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The Reign of Andrew Jackson: A Chronicle of the Frontier in Politics

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Title: The Reign of Andrew Jackson: A Chronicle of the Frontier in Politics

Author: Frederic Austin Ogg

Editor: Allen Johnson


        
Release date: July 23, 2004 [eBook #13009]
                Most recently updated: June 15, 2025

Language: English

Original publication: S.l.: s.n., 1919

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13009


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON: A CHRONICLE OF THE FRONTIER IN POLITICS ***
The Reign of Andrew Jackson
By Frederic Austin Ogg
A Chronicle of the Frontier in Politics

Volume 20 of the
Chronicles of America Series

Allen Johnson, Editor
Assistant Editors
Gerhard R. Lomer
Charles W. Jefferys

Textbook Edition





Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.
New York: United States Publishers Association, Inc.

Copyright, 1919
by Yale University Press
Printed in the United States of America
Contents

The Reign of Andrew Jackson
Chapter         Chapter Title                         Page
   I.   Jackson the Frontiersman                         1
  II.   The Creek War and the Victory of New Orleans    23
 III.   The "Conquest" of Florida                       45
  IV.   The Death of "King Caucus"                      68
   V.   The Democratic Triumph                          95
  VI.   The "Reign" Begins                             113
 VII.   The Webster-Hayne Debate                       137
VIII.   Tariff and Nullification                       158
  IX.   The War on the United States Bank              181
   X.   The Removal of the Southern Indians            201
  XI.   The Jacksonian Succession                      217
        Bibliographical Note                           237
        Index                                          241



THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON




CHAPTER I
JACKSON THE FRONTIERSMAN

Among the thousands of stout-hearted British subjects who decided to
try their fortune in the Western World after the signing of the Peace
of Paris in 1763 was one Andrew Jackson, a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian of
the tenant class, sprung from a family long resident in or near the
quaint town of Carrickfergus, on the northern coast of Ireland, close
by the newer and more progressive city of Belfast.

With Jackson went his wife and two infant sons, a brother-in-law, and
two neighbors with their families, who thus made up a typical
eighteenth-century emigrant group. Arrived at Charleston, the travelers
fitted themselves out for an overland journey, awaited a stretch of
favorable weather, and set off for the Waxhaw settlement, one hundred
and eighty miles to the northwest, where numbers of their kinsmen and
countrymen were already established. There the Jacksons were received
with open arms by the family of a second brother-in-law, who had
migrated a few years earlier and who now had a comfortable log house
and a good-sized clearing.

The settlement lay on the banks of the upper Catawba, near the junction
of that stream with Waxhaw Creek; and as it occupied a fertile oasis in
a vast waste of pine woods, it was for decades largely cut off from
touch with the outside world. The settlement was situated, too, partly
in North Carolina and partly in South Carolina, so that in the
pre-Revolutionary days many of the inhabitants hardly knew, or cared to
know, in which of the two provinces they dwelt.

Upon their arrival Jackson's friends bought land on the creek and
within the bounds of the settlement. Jackson himself was too poor,
however, to do this, and accordingly took up a claim six miles distant
on another little stream known as Twelve-mile Creek. Here, in the fall
of 1765, he built a small cabin, and during the winter he cleared five
or six acres of ground. The next year he was able to raise enough corn,
vegetables, and pork to keep his little household from want. The tract
thus occupied cannot be positively identified, but it lay in what is
now Union County, North Carolina, a few miles from Monroe, the county
seat.

Then came tragedy of a sort in which frontier history abounds. In the
midst of his efforts to hew out a home and a future for those who were
dear to him the father sickened and died, in March, 1767, at the early
age of twenty-nine, less than two years after his arrival at the
settlement. Tradition says that his death was the result of a rupture
suffered in attempting to move a heavy log, and that it was so sudden
that the distracted wife had no opportunity to seek aid from the
distant neighbors. When at last the news got abroad, sympathy and
assistance were lavished in true frontier fashion. Borne in a rude farm
wagon, the remains were taken to the Waxhaw burying ground and were
interred in a spot which tradition, but tradition only, is able today
to point out.

The widow never returned to the desolated homestead. She and her little
ones were taken into the family of one of her married sisters, where
she spent her few remaining years. On the 15th of March, less than two
weeks after her husband's death, she gave birth to a third son; and the
child was promptly christened Andrew, in memory of the parent he would
never know.

Curiously, the seventh President's birthplace has been a matter of
sharp controversy. There is a tradition that the birth occurred while
the mother was visiting a neighboring family by the name of McKemy; and
Parton, one of Jackson's principal biographers, adduces a good deal of
evidence in support of the story. On the other hand, Jackson always
believed that he was born in the home of the aunt with whom his
bereaved mother took up her residence; and several biographers,
including Bassett, the most recent and the best, accept this
contention. It really matters not at all, save for the circumstance
that if the one view is correct Jackson was born in North Carolina,
while if the other is correct he was born in South Carolina. Both
States have persistently claimed the honor. In the famous proclamation
which he addressed to the South Carolina nullifiers in 1832 Jackson
referred to them as "fellow-citizens of my native state"; in his will
he spoke of himself as a South Carolinian; and in correspondence and
conversation he repeatedly declared that he was born on South Carolina
soil. Jackson was far from infallible, even in matters closely touching
his own career. But the preponderance of evidence on the point lies
decidedly with South Carolina.

No one, at all events, can deny to the Waxhaw settlement an honored
place in American history. There the father of John C. Calhoun first
made his home. There the Revolutionary general, Andrew Pickens, met and
married Rebecca Calhoun. There grew up the eminent North Carolinian
Governor and diplomat, William R. Davie. There William H. Crawford
lived as a boy. And there Jackson dwelt until early manhood.

For the times, young Andrew was well brought up. His mother was a woman
of strong character, who cherished for her last-born the desire that he
should become a Presbyterian clergyman. The uncle with whom he lived
was a serious-minded man who by his industry had won means ample for
the comfortable subsistence of his enlarged household. When he was old
enough, the boy worked for his living, but no harder than the frontier
boys of that day usually worked; and while his advantages were only
such as a backwoods community afforded, they were at least as great as
those of most boys similarly situated, and they were far superior to
those of the youthful Lincoln.

Jackson's earlier years, nevertheless, contained little promise of his
future distinction. He grew up amidst a rough people whose tastes ran
strongly to horse-racing, cockfighting, and heavy drinking, and whose
ideal of excellence found expression in a readiness to fight upon any
and all occasions in defense of what they considered to be their
personal honor. In young Andrew Jackson these characteristics appeared
in a superlative degree. He was mischievous, willful, daring, reckless.
Hardly an escapade took place in the community in which he did not
share; and his sensitiveness and quick temper led him continually into
trouble. In his early teens he swore like a trooper, chewed tobacco
incessantly, acquired a taste for strong drink, and set a pace for
wildness which few of his associates could keep up. He was passionately
fond of running foot races, leaping the bar, jumping, wrestling, and
every sort of sport that partook of the character of mimic battle--and
he never acknowledged defeat. "I could throw him three times out of
four," testifies an old schoolmate, "but he would never stay throwed.
He was dead game even then, and never would give up." Another early
companion says that of all the boys he had known Jackson was the only
bully who was not also a coward.

Of education the boy received only such as was put unavoidably in his
way. It is said that his mother taught him to read before he was five
years old; and he attended several terms in the little low-roofed log
schoolhouse in the Waxhaw settlement. But his formal instruction never
took him beyond the fundamentals of reading, writing, geography,
grammar, and "casting accounts." He was neither studious nor teachable.
As a boy he preferred sport to study, and as a man he chose to rely on
his own fertile ideas rather than to accept guidance from others. He
never learned to write the English language correctly, although he
often wrote it eloquently and convincingly. In an age of bad spellers
he achieved distinction from the number of ways in which he could spell
a word within the space of a single page. He could use no foreign
languages; and of the great body of science, literature, history, and
the arts he knew next to nothing. He never acquired a taste for books,
although vanity prompted him to treasure throughout his public career
all correspondence and other documentary materials that might be of use
to future biographers. Indeed, he picked as a biographer first his
military aide, John Reid, and later his close friend, John H. Eaton,
whom he had the satisfaction in 1829 of appointing Secretary of War.

When the Revolution came, young Andrew was a boy of ten. For a time the
Carolina backwoods did not greatly feel the effect of the change. But
in the spring of 1780 all of the revolutionary troops in South Carolina
were captured at Charleston, and the lands from the sea to the
mountains were left at the mercy of Tarleton's and Rawdon's bands of
redcoats and their Tory supporters. Twice the Waxhaw settlement was
ravaged before the patriots could make a stand. Young Jackson witnessed
two battles in 1780, without taking part in them, and in the following
year he, a brother, and a cousin were taken prisoners in a skirmish. To
the day of his death Jackson bore on his head and hand the marks of a
saber blow administered by a British lieutenant whose jack boots he
refused to polish. When an exchange of prisoners was made, Mrs. Jackson
secured the release of her two boys, but not until after they had
contracted smallpox in Camden jail. The older one died, but the
younger, though reduced to a skeleton, survived. Already the third
brother had given up his life in battle; and the crowning disaster came
when the mother, going as a volunteer to nurse the wounded Waxhaw
prisoners on the British vessels in Charleston harbor, fell ill of
yellow fever and perished. Small wonder that Andrew Jackson always
hated the British uniform, or that when he sat in the executive chair
an anti-British feeling colored all of his dealings with foreign
nations!

At the age of fourteen, the sandy-haired, pockmarked lad of the Waxhaws
found himself alone in the world. The death of his relatives had made
him heir to a portion of his grandfather's estate in Carrickfergus; but
the property was tied up in the hands of an administrator, and the boy
was in effect both penniless and homeless. The memory of his mother and
her teachings was, as he was subsequently accustomed to say, the only
capital with which he started life. To a natural waywardness and
quarrelsomeness had been added a heritage of bitter memories, and the
outlook was not bright.

Upon one thing the youth was determined: he would no longer be a charge
upon his uncle or upon any one else. What to turn to, however, was not
so easy to decide. First he tried the saddler's trade, but that was too
monotonous. Then he undertook school-teaching; that proved little
better. Desirous of a glimpse of the world, he went to Charleston in
the autumn of 1782. There he made the acquaintance of some people of
wealth and fell into habits of life which were beyond his means. At the
race track he bet and swaggered himself into notice; and when he ran
into debt he was lucky enough to free himself by winning a large wager.
But the proceeds of his little inheritance, which had in the meantime
become available, were now entirely used up; and when in the spring the
young spendthrift went back to the Waxhaws, he had only a fine horse
with elegant equipment, a costly pair of pistols, a gold watch, and a
fair wardrobe--in addition to some familiarity with the usages of
fashion--to show for his spent "fortune."

One other thing which Jackson may have carried back with him from
Charleston was an ambition to become a lawyer. At all events, in the
fall of 1784 he entered the law office of a certain Spruce Macay in the
town of Salisbury, North Carolina; and, after three years of
intermittent study, he was admitted to practice in the courts of the
State. The instruction which he had received was not of a high order,
and all accounts agree that the young man took his tasks lightly and
that he learned but little law. That he fully sustained the reputation
which he had gained in the Waxhaws is indicated by testimony of one of
Macay's fellow townsmen, after Jackson had become famous, to the effect
that the former student had been "the most roaring, rollicking,
game-cocking, card-playing, mischievous fellow that ever lived in
Salisbury."

Upon his admission to the bar the irresponsible young blade hung out
his shingle in Martinsville, Guilford County, North Carolina, and sat
down to wait for clients. He was still less than twenty years old,
without influence, and with only such friends as his irascible
disposition permitted him to make and hold. Naturally business came
slowly, and it became necessary to eke out a living by serving as a
local constable and also by assisting in a mercantile enterprise
carried on by two acquaintances in the town. After a year this
hand-to-mouth existence began to pall. Neither then nor in later life
did Jackson have any real taste or aptitude for law. He was not of a
legal turn of mind, and he was wholly unprepared to suffer the
sacrifices and disappointments which a man of different disposition
would have been willing to undergo in order to win for himself an
established position in his profession. Chagrin in this restless young
man was fast yielding to despair when an alluring field of action
opened for him in the fast-developing country beyond the mountains.

The settlement of white men in that part of North Carolina which lay
west of the Alleghanies had begun a year or two after Jackson's birth.
At first the hardy pioneers found lodgment on the Watauga, Holston,
Nolichucky, and other streams to the east of modern Knoxville. But in
1779 a colony was planted by James Robertson and John Donelson on the
banks of the Cumberland, two hundred miles farther west, and in a brief
time the remoter settlement, known as Nashville, became a Mecca for
homeseeking Carolinians and Virginians. The intervening hill and forest
country abounded in hostile Indians. The settler or trader who
undertook to traverse this region took his life in his hands, and the
settlements themselves were subject to perennial attack.

In 1788, after the collapse of an attempt of the people of the "Western
District" to set up an independent State by the name of Franklin, the
North Carolina Assembly erected the three counties included in the
Cumberland settlement into a superior court district; and the person
selected for judge was a close friend of Jackson, John McNairy, who
also had been a law pupil of Spruce Macay in Salisbury. McNairy had
been in the Tennessee region two years, but at the time of receiving
his judicial appointment he was visiting friends in the Carolinas. His
description of the opportunities awaiting ambitious young men in the
back country influenced a half-dozen acquaintances, lawyers and others,
to make the return trip with him; and among the number was Jackson.
Some went to assume posts which were at McNairy's disposal, but Jackson
went only to see the country.

Assembling at Morganton, on the east side of the mountains, in the fall
of 1788, the party proceeded leisurely to Jonesboro, which, although as
yet only a village of fifty or sixty log houses, was the metropolis of
the eastern Tennessee settlements. There the party was obliged to wait
for a sufficient band of immigrants to assemble before they could be
led by an armed guard with some degree of safety through the dangerous
middle country. As a highway had just been opened between Jonesboro and
Nashville, the travelers were able to cover the distance in fifteen
days. Jackson rode a fine stallion, while a pack mare carried his
worldly effects, consisting of spare clothes, blankets, half a dozen
law books, and small quantities of ammunition, tea, tobacco, liquor,
and salt. For defense he bore a rifle and three pistols; and in his
pocket he carried one hundred and eighty dollars of the much valued
hard money. On the second day of November the emigrant train made its
appearance in Nashville bringing news of much interest--in particular,
that the Federal Constitution had been ratified by the ninth State, and
that the various legislatures were preparing to choose electors, who
would undoubtedly make George Washington the first President of the
Republic.

Less than ten years old, Nashville had now a population of not over two
hundred. But it was the center of a somewhat settled district extending
up and down the Cumberland for a distance of eighty or ninety miles,
and the young visitor from the Waxhaws quickly found it a promising
field for his talents. There was only one lawyer in the place, and
creditors who had been outbid for his services by their debtors were
glad to put their cases in the hands of the newcomer. It is said that
before Jackson had been in the settlement a month he had issued more
than seventy writs to delinquent debtors. When, in 1789, he was
appointed "solicitor," or prosecutor, in Judge McNairy's jurisdiction
with a salary of forty pounds for each court he attended, his fortune
seemed made and he forthwith gave up all thought of returning to his
Carolina home. Instead he took lodgings under the roof of the widow of
John Donelson, and in 1791 he married a daughter of that doughty
frontiersman. Land was still cheap, and with the proceeds of his fees
and salary he purchased a large plantation called Hunter's Hill,
thirteen miles from Nashville, and there he planned to establish a home
which would take rank as one of the finest in the western country.

The work of a frontier solicitor was diverse and arduous. A turbulent
society needed to be kept in order and the business obligations of a
shifty and quarrelsome people to be enforced. No great knowledge of law
was required, but personal fearlessness, vigor, and incorruptibility
were indispensable. Jackson was just the man for the business. His
physical courage was equaled by his moral strength; he was passionately
devoted to justice; he was diligent and conscientious; and, as one
writer has remarked, bad grammar, incorrect pronunciation, and violent
denunciation did not shock the judges of that day or divert the mind of
juries from the truth. Traveling almost constantly over the wretched
roads and through the dark forests, dodging Indians, swimming his horse
across torrential streams, sleeping alone in the woods with hand on
rifle, threatened by desperate wrongdoers, Andrew Jackson became the
best-known figure in all western Tennessee and won at this time a great
measure of that public confidence which later became his chief
political asset.

Meanwhile the rapid growth of population south of the Ohio River made
necessary new arrangements for purposes of government. In 1790 the
region between the Ohio and the present States of Alabama and
Mississippi, having been turned over to the Nation by its earlier
possessors, was erected into the "Southwest Territory," and in 1791 the
northern half became the State of Kentucky. In 1793 the remainder of
the Territory set up a Legislature, and three years later delegates
from the eleven counties met at Knoxville to draw up a new frame of
government with a view to admission to statehood. Jackson was a member
of this convention, and tradition has it that it was he who brought
about the selection of the name Tennessee, an Indian term meaning "The
Great Crooked River," as against Franklin, Washington, and other
proposed designations for the new State. At all events, upon the
admission of the State in 1796, he was chosen as its sole
representative in the lower branch of Congress.

In the late autumn of that year the young lawmaker set out for the
national capital at Philadelphia, and there he arrived, after a journey
of almost eight hundred miles on horseback, just as the triumphs of the
Democrats in the recent presidential election were being duly
celebrated. He had not been chosen as a party man, but it is altogether
probable that his own sympathies and those of most of his constituents
lay with the Jeffersonians; and his appearance on the floor of Congress
was an omen of the fast-rising tide of western democracy which should
never find its ultimate goal until this rough but honest Tennesseean
should himself be borne into the presidential chair.

Jackson's career in Congress was brief and uneventful. After a year of
service in the House of Representatives he was appointed to fill the
unexpired term of William Blount in the Senate. But this post he
resigned in 1798 in order to devote his energies to his private
affairs. While at Philadelphia he made the acquaintance not only of
John Adams, Jefferson, Randolph, Gallatin, and Burr, but of his future
Secretary of State, Edward Livingston, and of some other persons who
were destined to be closely connected with his later career. But
Jackson was not fitted for a legislative body either by training or by
temperament. He is recorded as speaking in the House only twice and in
the Senate not at all, and he seems to have made no considerable
impression upon his colleagues. Gallatin later described him as "a
tall, lank, uncouth-looking personage, with long locks of hair hanging
over his face, and a queue down his back tied in an eel-skin; his dress
singular, his manners and deportment those of a rough backwoodsman."
And Jefferson is represented as saying of Jackson to Webster at
Monticello in 1824: "His passions are terrible. When I was president of
the Senate he was Senator, and he could never speak on account of the
rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it repeatedly, and as
often choke with rage."

Return to Tennessee meant, however, only a transfer from one branch of
the public service to another, for the ex-Senator was promptly
appointed to a judgeship of the state supreme court at a salary of six
hundred dollars a year. The position he found not uncongenial and he
retained it for six years. Now, as earlier, Jackson's ignorance of law
was somewhat compensated by his common sense, courage, and
impartiality; and while only one of his decisions of this period is
extant, Parton reports that the tradition of fifty years ago
represented them as short, untechnical, unlearned, sometimes
ungrammatical, but generally right. The daily life of Jackson as a
frontier judge was hardly less active and exciting than it had been
when he was a prosecuting attorney. There were long and arduous
horseback journeys "on circuit"; ill-tempered persons often threatened,
and sometimes attempted, to deal roughly with the author of an
unfavorable decision; occasionally it was necessary to lay aside his
dignity long enough to lend a hand in capturing or controlling a
desperate character. For example, on arriving once in a settlement
Jackson found that a powerful blacksmith had committed a crime and that
the sheriff dared not arrest him. "Summon me," said the judge;
whereupon he walked down from the bench, found the culprit, led him
into court, and sentenced him.

