by Jon Meacham
“I hope to meet you all in Heaven—yes, all in Heaven, white and black,” Jackson said as he lay dying.
“Sleep sweetly, aged soldier,” was among the benedictions when Jackson died and at last joined Rachel in the garden tomb in early June 1845. Three thousand people attended the funeral.
A photograph of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural, March 4, 1861. In preparing his speech to deliver to a nation on the verge of the Civil War, Lincoln had consulted a copy of Jackson’s proclamation to South Carolina. The question of secession, Lincoln said, had been “fully discussed in Jackson’s time … and denied.”
Both allusions are revealing about Jackson’s state of mind, for both are wrong. The words about being “a father to the fatherless and a husband to the widow” are not from Jesus but from Psalm Sixty-eight, and David’s dead son was Absalom, not Jonathan. Jackson’s biblical confusion, rare in his correspondence, suggests that these weeks of uncertainty about the deposits—time was passing, and he still had no developed plan to move the money—were troubling.
But distance from the capital did nothing to dim Jackson’s resolve. “Mr. Blair,” Jackson told his editor, “Providence may change me, but it is not in the power of a man to do it.”
CHAPTER 23
THE PEOPLE, SIR, ARE WITH ME
THE CABINET GATHERED at the White House on Tuesday, September 10, 1833. Kendall had returned in late August with news Jackson wanted to hear: there were plenty of state banks that would take the money and appeared sound. Jackson had his alternative.
Brandishing Kendall’s summary of the mission to the banks, Jackson was eager to convince his skeptical secretaries that all would now be well. Though armed with details, he spoke with wariness and uncharacteristic nervousness, as though he feared Kendall’s handiwork might be found wanting. “How shall we answer to God, our country, or ourselves if we permit the public money to be thus used to corrupt the people?” he said, but then struck a more pleading tone than he usually used. “I anxiously desire … that we should at least do something. The report, if you put confidence in it—and I think you may—shows the readiness of the state banks to take the public money, and their ability and safety as substitutes for the present agent. Why, then, should we hesitate? Why not proceed, I say, as the country expects us to do? Here are the papers. When you have read them let us come to an understanding.”
Jackson was taking no chances on what the results of the Cabinet’s reading might be. In a series of articles, the Globe singled Duane out for attack. Confronted by Duane, Jackson—the master of the Globe—denied any involvement in the newspaper offensive. “It is impossible to describe the earnestness of the President’s professions in reply” to Duane’s complaints, Duane recalled. “He declared that no one had attempted to shake his confidence … that he regretted even a difference in opinion between us; and that he would put all doubts at rest by conferring on me the highest appointment then at his disposal”—the mission to Russia.
Offered a way out, Duane chose not to take it and stayed at the Treasury. (The Russian post was one of Jackson’s favorite ways to try to get rid of people. He had offered the same appointment to Ingham in the Cabinet chaos of the first term. It did not work then, either.) Jackson again made clear that Duane served at the president’s pleasure—not his own, and not Congress’s. “It is known what my determination is, and if he cannot act with me on that determination, he ought to withdraw,” Jackson told Roger Taney.
The Cabinet met again on Wednesday, September 18, 1833, a date that marks a turning point in the making of the modern presidency. In a manuscript in Andrew Donelson’s hand, apparently dictated at the Rip Raps (where Donelson had joined the president after his banking mission), Jackson revealed the direction of his thinking midway through his White House years—thinking that blended an instinct for the democratic with a vision of a dynamic presidency. “The divine right of kings and the prerogative authority of rulers have fallen before the intelligence of the age,” Jackson said, continuing:
Standing armies and military chieftains can no longer uphold tyranny against the resistance of public opinion. The mass of the people have more to fear from combinations of the wealthy and professional classes—from an aristocracy which through the influence of riches and talents, insidiously employed, sometimes succeeds in preventing political institutions, however well adjusted, from securing the freedom of the citizen.… The President has felt it his duty to exert the power with which the confidence of his countrymen has clothed him in attempting to purge the government of all sinister influences which have been incorporated with its administration.
