American Lion

by Jon Meacham

  Was there an element of shrewdness in the choice as well? Were Emily and Andrew, even unconsciously, reaching out to Jackson’s closest ally to secure their position? Perhaps, but a widowed, gentle father himself, Van Buren, like Jackson, adored children, and Emily and Andrew were at once perceptive and forgiving enough to see his essential goodness despite their differing views on the Eatons. They knew Van Buren to be a kind man who loved their uncle almost as they loved him. It is a testament to their unusual maturity of judgment and capacity to keep their political disputes free from rancor that the Donelsons so honored Van Buren.

  Van Buren was to hold Mary Rachel as the minister read the office, but she burst into tears and would be calmed only when Jackson himself swept her up in his long arms. Then the officiant hushed the gathering and began with the Lord’s Prayer.

  Addressing Cora and Van Buren, the officiant asked, “Dost thou, in the name of this child, renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the sinful desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow, nor be led by them?”

  Cora and Van Buren did not have a chance to answer. Hearing the question, Jackson, who was not supposed to have a speaking part, could not help himself, and announced with authority, “I do, sir, I renounce them all!”—a decided, improvised, but heartfelt reply that prompted smiles in the congregation. No little girl ever had a more sincere protector speak for her at such a moment.

  UPSTAIRS, AT WORK on his annual message to Congress, the sentiments from the baptism remained with the president. “In communicating with you for the first time it is to me a source of unfeigned satisfaction, calling for mutual gratulation and devout thanks to a benign Providence, that we are at peace with all mankind, and that our country exhibits the most cheering evidence of general welfare and progressive improvement,” Jackson said. “Turning our eyes to other nations, our great desire is to see our brethren of the human race secured in the blessings enjoyed by ourselves, and advancing in knowledge, in freedom, and in social happiness.”

  The making of Jackson’s speeches and messages often began with thoughts and points he would jot down and give to Donelson, who kept a running file. Cabinet secretaries and advisers were asked to sketch out what they thought the president should say about particular issues. The president then frequently produced a lengthy draft in his own hand—the documents tended to the lawyerlike, marshaling evidence—which he would hand off to Donelson, Kendall, and others for revision and refinement.

  Jackson’s message went to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, December 8, 1829. It was the Twenty-first Congress of the United States, with 213 representatives and 48 senators representing 24 states; the president’s supporters enjoyed majorities of 136–72 in the House and 25–23 in the Senate.

  The document reflected the will of a single man—Andrew Jackson—and its sweep promised a new course for the presidency and for the country. Looking abroad, he articulated the principle that had already driven him to take on piracy near Cuba and to open the secret mission to Turkey: he would protect the nation, come what may. “Blessed as our country is with everything which constitutes national strength, she is fully adequate to the maintenance of all her interests,” Jackson said. “In discharging the responsible trust confided to the Executive in this respect it is my settled purpose to ask nothing that is not clearly right and to submit to nothing that is wrong.”

  He then turned to his vision of the White House. No institution, he argued, should stand between the people and the presidency. There should be no check on the will of the nation in the choice of a president, and that will could be ascertained only by the popular vote. No president had spoken in such a way before. Each of his predecessors, from Washington to the second Adams, had at times moved to expand the power of the office, but none had gone so far as to suggest that the office itself should be in the direct gift of the people. Only the House was so close to the populace. The Senate was controlled by the state legislatures; the presidency by the Electoral College and possibly the House; the courts by the presidency and the Senate.

  The president, Jackson believed, should be an instrument of the people against the combined interests of the rich and the incumbent. “Our system of government was by its framers deemed an experiment, and they therefore consistently provided a mode of remedying its defects,” Jackson wrote in the message. It was time, he said, to put the presidency on a different footing. Amend the Constitution, Jackson said, to allow the people to have their choice, but—sensitive to the possibility that a president, too, could be corrupt—limit the executive to a single four- or six-year term, thus checking the danger of a despot.

  The first principle of America, Jackson believed, was that “the majority is to govern,” and the context of this assertion in the message was the connection between the people and the president: “It must be very certain that a President elected by a minority cannot enjoy the confidence necessary to the successful discharge of his duties.”

  Partly because of his defeat at the hands of the House in 1825, partly because of his fear of the Bank, partly because of his distrust of entrenched officeholders, Jackson believed the country was being controlled by a kind of congressional-financial-bureaucratic complex in which the needs and concerns of the unconnected were secondary to those who were on the inside. It was an oversimplified view, to be sure, but he was convinced of it, as he was convinced that he was to play the hero’s role.

  He could do so, however, only if the office he now held—the presidency—had the means to marshal what he saw as the will of the people in order to crush the will of the few. His vision of the appointment power was a case in point. “In a country where offices are created solely for the benefit of the people, no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another,” he said in the message. “Offices were not established to give support to particular men at the public expense. No individual wrong is, therefore, done by removal, since neither appointment to nor continuance in office is a matter of right.”

