American Lion

by Jon Meacham

  The reason: Henry Clay. In one of the defining rivalries of the age, Clay hated Jackson and Jackson hated Clay. Clay feared that a man of Jackson’s temperament might turn the Republic into a dictatorship and said that he, for one, could not see how “killing two thousand five hundred Englishmen at New Orleans qualifies for the difficult and complicated business of the chief magistracy.” After the resolution of the 1824 election, Jackson believed Clay, as he put it to Sam Houston, “certainly the basest, meanest scoundrel that ever disgraced the image of his God.”

  Amid the maneuvering in the House, Clay, not surprisingly, decided to support Adams. The Jacksonian argument that Clay’s duty lay with backing the people’s choice—Jackson, of course—carried no weight with Clay. Writing from the Senate floor on Monday, January 24, 1825, Jackson said, with some bitterness: “It shows the want of principle in all concerned.… It will give the people a full view of our political weathercocks here, and how little confidence ought to be reposed in the professions of some great political characters.” The election took place on Wednesday, February 9, 1825.

  Five days later Clay accepted Adams’s offer to become secretary of state, the office from which presidents seemed to spring, further infuriating Jackson. Briefing William Lewis, Jackson called Clay “the Judas of the West” and added, “his end will be the same.” He became convinced that Clay had sold his votes to Adams in exchange for the Cabinet appointment, and Jackson’s fury at this alleged “corrupt bargain” never abated. “If at this early period of the experiment of our Republic, men are found base and corrupt enough to barter the rights of the people for proffered office, what may we not expect from the spread of this corruption hereafter,” Jackson told Lewis. Washington, Rachel said, was a “terrible place.”

  That the election unfolded according to the letter of the Constitution did not matter to Jackson. The way he saw it, the son of a president, Adams, had struck a deal with the Speaker of the House, Clay, to elevate Adams, then the secretary of state, to the presidency. Though much may have been implied between them, the likely truth is that Clay and Adams did not reach an explicit deal. Clay’s antipathy for Jackson was already consuming, and so the Kentuckian’s decision to support Adams made the most political logic; for Adams, Clay, as a prominent and skillful lawmaker from an important state, was an obvious choice for secretary of state. No explanation would satisfy Jackson, however: he thought the country was watching the founding of a dynastic line that could perpetuate itself despite the wishes of the people.

  BUT THERE WAS nothing he could do. The campaign was over. On the evening of the day on which he had lost the presidency, Jackson appeared at a party given by President Monroe at the White House. President-elect Adams, an observer noted, was “by himself; General Jackson had a large, handsome lady on his arm.” Coming upon each other, neither man immediately moved. Adams and Jackson held each other’s stare. Here, feet apart, on a Washington winter’s evening, with the capital’s elite swirling around them, stood two of the most powerful men in the nation. Adams had been born with everything, Jackson with nothing. Yet it was Jackson, not Adams, who met the moment with skill.

  “How do you do, Mr. Adams?” Jackson said cheerily, extending his free hand. “I give you my left hand, for the right, as you see, is devoted to the fair: I hope you are very well, sir.”

  “Very well, sir; I hope General Jackson is well,” Adams replied, an eyewitness said, “with chilling coldness.” “It was curious to see the western planter, the Indian fighter, the stern soldier, who had written his country’s glory in the blood of the enemy at New Orleans,” recalled an observer, “genial and gracious in the midst of a court, while the old courtier and diplomat was stiff, rigid, cold as a statue!”

  Jackson moved through the party and back to his hotel as Washington hummed with reports of his grace in the face of his foe. “You have, by your dignity and forbearance under all these outrages, won the people to your love,” a friend wrote Jackson. Still, it was an unhappy conclusion to the campaign and, in the family circle, to Andrew and Emily’s honeymoon. Jackson paid the boarding bill at the hotel—between the dinners and the wine, brandy, whiskey, and champagne, the total came to $86.25—and he and his family left for Tennessee.

