Letter to the Hon. Langdon Cheves: To the Editors of the Charleston Mercury, Sept; 11, 1844 (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Letter to the Hon. Langdon Cheves: To the Ed...)
Excerpt from Letter to the Hon. Langdon Cheves: To the Editors of the Charleston Mercury, Sept; 11, 1844
Renounce absolutely and unreservedly, during this contest, all pretensions to the high horrors of the Union. Fill no oflice under the General Government, except in the Legislative Halls. This will be no sacrifice, for no son of yours will, whatever be his merits, ever till the Executive Chair until your wrongs are. Righted; until you shall be respected as equals in the Government; and until the withering scorn of the Legislative Assemblies shall banish from their floors your calumnious accusers.
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(A reply to the Letter of the Hon. Langdon Cheves. This bo...)
A reply to the Letter of the Hon. Langdon Cheves. This book, "A reply to the Letter of the Hon. Langdon Cheves", by Langdon Cheves, is a replication of a book originally published before 1844. It has been restored by human beings, page by page, so that you may enjoy it in a form as close to the original as possible.
Speech of Hon. Langdon Cheves, in the Southern convention, at Nashville, Tennessee, November 14, 185
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Langdon Cheves was an American politician, lawyer, and financier. He served as a Member of the U. S. House of Representatives from South Carolina's 1st district from 1811 to 1815 and the President of the Second Bank of the United States from 1819 to 1823.
Background
Langdon Cheves was the son of Alexander Chivas, of Buchan, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, son of John Chivas, or Chivis. In 1762 “honest Sandy Chivas, ” then twenty-one years of age, came to America and began life as a trader in the Ninety Six district of South Carolina on the frontiers of the Cherokee and Creek nations. In 1774 he married Mary Langdon, daughter of Thomas Langdon, who was a refugee after the “Braddock War” from Augusta County, Virginia. Alexander Chivas was a lieutenant in Colonel Hamilton’s Loyal Regiment, and Thomas Langdon was a captain on the American side in the Ninety Six Regiment. Langdon Cheves was born on September 17, 1776 in Abbeville County, South Carolina, United States, in a stockaded blockhouse, where his mother had taken refuge from the Cherokee Indians after the British attack on Charleston. After the death of Mary Langdon Chivas in 1779, this only son of a brilliant mother was brought up in the home of his aunt, Mrs. Thomas Cheves, for six years.
Education
Langdon attended Andrew Weed’s school. Beyond this and the help from his pastor, Dr. Buist, his education was obtained by his own untiring study. In 1785 he was taken to Charleston by his father and sent to a school kept by a severe old Scotchman who flogged him for his “up country” twang and tried to teach him his broad Scotch. Beyond this and the help from his pastor, Dr. Buist, his education was obtained by his own untiring study. After serving an apprenticeship in a factor’s supply store and showing the genius for accurate accounts that served him so well in his banking days, he read law under Judge William Marshall and was admitted to the bar in 1797.
Career
About 1797 Chever set up his own practice and his law firm was soon the best paid in the city. He early entered politics and held in succession the offices of warden for his city ward in 1802, member of the state legislature from 1802 to 1809, attorney-general in 1809, presidential elector in 1809, congressman from 1811 to 1815, and speaker of the national House of Representatives in the Thirteenth Congress. His favorite recreation was house building, and he planned and built at least six houses of architectural distinction, the most interesting of which was a summer house pear Pendleton, South Carolina.
Cheves’s national service began with his election in 1810 to fill a vacancy in the Eleventh Congress. He was one of that brilliant quartet of South Carolina statesmen which included John C. Calhoun, William Lowndes, and D. R. Williams. When Henry Clay was appointed one of the peace commissioners to Ghent, Cheves succeeded him in 1814 as speaker of the House and served until his retirement from Congress in 1815. Though little interested in expansion, he was considered one of the authors of War of 1812 and he was one of the Republicans who did not attend the caucus to renominate Madison in 1812. As speaker he cast the deciding vote to defeat Dallas’s bill for rechartering the United States Bank.
He was one of the most effective debaters in the House. Massive and striking in appearance, dignified and yet forceful in delivery, he was described by Washington Irving as the first orator he ever heard who satisfied his idea of Demosthenes. After the peace of 1815, believing that his national service was accomplished, he declined reelection to Congress and returned to his law practise in Charleston, refusing the position of secretary of the treasury to succeed Gallatin.
In 1816 he was elected a justice of the court of appeals of South Carolina and served for three years with distinction. In January 1819, Cheves was elected a director of the United States Bank and on March 6, 1819, its president. At the urgent request of the friends of the Bank he accepted the position, although it involved the sacrifice of what would have been to him a preferable position, that of associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, for which, he was informed by Senator Middleton, President Monroe had selected him. He found the affairs of the Bank in a deplorable condition. In a little over two years from its opening in 1817 it had done an enormous business but had so exceeded its resources in the purchase of drafts, especially on Southern and Western banks, that its demand liabilities exceeded the specie in its vaults by $100, 000.
On April 5, at the time when Cheves was taking entire control of the situation, John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary: “The Bank is so drained of its specie that it is hardly conceivable that it can go to June without stopping payments. The state of our currency is perilous in the highest degree, and threatens to terminate in a national convulsion. ” Three weeks after this the Bank was safe and sound again and able to help other solvent but needy concerns. Cheves accomplished this by continuing for a short time the policy of his predecessor, Jones, of curtailing circulation and especially forbidding banks in the South and West to issue notes when exchange was against them, and by a European loan of $2, 000, 000. Both of these policies were severely criticized but were fully justified by results. By 1822 an accumulation of $3, 500, 000 had been made to replace past losses of the Bank, and the capital, $28, 000, 000, again stood whole and untrammeled. Cheves then resigned his place to be succeeded by Nicholas Biddle.
At this time he was appointed chief commissioner of claims under the Treaty of Ghent and filled that office until all claims were adjusted. He resided for a time in Philadelphia and then at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he practised law. In the fall of 1829 he returned to South Carolina, which was then in the throes of the Nullification struggle. Though believing thoroughly in the right of secession, he opposed separate state action as “dangerous and ineffectual” and said that “the metaphysics of Nullification is the worst shape in which its bad principle of separate action can be embodied. ” But his long absence from the state in national service had weakened his influence with his countrymen, his opinions clashed with those of their leaders, and, rather than abjure his convictions, he withdrew from public life.
He wrote “occasional reviews, ” keen analyses of current situations, was a delegate to the Nashville convention of 1850, and advocated a Southern Confederacy but strongly opposed separate action on the part of any state. When about sixty years of age he took up agriculture seriously, built a new and handsome house, “The Delta, ” near Savannah, and in the last twenty years of his life amassed a large fortune. His close friend, Judge Huger, said, “Cheves loved truth; and to it he sacrificed everything. ”
(Excerpt from Letter to the Hon. Langdon Cheves: To the Ed...)
Politics
Cheves was a member of the Republican Party. He was a zealous supporter of the War of 1812. He advocated the secession of the Southern slave-holding states and opposed the doctrine of Nullification as insufficient to protect Southern interests.
Membership
Cheves was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society.
Personality
Cheves was a man of clear and accurate vision, broad sympathies, balanced judgment, and both moral and intellectual honesty.
Connections
On May 6, 1806, Chever married Mary Elizabeth Dulles, a school girl of barely seventeen, with whom he lived for thirty years a life of peculiar domestic charm, and who was the mother of his fourteen children.