When he was defending Burr, Clay was elected in 1806 to complete the U.S. Senate term of the incumbent, who had resigned in anger after losing reelection. Clay, then twenty-nine, was already the speaker of the state house of representatives but was four months shy of the minimum age of thirty required in the Constitution for service in the Senate. Nonetheless, the Senate seated him with no objection. As Clay was preparing to go to Washington, Burr contacted him to let him know he was about to be indicted a second time for treason.61 Clay was concerned that he might have a conflict of interest due to his new Senate duties, but Burr assured him in writing that he was innocent of the charges that he had promoted the dissolution of the United States in any way.62 When Clay appeared in court on Burr’s behalf, the prosecution again conceded that an important witness had failed to appear. Clay angrily denounced the prosecution’s shenanigans, and two days later the jury acquitted Burr.63
Eager to get to Washington to begin his life as a senator, Clay left almost immediately after procuring Burr’s acquittal, but before he arrived in the nation’s capital, President Jefferson got word to him that he was in possession of a coded message from Burr in which his treacherous schemes were evident. Jefferson issued a proclamation warning the nation of a military conspiracy and urging the capture of the traitors, including Burr. Once Clay arrived in Washington, he tried to reassure everyone that he had believed Burr was innocent, but at the White House, President Jefferson showed Clay some of the decoded documents demonstrating Burr’s guilt. “It seems,” Clay wrote his father-in-law, “that we have been much mistaken about Burr.”64 Clay refused to appear on Burr’s behalf at his treason trial conducted later before the chief justice of the United States, John Marshall. Clay told people that Burr had “deceived” him and that he would not give Burr “an opportunity for deceiving him [another] time.” 65 Clay’s association with Burr would follow him for the rest of his life, a warning to other lawyers, including Lincoln, on the risks of both representing and becoming too closely associated with unpopular clients.
The legal careers of Jackson and Clay each consistently took a backseat to their political ambitions. In 1812, Clay supported the United States’ declaration of war against Britain after it attempted to stop American traders from supplying Russian and American hemp to France for salt-resistant cordage for Napoleon’s navy. The British forced captured American sailors into servitude and encouraged Native American attacks on American settlers on the frontier. Jackson enthusiastically joined the cause and became a hero as the prevailing general when his ragtag army of roughly five thousand American men defeated the larger, better financed and armed forces of the British in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. In that case, he’d marched his band of volunteers to Washington from Tennessee but, once he arrived, he was ordered to disband his men. He refused. Instead, he funded their march back five hundred miles to Tennessee and eventually to New Orleans. Thinking he was as tough as the hardest wood they knew, they dubbed him Old Hickory. The name stuck.
Jackson had a hair-trigger temper. He fought two duels; in one of them, the man he killed had struck him first near the heart. The bullet was so close to his heart that surgeons decided they could not remove it without killing Jackson. He caned various enemies and made numerous challenges that were not accepted. He had two shootouts with the governor of Tennessee and another with his then aide-de-camp Thomas Hart Benton, whose bullet struck him in his left arm. Nevertheless, Benton later became a friend and political ally, and Jackson later would sometimes make a show of being angry to intimidate people he wished to be rid of.