  He would be back. “Genl. Jackson’s friends have made, and are still making, very great efforts to place him in the Chair,” said Daniel Webster in 1827. “He is a good soldier and I believe a very honest man, but some of us think him wholly unfit for the place to which he aspires. Military achievement however, is very visible and [has] palpable merit, and on this account the Genl. is exceedingly popular, in some of the States.”

  The force driving Jackson after 1824: a belief in the primacy of the will of the people over the whim of the powerful, with himself as the chief interpreter and enactor of that will. The idea and image of a strong president claiming a mandate from the voters to unite the nation and direct the affairs of the country from the White House took permanent root in the Age of Jackson. “I have great confidence in the virtue of a great majority of the people, and I cannot fear the result,” Jackson wrote in 1828. As long as the government heeds the popular will, Jackson said, “the republic is safe, and its main pillars—virtue, religion and morality—will be fostered by a majority of the people.”

  IN JACKSON’S ERA America was moving from a way of life based on farms to one fundamentally linked to a larger industrialized economy. Railroads, canals, and roads were tying the country together. Factories were growing, manufacturing burgeoning. When Jackson became president, the railroad was hardly more than a dream; by the end of the 1830s, there were 3,200 miles of track. The cotton textile workforce more than tripled from 1820 to 1840, and the number of iron wage earners increased fivefold. Immigration, much of it from Great Britain and Ireland, rose steadily in Jackson’s White House years, from twenty-seven thousand in 1828 to eighty thousand in 1837. Regular transatlantic steamship travel began in 1838.

  The Jackson years were also roiled by conversations and controversies about race, religion, immigrants, and the role of women. In 1829, the year Jackson took office, David Walker, the son of a slave, published his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a popular pamphlet that worried Southern slaveowners and inspired abolitionists. The blacks of the United States, wrote Walker, were “the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began, and I pray God that none like us ever may live again until time shall be no more.” If an “attempt” was made by blacks for liberty, Walker said, the slaves should feel justified to take up arms. “Now, I ask you, had you not rather be killed than to be a slave to a tyrant, who takes the life of your mother, wife and dear little children? … Believe this, that it is no more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty.” From 1829 to 1837, there were slave disturbances, revolts, or conspiracies in Kentucky, Virginia, Mississippi, Missouri, and Louisiana. From 1830 to 1835, Louisiana, Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, South Carolina, and North Carolina passed laws prohibiting teaching slaves to read. In 1831, William Lloyd Garrison began publishing the Liberator.

  It was a time of reform and new thinking. In 1830, the first tract on birth control in North America, Moral Physiology, was published, and in 1833 Oberlin College, in Ohio, was founded—the first American college to be open to blacks and whites, men and women. In these decades the American Journal of Science and Arts explored chemistry, geology, zoology, botany, and mineralogy, and by the middle of the nineteenth century “scientists” were distinct from “philosophers.” During Jackson’s years in power liberal arts colleges were founded at more than twice the rate of the previous decade.

  It was also an age of great faith and of militant atheism. Evangelical fervor was a constant force, with revivals making converts to Christianity by the thousands. In upstate New York the young Joseph Smith believed he was told by an angel to restore the Church of Jesus Christ, and so the Mormon faith was born. “Th
ere is no country in the world where the Christian religion remains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote. Taking advantage of the nation’s liberty of conscience, skeptics and doubters spoke out against the pious temper of the time. For eight days in Cincinnati in April 1829, two men—the evangelical Alexander Campbell and the atheist Robert Owen—faced off in a public debate pitting Christianity against atheism. Frances Trollope, a writer and mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope, was there. “All this I think could only have happened in America,” she said.

  In domestic politics, the familiar divisions since the Founding between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans—or, to put it in personal terms, between adherents of Alexander Hamilton and adherents of Thomas Jefferson—had broken down, with the Federalists largely extinct and the Jeffersonians turning into the Republicans, a hodgepodge of competing political and regional interests gathered under one broad label. By 1820, the year President James Monroe, a Jeffersonian, was seeking a second term, the party of Hamilton failed to field a candidate. Monroe ran unopposed.

