by Jon Meacham
His resolution was soon tested. The Republican’s denunciations were awaiting him on the day he returned to the White House, alone, from the Rip Raps. Away from Emily and from the president, Donelson had no one close to reassure him that all would be well, and the words were wounding. “I see that the Republican makes an ungenerous allusion to me as the cause of the President’s frank upon copies of the Globe addressed to persons in Tennessee,” he wrote Stockley on Tuesday, July 21. It was an outrage, Donelson thought, and the attack was not really on him but on Jackson. “It would be just as reasonable to assail the pen or the paper or the ink which the President uses as thus to charge upon those who are near him … with … responsibility for his acts,” Donelson wrote.
Angrily scrawling across the page, Donelson caught himself, and seems to have realized that he was hardly appearing unmoved by the criticism. “But I have no time at present to notice this subject,” he closed—after noticing it in detail, and with passion. Three days later, he took up the subject again, telling Stockley: “I have noticed the article you refer to in the Nashville Republican. He cannot hurt me if he would.” High hopes, perhaps, but Donelson had decided how he would view the matter—that the attacks directed at him were truly intended for Jackson, and that no reasonable person (Donelson prayed) would think otherwise. “It is … undoubtedly aimed at the General,” he wrote. Donelson was desperate to cast himself as a scapegoat because of his proximity to the president.
The Republican savored baiting Donelson and those in Jackson’s shadow. In July, the paper kept raising the stakes. “We do not feel disposed, either from inclination or duty, to enter the lists against the great Jackson himself, but to all the would-be little Jacksons, who cloak their designs under his name, and hope to ride into office upon his back, we say—come on—stand out like men, and fight upon your own hook,” it said on July 14.
The opposition turned Jackson’s democratic pretensions about the succession against him. If Donelson did not frank the material, then Jackson did—and if Jackson did so, he was violating his own pledges of neutrality. “It has been the professed object of the Globe, the Union and other Convention papers to show that General Jackson never did, and never wished to interfere in the approaching Presidential election,” the Republican wrote on Saturday, July 18. Now, though, the Jackson press seemed to be saying that Jackson was behind the frank. “And yet it is now willing to admit, nay it even insists upon the fact, that the President himself is engaged in distributing these copies of a violent party paper. Does not the Union, by this admission, furnish at once the most abundant evidence to prove the charge which has been made against General Jackson of a wish to influence the selection of his successor?”
The Republican’s true agenda was becoming clear: to cast Jackson as a kingmaking hypocrite, but in language that was arch rather than bombastic, indirect rather than frontal.
It did, however, explicitly link Blair and Donelson to the scandal. “That the Editor of the Globe is a joint conspirator with Major Donelson in this business, is evident from the fact that all the documents thus distributed emanate from the Globe office. They are carefully enclosed in separate envelopes and, in that shape, no doubt, are regularly laid upon the President’s table that he might frank them. To have them laid upon the table is the business, we presume, of the Major.”
The next sentence underscored Jackson’s assurances of neutrality. “Always supposing that the members of his own household who do not possess the franking privilege would ask the favor of him to frank nothing but what honor and public duty would sanction, he makes no inquiries,” the Republican said of Jackson. “It would be idle to tell us that the President knows what he is about when he puts his frank upon these documents, and that their contents are well understood by him. It is impossible it should be so. He cannot read them. He would not have the time.…” The editorial was published on Tuesday, July 28, 1835.
THE PAPER REACHED Jackson at the Rip Raps by Saturday, August 8. In a stern letter to the editor of the Republican, Jackson defended Donelson and Blair absolutely, denouncing the charges as “a vile calumny, utterly destitute of truth.… I have never franked any letters or packages for Major Donelson without being informed of their contents.”
The Republican’s editors could hardly contain themselves: they had now drawn the president himself into the arena. “Does he know—is he quite certain—that Major Donelson has always correctly informed him of the contents of the letters and packages which might be laid before him?”
