by Jon Meacham
The time came, but the vast majority of Cherokees had not left their lands. Thus began the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of Cherokees to the West. The military could be brutal, and an estimated 4,000 of the 16,000 Cherokees who were forced out died along the way. “I fought through the Civil War and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew,” said one Georgia volunteer.
Van Buren was by then president, but the policy that led to the deaths was Jackson’s. Rather than living up to the promise of his many warm words on the subject of his concern for the Indians as their “Great Father,” Jackson did not ensure that removal was done humanely (if such a thing were possible). Jackson knew how to exercise power, and had he chosen to do so, he could have used his power to bring about a fairer implementation of his removal policy. In his farewell address in March 1837, Jackson said that “the philanthropist will rejoice that the remnant of that ill-fated race has been at length placed beyond the reach of injury or oppression, and that the paternal care of the General Government will hereafter watch over them and protect them.” Did Jackson believe this? Probably; the human capacity to convince oneself of something one wants to think true is virtually bottomless. Given facts such as Indian removal, it has to be.
WITH VIOLENCE IN Texas, bloodshed in Florida, misery for the Cherokees, and the question of the White House succession open for another year, Jackson was buffeted from hour to hour and day to day. Emily, as always, did her best to create a kind of sanctuary for him at home. As Emily’s eldest daughter recalled it decades later, Emily organized a large party for Christmas Day 1835. There were six children in the White House: four of Emily and Andrew’s, ranging from eighteen months to nine years old, and two of Sarah and Andrew Jackson, Jr.’s, one eighteen months and the other three years old. On Saturday, December 19, 1835, Emily dispatched the invitations:
“The children of President Jackson’s family request you to join them on Christmas Day, at four o’clock p.m., in a frolic in the East Room.”
How Jackson loved both the idea and the reality of his own clan. For Jackson, home remained the center of order in a chaotic world. Surrounded by family, he tended to be more cheerful amid tribulation than if he were alone. Both Emily and Sarah had been in residence in Washington in the autumn of 1835, an interlude that brightened even Jackson’s grimmest days.
This White House holiday was in many ways the pinnacle of Jackson’s lifelong project to construct a comfortable and loving universe for himself. On Christmas Eve afternoon—it was a warm, sunny winter day, Mary Donelson Wilcox (then named Mary Rachel) recalled, “more like May than December”—Jackson announced that he wanted the older children dressed to go for a ride with him in his coach: they were to meet him at the front door of the White House, next to Jimmy O’Neal’s office. The household mobilized into action; as Mary Rachel recalled, those around Jackson were “always granting, often anticipating, his wishes” and the family “never dared oppose or disobey his orders.” The children were marched to the front door and into the carriage, where they waited for Jackson, who soon appeared.
“To the Orphan Asylum,” Jackson told George, the coachman, settling in among the children. Jackson was a strong supporter of the orphanage, a favorite charity of Washington society. (The petition to incorporate the asylum, which was founded by Marcia Van Ness, had been signed by Mrs. Van Ness, Margaret Bayard Smith, and Dolley Madison.) On the way, Mary Rachel recalled, the children quizzed “Uncle” on the absorbing question of the hour.
John: “Uncle … did you ever see Santa Claus?”
The President, eyeing John curiously over his spectacles: “No, my boy; I never did.”
John: “Mammy thinks he’ll not come tonight. Did you ever know him to behave that way?”
The President: “We can only wait and see. I once knew a little boy who not only never heard of Christmas or Santa Claus, but never had a toy in his life; and after the death of his mother, a pure, saintly woman, had neither home nor friends.”
Chorus of children: “Poor little fellow! Had he come to the White House we would have shared our playthings with him.”
Arriving at the asylum, Jackson said, “Here I am with some Christmas cheer for your young charges.” He was a familiar figure to the orphans, and he seemed to relish his fatherly role. “The children gathered in the reception room, and it was gratifying to see their faces light up as, greeting each one, he distributed his gifts, and even more gratifying was it to note his pleasure at their grateful surprise,” Mary Rachel wrote.
