American Lion

by Jon Meacham

  Thus reassured by their chief, the congressmen left, and Jackson stretched out on a sofa. Blair was still with him. Jackson’s eye fell on an old Indian headdress sitting atop a wardrobe in the room, and he put it on. “I think these fellows would not like to meet me at Bladensburg in this war equipment,” Jackson said, and shook his head until the feathers rattled.

  ON FRIDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1833, Andrew Donelson took Jackson’s annual message to the Congress. The deposits had been removed, Jackson said, because of “the unquestionable proof that the Bank of the United States was converted into a permanent electioneering engine.” The issue was “whether the people of the United States are to govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages or whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions.” But the Bank was not going to make it easy. On Saturday, December 4, 1833, Donelson briefed Emily’s brother Stockley. “Violent opposition may be expected from the friends of the Bank and those that will combine with them for the purpose of counteracting the influence of the President.”

  Henry Clay, fresh from Lexington, was prepared to take up the struggle—on Biddle’s behalf, and also his own. Donelson was right: Jackson’s foes were anxious not only to reverse, by whatever means, the removal of the deposits, but also longed to destroy Jackson, who had become, to his enemies, a suffocatingly successful figure.

  “Depend upon it, that everything for which you fought, or which you and I hold valuable in public concerns, is in imminent hazard,” Clay wrote to his lifelong friend Francis Brooke on Thursday, December 16, 1833. “By means of the veto, the power as exercised of removal from office, the possession of the public treasury and the public patronage, the very existence of liberty and the government is, in my judgment, in peril.” Jackson had won so many battles, crushed so many hopes, frustrated so many competing ambitions, that, finally, Clay believed he had to be stopped or the country was going to collapse.

  A fevered view, perhaps, but a deeply felt one, and it drove Clay into a frenzied but eloquent assault on Jackson in late December. “I mean myself to open and push a vigorous campaign,” Clay said as he prepared for his coming strike against Jackson on the Senate floor. Clay had failed with the people in 1832 but would not surrender completely to Jackson—not yet.

  CHAPTER 24

  WE ARE IN THE MIDST

  OF A REVOLUTION

  WASHINGTON READIED FOR political war. R. K. Polk, a cousin of the Speaker of the House, arrived in the city four days before Christmas. The intensity of the fight was rising; young Polk had just recovered from what he called “a burning fever and violent headache,” but Jackson’s foes were consumed, in a way, by their own sickness. Polk went straight to the Capitol to watch the debates over the deposits and heard George McDuffie of South Carolina denounce Jackson. McDuffie was, Polk said, “quite severe on the president of the United States in the course of his remarks and quite complimentary to the character of Biddle, observing that it had been General Jackson’s whole aim … for the last three years to destroy that institution.”

  Clay was to speak on the day after Christmas, and Jackson spent the holiday so consumed by callers and business that he had time for nothing else. Thinking of home, Emily wrote a sister, “I suppose you all are at my Dear Mother’s today as usual, and I can well picture to myself the happy group, and wish I was there to join it. Here everybody goes to church, but as Uncle had a great many gentlemen to visit him today we did not go, and I have been quite alone thinking of you all in Tennessee, particularly of my Dearest Mother.… I wish for nothing so much as to see her once more, and be quietly settled at home.”

  There was nothing quiet about Clay’s performance the next day. “We are in the midst of a revolution, hitherto bloodless, but rapidly tending towards a total change of the pure republican character of the Government, and to the concentration of all power in the hands of one man,” Clay told the Senate on Thursday, December 26, 1833. Jackson, he said, was destroying the America of the Founders, the America created by the Revolution. “In a term of eight years, a little more than equal to that which was required to establish our liberties, the government will have been transformed into an elective monarchy—the worst of all forms of government.”

  Clay’s peroration was purple but moving. “The eyes and hopes of the American people are anxiously turned to Congress.… The premonitory symptoms of despotism are upon us; and if Congress [does] not apply an instantaneous remedy, the fatal collapse will soon come on, and we shall die—ignobly die—base, mean, and abject slaves; the scorn and contempt of mankind; unpitied, unwept, unmourned!” In the audience, observers said, there was “loud and repeated applause from the immense crowd”—cheers that grew so loud Van Buren was forced to “order the galleries cleared.” Jackson had stymied the Washington establishment time and again. Now Clay was striking at what Jackson cherished most: his power and his honor.

  JACKSON TOOK JOY in the fight. “You would be surprised to see the General,” Andrew Donelson wrote to Edward Livingston on Friday, March 7, 1834. “This Bank excitement has restored his former energy, and gives to him the appearance he had ten years ago.” He was thriving on the drama of the people’s president standing fast against the aristocrats’ banker.

  His foes were flummoxed by his insistence on going straight to the nation. After Jackson’s remarks to the Cabinet about removing the deposits were published in the Globe, an enraged Calhoun virtually sputtered in the Senate. Making the arguments to the Cabinet public, Calhoun said, “was clearly and manifestly intended as an appeal to the people of the United States, and opens a new and direct organ of communication between the President and them unknown to the Constitution and the laws.”