The likely truth is that Jackson was responsible for the franked mailings, or had at least created a climate within the White House that made Donelson and Blair comfortable undertaking such a pro–Van Buren campaign in Tennessee. The significance of the episode of the Republican’s attacks is how it illuminates Jackson’s determination to have everything arranged to suit himself, and to secure the image he so cherished. So it was that Jackson would authorize, or tacitly allow, political work for Van Buren while insisting that he would never do such a thing.
Who paid a price? Not Jackson. Even as ferocious an opponent as the Republican went out of its way to depict Jackson as, at worst, a dupe of the men around him. Closest to home, it was Donelson who absorbed the most blows on Jackson’s behalf. Donelson could not resist replying, and he could not suppress his anger. The letter he wrote to rebut the Republican’s charges, he told his brother-in-law, had been “drawn up in most haste and possibly with too much feeling.” The stakes, however, demanded it. “It is painful to me to be drawn into the strife about the next Presidency,” he wrote Stockley, but drawn he was, and his own political future was never far from his mind. The best way to defuse the current criticism, it seemed to him, was to argue that the questions about him and his conduct were the inevitable result of jealousy about his place in Jackson’s affections.
Donelson believed his foes were hostile to him “not so much because my course was what it was in regard to Major Eaton and Mr. Calhoun, as that I did not allow it to separate me from the President,” he said in mid-August. Donelson needed all the fortifications he could muster, for the Republican was growing ever crueler as the weeks passed. “The Major, like all weak persons, has a constant itching for intermeddling with things and subjects above his caliber, and a few soft words and fair promises from a certain ‘sweet little fellow’ [read: Van Buren], who knows so well how to apply them, would almost set him upon his head,” the paper said in early September. The Republican closed the editorial contemptuously: “But we cannot afford to waste more of our time upon the Major today.”
Blair tried his hand at rearranging reality to cast Jackson, and Jackson’s circle, in a more flattering light. According to the Globe, Blair, Donelson, and Jackson were together in the president’s office one day in February 1835. An editorial headlined “General Jackson’s Preference” arrived in the mail, which Donelson was opening. Blair was idle; Jackson was immersed in correspondence. Holding the Republican in his hands, Donelson began to read aloud to Blair: “It must be apparent to the most superficial observer,” the paper said, that Van Buren supporters in Tennessee were trying “to create an impression that General Jackson would decidedly prefer Mr. Van Buren to any other person as his successor, and thus to bring the influence of his powerful name to bear upon the approaching election.” As Blair recalled it, “In the progress of the reading, it arrested the President’s attention, and at the conclusion, he observed in substance, with some strength of manner, that he would not allow himself to be so misrepresented—that he would not sacrifice his principles to personal partialities—that he would not have the impression made, that his preference was for any man, however he might esteem him as a friend.…” Refusing to plead to what Blair called “a charge of dictation,” Jackson “immediately, without waiting for a remark, glanced at the article, took up his pen and wrote a letter.”
IN TENNESSEE, THAT story sent White’s supporters into an operatic rage. “The indelicacy, presumption, and insincerity of t
his narrative cannot fail to strike the most hardened and credulous reader of the Globe,” the Republican said. The next lines illuminate the scope of the opposition’s fury at the Kitchen Cabinet, a fury so reflexive in this seventh year of Jackson’s presidency that it had become an inescapable element of the American political culture:
It is evident from the constrained and artificial manner in which this story is told that if … it should turn out to be true … it was only the execution of a preconcerted plot between Major Donelson and the Editor of the Globe. The industrious and vigilant Editor of a daily paper … was surely in the habit of opening his own packet of papers either overnight or, at all events, in the morning before he attended at the White House to assist the Private Secretary in opening the President’s mail. We venture to say that the wily Editor had thus got the start of the President, that he had read our article in his own copy of the Republican, and that he henceforth repaired to Maj. Donelson and arranged with him to have it brought to the notice of the President in a way that would take him by surprise and be calculated to excite him.