  LIKE MOST SIGNIFICANT historical shifts, the rise of democracy is a complex phenomenon, and its causes and effects extend far beyond a single man. But it was Jackson who gave voice and force at the highest levels to America’s ever-widening hopes and aspirations. Democracy was making its stand.

  In his own mind, Jackson was a figure of Jeffersonian restoration—an Old Republican, in the vernacular of the time, as opposed to a Federalist. To people like Jackson, “Republican” connoted Jefferson, states’ rights, and the citizenry; “Federalist” evoked images of Hamilton, a central government, and an aristocracy. In the battles of George Washington’s two administrations, the task of opposing the Federalist vision of a country governed more by the elites than by the people had fallen to Jefferson, who liked to think he represented an understanding of liberty that put as much power as possible closer to the states and to the people—really, the yeomanry—than to large, distant, and more easily corrupted national institutions. Yet to recall the conflict between the Federalist Alexander Hamilton and the Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson as a clear-cut matter of big versus small government, or federal power versus states’ rights, or a strong presidency versus a dominant Congress, is overly simplistic and misses critical nuances. Yes, Jefferson philosophically believed in a smaller federal establishment, in the rights of the states, and in congressional supremacy. In practice, however, he cheerfully extended the role of the executive to, among other things, acquiring the Louisiana territory. He was an energetic president—more so than his immediate predecessor, Adams, or the men who, until 1829, followed him in the office.

  Jackson took the Jeffersonian vision of the centrality of the people further, and he took Jefferson’s view of the role of the president further still. To Jackson, the idea of the sovereignty of the many was compatible with a powerful executive. He saw that liberty required security, that freedom required order, that the well-being of the parts of the Union required that the whole remain intact. If he felt a temporary resort to autocracy was necessary to preserve democracy, Jackson would not hesitate. He would do what had to be done. In this he set an example on which other presidents would draw in times of national struggle. There were moments, Abraham Lincoln argued during the Civil War, when “measures otherwise unconstitutional might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution through the preservation of the nation.” It was a Jacksonian way of looking at the world.

  IN NOVEMBER 1828, Jackson won 56 percent of the popular vote, defeating Adams in the Electoral College by a margin of 178 to 83. Jackson’s partisans thrilled to the news; their devotion was deep. “The Hickory is a tall, graceful tree, indigenous to America,” wrote the Argus of Western America, the paper edited by Amos Kendall, who would hand it over to Francis Preston Blair to come to Washington. “It yields gracefully to the gale of spring, and bows in whispers to the breath of autumn, but when the storms of winter invade the forest, it presents its recoiling strength to the blast, and saves its frailer neighbors from the fury of the storm.”

  Clay watched in horror from the State Department. That the election would even be close, Clay remarked to Webster, was “mortifying and sickening to the hearts of the real lovers of free Government.” When Jackson’s victory became clear, Clay thought “no greater calamity” had struck the United States “since we were a free people.”

  In the first weeks of 1829, Clay began thinking about his own campaign to defeat Jackson in four years’ time—and, for a moment, Jackson’s opponents thought providence might save them from “the People’s President” altogether. There were reports that Jackson was sick, too sick, possibly, to live long. There were even suggestions that he, not Rachel, had died. “On Wednesday morning, we were waked with the rumour of the death of the Hero, which put the City generally into a state of great consternation,” Louisa Catherine Adams, the wife of John Quincy Adams, wrote to their son Charles Francis on Sunday, February 1. Mrs. Adams’s intelligence was wrong, but the establishment held out some hope. “The rumour of Genl. J’s death has subsided,” Webster wrote a friend. “My own private opinion, however, still is, that he is very ill, and I have my doubts whether he will ever reach this place.”

  Jackson, however, arrived safely in Washington on Wednesday, February 11, 1829. He was not entirely well—he never was—and, Emily said, had “a very bad cough and has been a good deal troubled with headache and fever.”

