by Jon Meacham
Jackson’s vision of himself as the embodiment of the people standing against entrenched interests, combined with his appetite for control and for power, led him to see the veto as more than an occasional tool. Congress should consult with the president in advance of sending legislation down Pennsylvania Avenue, Jackson said—a novel notion in 1830. “Jackson was the first President to advance the theory that the President was the representative of the people and that a mandate from the ballot box warranted his intervention in the legislative process,” wrote the scholar C. Perry Patterson in 1947, two years after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, a president who had adopted a Jacksonian view of the White House’s power. Jackson, Patterson said, had “asserted that the veto was a legislative power given to the President without directions or limitations, and that the President was even more competent than the Congress by virtue of his national and representative character to judge the wishes of the electorate.” Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR were happy heirs to the tradition Jackson created with Maysville. They used the veto, and the threat of it, as means to extend the president’s influence over Congress. By the middle of the twentieth century, the power that was so striking in Jackson’s time had become routine. Franklin Roosevelt, the scholar Richard Neustadt noted, occasionally asked for “something I can veto”—just to make the point that lawmakers should fall in line.
In the spring of 1830, with Maysville, Clay understood what Jackson was doing and wondered how to fight back. “We are all shocked and mortified by the rejection of the Maysville road,” Clay wrote a friend. Perhaps, Clay told Webster, they could back a constitutional amendment that would allow a simple majority of Congress, rather than two thirds, to override a presidential veto. In any event, Clay knew that the veto was now yet another front in the war against Jackson’s expansion of power. “We shall be contending against a principle which wears a monarchial aspect, whilst our opponents will be placed in the unpopular attitude [of] defending it,” he wrote an ally in June 1830.
Jackson looked forward to such a struggle. “The veto, I find, will work well,” he wrote friends. And why should he not think so? By signing a message and giving it to Andrew Donelson to take up Capitol Hill, his will had triumphed over all.
FOR JEREMIAH EVARTS, thwarting Jackson’s will on Indian removal had been a consuming passion since Jackson’s arrival in the capital. “The Great Arbiter of Nations never fails to take cognizance of national delinquencies,” Evarts wrote in one of his “William Penn” essays. “In many forms, and with awful solemnity, he has declared his abhorrence of oppression in every shape; and especially of injustice perpetrated against the weak by the strong, when strength is in fact made the only rule of action.” Yes, Evarts acknowledged, white America had already significantly sinned against the Indians, but what Jackson was proposing was of a different, vaster scale. “The people of the United States are not altogether guiltless in regard to their treatment of the aborigines of this continent; but they cannot as yet be charged with any systematic legislation on this subject, inconsistent with the plainest principles of moral honesty.”
That systematic legislation, formally entitled “The Bill for an Exchange of Lands with the Indians Residing in Any of the States or Territories, and for Their Removal West of the Mississippi,” was reported out of the Indian Affairs Committee of the Senate on Monday, February 22, 1830, and out of the House committee two days later. An essential point of contention was whether the Jackson administration could simply ignore previous treaties in order to remove the Indians. Jackson believed the treaties irrelevant, but the Indians did not, and neither did the Indians’ defenders in Congress. Led by Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, a devout Christian who was convinced that Evarts was right and Jackson was wrong, the opposition did what it could to help, as Frelinghuysen put it, “the poor Indians.” On the Senate floor, over the course of several days at the beginning of April 1830, Frelinghuysen, who had been in close contact with Evarts, gave a speech that concluded:
Mr. President, if we abandon these aboriginal proprietors of our soil—these early allies and adopted children of our forefathers, how shall we justify it to our country, to all the glory of the past and the promise of the future? … How shall we justify this trespass to ourselves?
Appeals to white Americans’ sense of fair play were not completely wasted. Evarts’s essays and sentiments like the ones expressed by Frelinghuysen created a “Quaker panic” in Pennsylvania, Martin Van Buren said: the Indians’ allies had successfully raised questions about the bill.
Rather than make only moral arguments, however, those who opposed the administration decided to attack Jackson on the ground that he was seizing power, turning despotic and acting more like a monarch than the executive leader of a republic. If Jackson wanted a stronger presidency, then he would have to pay politically with charges of autocracy and overreaching. Jackson had, Frelinghuysen said, “without the slightest consultation with either House of Congress—without any opportunity for counsel or concert, discussion or deliberation, on the part of these co-ordinate branches of the government”—decided to end the decades of treaty making and coexistence. Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi were breaking ratified agreements, and Jackson was not only supporting them but was asking Congress to make removal law.
