American Lion

by Jon Meacham

  In a way, Taney was calling for followers to play a more consistent and demanding role in politics than might be comfortable for them. If a mass representative democracy were to work well, a leader’s troops could not be—to borrow a phrase from the Revolutionary War ethos so important to Jackson—sunshine patriots. They would have to be vigilant, keeping abreast of the shifting calculus of politics through the newspapers and standing ready to argue the party line with passion and conviction. A willingness to wage constant partisan combat, no matter what the issue, was an emerging requirement in the politics coming into being in the 1830s. Party organization was not new, but the machine Van Buren, Kendall, Blair, and others were building was larger and more complicated than any previous American political operation. And this early machine depended upon Andrew Jackson as its engine—a human engine that could inspire, charm, cajole, persuade, and, when necessary, coerce.

  AS JACKSON PRESSED the known limits of presidential power, Edward Everett wrote Henry Clay asking his thoughts about whether the opposition should try to impeach the president. It was a radical thought, but Jackson was in many senses a radical president, conducting himself in ways that were difficult to fit into any generally accepted ideological category. On Maysville and in the Cherokee case, he respected states’ rights; on nullification, he threatened war. Though there was a relatively coherent creed guiding him—a kind of Jeffersonian republicanism in which the preservation of the Union was central, since without a union presumably there would be no theater for Jeffersonian republicanism of any sort—Jackson was a politician, not a philosopher, and politicians generally value power over strict intellectual consistency, which leads a president’s supporters to nod sagely at their leader’s creative flexibility and drives his opponents to sputter furiously about their nemesis’s hypocrisy.

  As devoutly as Clay would have relished watching Jackson face impeachment, he believed Jackson too popular. “On the question of impeachment, suggested by you, I entertain no doubt of the President’s liability to it,” Clay said in reply to Everett on Sunday, June 12, 1831. “But, at present (what may be the state of the case hereafter we cannot say now) from the composition of the Senate, there is not the least prospect of such a prosecution being effectual. To attempt it, therefore, in the existing division of that body, would be unavailing, and, on that account, you would not be able to carry with you the judgment or the feelings of the public. Indeed there would be a danger of exciting the sympathies of the people in behalf of a person whom they have not yet altogether ceased to idolize.”

  But Jackson understood the political difficulties he was facing. Though he believed he had done the right thing in sacking the Cabinet, he also knew that entire Cabinets did not fall in America; that was a European sort of thing. The purge could cost him politically, and he was still working out precisely how many opponents he would face in 1832. He knew about Clay, and he was awaiting final word about Calhoun.

  “Mr. Calhoun will run for president if his friends believe he can be got into the House,” Jackson said. “This has been intended since 1828. The secret and precious plots are all leaking out.” Thinking of the Hermitage, he told John Coffee that the tranquillity of the plantation held enormous appeal at the moment. “Could I with honor … I would fly to it, there to bury myself from the corruption and treachery of this wicked world, where the wicked never cease troubling, and there the weary can have no rest. But this to me is denied, and I must submit.”

  Suffering from headaches and loneliness, he hated the idea that Clay and Calhoun might be able to run against him as a dictator, sending the election to the House, where he could lose yet again. He could not afford to show his insecurities to a wide audience, and so Emily and Andrew found themselves, as his closest family, suffering the most from the emotional storms he unleashed when he was feeling overburdened, angry, anxious, misunderstood, and helpless. He lived for power. Take that away, or threaten to, and the mask would fall, revealing a vulnerable, often violent man torn between tenderness and wrath.

  Worried by the trouble Jackson was confronting inside and outside the White House, Jackson’s Tennessee friends—Overton; McLemore; Coffee; Alfred Balch, a Nashville lawyer; and John Bell, a Tennessee congressman—went to work in midsummer. They knew he needed signs of reassurance, respect, and affection—three essential elements in steeling presidents to engage hostile forces. They knew he needed Emily and Andrew. And they knew their man and spent hours with Jackson bashing Calhoun, praising Eaton, and bolstering Jackson’s confidence by assuring him that he was not truly alone. “Our true policy now is to effect a union of action of all the true hearted throughout the country,” Balch told Jackson. “Let us clear our decks for action. Prepare our friends at Headquarters to move in a solid column. And there will not be the slightest danger.”