Donelson and Blair, the Republican admitted, were a “worthy pair of political jugglers or wirepullers.” Donelson knew the wars would go on; nothing less than the presidency was at stake. He put on a brave face. “You may rest assured that I have studied my ground well and feel that I am secure against all the assaults personal or political which … open enemies or pretended friends can make against me,” he told Stockley. He hoped that the “violence of party strife” would have a cleansing effect, and that the politicians devoted to division—any politician, in Donelson’s view, who opposed Van Buren and thus Jackson—would be dispatched in due course. “It will be among the best fruits of the administration to restore to private life many such men who have not the courage to defend the truth nor virtue enough to rejoice at the blessings of republicanism.” Hawkish talk aside, he remained worried that hatreds as old as the administration itself could rise up anew to roil the White House. The Donelsons longed to keep all that well in the past. “The Calhoun, the Eaton, and the ancient opposition interest have all … common feelings to [annoy] me,” Donelson said. But, he added, “I will not be the cause of opening afresh the old wounds.”
The back-and-forth was wearing on Jackson, too. One night at the shore, a messenger happened on Jackson kneeling before his miniature of Rachel, reading from her book of Watts’s psalms—“the stern man,” the observer reported, alone with his memories “with the meekness of a little child.”
CHAPTER 31
NOT ONE WOULD HAVE
EVER GOT OUT ALIVE
SUNDAY, AUGUST 16, 1835, Jackson, Emily, and the Donelson children left the Rip Raps to return home to the White House. All in all, the sun and sea had done their work, and Donelson was happy to have fresh distractions from the Republican attacks. Jackson would need his reserves of strength in the autumn, which was to be a season of war—and not simply political war.
First mapped by the Spanish in 1519, Texas had become a state of the Republic of Mexico in 1821 after Spain ended its three hundred years of control of Mexico. Like Florida, Texas had long tantalized Americans; it was, a visiting U.S. senator wrote in 1829, “a most delicious country.” Led in part by Stephen Austin, the son of a St. Louis banker who had been granted the right to settle Anglo-Americans while Texas was still in Spanish hands, Anglo-American settlers began making their homes in Texas in the 1820s, and the region’s cotton economy readily accommodated slavery. An 1826 rebellion against Mexican authority—an Anglo-American named Hayden Edwards founded the short-lived Republic of Fredonia—foreshadowed conflicts to come. Worried about the influx of settlers, Mexico began skirmishing with Texans. By Friday, October 2, 1835, the Texas Revolution had begun with a battle at Gonzales, when a hastily assembled army of Texans fought Mexican soldiers who had come to seize the town’s cannon. “I cannot remember that there was any distinct understanding as to the position we were to assume toward Mexico,” said a Texan who was there. “Some were for independence … and some for anything, just so it was a row. But we were all ready to fight.”
Jackson appreciated that spirit. From his perspective in Washington, Texas was another Florida: a rich prize that could endanger American security if left in hands other than his own. He had long maneuvered to win Texas, dispatching an envoy, Anthony Butler, to Mexico City with a commission to see if $5 million could convince the Mexicans to part with it. A land speculator in Texas, Butler had been a ward of Jackson’s as a child and had fought under him during the Battle of New Orleans; when Jackson became president, Butler came to Washington to see if he could turn his connections into a position with the government. For his part, Jackson regarded Butler’s time in Texas and his sympathetic opinions about acquiring Texas to secure the country’s borders to be strong qualifications, and appointed him as a chargé d’affaires.
Butler was even more aggressive in his pursuit of annexation than Jackson and at one point suggested bribing the Mexican government. (“A. Butler: What a scamp,” Jackson wrote on one of Butler’s letters.) It is possible—and perhaps probable—that Butler was simply taking the latitude that Jackson himself seemed to suggest. “This must be an honest transaction,” Jackson had written Butler when describing his duties as envoy, but he went on to say: “I scarcely ever knew a Spaniard who was not the slave of avarice, and it is not improbable that this weakness may be worth a great deal to us, in this case.” Mexico’s answer to Butler’s (and Jackson’s) offer was no, but Butler continued pushing for annexation.
