by Jon Meacham
“No!” Van Buren said. “General, there is but one thing can give you peace.”
“What is that, sir?”
“My resignation!”
Three decades later, Van Buren said he could still exactly recall “the start and the earnest look” on Jackson’s face. “Never, sir!” the president said.
But Van Buren laid out the case, arguing that “the course I had pointed to was perhaps the only safe one open to us.” In his memoirs Van Buren is oblique about all that they discussed, but it is possible that he argued that his resignation from the Cabinet would enhance his chances of becoming Jackson’s successor, since he would be insulated from the chaos of the capital and could campaign the way Jackson had—as an outsider, not an insider in the tradition of Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams. Jackson’s victory—both his popular one in 1824 and his undisputed triumph in 1828—was creating a new template for the presidential candidate, and Van Buren was thinking of how he might cast himself in such terms. They rode so far and talked so much—though Van Buren lectured much of the time—that they “did not reach home until long after our usual dinner hour.”
They parted until morning. Van Buren fretted; Jackson did not sleep. Appearing the next day, Van Buren thought, “unusually formal and passionless,” Jackson said: “Mr. Van Buren, I have made it a rule through life never to throw obstacles in the way of any man who, for reasons satisfactory to himself, desires to leave me, and I shall not make your case an exception.” Jackson was wounded by his friend’s prospective abandonment, and he had summoned up the psychological defenses of an orphan who had learned that the people one loves can disappear.
Van Buren jumped up and swore his allegiance, insisting he was only thinking of Jackson’s interests, and that he would stay until the last hour if Jackson wished it.
“You must forgive me, my friend, I have been too hasty in my conclusions,” Jackson said. “I know I have—say no more about it now, but come back at one o’clock—we will take another long ride and talk again in a better and calmer state of mind.”
They did, and Jackson warmed to the idea, asking whether he might bring Barry, Eaton, and Lewis into the conversation. Van Buren agreed, and the next day the three men met at the White House, came to consensus that Van Buren’s plan was sound, and then went back across Lafayette Square to Van Buren’s for dinner.
AFTER THEY ENTERED Decatur House, Eaton said: “Why should you resign? I am the man about whom all the trouble has been made and therefore the one who ought to resign.” Such a development was, Van Buren admitted in his memoirs, “a consummation devoutly to be wished but one I would have assumed to be hopeless.” When Eaton brought it up yet again at supper, Van Buren raised the obvious question: What, he asked, would Mrs. Eaton “think of such a movement as he proposed”? Eaton was certain, he said, that “she would highly approve of it.” The more realistic and less certain Van Buren suggested that Eaton confer with his wife and then bring word again. The next day, Eaton claimed Margaret had said he should indeed leave the Cabinet, and, in the first week of April 1831, Van Buren said, “it was forthwith agreed that we should both resign with General Jackson’s consent, which was obtained on the following day.”
Van Buren would take over as the envoy to England, and Eaton was likely to return to Tennessee to stand for the Senate. “The long agony is nearly over,” Ingham wrote Berrien on Tuesday, April 19, 1831. “Mr. V. B. and Major Eaton have resigned.” Before Ingham could gloat for long, though, Jackson forced him, Berrien, and Branch to resign as well, completing the purge of the Cabinet.
John Berrien, writing from Savannah on Sunday, April 24, was puzzled by the breakup. For all to resign, he told Ingham, “does not seem to be perfectly intelligible.” Van Buren and Eaton could leave for whatever reasons they chose, if the president agreed, Berrien said, “but how it could be believed, that the public would consider that circumstance as affecting you, Branch, or myself, it is difficult to discover.”
Jackson and Van Buren wanted them out of the way. Writing shortly after his firing, with a sense of irony, Ingham told the Pennsylvania lawmaker Samuel McKean that “to make up” for being forced to resign, he had had “a peculiar acknowledgement from Old Hickory of my skill in diplomacy by an invitation this day through the Secretary of State to go to Russia.” He declined.
