Rep. John Robertson of Virginia delivered a blistering attack on the Jackson Administration's spending priorities during a House debate over Navy appropriations on April 5, 1836. Robertson—a strict constructionist from a state jealous of federal power—accused President Jackson's party of betraying its own principles of frugal government. The core complaint: while denouncing the previous administration's annual spending of $10-12 million as extravagant, Jackson's team now proposed $31 million in appropriations for the current year, driven by a desperate need to spend down a massive federal surplus. Robertson warned that this spending spree would drive up wages across the economy by flooding the labor market, crippling state-funded internal improvements like the Ohio and Baltimore Railroad. He particularly excoriated schemes to invest public money in railroad contracts and federal buildings—moves that would give the central government an unwanted foothold in state affairs. Yet beneath his criticism lay a striking constitutional argument: Robertson endorsed distributing the surplus revenue directly to the states, citing President Jackson's own 1829 message recommending exactly this approach.

This debate captures a pivotal crisis in early American finance and constitutional philosophy. By 1836, aggressive tariffs and brisk land sales had created an unprecedented budget surplus—something governments rarely faced. The question of what to do with it exposed deep ideological fissures: Should the federal government spend aggressively on infrastructure? Loan money to states? Distribute it wholesale? Jackson's party, which had promised to shrink government, now faced the embarrassing temptation to do the opposite. Robertson's warning about wage inflation and labor distortion also hints at early American anxieties about federal economic intervention. The surplus issue would explode spectacularly two years later during the Panic of 1837, when the economy collapsed and those carefully accumulated funds suddenly vanished into bank failures.

• Robertson cites a stunning real-world example of federal wage pressure: Colonel Gratiot couldn't spend $100,000 appropriated for a fort on the East River in New York because 'the impossibility of obtaining the requisite force to carry on the work' — labor had simply become unavailable at any reasonable price.
• The paper reveals that public money was being loaned to state banks at absurdly low risk-free rates: Michigan had a $150,000 bank capital with nearly $300,000 in federal deposits, which bankers then remitted to New York and lent out at 4 percent interest — the banks pocketed a risk-free spread while Michigan and other states got nothing.
• Robertson explicitly fears federal buildings will become patronage machines: 'The General Government should obtain more permanent footing upon the soil of the States, or become proprietors of expensive buildings, which must have superintendents and guards to preserve them, and consequently add to that patronage already so much depreciated.'
• The speech reveals that Andrew Jackson himself had already proposed distributing the surplus among states according to representation ratios in his December 1829 message—making Robertson's opponent's attack on distribution as a 'vile abomination' an unwitting attack on the President's own prior plan.
• Robertson mentions by name three major interstate improvements underway: Richmond to the mouth of the Kanawha, the Ohio and Baltimore Railroad, and proposed connections between Cincinnati-Charleston and Nashville-New Orleans—suggesting 1836 America was experiencing a construction and infrastructure boom.

• Robertson invoked Virginia's 1784 land cession to the federal government (the Northwest Territory) as constitutional justification for distributing land sale proceeds—that deed explicitly stated lands should be held 'for the use and benefit of such of the United States...according to their usual respective proportions.' Virginia was essentially trying to enforce a 52-year-old real estate contract.
• The $31 million annual budget Robertson cited as scandalous in 1836 would equal roughly $1 billion in 2024 dollars—but came at a time when the entire U.S. population was only 15 million people, making this genuinely perceived as bloated spending.
• Robertson's concern about federal wage inflation proved prescient: massive spending on canals, roads, and public works in the 1830s did artificially pump up labor costs and contributed to the overheated, bubble economy that exploded in the Panic of 1837—just one year after this speech.
• The speech happened as Jackson was in his final year as president and his political machine was fracturing; the successor chosen by Democrats, Martin Van Buren, would take office in March 1837 and immediately face economic collapse—making this debate about surplus spending look darkly comic in hindsight.
• Robertson's proposal to loan federal surplus to states rather than distribute it outright foreshadows the modern federal credit and grant system—he was essentially arguing for what would become the 20th-century infrastructure finance model, though he framed it as a temporary expedient.