As the carriage rolled back to the White House through Washington, past still-green parks, Jackson delivered packages Emily and Sarah had prepared. There was, Mary Rachel said, “a hand-painted mirror for Mr. Van Buren, who was reputed to be on very good terms with his looking-glass.”
The next morning the president was up early, and the children raced to his room to open their stockings. “Did Santa Claus come?” the children cried. “See for yourselves,” Jackson said, and watched as they surveyed their gifts—a small gun, a bridle and saddle, a hobby horse and drum, dolls and tea sets and rattles. It was typically indulgent of Jackson. “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” Emily would say in arguments about discipline with Jackson, who would reply: “I think, Emily, with all due deference to the Good Book, that love and patience are better disciplinarians than rods.”
At four that afternoon the children were dressed in their party clothes and took up their stations amid evergreens and flowering plants at the doors of the East Room, on the first floor. The guests flowed in, staying in the Red Room as the children found, Mary Rachel recalled, the East Room to be “an ideal play-ground, and the players, free and unrestrained as if on a Texas prairie, romping, scampering, shouting, laughing, in all the exuberance of childish merry-making.” At one point Van Buren lost a game of tag, and was forced to stand on one leg and say: “Here I stand all ragged and dirty, / If you don’t come kiss me I’ll run like a turkey!” No one came to kiss him, and so the vice president of the United States—and putative favorite to be president himself in fifteen months’ time—“strutted like a game gobbler across the room.” After two hours of games, the band in the hall connecting the East Room to the State Dining Room began to play “The President’s March,” and supper began.
The dining room on this Christmas Day had been transformed into a confectioner’s winter wonderland. Snowballs made of starch-coated cotton towered in the center of the room; there were iced fruits, frosted trees, toy animals, and goldfish. After the meal the children seized the snowballs and raced back down to the East Room for a snowball fight.
The great room seemed, for a moment, filled with flakes of snow. It had been a spectacular, enchanting day—of family ties and affection and gifts and grace. But like the snowball skirmish, which Mary Rachel found “exhilarating and inspiring” though “provokingly brief,” the day was soon over. Emily saw the guests out, and the tired children were tucked into bed upstairs.
She would be dead within the year.
CHAPTER 32
I FEAR EMILY
WILL NOT RECOVER
ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 2, 1836, Jackson paid a Philadelphia merchant named George W. South for a shipment of furnishings for the rebuilt Hermitage. Included in an order for crimson silk curtains, brass andirons, and marble-topped washstands were three sets of wallpaper depicting scenes from the French philosopher Fénelon’s work Telemachus, a favorite of Jackson’s. The paper was to hang in the grand entry hall of the new house.
Written in 1699, the book chronicles the political education of Odysseus’s son by the tutor Mentor. “The whole world has its eyes upon him who is highly elevated above others, watching his conduct and criticizing it with the utmost severity,” the book notes. “Those who judge him are unacquainted with his situation. They know nothing of his difficulties, they will not allow him to have any human weaknesses and failings, but expect he should be altogether perfect.
A king, however wise and good he may be, is still only a man.”
The saga of Telemachus—a child left without a father—had innate appeal to Jackson, and Fénelon’s treatise, with its grasp of the subtleties of power and of the complexities of marrying monarchism with republicanism, was an engaging and resonant text for a man in the arena. At one point in the narrative, when Telemachus has complained of the burdens of office, Fénelon writes: “ ‘True it is,’ replied Mentor, ‘a king is only king in order to take care of his people, as a shepherd tends his flock, or a father superintends his family.… The wicked he punishes, and the good he rewards, and thus represents the gods in leading the whole human race to virtue.’ ”
Telemachus broods on the injustices and difficulties a ruler faces. “Mentor replied to him patiently: ‘You must count on the ingratitude of mankind, and yet not be discouraged by it from doing good: you must study their welfare, not so much for their own sakes, as for the sake of the gods, who have commanded it. The good that one does is never lost; if men forget it, the gods will remember and reward it. Further, if the bulk of mankind are ungrateful, there are always some good men who will have a due sense of your virtue. Even the multitude, though fickle and capricious, does not fail sooner or later to do justice, in some measure, to true virtue.’ ”
To some extent and to some degree, in other words, leadership is tragic. There will be disappointments and injustices and failures of imagination or of will. Jackson understood that governing was provisional—no single bill or single election would ever bring about the perfection of all things—but his experience suggested that the American people, if given world enough and time, would come to a right conclusion.
