by Jon Meacham
Blair was Kendall’s friend, but he would soon become a force in his own right. And the most important force of all, Jackson, was feeling triumphant, as well he should have: Blair’s coming gave Jackson absolute power over his own newspaper—which in turn meant absolute power over how the country, or at least the part of the country that read the administration’s paper, saw the White House. Born in Virginia in 1791, a graduate of Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, Blair converted to Jacksonian politics after supporting Clay for president in 1824.
Jackson liked his new editor’s verve, spirit, and speed—qualities that matched the rapid rate of political strife in a nation of proliferating newspapers and burgeoning party mechanics. Papers had always been partisan, and previous presidents had favored this publication over that one. Jackson was, however, the first to set out to create his own from scratch. “I wish you to stand just as I do—the friend of General Jackson and his administration, having no future political views other than the support of his principles,” Kendall had written to Blair in October. With Kendall doing the wooing, Blair had decided to take up the task.
Kendall, who was facing Senate confirmation for a Treasury post, promised his friend adventure in the year to come, and the support of the president, for he knew that Jackson returned loyalty with loyalty. “Now, I want you to prepare your mind to come on here at the meeting of Congress and remain during the session,” he wrote to Blair that August. “You shall be welcome to live with me in my lonely way, so that the expense to you here shall be no more than you choose. Much depends on next winter. We shall have to war with the giants”—Clay in the 1832 presidential race, the Bank forces, and the South Carolinians. “I know the President will enter with zeal into my views. Your sentiments in relation to the Bank will make him zealous for you. I think he will be for a new paper any how. He told a friend of mine that if I were rejected, he would sustain me with half his fortune if necessary. All this between ourselves.”
THE MAN WHO came to the White House to see Jackson in late November 1830 did not look like a ferocious, history-changing operative and editor. This is how his friend and associate John C. Rives described Blair: “about five feet ten inches high.… He looks like a skeleton, lacks but little of being one, and weighed last spring, when dressed in thick winter clothing, one hundred and seven pounds, all told, about eighty-five of which, we suppose, was bone, and the other twenty-two pounds, made up of gristle, nerve, and brain—flesh he has none. His face is narrow, and of the hatchet kind, according with his meat-axe disposition when writing about his enemies. His complexion is fair, his hair sandy, and his eyes blue—his countenance remarkably mild.”
The journey from Kentucky with his family had been dangerous and long, with carriage wrecks, near misses, and, finally, an accident in which Blair cut himself severely. Lewis took one look at him and said, “Mr. Blair, we want stout hearts and sound heads here.” Appearances to the contrary, Blair had both, and something else, too: a gift for invective and rhetoric that invested Jackson’s ideas with currency and force.
Blair was swept away by Jackson’s charm, by his personality, and finally by his kindness. Invited that very first night to a dinner on the first floor of the White House full of formally dressed diplomats and politicians, the injured and unkempt Blair felt out of place, a rude provincial thrust among elegant cosmopolitans. He was, James Parton said, “abashed and miserable,” until Jackson, who should have anticipated that Blair might feel out of place on his initial evening in the capital, appeared and, seeing his new editor’s discomfort, took Blair by the arm and sat with him at the table—a gesture, Parton said, that “completed the conquest of his heart.” Francis Preston Blair would now fight any battle for Andrew Jackson.
The editor wasted no time in getting to work. Andrew Donelson was to take the president’s annual message to Congress on Monday, December 6, 1830, and Blair and Kendall wanted it to be in circulation immediately thereafter in order to take the case for Jackson to the people. Blair loved the fight, writing editorials after nightfall in lead pencil, often in the White House, “in a great hurry,” John Rives said. As the deadline approached, “we had to keep two boys to run to him for copy. We have known him to send one of the boys after the other to overtake him and get the last word on the sheet sent off.”
