by Jon Meacham
Like many mercurial fathers, Jackson was like a summer storm—all darkness and ferocity one moment, giving way to light and calm the next. Such emotions might be contradictory but they were commingled within Jackson, who led as he lived: sometimes with his heart, sometimes with his mind, sometimes with both. In this critical phase of his life and his presidency, from the lonely autumn of 1830 through the election of 1832 to the showdown with South Carolina in 1833, Jackson expended great stores of private energy on his family while expanding the powers of the White House, all the while facing virulent critics who thought him unbalanced and dictatorial. It is true that he had his regrettable moments of fury, but Jackson was always more rational and more calculating than his enemies supposed. He was also genuinely committed to the ideal of democracy and to the preservation of the American experiment.
From Jefferson forward, contemporaries and commentators have argued that Jackson was a prisoner of his passions, suggesting that there could be no method in a man as mad as Jackson. In fact, as the arduous wars of Jackson’s White House years show, in the end he could rise above his own pride—and he had to do so regularly, since his pride was so often on display—to govern the nation far more wisely, and with more personal warmth for its people, than his opponents ever recognized. The journey from Jackson’s early, often inflammatory words on an issue to politically sensitive and shrewd results was not easy, or clean, or pretty, but frequently chaotic and highly charged. Yet the journey was made.
The struggle between Washington and South Carolina would in many ways be shaped by the tensions between Jackson and Calhoun, both of whom saw their own positions in absolute terms. Privately Calhoun believed nullification “to be the fundamental principle of our system, resting on facts as historically certain as our Revolution itself.” To Jackson, such talk was treason, and he could not imagine that South Carolina would push the matter too far. “I had supposed that every one acquainted with me knew that I was opposed to the nullifying doctrine, and my toast at the Jefferson dinner was sufficient evidence of the fact,” Jackson wrote to Joel Poinsett, a former South Carolina congressman and Jackson ally, in late October. With hope in his tone, he added, “The South Carolinians, as a whole, are too patriotic to adopt such mad projects as the nullifiers of that state propose.” The collision between Calhoun and Jackson—like the collision between Emily and Jackson—had far-reaching emotional and political consequences.
THE DOMESTIC ARRANGEMENTS within the presidential circle were of intense interest and debate far from the Donelsons’ Mansion and Jackson’s White House. In Tennessee, the Eaton issue was proving central in a congressional race, and the question of Andrew Donelson’s place in the president’s universe was a subject of open conjecture and controversy. Robert Burton was running for the House of Representatives on a pro-Eaton—and therefore pro-Jackson—ticket, and he attacked the incumbent, Robert Desha (who was not in the race himself but was supporting Burton’s opponent), saying that Jackson had asked Burton to run in order to test the country’s support for the president. Burton and Desha had encountered each other at the races in Tennessee and held an impromptu debate, with Burton lashing out at the Eatons’ foes as foes of Jackson. Before a crowd of about six hundred people, Burton was particularly rough on the Donelsons’ role in the story and, Emily told Andrew, “informed the people of the unfortunate split (as he called it) in the Donelson family.” Burton singled Andrew out for attack, publicly implying that Jackson himself thought Andrew was being disloyal, even treacherous, for in Jackson’s mind support of the Eatons translated into support for him, and opposition to the Eatons translated into opposition to him and to everything the administration was trying to do.
Sensible and sophisticated beyond her years—she had turned twenty-three the previous June—Emily suspected she knew how Burton had come by the hard words of Jackson’s he had quoted about the Donelsons. Jackson, she wrote Andrew, “may have used some expression to Mr. B[urton] when he imagined himself ill-treated by us that he never intended to be mentioned again.” The essential thing, she told Andrew, was to remain calm and steady: “My Dear husband, let me beg you not to let it ruffle in any way your feelings toward Uncle Jackson, for such a thing would be more acceptable to your enemies than anything you could do. Mr. B shows plainly that they are all jealous of Uncle’s friendship to you and are making use of every exertion in their power to separate you.… Burton’s meaning will recoil upon his own head and there let it rest.”
