by Jon Meacham
The cost of partisanship for partisanship’s sake—of seeing politics as blood sport, where the kill is the only object of the exercise—was, Livingston said, too high for a free society to pay. Differences of opinion and doctrine and personality were one thing, and such distinctions formed the natural bases of what Livingston called “the necessary and … the legitimate parties existing in all free Governments.”
Parties were one thing; partisanship another. “The spirit of which I speak,” Livingston said as he argued against zealotry, “… creates imaginary and magnifies real causes of complaint; arrogates to itself every virtue—denies every merit to its opponents; secretly entertains the worst designs … mounts the pulpit, and, in the name of a God of mercy and peace, preaches discord and vengeance; invokes the worst scourges of Heaven, war, pestilence, and famine, as preferable alternatives to party defeat; blind, vindictive, cruel, remorseless, unprincipled, and at last frantic, it communicates its madness to friends as well as foes; respects nothing, fears nothing.”
Even allowing for Livingston’s hyperbolic imagery, his point stands. What he called an “excess of party rage,” coming on like a fever, was always a threat when men of passion and ambition gathered to settle questions of power, wealth, and faith—the questions the president and the Congress, in close proximity to each other in the capital, confronted and attempted to answer. In such an intrinsically explosive atmosphere, Livingston argued for calm and common sense.
Acknowledging his own weaknesses—a good debating tactic—he said: “I am no censor of the conduct of others: it is sufficient for me to watch over my own. The wisdom of gentlemen must be their guide in the sentiments they entertain, and their discretion in the language in which they utter them. No doubt they think the occasion calls for the warmth they have shown; but of this the people must judge.”
THEREIN LAY A key element of the Jacksonian creed, and the context of Livingston’s remarks sheds light on the complexities of Jackson’s vision of public life. For generations, Americans have thought of Jackson as the quintessential man of the people, a president who might not have been too uncomfortable with mob rule. Such a view, however, does a disservice to Jackson, and Livingston’s point illuminates his friend Jackson’s larger hopes for the country. “The majority is to govern”—yes, Jackson believed that, but he also believed in order, in virtue, in forbearance, and in securing the nation and its people not only from foreign foes but from the disruptive winds of their own passions. He called upon the people to reason—and he believed they would. “There is too much at stake to allow pride or passion to influence your decision,” he later said. “Never for a moment believe that the great body of the citizens of any State or States can deliberately intend to do wrong. They may, under the influence of temporary excitement or misguided opinions, commit mistakes; they may be misled for a time by the suggestions of self-interest; but in a community so enlightened and patriotic as the people of the United States argument will soon make them sensible of their errors, and when convinced they will be ready to repair them.”
Partisan ferocity could be just that—ferocious—but in the end, the better part of wisdom would lead the country to the place Livingston sketched in the Senate: “We undoubtedly think differently of particular measures, and have our preferences for particular men: these, surely, cannot arrange us into any but temporary divisions, lasting no longer than while the election of the man is pending, or the debate on the measure continues.” The sin might be great—slavery, persecution of the Indians, neglect of the sick and the needy—the road to reform long, the battles bloody and heartbreaking, but in Livingston’s view violence and disunion were no answer.
“There are legitimate and effectual means to correct any palpable infraction of our Constitution,” he said. “Let the cry of constitutional oppression be justly raised within these walls, and it will be heard abroad—it will be examined; the people are intelligent, the people are just, and in time these characteristics must have an effect on their Representatives.”
The words were Livingston’s, the sentiments Jackson’s.
CHAPTER 11
GENERAL JACKSON RULES
BY HIS PERSONAL POPULARITY
ON MONDAY, April 12, 1830, Duff Green published a piece in the Telegraph detailing the plans for a dinner to take place the next night at the Indian Queen Hotel in commemoration of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. At the White House, Jackson decided that the program, with its toasts and speakers, would be “a nullification affair altogether.”