Though Jackson urged moderation in most things in his message, he attacked nullification. “Every State cannot expect to shape the measures of the General Government to suit its own particular interests.… Mutual forbearance becomes, therefore, a duty obligatory upon all.…” Still, Jackson was not being blindly confrontational on the tariff. He understood that politicians who were absolutists did not long endure. He was accustomed to waiting for the right moment to strike, and he believed a compromise on the tariff was possible.
In his message, Jackson argued the merits of the issue. “It is an infirmity of our nature to mingle our interests and prejudices with the operation of our reasoning powers, and attribute to the objects of our likes and dislikes qualities they do not possess and effects they cannot produce,” he said. “The effects of the present tariff are doubtless overrated, both in its evils and in its advantages. By one class of reasoners the reduced price of cotton and other agricultural products is ascribed wholly to its influence, and by another the reduced price of manufactured articles. The probability is that neither opinion approaches the truth.”
An insightful passage, but understanding the roots of irrational political sentiment cannot make such sentiment disappear. Politics, as Jackson pointed out, can be largely about belief, not fact, and in South Carolina it looked as though no amount of public policy debate was going to counter the trend toward nullification. And while Jackson would do what he could to avoid violence, he also unleashed Blair, who told the readers of the Globe that “the right of nullification” was attractive to “certain men, who, like Caesar, would rather reign in a village, than be second in Rome.” His more sophisticated readers may also have heard an echo of John Milton’s description of Lucifer in Paradise Lost—the fallen angel who decided it was better “to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.”
CHRISTMAS CAME AND went quietly. There were no children in the White House, and at the Mansion, Emily and her little ones passed the holiday “soberly yet agreeably,” entertaining themselves with candy pullings and games. The season—freighted again, on this second anniversary, with memories of Rachel’s death—took a toll on Andrew and on Emily. They loved each other and they missed each other—so much that the political element in their lives was put to the side in an exchange of anguished and touching letters in the opening moments of the new year.
On New Year’s Day 1831, Donelson excused himself from the busy public rooms of the first floor of the White House to write Emily a short, heartfelt note. “I detached myself for a moment from the New Year crowd to offer you the salutations of the season and to enjoy those which I know are breathed by you for me.” He closed by quoting a poem: “Think not beloved time can break / The spell around us cast, / Or absence from my bosom take / The memory of the past; / My love is not that silvery mist / From summer blooms by sunbeams kissed—/ Too fugitive to last.”
The Emily who read this had lost a great deal of weight—she did not have much to lose in the first place—and looked, as one guest at the Mansion told her, “like a spectre.” She was depressed and lonely, and scolded Andrew for failing to write her the kinds of letters she longed for. “Although your letters are ‘like angels visits few and far between,’ yet when they do come you hardly say how do you do, and good-bye; do let me know everything that passes, how you get along and what you employ yourself about, and if you think much about us. You are never absent from my thoughts. When I lay down it is only to think of you, and when I sleep [I] dream of you.”
Having been a part of their marriage from the beginning, Jackson shared Emily and Andrew’s sadness. “Although we have been visited by a vast number of ladies and gentlemen, and inundated as usu
al by office hunters, still we have appeared lonesome—several times I have been left to sup alone,” Jackson wrote to Emily on Thursday, January 20, 1831. “The levee was numerously attended, but still, there being no lady of the house, there was something wanting, and ladies appeared without a pivot to move on.”
Gustave de Beaumont, who was traveling in America with Tocqueville, met Jackson the same week and found both the president and the presidency unexpectedly unimposing. Jackson, Beaumont wrote his mother, “is an old man of 66 years, well preserved, and appears to have retained all the vigor of his body and spirit. He is not a man of genius. Formerly he was celebrated as a duelist and hot-head.… If he has courtiers they are not very attentive to him, for when we entered the salon he was alone.”
The president and the White House seemed muted to Beaumont. “People in France have got an altogether false idea of the presidency of the United States,” Beaumont said. “They see in it a sort of political sovereignty and compare it constantly with our constitutional monarchies. Of a certainty, the power of the King of France would be nil if it were modeled after the power of the President of the United States.”