She was thinking of her husband, of course, but also of her broader circle of friends. “I had the great pleasure yesterday evening of receiving my dear husband your affectionate letter and need not tell you how much I was gratified at its contents, and I wish it had been twice as long,” Emily told Andrew. “There are a great many things that I should like to hear about that you have not mentioned. I shall expect you to write oftener and detail every thing that passes.” Her anguish in exile was palpable, and his letters to her were her only means of connection to the world she loved. “I was thinking of you all the evening and would have given anything to have been there,” she said, evoking the image of her sitting in the Tennessee night, her mind on the imagined glitter of Washington.
In a postscript, Emily scribbled: “Is Major L[ewis] still at the President’s house?” Behind those few words lay a tangle of emotions. If Lewis remained in the White House, then his daughter Mary was the only woman there, and Emily knew Jackson’s need for female company could not be suspended. Would Mary Lewis rise to fill Emily’s place, providing Jackson with a sense of family and home? Mary was thought to be romantically interested in Abraham Van Buren, the secretary of state’s son, and such a flirtation would only bring her closer to Jackson, given the president’s own intimate connection to the potential beau’s father. For Emily all of these prospects were horrifying, and there is evidence that her friends in Washington sought to allay her fears by writing of Mary in harsh terms. “Mary Lewis is here.… Strange girl, she acts in such a way as to have a good many malicious remarks made on her,” Rebecca Branch told Emily in October. “I pity her sometimes. She is very friendly with me, I believe she has a good heart—Madame Rumour says she is terribly smitten with A.V.B.… They met here a few evenings ago and her conduct on the occasion was truly ridiculous.”
Reassuring, but Rebecca’s letter had its troubling elements, too. She did not paint a portrait of Andrew Donelson that his distant wife wanted to see. Describing a party, Rebecca recounted a chat with Andrew: “I saw your good man,” she told Emily. “He says if you don’t come on soon he will commence dancing”—which may well have been the last thing Emily wanted to hear reported, even in friendly jest, since she was so far from Washington. Emily was reduced to recounting the revealing adventures of her children, telling Andrew that young Jackson “sometimes … mounts his stick horse, rides off, and comes back and tells me he has been to Washington and brings me many fine messages from you.”
IN SOUTH CAROLINA in these October weeks, the voters went to the polls to elect state legislators, who in turn chose the governor. The stronger states’ rights elements took a majority of the legislative seats, and James Hamilton, Jr., who favored nullification, won the governorship. While there were not enough votes in the legislature to call a special state convention to consider nullification, South Carolina’s course was beginning to be set. As governor, Hamilton wanted to take a stand on turning back the tariff in order to establish a precedent that would protect slavery. “I have always looked to the present contest with the government, on the part of the Southern states, as a battle at the out-posts, by which, if we succeeded in repulsing the enemy, the citadel would be safe,” he said just before assuming office. The legislature passed six resolutions related to nullification, with three in particular giving the radicals hope for the future. One supported Hayne’s understanding of the Union over Webster’s, asserting that “each party” to the Constitution—that is, the states, not the people—could decide whether certain laws amou
nted to “infractions,” and they could then decide “the mode and measure of redress.”
As South Carolina debated the nature of the American family, Jackson entered into a new, pitched battle with Andrew Donelson over the nature of theirs. On Monday morning, October 25, 1830, the two clashed again over the terms on which Emily might return to the White House. The argument became so ugly that Andrew made a tactical retreat in order to rejoin the battle by note.
Writing with candor and verve, Andrew was honest with Jackson about his own fears for himself and about his love for the man who raised him. Tired, he wrote, of “intimations” from the Eaton camp “that my power to hold my place here depended upon my subserviency to the wishes of Mrs. Eaton,” Andrew acknowledged that he could see why Jackson was angry with him—yet he refused to give in.
