bill. Mr. Handy
thought, for a little while, that that circular was too hard
upon the banks and the trading people, and he seemed to
insinuate that the General was rather cornered by congress,
when they ordered its repeal by two-thirds of both houses;
and that, consequently, as a good Democrat, he ought to
have submitted to the will of the people in that matter, and
allowed them to have the law after it was passed. Mr. Flam
was diametrically opposed to him, and proved, I thought
conclusively, that, according to the sound Quodlibetarian
democratic principle, the General was altogether right in
putting the act of congress aside and not allowing them to
overset his plans by another vote of two-thirds; “for,”—
he inquired with great force of argument, adopting the
Socratic form—“what is Congress? The representatives
of the people, by districts and by states. For whom can
any one man in that body speak? For his own district, or
for his own state—no more. Now, what is the President?
Sir,” said he, in that solemn and impressive tone in which
he addresses the house at Washington, “the President himself
has answered that question in his immortal Protest
against the Senate—he is `the direct representative of the
American people,' and, as he took occasion once to say in
his Message, `It will be for those in whose behalf we all

[figure description] Page 054.[end figure description]

act, to decide whether the Executive Department of the
government, in the steps which it has taken on this subject,
has been found in the line of its duty.' The President,
sir, is the representative of the whole people—not
of a district, not of a state, but of the whole nation. Why
should these representatives of the parts undertake to dictate
to the representative of the whole? It is for the people
to decide whether, in putting that bill in his pocket, he
was in the line of his duty. Sir, there is the broad buttress
upon which the democratic principle reposes, and will repose
forever. Jackson has determined, as Representative of the
people, that the Specie Circular shall not be repealed, and
every true democrat will of course say that he is right. I
am surprised that you, Handy, should give any countenance
to the factious doctrine set up by the Whigs, that Congress
has a right to array itself against the clearly expressed will
of the people, when uttered through the Paramount Representative
of the whole nation.”

Mr. Handy was evidently confounded by this unanswerable
argument, and, of course, did not attempt to answer.
I confess, for my own part, I listened with admiration and
amazement at the dialectic skill with which so abstruse a
subject was so briefly yet so clearly elucidated, and I inwardly
ejaculated, in the language of the afflicted man of
Uz, “How forcible are right words!”

My late pupil's reflections were drawn to this question
of the Specie Circular with more intensity of regard, from a
very natural train of circumstances, which had great influence
in inducing an elaborate study of the subject. Mr. Handy
has often said that Mr. Flam was the very best customer
our bank had from the beginning. Acting, as he always
did, upon the principle that our first care is due to those
who are nearest to us, or, according to the adage, that
Charity begins at Home, the president of the bank refused

[figure description] Page 055.[end figure description]

to borrow from any other institution, but determined exclusively
to patronise his own. This principle he carried to
the romantic extent of borrowing four times as much as any
body else; and as he always contended for it as the most
approved theorem in banking, that the wider and the more
remote the circulation of the paper of a bank, the better for
its profit, he employed these funds in the purchase of a
large quantity of the Chickasaw Reserve lands; which, by-the-by,
it is whispered that very keen-sighted gentleman,
Mr. Amos Kendall, put him upon doing—he, the said
Kendall having, as many persons believed, the backstair
entrance to the old Hero's chamber, through which freedom,
I have heard it hinted, considerable facilities were gained as
regarded the President's consent to the sales of these lands
by the Indians—the same being, if I mistake not, altogether
unsaleable without that consent. By these means Mr. Flam
became the proprietor of a vast number of acres in that south-west
country; and as the Specie Circular was a most laudable
contrivance of the old Hero's, or of his frienbs (for it was
always the same thing with him—what his friends advised
he was in the habit of putting out as his own), to stop over-trading
and speculating in the public lands, it occurred to
our worthy representative that the less the public lands were
sold, the more his and Mr. Kendall's would come into the
market at good prices; and so, with a view to the benefit of
Quodlibet, where he expected to invest the profits, he became
a strong advocate of the circular. This set him to
studying the question of the pocketing of the bill for its
repeal, whereof I have spoken above, and enabled him to
convince himself how deeply that matter was connected
with the development of the democratic principle in the
manner put forth in his argument to Mr. Handy.

Thus does it come to pass that, step by step, as our
government rolls on, its fundamental features are

[figure description] Page 056.[end figure description]

successively disclosed in the practical operations of that sublime
system which so securely intrenches the good of the people
in the doctrines of genuine Quodlibetarian democracy,
as now of late, for the first time, fully understood and practised.

Ever after that notable discourse, Mr. Handy showed himself,
both in private and at our public meetings, the stern,
uncompromising champion of the Specie Circular and of the
broad representative character of the president. The other
questions upon which I have found him to differ occasionally
with Mr. Flam, shared pretty nearly the same fate as
this. The Cashier ultimately fell into entire harmony of
sentiment in all matters with the President; though, as I
have insinuated before, in the flood-tide of Mr. Handy's
fortune, when he began to be accounted a man of wealth,
he was, in accordance with a principle of human nature
founded upon the corrupting and debasing influence of
riches, much more difficult to bring into perfect conformity
of opinion with Mr. Flam, than in the ebb. Yet, I would
here remark that, almost in the same degree that Mr. Handy
yielded his assent to the doctrines of the honorable Middleton
Flam, did the rank and file of our sturdy and independent
democracy yield to Mr. Handy; the whole party being
kept in a harmonious agreement and accord by what
Fog terms “the electric diffusion of the democratic principle
through the whole circle of hand-in-hand, unflinching,
unwavering, uncorruptible, and power-frowning-down Yeomanry
of the most virtuous and enlightened nation upon the
terrestrial globe.”

p239-062

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