  Cannon fire and a marching band were supposed to greet his arrival, but instead Jackson slipped into town quietly. Alfred Mordecai, a West Point contemporary of Andrew Donelson’s, was in Washington and happened to see Jackson through his window that morning. It was a humble train, Mordecai said, “a plain carriage drawn by two horses followed by a single black servant.” Mordecai was struck by the gulf between the emotions Jackson aroused and the reality of the president-elect’s little party. A man alternately hailed as a “demigod and Hero” and denounced as a “tyrant,” Mordecai recalled, arrived without ceremony: “What a spectacle must this present to those who have had opportunities of seeing the entrance of European potentates into their capitals to take possession of their thrones.”

  Once in the capital, Jackson was the center of a swirl of office seekers in a suite at John Gadsby’s National Hotel, at Sixth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. From across the city, Clay called them a “motley host of greedy expectants.” Nearer at hand, Emily veered between her sickbed and society. “My health was so bad,” she told her sister in a letter home, “I was scarcely able to keep out of bed one half of my time.” But she discharged her social duties. “Owing to the death of our dear aunt and our being in mourning,” Emily reported, she avoided most parties but stayed “very busy” with “so many visits to return.”

  Andrew Donelson and William Lewis were busy sorting out real friends from opportunists. Major William Polk, who had fought in South Carolina during the Revolution, was an old friend and genuine caller, and Donelson noted how Jackson, on shaking hands with Polk, was transported back to a skirmish against Tarleton. “ ‘My dear old friend, how glad I am to see you!’ ” Donelson recalled Jackson saying. “ ‘I fancy I can see your red face during Tarleton’s raid upon the Waxhaw settlement, when you and I were running down the lane, closely pursued by the British cavalry!’ ”

  JACKSON’S CABINET CHOICES (Martin Van Buren for state, John Eaton for war, Samuel Ingham for Treasury, John Branch for the navy, John Berrien for attorney general, and William Barry for postmaster general) struck many as underwhelming, and the private circle of advisers (Donelson, Lewis, and Amos Kendall of Kentucky among them) produced similar worries.

  Kendall personified much of what the Washington establishment feared about Jackson and his men. Born in Massachusetts in 1789, Kendall grew up poor, went to Dartmouth, and eventually moved to Kentucky, where he practiced law, served as a postmaster, tutored Henry Clay’s children, began to edit a n
ewspaper (the Argus), and became a fervent advocate for Jackson. Moving to Washington with the new administration, Kendall officially became fourth auditor of the Treasury; unofficially he was a thoroughly political animal who advised the president and promoted the White House’s causes in the capital and beyond. He was what later generations would call a networker. At a wedding party shortly after his arrival in Washington, Kendall met Major General Alexander Macomb, the head of the army. “He is very sociable, and I was surprised to find him a Jackson man,” Kendall wrote to his wife. “He promised to call and see me, and I hope to find him a valuable acquaintance.” Like many of Jackson’s other allies, Kendall was an unknown quantity in Washington. They formed, Webster said, “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.’ ”

  Accustomed to wearing the mask of command, Jackson appeared serene, dignified, even regal. Emily wrote that he “always goes through everything ‘like a hero.’ ” In interviews between the president-elect and visitors seeking a job, wrote the anti-Jackson Daily National Intelligencer, “a courteous and dignified decorum is observed,” which prompted the paper to say archly, “Citizens who visit the President must not fall into the egregious error of supposing that they may treat him as the Farmer of Tennessee, or the unpretending republican.”

  While her husband worked with Jackson on the preparations for the new administration, Emily rallied from her sickbed and went shopping with Mary Eastin. The two women splurged on expensive cologne, soap, jewelry, good black veils, and yards of black satin at Abbott’s, a chic Washington store. The inauguration was scheduled for the East Front of the Capitol at noon on Wednesday, March 4, 1829.

  WASHINGTON WAS UNSEASONABLY frigid the week before Jackson took office. “There has not been a warm day since I came here, although I have often seen the peach trees in blossom in February,” Webster wrote his sister on Monday, March 2, 1829. “The ground is still covered with snow, the river hard frozen, and the weather steadily cold.” But the chilly spell broke and the capital thawed on the morning of the fourth. Winter, for the moment, gave way to spring.