The dinner, Webster told Clay, “was to found the party on Southern principles.” Surveying the field, Jackson rose early on the thirteenth and wrote out three different toasts. Lewis and Andrew Donelson were together in the president’s office going through the newspapers when Jackson appeared. He handed Lewis the three pieces of paper and asked which he “liked best.” Lewis chose one, and Jackson repeated the exercise with Donelson, who selected the same one Lewis had. Jackson was pleased. “He said he preferred that one himself for the reason that it was shorter and more expressive,” Lewis recalled. “He then put that one in his pocket and threw the others into the fire.”
At the Indian Queen, the room was crowded with politicians as Robert Hayne and others rhapsodized about the greatness of Jefferson’s “glorious stand” against John Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts. The implications were clear: it was time to recover that anti-Federalist spirit to undo the tariff and secure slavery. At last it was Jackson’s turn. Van Buren, who was seated across the room, climbed atop his chair to take in the scene. The words that had come to Jackson in the morning now produced a gasp among the Southerners and nullifiers: “Our Union—it must be preserved.”
Calhoun then rose to speak. The vice president interpreted Jackson’s toast as a direct threat to the Southern cause. “The Union—next to our liberty the most dear,” he said, adding, “May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States and distributing equally the benefit and burden of the Union.” There it was, then: a decisive rallying cry from Jackson and a legalistic, but still defiant, manifesto from Calhoun.
Van Buren tried to relieve the tension. “Mutual forbearance and reciprocal concessions: through their agency the Union was established—the patriotic spirit from which they emanated will forever sustain it.” Sitting amid what Van Buren called “the bustle and excitement of the occasion,” Robert Hayne reeled from this third assault on the cause of state sovereignty. First Webster, then Livingston, and now the president himself was weighing in against Hayne’s beloved South Carolina. Hurrying over to Jackson, Hayne asked whether they might add the word “Federal” to the text of his toast to be made public. “This was an ingenious suggestion,” Van Buren recalled, “as it seemed to make the rebuke less pungent although it really had no such effect.” Jackson agreed; he had meant to say “federal” anyway. Perhaps Hayne thought the country would interpret “Our Federal Union” differently than “Our Union”—in the event, it did not—but the editorial feint was typical of the Southern wing, which, since Webster and Livingston, was finding that the Unionists had more of a claim on the nation’s passions while it struggled to argue with constitutional precision.
Nothing, however, was going to assuage the Southerners’ loss on this long evening. “The veil was rent,” said Van Buren, revealing that Jackson, as the National Intelligencer put it in its coverage of the dinner, was in effect saying: “ ‘You may complain of the tariff and perhaps with reason, but so long as it is the law it shall as certainly be maintained as my name is Andrew Jackson.’ ” The paper had it right.
An old opponent understood it all—and knew that Jackson’s triumph at the Jefferson dinner foreshadowed victory after victory. “That Jackson will be a candidate for reelection, if, when the time of election comes, he has a fair prospect of success, I do not doubt,” said John Quincy Adams. “That his personal popularity, founded solely upon the Battle of New Orleans”—Adams’s bitterness was all too evi
dent here—“will carry him through the next election, as it did through the last, is altogether probable. The vices of his administration are not such as affect the popular feeling. He will lose none of his popularity, unless he should do something to raise a blister upon public sentiment; and of that there is no present prospect. If he lives, therefore, and nothing external should happen to rouse new parties, he may be re-elected, not only once, but twice or thrice.”
Still, some Southerners seethed. “I seriously apprehend a civil war if something is not done to conciliate the discontents which prevail at this time and for aught that I can see will increase,” William Crawford of Georgia wrote Van Buren the month after the Jefferson dinner.