  In late July 1831, the Tennesseans gambled that Jackson’s need for family and comfort would outweigh all else, and they packed Emily, Andrew (who had returned to Tennessee in June), and the children off to Washington. On Friday, July 29, 1831, after “the most mature reflection,” McLemore and Bell wrote Jackson, the group “urged it on Major Donelson to set out with his family for Washington without further correspondence, just as he did at the commencement of your administration, as a part of your family. We doubt not that his course and that of his family will be such as to afford no uneasiness to yourself or any just protest for the censure of your enemies. We think there is no necessity for the specification of terms on one side or the other. If on pursuing the course advised, Major Donelson shall go on to the city contrary to your wishes, we and not him are to blame.”

  THE WISE MEN of Tennessee believed that the sight of the family and the sounds of the children—along with the disappearance of the Eatons and the joining of the battle against the radicals in the South—would open a new, more peaceful period in the White House.

  As a lawyer, a soldier, and a politician, Jackson had long seen and experienced life in sequential chapters—case followed case, battle followed battle, election followed election, legislative fight followed legislative fight. Never dumb (only stubborn), Jackson was also ready to turn the page in the White House. He had so many other political concerns that he did not derail the reunion. McLemore told Coffee that there was every reason to hope for serenity, at least inside the White House. “All things will work right after a while.”

  Jackson, pen in hand, was writing a letter to Van Buren at the moment the Donelsons arrived at the front door of the White House. He had finished five paragraphs on politics, a diplomatic matter with France, and the tariff when the party from Tennessee began to come into the mansion; he had time to write one more section about the new Cabinet before his room flooded with his family, who immediately made the right moves, sending love to Van Buren and began busily resurrecting the world that had been dead for this long year of Jackson’s life. “This moment the ladies have entered, and Miss Mary Eastin and Mrs. Donelson, with the Major, have desired me to make a tender to you of their kind salutations,” Jackson said. “Uncle seems quite happy and everything is moving harmoniously and I sincerely hope it may remain so,” Emily told her sister.

  The cause of harmony was helped immeasurably at seven o’clock on the morning of Monday, September 19, when Margaret and John Eaton set out for Tennessee. “He ought to have left before this,” Andrew Jackson, Jr., said of Eaton in early September.

  But at least the Donelsons were back and things seemed to be veering toward order. As the Eatons’ carriage headed south, a warmth and a peace fell over the domestic life at the White House. The restoration could not have waited much longer, for Jackson needed all his strength. Telling Van Buren of Eaton’s departure, Jackson spoke of the reelection campaign, which he claimed to dread, saying, “Nothing reconciles me to my situation but the assurances of some virtuous men that it is now necessary for the preservation of the Union that I should permit my name to be continued for the next canvass for the Presidency.”

  The words o
f the virtuous and his own high motives played their part, but so did vengeance: “This, with the determination never to be driven by my enemies or to succumb to them, continues me here again.” If he relinquished control, it would be on his timing and his terms. He had come too far to fall now, and the appetites and anxieties that drove him were the kinds of appetites and anxieties that even the presidency of the United States could not satisfy or quell.

  GEORGE BANCROFT, THE historian and future secretary of the navy under President James K. Polk, called at the White House in late December 1831. He was, he wrote to his wife, “quite charmed” with Emily, and with Jackson. “Being determined to have a long and regular chat with the old man, the roaring lion I mean, I went in the evening,” Bancroft wrote. The president’s manners were perfect, the family warm, and the conversation touched on the centrality of virtue in a republic. Jackson, Bancroft said, “declares that our institutions are based upon the virtue of the community, and added that the moment ‘demagogues obtain influence with the people our liberties will be destroyed.’ ” Learned and intellectually polished, Bancroft was arch about Jackson’s lack of education. “He assured me that truth would in the eend (pronounce the word to rhyme with fiend) be every man’s best policy.” On his host’s “qualifications for President,” Bancroft said, “avast there—Sparta hath many a wiser son than he.…”