Power, and the efforts of those who sought to take it from him, was much on Jackson’s mind. To him, the enormity of the sins committed against the Eatons, and his abiding belief in the plot against him, kept him from accepting Emily back to the White House.
IN EARLY 1831 the Globe announced that Jackson would seek another term in the White House. “The conquering Hero is again in the field, and it must now be seen who are his friends and who are his foes,” the paper said. Twenty months before the election, however, Jackson was presiding over an administration riven with feuds and beset by scandal. His vice president was frozen out but still had alliances with three members of the Cabinet (Branch, Ingham, and Berrien); his secretary of state was viewed as the Iago of the White House, with Jackson cast in the role of the bewitched ruler in Van Buren’s thrall; and, of course, his own family was divided over Margaret Eaton’s status. In the late winter and early spring of 1831, several forces intersected to extricate Jackson from many of his tangled problems.
The first was the reemergence of an ancient quarrel. A dozen years earlier, in the Monroe administration, Adams and Calhoun had been in the Cabinet when Jackson had preemptively invaded Florida, leading to great controversy in Washington. At the time, Adams, the secretary of state, had defended Jackson’s decision; others, including Calhoun, the secretary of war, had questioned it. Jackson, who had been aware that Calhoun had opposed his Florida campaign, had not pressed the matter in the late 1820s, a time when he needed Calhoun in order to bring along the South in the race against Adams. The calculating part of Jackson—a part of his character his foes tended to underestimate, much to their dismay—had tucked the Florida issue away until he needed it.
And now, amid threats of nullification and trouble in the Cabinet, he did. Over a period of months between 1830 and 1831, the president demanded to know (though he probably already knew) what Calhoun had thought and done in the Florida matter. Calhoun understood that the argument was being revived to complete his estrangement from Jackson. “I should be blind not to see that this whole affair is a political maneuver, in which the design is that you should be the instrument and myself the victim,” Calhoun wrote Jackson. The Florida history was suddenly of present value for those Jacksonians who hated Calhoun. Even the smooth-tempered John Overton, so often a conciliating force in Jackson’s private world, detected only danger when it came to Calhoun. “He is aspiring, we all know, and his eye has never been averted for a moment from the presidency, since he became a member of Mr. Monroe’s Cabinet,” Overton wrote Jackson. “This is not unnatural for talented men. Hence, no man saw with more pain (Mr. Clay not excepted) the rise and elevation of your character.”
Isolated, Calhoun decided to publish the correspondence about the Seminole affair, a pamphlet that first appeared in Green’s Telegraph on Thursday, February 17, 1831. Jackson feigned surprise and outrage that the vice president had taken the argument public and thus divided the party; Calhoun self-pityingly claimed that the entire controversy was “a conspiracy for my destruction.” (It is likely that Jackson knew, or at least strongly suspected, that Calhoun was about to publish and did not try to stop him, gambling that the move would make Calhoun look disloyal to the president—which it did.) Blair opened a counteroffensive. “The Globe you will have seen is determined to make a bold push to keep up the war if possible between the P. and the V.P.,” Ingham said, and, in Blair’s capable hands, it was surely possible. Blair, Ingham said, “came out pell mell … to make a war of extermination against Calhoun under the banner of Gen. Jackson.” Jackson was done with Calhoun forever. “A man who could secretly make the attempt … to destroy me, and that under the strongest professions of friendship,” Jackson said, “is base enough to do anything.”
Perhaps even to challenge Jackson in 1832. Clay was already running, and Jackson was in the field, and Calhoun was still assessing his own chances. On Wednesday, March 2, 1831, Calhoun went to Meridian Hill to see John Quincy Adams, with whom he had served in Monroe’s Cabinet and under whom he had been vice president. Adams received him coolly. “This is the first time he has called upon me since the last Administration closed,” Adams said. “I meet Mr. Calhoun’s advances to a renewal of the intercourse of common civility because I cannot reject them. But I once had confidence in the qualities of his heart. It is not totally destroyed, but so impaired that it can never be fully restored. Mr. Calhoun’s friendships and enmities are regulated exclusively by his interests. His opinions are the sport of every popular blast, and his career as a statesman has been marked by a series of the most flagrant inconsistencies.… Calhoun veers round in his politics, to be always before the wind, and makes his intellect the pander to his will.”