By the time the paper was revised (by Taney) and read aloud (by Donelson) it was drier, but at its heart lay the conviction that the 1832 presidential election had settled the matter: because Jackson had won, the people wanted—and expected—the Bank to die. By asking for a new charter the previous year, Jackson said, “the object avowed by many of the advocates of the bank was to put the President to the test, that the country might know his final determination relative to the bank prior to the ensuing election.” And so the country learned it, in the unequivocal veto message. Now, a year or so later, “whatever may be the opinions of others, the President considers his reelection as a decision of the people against the banks,” Jackson said. “He was sustained by a just people, and he desires to evince his gratitude by carrying into effect their decision so far as it depends upon him.”
As the session broke up, Duane walked over to Jackson and asked for a copy of the message. Duane recalled asking “whether I was to understand him as directing me to remove the deposits? He replied that it was his desire that I should remove them, but upon his responsibility.” Duane left the White House and, the next morning, said he needed one more day to decide what to do, which would have carried matters through to Friday, September 20.
On hearing this, Jackson decided, as he might have put it, that the time for thinking was over and the time for action had come. Donelson was sent to the Treasury with a stark message: news of Jackson’s decision to remove the deposits would be published in the Globe the next morning, the twentieth. Duane protested, but it made no difference.
On the twenty-first, Duane himself raised the stakes and decided that he would not resign—Jackson would have to fire him. He wanted it made clear to the world that he had refused to carry out Jackson’s orders.
“Then I suppose you intend to come out against me,” Jackson said.
“Nothing is further from my thoughts. I … desire to do what is now my duty; and to defend myself if assailed hereafter.”
“A secretary, sir, is merely an executive agent, a subordinate, and you may say so in self-defense.”
But Duane would not resign, and so Jackson fired him. In a note drafted in Taney’s hand dated Monday, September 23, Jackson dismissed Duane in a short paragraph. Because Duane’s “feelings and sentiments” could not be reconciled with his own, Jackson said, “I feel myself constrained to notify you that your further services as Secretary of the Treasury are no longer required.”
The more Jackson thought of the episode, the angrier he became. Writing to Van Buren to inform him that Duane was out and that Roger Taney would give up the attorney generalship to become secretary of the Treasury, Jackson was brutal. He now thought Duane’s “conduct has been such of late that would induce a belief that he came into the Dept. as the secret agent of the Bank [and] to disclose the Cabinet secrets for its benefit, rather than to aid the Executive in the administration of the government.” The removal of the deposits was to begin in a week’s time, on Tuesday, October 1, 1833.
The story, Jackson thought, was over.
IN A WAY, however, it was only beginning. Six days after the effective date for removal, on Monday, October 7, 1833, Biddle held a board meeting in Philadelphia. He would, he said, call in loans and restrict credit in order to create a popular backlash against Jackson. It was a bald, bold maneuver—and one that played into Jackson’s cari
cature of the Bank as an aristocratic institution more interested in self-perpetuation than in the good of the country. “The ties of party allegiance can only be broken by the actual conviction of existing distress in the community,” Biddle said. “Nothing but the evidence of suffering abroad will produce any effect in Congress.… Our only safety is in pursuing a steady course of firm restriction—and I have no doubt that such a course will ultimately lead to restoration of the currency and the recharter of the Bank.” Biddle’s tactics worked, to a point. By late December, James A. Hamilton noted that New York business was “really in very great distress, nay even to the point of General Bankruptcy.”
The crisis had come, but what would be the end of it all? Who would prevail—Jackson, who launched his preemptive strike in late September, or Biddle, who counterattacked in October? The two agreed on this, at least: the future of the Bank was now a political question, and would be decided by public opinion as expressed in the Congress.
