by Jon Meacham
SUCH WAS THE covenant Jackson offered the nation at a critical moment. If the different parts of the country would surrender something dear to them for the sake of a larger cause, then they would be repaid with more liberty, more prosperity, and more happiness than if each element chose to guard its selfish interests, sacrificing the whole and foreclosing the possibilities of democracy. What Jackson once called “the prudence, the wisdom, and the courage” of a good people will leave a better, freer nation to the next generation, which will in turn, it is hoped, be faithful stewards of the American experiment in liberty. That, at least, was Jackson’s “most fervent prayer” for America to “that Almighty Being before whom I now stand,” he said in closing, beseeching God to deliver the country “from dangers of all kinds.” As a soldier of the people, Jackson would do all he could in the cause. For him it was the work of a lifetime.
The inaugural address was a brilliant but exhausting effort. With his sense of theater, Jackson, who wore his great cloak to and from the ceremonies, showed no signs of strain in the House chamber. After his speech, he took the oath again from John Marshall—it was to be the last of the chief justice’s nine inaugurations—and returned to the White House through the brutal cold, where he stood with Emily to receive well-wishers. One guest, Philip Hone, glimpsed the troubling reality behind Jackson’s dignified demeanor. “I would bet large odds that he does not outlive the present term of his office,” Hone said—though people, including Jackson himself, had been futilely betting against his health for years. Still, by late afternoon it had already been a long day, and Emily did what Rachel would have done: she sent him to bed.
EMILY AND ANDREW led the White House circle to the inaugural party, again held at Carusi’s. Jackson settled in for a quiet night in the White House as Calhoun traveled south, fast, en route to Columbia. The tariff had not been cut as much as South Carolina had asked, but it had still been cut, and Calhoun thought it wisest for the state to hold its fire. As the historian William Freehling wrote, the Clay rates were twice what the Nullification Ordinance had called for, but even James Henry Hammond “confessed that he thought that a majority of Carolinians would accept the compromise.” Hammond was right.
A week after Jackson’s inauguration, on Monday, March 11, 1833, the South Carolina convention met to consider what to do in light of the compromise tariff and the Force Bill. According to Samuel Cram Jackson’s diary of the convention, George McDuffie “very eloquently, bitterly, and sarcastically” attacked the compromise tariff, “condemned the administration and bragged about the South. His speech [was] calculated to influence the South against the North,” and Hayne seemed “very bitter and violent.”
Still, the ferocity was the exception, not the rule. The combination of the reduced duties and the fact that Congress had given the president the power to strike militarily both pacified and sobered many of the nullifiers, who rescinded the ordinance and accepted the tariff. The Force Bill was different, though. South Carolina would stand down for now, but its pride would not allow Jackson’s expanded powers to go unnoticed. And so the convention nullified the Force Bill—a symbolic gesture, to be sure, but a telling one, for it signaled that though a battle over states’ rights had ended, the war had not.
To underscore the point, hard-liners pressed for a test oath for officeholders to pledge, according to one proposal, “primary and paramount allegiance” to the state. Calhoun urged moderation—“We must not think of secession, but in the last extremity,” he said in late January. “It would be the most fatal of all steps.” While the crisis was resolved, however, its causes endured.
Frustrated by Jackson’s apparent victory, the attorney general of South Carolina, Robert Barnwell Smith—who later changed his name to Robert Barnwell Rhett, after an ancestor—dispensed with politic indirection or code in remarks to the convention. “A people, owning slaves, are mad, or worse than mad, who do not hold their destinies in their own hands,” he said. A powerful federal government could do slavery no good, Smith said: “Let Gentlemen not be deceived. It is not the Tariff—not Internal Improvement—nor yet the Force Bill, which constitutes the great evil against which we are contending.… These are but the forms in which the despotic nature of the Government is evinced—but it is the despotism which constitutes the evil: and until this Government is made a limited Government … there is no liberty—no security for the South.”