In 1817, President James Monroe directed Jackson to lead military forces to rebuff Native American attacks in Spanish Florida. Jackson succeeded, but not before ordering the brutal killing of Native Americans in his charge as well as two British citizens who had traded with them. When it became clear that Spain could not defend or control the Florida territory, President Monroe, through his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, negotiated the transfer of sovereignty over it from Spain to the United States. Monroe then placed Jackson in control of the territory as military governor.66
With the 1824 presidential election fast approaching, Jackson and Clay both tried to position themselves to succeed President Monroe, who was finishing his second term. Jackson got off the mark faster. A young man named John Eaton, a friend of Jackson’s family in Tennessee, published a biography of Jackson in 1817, the first campaign biography in American politics. Young Abraham Lincoln would likely have read it. Eaton’s book and Jackson’s campaign portrayed the candidate as a war hero, defender not only of his country but the common man, unbeholden to the banks and businesses, and a champion of states’ rights.67
For his part, Clay had become the youngest speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in its history, having been elected to the position when he first entered the House in 1811. Up until 1820, Clay had been an agitator rather than a peacemaker in Congress. His introduction of the Missouri Compromise in 1820 changed all that. A slave owner, he had founded the American Colonization Society in 1817 to provide a solution for the slavery problem by buying slaves their freedom and then funding their travel back to Africa. Clay was the society’s first president, Andrew Jackson its first vice president. Alarmed that sectional differences over slavery were threatening to rip the country apart, Clay saw an opportunity he could not resist: his chance to exercise leadership on the question of slavery. On March 3, 1820, the House approved Clay’s proposed compromise—allowing Maine to be admitted into the Union as a free state and Missouri as a slave state. The proposal further barred the expansion of slavery north of the 36°30′ parallel, excluding Missouri. As the first successful attempt to broker a compromise between the proslavery and antislavery members of Congress, Clay’s effort, including detailed accounts of his four-hour oration, delivered over two days, was widely reported by newspapers throughout the country.
Clay split each part of the compromise into separate bills, which were supported by different coalitions in the House. Clay earned the nickname the Great Compromiser for his kind of tactic, and he would use the same technique thirty years later in his crowning achievement as a legislator—the Compromise of 1850, yet another attempt to find a solution to the slavery problem that, in the end, merely postponed a final reckoning.
Over the course of two legislative days (and over 40 pages in the Annals of Congress), Clay delivered a speech that foreshadowed the eloquence to come. He set forth his belief in tariffs to protect fledgling American industry, in federal funds for internal improvements, and in a national bank that would give credit to help people improve the quality of their lives. “The object of the bill under consideration,” he declared, “is to create the home market, and to lay the foundations of a genuine American policy.”68 In characteristic fashion, he proceeded to systematically address ten arguments made against the tariff, and concluded, “But there is a remedy, and that remedy consists in modifying our foreign policy, and in adopting a genuine AMERICAN SYSTEM. We must naturalize the arts in our country, and we must naturalize them by the only means which the wisdom of nations has yet discovered to be effectual—by adequate protection against the otherwise overwhelming influence of foreigners.”69 As described by Lincoln’s biographer David Herbert Donald, “Clay’s American System sought to link the manufacturing of the Northeast with the grain production of the West and the cotton and tobacco crops of the South, so that the nation’s economy would become one vast interdependent web. When economic interests worked together, so would political interests, and sectional rivalries would be forgotten in a powerful American nationalism.”70
From an early age, Clay and Jackson had each regarded himself as the true heir to the political vision of Thomas Jefferson; at the turn of the nineteenth century, they each shared Jefferson’s skepticism of a strong federal government and commitment to expanding access to voting for ordinary American citizens. In time, Clay, unlike Jackson, became increasingly concerned that relying too m
uch on the uninformed opinions of the vast electorate was in conflict with the interests of American businesses whose success was crucial for ensuring the nation’s prosperity. Clay thus developed confidence in a potent national government that backed ambitious public works, such as a vast transportation infrastructure that would have included canals, roads, harbors, and navigation improvements, as well as funds for schools. Clay’s vision, which became known as the American System, was in sharp conflict with Jackson’s certitude that the hard push for economic development would give rise to rapacious businesses and banks that would gouge ordinary Americans. The mismatch in the two men’s world-views would, unsurprisingly, lead to a clash between them. While one crucial element of the American System, the Tariff of 1824, passed narrowly in the House, it was clear that without the support of the chief executive, progress would be severely limited.
In the 1824 election, the problem that both Jackson and Clay faced, however, was that they were just two of the four major candidates running for president. At that time, the predominant national party was the Democratic-Republican Party, which had won six consecutive elections. The only other major party, the Federalist Party, which had been the party of Washington and John Adams, had dissolved shortly after Adams lost the 1800 presidential election to his own vice president, Thomas Jefferson. After the Federalist Party melted away, the country entered what was commonly called the Era of Good Feelings, a deceiving nomenclature, as the 1824 election showed. The fact that there was one dominant political party did not mean every Democratic-Republican shared the same outlooks or allegiances. Unlike today’s political parties, those in the antebellum era did not simply coalesce around an agreed-upon platform of policies. Instead, they were formed around regional interests and beliefs about whether the Constitution envisioned a strong, effective federal government or a significant realm of state authority over which the federal government had no say.