In 1804 Jackson resigned his judgeship in order to give exclusive
attention again to his private affairs. He had fallen badly into debt,
and his creditors were pressing him hard. One expedient after another
failed, and finally Hunter's Hill had to be given up. He saved enough
from the wreck, however, to purchase a small plantation eight miles
from Nashville; and there, after several years of financial
rehabilitation, he erected the handsome brick house which the country
came subsequently to know as "The Hermitage." In partnership with two
of his wife's relatives, Jackson had opened a store in which, even
while still a member of the highest tribunal of the State, he not
infrequently passed tea and salt and calico over the counter to his
neighbors. In small trading, however, he was not adept, and the store
failed. Nevertheless, from 1804 until 1813 he successfully combined
with planting and the stock-raising business enterprises of a larger
sort, especially slave and horse dealing. His debts paid off, he now
became one of the most prosperous, as he already was one of the most
influential, men of the Cumberland country.

But it was not given to Andrew Jackson to be a mere money-maker or to
dwell in quietness. In 1804 he was denied the governorship of the New
Orleans Territory because he was described to Jefferson as "a man of
violent passions, arbitrary in his disposition, and frequently engaged
in broils and disputes." During the next decade he fully lived up to
this description. He quarreled with Governor John Sevier, and only the
intervention of friends prevented the two from doing each other
violence. He broke off friendly relations with his old patron, Judge
McNairy. In a duel he killed Charles Dickinson, who had spoken
disparagingly of Mrs. Jackson, and he himself suffered a wound which
weakened him for life. He publicly caned one Thomas Swann. In a
rough-and-tumble encounter with Thomas Hart Benton and the latter's
brother Jesse he was shot in the shoulder and one of his antagonists
was stabbed. This list of quarrels, threats, fights, and other violent
outbursts could be extended to an amazing length. "Yes, I had a fight
with Jackson," Senator Benton admitted late in life; "a fellow was
hardly in the fashion then who hadn't."

At the age of forty-five Jackson had not yet found himself. He was
known in his own State as "a successful planter, a breeder and racer of
horses, a swearer of mighty oaths, a faithful and generous man to his
friends, a chivalrous man to women, a hospitable man at his home, a
desperate and relentless man in personal conflicts, a man who always
did the things he set himself to do." But he had achieved no
nation-wide distinction; he had not wrought out a career; he had made
almost as many enemies as friends, he had cut himself off from official
connections; he had no desire to return to the legal profession; and he
was so dissatisfied with his lot and outlook that he seriously
considered moving to Mississippi in order to make a fresh start.

One thread, however, still bound him to the public service. From 1802
he had been major general of militia in the eleven counties of western
Tennessee; and notwithstanding the fact that three calls from the
Government during a decade had yielded no real opportunity for action,
he clung both to the office and to the hope for a chance to lead his
"hardy sons of the West" against a foe worthy of their efforts. This
chance came sooner than people expected, and it led in precisely the
direction that Jackson would have chosen--toward the turbulent,
misgoverned Spanish dependency of Florida.




CHAPTER II
THE CREEK WAR AND THE VICTORY OF NEW ORLEANS

Every schoolboy knows and loves the story of the midnight ride of Paul
Revere. But hardly anybody has heard of the twenty-day,
fifteen-hundred-mile ride of "Billy" Phillips, the President's express
courier, who in 1812 carried to the Southwest the news that the people
of the United States had entered upon a second war with their British
kinsmen. William Phillips was a young, lithe Tennesseean whom Senator
Campbell took to Washington in 1811 as secretary. When not more than
sixteen years old he had enjoyed the honor of riding Andrew Jackson's
famous steed, Truxton, in a heat race, for the largest purse ever heard
of west of the mountains, with the proud owner on one side of the
stakes. In Washington he occasionally turned an honest penny by
jockey-riding in the races on the old track of Bladensburg, and
eventually he became one of a squad of ten or twelve expert horsemen
employed by the Government in carrying urgent long-distance messages.

After much hesitation, Congress passed a joint resolution at about five
o'clock on Friday, June 18, 1812, declaring war against Great Britain.
Before sundown the express couriers were dashing swiftly on their
several courses, some toward reluctant New England, some toward
Pennsylvania and New York, some southward, some westward. To Phillips
it fell to carry the momentous news to his own Tennessee country and
thence down the Mississippi to New Orleans. That the task was
undertaken with all due energy is sufficiently attested in a letter
written by a Baptist clergyman at Lexington, North Carolina, to a
friend, who happened to have been one of Jackson's old teachers at the
Waxhaws. "I have to inform you," runs the communication, "that just now
the President's express-rider, Bill Phillips, has tore through this
little place without stopping. He came and went in a cloud of dust, his
horse's tail and his own long hair streaming alike in the wind as they
flew by. But as he passed the tavern stand where some were gathered he
swung his leather wallet by its straps above his head and
shouted--'Here's the Stuff! Wake up! War! War with England!! War!!!'
Then he disappeared in a cloud of dust down the Salisbury Road like a
streak of Greased Lightnin'." Nine days brought the indefatigable
courier past Hillsboro, Salisbury, Morganton, Jonesboro, and Knoxville
to Nashville--a daily average of ninety-five miles over mountains and
through uncleared country. In eleven days more the President's
dispatches were in the hands of Governor Claiborne at New Orleans.

The joy of the West was unbounded. The frontiersman was always ready
for a fight, and just now he especially wanted a fight with England. He
resented the insults that his country had suffered at the hands of the
English authorities and had little patience with the vacillating policy
so long pursued by Congress and the Madison Administration. Other
grievances came closer home. For two years the West had been disturbed
by Indian wars and intrigues for which the English officers and agents
in Canada were held largely responsible. In 1811 Governor Harrison of
Indiana Territory defeated the Indians at Tippecanoe. But Tecumseh was
even then working among the Creeks, Cherokees, and other southern
tribes with a view to a confederation which should be powerful enough
to put a stop to the sale of land to the advancing white population. A
renewal of the disorders was therefore momentarily expected.
Furthermore, the people of the Southwest were as usual on bad terms
with their Spanish neighbors in Florida and Texas; they coveted an
opportunity for vengeance for wrongs which they had suffered; and some
longed for the conquest of Spanish territory. At all events, war with
England was the more welcome because Spain, as an ally of that power,
was likely to be involved.

Nowhere was the news received with greater enthusiasm than at
Nashville; and by no one with more satisfaction than by Andrew Jackson.
As major general of militia Jackson had for ten years awaited just such
a chance for action. In 1811 he wrote fervently to Harrison offering to
come to his assistance in the Wabash expedition with five hundred West
Tennesseeans, but his services were not needed. At the close of the
year he induced the Governor of his State, William Blount, to inform
the War Department that he could have twenty-five hundred men "before
Quebec within ninety days" if desired. Again he was refused. But now
his opportunity had come. Billy Phillips was hardly on his way to
Natchez before Jackson, Blount, and Benton were addressing a mass
meeting called to "ratify" the declaration of war, and on the following
day a courier started for Washington with a letter from Jackson
tendering the services of twenty-five hundred Tennesseeans and assuring
the President, with better patriotism than syntax, that wherever it
might please him to find a place of duty for these men he could depend
upon them to stay "till they or the last armed foe expires."

After some delay the offer was accepted. Already the fiery major
general was dreaming of a conquest of Florida. "You burn with anxiety,"
ran a proclamation issued to his division in midsummer, "to learn on
what theater your arms will find employment. Then turn your eyes to the
South! Behold in the province of West Florida a territory whose rivers
and harbors are indispensable to the prosperity of the western, and
still more so, to the eastern division of our state. . . . It is here
that an employment adapted to your situation awaits your courage and
your zeal, and while extending in this quarter the boundaries of the
Republic to the Gulf of Mexico, you will experience a peculiar
satisfaction in having conferred a signal benefit on that section of
the Union to which you yourselves immediately belong."

It lay in the cards that Jackson was to be a principal agent in
wresting the Florida country from the Spaniards; and while there was at
Washington no intention of allowing him to set off post-haste upon the
mission, all of the services which he was called upon to render during
the war converged directly upon that objective. After what seemed an
interminable period of waiting came the first order to move. Fifteen
hundred Tennessee troops were to go to New Orleans, ostensibly to
protect the city against a possible British attack, but mainly to be
quickly available in case an invasion of West Florida should be decided
upon; and Jackson, freshly commissioned major general of volunteers,
was to lead the expedition.

The rendezvous was fixed at Nashville for early December; and when more
than two thousand men, representing almost every family of influence in
the western half of the State, presented themselves, Governor Blount
authorized the whole number to be mustered. On the 7th of January the
hastily equipped detachment started, fourteen hundred infantrymen going
down the ice-clogged Cumberland in flatboats and six hundred and
seventy mounted riflemen proceeding by land. The Governor sent a letter
carrying his blessing. Jackson responded with an effusive note in which
he expressed the hope that "the God of battles may be with us." Parton
says with truth that the heart of western Tennessee went down the river
with the expedition. In a letter to the Secretary of War Jackson
declared that his men had no "constitutional scruples," but would, if
so ordered, plant the American eagle on the "walls" of Mobile,
Pensacola, and St. Augustine.

After five weeks the troops, in high spirits, reassembled at Natchez.
Then came cruel disappointment. From New Orleans Governor James
Wilkinson, doubtless moved by hatred of Jackson quite as much as by
considerations of public policy, ordered the little army to stay where
it was. And on the 15th of March there was placed in the commander's
hands a curt note from the Secretary of War saying that the reasons for
the undertaking had disappeared, and announcing that the corps under
the Tennesseean's command had "ceased to exist."

Jackson flew into a rage--and with more reason than on certain other
occasions. He was sure that there was treachery somewhere; at the
least, it was all a trick to bring a couple of thousand good Tennessee
volunteers within the clutches of Wilkinson's recruiting officers. He
managed to write to the President a temperate letter of protest; but to
Governor Blount and to the troops he unbosomed himself with
characteristic forcefulness of speech. There was nothing to do but
return home. But the irate commander determined to do it in a manner to
impress the country. He kept his force intact, drew rations from the
commissary department at Natchez, and marched back to Nashville with
all the Èclat that would have attended a returning conqueror. When
Wilkinson's subordinates refused to pay the cost of transporting the
sick, Jackson pledged his own credit for the purpose, to the amount of
twelve thousand dollars. It was on the trying return march that his
riflemen conferred on him the happy nickname "Old Hickory."

The Secretary of War later sought to appease the irascible major
general by offering a wholly plausible explanation of the sudden
reversal of the Government's policy; and the expenses of the troops on
the return march were fully met out of the national treasury. But
Jackson drew from the experience only gall and wormwood. About the time
when the men reached Natchez, Congress definitely authorized the
President to take possession of Mobile and that part of Florida west of
the Perdido River; and, back once more in the humdrum life of
Nashville, the disappointed officer could only sit idly by while his
pet project was successfully carried out by General Wilkinson, the man
whom, perhaps above all others, he loathed. But other work was
preparing; and, after all, most of Florida was yet to be won.

In the late summer of 1813 the western country was startled by news of
a sudden attack of a band of upwards of a thousand Creeks on Fort Mims,
Alabama, culminating in a massacre in which two hundred and fifty white
men, women, and children lost their lives. It was the most bloody
occurrence of the kind in several decades, and it brought instantly to
a head a situation which Jackson, in common with many other military
men, had long viewed with apprehension.

From time immemorial the broad stretches of hill and valley land
southwards from the winding Tennessee to the Gulf were occupied, or
used as hunting grounds, by the warlike tribes forming the loose-knit
Creek Confederacy. Much of this land was extremely fertile, and most of
it required little labor to prepare it for cultivation. Consequently
after 1800 the influx of white settlers, mainly cotton raisers, was
heavy; and by 1812 the great triangular area between the Alabama and
the Tombigbee, as well as extensive tracts along the upper Tombigbee
and the Mobile, was quite fully occupied. The heart of the Creek
country was the region about the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers, which
join in central Alabama to form the stream which bears the State's
name. But not even this district was immune from encroachment.

The Creeks were not of a sort to submit to the loss of their lands
without a struggle. Though Tecumseh, in 1811, had brought them to the
point of an uprising, his plans were not carried out, and it remained
for the news of hostilities between the United States and Great Britain
to rouse the war spirit afresh. In a short time the entire Creek
country was aflame. Arms and ammunition the Indians obtained from the
Spaniards across the Florida border, and Colonel Edward Nicholls, now
stationed at Pensacola as provisional British Governor, gave them open
encouragement. The danger was understood not only among the people of
the Southwest but in Washington. Before plans of defense could be
carried into effect, however, the war broke out, and the wretched
people who had crowded into the flimsy stockade called by courtesy Fort
Mims were massacred.

Hardly had the heap of ruins, ghastly with human bodies, ceased to
smolder before fleet riders were spreading the news in Georgia, in
Louisiana, and in Tennessee. A shudder swept the country. Every exposed
community expected to be attacked next. The people's demand for
vengeance was overmastering, and from north, west, and east volunteer
armies were soon on the march. Tennessee sent two quotas, one from the
eastern counties under General John Cocke, the other from the western
under Andrew Jackson. When the news of the disaster on the Mobile
reached Nashville, Jackson was lying helpless from wounds received in
his fight with the Bentons. But he issued the necessary orders from his
bed and let it be known with customary vigor that he, the senior major
general, and no one else, would lead the expedition; and though three
weeks later he started off with his arm tightly bandaged to his side
and a shoulder so sore that it could not bear the pressure of an
epaulette, lead the expedition he did.

About the middle of October the emaciated but dogged commander brought
his forces together, 2700 strong, at Huntsville and began cutting his
way across the mountains toward the principal Creek settlements. His
plan was to fall suddenly upon these settlements, strike terror into
the inhabitants, and force a peace on terms that would guarantee the
safety of the frontier populations. Supplies were slow to arrive, and
Jackson fumed and stormed. He quarreled desperately, too, with Cocke,
whom he unjustly blamed for mismanagement. But at last he was able to
emerge on the banks of the Coosa and build a stockade, Fort Strother,
to serve as a base for the campaign.

During the months that followed, the intrepid leader was compelled to
fight two foes--his insubordinate militiamen and the Creeks. His
command consisted partly of militia and partly of volunteers, including
many men who had first enlisted for the expedition down the
Mississippi. Starvation and disease caused loud murmurings, and after
one or two minor victories had been won the militiamen took it into
their heads to go back home. Jackson drew up the volunteers across the
mutineers' path and drove them back to the camp. Then the volunteers
started off, and the militia had to be used to bring them back! At one
time the furious general faced a mutinous band single-handed and,
swearing that he would shoot the first man who stirred, awed the
recalcitrants into obedience. On another occasion he had a youth who
had been guilty of insubordination shot before the whole army as an
object lesson. At last it became apparent that nothing could be done
with such troops, and the volunteers--such of them as had not already
slipped away--were allowed to go home. Governor Blount advised that the
whole undertaking be given up. But Jackson wrote him a letter that
brought a flush of shame to his cheek, and in a short time fresh forces
by the hundreds, with ample supplies, were on the way to Fort Strother.
Among the newcomers was a lank, angular-featured frontiersman who
answered to the name of Sam Houston.

After having been reduced for a short period to one hundred men,
Jackson by early spring had an army of five thousand, including a
regiment of regulars, and found it once more possible to act. The enemy
decided to make its stand at a spot called by the Indians Tohopeka, by
the whites Horseshoe Bend, on the Tallapoosa. Here a thousand warriors,
with many women and children, took refuge behind breastworks which they
believed impregnable, and here, in late March, Jackson attacked with a
force of three thousand men. No quarter was asked and none given, on
either side, and the battle quickly became a butchery. Driven by fire
from a thicket of dry brush in which they took refuge, the Creek
warriors were shot down or bayoneted by the hundreds; those who plunged
into the river for safety were killed as they swam. Scarcely a hundred
survived. Among the number was a youth who could speak a little
English, and whose broken leg one of the surgeons undertook to treat.
Three stalwart riflemen were required to hold the patient. "Lie still,
my boy, they will save your life," said Jackson encouragingly, as he
came upon the scene. "No good," replied the disconsolate victim. "No
good. Cure um now, kill um again!"

The victory practically ended the war. Many of the "Red Sticks," as the
Creek braves were called, fled beyond the Florida border; but
many--among them the astute half-breed Weathersford, who had ordered
the assault on Fort Mims--came in and surrendered. Fort Jackson, built
in the river fork, became an outpost of American sovereignty in the
very heart of the Creek district. "The fiends of the Tallapoosa,"
declared the victorious commander in his farewell address to his men,
"will no longer murder our women and children, or disturb the quiet of
our borders."

Jackson returned to Tennessee to find himself the most popular man in
the State. Nashville gave him the first of what was destined to be a
long series of tumultuous receptions; and within a month the news came
that William Henry Harrison had resigned his commission and that
Jackson had been appointed a major general in the army of the United
States, with command in the southwestern district, including Mobile and
New Orleans. "Thus did the frontier soldier, who eighteen months
earlier had not commanded an expedition or a detachment, come to occupy
the highest rank in the army of his country. No other man in that
country's service since the Revolution has risen to the top quite so
quickly." π π Bassett, The Life of Andrew Jackson, Vol. I, p. 123.

By his appointment Jackson became the eventual successor of General
Wilkinson, with headquarters at New Orleans. His first move, however,
was to pay a visit to Mobile; and on his way thither, in August, 1814,
he paused in the Creek country to garner the fruits of his late
victory. A council of the surviving chiefs was assembled and a treaty
was presented, with a demand that it be signed forthwith. The terms
took the Indians aback, but argument was useless. The whites were
granted full rights to maintain military posts and roads and to
navigate the rivers in the Creek lands; the Creeks had to promise to
stop trading with British and Spanish posts; and they were made to cede
to the United States all the lands which their people had claimed west
and southeast of the Coosa River--more than half of their ancient
territories. Thus was the glory of the Creek nation brought to an end.

Meanwhile the war with Great Britain was entering a new and threatening
phase. No notable successes had been achieved on land, and repeated
attempts to reduce Canada had signally failed. On the Great Lakes and
the high seas the navy had won glory, but only a handful of privateers
was left to keep up the fight. The collapse of Napoleon's power had
brought a lull in Europe, and the British were free to concentrate
their energies as never before on the conflict in America. The effects
were promptly seen in the campaign which led to the capture of
Washington and the burning of the Federal Capitol in August, 1814. They
were equally manifest in a well-laid plan for a great assault on the
country's southern borders and on the great Mississippi Valley beyond.

The last-mentioned project meant that, after two years of immunity, the
Southwest had become a main theater of the war. There was plenty of
warning of what was coming, for the British squadron intended for the
attack began assembling in the West Indies before the close of summer.
No one knew, however, where or when the blow would fall. To Jackson the
first necessity seemed to be to make sure of the defenses of Mobile.
For a time, at all events, he believed that the attack would be made
there, rather than at New Orleans; and an attempt of a British naval
force in September to destroy Fort Bowyer, at the entrance to Mobile
Bay, confirmed his opinion.

But the chief attraction of Mobile for the General was its proximity to
Florida. In July he had written to Washington asking permission to
occupy Pensacola. Months passed without a reply. Temptation to action
grew; and when, in October, three thousand Tennessee troops arrived
under one of the subordinate officers in the recent Creek War, longer
hesitation seemed a sign of weakness. Jackson therefore led his forces
against the Spanish stronghold, now in British hands, and quickly
forced its surrender. His men blew up one of the two forts, and the
British blew up the other. Within a week the work was done and the
General, well pleased with his exploit, was back at Mobile. There he
found awaiting him, in reply to his July letter, an order from the new
Secretary of War, James Monroe, forbidding him to touch Pensacola. No
great harm was done, for the invaded territory was no longer neutral
soil, and the task of soothing the ruffled feelings of the Spanish
court did not prove difficult.