From Jackson’s vantage point, however, the tariff was cut, the powers of his office expanded, and the crisis eased. For a few days in the middle of March, calm prevailed in the White House, a well-earned respite. Jackson even indulged in philosophy, a luxury his victory had afforded him. “Reason must, when exercised, always triumph over error,” he wrote Poinsett in March. Reason did not always triumph, but in this case Jackson believed it had, and he drew strength and renewed self-confidence from the struggle.
WELCOME FAMILY NEWS also cheered Jackson. In Tennessee, Mary Eastin Polk delivered a healthy girl, Sarah Rachel, and Jackson jocularly warned her of the competition in store with Sarah Yorke Jackson’s Rachel, who had been born just before the presidential election the year before. “You know I have always been an advocate for the harmony of connections and families,” he told Mary. “To insure this harmony between you and Sarah I would advise you to submit the sprightliness and beauty of your Sarah Rachel and her little Rachel to the adjudication of a court of inquiry to settle this important matter, for Sarah writes me that her Rachel is one of the most sprightly and beautiful she ever saw.…” Closer to home, across the hall in the Donelson nursery, John Samuel Donelson, approaching his first birthday, had been sick, Jackson reported, “but his teeth have appeared through the gums, and he is better.”
John Samuel’s mother, meanwhile, was worried about the end of the season. “Washington will be very dull this summer,” Emily wrote her mother on Monday, April 22, 1833. Cora Livingston was marrying; Louise, whom Emily called “one of my best friends,” was moving to France with her husband as he took up his post as minister. But as Emily should have known by now, Andrew Jackson’s Washington was never dull for long.
CHAPTER 21
MY MIND IS
MADE UP
JACKSON NEVER FLINCHED. On Monday, May 6, 1833, the presidential party was on a steamboat excursion to Fredericksburg, Virginia, when a disturbed former navy officer, Robert B. Randolph, came through the crowd aboard the vessel. There had been no warning sign, nothing to lead anyone to suspect a threat, but Randolph leaped at the president as though to assault him.
Andrew Donelson lunged to protect Jackson. Fueled by adrenaline and affection, the nephew was ready to kill to save his uncle. “Had I known the man or had any intimation of his presence nothing would have been easier for me than to put him to death,” Donelson told Emily’s brother Stockley—an assertion that must have sprung viscerally from Donelson’s love for Jackson, for Donelson, who was not armed, could have used only his hands to slay the assailant. A table separated Donelson from Jackson and Randolph, and Donelson was joined by others in “hurling the villain from his position.” Randolph bloodied Jackson’s face, but the president’s stare stopped the assailant. “The object of the attack was no doubt assassination, but the ruffian was unnerved by the countenance of Uncle and he could do no more than display his intention,” Donelson said.
Still, blood had been drawn. It was the first such physical assault on an American president, and the country reacted nervously, seeing the assassination attempt as a sign of more fundamental tensions. Washington Irving happened to be in Fredericksburg and spent time with Jackson afterward. “It is a brutal transaction, which I cannot think of without indignation, mingled with a feeling of almost despair, that our national character should receive such crippling wounds from the hands of our own citizens,” Irving wrote his brother. An admirer of the president’s from Alexandria, Virginia, offered to avenge the attack. “Sir, if you will pardon me in case I am tried and convicted, I will kill Randolph for this insult t
o you, in fifteen minutes!”
Jackson demurred. “No, sir, I cannot do that,” he replied. “I want no man to stand between me and my assailants, and none to take revenge on my account.” He told Van Buren that if he had been standing rather than sitting behind the table, Randolph “never would have moved with life from the tracks he stood in.” Jackson’s frontier blood was up. He did not want, he said, “a military guard around the President,” which left only this option: officials, he said, had “to be prepared … [to] shoot down or otherwise destroy those dastardly assassins whenever they approach us.”