Jackson was determined to exert power over his household and beyond. But Andrew was equally determined to control—and to be seen by the wider world as controlling—his own family’s affairs. To surrender now would be personally humiliating and politically debilitating for Andrew—he would be viewed not as his own man, a distinguished secretary to the president of the United States and a potential force in his own right, but as yet another casualty of Jackson’s ambition and will. In a painful turn of events, Andrew’s future depended on declaring his independence from the patron of his past and his present.
There was calculation in Andrew’s course. He knew that as a man of strength, Jackson respected men of strength. The president admired in others what he valued in himself and was capable of epic reversals of opinion. A close student of Jackson’s life would understand this, and Andrew Donelson was such a student.
WITH STEEL IN his tone, then, Andrew went to the brink, believing that Jackson, like many leaders, truly settled matters only when a crisis was at hand. Declining to have any further face-to-face exchanges on the Eaton topic, Andrew wrote: “You have decided the question as you have a right to do. The only remaining one for me to consider is also depending in some degree upon your decision: how long shall I remain separated from my family?” He would leave; he would not come back; there would be no Emily, no children in the White House, nor a familiar face across the way. “It may be best for you to look to some one to take my place at once, and in the meantime to allow me to be employed in putting in more intelligible files the papers of the office, preparatory to my retirement from it,” Andrew told Jackson.
Jackson read Andrew’s note with deepening gloom. He was tired; he hated that Andrew would not come talk to him; he was staying up late, plagued by headaches. Alternating between sorrow and anger, Jackson replied on Saturday, October 30, telling “my dear Andrew” that “I have determined, like Mr. Jefferson, to live without any female in my family.” He asked Andrew to remain in Washington through the congressional session, then they would part permanently.
Andrew’s bid had failed. Undeterred, however, he wrote again in the autumn dusk. “In your house, my dear Uncle, as your guest I acknowledge that the same comity and politeness are due to Mrs. Eaton that are to the ladies of the other Cabinet officers or those of other gentlemen.… Out of your house I claim only the same general discretion in behalf of my family that is possessed by all others.” Struggling to find a way to break through to Jackson on this point, Andrew reached back into Jackson’s personal history, linking the present question with the first great test of Jackson’s honor. “You did not when a prisoner in the Revolutionary War obey the order of the enemy who had you in his power to clean his boots,” Andrew wrote. “Yet you find fault with my determination merely to keep out of the way of insult.”
It was almost midnight when Jackson read these words. Though tired, he could not let the matter rest. He was wounded. “My dear Andrew, for so I must still call you,” Jackson wrote, “you are pleased to say in your letter ‘In your house my dear Uncle as your guest I acknowledge the same comity and politeness are to Mrs. Eaton … etc.’ When, my dear Andrew, were you my guest or how and when treated only as such? The term … is surely unjust. You and Emily and Mary were considered by me as my family. You were so considered by the world, so introduced, and so treated, and in that situation as the representative of my dear and ever to be lamented wife was Mrs. Donelson here considered by me, and as such received and treated by all.”
Emily and Andrew, the president insisted, were not guests. “You were my family, my chosen family,” Jackson wrote, “and were placed where I was delighted to see you, and where, had it not been for bad advisers … we would have been living in peace with all, and in my bosom forever.” He could say no more. “Every time the subject is named it makes my heart bleed afresh.”
The note was carried across the hall and, reading Jackson’s emotionally charged reply, Andrew saw he had been imprecise in his own language. He had not meant to refer to his family as guests, but to Mrs. Eaton. Replying yet again, Andrew said, “Nothing was farther from my mind than to express such an idea as that we considered ourselves, or were considered by others, as guests in your house.”
And so the president of the United States and his secretary were reduced to an epistolary battle over grammar, sniping at and professing love for each other, often in the same paragraph. Power and affection were at stake and in play, indistinguishable. To Jackson, hostility to the Eatons continued to be “evidence of hostility to me.”