EMILY’S WINTER AND early spring followed the now familiar but still difficult pattern. Close to Jackson, she and Andrew and the babies were able to cheer him most of the time, greeting his guests and presenting a gracious face to the outside world. Then, in April, Emily’s father died, robbing her of a source of wisdom and counsel. Captain Donelson had been stoic and sensible to the end. He had been sick for three months, William Donelson wrote to John Coffee, “which he bore with great fortitude and resignation.” It was, Donelson said, “only in the few last days of his existence [that] he expressed some impatience at remaining here so long. His only fear was that he would be a long time dying.… Yet parting with a father who had so long watched over our best interests in childhood and in riper age and who was so kind and affectionate to all his children and had grown venerable with time [will] not be a thing of light moment.”
IN LATE MAY, two essential issues—the tariff and internal improvements such as federally funded roads, bridges, and canals—converged to mark a crucial moment in the evolution of presidential power. Roughly put, proceeds from the tariff filled the national treasury, and those funds helped pay for projects that were of most immediate benefit to the middle states and the West (the Deep South was a long way from seeing its own region linked with the others). However logical and appealing the idea may have seemed, skepticism about a large federal government—which was, at least in Jackson’s mind, a different thing altogether from skepticism about the virtues of Union—remained the political reality of the era. Internal improvements were the pork of the age (though the term would not be coined for several more decades); Van Buren watched with bemusement as congressmen “brought forward under captivating disguises the thousand local improvements with which they designed to dazzle and seduce their constituents.”
But Jackson and Van Buren believed the less government interference with the market, the better, and they worried that federally funded internal improvements in single states would lead to corruption and an unequal distribution of national resources. This was the prevailing presidential thinking when bills authorizing a number of projects, including funding for a sixty-mile Maysville Road that happened to fall within Kentucky (it was to be a leg of a north-south road like the east-west Cumberland Road), came to the White House for Jackson’s signature.
Van Buren was against it and made the case to Jackson while they were on horseback. It was not a difficult sell. “The road was in Mr. Clay’s own state,” Van Buren said, “and Mr. Clay was, the General thought—whether rightfully or not is now immaterial—pressing the measure and the question it involved … rather for political effect than for public ends.”
Van Buren warned Jackson that the White House’s foes wanted “to draw you into the approval of a bill most emphatically local, and thus endeavor to saddle you with the latitudinarian notions upon which the late administration acted, or to compel you to take a stand against internal improvements generally, and thus draw to their aid all those who are interested in the ten thousand schemes which events and the course of the government for the past few years have engendered.” The answer: approve interstate projects but veto anything that did not cross state lines.
Word about Jackson’s veto intentions leaked out in Washington, and the whispers grew so persistent that Colonel Richard Johnson of Kentucky, now a member of the House, called on Jackson at the White House. There Johnson found Jackson and Van Buren alone, going over a report on the Treasury. Johnson and Jackson began to speak of the possible Maysville veto, and Johnson, fearful that Clay could turn the issue on Jackson, grew emotional and extended his hand with a flourish.
“General! If this hand were an anvil on which the sledgehammer of the smith was descending,” Johnson said, “he would not crush it more effectually than you will crush your friends in Kentucky if you veto that bill!”
Jackson rose from his chair, as did Johnson, and the two faced each other.
“Sir,” Jackson said, “have you looked at the condition of the Treasury—at the amount of money that it contains—at the appropriations already made by Congress—at the amount of other unavoidable claims upon it?”
“No, General, I have not!” Johnson said. “But there has always been money enough to satisfy appropriations and I do not doubt there will be now!”
Jackson was determined to pay down the debt, which he abhorred, and he watched the growing number of bills proposed in Congress with alarm—noting, in a memorandum on the veto, that they would “far exceed by many millions the amount available in the Treasury for the year 1830” if passed. “I stand committed before the country to pay off the national debt at the earliest practicable moment,” he told Johnson. “This pledge I am determined to redeem, and I cannot do this if I consent to increase it without necessity. Are you willing—are my friends willing to lay taxes to pay for internal improvements?—for be assured I will not borrow a cent except in cases of absolute necessity!”