News of the fighting in the fall of 1835 sent Mexico into “a perfect tempest of passion in consequence of the Revolt in Texas and all breathe vengeance against that devoted Country,” Butler told Jackson. Antonio López de Santa Anna, the powerful leader of Mexico, was, Butler said, “perfectly furious, mad, and has behaved himself in a most undignified manner.” Sounding more than a little Jacksonian, Santa Anna had told a gathering of diplomats, including the British and French ministers, that he was convinced the Americans had fomented the rebellion (the settlements led by Austin were a chief culprit in this view) and, Butler told Jackson, the Mexican leader said that he “would in due season chastise us.… Yes, sir, he said chastise us.” Bowing to the British representative in an allusion to 1812, Santa Anna said he would “march to the capital” and “lay Washington city in ashes, as it has already been once done.” By this time, Sam Houston was advertising for Americans to join the cause. He circulated posters saying: “Volunteers from the United States will … receive liberal bounties of land.… Come with a good rifle, and come soon.… Liberty or death! Down with the usurper!”
AS SANTA ANNA gathered his forces and American volunteers struck out for Texas in December 1835, Jackson received news of war on another front. The removal of the Seminoles from Florida had been fraught and bloody, and was about to grow more so. Osceola led the Seminole war party, and the conflict had the usual elements: white greed, internal Indian divisions (Osceola had murdered a rival Seminole who had chosen to comply with removal), and, for whites, alarming word that escaped slaves were finding sanctuary among the Seminoles.
On Friday, December 18, 1835—a week before Christmas—Osceola attacked a Florida militia wagon train at Kanapaha. Ten days later a force of 180 Seminoles routed an advance guard of Major Francis Dade’s force near the Fort King road. By the time the fighting was over, Dade’s soldiers—roughly a hundred—were all dead.
The conflict that ensued, the Second Seminole War, would last seven years. It was to become the nation’s longest and most expensive Indian war, and while Jackson grew impatient and angry with the American commanders who lost battle after battle to the Seminoles, he never doubted that total victory was the only acceptable answer, no matter how costly. “I have been confined to my room all this day taking medicine,” Jackson wrote during the conflict. “I have been brooding over the unfortunate mismanagement of all the military operations in Florida, all [of] which are so humiliating to our militar
y character, that it fills me with pain and mortification—the sooner that a remedy can be afforded the better.” Without security—from Indians, from Mexico, from Spain, from Britain, from whomever—Jackson believed that everything else about the American republic was at risk. He was anguished about the Seminoles’ success. In a meeting with Florida’s territorial delegate, the president denounced the people of Florida. “Let the damned cowards defend their country,” Jackson said of Florida’s militia. He fumed that if five Indians had come into a white settlement in Tennessee or Kentucky—Jackson’s territory—“not one would have ever got out alive.” Yet the war went on.
IN NORTHERN GEORGIA in these late autumn and early winter months of 1835–36, Jackson’s men were completing the work of Cherokee removal. On Tuesday, December 29, 1835, the administration signed the Treaty of New Echota, a pact purportedly with the Cherokee Nation setting terms for the final removal of the tribe west of the Mississippi.
The Cherokees who signed the treaty, however, were not representative of the tribe as a whole. They were part of what was known as the “Treaty party,” a group in opposition to Chief John Ross’s “National party.” Ross, who represented an estimated 16,000 out of 17,000 Cherokees, was against removal and, if removal had to come, he wanted to hold out for a more advantageous deal with the government. But the Treaty party took the current offer, and the administration chose to believe that the signers had the authority to commit the entire Cherokee Nation. (The Senate ratified New Echota by one vote.) The deadline for removal was set for 1838—the year after Jackson left the White House.