Andrew’s only solace came from Emily, who wrote to reassure him that all would be well even if he lost his Washington skirmish and joined her in Tennessee. “Still, I think you should not come to me if you can possibly avoid it,” Emily told her husband. “It would be the most gratifying thing to your enemies as well as to the General’s that could happen, [and] it might become the subject of a newspaper paragraph and be the means of the General’s losing some ground and then the whole of the blame will be put on your shoulders.”
Torn between the personal and the political, between her sense of right and wrong and her ambition, Emily went a step further in a letter a few days later: “I would be willing, were I to return to the City, to visit Mrs. E. sometime officially; this I do not think would be inconsistent as I have done it before,” she wrote. “I am willing to make this apparent change of opinion to please our dear old uncle.… It will convince him of your desire to please him who has always been to you a kind father.”
To Emily, as to Jackson, power was paramount, and she had now spent enough time in Tennessee to realize that she did not want to surrender her place in the great world. As she read accounts from friends of the things she was missing, she grew firmer in her resolve to return. She would wait as long as it took, reassure Andrew, and offer concessions on the Eaton question, but she was in her way as inflexible and shrewd as Jackson himself when it came to surviving and thriving in life and politics. Though Jackson had raised Andrew as a son, Emily was more a child of Old Hickory—strong, smart, tenacious, tough, and wily.
ON SATURDAY, November 6, at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts, John Quincy Adams briefly noted in his diary the news of the evening’s paper: he had been elected as a member of the House in the Twenty-second Congress. In that entry, he wrote nothing more than the returns—no reactions, no emotions. Indeed, since the moment, on a cold September morning, when a loyal newspaper editor and the retiring incumbent had approached him about putting his name on the ballot, he had written little about whether he desired to win or not. He would only demur that he had “not the slightest desire to be elected,” but if elected, it was possible that he would “deem it my duty to serve.”
His wife and son were furious at the prospect of his return to the political arena; Louisa, who had been looking forward to a long retirement at their home in Quincy, had even threatened not to join him in Washington. But after hours of reflection the next evening, November 7, Adams admitted in an unusually emotional entry that his victory brought him relief from his trials—his loss to Jackson, the death of his son George, even his replacement as the president of the American Academy of Arts and Sc
iences. “It seemed as if I was deserted by all mankind,” he said.
“My return to public life in a subordinate station is disagreeable to my family, and disapproved by some of my friends,” he said. And yet, for all his professed desire for “an old age of quiet and leisure” and his lament about “the faithless wave of politics,” his election to Congress brought the greatest joy. “My election as President of the United States was not half so gratifying to my inmost soul. No election or appointment conferred upon me ever gave me so much pleasure.”
Adams could at times come across as an elitist—certainly Jackson thought so—but he, like his successor in the White House, cared for what the people thought. “This call upon me by the people of the district in which I reside, to represent them in Congress, has been spontaneous,” he wrote. The people had chosen him, and he was grateful to them.
AS THE LETTERS between uncle and nephew were going back and forth across the hall, Jackson welcomed a new member of his circle, Francis Preston Blair, who had moved from Kentucky to Washington to become the founding editor of a new administration newspaper. The brainchild of the politically brilliant Amos Kendall—who had run his newspaper in Kentucky, the Argus, with the help of Blair—the newspaper, to be called the Globe, was to be of what Jackson called “the true faith,” meaning it was to support the White House totally and without reservation.
Kendall was a critical figure in Jackson’s universe. Harriet Martineau, a British writer touring the United States, once recorded a brief Kendall sighting. “I was fortunate enough once to catch a glimpse of the invisible Amos Kendall, one of the most remarkable men in America,” Martineau said. “He is supposed to be the moving spring of the whole administration; the thinker, planner, and doer; but it is all in the dark.… Work is done, of goblin extent and with goblin speed, which makes men look about them with a superstitious wonder; and the invisible Amos Kendall has the credit of it all.”