The drama at Washington was moving quickly and, for the uninitiated, mysteriously. “You must read Tacitus and the Epistles of Pliny to understand this system of manoevering,” John Quincy Adams told his son Charles Francis. “That was the age of informers and spies—of denunciations and conversions.”
As Adams saw it, the rivalries in Washington represented a new iteration of an old and epic story. “You are disgusted with the diminutive rivalries [and] the paltry altercations … of our public men,” Adams wrote his son several days later. “They might indeed quarrel with a better choice of words, and as Addison says of Virgil’s Georgics, cast about their dung with an air of greater dignity. But you remember that in Homer Achilles tells Agamemnon to his face that he has the forehead of a dog and the heart of a deer. We think none the less for this either of Agamemnon or Achilles. Men have railed at each other in good set terms from that day to this. They will still do so as long as there are prizes to contend for which move their avarice or their ambition.”
Jackson would not have appreciated most of Adams’s literary allusions, but he agreed with the central point: politics is brutal because it engages the most fundamental human impulses for affection, honor, power, and fame. Great principles and grand visions are ennobling, but at its best politics is an imperfect means to an altruistic end.
What Van Buren had undertaken on horseback was now reality, and Jackson, at long last, emerged from the Eaton affair with a Cabinet he could control. It had come at a high price, but it had come. Beneath Jackson’s warmth and passionate attachments lay a coldheartedness essential to any great leader. “The President parts from [Eaton] with great reluctance, for he maintains the greatest affection towards him,” Blair said, “but he told me that he could always sacrifice every private feeling to what he considered a public duty.”
While Jackson believed the dissolution a good thing, he still hated the loss of the familiar. He needed Andrew Donelson, who had barely reached Tennessee, back in the White House, both to handle the complexities of the Cabinet crisis and to provide a steadying presence. “My labours have been incessant,” Jackson wrote Andrew on April 19. “I have great need of your aid.” Thrilled to read these words, believing them a reprieve, Andrew hurried back to Washington, telling Emily that he thought “every moment’s detention”—meaning delay on Andrew’s part—“will be felt by Uncle.” The opportunity to begin all over again was at hand, and Andrew did not want to miss it. Emily—though she, too, hated to be away from the center of action—stayed behind.
THE NEWS OF the Cabinet resignations broke in the Globe the next day, on Wednesday, April 20, 1831—a development startling enough to send diplomats in Washington scurrying to brief their governments. The British minister, Charles Vaughan, a neighbor of the Eatons’, wrote Viscount Palmerston, the foreign secretary, that “this day a complete change of the ministers comprising the Cabinet of the President of the United States has taken place.” The new secretaries—Edward Livingston at State, Louis McLane at Treasury, Lewis Cass at War, Levi Woodbury at Navy, and Roger Taney as attorney general—were, Vaughan said, strong appointments; in fact, he said to Palmerston, “the two persons who it is proposed should replace Major Eaton and Mr. Branch enjoy a higher reputation for talent than their predecessors.” Yet it was a treacherous period. On the day the Cabinet was dissolved, Vaughan told London to watch the South, warning the foreign secretary that the tariff issue, because of the “determined opposition to it of the Southern States,” could lead to “a dissolution of the Union.”
The Cabinet news, Bangeman Huygens reported home to the Netherlands, “provides scenes of unmatched scandal.” Recall
ing the 1830 provisional peace with Jackson over the Margaret question, Huygens wrote: “He was near the point of changing ministries for her sake, but … a compromise was made.” It was, however, “false” and “unnatural,” and now the president, Huygens said, felt it was time “to entirely remake his Cabinet.”
Jackson decided that gratitude to Eaton for resigning compelled him to insist that the new Cabinet receive Margaret on the same terms that had so divided his first Cabinet. Establishment observers like Margaret Bayard Smith were at a loss to explain the curiosities of the Jackson White House, so they put his tenacity down to senility. “In truth, the only excuse his best friends can make for his violence and imbecilities is that he is in his dotage,” Mrs. Smith said after the Cabinet dissolution. “The papers do not exaggerate, nay do not detail one half of his imbecilities.”