Jackson was betting that the people were with him. They had reelected him, and they would, he believed, stand with him, forcing Congress to capitulate if Biddle’s allies on Capitol Hill attempted to impeach Jackson in the House and convict him after a Senate trial—which was, really, the only option open to them once Jackson removed the deposits. By the time Congress met, the removal, as Jackson had hoped, was not a proposal but a fact. Duane had been fired; Taney could be rejected (and would be, in June 1834) when his name came to the Senate for confirmation, but the Constitution gave Jackson the power to appoint Cabinet officers during congressional recesses to serve until the end of the next session. The difficulties of the summer and fall—the physical pain of the Northern tour, the feeling that Duane had betrayed him—had, it seemed, been worth the trouble, for Jackson was in an excellent position as the test between him and Biddle came to pass in December. The only way Biddle could win was to convince enough of the people that Jackson was being reckless and despotic—and further, convince enough of those people to pressure Congress to either force Jackson to reverse himself or, in the last extremity, to try to remove Jackson from the White House.
Major Lewis, a practical man, raised objection after objection to Jackson’s course, to no avail. What would Jackson do, Lewis asked, if Congress passed a resolution “directing the Secretary to restore the deposits to the bank?”
“Why, I would veto it,” Jackson said.
But, Lewis persisted, what if the House and Senate could muster the two-thirds majority needed to override the veto? “What then would you do?” Lewis asked. “If you refuse to permit the secretary to do it, the next step, on the part of the House, would be to move an impeachment, and if Congress have the power to carry this resolution through in defiance of the veto power, they would be able to prosecute it to a successful termination.”
“Under such circumstances, elevating himself to his full height and assuming a firm and dignified aspect,” Lewis recalled, Jackson said: “Then, sir, I would resign the presidency and return to the Hermitage!”
Lewis was so taken aback by Jackson’s reply that, he recalled, “there was a pause in our conversation for a few minutes.” What struck Lewis most was that Jackson was not in a fury as they spoke. He was not indulging a passing rage. The possibility of resignation, however remote, was raised not in anger but as part of a reasonable exchange about the perils of the political course ahead.
Lewis broke the silence by asking what Jackson hoped to accomplish by withdrawing the money from the Bank.
“To prevent it from being rechartered,” Jackson said.
“But can not that object be as certainly attained as well without as with the removal of them?” Lewis asked.
“No, sir,” Jackson said. “If the bank is permitted to have the public money, there is no power that can prevent it from obtaining a charter—it will have it if it has to buy up all Congress, and the public funds would enable it to do so!”
“Why, General, as the bank’s charter expires twelve months before you go out of office, you will at all times have it in your power to prevent it by vetoing any bill that may be sent to you for that purpose,” Lewis said. “Would it not be better, then, to let it go quietly out of existence?”
“But, sir, if we leave the means of corruption in its hands, the presidential veto will avail nothing,” Jackson replied.
AS LAWMAKERS TRAVELED to the capital for the 1833–34 meeting of Congress, petition after petition flowed into Washington, begging Jackson for relief from the economic woes Biddle was inflicting on the country. One day Jackson was seated at a table in his office when a delegation from New York arrived. It was led by James G. King, son of the Federalist statesman Rufus King, and they had come with a petition of six thousand signatures calling for the president to spare them from their distress. “Excuse me a moment, gentlemen,” Jackson said. “Have the goodness to be seated.” He said this, James Parton reported, “half rising, and bowing to the group,” a sign of grace that the sophisticates from New York might not have been expecting from their frontier president. His good manners evident, Jackson returned to his work, a sign that though he might be polite, he was also the most powerful man in the room. They could wait for him.
In a moment he stood up. “Now, gentlemen, what is your pleasure with me?” The president seemed so reasonable, so deferential. King began to lay out the problems facing New York merchants.
He had barely begun when Jackson interrupted. “Mr. King, you are the son of Rufus King, I believe?”
“I am, sir.”
At this point, a witness later told Parton, Jackson “broke into a harangue which astonished the grave and reverend seigniors to whom it was addressed.”
