by Jon Meacham
Jackson shared his nephew’s view of slavery. To them it was an accepted part of life. Andrew Jackson, Jr., wrote to a friend about exchanging slaves—Southerners euphemistically referred to them as “servants”—in gratitude for seeing that his new wife’s “trunk and guitar” reached Nashville safely. The friend, Samuel Hays, apparently wrote to Andrew junior asking about the availability of a woman named Charlotte. “Late on yesterday evening your kind favor came to hand, and immediately I called up Charlotte to ascertain whether she was willing to leave Charles and her children and I find she is half willing to leave them and Charles. I had just taken her into the house and also as a washer. She is certainly a valuable servant and I hardly know how I can well spare her—and separate her from her children and Charles—and as to the other [girl] you are welcome to take her, but she is lazy and almost worthless.” Emily also spoke of slaves with an abhorrent breeziness. Writing her mother from the White House, Emily said: “Andrew has not yet bought me a girl and I am afraid will not have it in his power. Uncle’s expenses are so great that they will take the whole of his salary.” Jackson could be a harsh master. In an 1804 “Advertisement for Runaway Slave,” he offered a fifty-dollar reward for the return of a slave—“and ten dollars extra, for every hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of three hundred.” He owned about one hundred fifty slaves; he freed none in his will.
The direction of the nation’s thinking on slavery in the Jackson years did not bode well for the South. In 1829 David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World appeared; William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator newspaper, dedicated to the cause of abolition, had begun publication in January 1831. Jackson may have opposed states’ rights when it came to nullification, but on slavery, as on the Indian question, he was not interested in reform. Jackson, who believed in the virtues of democracy and individual liberties so clearly and so forcefully for whites, was blinded by the prejudices of his age, and could not see—or chose not to see, for other Americans of the age did recognize the horror of the way of life Jackson upheld—that the promise of the Founding, that all men are created equal, extended to all.
A slave at the Hermitage, Alfred, once had a revealing exchange with Roeliff Brinkerhoff, a tutor Andrew Jackson, Jr., had hired for his children (Brinkerhoff was later a prison reformer and the author of a seminal text on military logistics). “Alfred was a man of powerful physique, and had the brains and executive powers of a major-general,” Brinkerhoff recalled. “He was thoroughly reliable, and was fully and deservedly trusted in the management of plantation affairs.” Brinkerhoff ran into Alfred one evening on the grounds but found him “unusually reticent and gloomy.” Looking at Brinkerhoff, Alfred asked:
“You white folks have easy times, don’t you?”
“Why so, Alfred?” I asked.
“You have liberty to come and go as you will,” he replied.
I soon found that he was full of discontent with his lot, and I thought it wise to turn his attention to the brighter side.…
I showed him how freedom had its burdens as well as slavery; that God had so constituted human life that every one in every station had a load to carry, and that he was the wisest and the happiest who contentedly did his duty, and looked to a world beyond, where all inequalities would be made even. Alfred did not seem disposed to argue the question with me, or to combat my logic, but he quietly looked up into my face and popped this question at me:
“How would you like to be a slave?”
It is needless to say I backed out as gracefully as I could, but I have never yet found an answer to the argument embodied in that question.
Led by the president, the Jackson circle lived with a wrong, profited from it, and actively protected it. And so, while Andrew Donelson was in the White House, securing—or trying to secure—new slaves for Poplar Grove, Jackson, vacationing with Emily and the children at the Rip Raps, moved to curb the forces of abolition.
PREDICTABLY, THE BATTLE was joined again in South Carolina. From its headquarters on Nassau Street in Manhattan, the American Anti-Slavery Society dispatched thousands of abolitionist pamphlets to Charleston; on Wednesday, July 29, 1835, the mailings arrived aboard the steamboat Columbia. The question of what to do with them fell to Alfred Huger, the postmaster. Huger wanted guidance from above—specifically from Amos Kendall, now the postmaster general—and so he locked up the tracts and wrote Kendall for counsel.
