American Lion

by Jon Meacham

  Jackson was about to leave Washington for a major tour of New England, and he promised to send Duane more thoughts from the road. In the meantime, Jackson asked his new Treasury secretary to “reflect with a view to the public good.” There was no doubt what Jackson believed the public good to be.

  CHAPTER 22

  HE APPEARED TO FEEL

  AS A FATHER

  “UNCLE’S HEALTH IS as usual,” Emily wrote her mother in the spring of 1833. He was, she said, “often complaining.… He expects to start the last of May on his tour to the North and will be gone about two months.” It took a bit longer for Jackson to depart, but Emily’s worries about his health were on the mark, for he would have to force himself through his trip minute by minute, hour by hour, and day by day.

  Rising early on the morning of Thursday, June 6, 1833, he wrote a quick note to Van Buren before setting out on the Northern tour. “I want relaxation from business … but where can I get rest?” Jackson asked. “I fear not on this earth. When I see you I have much to say to you. The Bank and the change of deposits have engrossed my mind very much, is a perplexing subject, and I wish your opinion before I finally act.”

  Finishing the letter, Jackson walked out of the White House and stepped into his stagecoach for his journey into enemy territory. Josiah Quincy, the son of the president of Harvard University and a cousin of John Quincy Adams, recalled that parents in the Northeast sometimes invoked the name of Andrew Jackson to frighten misbehaving children. According to Harriet Martineau, a New England Sunday school teacher once asked a child who killed Abel. The answer: “General Jackson.”

  Yet everything that happened to Jackson as he traveled from Baltimore to Philadelphia to New Jersey to New York to Boston filled him with confidence, convinced him of the affection of the masses, and confirmed his sense that he was at one with the people of the country. Four days into the trip, as he prepared for bed, he sat in candlelight after dinner to write to his son. The crowds and cheers of the day were still with him.

  “I shall not attempt to describe the feelings of the people,” Jackson said. “Suffice it to say that it surpassed anything I ever witnessed.” After another four days of parades, toasts, and accolades through New Jersey and New York, Jackson returned to his lodgings after another dinner, took a warm bath, and again wrote to Andrew junior: “I have witnessed enthusiasms before, but never before have I witnessed such a scene of personal regard as I have today, and ever since I left Washington. I have bowed to upwards of two hundred thousand people today—never has there been such affection of the people before I am sure evinced. Party has not been seen here.” In Boston thousands of children lined the streets, their parents behind them, and to Andrew Donelson, who was with Jackson, it seemed the only sounds were “shouts and the roar of artillery.”

  JACKSON LOVED THE crowds as they loved him. Knowing that they were surging into the streets to see him, he stood for hours, determined not to disappoint. The sun was so hot at Philadelphia that his face, after five hours in the open air, had blistered, but he would not stand down as long as there were people who wanted to glimpse their president. Everything was to be endured to meet the expectations and reciprocate the respect of the public. The wadding from a cannon nearly singed his hair; a low-lying bridge collapsed just behind him, sending his entourage, including Donelson and Van Buren, into the water. But Jackson persevered. “The smile—the grace—the manner of the President is very engaging,” one newspaper said. “He appeared to feel as a father surrounded by a numerous band of children—happy in their affections and loving them with all a parent’s love.—Such are the impressions left by the visit of Andrew Jackson.”

  On a steamboat trip to Staten Island aboard the Cinderella, Jackson was talking with the Reverend Peter Van Pelt, Jr. Suffused with the apparently unending praise of the public, Jackson turned lyrical as they crossed New York harbor. “What a country God has given us!” he said. “How thankful we ought to be that God has given us such a country to live in.”

  “Yes, and this harbor, General, we think the finest thing in it.”

  “We have the best country, and the best institutions in the world,” Jackson said. “No people have so much to be grateful for as we.” His thoughts drifted to Philadelphia, to the bank on Chestnut Street. “But ah! My reverend friend, there is one thing that I fear will yet sap the foundation of our liberty—that monster institution, the bank of the United States! Its existence is incompatible with liberty. One of the two must fall—the bank or our free institutions. Next Congress, an effort to effect a recharter will be renewed; but my consent they shall never have!”

  Jackson went on about Biddle at such length, Van Pelt recalled, that the minister, who was growing tired of Jackson’s indictment, brought up Rachel in order to change the subject. “I hear, General, that you were blessed with a Christian companion.”

  The conversational ploy worked. “Yes, my wife was a pious, Christian woman,” Jackson said. “She gave me the best advice, and I have not been unmindful of it. When the people, in their sovereign pleasure, elected me President of the United States, she said to me, ‘Don’t let your popularity turn your mind away from the duty you owe to God. Before Him we are all alike sinners, and to Him we must all alike give account. All these things will pass away, and you and I, and all of us, must stand before God.’ I have never forgotten it, Doctor, and I never shall.” Jackson wept at the memory.

  Reflection was restorative, but the president’s contemplation of the world that might be gave way to his understanding of the world as it was. There was some confusion among the officers of the boat as it approached Manhattan, and Jackson took the opportunity to offer his views on the nature of command. “I see around me many who have seen fewer years than I have, and what I now say may be of some use to them. Always take all the time to reflect that circumstances permit, but when the time for action has come, stop thinking.”