Jackson was elegiac as he began his last full year in office. He was, in Fénelon’s terms, a shepherd and a father looking both forward and backward, musing on the past and the future. “You are assembled at a period of profound interest to the American patriot,” Jackson had told Congress in his annual message in December 1835. “The unexampled growth and prosperity of our country having given us a rank in the scale of nations which removes all apprehension of danger to our integrity and independence from external foes, the career of freedom is before us.”
It was a message, however, that alternated between hope and fear. Jackson had, in his view, triumphed over sundry sources of dissension, from South Carolina’s nullification movement to the purported corrupting influence of the Bank. But there were always enemies, always forces that threatened the essential structure of the country, and Jackson remained concerned about abolitionists who were determined to be heard through the distribution of pamphlets.
He denounced abolitionists’ “inflammatory appeals.” Worried that anti-slavery forces were about to destroy the country, Jackson said: “There is doubtless no respectable portion of our countrymen who can be so far misled as to feel any other sentiment than that of indignant regret at conduct so destructive of the harmony and peace of the country, and so repugnant to the principles of our national compact and to the dictates of humanity and religion.”
This was a widespread sentiment in the Jackson years. “Our happiness and prosperity essentially depend upon peace within our borders,” he wrote, “and peace depends upon the maintenance in good faith of those compromises of the Constitution upon which the Union is founded.” For Jackson and many others—including many Northerners—slavery was such a compromise, and abolition was seen as a threat to the Republic’s precarious political balance.
Still, Southerners feared history was not on their side. “The moral power of the world is against us,” Congressman Francis Pickens of South Carolina told the House in January 1836. Angelina Grimké, a native South Carolinian who had moved to the North and was, with her sister, an emerging force in the abolition movement, published an Appeal to the Christian Women of the South in 1836, holding up Esther and the women around Jesus as models of reform. On Friday, March 11, 1836, Calhoun acknowledged the high price of the flow of abolitionist appeals, whether by mail at home or by petition in the capital. “We must ultimately be not only degraded … but be exhausted and worn out on such a contest.”
THE WAR OVER slavery continued to be fought by proxy. In the early years of the administration, the pretext had been the tariff. The year before, in 1835, it had been the right of states to tell postmasters to suppress abolitionist mailings. Now, in the last full year of the Jackson presidency, the question became one of the right of American citizens to petition the Congress in favor of emancipation, particularly within the District of Columbia.
To curtail the debate and avoid having to decide on the future of slavery, Congress employed what was called the gag rule, which represented the slaveholders’ attempt to pretend as though—at least in the halls of Congress—there was no dispute over the question in America. In a practice devised by South Carolina congressman Henry Pinckney, the House would “table”—the parliamentary term for ignoring—abolitionist petitions, effectively denying constituents the right to be heard on arguably the most consequential issue in American life. (The Senate did the same, though it did not officially vote to “gag” abolitionists. It just did so.)
As 1836 wore on, several Jackson imperatives came into conflict with one another. There was his support, however tacit, for the Texas Revolution against Mexico; he hoped that an independent Texas would become part of the United States, frustrating any lingering British or European imperial designs. There was Indian removal, which was proving bloody and expensive and, if the Seminole case was any indication, could grow even bloodier.
