s was chartered by Congress in 1816. The charter was supposed to run for twenty years. The capital stock of it was assigned at thirty-five million dollars, one-fifth was from the federal government, and the rest was from the public. It was a central bank designed to regulate the credit and currency operations of the country. It was supposed to provide stability to the economy, tighten credit, and prevent an excess of paper money. The Bank was declared constitutional in the Supreme Court case of M'Culloch v. Maryland. In this case Maryland tried to tax the Bank out of existence. Its Baltimore cashier, James M'Culloch refused to pay. So the state sued and the case went to the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Marshall said, in a unanimous decision, that the Bank was constitutional and that it was unconstitutional for the state to tax the Bank. He said that since it was an agent of the national government, the state could not limit the nation's activity by the use of the taxing power. He said this because, in his words, "the power to tax involves the power to destroy"(Coit 148). By saying this he meant that a state could not hinder what the national government was trying do. This strengthened the power of the central government. And also took away some of the rights of the states. Presumably, Jackson should have been happy with this, given his stance on nullification, but he was not. He thought that the bank operated for the benefit of the rich few rather than the many poor people. The bank was against soft money, which was what westerners yearned for. They needed the cheap flow of paper money and easy credit to keep their farming economy up and running. He thought that it was a monopoly. He thought that it was independent of the people and had the means to nullify economic development. He also thought that it frequently interfered in politics. The Bank made the right loans to the right congressmen at the right times, on...