  ON WEDNESDAY, JUNE 26, 1833, Jackson went to Harvard to receive an honorary degree, and later, standing on Bunker Hill, commemorated the Revolution. He was resolute, but the physical toll of the tour was rising. “It is with great difficulty we can proportion his compliance with the kind wishes of the people to see him, to what is safe on the score of comfort and health, but nothing is omitted which can be done,” Andrew wrote Emily. “You can scarcely conceive of the anxiety to be introduced to him.”

  Jackson had been a public figure—almost always the most important person in any room he happened to be in—since the victory at New Orleans nearly twenty years before. He was accustomed to the trappings of power and celebrity, to the tedious but flattering rounds of dinners and memorials and toasts. Even by the standards of his long national career, however, the glories in June 1833 were notable, and Jackson saw what John Quincy Adams sardonically called “this magnificent tour” as vindication for what he had done and as a mandate for what he was about to do.

  The trip ended grimly. Throughout the journey he had rallied, even joking about his woes. (“Now, Doctor, I can do any thing you think proper to order, and bear as much as most men,” Jackson told a doctor. “There are only two things I can’t give up: one is coffee, and the other is tobacco.”) En route from Massachusetts to New Hampshire, though, he was feeling so sick that some feared for his life. Andrew Donelson arranged for a return to Washington, arriving on July 4.

  While Jackson fought his way back to health—or to what passed for health for him—the capital’s players gauged the political effects of a six-month period that began with nullification and ended with the confluence of the Northern tour and the beginning of the deposits battle. Writing to London, Sir Charles Vaughan believed the laurels of the journey “proved the increase of his personal influence and popularity from the bold and decisive line of policy which he adopted when the dissension between the State of South Carolina and the General Government threatened a separation of the Union.” Word of Jackson’s condition was the only troubling note. “The friends of the President have
been made very uneasy by the reports of his health having suffered by the fatigue to which he has been exposed, but the alarm for his safety has subsided upon his return.”

  And the enemies of the president? They found the ecstasy of the tour unsettling. The cries of affection, said the Richmond Enquirer, “were more like the homage of subjects to their ruler, than of a free people towards their first magistrate.”

  ON THE ROAD, Jackson had drafted a long paper to Duane about the deposits. Completed in Boston, dated June 26, it was accompanied by a letter, more personal in tone, about Jackson’s desire to strike before Congress met late in the year: “Upon a careful review of the subject in all its bearings, I have come to the conclusion that it ought to be done as soon as we can get ready.” Power was more easily obtained before the enemy could prepare.

  The skirmish with Duane, then, grew more critical as the days and weeks passed. The more time Jackson spent fighting his own Treasury secretary, the less he would have to remove the deposits, distribute them around the country, and thus cripple the Bank’s ability to buy its way to recharter. Biddle understood the game. Referring to Jackson’s men, he wrote that “the gamblers are doing everything in their power to bend Mr. Duane to their purposes. But he knows them and will not yield an inch.”

  Duane replied to Jackson on Wednesday, July 10, six days after Jackson’s return. By custom and by his reading of the Constitution, Duane believed that Congress held the power to decide the fate of the Bank. He was still thinking in pre-Jacksonian terms about the role of the president. “Legislators alone could duly investigate such important subjects,” he told Jackson. This was a principled if naïve view for a man serving under Andrew Jackson to hold, but there it was.

  Jackson asked Duane to call at the White House. The conversation opened gently. Jackson was worried, Duane recalled, that “we did not understand each other.” To Jackson the issue could not be clearer, and he began to explain it all again. “My object, sir, is to save the country, and it will be lost if we permit the bank to exist,” he said.

  The battle between the president and his secretary of the Treasury went on for nearly another week. More letters were exchanged, more meetings held. Biddle watched from Philadelphia. “I wish to wait a little while until the smoke blows off before doing anything very decisive,” Biddle wrote on Tuesday, July 30, 1833. “For when once we begin, we shall have many things to do, which will crush the Kitchen Cabinet at once.”

  AS BLAIR JOINED Jackson, Emily, Sarah, and the children in preparing for a month at the Rip Raps, Kendall and Donelson were dispatched to see whether the state banks would be open to receiving the deposits. “They tell me the state banks, through fear of the United States Bank, which can crush them at will, cannot be induced to take the public deposits and do the business of the government,” Jackson had told Kendall.

  “Send me to ask them, and I will settle the argument,” Kendall had said.

  “You shall go,” said Jackson, and finally, after a long debate with Duane, Kendall went, and Donelson soon took off for Nashville with the same task.

  Duane hated the idea of Kendall’s and Donelson’s missions—he sensed that once Jackson had a detailed alternative to the Bank, he would move—and in a conversation at the White House with Jackson, said that he would resign rather than do something he disagreed with. “All that I can promise, consistently with the respect due to you as well as myself, is that, when the moment for decision after inquiry and discussion shall arrive,” Duane said, “I will concur with you, or retire.”