As the autumn wore on, signs multiplied that the first British
objective in the South was to be New Orleans, and no efforts were
spared by the authorities at Washington to arouse the Southwest to its
danger and to stimulate an outpouring of troops sufficient to repel any
force that might be landed at the mouth of the Mississippi. On the 21st
of November, Jackson set out for the menaced city. Five days later a
fleet of fifty vessels, carrying ten thousand veteran British troops
under command of Generals Pakenham and Gibbs, started from Jamaica for
what was expected to be an easy conquest. On the 10th of December the
hostile armada cast anchor off the Louisiana coast. Two weeks later
some two thousand redcoats emerged from Lake Borgne, within six or
seven miles of New Orleans, when the approach to the city on that side
was as yet unguarded by a gun or a man or an entrenchment.

That the "impossible" was now accomplished was due mainly to Jackson,
although credit must not be withheld from a dozen energetic subordinate
officers nor from the thousands of patriots who made up the rank and
file of the hastily gathered forces of defense. Men from Louisiana,
Mississippi, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee--all contributed to one
of the most remarkable military achievements in our history; although
when the fight was over it was found that hundreds were still as
unarmed as when they arrived upon the scene.

A preliminary clash, in a dense fog, on the second evening before
Christmas served to inspire each army with a wholesome respect for the
other. The British decided to postpone further action until their
entire force could be brought up, and this gave Jackson just the time
he needed to assemble his own scattered divisions, select lines of
defense, and throw up breastworks. By the end of the first week of
January both sides were ready for the test.

The British army was a splendid body of seven thousand trained
soldiers, seamen, and marines.

There were regiments which had helped Wellington to win Talavera,
Salamanca, and Victoria, and within a few short months some of these
same regiments were to stand in that thin red line which Ney and
Napoleon's guard could never break. Their general, Pakenham,
Wellington's brother-in-law, was a distinguished pupil of his
illustrious kinsman. Could frontiersmen who had never fought together
before, who had never seen the face of a civilized foe, withstand the
conquerors of Napoleon? But two branches of the same stubborn race were
represented on that little watery plain. The soldiers trained to serve
the strongest will in the Old World were face to face with the rough
and ready yeomanry embattled for defense by the one man of the new
world whose soul had most iron in it. It was Salamanca against
Tohopeka, discipline against individual alertness, the Briton of the
little Isle against the Briton of the wastes and wilds. But there was
one great difference. Wellington, "the Iron Duke," was not there; "Old
Hickory" was everywhere along the American lines. π

π Brown, Andrew Jackson, pp. 75-76.

Behind their battery-studded parapets the Americans waited for the
British to make an assault. This the invaders did, five thousand
strong, on January 8, 1815. The fighting was hard, but the main attack
failed at every point. Three British major generals, including
Pakenham, were killed early in the action, and the total British loss
exceeded two thousand. The American loss was but seventy-one. The
shattered foe fell back, lay inactive for ten days, and then quietly
withdrew as they had come. Though Jackson was not noted for piety, he
always believed that his success on this occasion was the work of
Providence. "Heaven, to be sure," he wrote to Monroe, "has interposed
most wonderfully in our behalf, and I am filled with gratitude when I
look back to what we have escaped."

By curious irony, the victory had no bearing upon the formal results of
the war. A treaty of peace had been signed at Ghent two weeks before,
and the news of the pacification and of the exploit at New Orleans
reached the distracted President at almost the same time. But who shall
say that the battle was not one of the most momentous in American
history? It compensated for a score of humiliations suffered by the
country in the preceding years. It revived the people's drooping pride
and put new energy into the nation's dealings with its rivals,
contributing more than any other single event to make this war indeed a
"second war of independence." "Now," declared Henry Clay when the news
reached him in Paris, "I can go to England without mortification."
Finally, the battle brought Andrew Jackson into his own as the idol and
incarnation of the West, and set the western democracy decisively
forward as a force to be reckoned with in national affairs.




CHAPTER III
THE "CONQUEST" OF FLORIDA

The victory at New Orleans made Jackson not only the most popular man
in the United States but a figure of international interest. "Napoleon,
returning from Elba to eke out the Hundred Days and add the name
Waterloo to history, paused now and then a moment to study Jackson at
New Orleans. The Duke of Wellington, chosen by assembled Europe to meet
the crisis, could find time even at Brussels to call for 'all available
information on the abortive expedition against Louisiana.'" π

π Buell, History of Andrew Jackson, Vol II, pp. 94-95.

While his countrymen were sounding his praises, the General, however,
fell into a controversy with the authorities and people of New Orleans
which lent a drab aspect to the closing scene of an otherwise brilliant
drama. One of his first acts upon arriving in the defenseless city had
been to declare martial law; and under the decree the daily life of the
inhabitants had been rigorously circumscribed, citizens had been
pressed into military service, men under suspicion had been locked up,
and large quantities of cotton and other supplies had been seized for
the soldiers' use. When Pakenham's army was defeated, people expected
an immediate return to normal conditions. Jackson, however, proposed to
take no chances. Neither the sailing of the British fleet nor the
receipt of the news of peace from Admiral Cochrane influenced him to
relax his vigilance, and only after official instructions came from
Washington in the middle of March was the ban lifted.

Meanwhile a violent quarrel had broken out between the commander and
the civil authorities, who naturally wished to resume their accustomed
functions. Finding that the Creoles were systematically evading service
by registering as French citizens, Jackson abruptly ordered all such
people from the city; and he was responsible for numerous other
arbitrary acts. Protests were lodged, and some people threatened
judicial proceedings. But they might have saved their breath. Jackson
was not the man to argue matters of the kind. A leading Creole who
published an especially pointed protest was clapped into prison, and
when the Federal district judge, Hall, issued a writ of habeas corpus
in his behalf, Jackson had him also shut up.

As soon as he was liberated, the irate judge summoned Jackson into
court to show why he should not be held in contempt. Beyond a blanket
vindication of his acts, the General would not plead. "I will not
answer interrogatories," he declared. "I may have erred, but my motives
cannot be misinterpreted." The judge thereupon imposed a fine of one
thousand dollars, the only question being, he declared, "whether the
Law should bend to the General or the General to the Law." Jackson
accepted the sentence with equanimity, and to a group of admirers who
drew him in a carriage from the court room to one of the leading
coffeehouses, he expressed lofty sentiments on the obligation of
citizens of every rank to obey the laws and uphold the courts.
Twenty-nine years afterwards Congress voted reimbursement to the full
amount of the fine with interest.

For three weeks after the arrival of the treaty of peace Jackson
lingered at New Orleans, haggling by day with the contractors and
merchants whose cotton, blankets, and bacon were yet to be paid for,
and enjoying in the evening the festivities planned in his honor by
grateful citizens. His pleasure in the gala affairs of the time was
doubled by the presence of his wife, who one day arrived quite
unexpectedly in the company of some Tennessee friends. Mrs. Jackson was
a typical frontier planter's wife--kind-hearted, sincere, benevolent,
thrifty, pious, but unlettered and wholly innocent of polished manners.
In all her forty-eight years she had never seen a city more pretentious
than Nashville. She was, moreover, stout and florid, and it may be
supposed that in her rustic garb she was a somewhat conspicuous figure
among the fashionable ladies of New Orleans society.

But the wife of Jackson's accomplished friend and future Secretary of
State, Edward Livingston, fitted her out with fashionable clothes and
tactfully instructed her in the niceties of etiquette, and ere long she
was able to demean herself, if not without a betrayal of her
unfamiliarity with the environment, at all events to the complete
satisfaction of the General. The latter's devotion to his wife was a
matter of much comment. "Debonair as he had been in his association
with the Creole belles, he never missed an opportunity to demonstrate
that he considered the short, stout, beaming matron at his side the
perfection of her sex and far and away the most charming woman in the
world." π "Aunt Rachel," as she was known throughout western Tennessee,
lived to see the hero of New Orleans elected President, but not to
share with him the honors of the position. "I have sometimes thought,"
said Thomas Hart Benton, "that General Jackson might have been a more
equable tenant of the White House than he was had she been spared to
share it with him. At all events, she was the only human being on earth
who ever possessed the power to swerve his mighty will or soothe his
fierce temper."

π Buell, History of Andrew Jackson, Vol II, p. 97.

Shortly before their departure the Jacksons were guests of honor at a
grand ball at the Academy. The upper floor was arranged for dancing and
the lower for supper, and the entire building was aglow with flowers,
colored lamps, and transparencies. As the evening wore on and the
dances of polite society had their due turn, the General finally avowed
that he and his bonny wife would show the proud city folk what real
dancing was. A somewhat cynical observer--a certain Nolte, whom Jackson
had just forced to his own terms in a settlement for war
supplies--records his impression as follows: "After supper we were
treated to a most delicious pas de deux by the conqueror and his
spouse. To see these two figures, the General, a long haggard man, with
limbs like a skeleton, and Madame la GÈnÈrale, a short fat dumpling,
bobbing opposite each other like half-drunken Indians, to the wild
melody of Possum up de Gum Tree, and endeavoring to make a spring into
the air, was very remarkable, and far more edifying a spectacle than
any European ballet could possibly have furnished." But Jackson was
only less proud of his accomplishments as a dancer than as a fighter,
and it was the part of discretion for a man of Nolte's critical turn to
keep a straight face on this occasion.

In early April the General and his wife started homeward, the latter
bearing as a parting gift from the women of New Orleans the somewhat
gaudy set of topaz jewelry which she wears in her most familiar
portrait. The trip was a continuous ovation, and at Nashville a series
of festivities wound up with a banquet attended by the most
distinguished soldiers and citizens of Tennessee and presided over by
the Governor of the State. Other cities gave dinners, and legislatures
voted swords and addresses. A period of rest at the Hermitage was
interrupted in the autumn of 1815 by a horseback trip to Washington
which involved a succession of dinners and receptions. But after a few
months the much fÍted soldier was back at Nashville, ready, as he said,
to "resume the cultivation of that friendly intercourse with my friends
and neighbors which has heretofore constituted so great a portion of my
happiness."

After Jackson had talked over his actions at New Orleans with both the
President and the Secretary of War, he had received, as he says, "a
chart blank," approving his "whole proceedings"; so he had nothing
further to worry about on that score. The national army had been
reorganized on a peace footing, in two divisions, each under command of
a major general. The northern division fell to Jacob Brown of New York,
the hero of Lundy's Lane; the southern fell to Jackson, with
headquarters at Nashville.

Jackson was the last man to suppose that warfare in the southern half
of the United States was a thing of the past. He knew that the late
contest had left the southern Indians restless and that the existing
treaties were likely to be repudiated at any moment. Florida was still
in the hands of the Spaniards, and he had never a doubt that some day
this territory would have to be conquered and annexed. Moreover Jackson
believed for some years after 1815, according to General Eaton, that
Great Britain would again make war on the United States, using Florida
as a base. At all events, it can have caused the General no
surprise--or regret--to be called again into active service on the
Florida border before the close of 1817.

The hold of the Spaniards upon Florida had been so far weakened by the
War of 1812 that after the restoration of peace they occupied only
three important points--Pensacola, St. Marks, and St. Augustine. The
rest of the territory became a No Man's Land, an ideal resort for
desperate adventurers of every race and description. There was a
considerable Indian population, consisting mainly of Seminoles, a tribe
belonging to the Creek Confederacy, together with other Creeks who had
fled across the border to escape the vengeance of Jackson at Tohopeka.
All were bitterly hostile to the United States. There were Spanish
freebooters, Irish roustabouts, Scotch free lances, and runaway
slaves--a nondescript lot, and all ready for any undertaking that
promised excitement, revenge, or booty. Furthermore there were some
British soldiers who had remained on their own responsibility after the
troops were withdrawn. The leading spirit among these was Colonel
Edward Nicholls, who had already made himself obnoxious to the United
States by his conduct at Pensacola.

At the close of the war Nicholls and his men built a fort on the
Apalachicola, fifteen miles from the Gulf, and began again to collect
and organize fugitive slaves, Indians, and adventurers of every sort,
whom they employed on raids into the territory of the United States and
in attacks upon its inhabitants. The Creeks were falsely informed that
in the Treaty of Ghent the United States had promised to give up all
lands taken from them during the late war, and they were thus incited
to rise in vindication of their alleged rights. What Nicholls was
aiming at came out when, in company with several chieftains, he
returned to England to ask for an alliance between the "mother country"
and his buccaneer state. He met no encouragement, however, and in reply
to an American protest the British Government repudiated his arts. His
rÙle was nevertheless promptly taken up by a misguided Scotch trader,
Alexander Arbuthnot, and the reign of lawlessness continued.

After all, it was Spain's business to keep order on the frontier; and
the United States waited a year and a half for the Madrid Government to
give evidence of intent to do so. But, as nothing but vain promises
were forthcoming, some American troops engaged in building a fort on
the Apalachicola, just north of the boundary line, marched down the
river in July, 1816, bombarded Nicholls's Negro Fort, blew up its
magazine, and practically exterminated the Negro and Indian garrison. A
menace to the slave property of southern Georgia was thus removed, but
the bigger problem remained. The Seminoles were restive; the refugee
Creeks kept up their forays across the border; and the rich lands
acquired by the Treaty of Fort Jackson were fast filling with white
settlers who clamored for protection. Though the Monroe Administration
had opened negotiations for the cession of the whole Florida country to
the United States, progress was slow and the outcome doubtful.

Matters came to a head in the closing weeks of 1817. General Gaines,
who was in command on the Florida border, had tried repeatedly to get
an interview with the principal "Red Stick" chieftain, but all of his
overtures had been repulsed. Finally he sent a detachment of soldiers
to conduct the dignitary and his warriors from their village at
Fowltown, on the American side of the line, to a designated parley
ground. In no mood for negotiation, the chief ordered his followers to
fire on the visitors; whereupon the latter seized and destroyed the
village.

The fight at Fowltown may be regarded as the beginning of the Seminole
War. General Gaines was directed to begin operations against the
Indians and to pursue them if necessary into East Florida; but before
he could carry out his orders, Jackson was put in personal command of
the forces acting against the Indians and was instructed to concentrate
all of the troops in his department at Fort Scott and to obtain from
the Governors of Georgia and Tennessee such other assistance as he
should need.

Jackson received his orders at the Hermitage. Governor Blount was
absent from Nashville, but the eager commander went ahead raising
troops on his own responsibility. Nothing was so certain to whet his
appetite for action as the prospect of a war in Florida. Not only did
his instructions authorize him to pursue the enemy, under certain
conditions, into Spanish territory, but from the first he himself
conceived of the enterprise as decidedly more than a punitive
expedition. The United States wanted Florida and was at the moment
trying to induce Spain to give it up. Here was the chance to take it
regardless of Spain. "Let it be signified to me through any channel
(say Mr. J. Rhea)," wrote the Major General to the President, "that the
possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States, and
in sixty days it will be accomplished."

This "Rhea letter" became the innocent source of one of the most famous
controversies in American history. Jackson supposed that the
communication had been promptly delivered to Monroe, and that his plan
for the conquest of Florida had the full, if secret, approval of the
Administration. Instructions from the Secretary of War, Calhoun, seemed
susceptible of no other interpretation; besides, the conqueror
subsequently maintained that he received through Rhea the assurance
that he coveted. Monroe, however, later denied flatly that he had given
any orders of the kind. Indeed he said that through a peculiar
combination of circumstances he had not even read Jackson's letter
until long after the Florida campaign was ended. Each man, no doubt,
thought he was telling the truth, and historians will probably always
differ upon the merits of the case. The one thing that is perfectly
certain is that Jackson, when he carried his troops into Florida in
1818, believed that the Government expected him to prepare the
territory for permanent American occupation.

In early March, Jackson was at Fort Scott, on the Georgia frontier,
with about two thousand men. Though he expected other forces, Jackson
found that scarcity of rations made it inadvisable to wait for them,
and he therefore marched his army on as rapidly as possible down the
soggy bank of the Apalachicola, past the ruins of Negro Fort, into
Florida, where he found in readiness the provisions which had been sent
forward by way of Mobile. Turning eastward, Jackson bore down upon the
Spanish settlement of St. Marks, where it was rumored that the hostile
natives had assembled in considerable numbers. A small fleet of
gunboats from Mobile and New Orleans was ordered to move along the
coast and intercept any fugitives, "white, red, or black." Upwards of
two thousand friendly Indians joined the land expedition, and the
invasion became from a military standpoint a sheer farce. The Seminoles
were utterly unprepared for war, and their villages were taken
possession of, one by one, without opposition. At St. Marks the Indians
fled precipitately, and the little Spanish garrison, after a glimpse of
the investing force, asked only that receipts be given for the movable
property confiscated. The Seminole War was over almost before it was
begun.

But Jackson was not in Florida simply to quell the Seminoles. He was
there to vindicate the honor and establish the sovereignty of the
United States. Hence there was further work for him to do. The British
instigators of lawlessness were to be apprehended; the surviving
evidences of Spanish authority were to be obliterated. Both objects
Jackson attained with characteristic speed and thoroughness. At St.
Marks he made Arbuthnot a prisoner; at Suwanee he captured another
meddler by the name of Ambrister; and after a court-martial he hanged
one and shot the other in the presence of the chieftains whom these men
had deceived into thinking that Great Britain stood ready to come to
the red man's relief. Two Indian chiefs who were considered ringleaders
he likewise executed. Then, leaving St. Marks in the possession of two
hundred troops, Jackson advanced upon Pensacola, the main seat of
Spanish authority in the colony.

From the Governor, Don JosÈ Callava, now came a dignified note of
protest; but the invader's only reply was an announcement of his
purpose to take possession of the town, on the ground that its
population had encouraged the Indians and given them supplies. On May
24, 1818, the American forces and their allies marched in, unopposed,
and the commander coolly apprised Callava that he would "assume the
government until the transaction can be amicably adjusted by the two
governments." "If, contrary to my hopes," responded the Spanish
dignitary, "Your Excellency should persist in your intention to occupy
this fortress, which I am resolved to defend to the last extremity, I
shall repel force by force; and he who resists aggression can never be
considered an aggressor. God preserve Your Excellency many years." To
which Jackson replied that "resistance would be a wanton sacrifice of
blood," and that he could not but remark on the Governor's
inconsistency in presuming himself capable of repelling an army which
had conquered Indian tribes admittedly too powerful for the Spaniards
to control.

When the Americans approached the fort in which Callava had taken
refuge, they were received with a volley which they answered, as
Jackson tells us, with "a nine-pound piece and five eight-inch
howitzers." The Spaniards, whose only purpose was to make a decent show
of defending the place, then ran up the white flag and were allowed to
march out with the honors of war. The victor sent the Governor and
soldiery off to Havana, installed a United States collector of customs,
stationed a United States garrison in the fort, and on the following
day set out on his way to Tennessee.

In a five months' campaign Jackson had established peace on the border,
had broken the power of the hostile Indians, and had substantially
conquered Florida. Not a white man in his army had been killed in
battle, and not even the most extravagant eulogist could aver that the
war had been a great military triumph. None the less, the
people--especially in the West and South--were intensely pleased. Life
in the frontier regions would now be safer; and the acquisition of the
coveted Florida country was brought appreciably nearer. The popular
sentiment on the latter subject found characteristic expression in a
toast at a banquet given at Nashville in honor of the returning
conqueror: "Pensacola--Spanish perfidy and Indian barbarity rendered
its capture necessary. May our Government never surrender it from the
fear of war!"

It was easy enough for Jackson to "take" Florida and for the people to
rejoice in the exploit. To defend or explain away the irregular
features of the act was, however, quite a different matter; and that
was the task which fell to the authorities at Washington. "The
territory of a friendly power had been invaded, its officers deposed,
its towns and fortresses taken possession of; two citizens of another
friendly and powerful nation had been executed in scandalously summary
fashion, upon suspicion rather than evidence." The Spanish Minister,
Onis, wrathfully protested to the Secretary of State and demanded that
Jackson be punished; while from London Rush quoted Castlereagh as
saying that English feeling was so wrought up that war could be
produced by the raising of a finger.

