by Jon Meacham
At almost midnight on that evening, Donelson recommitted himself to the old man’s service. Emily was gone, but his duty remained. “Let me hear from you often, for now that my dear wife is withdrawn from me, my greatest solicitude is to know that your health will last until you can reach the Hermitage once more,” Donelson said.
The news did not reach the White House until New Year’s Eve. “Would to God I had been there,” Jackson told Donelson. “I was fearful from my dream that her God had called her hence, and … my forebodings increased, and are now realized.” Ten days after that, he joined Andrew in taking charge of the now motherless brood: “We must summon up all that fortitude we can, to preserve our healths, and to live for their benefit.” They were in this together, Jackson said: “Peace to her manes, and consolation to you and your dear children, is my prayer.”
CHAPTER 33
THE PRESIDENT WILL
GO OUT TRIUMPHANTLY
AS EMILY LAY dying, politics in Washington ran their usual course. In November people cast their votes for the next president. It was a close race, and for a while, as the returns trickled in, Van Buren seemed likely to be defeated. If the vote was sent to the House—which was possible—he would probably lose to Harrison or White. But by the beginning of December Van Buren learned that he had won in the Electoral College. His margin of victory in the popular vote in some states measured in the hundreds.
However distracted by his own fortunes, President-elect Van Buren comforted Andrew Donelson with a report that Emily’s death had touched even the most cynical in Washington. He would, he said, “never cease to admire her excellent character.… It will I am sure be grateful to your feelings to learn how extensively this sentiment is entertained here where such feelings are, you know, not apt to take deep root—it is much more than I have witnessed on any former occasion.”
Anything connected to Emily took on significance, particularly a portrait by Earl. Jackson had it boxed to send back to Nashville. Remembering the loss of other shipments in recent years, though, Donelson asked Jackson to put it aside until he reached Washington. “I shall write you again in a few days, in respect to the portrait of my dear wife, which you inform me is packed up with the others you design sending out,” Donelson said. “I would remark that I prefer not to risk it to the chances of a consignment either by water or land to Nashville. If I can so arrange my business as to be able to leave home in the spring I can bring it with me.”
In his grief, as he had with Rachel, Jackson pressed on. Eight Christmases before, he had turned to Emily and made the journey to Washington. Then he had found comfort in fighting what he saw as a war for the people. Now, in the twilight of his presidency, he wanted to win one final battle for the presidency itself, and for his personal honor, by erasing what he thought was the great blot on his record: the censure of the Senate for his removal of the Bank deposits in 1834.
The White House years of Andrew Jackson were to end as they had begun—in personal grief and political passion, with hosannas from his supporters and hatred from his foes. The era itself had been one of drama—sometimes melodrama—and danger. It would now come to a close in the Senate chamber, with speeches of praise and condemnation, with lawmakers standing implacably for him or against him. The business before the Senate in January 1837 was a motion to expunge the censure from the record—undoing, in effect, the Senate’s denunciation of Jackson’s unilateral decision to effectively destroy the Bank of the United States. Benton, who was leading the president’s cause, wanted his troops well cared for, and ordered a supply of cold ham, turkey, wine, and hot coffee. It was, however, hardly a festive occasion. According to Isaac Bassett, a young page, “the great part of the Senate was not in a humor to eat.”
Sarcastic, angry, and resigned, Clay said:
The decree has gone forth. It is one of urgency, too. The deed is to be done—that foul deed which, like the blood-stained hands of the guilty Macbeth, all ocean’s waters will never wash out. Proceed, then, by the noble work which lies before you, and like other skillful executioners, do it quickly. And when you have perpetrated it, go home to the people, and tell them what glorious honors you have achieved for our common country. Tell them that you have extinguished one of the brightest and purest lights that ever burnt at the altar of civil liberty. Tell them that you have silenced one of the noblest batteries that ever thundered in defense of the constitution, and bravely spiked the cannon. Tell them that, henceforward, no matter what daring or outrageous act any President may perform, you have forever hermetically sealed the mouth of the Senate. Tell them that he may fearlessly assume what powers he pleases, snatch from its lawful custody the public purse, command a military detachment to enter the halls of the Capitol, overawe Congress, trample down the constitution, raze every bulwark of freedom; but that the Senate must stand mute, in silent submission, and not dare to raise its opposing voice.… And, if the people do not pour out their indignation and imprecations, I have yet to learn the character of American freemen.
