by Jon Meacham
THE CHIEF ENEMY—at least as the old guard saw him—was not far away, at the White House, reviewing the capital establishment, deciding who would retain office and who would not. There was, Clay said, “the greatest … apprehension” among the Washington elite. “No one knows who is next to encounter the stroke of death; or, which with many of them is the same thing, to be dismissed from office.”
Jackson was not alone in drawing hostile fire. At a big Washington wedding uniting two important capital families—Dr. Henry Huntt, a physician who would later treat Jackson, was marrying the daughter of Tench Ringgold, a friend of President Monroe’s and marshal of the District—Van Buren was moving among the guests when Judge Buckner Thruston confronted him. The judge’s son had been fired as a State Department clerk. Now an “exceedingly indignant” Judge Thruston looked Van Buren in the eye and “very energetically” called him a “Scoundrel” loudly enough, Adams wrote in his diary, for a dozen other guests to hear.
People like the angry judge and the Clays and the Smiths saw the replacement of federal officials as the ruin of the country. Jackson saw it as the nation’s salvation. That a president would have wide power to reward loyalists with offices, both to thank them for their steadfastness and to ensure that he had a cadre of people at hand who would presumably execute his policies with energy and enthusiasm, is now a given, but Jackson was the first president to remake the federal establishment on such a large scale.
The old officeholders could be forgiven for imagining themselves immune to the vagaries of politics. By James Parton’s count, Washington and Adams had removed 9 people each; Jefferson, 39 (illustrating the victory of the Democrat-Republicans over the Federalists); Madison, 5; Monroe, 9; and John Quincy Adams, 2. By the time Jackson was done, he had turned out fewer than one might suppose, but still a historic number: about 919, just under 10 percent of the government. And he had made a particularly high number of changes among those civil servants directly appointed by the president himself.
Jackson’s vision was elementary yet expansive in the context of the early Republic. He wanted a political culture in which a majority of the voters chose a president, and a president chose his administration, and his administration governed by its lights in full view of the people, and the people decided four years hence whether to reward the president with another term or retire him—and them—from public life.
The human reaction to Jackson’s reform among the officeholders and their families was swift and fierce. “At that period, it must be remembered, to be removed from office in the city of Washington was like being driven from the solitary spring in a wide expanse of desert,” Parton wrote three decades after the purge. John Quincy Adams monitored the terror: “A large portion of the population of Washington are dependent for bread upon these offices.… Every one is in breathless expectation, trembling at heart, afraid to speak.”
Jackson’s decisions about federal appointments involved much more than the lingering historical image of the “spoils system,” a principle summed up by New York senator William Marcy in a speech he delivered about the new class of politicians: “They see nothing wrong in the rule, that to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.” Jackson was far from the last American president to arrive in Washington with the cry that the preceding administration had made a grand mess of things. Yet he firmly believed he was coming to power after a long period of sustained official corruption—he called the government “the Augean Stable,” seeing himself as Hercules—and viewed what he broadly referred to as “reform” as a moral as well as a political task. In Jackson’s mind, sins in the public sphere represented, as he said, a “struggle between the virtue of the people and executive patronage.”
There was always graft, which was regrettable, but what truly worried Jackson was what he saw as a pattern by Washington officials to deploy public money and means to perpetuate and promote themselves and their allies in office. Such corruption, as Jackson saw it, was possibly fatal to the American experiment, a fear grounded in the old notion that society was organic, and that an affliction in one part of the state could infect and even kill the whole.
STILL, JACKSON WAS susceptible to emotional appeals from officeholders facing dismissal. He was moved by stories of courage, admiring in others what he saw in himself. In the fever of the firings, the postmaster of Albany, New York, the War of 1812 veteran General Solomon Van Rensselaer, was slated for termination. According to the logic of the removals—to reward friends and eliminate foes—the Van Rensselaer maneuver made perfect sense. He was a Federalist who had supported John Quincy Adams, and Van Buren wanted him out, as did Silas Wright, Jr., a key New York politician, so the case seemed closed. To save his job, Van Rensselaer went to the White House and waited for Jackson to finish with his guests at a reception.