Monroe and his Cabinet were therefore given many anxious days and
sleepless nights. They wanted to buy Florida, not conquer it. They had
entertained no thought of authorizing the things that Jackson had done.
They recognized that the Tennesseean's crude notions of international
law could not be upheld in dealings with proud European States. Yet it
was borne in upon them from every side that the nation approved what
had been done; and the politically ambitious might well think twice
before casting any slur upon the acts of the people's hero. Moreover
the irascibility of the conqueror himself was known and feared.
Calhoun, the Secretary of War, who was specially annoyed because his
instructions had not been followed, favored a public censure. On the
other hand, John Quincy Adams, the Secretary of State, took the ground
that everything that Jackson had done was "defensive and incident to
his main duty to crush the Seminoles." The Administration finally
reached the decision to surrender the posts but otherwise to back up
the General, in the hope of convincing Spain of the futility of trying
longer to hold Florida. Monroe explained the necessities of the
situation to Jackson as tactfully as he could, leaving him under the
impression--which was corrected only in 1830--that Crawford, rather
than Calhoun, was the member of the Cabinet who had held out against
him.

But the controversy spread beyond the Cabinet circle. During the winter
of 1818-19 Congress took it up, and a determined effort was made to
carry a vote of censure. The debate in the House--with galleries
crowded to suffocation, we are informed by the National
Intelligencer--lasted four weeks and was notable for bringing Clay for
the first time publicly into opposition to the Tenneseean. The
resolutions containing the censure were voted down, however, by a
majority of almost two to one. In the Senate a select committee, after
a laborious investigation, brought in an unfavorable report, but no
further action was taken.

When the discussion in Congress was at its height, Jackson himself
appeared in Washington. Certain friends at the capital, fearing that
his outbursts of temper would prejudice his case, urged him to remain
at home, but others assured him that his presence was needed. To his
neighbor, Major Lewis, Jackson confided: "A lot of d------d rascals,
with Clay at their head--and maybe with Adams in the rear-guard--are
setting up a conspiracy against me. I'm going there to see it out with
them."

Until vindicated by the House vote, he remained quietly in his hotel.
After that he felt free to pay and receive calls, attend dinners, and
accept the tokens of regard which were showered upon him. It was now
that he paid his first visit to a number of the larger eastern cities.
Philadelphia fÍed him four days. In New York the freedom of the city
was presented by the mayor on a delicately inscribed parchment enclosed
in a gold box, and Tammany gave a great dinner at which the leading
guest, to the dismay of the young Van Buren and other supporters of
Crawford, toasted DeWitt Clinton, the leader of the opposing Republican
faction. At Baltimore there was a dinner, and the city council asked
the visitor to sit for a picture by Peale for the adornment of the
council room. Here the General was handed a copy of the Senate
committee's report, abounding in strictures on his Seminole campaign.
Hastening back to Washington, he filled the air with threats, and was
narrowly prevented from personally assaulting a member of the
investigating committee. When, however, it appeared that the report was
to be allowed to repose for all time on the table, Jackson's
indignation cooled, and soon he was on his way back to Tennessee. With
him went the news that Adams and Onis had signed a treaty of "amity,
settlements, and limits," whereby for a consideration of five million
dollars the sovereignty of all Florida was transferred to the United
States. This treaty, as Jackson viewed it, was the crowning vindication
of the acts which had been called in question; and public sentiment
agreed with him.

Dilatory tactics on the part of the Madrid Government delayed the
actual transfer of the territory more than two years. After having
twice refused, Jackson at length accepted the governorship of Florida,
and in the early summer of 1821 he set out, by way of New Orleans, for
his new post. Mrs. Jackson went with him, although she had no liking
for either the territory or its people. On the morning of the 17th of
July the formal transfer took place. A procession was formed,
consisting of such American soldiers as were on the spot. A ship's band
briskly played The Star Spangled Banner and the new Governor rode
proudly at the fore as the procession moved along Main Street to the
government house, where ex-Governor Callava with his staff was in
waiting. The Spanish flag was hauled down, the American was run up, the
keys were handed over, and the remaining members of the garrison were
sent off to the vessels which on the morrow were to bear them on their
way to Cuba. Only Callava and a few other officials and merchants
stayed behind to close up matters of public and private business.

Jackson's governorship was brief and stormy. In the first place, he had
no taste for administrative routine, and he found no such opportunity
as he had hoped for to confer favors upon his friends. "I am sure our
stay here will not be long," wrote Mrs. Jackson to a brother in early
August. "This office does not suit my husband. . . . There never was a
man more disappointed than he has been. He has not the power to appoint
one of his friends." In the second place, the new Governor's status was
wholly anomalous, since Congress had extended to the territory only the
revenue and anti-slave-trade laws, leaving Jackson to exercise in other
matters the rather vague powers of the captain general of Cuba and of
the Spanish governors of the Floridas. And in the third place, before
his first twenty-four hours were up, the new executive fell into a
desperate quarrel with his predecessor, a man of sufficiently similar
temperament to make the contest a source of sport for the gods.

Jackson was prepared to believe the worst of any Spaniard, and his
relations with Callava grew steadily more strained until finally, with
a view to obtaining possession of certain deeds and other legal papers,
he had the irate dignitary shut up overnight in the calaboose. Then he
fell upon the judge of the Western District of Florida for issuing a
writ of habeas corpus in the Spaniard's behalf; and all
parties--Jackson, Callava, and the judge--swamped the wearied officials
at Washington with "statements" and "exhibitions" setting forth in
lurid phraseology their respective views upon the questions involved.
Callava finally carried his complaints to the capital in person and
stirred the Spanish Minister to a fresh bombardment of the White House.
Monroe's Cabinet spent three days discussing the subject, without
coming to a decision. Many were in honest doubt as to the principles of
law involved; some were fearful of the political effects of any stand
they might take; all were inexpressibly relieved when, late in the
year, word came that "Don Andrew Jackson" had resigned the governorship
and was proposing to retire to private life at the Hermitage.




CHAPTER IV
THE DEATH OF "KING CAUCUS"

On a bracing November afternoon in 1821 Jackson rode up with his family
to the Hermitage free for the first time in thirty-two years from all
responsibility of civil and military office. He was now fifty-four
years old and much broken by exposure and disease; the prospect of
spending the remainder of his days among his hospitable neighbors on
the banks of the Cumberland yielded deep satisfaction. The home-loving
Mrs. Jackson, too, earnestly desired that he should not again be drawn
into the swirl of public life. "I do hope," she wrote plaintively to a
niece soon after her return to the Hermitage, "they will leave Mr.
Jackson alone. He is not a well man and never will be unless they allow
him to rest. He has done his share for the country. How little time has
he had to himself or for his own interests in the thirty years of our
wedded life. In all that time he has not spent one-fourth of his days
under his own roof. The rest of the time away, traveling, holding
court, or at the capital of the country, or in camp, or fighting its
battles, or treating with the Indians; mercy knows what not."

The intent to retire was honest enough but not so easy to carry out.
The conqueror of the Creeks and Seminoles belonged not merely to
Tennessee but to the entire Southwest; the victor of New Orleans
belonged to the Nation. Already there was talk--"talk everlastingly,"
Mrs. Jackson tells us in the letter just quoted--of making the hero
President. Jackson, furthermore, was not the type of man to sit idly by
while great scenes were enacted on the political stage. When he
returned from Florida, he faced the future with the weary vision of a
sick man. Rest and reviving strength, however, put the old vim into his
words and acts. In two years he was a second time taking a seat in the
United States Senate, in three he was contesting for the presidency,
and in seven he was moving into the White House.

The glimpses which one gets of the General's surroundings and habits
during his brief interval of repose create a pleasing impression.
Following the winding turnpike westward from Nashville a distance of
nine or ten miles and rumbling across the old wooden bridge over Stone
River, a visitor would find himself at Hermitage Farm. The estate
contained at that time somewhat more than a thousand acres, of which
four hundred were under cultivation and the remainder luxuriant forest.
Negro cabins stood here and there, and in one corner was a little brick
church which the proprietor had built for the solace of his wife. In
the center of a well-kept lawn, flanked with cedars and oaks, stood the
family mansion, the Hermitage, whose construction had been begun at the
close of the Seminole War in 1819. The building was of brick, two
stories high, with a double wooden piazza in both front and rear. The
rooms were small and simply furnished, the chief adornment being
portraits of the General and his friends, though later was added the
familiar painting of Mrs. Jackson. Lavasseur, who as private secretary
of La Fayette visited the place in 1825, was greatly surprised to find
a person of Jackson's renown living in a structure which in France
would hardly suffice for the porter's lodge at the ch‚teau of a man of
similar standing. But western Tennessee afforded nothing finer, and
Jackson considered himself palatially housed.

Life on the Hermitage estate had its full share of the charm of the old
South. After breakfasting at eight or nine, the proprietor spent the
day riding over his broad acres, giving instructions to his workmen,
keeping up his accounts, chatting with neighbors and passers-by, and
devouring the newspapers with a zeal born of unremitting interest in
public affairs. After the evening meal the family gathered on the cool
piazza in summer, or around the blazing hearth of the great living room
in winter, and spent the hours until the early bedtime in telling
stories, discussing local and national happenings, or listening to the
news of distant localities as retailed by the casual visitor. The
hospitality of the Jackson home was proverbial. The General's army
friends came often to see him. Political leaders and advisers flocked
to the place. Clergymen of all denominations were received with special
warmth by Mrs. Jackson. Eastern men of distinction, when traveling to
the West, came to pay their respects. No foreigner who penetrated as
far as the Mississippi Valley would think of returning to his native
land without calling upon the picturesque figure at the Hermitage.

Chief among visitors from abroad was La Fayette. The two men met in
Washington in 1824 and formed an instant attachment for each other. The
great French patriot was greeted at Nashville the following year with a
public reception and banquet at which Jackson, as the first citizen of
the State, did the honors. Afterwards he spent some days in the Jackson
home, and one can imagine the avidity with which the two men discussed
the American and French revolutions, Napoleon, and the late New Orleans
campaign.

Jackson was first and last a democrat. He never lost touch with the
commonest people. Nevertheless there was always something of the grand
manner about him. On formal and ceremonial occasions he bore himself
with becoming dignity and even grace; in dress he was, as a rule,
punctilious. During his years at the Hermitage he was accustomed to
ride about in a carriage drawn by four spirited iron-gray horses,
attended by servants in blue livery with brass buttons, glazed hats,
and silver bands. "A very big man, sir," declared an old hotel waiter
to the visiting biographer Parton long afterwards. "We had many big
men, sir, in Nashville at that time, but General Jackson was the
biggest man of them all. I knew the General, sir; but he always had so
many people around him when he came to town that it was not often I
could get a chance to say anything to him."

The question as to who first proposed Jackson for the presidency will
probably never be answered. The victory at New Orleans evidently
brought the idea into many minds. As the campaign of 1816 was
beginning, Aaron Burr wrote to his son-in-law that, if the country
wanted a President of firmness and decision, "that man is Andrew
Jackson." Not apparently until 1821 was the suggestion put forward in
such a way as to lead Jackson himself to take note of it. Even then he
scoffed at it. To a friend who assured him that he was not "safe from
the presidency" in 1824, he replied: "I really hope you don't think
that I am d------ fool enough to believe that. No sir; I may be pretty
well satisfied with myself in some things, but am not vain enough for
that." On another occasion he declared: "No sir; I know what I am fit
for. I can command a body of men in a rough way; but I am not fit to be
President."

It really mattered little what the General himself thought. His
Tennessee friends had conceived the idea that he could be elected, and
already they were at work to realize this vision. One of the most
active was John H. Eaton, who had lately written the hero's biography
down to the return from New Orleans. Another of his friends was
Governor Blount. John Rhea, Felix Grundy, and half a dozen more helped.
But the man who really made Jackson President was his near neighbor and
his inseparable companion of later years, William B. Lewis.

In a day of astute politicians Major Lewis was one of the cleverest. He
knew Jackson more intimately than did any other man and could sway him
readily to his purposes in all matters upon which the General's mind
was not absolutely made up. He had a wide acquaintance over the
country; he was possessed of ample means and leisure; he was an adept
at pulling judiciously laid and well-concealed political wires; he
fully understood the ideas, aspirations, and feelings of the classes
whose support was necessary to the success of his plans. In the present
juncture he worked on two main lines: first, to arouse Jackson's own
State to a feverish enthusiasm for the candidacy of its "favorite son,"
and, second, to start apparently spontaneous Jackson movements in
various sections of the country, in such a manner that their cumulative
effect would be to create an impression of a nation-wide and
irresistible demand for the victor of New Orleans as a candidate.

Tennessee was easily stirred. That the General merited the highest
honor within the gift of the people required no argument among his
fellow citizens. The first open steps were taken in January, 1822, when
the Gazette and other Nashville papers sounded the clarion call. The
response was overwhelming; and when Jackson himself, in reply to a
letter from Grundy, diplomatically declared that he would "neither seek
nor shun" the presidency, his candidacy was regarded as an established
fact. On the 20th of July, the Legislature of the State placed him
formally in nomination. Meanwhile Lewis had gone to North Carolina to
work up sentiment there, and by the close of the year assurances of
support were coming in satisfactorily. From being skeptical or at best
indifferent, Jackson himself had come to share the enthusiasm of his
assiduous friends.

The Jackson managers banked from the first upon two main assets: one
was the exceptional popularity of their candidate, especially in the
South and West; the other was a political situation so muddled that at
the coming election it might be made to yield almost any result. For
upwards of a generation the presidency and vice presidency had been at
the disposal of a working alliance of Virginia and New York, buttressed
by such support as was needed from other controllable States. Virginia
regularly got the presidency, New York (except at the time of the
Clinton defection of 1812) the vice presidency. After the second
election of Monroe, in 1820, however, there were multiplying signs that
this affiliation of interests had reached the end of its tether. In the
first place, the Virginia dynasty had run out; at all events Virginia
had no candidate to offer and was preparing to turn its support to a
Georgian of Virginian birth, William H. Crawford. In the second place,
party lines had totally disappeared, and the unifying and stabilizing
influences of party names and affiliations could not be counted on to
keep down the number of independent candidacies. Already, indeed, by
the end of 1822 there were a half-dozen avowed candidates, three of
whom had seats at Monroe's Cabinet table. Each was the representative
of a section or of a distinct interest, rather than of a party, and no
one was likely to feel under any compulsion to withdraw from the race
at a preliminary stage.

New England offered John Quincy Adams. She did so with reluctance, for
the old Federalist elements had never forgiven him for his desertion to
the Republican camp in the days of the embargo, while the back country
democracy had always looked upon him as an alien. But he was the
section's only available man--indeed, the only promising candidate from
any Northern State. His frigid manner was against him. But he had had a
long and honorable diplomatic career; he was winning new distinction as
Secretary of State; and he could expect to profit both by the feeling
that the North was entitled to the presidency and by the fact that he
was the only candidate from a non-slave State.

Crawford, Secretary of the Treasury, was the heir apparent of the
Virginia dynasty. Formerly this would have meant a clear road to the
White House. Even now it was supposed to be a tremendous asset; and
notwithstanding the Georgian's personal unpopularity in most parts of
the country, his advantages as the "regular candidate," coupled with
the long and careful campaign carried on in his behalf, were expected
by many keen observers to pull him through.

A third candidate within the Cabinet circle was Calhoun, Secretary of
War. Like Crawford, he could expect to reach the presidency only by
winning the support of one or more of the greater Northern States. For
a while he had hopes of Pennsylvania. When it appeared that he had
nothing to look for in this direction, he resigned himself to the
conclusion that, since he was yet hardly forty years of age, his time
had not yet come.

For the first time, the West now put forward candidates--two of them,
Clay and Jackson. Clay was a Kentuckian, of Virginian birth and
breeding, in whom were mingled the leading characteristics of both his
native and his adopted section. He was "impetuous, wilful,
high-spirited, daring, jealous, but, withal, a lovable man." For a
decade he had been the most conspicuous figure in the national House of
Representatives. He had raised the speakership to a high level of
importance and through its power had fashioned a set of issues,
reflective of western and middle-state ideas, upon which the politics
of the country turned for more than a quarter of a century. As befitted
a "great conciliator," he had admirers in every corner of the land.
Whether his strength could be sufficiently massed to yield electoral
results remained to be discovered.

But what of Jackson? If, as one writer has said, Clay was one of the
favorites of the West, Jackson was the West itself. "While Clay was
able to voice, with statesmanlike ability, the demand for economic
legislation to promote her interests, and while he exercised an
extraordinary fascination by his personal magnetism and his eloquence,
he never became the hero of the great masses of the West; he appealed
rather to the more intelligent--to the men of business and of
property." π Jackson, however, was the very personification of the
contentious, self-confident, nationalistic democracy of the interior.
He could make no claim to statesmanship. He had held no important
legislative or administrative position in his State, and his brief
career in Congress was entirely without distinction. He was a man of
action, not a theorist, and his views on public questions were, even as
late as 1820, not clear cut or widely known. In a general way he
represented the school of Randolph and Monroe, rather than that of
Jefferson and Madison. He was a moderate protectionist, because he
believed that domestic manufactures would make the United States
independent of European countries in time of war. On the Bank and
internal improvements his mind was not made up, although he was
inclined to regard both as unconstitutional.

π Turner, Rise of the New West, p. 188.

Jackson's attitude toward the leading political personalities of the
time left no room for doubt. He supported Monroe in 1816 and in 1820
and continued on friendly terms with him notwithstanding the
President's failure on certain occasions to follow his advice. Among
the new contenders for the presidency the one he disliked most was
Crawford. "As to Wm. H. Crawford," he wrote to a friend in 1821, "you
know my opinion. I would support the Devil first." Clay, also, he
disliked--partly out of recollection of the Kentuckian's censorious
attitude during the Seminole debates, partly because of the natural
rivalry between the two men for the favor of the western people. Clay
fully reciprocated by refusing to believe that "killing 2500 Englishmen
at New Orleans" qualified Jackson for the "various difficult and
complicated duties of the chief magistracy." Toward Adams, Jackson was
not ill disposed; before he decided to permit his own name to be used,
he said that he would give his support in 1824 to the New
Englander--unless one other person should be brought forward. That
person was Calhoun, for whom, among all the candidates of the day, he
thus far had the warmest regard.

Among so many aspirants--and not all have been mentioned--how should
the people make up their minds? In earlier days the party caucuses in
Congress would have eliminated various candidates, and the voters would
have found themselves called upon to make a choice between probably but
two opponents. The caucus was an informal, voluntary gathering of the
party members in the two houses to canvass the political situation and
decide upon the men to be supported by the rank and file of the party
for the presidency and vice presidency. In the lack of other nominating
machinery it served a useful purpose, and nominations had been commonly
made in this manner from 1796 onwards. There were obvious objections to
the plan--chiefly that the authority exercised was assumed rather than
delegated--and, as the campaign of 1824 approached, opposition flared
up in a very impressive manner.

Crawford, as the "regular" candidate, wanted a caucus, and his
adherents supported him in the wish. But all his rivals were opposed to
it, partly because they felt that they could not gain a caucus
nomination, partly because their followers generally objected to the
system. "King Caucus" became the target of general criticism.
Newspapers, except those for Crawford, denounced the old system;
legislatures passed resolutions against it; public meetings condemned
it; ponderous pamphlets were hurled at it; the campaigns of Jackson and
Clay, in particular, found their keynote in hostility toward it.
Failing to perceive that under the changed circumstances a caucus
nomination might become a liability rather than an asset, the Crawford
element pushed its plans, and on February 14, 1824, a caucus--destined
to be the last of the kind in the country--was duly held. It proved a
fiasco, for it was attended by only sixty-six persons. Crawford was
"recommended to the people of the United States" by an almost unanimous
vote, but the only effect was to infuse fresh energy into the campaigns
of his leading competitors. "The caucus," wrote Daniel Webster to his
brother Ezekiel, "has hurt nobody but its friends."