John Quincy Adams was preparing for a trip when word arrived of the mass resignations. Calling it the “explosion at Washington,” Adams reported to his son that “people stare—and laugh—and say, what next?”
It was a good question.
CHAPTER 13
A MEAN AND SCURVY
PIECE OF BUSINESS
SINCE HIS CHILDHOOD hiding in the Carolina countryside on the lookout for Tarleton’s redcoats, Jackson loved being in on what he called “secretes.” As president he was no different, and he maintained an informal network to gather bits and pieces of political intelligence. In the South, Joel Poinsett, the diplomat, world traveler, and firm Unionist who was Jackson’s main source of information in the region, was hearing talk of conspiracy and rebellion. “I know not how things are moving over in Charleston, but with us the nullifiers are in motion, and … are endeavoring to rally their scattered forces for a new contest in 1832,” Alexander Speer, a former comptroller general of South Carolina, wrote to Poinsett early in 1831 from Church Hill in Abbeville, near the western edge of South Carolina. “I will not be at all surprised if at the next presidential election Mr. Calhoun’s name should be brought forward as a candidate.”
A repeat of 1824, with Calhoun and Henry Clay in the villainous roles, was under consideration, Speer said, and he thought his information sound. “The understanding appears to be that Mr. Calhoun’s name is to be run as a candidate, not because it is expected he can be elected, but to defeat the election by the people, and thus throw it into the House of Representatives, where it can be managed as to their best … interests.… This junto are at this time making open declarations of hostility to the Union, and expect roundly that … civil war must and shall be the consequence. As to Genl. Jackson their hostility is unequivocal.…”
The Cabinet breakup led to a national debate over Jackson’s first three years of leadership and whether he should have another term. With the presidential campaign at hand, partisans on all sides—Jackson’s, Calhoun’s, Clay’s, and others’—chattered about the resignations. The governor of Pennsylvania, George Wolf, wrote Ingham of allegations that “Jackson had turned you and Branch out because he detected you in conspiracy to turn him out and put Calhoun in his place.”
The opposition continued to fear Jackson’s mysterious power over so many people. “His administration is absolutely odious, and yet there is an adherence to the man,” John Sergeant, a former congressman from Pennsylvania, wrote to Clay. “It remains to be seen whether this will not yield to the conviction that his continuance must be destructive of everything that is worthy to be cherished.”
Civility in Washington—rare enough since the election of Adams by the House in 1825—disappeared. Writing to her son Charles Francis Adams, Louisa Adams called the battles within the Jackson administration “altogether as mean and scurvy a piece of business as I ever saw.” John McLean of Ohio, appointed by Jackson to the Supreme Court in 1829, believed that “the Jackson party is a good deal dispirited” in the wake of the resignations. “Gen. Jackson will not get on as successfully as many are inclined to think,” McLean wrote Ingham in May. “The general’s qualifications for the office begin to be questioned by many who have believed him capable of managing the government by the superior powers of his own mind.” In Kentucky and Ohio, McLean said, Jacksonians “have lost the enthusiasm they once possessed in the cause.” In South Carolina, the radicals thought the crisis would help them. “The administration at Washington cannot recover from the retreat precipitate of the late Cabinet,” James Hamilton, Jr., wrote to James Henry Hammond from Charleston, “and consequently Jackson’s reelection is placed in such hazard as scarcely to be a probable event.”
THE CABINET PURGE did not bring peace to John Eaton, either. He was out of power, open to charges that his resignation proved what his enemies had been saying about his wife, and felt disoriented by his sudden official distance from Jackson—he had served with Jackson in three different decades, in wars hot and cold, and was now in an ambiguous position in Washington, close to the president but not in office. Not surprisingly, then, Eaton began to lose control of his temper. In the pages of the Telegraph on Friday, June 17, 1831, Duff Green, firmly allied with Calhoun, told the Eaton story, and Branch, Berrien, and Ingham were (accurately) said to have snubbed the wife of the secretary of war on moral grounds. In response, Eaton issued a challenge to the three men in a note written that evening to “know of you, whether or not you sanction, or will disavow” this “vile abuse of me, and of my family.” Ingham was the one most willing to answer.