The next day, another caller, a journalist named Matthew L. Davis, came to Adams, and they spent two hours talking politics. Davis reported some bold words of Calhoun’s, telling Adams that Calhoun thought himself “the strong man of the South” who “expected to obtain the votes of all the Southern states except Georgia.” When Davis told Calhoun he would not back him, Calhoun had “only asked for fair play in public and if the election should come to the House of Representatives.”
AS CALHOUN DREAMED of the presidency and Clay planned for it, Jackson decided to bring order to his own house and dispatched Andrew on Tuesday, March 8, to bring Emily back. The reason for his relenting as Congress adjourned is unclear. It was most likely exhaustion at the battle combined with his characteristic belief that he would win in the end. There was the presidential campaign, the standoff with South Carolina, and the war with the Bank, and Jackson hated the idea of another lonely season. For Andrew, spring meant the promise of reunion. “The adjournment of Congress is to my feelings on this occasion what the melting of the ice and the spring navigation of the rivers is to the merchant—the source of my joy,” Andrew wrote Emily as he left by stage for Tennessee. “Kiss Jackson and the little red bird for me.” He was expected in Nashville shortly to collect his family and set back out for Washington, bound for the White House.
No sooner had Andrew Donelson arrived in Tennessee, however, than another letter arrived from Jackson. He had changed his mind. “As much as I desire you, and your dear little family with me,” he wrote Andrew, “unless you and yours can harmonize with Major Eaton and his family I do not wish you here.” Stunned, Emily and Andrew determined to stay in Nashville. “Recent information from the General makes it impossible for me to return to Washington without hearing from him first,” Donelson wrote to Secretary Branch. “I need not tell you the cause, you can guess it too well.”
VAN BUREN HAD been thinking about what Ingham called “this disgusting petticoat business” for a long time. A triumphant two-term Jackson administration would reflect well on the architect of the initial 1828 victory, and Van Buren, like many others, hoped one day to have the White House for himself.
In the first months of 1831, worried about “the plots, intrigues and calumnies by which I had been for two years surrounded,” Van Buren said, he settled on a plan: he would resign from the State Department, a move that, once accomplished, triggered a series of events that would ultimately free Jackson from scandal, strengthen him politically, and reunite the president’s family.
Jackson and Van Buren were on their daily horseback ride, when a thunderstorm drove them inside a nearby tavern. Jackson’s mood matched the weather. “His spirits were on that day much depressed and on our way he spoke feelingly of the condition to which he had been reduced in his domestic establishment, Major Donelson and the ladies and children, of whom he was exceedingly fond, having, some time before, fled to Tennessee to avoid the Eaton malaria,” Van Buren said. Unable to bring himself to raise the issue of his resignation, Van Buren left the president alone with his thoughts, passing the interlude in the tavern chatting with a farmer. The storm over, Jackson and Van Buren resumed their ride. Soon Jackson’s horse slipped on the wet road and “threatened to fall or to throw his rider,” Van Buren recalled. “I was near enough to seize the bridle and thus to assist him in regaining his footing.”
“You have possibly saved my life, sir!” Jackson said, then mumbled what Van Buren called “broken and half audible sentences which I understood to import that he was not certain whether his escape from death, if it was one, was under existing circumstances, worthy of much congratulation.” Van Buren saw that this was hardly the time to bring up anything as momentous as the loss of the secretary of state. On a later ride, however, Jackson’s humor was much improved, and the two were near the Potomac when Jackson, with more hope than certainty, said, “We should soon have peace in Israel.”