In 1824, four different men vied for the Democratic-Republican Party’s mantle: William Crawford, who had served as Monroe’s secretary of war and Adams’s Treasury secretary but then suffered a debilitating stroke. His disability was an open secret likely to hinder support from outside his home state of Georgia. John Quincy Adams, the son of President Adams, had served in a series of prestigious public offices; he was the sitting secretary of state, the same office that James Madison had occupied when he was elected president the first time in 1808, and that James Monroe had occupied when he ran in 1816 to succeed Madison. Jackson quit after serving brief stints in both the Senate and the House. Clay, on his way to becoming the longest-serving speaker of the House of Representatives, was widely revered (and castigated) as a visionary and seasoned statesman. A fifth candidate, John Calhoun, a South Carolina senator and the most outspoken defender of slavery on the national stage, competed only for the vice presidency and therefore ensured that he would serve as the vice president for whomever was elected president.
None of the four major candidates seemed to have a good chance at winning the presidency, as none could muster anything more than moderate regional backing. Adams received support in New England and split the Mid-Atlantic region with Jackson but did not win the popular vote. Jackson and Crawford split the popular vote in the South, while Jackson and Clay split it in the Western regions. Jackson claimed a plurality of the national popular vote, but no one won a majority in the Electoral College.
Under the Twelfth Amendment, which had been ratified to prevent any confusion over how electoral votes should be counted for president and vice president, as had occurred in the election of 1800, the House of Representatives decided the outcomes of presidential elections unresolved in the Electoral College. Only the top three candidates in the popular election were eligible to be considered in the House. Because Clay had finished fourth in the popular vote, he was no longer eligible to be a candidate, but as speaker of the House, he was in charge of handling the vote to break the electoral stalemate. He threw his support to Adams—unsurprising given that Adams was the only other candidate who had supported the infrastructure program that Clay favored. Due to Clay’s support and influence in the House, Adams became president, and he named Clay secretary of state.
Bitterly disappointed, Jackson threw one of the most famous fits of anger in American history. From the moment the House made Adams president to the 1828 rematch between Jackson and Adams, Jackson denounced wherever he went the arrangement between Adams and Clay as a “corrupt bargain.”71
When the 1828 election came around, Jackson’s grudge against both Adams and Clay was as strong as ever. This time, it was only Jackson and Adams who faced off, since as Adams’s secretary of state, Clay was obviously in the president’s camp. Nor were there any minor candidates to siphon votes from either of the major candidates. Besides recirculating Eaton’s biography, Jackson initiated a style of campaigning that candidates continue to use today, including personal appearances, soliciting backing from newspapers, and reminding voters of Jefferson’s endorsement in his earlier run for president.72 Jackson worked with Martin Van Buren and others to build a new party apparatus called the Democratic Party to replace the deteriorating and defunct Democratic-Republican regime.
For his part, Adams was largely tone-deaf when it came to political acumen. Throughout his administration, he had not bothered to use his appointments to solidify support within his administration or Congress, nor had he bothered to curry favor with congressional leaders to get his legislative initiatives enacted. He had little to show for his four years in office except perhaps for his stubbornness and determination not to suffer fools gladly. And this time he faced not only an energized Jackson but a brand-new party.
In the months prior to the election, Jackson, with the help of a small band of close advisers that included the new vice president, Martin Van Buren, had established the Democratic Party, emphasizing its commitment to following the will of a majority of voting Americans. Clay replaced the name of the Democratic-Republican Party, which was all but defunct anyway, adopting the other half of the old party’s moniker: he was now the candidate of the National Republican Party.
Jackson’s new party destroyed the competition. Jackson won the 1828 election with nearly 56 percent of the popular vote and over twice as many Electoral College votes as Adams had won in 1824. During the 1828 campaign, Calhoun, then the vice president to Adams, offered to serve as Jackson’s vice president if he won. Jackson agreed. Many of the people who voted for him were Southern Democrats who also supported Calhoun, and both he and Calhoun opposed federal overreach into domains that, in their opinion, were properly within the jurisdiction of the states.
