American Lion

by Jon Meacham

  Recording some “small gossiping anecdotes” in his diary, John Quincy Adams reported how “indignant” a Jackson caller had been when introduced to the president-elect “as an Aristocrat.” Democracy was in; elitism was out. New forces were being unleashed and new paths taken. “When he comes, he will bring a breeze with him,” Webster said of Jackson. “Which way it will blow, I cannot tell.” He was not the only one.

  CHAPTER 4

  YOU KNOW BEST, MY DEAR

  AT THE WHITE House, President Adams was dour in defeat. “He seems to have been in bad health,” Leonidas Polk, an Episcopal seminarian in Alexandria, Virginia, wrote home after a visit with Adams. Henry Clay, meanwhile, was ill, lying on a sofa in his drawing room at Decatur House, the three-story brick town house across from the White House. When Margaret Bayard Smith, a chronicler of Washington life who had lived in the capital since 1800, called on Clay, he was “scarcely able to sit up … very pale, his eyes sunk in his head and his countenance sad and melancholy.” At the Clays’ and elsewhere, belongings were being boxed and set in straw to make way for the Jacksonians. To many in established Washington—a city and a culture of nearly three decades’ standing, with roots stretching to the first Adams and to Jefferson—Jackson’s arrival signaled the destruction of the rule of the nation in an atmosphere of geniality and gentility.

  Taking up his presidential duties, Jackson thought the country was suffering from a crisis of corruption. If virtue was central to the well-being of the nation, then corruption and selfishness were corrosive, and could be fatal. By corruption, Jackson did not mean only scandal and mismanagement. He meant it in a broader sense: in the marshaling of power and influence by a few institutions and interests that sought to profit at the expense of the whole. He was not against competition in the marketplace of goods and ideas. Like the Founders, he believed in vigorous debate, and like Adam Smith, he put his faith in the capacity of free individuals to work out their destinies. But he was very much against the special deal or the selfish purpose, and he was very much in favor of his own role as defender of the many and protector of the nation. In Washington, he was intent on dismantling the kind of permanent federal establishment that created a climate in which, in his view, insiders such as John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay could thrive no matter what the people beyond Washington wanted.

  Jackson worried about the power of the Second Bank of the United States, an institution that held the public’s money but was not subject to the public’s control, or to the president’s. Presided over by Nicholas Biddle—brilliant, arrogant, and as willful in his way as Andrew Jackson was in his—the Bank, headquartered in a Greek Revival building on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, was a rival interest that, Jackson believed, made loans to influence elections, paid retainers to pro-Bank lawmakers, and could control much of the nation’s economy on a whim.

  IN SOUTH CAROLINA, Jackson knew, the state’s cotton and rice planters had been driven nearly mad by fears of slave rebellions. The previous decade had suggested one avenue: nullification. An early test of federal authority by South Carolina occurred after a slave conspiracy, perhaps led by Denmark Vesey, in 1822. International treaties allowed black seamen who docked in Charleston to come ashore and visit other blacks, but when it emerged that visiting sailors had possibly played a role in the plot, South Carolina ordered that black seamen had to be jailed while their ships were in port. Supreme Court Justice William Johnson, who had circuit authority over the state, ruled the law unconstitutional, but South Carolina continued to jail the sailors. The state was motivated by a fundamental fear: slave violence. According to the state senate, the “duty to guard against insubordination or insurrection” was “paramount to all laws, all treaties, all constitutions.” Washington decided not to force matters—and South Carolina thus overrode federal authority.

  The state had remained unsettled throughout the decade. South Carolina was in economic trouble, its whites were wary of slave rebellion, and protective national tariffs agitated the state even more. (Cotton prices were falling for a variety of reasons, but the tariffs, which protected American manufacturing, were a handy target, for the duties drove up prices agrarian states had to pay for things produced in manufacturing states and lowered demand abroad for Southern cotton.) Their fury had led to talk of more nullification—they recalled their de facto victory in the case of the black seamen—and perhaps secession. Thomas Cooper, the president of South Carolina College, stated the matter succinctly in 1827: the time may be at hand, he said, when the state would have “to calculate the value of the Union, and ask of what use to us is this most unequal alliance.” For the hotheads things grew even less equal in 1828, when Congress passed, and President Adams signed, what became known as the Tariff of Abominations. The measure raised duties from 33 percent to 50 percent. The tariffs hurt, but should be seen as only one of several forces that led the state to consider shattering a union that seemed at best indifferent and at worst hostile to South Carolina’s way of life. The chief issue was the core of that way of life: slavery.

  The sense of powerlessness in South Carolina was wide and deep. In a pair of letters written to Calhoun in April and May, Francis W. Pickens of Edgefield, South Carolina—a lawyer-planter and future legislator and governor—expressed a kind of romantic regional pride as he worried about the South’s ability to protect its interests. It was, Pickens said, “with the most melancholy feelings that I look on a great and gallant people, sacrificed by a government over which they have practically at present no restrictive power”—a state of things that left open possibilities of further taxation and even the abolition of slavery. “I believe after a series of years that no government that has the power to collect taxes and declare war, can be restrained but by a display of sufficient power to break it up,” Pickens said. Such harsh words seem to have made Calhoun—still very much hoping to preside over the Union from the White House—uncomfortable, for he lectured Pickens about the dangers of “revolutionary” talk. Pickens denied that he was thinking of the government’s immediate destruction but did not waver from asserting that force, or the threat of force, should always be an option. He was a pragmatic man, telling Calhoun “that there can be but very little practical effect produced by any thing short of a display of real power.”