John Quincy Adams saw the inherent tensions. “Mr. Chairman, are you ready for all these wars? A Mexican war? A war with Great Britain, if not with France? A general Indian war? A servile war? And, as an inevitable consequence of them all, a civil war?” Adams demanded in the House in May 1836. “From the instant that your slaveholding states become the theater of war, civil, servile, or foreign, from that instant the war powers of Congress extend to interference with the institution of slavery in every way by which it can be interfered with.”
AN APPEAL FOR help from Stephen Austin came to Jackson in the middle of April 1836. It had been a dizzying few weeks for Texas. On Wednesday, March 2, Texas declared its independence at the town of Washington, on the Brazos River. Then, on Sunday, March 6, Santa Anna’s Mexican troops stormed the Alamo, a fort being defended by David Crockett, James Bowie, William Barret Travis, and roughly 185 others. The Texans refused to give in, and in an hour and a half of brutal combat, Santa Anna massacred every man in the fort. Two weeks later, at Goliad, the Mexican dictator executed 330 soldiers. Then, on April 20 and 21, 1836, at the junction of Buffalo Bayou and the San Jacinto River, Sam Houston rallied his men for what became a final victory. “Victory is certain! Trust in God and fear not! And remember the Alamo! Remember the Alamo!” A Texas force of nearly one thousand defeated Santa Anna’s fourteen hundred men—and the general was brought to Houston as a prisoner.
For official purposes, Jackson had maintained the appearance of neutrality in the Texas conflict. When Austin wrote asking for help in what he told Jackson was “a war of barbarism against civilization, of despotism against liberty, of Mexicans against Americans,” Jackson demurred, noting on the letter: “The writer does not reflect that we have a treaty with Mexico, and our national faith is pledged to support it. The Texans, before they took the step to declare themselves independent, which has aroused and united all Mexico against them, ought to have pondered well.”
But to young Jackson Donelson, Emily and Andrew’s nine-year-old son, the president expressed his true feelings on the subject in a letter about the story of the Alamo. From boarding school in Chantilly, Virginia, young Donelson had written Jackson about the Alamo, and on Friday, April 22, 1836, Jackson replied: “Your sympathies expressed on hearing of the death of those brave men who fell in defense of the Alamo displays a proper feeling of patriotism and sympathy for the gallant defenders of the rights of freemen, which I trust will grow
with your growth … and find you always a strong votary in the cause of freedom.”
ON TUESDAY, MAY 10, 1836, the spring racing season began in Washington; Andrew Donelson was to try his luck with a filly named Emily. According to Blair’s Globe, “To give variety to the amusement of the turf a splendid ball is to be given by the members of the Jockey Club … at Carusi’s rooms which no doubt will be graced by the beauty and the fashion of the City.”
Such glamorous hours—Carusi’s had been the scene of the first inaugural party, all those years ago—were growing short for Emily, who was to return to Tennessee in June. She lost a sister in April, and in May Edward Livingston died—news that shook Emily, who was herself never in the best of health. Her letter to Louise Livingston suggests that the subject of mortality was uncomfortable, and it was only with effort that she was able to express her sympathy to the family that had been so kind to her.
“I have intended to write to you for some days past but have felt so much distressed at the loss we have all sustained [that I] have not been able to do so until today,” Emily wrote on June 8; by contrast, Jackson’s letter to Mrs. Livingston was dated May 26. “I expect to leave the city for our home in Tennessee in a few days and cannot bear to set off until assuring you and my dear Cora of my sincere and affectionate sympathy.… No one was more beloved by all who knew him and more regretted than Mr. Livingston and we may hope [he] has only exchanged this for a better world and we must all sooner or later expect to follow.” Having at last rallied her energies to write, Emily forced herself to look ahead to the autumn with confidence and made a noble effort at good cheer, anticipating a journey to the Livingstons’ in New York. “I hope … to return early in the fall and unless something should happen to prevent will see you on the North River and pay to you the long promised visit.”