“No,” Johnson said of the threat of a tax increase, “that would be worse than a veto!”
Jackson told Johnson that he was trying to find a way to veto the bill without bringing all internal improvements to a stop. As Van Buren recalled it, Jackson said “he was giving the matter a thorough investigation and that their friends might be assured that he would not make up his mind without looking at every side of it”—a classic piece of political tradecraft, for Jackson did not want an upset Johnson to spread the word that all was decided. Jackson never foreclosed his options until he had to, and the Maysville moment had not yet come.
When it did, on Thursday, May 27, 1830, Jackson vetoed the bill and three others but approved two land measures—a survey law that affected more than one state, and money for the Cumberland Road, which was already an interstate project—after what he described as “much, and, I may add, painful reflection to me.” He truly did not believe there was enough money for Maysville, and he was more interested in paying down the debt than in spending federal resources on state enterprises. By crushing Maysville, he was distinguishing between national and local projects, though in the legislative world, such distinctions are in the eye of the beholder. One man’s pork is another man’s steak. “What is properly national in its character or otherwise is an inquiry which is often extremely difficult of solution,” Jackson said in a veto message drafted by Van Buren. “The appropriations of one year for an object which is considered national may be rendered nugatory by the refusal of a succeeding Congress to continue the work on the ground that it is local.” He spoke of his grand design to return surpluses to the states and, characteristically, said the people should amend the Constitution if they wanted the federal government to pay for local improvements. (Still, by the end of his second term, Jackson spent more on internal improvements than all previous presidents combined.)
With a flourish, Jackson also denounced taxes in terms similar to those he had used in his exchange with Johnson in the White House. Noting that “many of the taxes collected from our citizens through the medium of imposts have for a considerable period been onerous,” Jackson said that the burdens of these taxes “have borne severely upon the laboring and less prosperous classes of the community, being imposed on the necessaries of life” (clothing and the like). Americans were not complaining—not yet. But let federal dollars begin
to be spent in seemingly indiscriminate ways, and there could be trouble. The taxes, Jackson said, “have been cheerfully borne because they were thought to be necessary to the support of government and the payment of the debts unavoidably incurred in the acquisition and maintenance of our national rights and liberties. But have we a right to calculate on the same cheerful acquiescence when it is known that the necessity for their continuance would cease were it not for irregular, improvident, and unequal appropriations of the public funds?”
It was a shrewd document, one that put the president at the center of the national drama—for he, not anyone else, would presumably decide what was “irregular, improvident, and unequal”—and gave him room to maneuver depending on the specifics of any legislative issue. “The veto message was a hodgepodge of constitutional and expedient arguments, but in its very logical fuzziness lay its political strength,” wrote the historian Daniel Feller. “The nebulous distinction between national and local works stung American System men to fury, for it freed Jackson to decide on individual bills precisely as he chose—a freedom he exploited to the utmost. None of his predecessors enjoyed such flexibility.” But Jackson would.
WRITING TO FRIENDS in the weeks and months after Maysville, Jackson was cheerful about his sharpening of a constitutional weapon, savoring his insight that the veto could be wielded as the president saw fit. His predecessors had limited themselves to sending back bills on constitutional grounds. The first six presidents of the United States vetoed a total of nine bills; Jackson alone, beginning with Maysville, vetoed a dozen. None of them had thought of the power in quite the way Jackson did. Even when they chafed against legislative restraints and tried to enlarge the presidential role, they accepted the essential premise that Congress was the prime power in the national government. “From motives of respect to the legislature,” wrote George Washington, who vetoed two measures in his eight years, “I give my signature to many bills with which my judgment is at variance.” Watching Jackson veto Maysville, John Quincy Adams said, “These are remarkable events.… The Presidential veto has hitherto been exercised with great reserve. Not more than four or five Acts of Congress have been thus arrested by six Presidents, and in forty years. He has rejected four in three days. The overseer ascendancy is complete.”