Randolph was a figure in the Eaton affair. John Eaton and John Timberlake (Margaret Eaton’s first husband, who had died while serving aboard the Constitution) had been accused of financial impropriety involving money that Timberlake had controlled as a navy purser. Kendall investigated and came to suspect Randolph, who had taken Timberlake’s place as purser on the Constitution after Timberlake’s death, of misconduct. All of this led to controversy in Washington and a naval court of inquiry; in April 1833, just before the attack, Jackson had dismissed Randolph from the navy.
The spectacle of assassination belonged more to the worlds of ancient Rome and the kingdoms of Europe, where struggles for power between monarchs, aristocrats, and the populace often led to plots and upheavals. Randolph’s attack exacerbated the sense among Jackson’s critics that the president had become a king, the White House a court, and Washington a conspiratorial capital.
FOR DONELSON, BLAIR, and Kendall, 1833 and 1834 were very good years—years in which they held their greatest sway. They were soldiers in an army Jackson deployed to crush foes from Philadelphia to Paris; his push for power over the Bank, over Congress, and over foreign capitals kept him engaged in constant strife. He was, as ever, confident of victory. Once, on the way to the Rip Raps, riding by steamboat down the Chesapeake, the seas were rough, and a fellow passenger, James Parton reported, “exhibited a good deal of alarm.” Jackson was preternaturally calm. “You are uneasy,” he said to the worried man. “You have never sailed with me before, I see.”
In the White House, attention was once more turning to Nicholas Biddle. The recharter had been vetoed and Jackson had been reelected, but the federal government’s deposits remained in the Bank, and Biddle could again try to renew the Bank in the hope that Congress would override Jackson’s veto. Understanding this, Jackson looked for a way to destroy the Bank now, rather than be content with having denied it a future beyond its 1836 date of expiration. “The hydra of corruption is only scotched, not dead,” Jackson told James K. Polk. Though the House had passed a resolution (by a margin of 109 to 46) asserting that the government’s deposits were safe in the Bank and should be left there, Jackson was unconvinced. The vote came after the House decided to reject a report, crafted by Polk, alleging corruption.
“Biddle is actually using the people’s money to frustrate the people’s will,” Blair said to Jackson early in 1833. “He is using the money of the government for the purpose of breaking down the government. If he had not the public money he could not do it.” This was an obsession with Blair, who told William Lewis that “the damned bank ought to be put down, and the only effectual way of doing it was to take from it the whole of the public money.”
Jackson agreed with his editor. “He shan’t have the public money,” Jackson said of Biddle. “I’ll remove the deposits! Blair, talk with our friends about this, and let me know what they think of it.”
Blair then canvassed a circle of Jacksonians—and found that none of them was for removing the deposits. Van Buren was against it; so was Silas Wright, Jr., of New York, who argued, James Parton said, “that the withdrawal of the public money from the bank would compel it to curtail its business to such a degree that half the merchants in the country would fail.” Kendall and Van Buren had a tense conversation about the issue. The vice president was cool to the idea, leading Kendall to suggest that a strong Bank would probably be an able ally of the National Republicans in taking the White House away from the Democrats—that is, away from Van Buren—in three years’ time. It had been an unpleasant scene. Kendall’s son-in-law noted that “the parties separated, both somewhat excited.”
When Blair gave Jackson the bad news that few of the White House’s allies favored removing the deposits, Jackson was unimpressed. “Oh, my mind is made up on that matter,” Jackson said. “Biddle shan’t have the public money to break down the public administration with. It’s settled. My mind’s made up.”
Even for Jackson, such resolution was more easily articulated than accomplished. Respectable opinion doubted the president had the authority to do what he wanted to do. It was Kendall who saw that breaking the Bank once and for all required taking the fight from the capital to the country. The crucial first step in democratic leadership: get the people on the president’s side.
The story of Jackson’s presidency thus far was about the growth of executive power, both formally and informally. The veto on grounds of policy differences was a formal means that Jackson had put at a president’s disposal. The building of public support for a president’s policies, so evident in the battle over the Bank veto the previous year and in the struggle against South Carolina, was a more informal but no less potent weapon. The deposits battle would test both formal authority (who had the legal power to move the money?) and the president’s ability to persuade the public of the wisdom of a particular course.