One of the results of Jackson’s coalition victory in 1828 was a rising sense of party identity. Soon to be known as “the Democracy,” and eventually as the Democratic Party, Jackson’s supporters in the House and the Senate found themselves the objects of White House wooing and lobbying. Those who backed Jackson stood to be rewarded by favorable coverage in administration newspapers and might be heeded on matters of local patronage. The political machine conceived by Van Buren and being built and maintained by Kendall and others would be at the disposal of lawmakers who voted with Jackson on key matters. On Tuesday, April 6, John Quincy Adams told his diary: “General Jackson rules by his personal popularity, which his partisans in the Senate dare not encounter by opposing anything that he does; and while that popularity shall last, his majorities in both houses of Congress will stand by him for good or evil. It has totally broken down in the Senate both the esprit de corps and the combination against the Executive, which, from the last session of Mr. Jefferson’s administration, had presided in many of their deliberations and governed many of their decisions.”
Evarts, too, complained of “the spirit of party” at work in Congress, saying that a Jacksonian congressman from Alabama had told him he believed in the Indians’ cause but would not cross the White House. “Now what can we do, when men will act in this manner?” Evarts said. “The question is already as plain in the Senate as any question of human conduct can possibly be. Not one question of theft, robbery, or murder, in ten thousand, is so perfectly free from all doubt or cavil … yet it is expected that men will vote by platoons, in regular rank and file, according to party drilling, on this question of public faith. I have never before seen such a commentary on human depravity.”
Jackson’s supporters made the usual arguments for removal—the states were sovereign, the Indians were irredeemable in current conditions, and a fresh start beyond the Mississippi, under the protection of the president, was the only way to ensure the survival of the tribes. The Senate vote was not particularly close, with the bill passing 28 to 19. The House, though, was a different story.
God, justice, and presidential power dominated the debate, which began on Thursday, May 13, 1830. The Evarts-Frelinghuysen case resonated more in the House, it seemed, than it had in the Senate. The Indian issue had become an emotional one, and congressmen were more likely to be roiled by popular passions. Pro-Jackson lawmakers had begun attacking the anti-removal forces, arguing that religious fervor was trumping deliberate judgment. In the House, Congressman Wilson Lumpkin of Georgia dismissed the Evarts contingent as “canting fanatics” who were unjustly attacking his people as “atheists, deists, infidels, and Sabbath-breakers laboring
under the curse of slavery.”
Perhaps the most striking moment came when Congressman Henry R. Storrs of New York took the floor on Saturday, May 15, 1830. Past treaties had guaranteed the Indians’ rights, acknowledged their sovereignty, and promised them the protection of the federal government against the states. Now, Storrs told the House, “the treaties of this Government, made with them from its first organization and under every administration, to which they have solemnly appealed for their security against these fatal encroachments on their rights, have been treated as subordinate to the laws of these states, and are thus virtually abrogated by the Executive Department. The President has assumed the power to dispose of the whole question, and … proposes to us little more than to register this executive decree.” Jackson’s course, he said, had “shocked the public feeling, and agitated the country.”
Storrs was bluntest about Jackson’s bid for wide authority. The government, Storrs told the House, “was to be a government of law, and not of prerogative, and especially not of executive prerogative; for if his will was to have the force of law, that [would be], to a certain degree, despotism.” Finally, toward the conclusion of his long address, Storrs implicitly compared Jackson to Napoleon. Should Jackson succeed with Indian removal, Storrs said, sweeping away the earlier agreements, ratified by the Senate and signed by previous presidents, then America would look more like imperial France than a republic:
The eye of other nations is now fixed upon us. Our friends are looking with fearful anxiety to our conduct in this matter. Our enemies, too, are watching our steps. They have lain in wait for us for half a century, and the passage of this bill will light up joy and hope in the palace of every despot. It will do more to destroy the confidence of the world in free government than all their armies could accomplish.… It will weaken our institutions at home, and infect the heart of our social system. It will teach our people to hold the honor of their Government lightly, and loosen the moral feeling of the country. Republics have been charged, too, with insolence and oppression in the day of their power. History has unfortunately given us much proof of its truth, and we are about to confirm it by our own example.
Storrs was not being mindlessly anti-Jackson, he said, and took on a pleading tone toward the end. “Whether we favored his elevation to his present station or not, we may all unite in wishing that he may … advance the honor of his country beyond even the hopes of his friends,” Storrs said. “We are all interested in his fame, for it is now identified with his country.”
The words made no difference. After much back-and-forth and several procedural votes, Jackson won, narrowly, by a margin of 102 to 98. The vote was taken before the Congress knew about the Maysville veto; in the veto’s wake, the arguments about Jackson’s despotic tendencies seemed all the stronger. But it was too late: the Indian bill passed on Wednesday, May 26, 1830.
The last week of May 1830, then, was one of the finest of Andrew Jackson’s life. He had done what he set out to do: he had overturned the decades-long Indian policy put in motion by Washington and Knox. He now had the authority to purge the South of its native inhabitants and, with Maysville, he had taught Congress that he must be heeded. Jackson had thus made himself arguably the most powerful president since the creation of the office forty years before.