Calhoun joined Clay in opposition. “No one, not blinded by party zeal, can possibly be insensible that the measure proposed is a violation of the constitution,” Calhoun said. “The constitution requires the Senate to keep a journal; this resolution goes to expunge the journal. If you may expunge a part, you may expunge the whole; and if it is expunged, how is it kept?” Like Clay, however, he knew that his was a futile argument, for “this act originates in pure, unmixed, personal idolatry. It is the melancholy evidence of a broken spirit, ready to bow at the feet of power.… An act like this could never have been consummated by a Roman Senate until the times of Caligula and Nero.”
As Benton undertook the defense of the president, the galleries filled with Jackson enemies (Benton believed them to be Bank men), prompting several pro-Benton senators to send for guns. Not surprisingly, Benton’s speech making the case for Jackson was as grand in exaltation as Clay’s and Calhoun’s had been in denunciation.
“History has been ransacked to find examples of tyrants sufficiently odious to illustrate him by comparison,” Benton said of Jackson. “Language has been tortured to find epithets sufficiently strong to paint him in description. Imagination has been exhausted in her efforts to deck him with revolting and inhuman attributes. Tyrant, despot, usurper; destroyer of the liberties of his country; rash, ignorant, imbecile; endangering the public peace with all foreign nations; destroying domestic prosperity at home.…” Benton dismissed all such charges.
He came into office the first of generals; he goes out the first of statesmen. His civil competitors have shared the fate of his military opponents; and Washington city has been to the American politicians who have assailed him what New Orleans was to the British generals who attacked his lines. Repulsed! Driven back! Discomfited! Crushed! has been the fate of all assailants, foreign and domestic, civil and military. At home and abroad, the impress of his genius and of his character is felt.
Still, though, the assailants came, and came, and came again, and against any other president, Benton argued, they might have succeeded. But not against Jackson. “Great has been the opposition to President Jackson’s administration; greater, perhaps, than ever has been exhibited against any government, short of actual insurrection and forcible resistance,” Benton said. “The country has been alarmed, agitated, convulsed. From the Senate chamber to the village bar-room, from one end of the continent to the other, denunciation, agitation, excitement, has been the order of the day. For eight years the President of this republic has stood upon a volcano, [which has been] vomiting fire and flames upon him, and threatening the country itself with ruin and desolation, if the people did not expel the usurper, despot, and tyrant, as he was called, from the high place to which the suffrages of millions of freemen had elevated him.”
How had he done it? How had he survived? Benton gave a high-flown answer, but one with much merit.
Great is the confidence which he has always reposed in the discernment and equity of the Am
erican people. I have been accustomed to see him for many years, and under many discouraging trials; but never saw him doubt, for an instant, the ultimate support of the people.… He always said the people would stand by those who stand by them; and nobly have they justified that confidence! That verdict, the voice of millions, which now demands the expurgation of that sentence, which the Senate and the Bank then pronounced upon him, is the magnificent response of the people’s hearts to the implicit confidence which he then reposed in them.
The motion to expunge carried, and, after what Isaac Bassett called “a storm of hisses and groans” from the left wing of the Circular Gallery (the sergeant at arms rounded up the “disturbers”), the record of Jackson’s censure for abuse of power was marked out of the journal by the secretary of the Senate.
THRILLED BY THE vote, Jackson invited the senators who had become known as “the expungers” to dine at the White House with their wives. He was too sick to sit at the table, but he greeted his guests and seated Benton—the “head-expunger,” a title that, in these days in Jackson’s world, had no rival—in his own chair. “All going well here,” Andrew Jackson, Jr., wrote to Stockley Donelson on the last day of January 1837, “and the President will go out triumphantly after all.” That he would. The vindication was to his political career what New Orleans had been to his military years: what Benton called the “crowning mercy.”