For the first time in eight years the country witnessed a real
presidential contest. The campaign, none the less, was one in which the
candidates themselves took but little active part. The days of
"swinging around the circle" had not yet dawned in our national
politics, nor had even those of the "front-porch" campaign. Adams made
no effort either to be nominated or to be elected, retaining throughout
the contest that austere reserve in public manner which contrasted so
singularly with his amiability and good humor in private life. Jackson
remained quietly at the Hermitage, replying to correspondents and
acknowledging expressions of support, but leaving to his managers the
work of winning the voters. Clay, whose oratorical gifts would have
made him an invincible twentieth century campaigner, contented himself
with a few interviews and speeches. The candidate who normally would
have taken most active personal part in the campaign was Crawford. But
in August, 1823--six months before the caucus nomination--he was
stricken with paralysis and rendered speechless, almost blind, and
practically helpless. For months he hovered between life and death in a
"mansion" on the outskirts of Washington, while his friends labored to
conceal the seriousness of his condition and to keep his canvass going.
Gradually he rallied; but his powerful frame was shattered, and even
when the caucus discharged its appointed task of nominating him, the
politicians were cold-heartedly speculating upon who would receive the
"old republican" support if he should die. He recovered and lived ten
years; but his chances of the presidency were much diminished by his
ill fortune. "He had fallen with his face toward the goal, with his
eyes and his heart fixed upon it."

As the canvass progressed, Jackson steadily gained. His election to the
United States Senate, in the autumn of 1823, over a stanch supporter of
Crawford showed that his own State was acting in good faith when it
proposed him for the higher position. Clever propaganda turned
Pennsylvania "Jackson mad"; whereupon Calhoun, with an eye to the
future, sought an alliance with his competitor. The upshot was that a
convention held at Harrisburg in March, 1824, nominated Jackson almost
unanimously and named Calhoun for the vice presidency. Hostility to the
caucus became also a great asset. Tariff, internal improvements, and
foreign policy were discussed in the campaign, but the real issue was
the manner of selecting the President. Should he continue to be chosen
by a combination of Congressmen, or should the people take matters into
their own hands? Impatience with the caucus system showed itself in
numerous nominations of Clay, Adams, and Jackson by sundry state
conventions, legislatures, and other more or less official bodies. The
supporters of Jackson, in particular, made "down with the caucus" their
rallying cry and found it tremendously effective. In the earlier stages
of the campaign the politicians, aside from Lewis and his coworkers,
were unwilling to believe that Jackson could be elected. Later,
however, they were forced to acknowledge his strength, and at the end
the fight was really between Jackson and the field, rather than between
Crawford and the field as had been anticipated.

At the beginning of November, Jackson, accompanied by his wife and
traveling in a handsome coach drawn by four of the finest Hermitage
thoroughbreds, set out for Washington. Hostile scribblers lost no time
in contrasting this display of grandeur with the republican simplicity
of Jefferson, who rode from Monticello to the capital on the back of a
plantation nag without pedigree. But Jackson was not perturbed. At
various points on the road he received returns from the elections, and
when after four or five weeks the equipage drew up in the capital
Jackson knew the general result. Calhoun had been elected vice
president with little opposition. But no one of the presidential
candidates had obtained an electoral majority, and the task of choosing
among the highest three would, under the terms of the Constitution,
devolve upon the House of Representatives. When, by the middle of
December, the returns were all in, it was found that Jackson would have
99 votes in the electoral college, Adams 84, Crawford 41, and Clay 37.

The country awaited the 9th of February--the day of the official
count--with great interest. Clay was, of course, eliminated. Crawford
likewise, by reason of his poor showing and the precarious state of his
health, could not expect to do more than hold his own. The contest had
narrowed to Jackson and Adams, with Clay holding the balance. There
were twenty-four States in the Union; the successful candidate must
command the votes of thirteen.

The choice that Clay now had to make was distasteful, although not
really difficult. Jackson had obtained a substantial plurality of the
electoral votes; he probably had a plurality of the popular vote,
although in the six States in which the electors were chosen by the
Legislature the popular vote could not be computed; the Legislature of
Clay's own State called upon the Congressmen from the State to give the
Tenneseean its support. But Clay had felt very bitterly about the
candidacy of "this military chieftain." Furthermore, he knew that if
Jackson were to be elected, the country would not be disposed to take
his successor from the West. Besides, Calhoun had put himself in line
for the Jacksonian succession. On the other hand, Clay was not without
grievances against Adams. The New Englander had captured the coveted
Secretaryship of State in Monroe's Cabinet; he had taken no pains to
conceal his dislike of the Kentucky "gamester in politics"; his foreign
policy had been the target of many of Clay's keenest oratorical
thrusts. But the country would be safe in his hands; and a popular
westerner might well hope to become his successor. The decision in
favor of Adams was reached with little delay and was confided to
intimates almost two months before the House balloted. Though Clay's
choice did not insure the election of Adams, it made that outcome
extremely probable.

As the weeks passed, the situation became more tense. All the
principals in the drama were at the capital--Adams as Secretary of
State, Crawford as Secretary of the Treasury, Clay as Speaker of the
House, Jackson as Senator--and the city was filled with followers who
busied themselves in proposing combinations and making promises which,
for the greater part, could not be traced to the candidates themselves.
O'Neil's Tavern--graced by the vivacious "Peggy," who, as Mrs. John H.
Eaton, was later to upset the equilibrium of the Jackson
Administration--and other favorite lodging houses were the scenes of
midnight conferences, intimate conversations, and mysterious comings
and goings which kept their oldest and most sophisticated frequenters
on the alert. "Incedo super ignes--I walk over fires," confided the
straitlaced Adams to his diary, and not without reason. A group of
Clay's friends came to the New Englander's room to urge in somewhat
veiled language that their chief be promised, in return for his
support, a place in the Cabinet. A Missouri representative who held the
balance of power in his delegation plainly offered to swing the State
for Adams if the latter would agree to retain a brother on the federal
bench and be "reasonable" in the matter of patronage.

By the last week of January it was rather generally understood that
Clay's strength would be thrown to Adams. Up to this time the Jackson
men had refused to believe that such a thing could happen. But evidence
had been piled mountain-high; adherents of both allies were openly
boasting of the arrangements that had been made. The Jacksonians were
furious, and the air was filled with recriminations. On January 28,
1825, an anonymous letter in the Columbian Observer of Philadelphia
made the direct charge that the agents of Clay had offered the
Kentuckian's support to both Jackson and Adams in return for an
appointment as Secretary of State, and that, while the friends of
Jackson would not descend to "such mean barter and sale," a bargain
with the Adams forces had been duly closed. Clay's rage was
ungovernable. Through the columns of the National Intelligencer he
pronounced his unknown antagonist "a base and infamous calumniator, a
dastard and a liar," called upon him to "unveil himself," and declared
that he would hold him responsible "to all the laws which govern and
regulate men of honor."

Two days later an obscure Pennsylvania Congressman by the name of
George Kremer tendered his respects to "the Honorable H. Clay," avowed
his authorship of the communication in question, offered to prove the
truth of his charges, and closed sententiously by affirming that as a
representative of the people he would "not fear to 'cry aloud and spare
not' when their rights and privileges are at stake." The matter was
serious, but official Washington could hardly repress a smile. Kremer
was a thoroughly honest but grossly illiterate rustic busybody who thus
far had attracted the capital's attention mainly by reason of his
curiously cut leopard-skin overcoat. The real author of the charge
seems to have been James Buchanan, and Kremer was simple-minded and
credulous enough to be made the catspaw in the business. Clay was taken
aback. Kremer significantly made no reference to the "code of honor";
and since a duel with such a personage would be an absurdity, Clay
substituted a request that the House make an immediate investigation of
the charges. A committee of seven was appointed. But when it summoned
Kremer to give his testimony, he refused to appear, on the
ground--which in the present instance was a mere pretext--that the
House had no jurisdiction over the conduct of its members outside the
chamber.

The truth of the matter is that Kremer was only a tool in the hands of
the Jackson managers. He admitted privately to members of the committee
that he did not write the letter in the Observer, and it was plain
enough that he did not understand its purport. His promise to
substantiate its contents was made in a moment of surprise, because
somebody had neglected to coach him on the point. Finding that it could
make no headway, the committee reported the fact, on the 9th of
February, and the investigation was dropped. This was precisely what
the Jackson managers wanted. Whatever happened, Jackson would be the
gainer. "If Clay transferred his following to Adams, the charge would
gain credence with the masses; if he were not made Secretary of State,
it would be alleged that honest George Kremer (an ardent Jacksonian)
had exposed the bargain and prevented its consummation." π

π Turner, Rise of the New West, p. 208.

Was this charge of a "corrupt bargain" well founded? For a generation
every public man had views on that subject for which he was ready to
fight; mid-century and later historians came to conclusions of the most
contradictory nature. The pros and cons are too complicated to be
presented here, but certain things are fairly clear. In two elaborate
speeches Clay marshaled evidence that before leaving Kentucky he
decided to support Adams in preference to Jackson and Crawford. This
evidence did not convince the Jacksonians; but it could hardly have
been expected to do so, and nowadays it looks to be unimpeachable. It
is certain that the friends of Clay approached the Adams managers with
a view to a working agreement involving the Secretaryship of State; but
it is equally clear that the Jackson and Crawford men solicited Clay's
support "by even more unblushing offers of political reward than those
alleged against Adams." Finally it is known that Adams gave some
explicit preÎlection pledges, and that by doing so he drew some votes;
but on the subject of an alliance with Clay he is not known to have
gone further than to say to a delegation of Clay supporters that if
elected by western votes he would naturally look to the West for much
of the support which his Administration would need.

At noon, on the 9th of February, the Senate and House met in joint
session to witness the count of the electoral vote. Spectators packed
the galleries and overflowed into every available space. The first acts
were of a purely formal nature. Then the envelopes were opened; the
votes were counted; Calhoun was declared elected to the vice
presidency; and it was announced that no candidate for the presidency
had received a majority. Then the senators withdrew, and the
representatives addressed themselves to the task which the Constitution
devolved upon them. The members of each delegation took their seats
together; the vote of each State was placed in a separate box on a
table; and Daniel Webster and John Randolph, acting as tellers, opened
the boxes and tabulated the results. No one expected the first ballot
to be decisive; indeed the friends of Crawford, who were present in
large numbers, were pinning their hopes to the possibility that after
repeated ballotings the House would break the deadlock between Jackson
and Adams by turning to their candidate. A hush fell upon the expectant
assemblage as Webster rose to announce the result; and seasoned
politicians could hardly trust their ears when they heard: Adams,
thirteen votes; Jackson, seven; Crawford, four. An eleventh-hour change
of mind by a New York representative had thrown the vote of that State
into the Adams column and had thereby assured the triumph of the New
Englander.

That evening Jackson and Adams came face to face at a presidential
levee, Jackson with a lady on his right arm. Each man hesitated an
instant, and spectators wondered what was going to happen. But those
who were looking for a sensation were disappointed. Reaching out his
long arm, the General said in his most cordial manner: "How do you do,
Mr. Adams? I give you my left hand, for the right, as you see, is
devoted to the fair: I hope you are very well, sir." The reply came in
clear but icy tones: "Very well, sir; I hope General Jackson is well."
It is the testimony of an unprejudiced observer that of the two, the
defeated Tenneseean bore himself more graciously than the victorious
New Englander.

Two days later Adams, following a conference with Monroe, invited upon
his head the fires of heaven by announcing that he had decided to
appoint Clay Secretary of State, "considering it due to his talents and
services to the western section of the United States, whence he comes,
and to the confidence in me manifested by their delegations."




CHAPTER V
THE DEMOCRATIC TRIUMPH

Monroe's Administration drew to a close in a mellow sunset of popular
approval. But no prophetic genius was required to foresee that clouds
of discontent and controversy would hang heavy about the head of his
successor. Adams certainly did not expect it to be otherwise.
"Prospects are flattering for the immediate issue," he recorded in his
diary shortly before the election, "but the fearful condition of them
is that success would open to a far severer trial than defeat." The
darkest forebodings were more than realized. No one of our chief
executives, except possibly Andrew Johnson, was ever the target of more
relentless and vindictive attacks.

Adams was, in the first place, a minority President. Jackson's popular
vote was probably larger; his electoral vote was certainly so; and the
vote in the House of Representatives was at the last moment swung to
Adams only by certain unexpected and more or less accidental
developments. By thus receiving his office at the hands of a branch of
Congress, in competition with a candidate who had a wider popular
support, the New Englander fell heir to all the indignation that had
been aroused against congressional intrigue, and especially against the
selection of a President by Congressmen.

There was, in addition, the charge of a "corrupt bargain." It mattered
not greatly whether the accusation was true or not. The people widely
accepted it as true, and the Administration had to bear the stigma.
"The coalition of Blifil and Black George, of the Puritan and the
black-leg," John Randolph called the new alliance; and while Clay
sought to vindicate his honor in a duel with the author of the phrase,
nothing that he or Adams could do or say was able to overcome the
effect upon the public mind created by the cold fact that when the Clay
men turned their support to Adams their leader was forthwith made
Secretary of State.

A further source of difficulty in the situation was the temperament of
Adams himself. There was no abler, more honest, or more patriotic man
in public life; yet in the presidency he was, especially at this
juncture of affairs, a misfit. He was cold and reserved when every
consideration called for cordiality; he was petulant when tolerance and
good humor were the qualities most needful. He could neither arouse
enthusiasm nor win friends. He was large visioned and adept at mapping
out broad policies, but he lacked the elements of leadership requisite
to carry his plans into effect. He scorned the everyday arts of
politics, and by the very loftiness of his ideals he alienated support.
In short, as one writer has remarked, he was "a weigher of scruples and
values in a time of transition, a representative of old-school politics
on the threshold of triumphant democracy. The people did not understand
him, but they felt instinctively that he was not one of themselves;
and, therefore, they cast him out." Nobody had ever called him "Old
Hickory" or any other name indicative of popular endearment.

Clay's appointment as Secretary of State was thoroughly typical of the
independent, unyielding attitude of the new Administration. Adams had
not the slightest sympathy with the idea of rotation in public
position: such a policy, he said, would make government "a perpetual
and unremitting scramble for office." He announced that there would be
no removals except such as complaint showed to be for the good of the
service, and only twelve removals took place during his entire term.
The spoilsmen argued and fumed. The editor of an administration
newspaper warmly told the President that in consequence of his policy
he would himself be removed as soon as the term for which he had been
elected had expired. But entreaties and threats were alike of no avail.
Even Clay could not get the removal of a naval officer guilty of
unbecoming conduct. In his zeal for nonpartizanship Adams fairly leaned
backwards, with the result that incompetents were shielded and the
offices were left in the hands of men who, in a very large number of
cases, were openly hostile to the President and to his policies.

"Less possessed of your confidence in advance than any of my
predecessors," wrote Adams in his first message to Congress, "I am
deeply conscious of the prospect that I shall stand more and oftener in
need of your indulgence." In the principles and measures which he urged
upon the legislative branch, none the less, he showed small regard for
moderation or expediency. He defined the object of government to be the
improvement of the condition of the people, and he refused to recognize
in the federal Constitution restrictions which would prevent the
national authorities from fulfilling this function in the highest
degree. He urged not only the building of roads and canals but the
establishment of a national university, the support of observatories,
"the light-houses of the skies," and the exploration of the interior
and of the far northwestern parts of the country. He advocated heavy
protective duties on goods imported from abroad, and asked Congress to
pass laws not alone for the betterment of agriculture, manufactures,
and trade but for the "encouragement of the mechanic and of the elegant
arts, the advancement of literature, and the progress of the sciences,
ornamental and profound." He thought that the public lands should be
sold at the highest prices they would bring and that the money should
be used by the Government to promote the general welfare. He had no
doubt of either the power or the duty of the Government to maintain a
national bank.

Since the War of 1812 the Republicans, with whom Adams had been
numbered, had inclined strongly toward a liberal construction of the
Constitution, but none had gone to the limits marked out in this
program. Besides, a strong reaction was now setting in. The President's
recommendations were received in some quarters with astonishment, in
some rather with amusement. Nowhere were they regarded, in their
entirety, with favor. Even Clay--spokesman of nationalism though he
was--could not follow his chief in his untrammeled flights. Men still
widely believed that the National Government ought to spend money
freely on highways, canals, and other improvements. But by his bold
avowals Adams characteristically threw away support for both himself
and his cause; and the era of federal initiative and management was
thus hastened toward its close.

No one who knew Jackson and his political managers expected them to
accept the anomalous electoral results of 1825 as expressing the real
will of the nation, and it was a foregone conclusion not only that the
General would again be a candidate, but that the campaign of 1828 would
at once begin. The defeated Senator remained in Washington long enough
to present himself at the White House on Inauguration Day and
felicitate his successful rival. Then he set out on the long journey
homeward. Every town through Pennsylvania and along the Ohio turned out
en masse to greet him, and at Nashville he was given a prodigious
reception. To friends and traveling companions he talked constantly
about the election, leaving no doubt of his conviction that he had been
defeated by intrigue. To a sympathetic group of passengers traveling
down the Ohio with him on board the General Neville he declared
emphatically that, if he had been willing to make the same promises and
offers to Clay that Adams had made, he would that minute be in the
presidential chair. If he should yet attain that dignity, he added
significantly, he would do it "with clean hands." It is reported that
as he spoke there was in his eye the fire of determination, such as his
soldiers had seen there as he strode up and down the breastworks at New
Orleans.

To this point Jackson had sought the presidency rather at the
instigation of his friends than because of personal desire for the
office. Now all was changed. The people had expressed their preference
for him, and their will had been thwarted. Henceforth he was moved by
an inflexible purpose to vindicate both his own right to the position
and the right of his fellow citizens to choose their chief executive
without hindrance. In this determination he was warmly backed up by his
neighbors and advisers, and the machinery for a long, systematic, and
resistless campaign was speedily put into running order. One group of
managers took charge in Washington. Another set to work in New York. A
third undertook to keep Pennsylvania in line. A fourth began to
consolidate support in the South. At the capital the United States
Telegraph, edited by Duff Green of Missouri, was established as a
Jackson organ, and throughout the country friendly journals were set
the task of keeping up an incessant fire upon the Administration and of
holding the Jackson men together. Local committees were organized;
pamphlets and handbills were put into circulation; receptions and
public dinners were exploited, whenever possible, in the interest of
the cause. First, last, and always, Jackson's candidacy was put forward
as the hope and opportunity of the plain people as against the
politicians.

In October the Tennessee Legislature again placed its favorite formally
in nomination, and a few days later the candidate resigned his seat in
the Senate in order to be more advantageously situated for carrying on
his campaign. For more than a year he remained quietly at the
Hermitage, dividing his attention between his blooded horses and dogs
and his political interests. Lewis stayed at his side, partly to
restrain him from outbreaks of temper or other acts that might injure
his interests, partly to serve as an intermediary between him and the
Washington manipulators.