“General Jackson, I have come here to talk to you about my office,” Van Rensselaer said once he had the president alone. “The politicians want to take it away from me, and they know I have nothing else to live upon.”
Accustomed to such pleas and committed to his course, Jackson said nothing. Desperate, Van Rensselaer moved to strip off his own clothes.
“What in Heaven’s name are you going to do?” Jackson said. “Why do you take off your coat here?”
“Well, sir, I am going to show you my wounds, which I received in fighting for my country against the English!”
“Put it on at once, sir!” Jackson said. “I am surprised that a man of your age should make such an exhibition of himself.” Still, recalled Benjamin Poore, a journalist who recorded the story, “the eyes of the iron President were suffused with tears.” Van Rensselaer took his leave.
The image of the scarred old man stayed in Jackson’s mind overnight. As Poore told it, “The next day Messrs. Van Buren and Wright called at the White House and were shown into the President’s room, where they found him smoking a clay pipe.” Apparently unaware of Van Rensselaer’s preemptive strike the previous evening, Wright began to make the case for sacking him. Jackson “sprang to his feet, flung his pipe into the fire,” and virtually roared at his two friends.
“I take the consequences, sir; I take the consequences,” Jackson said. “By the Eternal! I will not remove the old man—I cannot remove him. Why, Mr. Wright, do you not know that he carries more than a pound of British lead in his body?” The postmaster was safe.
John Quincy Adams tracked everything. “The proscriptions from office continue, and, independent of the direct misery that they produce, have indirectly tragic effects,” Adams wrote on Saturday, April 25, 1829. “A clerk in the War Office named Henshaw, who was a strong partisan for Jackson’s election, three days since cut his throat from ear to ear from the mere terror of being dismissed. Linneus Smith, of the Department of State, one of the best clerks under the Government, has gone raving distracted, and others are said to be threatened with the same calamity.” Suicide and madness: it was the most unstable of seasons.
BUT JACKSON WAS getting his way, and Clay, returning to Kentucky as a private citizen, could not hold his tongue. “During the reign of Bonaparte, upon one of those occasions in which he affected to take the sense of the French people as to his being made Consul for life, or Emperor, an order was sent to the French armies to collect their suffrages,” Clay said in a Lexington speech on Saturday, May 16, 1829. “They were told, in a public proclamation, that they were authorized and requested to vote freely, according to the dictates of their best judgments and their honest convictions. But a mandate was privately circulated among them importing that if any soldier voted against Bonaparte he should be instantly shot.”
Not subtle—but then, Clay’s hatred of Jackson was running ever deeper as Clay tried to grow accustomed to exile after so many years of power and the anticipation of greater office. “Is there any difference, except in the mode of punishment,” Clay continued, bringing his listeners from Napoleonic France to Jacksonian America, “between that case and the arbitrary removal of men from their
public stations for no other reason than that of an honest and conscientious preference of one Presidential candidate to another?”
Clay had learned a lesson from Jackson’s sojourn in the wilderness after the 1824 election: that the political future belonged to men who constantly made the case for themselves in the most accessible way possible for a mass audience. By relentless repetition, Jackson had turned the phrase “corrupt bargain” into a weapon that brought Adams down and forced Clay out of office. Jackson’s success suggested that the ambitions of the men who would be president were best served by total immersion in the mechanics and the substance of political life.
IN WASHINGTON, WHEN the Senate summoned up the gumption to strike back at the president over patronage, voting down several nominees, Jackson sent for Duff Green, the editor of the administration’s then-favored newspaper, the Telegraph. “Let Congress go home, and the people will teach them the consequence of neglecting my measures and opposing my nominations,” Jackson said. “The people, sir, the people will put these things to rights!” He depended on a single force against all the florid attacks in the world: his mystical link to the country.
Andrew Jackson was rapidly turning the presidency into what John F. Kennedy later called “the vital center of action.” Little wonder, then, that the Washington establishment believed the end of their reign had come. It had.