Local newspapers ran stories on the contents of the cargo the next morning, and before long the streets of Charleston were once more out of control. It was nullification all over again. A mob came to the post office and burned the mailings—along with effigies of William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionist leaders—before forty-eight hours had elapsed.
If Jackson had been a president of consistent principle, the issue would have been clear. He was the defender of the Union, the conqueror of nullification, the hero of democracy. An American organization was exercising its constitutional right to free speech and was using the public mails—mails that were to be open to all—to do so. But Jackson was not a president of consistent principle. He was a politician, subject to his own passions and predilections, and those passions and predilections pressed him to cast his lot with those with whom he agreed on the question at hand—slavery—which meant suppressing freedom of speech. He had done the same in the case of the Cherokees and the state of Georgia, allowing a particular issue to trump his more general vision of government, a vision in which people who obeyed the laws were entitled to the protection of the president.
Watching from the Rip Raps, exchanging notes with Kendall, who was in Washington, Jackson spoke as a planter, not a president, referring to the Anti-Slavery Society mailings as a “wicked plan of exciting the Negroes to insurrection and to massacre.”
Modernity was working against the white order in practical ways. A Virginia congressman, John W. Jones, articulated the slaveowners’ conundrum on the floor of the House in the year of the Charleston debacle. Abolition societies, Jones said, had been formed, and “had gone on to collect large sums of money, and had put into operation printing presses, which were worked by steam.… Yes, sir, worked by steam, with the open and avowed object of effecting the immediate abolition of slavery in the Southern states.” Steam and the postal service were working in tandem, Jones said—tragic tandem, in his view, as “two great revolutionizers of the world … steam power and the press” were creating “large numbers of newspapers, pamphlets, tracts, and pictures, calculated, in an eminent degree, to rouse and inflame the passions of slaves against their masters, to urge them on to deeds of death, and to involve them all in the horrors of a servile war.” Jones’s view—and Jackson’s—was not an extreme one. Northern opinion was hardly enthusiastic about abolition in the mid-1830s, either.
JACKSON REFERRED TO the kinds of tracts that had reached Charleston as “unconstitutional and wicked.” In his annual message in December 1835, he asked Congress for a law to “prohibit, under severe penalties, the circulation in the southern States, through the mail, of incendiary publications, intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection.”
Calhoun and Jackson agreed on slavery, but the senator from South Carolina heard Jackson’s proposal as a call for more federal power, and the more federal power, Calhoun believed, the worse for the South in the long run. Calhoun moved, then, to suggest that the states, not the federal government, should have the right to determine what was incendiary, and what to do about it. The states, Calhoun said, “possessed full power to pass any laws they thought proper.” To give Jackson the authority he was asking for would, Calhoun said, “virtually … clothe Congress with the power to abolish slavery,” for the power to protect implied the power to control, and the power to control included the power to destroy.
Calhoun’s proposal instructed federal postmasters to take orders from the various states about what to deliver and what to suppress. The bill was conceived in a confrontational and divisive spir
it. “If you refuse cooperation with our laws [forbidding the circulation of mailings regarding slavery] and conflict should ensue between your law and our law, the Southern States will never yield to the superiority of yours,” Calhoun said.
Calhoun’s bill failed, though, leaving Jackson where he liked to be: in charge. The reports of the violence in Charleston had made him uncomfortable. He thought he had secured that front, and he equated South Carolina’s renewed hostility to the federal government—which to Jackson meant hostility against him personally—with a slave insurrection. “This spirit of mob-law is becoming too common and must be checked,” he said, “or ere long it will become as great an evil as a servile war.” How to exert control over the mob, make clear his own powers, and yet not advance the abolitionist cause? Jackson and Kendall chose the simplest route: they tacitly allowed the suppression of the antislavery mailings.