Before Adams had been in the White House six months the country was
divided substantially into Jackson men and anti-Jackson or
administration men. The elements from which Jackson drew support were
many and discordant. The backbone of his strength was the
self-assertive, ambitious western Democracy, which recognized in him
its truest and most eminent representative. The alliance with the
Calhoun forces was kept up, although it was already jeopardized by the
feeling of the South Carolinian's friends that they, and not Jackson's
friends, should lead in the coming campaign. After a good deal of
hesitation the supporters of Crawford came over also. Van Buren
coquetted with the Adams forces for a year, and the old-line
Republicans, strong in the Jeffersonian faith, brought themselves to
the support of the Tenneseean with difficulty; but eventually both
northern and southern wings of the Crawford contingent alined
themselves against the Administration. The decision of Van Buren
brought into the Jackson ranks a past master in party management, "the
cleverest politician in a State in which the sort of politics that is
concerned with the securing of elections rather than fighting for
principles had grown into a science and an art." By 1826 the Jackson
forces were welded into a substantial party, although for a long time
their principles involved little more than hostility to Adams and
enthusiasm for Jackson, and they bore no other designation than Jackson
men.

The elements that were left to support the Administration were the
followers of Adams and Clay. These eventually drew together under the
name of National Republicans. Their strength, however, was limited, for
Adams could make no appeal to the masses, even in New England; while
Clay, by contributing to Jackson's defeat, had forfeited much of the
popularity that would otherwise have been his.

If the story of Adams's Administration could be told in detail, it
would be one long record of rancorous warfare between the President and
the Jacksonian opposition in Congress. Adams, on the one hand, held
inflexibly to his course, advocating policies and recommending measures
which he knew had not the remotest chance of adoption; and, on the
other hand, the opposition--which in the last two years of the
Administration controlled the Senate as well as the House of
Representatives--balked at no act that would humiliate the President
and make capital for its western idol. At the outset the Jacksonians
tried to hold up the confirmation of Clay. It fell furiously, and quite
without discrimination, upon the President's great scheme of national
improvements, professing to see in it evidence of an insatiable desire
for "concentration." In the discussion of a proposed amendment to the
Constitution providing for direct election of the President by the
people it was constantly assumed and frequently stated that Adams had
no moral right to the position which he occupied. The President's
decision to send delegates to the Panama Congress of 1826 raised a
storm of acrimonious debate and brought the Administration's enemies
into closer unison. To cap the climax, Adams was solemnly charged with
abuse of the federal patronage, and in the Senate six bills for the
remedy of the President's pernicious practices were brought in by
Benton in a single batch! Adams was able and honest, but he got no
credit from his opponents for these qualities. He, in turn, displayed
little magnanimity; and in refusing to shape his policies and methods
to meet the conditions under which he had to work, he fell short of the
highest statesmanship.

As election year approached, it became clear that the people would at
last have an opportunity to make a direct choice between Adams and
Jackson. Each candidate was formally nominated by sundry legislatures
and other bodies; no one so much as suggested nomination by
congressional caucus. In the early months of 1828 the campaign rapidly
rose to an extraordinary level of vigor and public interest. Each party
group became bitter and personal in its attacks upon the other; in our
entire political history there have been not more than two or three
campaigns so smirched with vituperation and abuse. The Jackson papers
and stump speakers laid great stress on Adams's aristocratic
temperament, denounced his policies as President, and exploited the
"corrupt bargain" charge with all possible ingenuity.

On the other hand, the Adams-Clay forces dragged forth in long array
Jackson's quarrels, duels, and rough-and-tumble encounters to prove
that he was not fit to be President; they distributed handbills
decorated with coffins bearing the names of the candidate's victims;
they cited scores of actions, from the execution of mutinous militiamen
in the Creek War to the quarrel with Callava, to show his arbitrary
disposition; and they strove in a most malicious manner to undermine
his popularity by breaking down his personal reputation, and even that
of his wife and of his mother. It has been said that "the reader of old
newspaper files and pamphlet collections of the Adamsite persuasion, in
the absence of other knowledge, would gather that Jackson was a
usurper, an adulterer, a gambler, a cock-fighter, a brawler, a
drunkard, and withal a murderer of the most cruel and blood-thirsty
description." Issues--tariff, internal improvements, foreign policy,
slavery--receded into the background; the campaign became for all
practical purposes a personal contest between the Tennessee soldier and
the two statesmen whom he accused of bargain and corruption. "Hurrah
for Jackson!" was the beginning and end of the creed of the masses bent
on the Tenneseean's election.

Jackson never wearied of saying that he was "no politician." He was,
none the less, one of the most forceful and successful politicians that
the country has known. He was fortunate in being able to personify a
cause which was grounded deeply in the feelings and opinions of the
people, and also in being able to command the services of a large group
of tireless and skillful national and local managers. He was willing to
leave to these managers the infinite details of his campaign. But he
kept in close touch with them and their subordinates, and upon occasion
he did not hesitate to take personal command. In politics, as in war,
he was imperious; persons not willing to support him with all their
might, and without question or quibble, he preferred to see on the
other side. Throughout the campaign his opponents hoped, and his
friends feared, that he would commit some deed of anger that would ruin
his chances of election. The temptation was strong, especially when the
circumstances of his marriage were dragged into the controversy. But
while he chafed inwardly, and sometimes expressed himself with more
force than elegance in the presence of his friends, he maintained an
outward calm and dignity. His bitterest feeling was reserved for Clay,
who was known to be the chief inspirer of the National Republicans'
mud-slinging campaign. But he felt that Adams had it in his power to
put a stop to the slanders that were set in circulation, had he cared
to do so.

As the campaign drew to a close, circumstances pointed with increasing
sureness to the triumph of the Jackson forces. Adams, foreseeing the
end, found solace in harsh and sometimes picturesque entries in his
diary. A group of opposition Congressmen he pronounced "skunks of party
slander." Calhoun he described as "stimulated to frenzy by success,
flattery, and premature advancement; governed by no steady principle,
but sagacious to seize upon every prevailing popular breeze to swell
his own sails." Clay, likewise, became petulant and gloomy. In the last
two months of the canvass Jackson ordered a general onslaught upon
Kentucky, and when finally it was affirmed that the State had been
"carried out from under" its accustomed master, Clay knew only too well
that the boast was true. To Adams's assurances that after four years of
Jackson the country would gladly turn to the Kentuckian, the latter
could only reply that there would, indeed, be a reaction, but that
before another President would be taken from the West he would be too
old; and it was with difficulty that Adams persuaded him not to retire
immediately from the Cabinet.

The results of the contest fully bore out the apprehensions of the
Administration. Jackson received nearly 140,000 more popular votes than
Adams and carried every State south of the Potomac and west of the
Alleghanies. He carried Pennsylvania also by a vote of two to one and
divided about equally with his opponent the votes of New York and
Maryland. Only New England held fast for Adams. As one writer has
facetiously remarked, "It took a New England conscience to hold a
follower in line for the New England candidate." The total electoral
vote was 178 for Jackson and 83 for Adams. Calhoun was easily reÎlected
to the vice presidency. Both branches of Congress remained under the
control of Jackson's partizans.

Months before the election, congratulatory messages began to pour into
the Hermitage. Some came from old friends and disinterested
well-wishers, many from prospective seekers of office or of other
favors. Influential people in the East, and especially at the capital,
hastened to express their desire to be of service to the Jacksons in
the new life to which they were about to be called. In the list one
notes with interest the names of General Thomas Cadwalader of
Philadelphia, salaried lobbyist for the United States Bank, and Senator
Robert Y. Hayne, the future South Carolina nullifier.

Returns sufficiently complete to leave no doubt of Jackson's election
reached the Hermitage on the 9th of December. That afternoon, Lewis,
Carroll, and a few other members of the "general headquarters staff"
gathered at the Jackson home to review the situation and look over the
bulky correspondence that had come in. "General Jackson," reports
Lewis, "showed no elation. In fact, he had for some time considered his
election certain, the only question in his mind being the extent of the
majority. When he finished looking over the summary by States, his only
remark was that Isaac Hill, considering the odds against him, had done
wonders in New Hampshire!"

When, two weeks later, the final returns were received, leading
Tenneseeans decided to give a reception, banquet, and ball which would
outshine any social occasion in the annals of the Southwest. Just as
arrangements were completed, however, Mrs. Jackson, who had long been
in failing health, suffered an attack of heart trouble; and at the very
hour when the General was to have been received, amid all the trappings
of civil and military splendor, with the huzzas of his neighbors,
friends, and admirers, he was sitting tearless, speechless, and almost
expressionless by the corpse of his life companion. Long after the
beloved one had been laid to rest in the Hermitage garden amid the
rosebushes she had planted, the President-elect continued as one
benumbed. He never gave up the idea that his wife had been killed by
worry over the attacks made upon him and upon her by the Adams
newspapers--that, as he expressed it, she was "murdered by slanders
that pierced her heart." Only under continued prodding from Lewis and
other friends did he recall himself to his great task and set about
preparing for the arduous winter journey to Washington, composing his
inaugural address, selecting his Cabinet, and laying plans for the
reorganization of the federal Civil Service on lines already definitely
in his mind.




CHAPTER VI
THE "REIGN" BEGINS

Jackson's election to the presidency in 1828 was correctly described by
Senator Benton as "a triumph of democratic principle, and an assertion
of the people's right to govern themselves." Jefferson in his day was a
candidate of the masses, and his triumph over John Adams in 1800 was
received with great public acclaim. Yet the Virginian was at best an
aristocratic sort of democrat; he was never in the fullest sense a man
of the people. Neither Madison nor Monroe inspired enthusiasm, and for
John Quincy Adams even New Englanders voted, as Ezekiel Webster
confessed, from a cold sense of duty. Jackson was, as no President
before him, the choice of the masses. His popular vote in 1824 revealed
not only his personal popularity but the growing power of the
democratic elements in the nation, and his defeat in the House of
Representatives only strengthened his own and the people's
determination to be finally victorious. The untrained, self-willed,
passionate frontier soldier came to power in 1828 as the standard
bearer of a mighty democratic uprising which was destined before it ran
its course to break down oligarchical party organizations, to
liberalize state and local governments, and to turn the stream of
national politics into wholly new channels. It was futile for men of
the old school to protest and to prophesy misfortune for the country
under its new rulers. The people had spoken, and this time the people's
will was not to be denied.

Still haggard from his recent personal loss, the President-elect set
out for Washington, at the middle of January, 1829. With him went his
nephew, Andrew Jackson Donelson, who was to be his private secretary;
Mrs. Donelson, who was to preside over the executive mansion; an
accomplished niece of Mrs. Jackson, who was to be of social assistance;
an artist by the name of Earl, who resided at the White House
throughout Jackson's two Administrations, engaged continually in
painting portraits of the General; and, finally, the faithful Major
Lewis, whose intention was merely to attend the inauguration and then
return to his plantation. The puffing little steamboat on which the
party traveled down the Cumberland and up the Ohio was saluted and
cheered a hundred times a day; at Louisville, Cincinnati, and
Pittsburgh there were great outpourings of demonstrative citizens. Duff
Green, one of the party managers, proposed that a great cavalcade
should meet the victor at Pittsburgh and escort him by relays to the
capital. On Van Buren's advice the plan was abandoned. But as the party
passed along the National Road toward its destination it was accorded
an ovation which left nothing to be desired as an evidence of the
public favor.

Arrived in Washington, on the 11th of February--the day on which the
electoral votes were counted in the Senate--Jackson and his friends
found temporary lodgings at the Indian Queen Tavern, commonly known as
"the Wigwam." During the next three weeks the old inn was the scene of
unwonted activity. Office seekers besieged it morning, noon, and night;
politicians came to ask favors or give advice; exponents of every sort
of cause watched for opportunities to obtain promises of presidential
support; scores of the curious came with no other purpose than to see
what a backwoods President looked like. "The city is full of
speculation and speculators," wrote Daniel Webster to his sister-in-law
a few days after Jackson's arrival; "a great multitude, too many to be
fed without a miracle, are already in the city, hungry for office.
Especially, I learn that the typographical corps is assembled in great
force. From New Hampshire, our friend Hill; from Boston, Mr. Greene . .
. and from everywhere else somebody else. So many friends ready to
advise, and whose advice is so disinterested, make somewhat of a
numerous council about the President-elect; and, if report be true, it
is a council which only makes that darker which was dark enough
before."

To all, Jackson was accessible. But he was not communicative, and up to
Inauguration Day people were left to speculate not only upon the truth
of the rumor that there was to be a "full sweep" in the offices but
upon the new Administration's attitude on public questions in general.
Even Isaac Hill, a warm friend and supporter, was obliged to write to
an acquaintance four days before the inauguration that Jackson had
little to say about the future, "except in a general way." The men with
whom the Executive-elect was daily closeted were Major Lewis and
Senators Eaton and White. Van Buren would have been of the number, had
not his recently assumed duties as Governor kept him at Albany. He was
ably represented, however, by James A. Hamilton, a son of Alexander
Hamilton, to whose correspondence we owe most of what we know about the
laying of the plans for the new Administration.

The most pressing question was the personnel of the Cabinet. Upon only
one appointment was Jackson fully determined when he reached
Washington: Van Buren was to be Secretary of State. The "little
magician" had been influential in turning New York from Crawford to
Jackson; he had resigned his seat in the Senate and run for the
governorship with a view to uniting the party for Jackson's benefit; he
was the cleverest politician and, next to Calhoun, the ablest man, in
the Democratic ranks. When offered the chief place in the Cabinet he
promptly accepted. Edward Livingston was given his choice of the
remaining positions, but preferred to accept an election to the Senate.
With due regard for personal susceptibilities and sectional interests,
the list was then completed. A Pennsylvania Congressman, Samuel D.
Ingham, became Secretary of the Treasury; Senator John H. Eaton was
made Secretary of War; a Calhoun supporter from North Carolina, John
Branch, was given the Navy portfolio; Senator John M. Berrien of
Georgia became Attorney-General; and William T. Barry of Kentucky was
appointed Postmaster-General, after the incumbent, John McLean, refused
to accept the policy of a clean slate in the department. The
appointments were kept secret until one week before the inauguration,
when they were announced in the party organ at the capital, Duff
Green's United States Telegraph.

Everywhere the list caused consternation. Van Buren's was the only name
of distinction in it; and only one of the appointees had had experience
in the administration of national affairs. Hamilton pronounced the
group "the most unintellectual Cabinet we ever had." Van Buren doubted
whether he ought to have accepted a seat in such company. A crowning
expression of dissatisfaction came from the Tennessee delegation in
Congress, which formally protested against the appointment of Eaton.
But the President-elect was not to be swayed. His ideas of
administrative efficiency were not highly developed, and he believed
that his Cabinet would prove equal to all demands made upon it. Not the
least of its virtues in his eyes was the fact that, although nearly
evenly divided between his own followers and the friends of Calhoun, it
contained not one person who was not an uncompromising anti-Clay man.

Meanwhile a motley army of office seekers, personal friends, and
sightseers--to the number of ten or fifteen thousand--poured into
Washington to see the old rÈgime of Virginia, New York, and
Massachusetts go out and the new rÈgime of the people come in. "A
monstrous crowd of people," wrote Webster on Inauguration Day, "is in
the city. I never saw anything like it before. Persons have come five
hundred miles to see General Jackson, and they really seem to think
that the country is rescued from some dreadful danger." Another
observer, who was also not a Jacksonian, wrote: π

π Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, Vol. III, p. 168.

No one who was in Washington at the time of General Jackson's
inauguration is likely to forget that period to the day of his death.
To us, who had witnessed the quiet and orderly period of the Adams
Administration, it seemed as if half the nation had rushed at once into
the capital. It was like the inundation of the northern barbarians into
Rome, save that the tumultuous tide came in from a different point of
the compass. The West and the South seemed to have precipitated
themselves upon the North and overwhelmed it. . . .

Strange faces filled every public place, and every face seemed to bear
defiance on its brow. It appeared to me that every Jackson editor in
the country was on the spot. They swarmed, especially in the lobbies of
the House, an expectant host, a sort of PrÊtorian band, which, having
borne in upon their shields their idolized leader, claimed the reward
of the hard-fought contest.

The 4th of March dawned clear and balmy. "By ten o'clock," says an
eye-witness, "the Avenue was crowded with carriages of every
description, from the splendid baronet and coach, down to wagons and
carts, filled with women and children, some in finery and some in rags,
for it was the People's president." The great square which now
separates the Capitol and the Library of Congress was in Jackson's day
shut in by a picket fence. This enclosure was filled with people--"a
vast agitated sea"--while in all directions the slopes of Capitol Hill
were thickly occupied. At noon watchers on the west portico, looking
down Pennsylvania Avenue, saw a group of gentlemen issue from the
Indian Queen and thread its way slowly up the hill. All wore their hats
except one tall, dignified, white-haired figure in the middle, who was
quickly recognized as Jackson. Passing through the building, the party,
reinforced by Chief Justice Marshall and certain other dignitaries,
emerged upon the east portico, amid the deafening cheers of the
spectators. The President-elect bowed gravely, and, stepping forward to
a small cloth-covered table, read in a low voice the inaugural address;
the aged Chief Justice, "whose life was a protest against the political
views of the Jackson party," administered the oath of office; and the
ceremony was brought to a close in the customary manner by the new
Executive kissing the Bible. Francis Scott Key, watching the scene from
one of the gates, was moved to exclaim: "It is beautiful, it is
sublime."

Thus far the people had been sufficiently impressed by the dignity of
the occasion to keep their places and preserve a reasonable silence.
But when the executive party started to withdraw, men, women, and
children rushed past the police and scrambled up the steps in a wild
effort to reach their adored leader and grasp his hand. Disheveled and
panting, the President finally reached a gate at which his horse was in
waiting; and, mounting with difficulty, he set off for the White House,
followed by a promiscuous multitude, "countrymen, farmers, gentlemen,
mounted and unmounted, boys, women, and children, black and white."

The late President had no part in the day's proceedings. On arriving in
Washington, Jackson had refused to make the usual call of the incoming
upon the outgoing Executive, mainly because he held Adams responsible
for the newspaper virulence which had caused Mrs. Jackson such distress
and had possibly shortened her life. Deserted by all save his most
intimate friends, the New Englander faced the last hours of his
Administration in bitterness. His diary bears ample evidence of his
ill-humor and chagrin. On the 3d of March he took up his residence on
Meridian Hill, near the western limits of the city; and thence he did
not venture until the festivities of the ensuing day were ended. No
amount of effort on the part of mediators ever availed to bring about a
reconciliation between him and his successor.

According to custom, the inaugural program came to an end with a
reception at the White House; and arrangements were made to entertain a
large number of guests. Police control, however, proved wholly
inadequate, and when the throng that followed the President up the
Avenue reached the executive grounds it engulfed the mansion and poured
in by windows as well as doors, until the reception rooms were packed
to suffocation. Other guests, bidden and unbidden--"statesmen and
stable-boys, fine ladies and washerwomen, white people and
blacks"--continued for hours to besiege the doors. "I never saw such a
mixture," records Judge Story; "the reign of King Mob seemed
triumphant. I was glad to escape from the scene as soon as possible."
The President, too, after being jostled for an hour, very willingly
made his way by a side entrance to the street and thence to his hotel.

A profusion of refreshments, including barrels of orange punch, had
been provided; and an attempt to serve the guests led to a veritable
saturnalia. Waiters emerging from doors with loaded trays were borne to
the floor by the crush; china and glassware were smashed; gallons of
punch were spilled on the carpets; in their eagerness to be served men
in muddy boots leaped upon damask-covered chairs, overturned tables,
and brushed bric-‡-brac from mantles and walls. "It would have done Mr.
Wilberforce's heart good," writes a cynical observer, "to have seen a
stout black wench eating in this free country a jelly with a gold spoon
at the President's House." Only when some thoughtful person directed
that tubs of punch be placed here and there on the lawn was the
congestion indoors relieved. When it was all over, the White House
resembled a pigsty. "Several thousand dollars' worth of broken china
and cut glass and many bleeding noses attested the fierceness of the
struggle." It was the people's day, and it was of no avail for
fastidious Adamsites to lift their eyebrows in ridicule or scorn.