CHAPTER 6
A BUSYBODY
PRESBYTERIAN CLERGYMAN
WRITING A FRIEND in Tennessee, Jackson linked his intransigence on the Eaton question to his most enduring conviction: that as president he was acting selflessly in the interest of the nation and of its mass of citizens, who looked to him for clarity in a chaotic world. “I was elected by the free voice of the people,” Jackson told his friend John C. McLemore, a Nashville businessman. “I was making a Cabinet to aid me in the administration of the Government, agreeable to their will.” In a remark that indicates how he viewed his own will and that of the country as one, he said: “I was making a Cabinet for myself.” Then, returning bitterly to the immediate social dimension of the problem, he added: “I did not come here to make a Cabinet for the ladies of this place, but for the nation.”
Jackson was beset—by Clay, by Calhoun, and by powerful Protestant clergymen, including his own Washington minister. On Wednesday, March 18, the same day the Calhouns started their journey south, the Reverend Ezra Stiles Ely sat down at his desk in Philadelphia to write to Jackson on the subject of the Eatons.
The pastor of the city’s Third Presbyterian Church, Ely was among the best-known clerics of the day. Christian voters, Ely had said in his celebrated 1827 sermon on a “Christian Party in Politics,” should join forces to keep “Pagans” and “Mohammedans” (Muslims) from office as well as deists like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or Unitarians like John Quincy Adams. The essence of the sermon: “Every ruler should be an avowed and a sincere friend of Christianity.… Our civil rulers ought to act a religious part in all the relations which they sustain.”
Ely had old connections to Jackson, dating back to Jackson’s days when he had business interests in Philadelphia, and Ely was not shy about pushing Jackson on the evangelical community and evangelical causes on Jackson. When Ely published his “Christian Party” sermon before the 1828 presidential election, he added his own warm exchange of letters with Jackson and his call for voters to send Jackson to the White House—the implication being that Old Hickory was a man evangelicals could count on.
Yet Jackson handled Ely’s sermon, and his problematic support, deftly. Realizing that sectarian rhetoric like Ely’s struck many Americans as dangerous, Jackson articulated a middle position, arguing that one of the country’s greatest strengths was freedom of religion, a freedom that also gave the skeptical the right to live unmolested and unevangelized.
Jackson acknowledged the centrality of the separation of church and state. “Amongst the greatest blessings secured to us under our Constitution,” Jackson said, “is the liberty of worshipping God as our conscience dictates”—or not. But he also gave faith its due—in moderate terms: “All true Christians love each other, and while here below ought to harmonize; for all must unite in the realms above,” Jackson wrote Ely after the sermon. “I have thought one evidence of true religion is when all who believe in the atonement of our crucified Savior are found in harmony and friendship together.”
In his vision of Christian voters marching as to war, Ely was attempting to undo the work of decades by ensuring that only avowed Protestants would hold public office. He even had a specific timetable in mind. In preparing his sermon for publication, Ely included a quotation from the American Sunday School Union. “In ten years, or certainly in twenty, the political power of our country would be in the hands of men whose characters have been formed under the influence of Sabbath schools,” resulting in “an organized system of mutual co-operation between ministers and private Christians, so that every church shall be a disciplined army.”
Ely’s crusade—for crusade it was—foundered when a specific mission, the battle to end the federal delivery of mail on Sundays, collided with Jacksonians. Jeremiah Evarts’s opinion of the Sabbath mails illustrates the scope of evangelical passion on the question: “We have always viewed it as a national evil of great magnitude, and one which calls for national repentance and reformation, that the mails are carried, and the post-offices kept open, on that holy day in every part of our country,” Evarts said. To desecrate the Sabbath, these activists believed, was to invite God’s wrath on the nation.
Colonel Richard M. Johnson, a Kentucky congressman, senator, and later vice president under Van Buren, was in charge of a congressional committee assigned to rule on the question.