  Another American man of letters, Nathaniel Hawthorne, recorded a conversation about Jackson that helps explain why Bancroft’s 1831 impression of Jackson was correct but incomplete. A man who had been at a gathering with Jackson, Hawthorne wrote in a journal, “told an anecdote, illustrating the General’s little acquaintance with astronomical science, and his force of will in compelling a whole dinner-party of better-instructed people to knock under to him in an argument about eclipses and the planetary systems generally.” Jackson’s personal force, in other words, swept away everything in its path. Hawthorne’s verdict: “Surely, he was the greatest man we ever had; and his native strength, as well of intellect as character, compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the [more] cunning … the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool.”

  WITH THE 1832 presidential campaign at hand, Jackson’s adopted son, Andrew Jackson, Jr., wrote his kinsman William Donelson a chatty letter from the White House. “I have no very important news to communicate except to tell you of the safe arrival of Cousin Andrew and Emily and the young ladies,” he said on Friday, September 9, 1831. “They are well and we were very glad to see them.” Turning to politics, Andrew junior was optimistic but resigned to a long slog—a fair indication of Jackson’s own thinking, since Andrew junior spent time with his adopted father in Emily and Andrew’s absence. Andrew junior suspected that “the dissolution of the Cabinet will be a theme to harp upon for some time.… God only knows how they will settle it—I suppose [through] public opinion—vox populi; perhaps a little fighting will be had—etc. etc. and some thing else may come forth and too the reelection of the President is not too far distant.”

  High hopes, for victory could not be certain, as Andrew junior himself admitted a moment later. “It is thought that three or four may be put in nomination to run against the Old Man,” he wrote. “They can hope to carry the election into the House of Representatives and there settle it by intrigue, bargain, etc etc etc.” Though he was skeptical, he was unwilling to dismiss the scenario that “Clay, Calhoun or Mr. Adams will one of them oppose the General, perhaps two.” Still, he believed “some of these men will have more sense—but I know that they have ambition sufficient.” Ambition sometimes divorced from sense was something the Jackson circle knew very well indeed. The “Old Man” had taught them a great deal about it—often inadvertently, perhaps, but indelibly.

  IN THE AFTERMATH of the Cabinet breakup, Van Buren had accepted Jackson’s appointment as the envoy to England and moved to London to take up his duties. The Senate would have to confirm the posting, but few expected any problem there—until the nomination actually reached the floor in January 1832. In a sign of the divisiveness of the day, on Wednesday, January 25, 1832, the Senate voted 24–23—Vice President Calhoun broke a 23–23 tie—to reject Van Buren.

  Calhoun was practicing the politics of vengeance, paying Van Buren in kind for Van Buren’s long campaign to turn Jackson against him. The hope was to embarrass Jackson and wreck Van Buren’s future; the first was more easily accomplished than the second. On hearing the news—word arrived as a White House dinner party was breaking up, with the president holding forth in the Red Room—Jackson said, “By the Eternal! I’ll smash them!” Ill and furious, Jackson said Calhoun’s refusal to confirm “has displayed a want of every sense of honor, justice or magnanimity” and asserted that Calhoun was “politically damned.” His enemies were out in the open, working together—what Jackson called a “factious opposition in the Senate with Calhoun and Clay at its head.”

  For Calhoun, it was a rare—and brief—moment of triumph over Van Buren. “It will kill him, sir, kill him dead,” Calhoun said after the Senate vote. “He will never kick, sir, never kick.” Andrew Donelson gauged the politics more aptly than Calhoun. “The common sentiment on this subject is that Mr. Van Buren has been violently thrown overboard by the enemies of the Administration and that its friends are bound to avenge the insult,” Andrew wrote John Coffee. “This sentiment … will no doubt spread throughout the Union. If so there can scarcely be a doubt that Mr. Van Buren will be nominated at Baltimore as the candidate of our party for Vice President.”