Thus began three days of incendiary correspondence and confrontation. Ingham would not dignify the question of his having sanctioned the Telegraph piece with a reply, he wrote Eaton the next day, and then snarled: “In the meantime I take the occasion to say that you must be not a little deranged to imagine that any blustering of yours could induce me to disavow what all the inhabitants of this City know and perhaps half the people of the U.S. believe to be true.” Answering later that Saturday, Eaton called Ingham’s note “impudent and insolent” and raised the stakes: “I demand of you satisfaction, for the wrong and injury you have done me. Your answer must determine whether you are so far entitled to the name and character of a gentleman, as to be able to act like one.”
So it was that the former secretary of war decided to kill the former secretary of the Treasury. When there was no immediate reply from Ingham to the challenge to duel, a brother-in-law of Eaton’s, Dr. Philip G. Randolph, forced his way in to see Ingham on Sunday morning with what Ingham called “a threat of personal violence.” Affecting a condescending tone—and thereby infuriating Eaton all the more—Ingham wrote: “I perfectly understand the part you are made to play in the farce now acting before the American people. I am not to be intimidated by threats or provoked by abuse to any act inconsistent with the pity and contempt which your condition and conduct inspire.”
At this Eaton went nearly mad. “Your contempt I heed not, your pity I despise,” he replied. “It is such contemptible fellows as yourself that have set forth rumors of their own creation, and taken them as a ground of imputation against me.… But no more; here our correspondence closes. Nothing more will be received short of an acceptance of my demand of Saturday, and nothing more be said to me until face-to-face we meet. It is not in my nature to brook your insults; nor will they be submitted to.”
On the morning of Monday, June 20, 1831, Eaton and his friends searched the city for Ingham—Ingham’s office, his boardinghouse, streets where he was likely to be. It was a formidable company: Lewis, Randolph, Colonel John Campbell (the treasurer of the United States), and Major Thomas L. Smith (the register of the Treasury). In Ingham’s mind, there was no doubt about the mission: they were “lying in wait,” he said, “for the purpose of assassination.”
The Eaton party took up positions at the Treasury and in a grocery store near Ingham’s F Street lodgings. “While prowling about … the movements of the band were so suspicious as to induce Ingham’s son to go to his father’s lodgings to put him on his guard,” Duff Green told William Cabell Rives, the Virginia editor. Now “apprised of these m
ovements,” Ingham armed himself and, guarded by his son and a handful of friends, he managed to go to work and come home without being attacked. Daylight may have deterred the Eaton forces, and Ingham’s own unexpected show of force probably played a part, too. Duff Green thought Ingham’s display of strength in the streets—what Green called “the firmness of the old gentleman backed by his friends”—had spooked Eaton, who, Green believed, had “felt his courage oozing out at his fingers’ ends and immediately left the building without noise or bloodshed.”
Whatever momentary failure of nerve may have afflicted Eaton, it lasted only a moment, for by nightfall he was back on the march. “Having recruited an additional force in the evening,” Ingham recalled, “they paraded until a late hour on the streets near my lodgings heavily armed, threatening an assault on the dwelling I reside in.” Beseeching Jackson to intervene “as the chief magistrate of the U. States and most especially of the District of Columbia, whose duties in maintaining good order among its inhabitants … cannot be unknown to you,” Ingham invoked Jackson’s public responsibilities rather than his personal feelings. On reflection, however, Ingham decided that hoping Jackson would side with him against Eaton was a bad bet, and since the stakes were now life and death, guessing wrong could be fatal. So, unwilling to risk his luck any further, Ingham fled the city at four o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, June 21, taking a stage to Baltimore.
THE ESCAPE PROBABLY saved his life. Far from policing the District or chastising the officials of his government—including Lewis, the acting secretary of war and a resident of the White House—Jackson was taking a kind of perverse pleasure in Ingham’s predicament and flight in the darkness. Replying to Ingham—who was already out of Washington, heading for safety—Jackson dismissed Ingham’s story about the posse, telling him that the men Ingham had named had denied the charge.