Johnson was one of the more intriguing politicians of the time. A “War Hawk” lawmaker along with Clay and Calhoun in the War of 1812, Johnson left Congress to fight in the field. At the Battle of the Thames in 1813, Johnson claimed to have personally killed Tecumseh, the Shawnee leader who was allied with the British. Johnson was open about his common-law marriage to a mulatto slave, Julia Chinn, and their two daughters; Chinn would die in the cholera epidemic of 1833. She had two successors. On discovering that his new companion was unfaithful, Johnson, Kendall reported, “sold [her] for her infidelity,” and then took up with the woman’s sister.
The Johnson committee’s decree crippled Ely’s “Christian party” movement. “It is not the legitimate province of the Legislature to determine which religion is true, or what false,” wrote Johnson in 1829. “Our government is a civil, and not a religious institution.”
A second Johnson report on the subject the next year depicted the Sabbath mails movement as an obstacle to the life of the mind. “The advance of the human race in intelligence, in virtue, and religion itself depends, in part, upon the speed with which … knowledge … is disseminated,” Johnson wrote, concluding: “The mail is the chief means by which intellectual light irradiates to the extremes of the republic. Stop it one day in seven, and you retard one seventh of the advancement of our country.” The reports issued, Congress did not move to limit Sunday mails.
The theocratic kingdom Ely hoped for was not at hand, but the evangelicals’ challenge to the mainstream, so manifest in the Jackson administration, was to be a constant force in the life of the nation.
WHEN JACKSON RECEIVED Ely’s letter about the Eatons in March 1829, he already understood that the minister was a man of great ambition and spotty judgment—a “busybody Presbyterian clergyman of Philadelphia,” as John Quincy Adams called him. Ely had pestered Jackson with appeals not to travel on the Sabbath, but, as a minister who liked proximity to the powerful, he had also been a faithful supporter of Rachel Jackson’s during the 1828 campaign. He had come to Washington for the inauguration, paid his respects, and, according to Jackson, “recommended the appointment of Major Eaton in the warmest terms” and “expressed the most favorable opinion” of both Mr. and Mrs. Eaton on that occasion.
What was behind Ely’s initial enthusiasm for the Eatons? Knowing that Jackson was close to them, Ely had most likely been attempting to please the new president. The Eaton appointment was already controversial by that point, and Ely may have been trying to store up treasure with Jackson that might be drawn on in pursuit of evangelical causes.
Then everything changed. Before he left Washington for home, Ely visited with a fellow minister, the Reverend John N. Campbell, pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church in Washington, where Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Calhouns occasionally worshipped.
Campbell had absorbed Washington’s view of the Eatons. A social creature, he enjoyed mixing with his fancier parishioners. He walked Ely through a series of damaging stories about the Eatons—stories that Ely added to a few he had picked up in Baltimore on the way home, as he wrote to Jackson. Everyone in Washington, Ely told Jackson, said that Mrs. Eaton was “a woman of ill fame before Major Eaton knew her and had lived with him in illicit intercourse.” As though he were filing a brief, Ely broke down Mrs. Eaton’s sins into a “sad catalogue.”
He reported a rumor that Margaret had privately said that her children were Eaton’s, not Timberlake’s, and that “Mr. Timberlake, when he last left Washington, told this gentleman with tears, ‘that he would never return to this country’ on account of Eaton’s seduction of his wife.” An unnamed “clergyman of Washington”—Campbell—“besought me to tell you that when Timberlake had been gone more than a year from this country, Mrs. T. had a miscarriage.”
And Ely brought Rachel Jackson into the conversation. He was really writing, he said, because “the name of your dear departed and truly pious wife is stained through Mrs. Eaton. In a meeting of the directors of a bank in Baltimore it was publicly said ‘it’s too bad, but what could you expect better: it’s only supporting Mrs. Jackson,’ or words to that effect.” Those who consider Margaret “to have been a licentious woman for years will consider her elevation to society through the influence of the President as a reflection upon the memory of Mrs. Jackson,” Ely said. “It is uttered by a thousand malicious tongues, ‘he could not make an objection to [Eaton] on account of his wife.’ ”
