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Neither John Adams nor Thomas Jefferson used it even once. Madison resorted to it three times, Monroe only once, John Quincy Adams in not a single instance. Under the first six Presidents, the veto-power had been used but six times in all; unless there should be included some private bills sent back for correction and not in any sense furnishing matter of contest between parties.
The forces thus set in motion have resulted in our day in the general acceptance of political democracy witness in contemporary affairs the inception of the Portuguese Republic, the Chinese Republic, the abolition of the veto-power of the British House of Lords-and are creating a widespread belief in industrial democracy.
Unfortunately, by that power of esprit de corps of the entire system, known as "pluck" or "grit," or the veto-power, physiologically termed inhibition, we may ignore and for a time suppress the symptom, but this in the long run is just as rational as cutting the wire that rings a fire alarm, or blowing out the red light without closing the switch.
But he had never abjured the political doctrines of the Old Dominion, and his published letters and speeches during the Presidential campaign which resulted in his election showed that he was a believer in what the Virginians called a strict construction of financial questions, internal improvements, the veto-power, and the protection of negro slavery.
Commenting with great power, at the time, upon the new use of the veto-power in all its forms by President Jackson, Mr.
Johnson's character without taking into account these qualities qualities which were both the remote and immediate cause of his extraordinary career as Chief Magistrate. The earlier Presidents, filled with the spirit of the convention that formed the Constitution, were extremely careful in the use of the veto-power. In eight years Washington used it but twice.
It was followed so vigorously indeed that the forty years succeeding Jackson's advent to power presented a strong contrast with the forty years that preceded it. The one began with Washington, the other ended with Andrew Johnson. Mr. Van Buren, though in all respects a lineal heir to the principles of Jackson, did not imitate him in the frequent use of the veto-power. But Mr.
There was much cant in those days about "the one-man power," because President Jackson saw fit to make use of the Constitutional qualified veto-power to express his opposition to certain measures adopted by Congress; but the best exhibition of "the one-man power" that the country ever saw, then or before or since, was when the same magistrate crushed Nullification, maintained the Union, and secured the nation's peace for more than a quarter of a century.
President Johnson, who in many features of his career has been suspected of an attempted imitation of Jackson, far surpassed his great prototype in the use of the veto-power, employing it directly in no less than twenty-one instances, besides pocketing at least two bills of public importance.
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