THE EPISODE AFFIRMED the power of the president, and it captured the intransigence of the slaveholding class. “So the pamphlet controversy in that winter of 1835–36 first showed to the broad public of the new nation that the defenders of slavery were proposing an intellectual blockade,” wrote the scholar William Lee Miller. “And it began to suggest, therefore, that that institution, even if confined to the South, was incompatible with republican government. Not only was the enslaved black person denied every freedom, but now the white person was to be denied the freedom to talk about it.”
In the pages of the Globe, Blair could, on occasion, strike humane notes on the subject. “On principle, slavery has no advocates North or South of the Potomac,” the paper once wrote. “The present generation finds the evil entailed on it [and] Providence … will, no doubt, in the course of time, relieve the American people of their share of this misfortune.”
In the White House, however, the talk about slavery was mostly about the mundane business of acquiring slaves and transporting them back home. Andrew Donelson complained of the expense of sending the slaves he bought in Virginia down to Tennessee. “I had to employ a man, buy horses, wagon, tent, and traveling apparatus throughout for those Negroes,” Andrew wrote his brother. There was hope, though, of recouping some of the money: “The wagon and horses,” Andrew said, “will no doubt sell” at the conclusion of the journey.
CHAPTER 30
THE STRIFE ABOUT
THE NEXT PRESIDENCY
THE POLITICS OF 1836—the first presidential election in a dozen years in which Jackson, who was retiring in accordance with George Washington’s two-term tradition, would not be a candidate—were already moving quickly. For years now, Jackson had dreamed that Van Buren would succeed him, and the Democratic convention in Baltimore in May 1835 had duly nominated the vice president. But Jackson’s fellow Tennesseans, unhappy with the prospect of a Van Buren presidency, had nominated one of their own, Judge Hugh Lawson White, a former Democrat, for the White House. Jackson was furious, but he could do nothing about it—except ensure that the Democratic Party he was building was behind Van Buren, not White. The Whigs in the North ultimately settled on William Henry Harrison as their nominee (Daniel Webster was also in the field), and White was the candidate in the South.
The reaction to Van Buren’s rise had been vicious. “He is not of the race of the lion or the tiger,” Calhoun said of Van Buren; rather, he “belongs to a lower order—the fox.” Van Buren, said fellow New Yorker William Seward, was “a crawling reptile, whose only claim was that he had inveigled the confidence of a credulous, blind, dotard old man.”
Jackson could not help Van Buren too overtly. Since 1824, Jackson had argued that the selection of a president belonged to the people, not to the bankers or to the politicians. The will of the voters had been thwarted with Adams’s victory in 1825, and Jackson believed Biddle and his allies had long maneuvered to manipulate elections. In his first inaugural address, the memories of Clay and Adams still fresh, Jackson had said: “The recent demonstration of public sentiment inscribes on the list of Executive duties, in characters too legible to be overlooked, the task of reform, which will require particularly the correction of those abuses that have brought the patronage of the Federal Government into conflict with the freedom of elections.” In the Jackson years, in other words, the only kingmakers would be the people. A fine expression of principle—but politics has a way of complicating the application of such principles.
Jackson felt compelled to make his alleged neutrality explicit in an effort to convince the public that he had been steadfast in his view that the selection of a president should be in the hands of the people. “All my friends know that since I have been in the Executive Chair, I have carefully abstained from an interference in the elective franchise,” Jackson claimed.
The president’s assertions were unconvincing. Not even a full year into his administration, Jackson was promoting Van Buren for president. “Permit me here to say of Mr. Van Buren that I have found him everything that I could desire him to be, and believe him not only deserving my confidence, but the confidence of the nation,” he wrote John Overton in December 1829, adding that Van Buren “is not only well qualified, but desires to fill the highest office in the gift of the people.” In the autumn of 1834, when Jackson was en route from Nashville to Washington, he had a conversation about the 1836 presidential election with Orville Bradley, a prominent east Tennessean. As Jackson and Bradley rode through Hawkins County, Bradley recalled, “the subject of succession was freely discussed.” Bradley explained the state’s support for White, but “General Jackson entered warmly into a vindication of Van Buren; spoke of him in the highest terms, said that he was the man to whom the party, generally, out of Tennessee was looking to be his successor; that White could hardly get a vote out of Tennessee, and that Tennessee must not separate from the rest of his friends.” The solution, Jackson told Bradley, was to nominate White for the vice presidency. “Judge White is yet young enough to come in after Mr. Van Buren,” Bradley recalled Jackson saying, “and such an arrangement will make all right now, and secure the certain elevation of Judge White after Mr. Van Buren.”