Kendall made the case to Jackson one day when the president was worrying that if he “did cause the deposits to be removed from the Bank, Congress, having resolved that they were safe there, would require them to be restored.”
Kendall dismissed the anxiety. “Let the removal take place so early as to give us several months to defend the measure in the Globe, and we will bring up the people to sustain you with a power which Congress dare not resist,” he told Jackson. His confidence was not mere bluster; he was gaining a reputation for his ability to require absolute loyalty from Jackson’s men. (Hearing that Kendall was to “take charge of appointments,” Samuel Ingham remarked bitterly that “the new men must harmonize”—a favorite Jackson term—“ie sign their names and register commissions decreed by the ‘Argus club.’”)
One obstacle: the new secretary of the Treasury, William J. Duane, who took office on Saturday, June 1, 1833, replacing Louis McLane, who had moved to the State Department after Edward Livingston was made minister to France.
A Philadelphian, the son of the editor of the Jeffersonian newspaper the Aurora, Duane was a businessman, lawyer, and legislator who was chosen, in part, to give Pennsylvania a seat in the Cabinet. At first reluctant—Jackson’s Cabinet officers did not last long—Duane eventually accepted. Duane was an opponent of the Bank, but Jackson apparently never asked him what he might think of removing the deposits. By law the Treasury secretary was empowered to decide what to do with the public deposits; whether or not his decision had to reflect the will of the president would become the question of the hour.
DUANE’S TENURE BEGAN badly and never improved. On the evening of his first day as secretary, a Saturday, he was visited at his lodgings by Reuben Whitney, a merchant and former Bank official who had become an ally of Kendall’s. To Duane’s surprise and dismay, Whitney undertook to explain the political lay of the land—a task Jackson had chosen not to undertake himself. Whitney spoke bluntly. “He stated that the President had concluded to take upon himself the responsibility of directing the Secretary of the Treasury to remove the public deposits from [the] bank, and to transfer them to state banks,” Duane recalled. Whitney added that “no doubt the President would soon speak to” Duane on the subject.
The new secretary did not take Whitney’s visit well. “The communication thus made to me created surprise and mortification,” he recalled. “I was surprised at the position of affairs which it revealed; and mortified at the low estimate which had been formed of the independence of my character” in the assumption that he would fall into line
with the machinations of the White House. Duane complained to Louis McLane, who had recruited him. The next night Kendall himself appeared to see if he could assuage Duane’s pride and make sure everything was in order.
It was not. Duane was correct and cool, saying virtually nothing to the president’s adviser. “I did not invite nor check communications,” Duane recalled. “Very little was said, and, perhaps, because I could not wholly conceal my mortification at an attempt, apparently made with the sanction of the President, to reduce me to a mere cipher in the administration.”
The next morning, Monday, June 3, 1833, Duane went to the White House to see Jackson. “I said I feared that I should not be able to see the subject in the light in which the President viewed it,” Duane recalled, “to which he remarked that he liked frankness [but] that unless the bank was broken down, it would break us down.” Despite the veto, Jackson insisted, Biddle would still attempt to buy a victory for recharter in Congress before it was too late. If the last Congress had stayed a week longer, Jackson said, “two thirds would have been secured for the bank by corrupt means; and … the like result might be apprehended at the next Congress.” Jackson wanted to withdraw the deposits, and he was the president. If Jackson thought the debate was over, it was over.
Duane disagreed, and Jackson could not even generate consensus among his official Cabinet, which made the work of Blair, Kendall, and others all the more important—and, to Duane, irritating. “I had heard rumors of the existence of an influence at Washington, unknown to the Constitution and to the country, and the conviction that they were well founded now became irresistible,” Duane said. “I knew that four of the six members of the last Cabinet, and that four members of the present Cabinet, opposed a removal of the deposits, and yet their exertions were nullified by individuals whose intercourse with the President was clandestine.”