“Well, sir, Rufus King was always a Federalist, and I suppose you take after him,” Jackson said. “Insolvent, do you say? What do you come to me for, then? Go to Nicholas Biddle. We have no money here, gentlemen. Biddle has all the money. He has millions of specie in his vaults, at this moment, lying idle, and yet you come to me to save you from breaking. I tell you, gentlemen, it’s all politics.”
The witness and the delegation were astonished at the shift in tone from the benign man who met them to the ferocious president who now paced before them, spewing out his points. The fit seemed to last forever. “He continued to speak in a strain like this for fifteen minutes, denouncing Biddle and the bank,” reported Parton. “He laid down his pipe; he gesticulated wildly; he walked up and down the room; and finished by declaring, in respectful but unmistakable language, that his purpose was unchangeable not to restore the deposits.” King and his colleagues, “correctly surmising that their mission was a failure,” took their leave.
Afterward, Jackson savored his performance. His madness had been all method. “Didn’t I manage them well?” he said, cheerily, an old warrior thinking of a battle well fought. It was a routine that was becoming familiar in these desperate months: a delegation would arrive, he would rage and rant, and then chortle as the pleading bankers or merchants fled the White House, convinced anew that there could be no peace until either Jackson or Biddle was vanquished.
“Go home, gentlemen, and tell the Bank of the United States to relieve the country by increasing its business,” he told a group from Philadelphia. “Sooner than restore the deposits or recharter the bank I would undergo the torture of ten Spanish inquisitions. Sooner than live in a country where such a power prevails I would seek an asylum in the wilds of Arabia.” Hearing of the scene, Biddle could not help virtually sneering, remarking that Jackson “may as well send at once and engage lodgings” in Arabia.
Jackson took to referring to himself in the third person, a sign that even he had come to think of himself as a force with a life of its own. “Well, what do you want?” he asked a delegation from New York. “I tell you I will never restore the deposits. I will never recharter the United States Bank.… Here I am receiving one or two anonymous letters every day threatening me with assassination.… Is Andrew Jackson to bow the knee to the golden calf? �
� I tell you if you want relief go to Nicholas Biddle.”
On another day a group from Baltimore tried its luck. “General,” said the chairman, “the committee has the honor to be delegated by the citizens of Baltimore, without regard to party, to come to you, sir, the fountain head, for relief.…”
“Relief, sir!” Jackson interrupted. “Come not to me, sir! Go to the monster! It is folly, sir, to talk to Andrew Jackson.”
“Sir, the currency of the country is in a dreadful situation.”
“Sir, you keep one-sided company,” said Jackson. “Andrew Jackson has fifty letters from persons of all parties daily on the subject. Sir, he has more and better information than you, sir, or any of you.”
“The people, sir …”
“The people! The people, sir, are with me.”
JACKSON BELIEVED SO, and never doubted the virtue of his course. It was a wild time. The French diplomat Louis Sérurier, who had first arrived in Washington as the young representative of Napoleon in 1811, wrote of “the violent withdrawal of public funds,” and told Paris that the Bank affair “had become the all-engrossing business of the executive.” In the winter of 1833–34, perhaps fueled by memories of the Randolph attack, people began to say that the army was protecting Jackson from assassination. Blair took up the issue in the Globe, joking that a Mrs. Gadsby, supposedly an elderly admirer of Jackson’s, said that “the General did not want the aid of the army. She had recruited a volunteer corps of Lady veterans that would protect him with broomsticks.”
Before long a delegation of Jacksonian congressmen arrived at the White House with word that a mob from Baltimore was headed toward the capital. Taking his cue from Blair, Jackson said that he “would in person meet them at the head of Mrs. Gadsby’s corps of old women armed with broomsticks at Bladensburg and drive them back.” His tone turned a bit more serious when he added that “in the case Biddle’s mob ever showed themselves around the Capitol to threaten the Houses, they should see the ringleaders hanging as high as Haman about the square.”
