he proposed the establishment of a specie-paying national bank, virtually a revival of the old Bank of the United States.
The Republican majority of 1816 was ready to return to Hamilton's plan of a financial agency, which the Republicans of 1811 had denounced and rejected; and they were ready, too, to enlarge that plan in all the features formerly objected to. But how could Clay support such a scheme? We shall see.
On January 8, 1816, Calhoun reported to the House of Representatives a bill providing that a Bank of the United States should be chartered for twenty years, with a capital of $35,000,000, divided into 350,000 shares, Congress to have the power to authorize an increase of the capital to $50,000,000; 70,000 shares, amounting to $7,000,000, to be subscribed and paid for by the United States, and 280,000 shares to be taken by individuals, companies, or corporations; the government to appoint five of the twenty-five directors; the bank to be authorized to establish branches, to have the deposits of the public money, subject to the discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury, and to pay to the government $1,500,000 in three instalments, as a bonus for its charter. This was substantially Hamilton's National Bank of 1791, only on a larger scale. It was exactly the thing which, five years before, Clay had found so utterly unconstitutional, and in its very nature so dangerous, that he could under no circumstances consent to a prolongation of its existence.