  In their understanding of the presidency, as in so much else, Calhoun and Jackson were worlds apart. Ever legalistic, Calhoun went on: “There are but two channels … through which the President can communicate with the people—by messages to the two Houses of Congress, as expressly provided for in the Constitution, or by proclamation, setting forth the interpretations which he places upon a law it has become his official duty to execute. Going beyond is one among the alarming signs of the times which portend the overthrow of the Constitution and the approach of despotic power.”

  Such was the verdict of the senator from South Carolina about the idea that a president might discuss issues directly with the nation. Calhoun’s hope (and Clay’s) was that a strict construction of the Constitution could hobble Jackson’s campaign to make the presidency the center of action. “What, then, is the real question which now agitates the country?” Calhoun said. “I answer, it is a struggle between the Executive and Legislative departments of the Government—a struggle, not in relation to the existence of the Bank, but which, Congress or the President, should have the power to create a Bank, and the consequent control over the currency of the country. This is the real question.”

  Jackson and his allies were, Calhoun said, “artful, cunning, and corrupt politicians.… They have entered the Treasury, not sword in hand, as public plunderers, but with the false keys of sophistry, as pilferers, under the silence of midnight.… With money we will get partisans, with partisans votes, and with votes money, is the maxim of our public pilferers.”

  Calhoun was explicit about the political stakes. The removal of the deposits and the prospect of a national Democratic nominating convention filled with Jacksonians (whose loyalty and votes will have been presumably purchased) will, Calhoun said, “dictate the succession … and all the powers of our Republic [will] be consolidated in the President, and perpetuated by his dictation.” The Calhoun of 1834 was terribly worried about the health of the institutions of the American Union.

  “We have arrived at a fearful crisis,” Calhoun said. “Things cannot long remain as they are. It behooves all who love their country—who have affection for their offspring, or who have any stake in our institutions, to pause and reflect. Confidence is daily
withdrawing from the General Government. Alienation is hourly going on. These will necessarily create a state of things inimical to the existence of our institutions, and, if not arrested, convulsions must follow, and then comes dissolution or despotism, when a thick cloud will be thrown over the cause of liberty and the future prospects of our country.”

  At one point while Congress was in session, a Jacksonian congressman had a weak moment with Kendall. “We cannot resist this tremendous pressure; we shall be obliged to yield,” the lawmaker said of the opposition’s argument against removing the deposits.

  “What!” Kendall said. “Are you prepared to give up the Republic? This is a struggle to maintain a government of the people against the most heartless of all aristocracies, that of money. Yield now, and the Bank of the United States will henceforth be the governing power whatever may be the form of our institutions.”

  THE POLITICS OF the moment seemed to be in Jackson’s favor. “The distress so much complained of is disappearing,” Andrew Donelson told Emily’s brother, “or where it does exist illustrates only the dangerous power of the Bank; and thus instead of strengthening it justifies the ground occupied by the administration.” In late February 1834, Governor George Wolf of Pennsylvania—home of the Bank, and a critical state in presidential politics—said that Biddle’s curtailment policy had brought about “indiscriminate ruin.” Wolf’s move cheered the White House. “We are gaining strength politically,” Andrew told Stockley. “Wolf’s message a few days since has helped us very much. It serves to show the leaders of the Bank party that the people of that great state stand by the President.”

  Jackson was in control. At the end of a long session in the Senate, Thomas Hart Benton would come down to the White House. It was always at night—“for I had no time to quit my seat during the day,” Benton said—and in the mansion’s soft light Jackson would listen to his friend’s report from the front. In all their years together, Benton said that Jackson never seemed “more truly heroic and grand than at this time. He was perfectly mild in his language, cheerful in his temper, firm in his conviction; and confident in his reliance on the power in which he put his trust.”

  Benton’s accounts of the combat on the floor were full and detailed, and when the senator took his leave, Jackson was confiding and encouraging, drawing strength from the masses beyond the mansion. “We shall whip them yet,” Jackson told Benton.

  AND THEY DID. The argument against Biddle—that he had abused the Bank’s power—stuck. While the more insulated Senate—whose members were still chosen by state legislatures, not the voters—thundered on about Jackson and his overreaching, the House, with its proximity to the people, gave Jackson what he wanted. On Friday, April 4, 1834, the House voted that the Bank “ought not to be rechartered” and that the state banks should keep the federal deposits. “I have obtained a glorious triumph,” Jackson said. The House had at last “put to death that mammoth of corruption and power, the Bank of the United States.”

  In defeat, Jackson’s opponents wanted to see him brought low, and they hoped a resolution of Clay’s in the Senate would do it. The proposed measure would censure the president for allegedly exceeding his authority in removing the deposits and in dismissing Duane. Censure would have no legal effect. It was only a symbolic move, but symbols mattered.

  The ensuing censure battle was therefore personal on both sides. A correspondent of Clay’s referred to Jackson as “Caesar” and thought the president “wholly unworthy” of power like that conferred on the office by the Force Bill. “The whole community of the United States seems to be under the influence of extraordinary political excitement,” Sir Charles Vaughan wrote Palmerston. Jackson’s foes, Vaughan added, were attacking “what is represented to be the illegal and reckless conduct of the President.”