  For Jackson, the moment of decision had come and gone. At the Rip Raps in August, he whiled away the hours with Blair. It was not an entirely cheery time. On Sunday, July 7, 1833, his old friend John Coffee died, and in crisis the grieving Jackson turned, as he tended to do, to scripture. Writing Mary Coffee from the Rip Raps on Thursday, August 15, 1833, Jackson said: “My dear Mary, his request for my prayers for his dear wife and children will be bestowed with pleasure. They will be constantly offered up at the throne of grace for you all, and our dear Savior, has spoken it—‘that he will be a father to the fatherless and a husband to the widow.’ ” To Van Buren, Jackson said that he was struck as David had been when “his son Jonathan” had died in the Old Testament.

  A masterful orator, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts was a crucial figure in the Senate. It was his “Second Reply to Hayne” in 1830 that gave poetic force to Jackson’s unwavering stand against South Carolina.

  A man of ambition and skill, Henry Clay was John Quincy Adams’s secretary of state, a senator from Kentucky, and Jackson’s opponent in 1832. He and Jackson hated each other—Clay thought Jackson “a military chieftain,” and fought him on virtually everything. Their rivalry helped define American politics for more than a generation.

  A political cartoon, showing Henry Clay sewing Jackson’s mouth shut, captures the senator’s hostility toward Jackson and the expanding powers of the White House. “We are in the midst of a revolution” of executive usurpation, Clay argued, and he led the fight in the Senate to censure Jackson for removing the government’s deposits from the Bank of the United States—a censure Jackson spent years struggling to erase.

  A federal revenue cutter enforces the tariff in Charleston harbor during the nullification crisis with South Carolina in 1832–1833, when radicals in the state threatened to defy Washington’s authority with force of arms.

  An image depicting Margaret Eaton in later life, after her marriage to John Henry Eaton roiled Washington. In her old age she married her grandchildren’s nineteen-year-old Italian dancing master.

  “The Rats Leaving a Falling House”: a cartoon lampoons Jackson’s 1831 dissolution of the Cabinet. A first in American history, the Cabinet breakup was caused by Jackson’s insistence that the secretaries (and their wives) accept Margaret Eaton socially; in Jackson’s eyes, opposition to Mrs. Eaton was opposition to him and his policies.

  The Second Bank of the United States, headquarters of the institution Jackson called a “hydra of corruption,” on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia.

  Brilliant and determined, Nicholas Biddle served as president of the Second Bank of the United States. His great miscalculation was to take a fight directly to Jackson. “The Bank … is trying to kill me,” Jackson once said, “but I will kill it.” And he did.

  A loyal Tennessee lieutenant, John Henry Eaton was an architect of Jackson’s political career and a trusted secretary of war. But his marriage created a sexual, social, and political storm that consumed Jackson’s first two years in Washington and shaped the presidential succession.

  Edward Livingston gave a little-noted but illuminating speech during the Webster-Hayne debate, and later served as envoy to France during the crisis with Paris.

  A rendering of Robert B. Randolph’s attempted assault on Jackson in May 1833. Andrew Donelson believed “the object no doubt was assassination.” It was the first such attack on a president in American history.

  Roger B. Taney of Maryland, a member of Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet, recorded how the Bank spread money around Capitol Hill during the struggle over recharter.

  The Whig critique of Jackson captured in a cartoon: Jackson as a power-mad dictator who used the veto and his personal popularity to put the presidency at the center of national political life.

  The Battle of Quallah Battoo in Sumatra was brief but bloody—and illustrated the willingness of Jackson’s America to project force around the globe to protect its economic and political interests.

  A deranged man armed with two pistols tried to shoot Jackson after a funeral service at the Capitol, but both of the assailant’s weapons miraculously failed to fire. The president fought back with his cane and, back at the White House, speculated that Mississippi senator George Poindexter, a political foe, had been behind the attempt.

  Hugh Lawson White of Tennessee was nominated for president in the campaign of 1836 to oppose Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s chosen successor. This led to a political civil war in
Tennessee, and the passions of the contest enveloped Andrew Donelson and Francis Blair in scandal.

  Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri moved from brawling against Jackson in the streets of Nashville to serving as the seventh president’s chief defender in the Senate. Benton’s campaign to expunge Clay’s censure of Jackson ended on a night when the Senate galleries were so raucous and the atmosphere so tense that Benton’s colleagues sent for guns.

  One of the great moral figures of the first half of the nineteenth century, Jeremiah Evarts defended the rights of Indians against Jackson, but failed.

  At the climactic Battle of Bad Axe during the Black Hawk War in 1832, Indians were massacred on the Mississippi River. Many were shot, and many others died by drowning.

  In 1831, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Cherokees did not have the standing to sue in the Supreme Court—a judicial defeat for a tribe fighting for its life in the South.

  The Trail of Tears was a deadly chapter in the long, grim story of white Americans’ treatment of the Indians. Though Jackson had retired to the Hermitage by the time the Cherokees were physically driven from their ancestral homes, he was the prime architect of the policy that led to so many deaths.

  The end of the journey: in pain so much of his life, Jackson, pictured here in an 1844–1845 daguerreotype, was constantly complaining about his health, yet lived to the age of seventy-eight.