  IN THE VAST stretches of Indian land, particularly in the Southwest, Jackson saw a monumental task: the removal of Native Americans to lands west of the Mississippi. It was, said Congressman Edward Everett of Massachusetts, “the greatest question which ever came before Congress, short of the question of peace and war.” Jackson believed in removal with all his heart, and by refusing to entertain any other scenario, he was as ferocious in inflicting harm on a people as he often was in defending the rights of those he thought of as the people. To Jackson the interests of whites were paramount in the removal question. To those who argued for Indian rights, he justified his course by arguing that removal would guarantee the survival of the tribes, which would otherwise be wiped out, and by asserting that coexistence was impossible. In an 1833 book entitled Indian Wars of the West, Timothy Flint summed up the arguments of those in favor of removal: “Collisions, murders, escapes of fugitive slaves, and the operations of laws and usages so essentially different, as those of the white and red people, will forever keep alive between the contiguous parties feuds, quarrels, and retaliations, which can never cease until one of the parties becomes extinct.” Flint concluded that advocates of removal “see the race perpetuated in opulence and peace in the fair prairies of the west. Here they are to grow up distinct red nations, with schools and churches, the anvil, the loom, and the plough—a sort of Arcadian race between our borders and the Rocky Mountains, standing memorials of the kindness and good faith of our government.” But they would instead become reminders of the government’s bloodthirstiness and of the American people’s greed. Removal was, however, of a piece with Jackson’s broader vision of securing the country—even if he was securing it primarily for the advanc
ement of the interests of whites.

  IN THE CHURCHES and meeting rooms of organizations such as the American Sunday School Union, in pulpits and pews, the leaders of evangelical Christianity’s newly energetic campaign to bring religious precepts to public life were eager to enlist Jackson in their ranks. Church and state, these Christians believed, should be intertwined, arguing, in the words of a movement pamphlet entitled An Inquiry into the Moral and Religious Character of the American Government, that “Without religion, law ceases to be law, for it has no bond, and cannot hold society together.”

  In 1827 the Reverend Ezra Stiles Ely of Philadelphia, a prominent Presbyterian minister and leader of the national church, called for the formation of “a Christian Party in Politics.” While many religious believers pursued large moral causes such as the abolition of slavery and justice for the Indians—causes that also attracted secular supporters—many others sought to impose a narrower religious agenda on the rest of the nation. Such Christians opposed travel and the transport and delivery of mail on the Sabbath, as well as the testimony of nonbelievers in courts of law. In early 1829, Ely wrote Jackson to pass along a letter from the Reverend Lyman Beecher of Boston, one of the great ecclesiastical figures of the age, asking that Jackson not ride on Sundays en route to Washington. Ely and Beecher hoped, they said, that “no Christian ruler of a Christian people should do violence to his own professed, personal principles,” and Jackson, shrewdly, did not travel on Sundays on the way to the capital unless he was on a steamboat. He would accede that far but no further. He fought corruption in the public sphere, with political means, and left the church free to do what it could by persuasion, not by fiat.

  Jackson was more anticlerical than antireligious. Like bankers or entrenched incumbents, ministers created a layer between Jackson and the people at large, and he hated such elite intermediaries. Believers were part of the public; clergy were an interest with specific demands. Broadly put, the organized church was beyond Jackson’s control, and that made him suspicious of its ministers and their motives.

  IN KENTUCKY AND elsewhere, Jackson fretted about what were drily known as internal improvements—projected roads and canals that were to be funded by the federal government. The issue was at the heart of a philosophical argument. Was Washington’s role to be a limited one, leaving such matters to the states except in truly national cases, or was the federal government to be a catalyst in what was known as “the American System,” in which tariffs and the sales of public lands funded federally sponsored internal improvements? As president, Jackson favored the former, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay the latter. Related, in Jackson’s mind, was the issue of the national debt (the money owed by the federal government). To him debt was dangerous, for debt put power in the hands of creditors—and if power was in the hands of creditors, it could not be in the hands of the people, where Jackson believed it belonged.

  IN THE WATERS off Cuba, on Sunday, February 22, 1829, well-armed pirates stormed the Attentive, an American merchant vessel bound for New York from the Cuban port of Matanzas. Murdering the captain and crew, the pirates captured the vessel and scoured it for money. The New Priscilla was also attacked in February in these waters, provoking anxiety on the busy seas between Cuba and the American ports and raising fears among American businessmen that pirates were singling out U.S. ships. Told of the Attentive incident on his thirteenth day in office, Jackson exerted American power: an attack on anything American was an attack on America, and on him. “These atrocities will require prompt and energetic measures on the part of the Government [in] order to put them down,” Jackson told Navy Secretary John Branch, who dispatched the USS Natchez, an eighteen-gun sloop of war, to the coast of Cuba. “The dictates of humanity and the honor of our flag require that the piracies in those seas should be suppressed,” Jackson said. The world was on notice: Jackson would strike when struck.