  FRIDAY, MARCH 28, 1834, was, in retrospect, one of the most consequential days of Andrew Jackson’s life. In Washington, he was censured for his removal of the deposits. The tally in the Senate was 26 to 20, the language straightforward:

  Resolved, That the President, in the late Executive proceedings in relation to the public revenue, has assumed upon himself authority and power not conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in derogation of both.

  Half a world away, on the same Friday, the Chamber of Deputies in France opened debate on paying the United States a debt of 25 million francs (about $5 million) as an indemnity for French damage to American shipping during the Napoleonic wars. France had agreed to pay the money under an 1831 treaty, but after four days of consideration, by a margin of eight, France declined to honor its obligations.

  Jackson stood convicted in the records of the Senate, and America was repudiated in the councils of a foreign government. When he pondered what the Senate had done, Jackson could not get it out of his head that a verdict had been rendered against him, and against his vision of the presidency. When he thought of France, Jackson was convinced that both he and America were being put to the test—that his honor and the honor of the nation were now in question. He would use all of his power, all of his will, all of his ebbing physical strength to strike back, at home and abroad. He would not be censured and he would not let the country be insulted. He was now sixty-seven years old, tired and often sick, but he was ready to fight any battle for the sanctity of the presidency, for the reputation of the nation, and for the glory of his name.

  PART III

  THE EVENING

  OF HIS DAYS

  1834 to the End

  CHAPTER 25

  SO YOU WANT WAR

  WORD OF THE insult from Paris, in the form of dispatches from Edward Livingston, arrived aboard the Liverpool in early May 1834. As Jackson and McLane absorbed the news, Louis Sérurier, France’s minister in Washington, struggled to figure out what to do. He had promised the Americans resolution, but was now the representative of a government that had chosen to ignore, at least for the moment, its obligations to the United States. Thinking of “the President’s fiery character, his cruel disappointment, and his own personal political situation at the moment”—the censure vote was six weeks old—Sérurier called on McLane at the State Department.

  “I was informed that the President and the Secretary of State had received the dispatches … that the President was incensed, and that they were talking about a message to Congress on the following Monday concerning our legislature’s decision,” Sérurier wrote Paris on Sunday, May 11, 1834. “It would no longer be discussed on a purely monetary basis, but would be treated as a question of national honor and injured pride.”

  The moment evoked uncomfortable memories. Europe and America had been here before. Jackson’s reaction “is what I feared the most,” Sérurier added, “as I recall that in treating the question on the same basis in 1812, Mr. Madison brought about Congress’ declaration of war on England.” Could it happen again?

  Separately, a friend of Jackson’s—unnamed in Sérurier’s correspondence—came to see the Frenchman and echoed McLane’s analysis. The president, the friend said, “was deeply irritated at the unexpected turn of events.” But it was less the money, the friend said, than the motives behind the vote. “He told me that, for the President, the latest vote of the French legislature indicated that … the treaty was violated—a glaring refusal to make amends—and for him, personally, the pressing duty to protect his fellow citizens against an insulting refusal of justice” was now before him. Though Sérurier tried to explain that the decision was driven by internal French politics, not a desire to embarrass the United States, he found his caller unmoved. “But this will have serious consequences, replied my visitor, and the President, with all the calm that his astonishment allows him to muster, is now deliberating over what should be his duty to his country.”

  McLane made the same point to Sérurier. The French decision, McLane said, “had hit the President like a thunderbolt and … he was still dizzy from it.” Sérurier’s day only got worse. As he arrived home, he noticed a horseman stopping at his door
. It was Henry Clay, in a fury. In the space of a few hours, the worst of American political enemies, Jackson and Clay, seemed united on one thing: France had wronged the United States, and France would retreat—or else.

  “Well, he said to me, so you want war,” Sérurier wrote of Clay’s remarks to him. “This is a case for war if anything is. You will have it if you persevere. We are a proud people, M. Sérurier. You ought to know that. We do not deserve to be insulted and scorned, and there is contempt for us in your Chamber’s vote.”

  CLAY’S REMARKS, SÉRURIER told the Kentucky senator, were not the kind of thing one says to one’s friends. Perhaps, replied Clay, but Paris had put the two nations in dangerous territory. “You are the last people on earth, replied Mr. Clay, as he shook my hand, that I would want to go to war with, but honor admits no distinctions between one’s adversaries.”

  The two continued their conversation that evening at the Clays’. Sérurier pleaded with Clay to help him moderate the war of words before things went too far. The Americans did not have a monopoly on pride, and should Washington overreact to the French vote, Paris might have no choice but to respond harshly, and matters could escalate even further. “Above all, Mr. Clay, avoid threats,” Sérurier said. “There is nothing to be gained by this kind of language, and it would cut any negotiations short.”

  Clay closed the exchange on a gentle but far from conclusive note. “I promise you that, together with my friends, we will do everything we can to avoid all warlike proposals, and I hope that I may succeed.”