Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[935] face Minie bullets in the field — bold enough to insist that the letter of the law did not authorize payment of the principal of the five-twenty bonds in lawful money of the United States.

The next class of arguments that the gentleman from Maine puts forward on this question is the proposals in the advertisements of those he terms the authorized agents of the United States who disposed of the loan. Allow me here to say that for contracting a national debt I know no other authorized agent of the nation but the Congress of the United States; I know no broker, whether he is in the treasury office or out of it, that has a right to fix the terms of the national debt for the United States. No man is authorized to pay a dollar of money unless appropriated by the Congress of the United States, and therefore no man can contract a dollar's debt unless authorized directly and distinctly by an act of the Congress of the United States. I agree that Mr. Jay Cooke advertised, after some sort, when endeavoring to sell it, that the principal of this loan was payable in coin; but in the same newspaper you find another of his advertisements, intended also to sell the loan, that “a national debt is a national blessing.” Are we bound by contract to that? If, as the gentleman claims, we are bound by advertisements in the one case, we are bound as well in the other; and does my friend insist that Mr. Jay Cooke has bound the country to the proposition that a national debt is a national blessing to anybody except bankers? With that amendment I might agree to the declaration. When I called the attention of the country to this some little time ago, Mr. Jay Cooke, for whom. I have very high respect, wrote me that I was mistaken; that what he did advertise was that a national debt rightly managed was a national blessing. I am at issue with him upon that. I insist that a national debt .managed any how, by anybody — the Angel Gabriel or Jay Cooke or any other body — is not a national blessing. [Laughter.] No management of a national debt can make it a national blessing. And yet, if we are bound by brokers' advertisements, we are bound to the doctrine that it is a national blessing which we must enjoy and bequeath to our posterity forever!

The next evidence which the gentleman from Maine presents in support of his contract to pay the five-twenties in gold is the declarations of Secretaries of the Treasury. Now, no Secretary of the Treasury had a right to make any declarations on this subject which can be binding on the country. The gentleman does not claim that he had; he only says that Congress stood by and saw the secretary make declarations and did not interfere. Once for all, I protest against Congress being bound by what secretaries do or do not do that Congress does not interfere with.