  Jackson believed he, as president, was the defender of the liberties of the people and of fair play; his opponents on Capitol Hill chose to see his executive exertions as prelude to dictatorship. In a speech on the Senate floor, David Barton of Missouri, an ally of John Quincy Adams, worried about the perversion of what he thought to be the Founders’ will in the matter of the presidency. The Framers and the people of the time, Barton said, feared “Executive encroachment.… The histories of all nations which have lost their liberties lay before them and they saw on their pages that arbitrary Executive discretion and will … had been the destroyers of national liberty throughout the greater part of the world … and the fathers did intend … to establish a government of law and of checks and restraints upon Executive will, in which no case should exist in which the fate of the humblest citizen whether in private or in public life could depend upon the arbitrary will of a single man.”

  The stakes of the battle were now clear. It was Jackson and his interpretation of the will of the people versus those congressmen, senators, Bank presidents, nullifiers, judges, federal officials, religious activists, and Indians who differed from him.

  On the Bank, Jackson kept his word to Biddle and mentioned the matter. Far from a salute or an offering of thanks, though, the allusion was a signal that Jackson wanted to reconsider the Bank’s very existence. “Both the constitutionality and the expediency of the law creating this bank are well questioned by a large portion of our fellow-citizens,” Jackson said, suggesting perhaps a simpler national bank to handle only the government’s credit and revenues, thus eliminating private profit on the government’s money.

  Learning of the president’s remarks, Biddle tried to make the best of things. “It is not … a cabinet measure, nor a party measure, but a personal measure. As such it is far less dangerous because if the people know that this is not an opinion which they must necessarily adopt as a portion of their party creed—but an o
pinion of the President alone—a very honest opinion though a very erroneous one—then the question will be decided on its own merits,” Biddle wrote to a Senate ally after the message.

  IT WAS A personal measure, but because it was Jackson’s, it was now a public measure. His view of the presidency was that he was in the White House to fight the people’s battles as best he could. Earlier presidents tended to limit their appeals to the broader public (in part because the voting population was much smaller prior to 1828). Jackson was committed to the idea that if left to their own devices, the elite would serve their own interests at the expense of the interests of the many. In 1824–25, he had been unable to stop the powers that were from taking the presidency away from him. He had promised himself and the country that nothing like that would happen on his watch, and he saw the Bank as the embodiment of unfair privilege. “I was aware that the Bank question would be disapproved by all the sordid and interested who prized self-interest more than the perpetuity of our liberty, and the blessings of a free republican government,” he wrote to James A. Hamilton in mid-December. “I foresaw the powerful effect, produced by this moneyed aristocracy, upon the purity of elections, and of legislation; that it was daily gaining strength, and by its secret operations was adding to it.” He had, therefore, done the most important thing he could do: “I have brought it before the people and I have confidence that they will do their duty.”

  There was a distinctly Old Republican tone to the annual message. Jackson was calling, in many cases and on many issues, for an approach that would limit the role of the general government. On the tariff, which so vexed South Carolina, for example, Jackson—who, as a senator, had voted in favor of the tariff in 1824—called for moderate reform, avoiding specifics (there would be time enough for those) and laid out the many virtues of retirement of the national debt. Jackson wanted the presidency to be central, but he was less interested in a centralized government, believing that such consolidation (as his contemporaries often called it) led to the rise of special interests like the ones he was now fighting.

  Jackson also pressed Indian removal. In a series of twenty-four essays, signed “William Penn,” published from Wednesday, August 5, to Saturday, December 19, 1829, Jeremiah Evarts had made the moral case against removal. “Most certainly an indelible stigma will be fixed upon us, if, in the plenitude of our power, and in the pride of our superiority, we shall be guilty of manifest injustice to our weak and defenseless neighbors,” Evarts wrote in his first Penn essay. God, Evarts said, was watching, and would hold the country accountable.

  In a self-aware passage in the annual message, Jackson admitted that government policy toward the Indians had been a failure, but he asserted that he could see no answer other than removal or submission to state laws. Emigration, he said, “should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land. But they should be distinctly informed that if they remain within the limits of the states they must be subject to their laws.”

  Signaling that he understood the moral elements of the problem, Jackson acknowledged the tragedy of it all. “Our conduct toward these people is deeply interesting to our national character. Their present condition, contrasted with what they once were, makes a most powerful appeal to our sympathies. Our ancestors found them the uncontrolled possessors of these vast regions. By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for awhile their once terrible names.… It is too late to inquire whether it was just in the United States to include them and their territory within the bounds of new states.… That step cannot be retraced. A state cannot be dismembered by Congress.”

  In the hierarchy of Jackson’s concerns, the sanctity of the Union outranked any other consideration. As long as the Indians were in the heart of the nation, they were threats—and as threats they had to be removed.

  CHRISTMAS 1829 WAS a dim, unremarkable affair at the White House. Sick and unhappy, Jackson was, Lewis said, “in very feeble health”—so feeble that the Jackson circle thought the end might be near. “Indeed, his whole physical system seemed to be totally deranged,” Lewis recalled, “his feet and legs, particularly, had been very much swollen for several months and continued to get worse every day, until his extreme debility appeared to be rapidly assuming the character of a confirmed dropsy”—referring to a now obsolete diagnosis of swollen tissues that could be fatal. Jackson, who ordinarily thrived on offering hospitality to all comers, spent the season, as he had the last, immersed in the most solemn of thoughts. “Things are not as they ought to be here,” Amos Kendall wrote Francis Preston Blair.