Those in whom the establishment of the new order aroused keenest
apprehension were the officeholders. A favorite theme of the Jackson
forces during the late campaign was the abuses of the patronage, and
the General came into office fully convinced that an overhauling of the
civil service would be one of the greatest contributions that he could
make to his country's welfare. Even if he had been less sure of this
than he was, the pressure which office seekers and their friends
brought to bear upon him would have been irresistible. Four-fifths of
the people who flocked to Washington at inauguration time were seekers
after office for themselves or their friends, and from every county and
town the country over came pleas of service rendered and claims for
reward. But Jackson needed little urging. He thought, and rightly, that
many of the incumbents had grown lax in the performance of their
duties, if indeed they had ever been anything else, and that fresh
blood was needed in the government employ. He believed that short terms
and rapid rotation made for alertness and efficiency. He felt that one
man had as much right to public office as another, and he was so
unacquainted with the tasks of administration as to suppose all honest
citizens equally capable of serving their fellowmen in public station.
As for the grievances of persons removed, his view was that "no
individual wrong is done by removal, since neither appointment to nor
continuance in office is a matter of right."

Shortly after the election Major Lewis wrote to a friend that the
General was "resolved on making a pretty clean sweep of the
departments." It is expected, he added, that "he will cleanse the
Augean stables, and I feel pretty confident that he will not disappoint
the popular expectation in this particular." If a complete overturn was
ever really contemplated, the plan was not followed up; and it is more
than possible that it was Van Buren who marked off the limits beyond
which it would not be expedient to go. None the less, Jackson's
removals far exceeded those made by his predecessors. Speaking broadly,
the power of removal had never yet been exercised in the Federal
Government with offensive partizanship. Even under Jefferson, when the
holders of half of the offices were changed in the space of four years,
there were few removals for political reasons.

No sooner was Jackson in office, however, than wholesale proscription
began. The ax fell in every department and bureau, and cut off chiefs
and clerks with equal lack of mercy. Age and experience counted rather
against a man than in his favor, and rarely was any reason given for
removal other than that some one else wanted the place. When Congress
met, in December, it was estimated that a thousand persons had been
ousted; and during the first year of the Administration the number is
said to have reached two thousand. The Post-Office Department and the
Customs Service were purged with special severity. The sole principle
on which the new appointees were selected was loyalty to Jackson.
Practically all were inexperienced, most were incompetent, and several
proved dishonest.

"There has been," wrote the President in his journal a few weeks after
the inauguration, "a great noise made about removals." Protest arose
not only from the proscribed and their friends, but from the Adams-Clay
forces generally, and even from some of the more moderate Jacksonians.
"Were it not for the outdoor popularity of General Jackson," wrote
Webster, "the Senate would have negatived more than half his
nominations." As it was, many were rejected; and some of the worst
were, under pressure, withdrawn. On the general principle the President
held his ground. "It is rotation in office," he again and again
asserted in all honesty, "that will perpetuate our liberty," and from
this conviction no amount of argument or painful experience could shake
him. After 1830 one hears less about the subject, but only because the
novelty and glamor of the new regime had worn off.

Jackson was not the author of the spoils system. The device of using
the offices as rewards for political service had long been familiar in
the state and local governments, notably in New York. What Jackson and
his friends did was simply to carry over the spoils principle into the
National Government. No more unfortunate step was ever taken by an
American President; the task of undoing the mischief has been long and
laborious. Yet the spoils system was probably an inevitable feature of
the new rule of the people; at all events, it was accepted by all
parties and sanctioned by public sentiment for more than half a
century.

Like Philip II of Spain, who worked twelve hours a day at the business
of being a King, Jackson took the duties of his exalted post very
seriously. No man had ever accused him of laxness in public office,
civil or military; on the contrary, his superiors commonly considered
themselves fortunate if they could induce or compel him to keep his
energies within reasonable bounds. As President he was not without
distressing shortcomings. He was self-willed, prejudiced, credulous,
petulant. But he was honest, and he was industrious. No President ever
kept a closer watch upon Congress to see that the rights of the
executive were not invaded or the will of the people thwarted; and his
vigilance was rewarded, not only by his success in vindicating the
independence of the executive in a conflict whose effects are felt to
this day, but by the very respectable amount of legislation which he
contrived to obtain in the furtherance of what he believed to be the
public welfare. When a rebellious Congress took the bit in its teeth,
he never hesitated to crack the whip over its head. Sometimes the
pressure was applied indirectly, but with none the less effect. One of
the first acts of the Senate to arouse strong feelings in the White
House was the rejection of the nomination of Isaac Hill to be Second
Comptroller of the Treasury. A New Hampshire senatorship soon falling
vacant, the President deftly brought about the election of Hill to the
position; and many a gala hour he had in later days as Lewis and other
witnesses described the chagrin of the senators at being obliged to
accept as one of their colleagues a man whom they had adjudged unfit
for a less important office.

Much thought had been bestowed upon the composition of the Cabinet, and
some of the President's warmest supporters urged that he should make
use of the group as a council of state, after the manner of his
predecessors. Jackson's purposes, however, ran in a different
direction. He had been on intimate terms with fewer than half of the
members, and he saw no reason why these men, some of whom were
primarily the friends of Calhoun, should be allowed to supplant old
confidants like Lewis. Let them, he reasoned, go about their appointed
tasks as heads of the administrative departments, while he looked for
counsel whithersoever he desired. Hence the official Cabinet fell into
the background, and after a few weeks the practice of holding meetings
was dropped.

As advisers on party affairs and on matters of general policy the
President drew about himself a heterogeneous group of men which the
public labeled the "Kitchen Cabinet." Included in the number were the
two members of the regular Cabinet in whom Jackson had implicit
confidence, Van Buren and Eaton. Isaac Hill was a member. Amos Kendall,
a New Englander who had lately edited a Jackson paper in Kentucky, and
who now found his reward in the fourth auditorship of the Treasury, was
another. William B. Lewis, prevailed upon by Jackson to accept another
auditorship along with Kendall, rather than to follow out his original
intention to return to his Tennessee plantation, was not only in the
Kitchen Cabinet but was also a member of the President's household.
Duff Green, editor of the Telegraph, and A. J. Donelson, the
President's nephew and secretary, were included in the group; as was
also Francis P. Blair after, in 1830, he became editor of the new
administration organ, the Globe. It was the popular impression that the
influence of these men, especially of Lewis and Kendall, was very
great--that, indeed, they virtually ruled the country. There was some
truth in the supposition. In matters upon which his mind was not fully
made up, Jackson was easily swayed; and his most intimate "Kitchen"
advisers were adepts at playing upon his likes and dislikes. He,
however, always resented the insinuation that he was not his own
master, and all testimony goes to show that when he was once resolved
upon a given course his friends were just as powerless to stop him as
were his enemies.

The Jacksonians were carried into office on a great wave of popular
enthusiasm, and for the time being all the powers of government were
theirs. None the less, their position was imperiled almost from the
beginning by a breach within the administration ranks. Calhoun had
contented himself with reÎlection to the vice presidency in 1828 on the
understanding that, after Jackson should have had one term, the road to
the White House would be left clear for himself. Probably Jackson, when
elected, fully expected Calhoun to be his successor. Before long,
however, the South Carolinian was given ground for apprehension. Men
began to talk about a second term for Jackson, and the White House gave
no indication of disapproval. Even more disconcerting was the large
place taken in the new rÈgime by Van Buren. The "little magician" held
the chief post in the Cabinet; he was in the confidence of the
President as Calhoun was not; there were multiplying indications that
he was aiming at the presidency; and if he were to enter the race he
would be hard to beat, for by general admission he was the country's
most astute politician. With every month that passed the Vice
Presidentªs star was in graver danger of eclipse.

Several curious circumstances worked together to widen the breach
between the Calhoun and Van Buren elements and at the same time to
bring the President definitely into the ranks of the New Yorker's
supporters. One was the controversy over the social status of "Peggy"
Eaton. Peggy was the daughter of a tavern keeper, William O'Neil, at
whose hostelry both Jackson and Eaton had lived when they were
senators. Her first husband, a purser in the navy, committed suicide at
sea; and Washington gossips said that he was driven to the act by
chagrin caused by his wife's misconduct, both before and after her
marriage. On the eve of Jackson's inauguration the widow became Mrs.
Eaton, and certain disagreeable rumors connecting the names of the two
were confirmed in the public mind. When Eaton was made Secretary of
War, society shrugged its shoulders and wondered what sort of figure
"Peg O'Neil" would cut in Cabinet circles. The question was soon
answered. At the first official functions Mrs. Eaton was received with
studied neglect by the wives of the other Cabinet officers; and all
refused either to call on her or to receive her in their homes.

Jackson was furious. It was enough for him that Mrs. Jackson had
thought well of the suspected woman, and all his gallantry rose in her
defense. Professing to regard the attitude of the protesters as nothing
less than an affront to his Administration, he called upon the men of
the Cabinet, and upon the Vice President, to remonstrate with their
wives in Mrs. Eaton's behalf. But if any such remonstrances were made,
nothing came of them. "For once in his life, Andrew Jackson was
defeated. Creeks and Spaniards and Redcoats he could conquer, but the
ladies of Washington never surrendered, and Peggy Eaton, though her
affairs became a national question, never got into Washington society."
π The political effect of the episode was considerable. Van Buren was a
widower, and, having no family to object, he showed Mrs. Eaton all
possible courtesy. On the other hand, Mrs. Calhoun was the leader of
those who refused Mrs. Eaton recognition. Jackson was not slow to note
these facts, and his opinion of Van Buren steadily rose, while he set
down Calhoun as an obdurate member of the "conspiracy."

π Brown, Andrew Jackson, p. 127.

Throughout the winter of 1829-30 the Calhoun and Van Buren factions
kept up a contest which daily became more acrimonious and open. Already
the clique around the President had secretly decided that in 1832 he
must run again, with Van Buren as a mate, and that the New Yorker
should be the presidential candidate in 1836. Though irritated by the
Vice President's conduct in the Eaton affair and in other matters,
Jackson threw over the understanding of 1828 with reluctance. Even
when, on the last day of 1829, his friends, alarmed by the state of his
health, persuaded him to write a letter to a Tennessee judge warmly
commending Van Buren and expressing grave doubts about the South
Carolinian--a statement which, in the event of worst fears being
realized, would be of the utmost value to the Van Buren men--he was
unwilling to go the full length of an open break.

But Lewis and his coworkers were craftily laying the train of powder
that would lead to an explosion, and in the spring of 1830 they were
ready to apply the match. When the President had been worked up to the
right stage of suspicion, it was suddenly made known to him that it was
Calhoun, not Crawford, who in Monroe's Cabinet circle in 1818 had urged
that the conqueror of Florida be censured for his bold deeds. This had
the full effect desired. Jackson made a peremptory demand upon the Vice
President for an explanation of his perfidy. Calhoun responded in a
letter which explained and explained, yet got nowhere. Whereupon
Jackson replied in a haughty communication, manifestly prepared by the
men who were engineering the whole business, declaring the former
Secretary guilty of the most reprehensible duplicity and severing all
relations with him. This meant the end of Calhoun's hopes, at all
events for the present. He could never be President while Jackson's
influence lasted. Van Buren had won; and the embittered South
Carolinian could only turn for solace to the nullification movement, in
which he was already deeply engulfed.

Pursuing their plans to the final stroke, the Administration managers
forced a reconstruction of the Cabinet, and all of Calhoun's supporters
were displaced. Louis McLane of Delaware became Secretary of the
Treasury; Lewis Cass of Michigan, Secretary of War; Levi Woodbury of
New Hampshire, Secretary of the Navy; and Roger B. Taney of Maryland,
Attorney-General. Van Buren also retired, in conformity with Jackson's
announced intention not to have any one in the Cabinet who was a
candidate for the succession; and Edward Livingston, Jackson's old
Louisiana friend, became Secretary of State.

It was decided that a fitting post for a successor while awaiting his
turn--particularly for one who was not popular--would be the
ministership to Great Britain; and Van Buren duly traveled to London to
take up the duties of this position. But when the appointment was
submitted to the Senate, Calhoun's friends adroitly managed matters so
that the Vice President should have the satisfaction of preventing
confirmation by his casting vote. "It will kill him, sir, kill him
dead," declared the vengeful South Carolinian to a doubting friend. "He
will never kick, sir, never kick." But no greater tactical error could
have been committed. Benton showed the keener insight when he informed
the jubilant Calhoun men that they had "broken a minister," only to
elect a Vice President.




CHAPTER VII
THE WEBSTER-HAYNE DEBATE

The United States came out of her second war with Great Britain a proud
and fearless nation, though her record was not, on its face, glorious.
She went to war shockingly unprepared; the people were of divided
opinion, and one great section was in open revolt; the military leaders
were without distinction; the soldiery was poorly trained and equipped;
finances were disordered; the operations on land were mostly failures;
and the privateers, which achieved wonders in the early stages of the
contest, were driven to cover long before the close; for the
restoration of peace the nation had to thank England's war weariness
far more than her own successes; and the Treaty of Ghent did not so
much as mention impressment, captures, or any of the other matters
mainly at issue when the war was begun. Peace, however, brought
gratitude, enthusiasm, optimism. Defeats were quickly forgotten; and
Jackson's victory at New Orleans atoned for the humiliations of years.
After all, the contest had been victorious in its larger outcome, for
the new world conditions were such as to insure that the claims and
practices which had troubled the relations of the United States and
Great Britain would never be revived. The carpings of critics were
drowned in the public rejoicings. The Hartford Convention dissolved
unwept and unsung. Flushed with pride and confidence, the country
entered upon a new and richer epoch.

The dominant tone of this dawning period was nationalism. The nation
was to be made great and rich and free; sectional interests and
ambitions were to be merged in the greater national purpose. Congress
voiced the sentiment of the day by freely laying tariffs to protect
newly risen manufactures, by appropriating money for "internal
improvements," by establishing a second United States Bank, and by
giving full support to the annexation of territory for the adjustment
of border difficulties and the extension of the country to its natural
frontiers.

Under the leadership of John Marshall, the Supreme Court handed down an
imposing series of decisions restricting the powers of the States and
throwing open the floodgates for the expansion of national functions
and activities. Statesmen of all sections put the nation first in their
plans and policies as they had not always done in earlier days. John C.
Calhoun was destined shortly to take rank as the greatest of
sectionalists. Nevertheless, between 1815 and 1820 he voted for
protective tariffs, brought in a great bill for internal improvements,
and won from John Quincy Adams praise for being "above all sectional .
. . prejudices more than any other statesman of this union" with whom
he "had ever acted."

The differences between the nationalist and state rights schools were,
however, deep-rooted--altogether too fundamental to be obliterated by
even the nationalizing swing of the war period; and in a brief time the
old controversy of Hamilton and Jefferson was renewed on the former
lines. The pull of political tradition and of sectional interest was
too strong to be resisted. In the commercial and industrial East
tradition and interest supported, in general, the doctrine of broad
national powers; and the same was true of the West and Northwest. The
South, however, inclined to limited national powers, large functions
for the States, and such a construction of the Constitution as would
give the benefit of the doubt in all cases to the States.

The political theory current south of the Potomac and the Ohio made of
state rights a fetish. Yet the powerful sectional reaction which set in
after 1820 against the nationalizing tendency had as its main impetus
the injustice which the Southern people felt had been done to them
through the use of the nation's larger powers. They objected to the
protective tariff as a device which not only brought the South no
benefit but interfered with its markets and raised the cost of certain
of its staple supplies. They opposed internal improvements at national
expense because of their consolidating tendency, and because few of the
projects carried out were of large advantage to the Southern people.
They regarded the National Bank as at best useless; and they resisted
federal legislation imposing restrictions on slavery as prejudicial to
vested rights in the "peculiar institution."

After 1820 the pendulum swung rapidly back toward particularism. State
rights sentiment was freely expressed by men, both Southern and
Northern, whose views commanded respect; and in more than one
State--notably in Ohio and Georgia--bold actions proclaimed this
sentiment to be no mere matter of academic opinion. Ohio in 1819
forcibly collected a tax on the United States Bank in defiance of the
Supreme Court's decision in the case of M'Culloch vs. Maryland; and in
1821 her Legislature reaffirmed the doctrines of the Virginia and
Kentucky resolutions and persisted in resistance, even after the
Supreme Court had rendered a decision π specifically against the
position which the State had taken. Judge Roane of Virginia, in a
series of articles in the Richmond Enquirer, argued that the Federal
Union was a compact among the States and that the nationalistic
reasoning of his fellow Virginian, Marshall, in the foregoing decisions
was false; and Jefferson heartily endorsed his views. In Cohens vs.
Virginia, in 1821, the Supreme Court held that it had appellate
jurisdiction in a case decided by a state court where the Constitution
and laws of the United States were involved, even though a State was a
party; whereupon the Virginia House of Delegates declared that the
State's lawyers had been right in their contention that final
construction of the Constitution lay with the courts of the States.
Jefferson, also, gave this assertion his support, and denounced the
centralizing tendencies of the Judiciary, "which, working like gravity
without any intermission, is to press us at last into one consolidated
mass."

π Osborn vs. Bank of the United States.

In 1825 Jefferson actually proposed that the Virginia Legislature
should pass a set of resolutions pronouncing null and void the whole
body of federal laws on the subject of internal improvements. The
Georgia Legislature, aroused by growing antislavery activities in the
North, declared in 1827 that the remedy lay in "a firm and determined
union of the people and the States of the South" against interference
with the institutions of that section of the country. Already Georgia
had placed herself in an attitude of resistance to the Federal
Government upon the rights of the Indians within her borders, and
within the next decade she repeatedly nullified decisions of the
federal courts on this subject. In 1828 the South Carolina Legislature
adopted a series of eight resolutions denouncing the lately enacted
"tariff of abominations," and a report, originally drafted by Calhoun
and commonly known as The South Carolina Exposition, in which were to
be found all of the essentials of the constitutional argument
underlying the nullification movement of 1832.

When Jackson went into the White House, the country was therefore
fairly buzzing with discussions of constitutional questions. What was
the true character of the Constitution and of the Union established
under it? Were the States sovereign? Who should determine the limits of
state and federal powers? What remedy had a State against
unconstitutional measures of the National Government? Who should say
when an act was unconstitutional?

The South, in particular, was in an irritable frame of mind.
Agriculture was in a state of depression; manufacturing was not
developing as had been expected; the steadily mounting tariffs were
working economic disadvantage; the triumph of members of Congress and
of the Supreme Court who favored a loose construction of the
Constitution indicated that there would be no end of acts and decisions
contrary to what the South regarded as her own interests. Some
apprehensive people looked to Jackson for reassurance. But his first
message to Congress assumed that the tariff would continue as it was,
and, indeed, gave no promise of relief in any direction.

It was at this juncture that the whole controversy flared up
unexpectedly in one of the greatest debates ever heard on the floor of
our Congress or in the legislative halls of any country. On December
29, 1829, Senator Samuel A. Foote of Connecticut offered an
innocent-looking resolution proposing a temporary restriction of the
sale of public lands to such lands as had already been placed on the
market. The suggestion was immediately resented by western members, who
professed to see in it a desire to check the drain of eastern
population to the West; and upon the reconvening of Congress following
the Christmas recess Senator Benton of Missouri voiced in no uncertain
terms the indignation of his State and section. The discussion might
easily have led to nothing more than the laying of the resolution on
the table; and in that event we should never have heard of it. But it
happened that one of the senators from South Carolina, Robert Y. Hayne,
saw in the situation what he took to be a chance to deliver a telling
blow for his own discontented section. On the 19th of January he got
the floor, and at the fag-end of a long day he held his colleagues'
attention for an hour.