Benton sent Jackson the pen that had, in Clay’s phrase, done the deed. Jackson would treasure it, he told Benton, as one of his “precious relics.” It was, for him, the instrument of a sacred act, for it had vindicated his vision not only of the presidency but of himself and his connection with the people—a connection Jackson considered as strong as any earthly bond could be. He loved them, or had convinced himself he loved them; how could anyone doubt his motives, or dare criticize his means? “It has been my fortune in the discharge of public duties, civil and military, frequently to have found myself in difficult and trying situations, where prompt decision and energetic action were necessary, and where the interest of the country required that high responsibilities should be fearlessly encountered,” Jackson wrote in the farewell address he issued on March 4, 1837, “and it is with the deepest emotions of gratitude that I acknowledge the continued and unbroken confidence with which you have sustained me in every trial.”
His own verdict on his decades in the arena? “My public life has been a long one, and I cannot hope that it has at all times been free from errors; but I have the consolation of knowing that if mistakes have been committed they have not seriously injured the country I so anxiously endeavored to serve,” he said in the farewell address, “and at the moment when I surrender my last public trust I leave this great people prosperous and happy, in the full enjoyment of liberty and peace, and honored and respected by every nation of the world.”
SATURDAY, MARCH 4, 1837, was a splendid day in Washington, cloudless and warm. Watching the transfer of power from Andrew Jackson to Martin Van Buren from a window overlooking the East Front of the Capitol, Thomas Hart Benton found the crowd “profoundly silent.… It was the stillness and silence of reverence and affection; and there was no room for mistake as to whom this mute and impressive homage was rendered.” Van Buren appeared to sense, too, that this was as much Jackson’s moment as his own, and he conceded that he was working in the shadow of a giant whose powers he could not hope to match. “In receiving from the people the sacred trust twice confided to my illustrious predecessor, and which he has discharged so faithfully and so well,” Van Buren said in his inaugural address, “I know that I cannot expect to perform the arduous task with equal ability and success.” It was, Benton observed from his window, an occasion on which “the rising was eclipsed by the setting sun.” Leaving the Capitol for the last time, Jackson, as was his habit, bowed to the people, then returned down Pennsylvania Avenue.
It was over. “My own race is nearly run; advanced age and failing health warn me that before long I must pass beyond the reach of human events and cease to feel the vicissitudes of human affairs,” Jackson said in his farewell address. “I thank God that my life has been spent in a land of liberty and that He has given me a heart to love my country with the affection of a son.” A son to his country, a father to the people.
With that, he turned toward home.
CHAPTER 34
THE SHOCK IS GREAT,
AND GRIEF UNIVERSAL
ONCE JACKSON LEFT the White House on Tuesday, March 7, 1837, there were the expected huzzas and throngs on his pilgrimage south. But the receptions were complicated—and were all the more compelling for it. In an account of Jackson’s stop in Louisville written to Reuben Lewis (brother of the explorer Meriwether Lewis), a contemporary observer noted the complexities of the town’s reaction to the traveling former president.
“In the heart of a city where I had heard him cursed with the most intense bitterness thousands of times—where many openly declared they would not begrudge millions to see him assassinated,” the observer wrote, “all was respect and reverence, and that same feeling and deportment was evinced towards him that children show a deeply loved father.”
It was a moment of unity in a world given to division. As the Louisville observer said, “I thought it was one of the most sublime moral spectacles I ever beheld or that sun perhaps ever shone upon.… Thank God it was so! It gives a patriot better hopes of his country.”
THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD was a comfort. Sarah Yorke Jackson and Andrew Jackson, Jr., lived in the Hermitage with Jackson, and Donelson, though troubled in his grief, was nearby at Poplar Grove. Jackson worried about his nephew, writing to Van Buren: “The Major is so much engaged with his little family and farm, and so depressed in spirits by his late bereavement, that he does not now appear to take any lively interest in politics—this in time will change, and I hope to see him once more himself again.”