SHORTLY BEFORE FOUR o’clock on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 9, 1830, John Eaton came home from the War Department bearing an invitation from the president for the Eatons to dine at the White House. It was the moment, Margaret decided, for total war. Up to this point Margaret had complained of the Donelsons to Jackson, but not so strongly that Jackson could not choose to avoid a showdown. Even the ablest of politicians, however, cannot always control the timing of a crisis, and as Jackson read a note from Margaret written that afternoon, he realized his strategy of temporizing had run its course.
“Circumstances, my dear General, are such that under your kind and hospitable roof I cannot be happy,” Margaret wrote, playing to Jackson’s instinct that his house should be a shelter against the world for those he loved and cared for, and Margaret was one of those people. “You are not the cause,” Margaret assured him—needlessly but flatteringly—“for you have felt and manifested a desire that things should be different.” But things were not, and Emily and Andrew were at fault. “I could not expect to be happy at your house for this would be to expect a different course of treatment from part of your family.” Eaton had tried to talk her into going, arguing, she said, “that it may be a triumph to some if it may be said I were not invited, but what of that, it will only be another feast to those whose pleasure it is to make me the object of their censures and reproaches.”
Tough words: she was basically accusing Emily and Andrew of open hostility, for which there is scant evidence. They might fall short on occasion—Emily did not acquit herself well on the boat trip to Norfolk the previous year, and was cooler than she might have been on the social circuit in Washington—but all in all the Donelsons had not been vicious, which was the impression Margaret was trying to give Jackson. “I ask to say to you that whatever may be the cause of the unkind treatment I have received from those under your roof … I have done all in my power to avoid it.”
Unable to leave things there, Margaret went a beat further, asserting her own innocence in the whole affair. “I have spoken of your family in no other manner than a respectful one,” she said, adding, “I have ever endeavored to return good for evil”—an allusion to an exhortation in Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, which would have resonated with Jackson.
Margaret was almost certainly stretching the truth here: in her memoirs she had tart things to say about both Donelsons, and when she spoke privately with Jackson it is virtually impossible to imagine that her bluntness would have failed her. As Jackson came to the end of the letter, however, he was in her hands. She had struck the right notes to convince Jackson that his family had gone too far when his house—his home—was unwelcoming to the wife of his friend.
Jackson gave Andrew the letter, and by the time Andrew had finished reading it both men were furious. Jackson unleashed his rage on Donelson. He had been defied long enough. Emily and Andrew owed him their place in Washington, and if they could not live by his rules then they must leave. Jackson’s words were so painful that Andrew could not commit them to paper. There is no known record of the specifics of the conversation. Yet they were burned into Andrew’s memory. Standing before his guardian—before, really, his father—he realized he and his family might well be cast out. It may have been the first time Andrew felt the full, terrific force of Jackson’s anger. Even long afterward, the recollections of the scene were so raw that Andrew could speak of them only in the most formal of terms. In his anger and anguish Donelson distinguished what he called “my family” from what he referred to as “your house,” saying: “You have not forgotten the note of Mrs. Eaton in which she refused to dine with you because my family was in your house,” Andrew wrote to Jackson in October 1830. “I have not forgotten the language which you employed on that occasion, and the determination you then expressed of carrying us home and leaving us there.”
Incredulous that this woman had done so much damage, Andrew wrote a passionate note for the president’s files: “The only unkind treatment which my family can have practiced towards Mrs. Eaton is their refusal to acknowledge her right to interfere with their social relations. All else is imaginary or worse. This letter is abundant evidence of the indelicacy which distinguishes her character, and is disgraceful to her husband.” Jackson had grown tired of his own balancing act, of fighting to make Washington do his bidding while keeping up a more benign and patient face in his own house. He told Andrew and Emily that the three of them would leave for Tennessee in a week. Who came back was an open question.
But could he happily live apart from Emily and Andrew? They had been together so long now. Andrew and Emily had known Jackson all their lives, and he had come to cherish them as the flesh of his flesh. If
a rupture were really so simple, it would have come much earlier and much more decisively. Jackson’s temporizing—angry one moment, calculating another, yet reluctant to take an irrevocable step—suggests that his emotions were churning, pressing him one way and then another, and that he did not know, finally, whether he could cut the Donelsons out of his innermost circle.
The trip would be a momentous one. Two of Jackson’s dearest causes were to be advanced over the summer. One was Indian removal: he was summoning tribal leaders to meet with him personally in Tennessee. To succeed, he believed he needed the man he could most depend on to make his wishes reality on removal. And so Jackson decided to add two others to the party in Nashville.
He invited Margaret and John Eaton.
WHEN HE LEARNED the Eatons would be joining them, Andrew seemed resigned to having lost his influence with Jackson. There were, he told John Coffee, “embarrassments that yet attend us,” and there would be no relief in Tennessee. “The Secretary of War and family”—Andrew could not bring himself to mention Margaret’s name—“have started [for Tennessee] … a circumstance which I very much regret.” In his own letter to Coffee, Jackson admitted that “there has been and are things that have corroded my peace and my mind and must cease or my administration will be a distracted one.”