  Close to Jackson and again familiar with his thinking, Andrew saw what was coming: the New Yorker would replace the South Carolinian on the Jackson ticket, creating a Western-Northern axis against Clay and perhaps, if he were to run, Calhoun. In London, Van Buren was not feeling well when the news reached him. Still, wrote Washington Irving, the legation’s secretary, Van Buren “received the tidings of his rejection with his usual equanimity.” The British could not help but be impressed with the sheer scope of the Senate’s vicious attack. In a conversation with Irving, a Foreign Office official said that “he had never known a more naked and palpable party maneuver” than to turn down a former secretary of state to be minister to a single nation. “Every thing is going on well,” Clay wrote in February 1832. “V. Buren, Old Hickory and the whole crew will, I think, in due time be gotten rid of.”

  The battle in the Senate had grown even uglier. Senator John Holmes introduced a resolution that the nomination go to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “and that said committee be instructed to investigate the causes which produced the removal of the late Secretaries of the Treasury and Navy Departments, and of the Attorney General of the United States, and also the resignations of the Secretaries of the State and War Departments.” Calling the dissolution a “novel and important political movement,” Holmes also wanted to know “whether the said Martin Van Buren, then Secretary of State, participated in any practices disreputable to the national character, which were designed to operate on the mind of the President of the United States.…” The motion was tabled, but the point was made: the opposition was going to make as much of the purge as it could.

  In Tennessee, the Eatons tried to be cheerful. “To myself, I feel like a new man in the little sphere where now I am placed … standing in the ambitious way of no one, and hence not an object of envy and destruction,” Eaton wrote to Jackson after the return to Tennessee. Margaret wrote Jackson, too. Her anger had faded enough for her to realize that alienating Jackson was monumentally stupid. In her letter, she told him they were visiting the Hermitage: “Would to heaven you were here with us, for I believe you would be more happy; and when years shall roll round, and you shall again be the Cincinnatus of the West, you will see how devoted I have been in my attachment towards you. When the splendor of the President’s home shall be done with, then you will be better able to tell who are your real friends; and I do and can say with truth none will you find more sincere than my d
ear Husband and myself.”

  THE TARGET OF Margaret’s not very veiled attack loved being back at the White House. Emily found the season of 1831–32 “very gay.” She was pregnant with her third child. Andrew Jackson, Jr., had fallen in love with and married a wonderful young woman from Pennsylvania, Sarah Yorke, who quickly became a favorite of Jackson’s and was friendly enough with Emily that, remarkably, there seems to have been little if any tension between the two women. “Cousin Andrew arrived last Sunday with his bride,” Emily wrote to her sister. “She is quite pretty, has black hair and eyes and is about an inch lower than myself—she is quite agreeable and we are all very much pleased with her, and Uncle seems much pleased.”

  To celebrate the wedding—Jackson had stayed in Washington during the actual ceremony in Philadelphia—Emily and Jackson gave Sarah and Andrew junior a huge party. “We were quite gay last week,” Emily wrote home. “In the first place there was a large dining given to them of about forty persons, the cabinet and the diplomatic corps—The dinner party were invited at 5 o’clock, and at 8, three hundred were invited to spend the evening—the party was very brilliant and everything went off well—”

  The dinner for Sarah and Andrew junior did not escape Margaret Bayard Smith’s scrutiny. At issue was who followed whom into dinner, and the new secretary of the Treasury and his wife, the Louis McLanes, back from England, where he had served as minister, were acutely conscious of their status in the capital. Mrs. Smith thought Mrs. McLane “the same frank, gay, communicative woman she ever was,” and found her “evidently very much elated with her past and present dignity.” Yet the first three years of Jackson’s administration had abundantly shown that being in Jackson’s Cabinet—or being married to someone in Jackson’s Cabinet—was no easy task. Chatting with Mrs. McLane after her husband’s appointment, Mrs. Smith said, “She will have as difficult a part to play in society as her husband will in office, as she, as well as he, must be under the influence, I was going to say despotism, of the President’s will.” At Decatur House, which they had taken after Van Buren resigned the State Department, the Livingstons were the leading lights of the moment, and the McLanes were unhappy about being overshadowed by the Livingstons. “Neither Mr. or Mrs. McLane are people who will willingly follow,” Mrs. Smith said, “and it is already rumored that much conflict and dissatisfaction exists in the Cabinet.”