Donelson did revive, as did Jackson, who, not surprisingly, was restless in retirement and never slowed down. The former president spent the next eight years advising his successors and aspiring successors, urging the annexation of Texas, and keeping up a stream of political correspondence. Letters were his lifeline. On a cold autumn Friday in 1838, Amos Kendall arrived at the outskirts of the Hermitage property about eleven o’clock in the morning. There he found his “good old chief” standing at the gate, waiting for the day’s mail. Despite the raw weather, Jackson wore no coat, and Kendall admired how “his face was colored by the keen air.” And Jackson always thought of his neighboring nephew, advising Donelson in 1840 to “seek out a discreet lady for a partner and marry. This can alone make you happy at home, and enable you to raise your charming little daughters and keep them under your own roof.” In 1841, Donelson married Elizabeth Martin Randolph—Emily’s niece, who had cared for her through her dying days, and whose own husband, Lewis Randolph, had died in 1837. (About this time the name of the Donelson house was changed from Poplar Grove to Tulip Grove; Hermitage legend has it that Van Buren made the suggestion on a visit to Nashville.) Politics remained a central part of Donelson’s life: in 1844 President John Tyler appointed him chargé d’affaires to the Republic of Texas at an hour when Britain and France were both maneuvering for influence on the American continent.
AT THE HERMITAGE, Jackson grew more religious as the years passed. A vigilant sentry on what Jefferson, in a New Year’s Day 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, had called the “wall of separation between church and state,” he had long avoided formally joining a church. He changed that after retiring, when, sitting in his pew in the Hermitage church, he listened to the Reverend Dr. John Todd Edgar preach a sermon on “the interposition of Providence in the affairs of men.”
As Edgar told the story to James Parton, the minister noticed Jackson listening intently. Moved by the moment, Edgar began to speak of “the career of a man who, in addition to the ordinary dangers of human life, had encountered those of the wilderness, of war, and of keen political conflict; who had e
scaped the tomahawk of the savage, the attack of his country’s enemies, the privations and fatigues of border warfare, and the aim of the assassin. How is it,” Edgar went on, “that a man endowed with reason and gifted with intelligence can pass through such scenes as these unharmed, and not see the hand of God in his deliverance?”
Afterward, Jackson insisted that Edgar come see him at the Hermitage. The minister had another engagement, but promised to come the next morning. Jackson was annoyed by the delay: he was unaccustomed to being put off, even for a night. Yet that evening, alone, Jackson appears to have had a kind of conversion experience. “As the day was breaking,” Parton wrote after speaking with Edgar, “light seemed to dawn upon his troubled soul, and a great peace fell upon him.” He told Edgar of the long night, and of the relief at sunrise.
Soon Jackson stood, leaning on a cane, in the Hermitage church, declaring his faith. It was a world away from the Waxhaw meetinghouse—so many years, so much strife, so many battles, so many struggles. Yet he had returned, in a way, to the place where he had first set out.
A FINANCIAL PANIC, followed by depression, struck the country only months after Jackson left office. There is much historical debate over whether it was Jackson’s policies, crop failures, international forces, or some combination of all three that contributed to the hard times. In the middle of 1836 he had reluctantly signed a bill that increased the number of banks that received government deposits. This Deposit Bill led to the distribution of the federal surplus to banks in the states and fed speculation in the wild market for public lands. Then he issued an order called the Specie Circular, which, in an attempt to curb that speculation, directed that only gold and silver would be accepted for the purchase of public lands. (Settlers could still use paper money; the circular was aimed at speculators.) However good Jackson’s intentions, the nation experienced an economic debacle in his wake. There is plenty of blame to assign to different players in the drama, from the White House to the Whigs in Congress to the bankers and the speculators—even to British demands for specie. One lesson may be that the American economy had already reached such a level of complexity, and was already sufficiently subject to global forces, that even the most attentive of presidents would find managing it a daunting and often disappointing task.