Everyone expected the 1832 presidential election to be the culmination of the feud between the Jacksonites and Clay men. It was not. Their ideological dispute was not put to rest until after their deaths, Lincoln’s reelection, and the end of the Civil War.
Neither Jackson nor Clay anticipated that Vice President John Calhoun would attempt to thwart Jackson’s reelection. Jackson and Calhoun had been increasingly at odds throughout most of Jackson’s first term, as Calhoun and his allies in the Cabinet belligerently tried to push Jackson toward a more extreme defense of slavery and adoption of the doctrine of nullification (the entitlement of states to disregard any federal laws they considered to encroach upon their autonomy).
In February 1831, with the presidential election more than a year away, Calhoun hoped to sabotage Jackson’s reelection by leaking a copy of a letter that President Monroe had written to Jackson back in 1818. The letter seemed to indicate that Monroe had not given Jackson clear authority to take the aggressive measures that he did to help the United States wrest Florida from Spanish control. Clay and other critics of Jackson—who continued to claim that he’d had Monroe’s support—seized on the letter as further evidence of Jackson’s tyrannical disposition.
Jackson restructured his Cabinet to rid himself of Calhoun’s allies as well as the members whose wives had snubbed the wife of Jackson’s f
riend, biographer, and war secretary, John Eaton—a purge seemingly driven more by personal slight than policy. Jackson asked Secretary of State Martin Van Buren, who had suggested the reorganization, to resign so that Jackson could appoint him as minister to Great Britain. To avoid a clash in the Senate, Jackson gave Van Buren a recess appointment as minister in August 1831. When in 1832 the Senate split over the nomination of Van Buren as ambassador, Calhoun, in his capacity as vice president, cast the tie-breaking vote to defeat it. In doing so, he made Van Buren a martyr for Jackson’s cause.
As the turmoil in the Jackson administration subsided, Henry Clay tried to outmaneuver Jackson on a different front. Clay decided to turn the national bank—the centerpiece of his American System—into the major issue in the upcoming presidential election. Previously, on May 27, 1830, Jackson had vetoed the Maysville Road project.73 The road would have connected Lexington to Maysville, Kentucky, a sixty-six-mile stretch that would have extended the Cumberland Road, the nation’s first interstate highway, built between 1811 and 1837 and designed to extend from Cumberland, Maryland, to the Northwest Territory. Jackson argued that the Maysville project was unconstitutional because it was purely intrastate and therefore a matter to be addressed solely by Kentucky authorities.74 Clay decided, along with Nicholas Biddle, the director of the national bank, to bring up the rechartering of the bank five years sooner than it needed to be, in order to force Jackson to again show the extent to which he opposed the concept.
Clay underestimated Jackson. Jackson killed the national bank in perhaps the most famous veto message in American history. In spite of the fact that the United States Supreme Court had previously upheld the national bank’s constitutionality as a lawful exercise of Congress’s authority under the Necessary and Proper Clause (because the law made collection and redistribution of federal money much easier), Jackson, in a message drafted by his then–attorney general Roger Taney, argued that this same clause vested him with independent authority to determine whether a law was “necessary” or not.75 Jackson concluded that the national bank charter was not. Lambasting the bank as “corrupt,” Jackson warned that “if this monopoly were regularly renewed every fifteen or twenty years on terms proposed by themselves, they might seldom in peace put forth their strength to influence elections or control the affairs of the nation.” As for the Supreme Court’s decision unanimously upholding the bank’s constitutionality, Jackson declared that its decision “ought not to control the coordinate authorities of this Government.” In a declaration that would guide every subsequent president, including Lincoln, Jackson wrote, “The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution.” The president, he explained, is “independent of both” the Court and Congress, particularly since the president is the only national leader elected by the voters. In the upcoming campaign, Jackson men would argue that the bank was corrupt and indeed was responsible already for one national economic downturn, the Crisis of 1819, when banks failed because they overextended their credit and then foreclosed mortgages, forcing people out of their homes and off their farms.
Lincoln's Mentors Page 4