This was hardly the conversation of a disinterested incumbent. Jackson’s opponents cleverly sounded more sorrowful than angry. In July 1835, the Nashville Republican wrote that “much as the people of Tennessee love Gen. Jackson—much as they venerate his name—they will never surrender, even at his dictation, the glorious prize for which he and they so bravely contended at the Battle of New Orleans—THEIR INDEPENDENCE.” The paper continued, in all capital letters: “WE WILL NOT FOR AN INSTANT BELIEVE THAT HE WILL DESCEND FROM HIS HIGH ESTATE TO TAKE AN ACTIVE PART IN THE ENSUING ELECTION OR CONSENT TO LEND AN IMPROPER AND UNREPUBLICAN INFLUENCE IN THE APPOINTMENT OF HIS SUCCESSOR.”
It was the kind of attack best calibrated to wound Jackson, for it undermined his image of himself as the people’s champion. Unfortunately for Jackson, the administration’s maneuvers at Baltimore had given the opposition papers a lot to work with. When the moment had come to select a vice presidential nominee, Francis Blair, who had been on hand at the Democratic convention to help Van Buren, successfully backed Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky against William Cabell Rives of Virginia. It was widely believed that Blair was doing Jackson’s bidding.
Jackson’s attempt to control the succession—he believed he was right to choose Van Buren—took a toll on Andrew Donelson and Blair. In midsummer, while Jackson and Emily were still at the Rip Raps and Donelson was working in Washington, the Nashville Donelsons, led by Stockley, were worried about a series of attacks on Andrew and on Blair in the pages of the Republican, an opposition newspaper that favored White over Van Buren. The charge: that the private secretary to the president and the editor of the Globe had conspired to use Jackson’s frank—his privilege to send mail free of charge—to build up Van Buren for the presidency.
For the Republican, targeting Donelson and Blair was shrewd: frontal assaults on Jackson had never gotten very far. By striking at the men around the president, however, the editors of th
e paper were able to raise ethical questions about the White House without overtly damning Jackson—and simultaneously imply that Jackson was overly dependent on the Kitchen Cabinet.
STRIKE THEY DID, again and again in the summer weeks. The Republican declared itself, in the paper’s words, “For President HUGH WHITE, whose claim will be submitted not to a packed jury, dignified with the name of a National Convention—but to the impartial decision of a free and enlightened PEOPLE.” Van Buren, the paper was saying, had been anointed by Jackson and affirmed by a “packed jury” in Baltimore. The theme of Jacksonian overreach suffused the paper’s crusade against Donelson and Blair. On Tuesday, July 7, 1835, the Republican decried an influx of editions of the Globe into the Nashville congressional district. Blair’s newspaper, the Republican said, carried “the grossest calumnies against Judge White,” which had been sent “to many of the prominent citizens of this Congressional District, as well as other parts of this state, under the frank of the President.” Jackson himself, the Republican said, would never “lend himself to such uses knowingly and willfully. In this conviction we are confirmed by the subscriptions of those envelopes which we have seen, and which are not in the handwriting of the President, but in the handwriting of another individual, whose position gives him great facilities in affording these advantages to his political friends.”
Donelson had been ready for some kind of assault. “You must keep me advised of movements which will doubtless be made by the junta … intended to … injure me in the public estimation,” Donelson wrote Stockley in mid-July. Now that those movements were under way, he tried to project confidence. “My inclinations as well as my duty enjoin upon me silence and forbearance as far as they are consistent with the preservation of my character.”