  PATRONAGE, THE BANK, nullification, Indian removal, clerical influence in politics, internal improvements, respect abroad—these were the questions that would define Jackson’s White House years. They were questions about power, money, and God, and Jackson’s answers were linked to his expansive view of the office of the president. He would die for the Union; his foes were fighting to keep the possibility of secession alive. Jackson believed that the president should use his powers with a firm hand; his foes thought of the Congress as the government’s center of gravity. And so Jackson began his presidency prepared for anything, in much the way he used to travel through the Tennessee wilderness forty years before, looking out for danger, guarding those in his care, and promising to save them all yet.

  AS A COLD spell broke on the morning of the inauguration, sunlight poured down on the city and twenty thousand people converged on the Capitol grounds. It was, Emily reported home, “by far the greatest crowd that ever was seen in Washington.” Jackson left Gadsby’s Hotel, met an escort of Revolutionary War and Battle of New Orleans veterans, and walked up Capitol Hill.

  He wore no hat—“the Servant in presence of his Sovereign, the People,” Mrs. Smith remarked—and moved with grace and simplicity.

  “There, there, that is he,” called out some on the hill.

  “Which?” said others.

  “He with the white head.”

  Then they saw. “Ah, there is the old man … there is the old veteran, there is Jackson.” The people, Mrs. Smith said, were “not a ragged mob, but well dressed and well behaved, respectable and worthy citizens.” The emotion of the day was intense. “It is beautiful!” said Francis Scott Key, who was with Mrs. Smith. “It is sublime!”

  From the procession, Jackson went inside to the Senate chamber, where the president pro tempore swore John C. Calhoun in as vice president. Articulate and intellectual, more at home with ideas than action, Calhoun had balanced the Jackson ticket, but the two men were not close, and never would be. To Jackson, Calhoun brought a certain polish to the administration; to Calhoun, Jackson was, God willing, a one-term president whom he would soon succeed.

  As they walked from the chamber to the East Portico on this March day, they were already on different ideological and political paths. Calhoun began his career as a fervent nationalist, a celebrated “War Hawk” who enthusiastically supported the War of 1812 in order to establish the nation’s credentials with the rest of the world. Moving ever nearer a pure states’ rights position, however, Calhoun sensed that the protective tariff—which many of Calhoun’s constituents believed helped Northern states at the expense of the South—was a sign of things to come. If the national government could tax the South against its will, the national government could, in the future, take the region’s slaves away against its will.

  In the late autumn of 1828, at his Fort Hill estate near Pendleton, South Carolina, he had drafted what would become the South Carolina Exposition and Protest to make the case for nullification. The nullification doctrine would enable a state to void a federal law within its borders. The federal government then had two choices: either leave the state alone or amend the Constitution (which required the approval of two thirds of each house of Congress or a constitutional convention called by two thirds of the states, and then ratification by three fourths of the states) to make the objectionable law explicitly constitutional. And what if the amendment passed? The nullifying state must then capitulate or secede from the Union.

  For about a decade, from roughly 1828 to 1838—a period that included the crisis with Jackson—Calhoun, who nursed presidential ambitions, was unwilling to state clearly whether he believed his theory logically led to secession. Many of those around him in South Carolina did think so, and, perhaps most important, so did Jackson, who always thought of what he called “the absurd and wicked doctrines of nullification and secession” as parts of a whole. They were of a piece in his mind, and he acted accordingly. By 1838, Calhoun more openly acknowledged the possibility of disunion. “We cannot and ought not to live together as we are at present, exposed to the continual attacks and assau
lts of the other portion of the Union,” he wrote his daughter, “but we must act throughout on the defensive, resort to every probable means of arresting the evil, and only act, when all has been done, that can be, and when we shall stand justified before God and man in taking the final step.” Calhoun was a careful man, but in the end his theory threatened the existence of the Union Jackson loved.

  Calhoun kept his authorship of the 1828 document secret, and the vehemence of his views quiet. He believed that the white-haired general about to take the presidential oath would heed his counsel to slash the tariff, relieve the South, and calm fears of future interference with the region’s way of life. Then, Calhoun hoped, his own hour would strike, and carry him to the White House.

  Emily, who had watched Calhoun’s swearing-in from the Senate gallery, walked to the East Portico. Looking out, she saw only “one dense mass of living beings.” Even Mrs. Smith, whose heart belonged to the capital of Madison, Monroe, and Adams, was nevertheless impressed by the scenes of democracy in action. “Thousands and thousands of people, without distinction of rank, collected in an immense mass round the Capitol,” she said, “silent, orderly and tranquil, with their eyes fixed on the front of that edifice, waiting [for] the appearance of the President in the portico.” When Jackson emerged, he bowed to the people, and “the shout that rent the air still resounds in my ears,” said Mrs. Smith. Cannons boomed. As the sounds of the salute died off, Jackson began to read his address.