  Lamenting that with Congress in town “my labors increase,” Jackson told a friend, “I can with truth say mine is a situation of dignified slavery.” Jackson was finding, as presidents do, that he could not control the crush of events.

  He was faced, still, with a divided Cabinet and a vice president who was more rival than ally. Speaking of the “old differences” and the “vile tales about Mrs. Eaton,” Kendall wrote Blair: “The impression is abroad, but I cannot tell whether it is true or not, that Mr. Calhoun’s friends are the principal agitators and instigators of this business. Mr. Calhoun is a madman if he promotes it, and he is not a wise man if he does not put an end to it. What can he expect by separating from General Jackson? But it is useless to speculate. The old General is determined to put an end to all these intrigues as far as he can, whatever may be their object, and if those around him will not harmonize, he will scatter them like a whirlwind.”

  CHAPTER 10

  LIBERTY AND UNION,

  NOW AND FOREVER

  EVER RESILIENT, President Jackson rallied from his sickbed on Sunday, January 10, 1830, to host a White House levee. The Cabinet was there, and crowds of others, from five in the afternoon until nearly ten that night. Guests came and went, and Jackson stood with Emily and Mary, the picture of hospitality. One observer watched them approvingly. “Shaking hands with those who had just entered the room, or were about to retire from it, Mrs. Donelson and Miss Eastin of the President’s family … were dressed in American calico and wore no ruffles and no ornaments of any sort.” (Emily’s descendant Pauline Wilcox Burke wrote that the calico “serves to show their loyalty to the Jackson party”; in 1828, Old Hickory’s partisans had worn it as a sign of support for their candidate. Mrs. Burke added: “No doubt Emily’s concession to this whim of fashion was at a personal sacrifice for her choice in dress leaned rather to velvets, brocades and rich satins.”)

  Emily and Mary were gracious. “They affected no superiority, showed no pride, and from their behavior no one would have supposed that they belonged to the family of the Chief Magistrate of a great nation,” the observer said. “Their honor sat so easy on them that they seemed not to know it.” It was, he said, “perfect good breeding … taught them from their earliest infancy both by precept and example by their Aunt, the good, the amiable, and ever to be lamented Mrs. Jackson.”

  Van Buren was working the room. His love of the swirl and his favor with Jackson were evident. “There is no scarcity of subjects for an Epistle at the Metropolis of the Union, as you know the inhabitants of Washington insist upon having their City called,” John Quincy Adams wrote his daughter-in-law. “It is the prevailing opinion … that Mr. Van Buren is about to scale the Presidency of the United States by mounting upon the shoulders of Mrs. Eaton.”

  At the annual commemoration of Jackson’s victory at New Orleans, the guests treated Margaret even more coolly than usual. “She is not received in any private parties, and since the 8th of January has withdrawn from public assemblies,” Mrs. Smith said. “At the ball given on that occasion, she was treated with such marked and universal neglect and indignity, that she will not expose herself again to such treatment.” Yet Margaret remained central in the public—and politic
al—eye. “Our government is becoming every day more democratic, the rulers of the people are truly their servants and among those rulers women are gaining more than their share of power,” Margaret Bayard Smith wrote a friend in January 1830. Referring to Margaret Eaton, Calhoun, and the members of Jackson’s Cabinet, she went on: “One woman has made sad work here; to be, or not to be, her friend is the test of Presidential favor. Mr. V. B. sided with her and is consequently the right hand man, the constant riding, walking, and visiting companion.… Mr. Calhoun, Ingham (his devoted friend), Branch and Berrien form one party, the President, V. B., Genl. [sic] E., and Mr. Barry the other. It is generally supposed that, as they cannot sit together, some change in the Cabinet must take place.”

  She was right: the Cabinet nearly cracked up over the matter in early 1830. There were conversations and meetings, and finally a session between the president, Ingham, Branch, and Berrien. “I will not part with Major Eaton from my Cabinet,” Jackson told them, “and those of my Cabinet who cannot harmonize with him had better withdraw, for harmony I must and will have.” A kind of compromise was reached: Jackson would not press the social question if his Cabinet would agree not to fuel the fires of gossip against the Eatons. There was no mistaking the president’s will: he depended on John Eaton. “Any attempt to degrade him I viewed, and should continue to view, as an indignity to myself,” Jackson told Ingham, Branch, and Berrien. It was a very fragile peace. William Barry, who, with Van Buren, was the Eatons’ only ally in the Cabinet, said, “Society is [still] unhappily divided about her.”

  THERE WERE, MEANWHILE, signs of trouble in the South. In a letter from Washington to an ally in Columbia, South Carolina, Senator Robert Hayne wrote: “Our Presses at home ought to refuse to discuss in any way the question of the next presidential election. We have questions of our own entirely above that of whether A. or B. is to be our next President. We must not … mix up our complaints with mere party questions.” South Carolina was about to face its severest test thus far: an unexpected hearing on the floor of the Senate.