The thing that Hayne had in mind to do primarily was to draw the West
to the side of the South, in common opposition to the East. He
therefore vigorously attacked the Foote resolution, agreeing with
Benton that it was an expression of Eastern jealousy and that its
adoption would greatly retard the development of the West. He laid much
stress upon the common interests of the Western and Southern people and
openly invited the one to an alliance with the other. He deprecated the
tendencies of the Federal Government to consolidation and declared
himself "opposed, in any shape, to all unnecessary extension of the
powers or the influence of the Legislature or Executive of the Union
over the States, or the people of the States." Throughout the speech
ran side by side the twin ideas of strict construction and state
rights; in every sentence breathed the protest of South Carolina
against the protective tariff.

Just as the South Carolinian began speaking, a shadow darkened the
doorway of the Senate chamber, and Daniel Webster stepped casually
inside. The Massachusetts member was at the time absorbed in the
preparation of certain cases that were coming up before the Supreme
Court, and he had given little attention either to Foote's resolution
or to the debate upon it. What he now heard, however, quickly drove
Carver's Lessee vs. John Jacob Astor quite out of his mind. Aspersions
were being cast upon his beloved New England; the Constitution was
under attack; the Union itself was being called in question. Webster's
decision was instantaneous: Hayne must be answered--and answered while
his arguments were still hot.

"Seeing the true grounds of the Constitution thus attacked," the New
Englander subsequently explained at a public dinner in New York, "I
raised my voice in its favor, I must confess, with no preparation or
previous intention. I can hardly say that I embarked in the contest
from a sense of duty. It was an instantaneous impulse of inclination,
not acting against duty, I trust, but hardly waiting for its
suggestions. I felt it to be a contest for the integrity of the
Constitution, and I was ready to enter into it, not thinking, or
caring, personally, how I came out." In a speech characterized by Henry
Cabot Lodge as "one of the most effective retorts, one of the strongest
pieces of destructive criticism, ever uttered in the Senate," Webster
now defended his section against the charges of selfishness, jealousy,
and snobbishness that had been brought against it, and urged that the
Senate and the people be made to hear no more utterances, such as those
of Hayne, tending "to bring the Union into discussion, as a mere
question of present and temporary expediency."

The debate was now fairly started, and the word quickly went round that
a battle of the giants was impending. Each foeman was worthy of the
other's steel. Hayne was representative of all that was proudest and
best in the South Carolina of his day. "Nature had lavished on him,"
says Benton, "all the gifts which lead to eminence in public, and to
happiness in private, life." He was tall, well-proportioned, graceful;
his features were clean-cut and expressive of both intelligence and
amiability; his manner was cordial and unaffected; his mind was
vigorous and his industry unremitting. Furthermore, he was an able
lawyer, a fluent orator, a persuasive debater, an adroit
parliamentarian. Upon entering the Senate at the early age of
thirty-two, he had won prompt recognition by a powerful speech in
opposition to the tariff of 1824; and by 1828, when he was reÎlected,
he was known as the South's ablest and boldest spokesman in the upper
chamber.

Webster was an equally fitting representative of rugged New England.
Born nine years earlier than Hayne, he struggled up from a boyhood of
physical frailty and poverty to an honored place at the Boston bar, and
in 1812, at the age of thirty, was elected to Congress. To the Senate
he brought, in 1827, qualities that gave him at once a preeminent
position. His massive head, beetling brow, flashing eye, and stately
carriage attracted instant attention wherever he went. His physical
impressiveness was matched by lofty traits of character and by
extraordinary powers of intellect; and by 1830 he had acquired a
reputation for forensic ability and legal acumen which were second to
none.

When, therefore, on the 21st of January, Hayne rose to deliver his
First Reply, and Webster five days later took the floor to begin his
Second Reply--probably the greatest effort in the history of American
legislative oratory--the little chamber then used by the Senate, but
nowadays given over to the Supreme Court, presented a spectacle fairly
to be described as historic. Every senator who could possibly be
present answered at roll call. Here were Webster's more notable fellow
New Englanders--John Holmes of Maine, Levi Woodbury of New Hampshire,
Horatio Seymour of Vermont. There were Mahlon Dickerson and Theodore
Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, and John M. Clayton of Delaware. Here,
John Tyler of Virginia, John Forsyth of Georgia, William R. King of
Alabama; there, Hugh L. White and Felix Grundy of Tennessee, and Thomas
H. Benton of Missouri. From the President's chair Hayne's distinguished
fellow South Carolinian, Calhoun, looked down upon the assemblage with
emotions which he vainly strove to conceal.

During the later stages of the discussion people of prominence from
adjoining States filled the hotels of the city and bombarded the
senators with requests for tickets of admission to the senate
galleries. Lines were formed, and when the doors were thrown open in
the morning every available inch of space was instantly filled with
interested and excited spectators. So great was the pressure that all
rules governing the admission of the public were waived. On the day of
Webster's greatest effort ladies were admitted to the seats of the
members, and the throng overflowed through the lobbies and down the
long stairways, quite beyond hearing distance. In the House of
Representatives the Speaker remained at his post, but the attendance
was so scant that no business could be transacted.

Hayne's speech--begun on the 21st and continued on the 25th of
January--was the fullest and most forceful exposition of the doctrines
of strict construction, state rights, and nullification that had ever
fallen upon the ear of Congress. It was no mere piece of abstract
argumentation. Hayne was not the man to shrink from personalities, and
he boldly accused the New England Federalists of disloyalty and Webster
himself of complicity in "bargain and corruption." Thrusting and
parrying, he stirred his supporters to wild enthusiasm and moved even
the solemn-visaged Vice President to smiles of approval. The
nationalists winced and wondered whether their champion would be able
to measure up with so keen an antagonist. Webster sat staring into
space, breaking his reverie only now and then to make a few notes.

The debate reached a climax in Webster's powerful Second Reply, on the
26th and 27th of January. Everything was favorable for a magnificent
effort: the hearing was brilliant, the theme was vital, the speaker was
in the prime of his matchless powers. On the desk before the New
Englander as he arose were only five small letter-paper pages of notes.
He spoke with such immediate preparation merely as the labors of a
single evening made possible. But it may be doubted whether any
forensic effort in our history was ever more thoroughly prepared for,
because Webster lived his speech before he spoke it. The origins of the
Federal Union, the theories and applications of the Constitution, the
history and bearings of nullification--these were matters with which
years of study, observation, professional activity, and association
with men had made him absolutely familiar. If any living American could
answer Hayne and his fellow partizans, Webster was the man to do it.

Forty-eight in the total of seventy-three pages of print filled by this
speech are taken up with a defense of New England against the Southern
charges of sectionalism and disloyalty. Few utterances of the time are
more familiar than the sentences bringing this part of the oration to a
close: "Mr. President, I shall enter on no encomium of Massachusetts;
she needs none. There she is. Behold her, and judge for yourselves.
There is her history; the world knows it by heart. . . . There is
Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and there they
will remain forever." If this had been all, the speech would have been
only a spirited defense of the good name of a section and would hardly
have gained immortality. It was the Union, however, that most needed
defense; and for that service the orator reserved his grandest efforts.

From the opening of the discussion Webster's object had been to "force
from Hayne or his supporters a full, frank, clear-cut statement of what
nullification meant; and then, by opposing to this doctrine the
Constitution as he understood it, to show its utter inadequacy and
fallaciousness either as constitutional law or as a practical working
scheme." π In the Southerner's First Reply Webster found the statement
that he wanted; he now proceeded to demolish it. Many pages of print
would be required to reproduce, even in substance, the arguments which
he employed. Yet the fundamentals are so simple that they can be stated
in a dozen lines. Sovereignty, under our form of government, resides in
the people of the United States. The exercise of the powers of
sovereignty is entrusted by the people partly to the National
Government and partly to the state Governments. This division of
functions is made in the federal Constitution. If differences arise, as
they must, as to the precise nature of the division, the decision
rests--not with the state legislatures, as Hayne had said--but with the
federal courts, which were established in part for that very purpose.
No State has a right to "nullify" a federal law; if one State has this
right, all must have it, and the result can only be conflicts that
would plunge the Government into chaos and the people ultimately into
war. If the Constitution is not what the people want, they can amend
it; but as long as it stands, the Constitution and all lawful
government under it must be obeyed.

π MacDonald, Jacksonian Democracy, p. 98.

The incomparably eloquent peroration penetrated to the heart of the
whole matter. The logic of nullification was disunion. Fine theories
might be spun and dazzling phrases made to convince men otherwise, but
the hard fact would remain. Hayne, Calhoun, and their like were playing
with fire. Already they were boldly weighing "the chances of preserving
liberty when the bonds that unite us together shall be broken asunder";
already they were hanging over the precipice of disunion, to see
whether they could "fathom the depth of the abyss below." The last
powerful words of the speech were, therefore, a glorification of the
Union:

While the Union lasts, we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects
spread out before us, for us and our children. Beyond that I seek not
to penetrate the veil. God grant that in my day, at least, that curtain
may not rise. . . . When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last
time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and
dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered,
discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched,
it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering
glance, rather, behold the gorgeous ensign of the Republic, now known
and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms
and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or
polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such
miserable interrogatory as "What is all this worth?" nor those other
words of delusion and folly "Liberty first and Union afterward"; but
everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on
all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and
in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to
every American heart--"Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and
inseparable!"

Undaunted by the flood of eloquence that for four hours held the Senate
spellbound, Hayne replied in a long speech that touched the zenith of
his own masterful powers of argumentation. He conceded nothing. Each
State, he still maintained, is "an independent sovereignty"; the Union
is based upon a compact; and every party to the compact has a right to
interpret for itself the terms of the agreement by which all are bound
together. In a short, crisp speech, traversing the main ground which he
had already gone over, Webster exposed the inconsistencies and dangers
involved in this argument; and the debate was over. The Foote
resolution, long since forgotten, remained on the Senate calendar four
months and was then tabled. Webster went back to his cases; the
politicians turned again to their immediate concerns; the humdrum of
congressional business was resumed; and popular interest drifted to
other things.

Both sides were well satisfied with the presentation of their views.
Certainly neither was converted to the position of the other. The
debate served, however, to set before the country with greater
clearness than ever before the two great systems of constitutional
interpretation that were struggling for mastery, and large numbers of
men whose ideas had been hazy were now led to adopt thoughtfully either
the one body of opinions or the other. The country was not yet ready to
follow the controversy to the end which Webster clearly foresaw--civil
war. But each side treasured its vitalized and enriched arguments for
use in a more strenuous day.

Advantage in the great discussion lay partly with Hayne and partly with
his brilliant antagonist. On the whole, the facts of history were on
the side of Hayne. Webster attempted to argue from the intent of the
framers of the Constitution and from early opinion concerning the
nature of the Union; but a careful appraisal of the evidence hardly
bears out his contentions. On economic matters also, notably the
operation of the protective tariff, he trod uncertain ground. He
realized this fact and as far as possible kept clear of economic
discussion. The South had real grievances, and Webster was well enough
aware that they could not be argued out of existence.

On the other hand, the Northerner was vastly superior to his opponent
in his handling of the theoretical issues of constitutional law; and in
his exposition of the practical difficulties that would attend the
operation of the principle of nullification he employed a fund of
argument that was simply unanswerable. The logic of the larger phases
of the situation lay, too, with him. If the Union for which he pleaded
was not the Union which the Fathers intended to establish or even that
which actually existed in the days of Washington and the elder Adams,
it was at all events the Union in which, by the close of the fourth
decade under the Constitution, a majority of the people of the United
States had come to believe. It was the Union of Henry Clay, of Andrew
Jackson, of Abraham Lincoln. And the largest significance of Webster's
arguments in 1830 arises from the definiteness and force which they put
into popular convictions that until then were vague and
inarticulate--convictions which, as has been well said, "went on
broadening and deepening until, thirty years afterward, they had a
force sufficient to sustain the North and enable her to triumph in the
terrible struggle which resulted in the preservation of national life."
It was the Second Reply to Hayne which, more than any other single
event or utterance between 1789 and 1860, "compacted the States into a
nation."




CHAPTER VIII
TARIFF AND NULLIFICATION

It was more than brilliant oratory that had drawn to the Senate chamber
the distinguished audiences faced by Webster and Hayne in the great
debate of 1830. The issues discussed touched the vitality and
permanence of the nation itself. Nullification was no mere abstraction
of the senator from South Carolina. It was a principle which his
State--and, for aught one could tell, his section--was about to put
into action. Already, in 1830, the air was tense with the coming
controversy.

South Carolina had traveled a long road, politically, since 1789. In
the days of Washington and the elder Adams the State was strongly
Federalist. In 1800 Jefferson secured its electoral vote. But the
Virginian's leadership was never fully accepted, and even before the
Republican party had elsewhere submitted to the inevitable
nationalization the South Carolina membership was openly arrayed on the
side of a protective tariff, the National Bank, and internal
improvements. Calhoun and Cheves were for years among the most ardent
exponents of broad constitutional construction; Hayne himself was
elected to the Senate in 1822 as a nationalist, and over another
candidate whose chief handicap was that he had proposed that his State
secede rather than submit to the Missouri Compromise.

After 1824 sentiment rapidly shifted. The cause appeared to be the
tariff; but in reality deeper forces were at work. South Carolina was
an agricultural State devoted almost exclusively to the raising of
cotton and rice. Soil and climate made her such, and the "peculiar
institution" confirmed what Nature already had decreed. But the
planters were now beginning to feel keenly the competition of the new
cotton lands of the Gulf plains. As production increased, the price of
cotton fell. "In 1816," writes Professor Turner, "the average price of
middling uplands . . . was nearly thirty cents, and South Carolina's
leaders favored the tariff; in 1820 it was seventeen cents, and the
South saw in the protective system a grievance; in 1824 it was fourteen
and three-quarters cents, and the South Carolinians denounced the
tariff as unconstitutional." π

π Turner, The Rise of the New West, p. 325.

Men of the Clay-Adams school argued that the tariff stimulated
industry, doubled the profits of agriculture, augmented wealth, and
hence promoted the well-being of the nation as a whole. The Southern
planter was never able to discover in the protective system any real
advantage for himself, but as long as the tariffs were moderate he was
influenced by nationalistic sentiment to accept them. The demand for
protection on the part of the Northern manufacturers seemed, however,
insatiable. An act of 1824 raised the duties on cotton and woolen
goods. A measure of 1827 which applied to woolens the ruinous principle
already applied to cottons was passed by the House and was laid on the
table in the Senate only by the casting vote of Vice President Calhoun.
The climax was reached in the Tariff Act of 1828, which the Southerners
themselves loaded with objectionable provisions in the vain hope of
making it so abominable that even New England congressmen would vote
against it.

A few years of such legislation sufficed to rouse the South to a deep
feeling of grievance. It was no longer a question of reasonable
concession to the general national good. A vast artificial economic
system had been set up, whose benefits accrued to the North and whose
burdens fell disproportionately upon the South. The tone and temper of
the manufacturing sections and of the agricultural West gave no promise
of a change of policy. The obvious conclusion was that the planting
interests must find some means of bringing pressure to bear for their
own relief.

The means which they found was nullification; and it fell to South
Carolina, whose people were most ardent in their resentment of anything
that looked like discrimination, to put the remedy to the test. The
Legislature of this State had made an early beginning by denouncing the
tariff of 1824 as unconstitutional. In 1827 Robert J. Turnbull, one of
the abler political leaders, published under the title of The Crisis a
series of essays in which he boldly proclaimed nullification as the
remedy. In the following summer Calhoun put the nullification doctrine
into its first systematic form in a paper--the so-called
Exposition--which for some time was known to the public only as the
report of a committee of the Legislature.

By 1829 the State was sharply divided into two parties, the
nationalists and the nullifiers. All were agreed that the protective
system was iniquitous and that it must be broken down. The difference
was merely as to method. The nationalists favored working through the
customary channels of legislative reform; the nullifiers urged that the
State interpose its authority to prevent the enforcement of the
objectionable laws. For a time the leaders wavered. But the swing of
public sentiment in the direction of nullification was rapid and
overwhelming, and one by one the representatives in Congress and other
men of prominence fell into line. Hayne and McDuffie were among the
first to give it their support; and Calhoun, while he was for a time
held back by his political aspirations and by his obligations as Vice
President, came gradually to feel that his political future would be
worth little unless he had the support of his own State.

As the election of 1828 approached, the hope of the discontented forces
centered in Jackson. They did not overlook the fact that his record was
that of a moderate protectionist. But the same was true of many South
Carolinians and Georgians, and it seemed not at all impossible that, as
a Southern man and a cotton planter, he should undergo a change of
heart no less decisive than that which Hayne and Calhoun had
experienced. Efforts to draw him out, however, proved not very
successful. Lewis saw to it that Jackson's utterances while yet he was
a candidate were safely colorless; and the single mention of the tariff
contained in the inaugural address was susceptible of the most varied
interpretations. The annual message of 1829 indicated opposition to
protection; on the other hand, the presidential message of the next
year not only asserted the full power of Congress to levy protective
duties but declared the abandonment of protection "neither to be
expected or desired." Gradually the antiprotectionist leaders were made
to see that the tariff was not a subject upon which the President felt
keenly, and that therefore it was useless to look to him for effective
support.

Even the adroit efforts which were made to get from the incoming
executive expressions that could be interpreted as endorsements of
nullification were successfully fended off. For some months the
President gave no outward sign of his disapproval. With more than his
usual deliberateness, Jackson studied the situation, awaiting the right
moment to speak out with the maximum of effect.

The occasion finally came on April 13, 1830, at a banquet held in
Washington in celebration of Jefferson's birthday. The Virginia patron
of democracy had been dead four years, and Jackson had become, more
truly than any other man, his successor. Jacksonian democracy was,
however, something very different from Jeffersonian, and never was the
contrast more evident than on this fateful evening. During the earlier
part of the festivities a series of prearranged toasts, accompanied by
short speeches, put before the assemblage the Jeffersonian teachings in
a light highly favorable--doubtless unwarrantably so--to the ultra
state rights theory. Then followed a number of volunteer toasts. The
President was, of course, accorded the honor of proposing the
first--and this gave Jackson his chance. Rising in his place and
drawing himself up to his full height, he raised his right hand, looked
straight at Calhoun and, amid breathless silence, exclaimed in that
crisp, harsh tone that had so often been heard above the crashing of
many rifles: "Our Union! It must be preserved!"

An account of the scene which is given by Isaac Hill, a member of the
Kitchen Cabinet and an eyewitness, is interesting:

A proclamation of martial law in South Carolina and an order to arrest
Calhoun where he sat could not have come with more blinding, staggering
force. All hilarity ceased. The President, without adding one word in
the way of speech, lifted up his glass as a notice that the toast was
to be quaffed standing. Calhoun rose with the rest. His glass so
trembled in his hand that a little of the amber fluid trickled down the
side. Jackson stood silent and impassive. There was no response to the
toast. Calhoun waited until all sat down. Then he slowly and with
hesitating accent offered the second volunteer toast: "The Union! Next
to Our Liberty Most Dear!" Then, after a minute's hesitation, and in a
way that left doubt as to whether he intended it for part of the toast
or for the preface to a speech, he added: "May we all remember that it
can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States and by
distributing equally the benefit and burden of the Union."

The nullifiers had carefully planned the evening's proceedings with a
purpose to strengthen their cause with the country. They had not
reckoned on the President, and the dash of cold water which he had
administered caused them more anguish than any opposition that they had
yet encountered. The banquet broke up earlier than had been expected,
and the diners went off by twos and threes in eager discussion of the
scene that they had witnessed. Some were livid with rage; some shook
their heads in fear of civil war; but most rejoiced in the splendid
exhibition of executive dignity and patriotic fervor which the
President had given. Subsequently it transpired that Jackson had acted
on no mere impulse and that his course had been carefully planned in
consultation with Van Buren and other advisers.

Throughout the summer and autumn of 1830 both the State R

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