Before confronting Biddle, the President decided on a trip north into the old Federalist hinterland. Like presidential heroes before him, he received the cheers of Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, but this presidential party traveled by steamboat, canal barge, and train—Jackson’s first train ride. The party even invaded Boston, where they expected the coolest of receptions. Greeted at the Massachusetts border by young Josiah Quincy, who had reluctantly accepted the duty of escorting the dragon, Old Hickory so charmed Josiah and other Bostonians that the young man’s father, President Quincy of Harvard College, called his overseers together and voted Jackson a degree of Doctor of Laws. Overseer John Quincy Adams boycotted the ceremony in Harvard Yard. He would not be present to watch Harvard’s disgrace, he said, in conferring “her highest literary honors upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.” Despite serious hemorrhaging of the lungs, Jackson moved on up the North Shore to Lynn and Salem and finally Concord, New Hampshire, where he collapsed and had to be borne back to Washington by steamer.
He was not too sick, however, to resume the project he had got under way soon after his inauguration: removing the government deposits from Biddle’s bank. Why did Jackson pursue the bank further, after his “veto victory” of ’32? In part because he feared that Biddle might use the three years remaining before charter expiration to manipulate money and politicians to gain recharter, or even to precipitate a financial panic just before the 1836 election and thus help pro-bank candidates. Withdrawing the sizable government deposits in the bank would be a body blow to Biddle’s “monster” financially—and a symbol around which Jackson men could rally.
But the President’s decision had a deeper, more personal source. He was immovably, fanatically, emotionally committed to breaking Biddle’s bank. Delegations of businessmen and bankers who came to ask him for relief could hardly get their first sentence out of their mouths before he would break in with his harangue. “Relief, sir!” he would burst out. “Come not to me, sir! Go to the monster.…You would have us, like the people of Ireland, paying tribute to London.…” Would to God all the “stockjobbers, brokers, and gamblers [were] swept from the land!” He always came back to the monster. “I’ve got my foot upon it and I’ll crush it.” Over and over again he declaimed that he would never—never—never give in. Jackson’s fanaticism, Michael Rogin has theorized, issued from a ferocious inner struggle that had its sources in childhood deprivation and adult trauma and conflict.
And he was officially almost alone. Treasury Secretary McLane had made clear from the start that he was against removal, so he was smoothly shifted to Secretary of State in the spring. Vice-President Van Buren, facing every day the full panoply of Democratic party factions arrayed in front of his Senate rostrum, dragged his heels, concerned as he was with the implications of the new struggle for party harmony and his own presidential ambitions. Jackson chose William J. Duane, a Philadelphia lawyer, to carry on the fight for repeal, only to discover that his new Treasury Secretary had no stomach to take on his fellow Philadelphian. The President sacked him, and substituted Attorney General Taney, who, along with Kendall and other members of the “kitchen cabinet,” had been a close adviser on the program. Late in September, Taney instructed federal tax collectors in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston to stop using the bank as a depository within five days. That was the kind of action Jackson liked.
Somberly Nicholas Biddle watched these proceedings from deep within the bowels of his marble, Corinthian-columned temple on Chestnut Street. Fighting desperately on both the political and economic fronts, he saw to it that his banking friends and allies inundated Congress with clamoring delegations and a shower of petitions, memorials, and letters. He worked so closely with Webster politically that the senator, after much consultation back and forth, often served as his Washington agent, so closely financially that Webster borrowed from the bank and complained at the height of the removal battle that “my retainer has not been renewed, or refreshed, as usual.” (Webster asked Biddle to burn all letters; Biddle replied primly that he did so “scrupulously,” but only when asked.) Through the Massachusetts senator Biddle had access to free legal advice from a United States Supreme Court justice, Webster’s friend Joseph Story.
Biddle’s loftiest political hope was that the great Senate triumvirate of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun would amalgamate their forces against the “banditti” in the White House. “I only repeat what I have said again & again that the fate of this nation is in the hands of Mr. Clay Mr. Calhoun & yourself,” he wrote Webster. “It is in your power to save us from the misrule of these people in place, but you can only do it while you are united.” He added that the enemies of the bank were hanging on every whisper of hostility among them. Here Biddle miscalculated. The celebrated trio were too far apart on major issues like slavery and the tariff, too self-protective of their own presidential ambitions, too suspicious of one another, to organize a grand coalition behind the bank. At most they managed to organize some committees hostile to Jackson in the new Congress that met in December 1833.
On the economic front Biddle could move on his own, and more boldly. During late 1833 the bank initiated a credit reduction that was in part a response to the Treasury’s deposit removals, but even more, enemies charged, an effort to put pressure on the government through the whole credit structure. The money, pressure in the business world became so acute that leading Boston and New York merchants met with Biddle and charged to his face that the contraction gave no protection to the bank and represented a transparent effort to extort a new charter from the government. Soon the bank returned to expansion.
The last act of the drama took place in the Senate. No one there had been more dismayed by Jackson’s exercise of presidential power than his great rival from the West, Henry Clay. The day after Christmas 1833 the Kentucky senator rose to offer resolutions of censure of the President. Jackson, Clay said, had seized powers not granted him under the Constitution, powers dangerous to popular liberty. He had abused the right of veto, made arbitrary appointments and removals, treated the judiciary with contempt, and had made the Treasury Secretary responsible to himself rather than to Congress. At this rate, he said, the great republic would become an elective monarchy, “the worst of all forms of government.” He closed with stirring and portentous warnings—of approaching tyranny, of a land filled with spies and informers, where people no longer spoke “in the fearless tones of manly freedom, but in the cautious whispers of trembling slaves.” Unless Congress acted quickly, “we shall die—ignobly die! base, mean and abject slaves—the scorn and contempt of mankind—unpitied, unwept, unmourned!”
After three months’ debate, during which the Jacksonians tried to pose the key issue as rechartering the bank rather than the Constitution, the Senate passed censure by decisive majorities. The President was furious, but bided his time. Then the Democrats swept the congressional elections of 1834, increasing their majority in the House. The result was seen as a test of Jackson’s bank policy; Biddle’s bank was now doomed. But the President tasted the full sweets of victory only when his fellow Democrats pulled the obnoxious resolution out of the archives, directed that heavy black lines be drawn around the offending words, and ordered the censure EXPUNGED.
JACKSONIAN LEADERSHIP
Like all strong leaders, Jackson became the target of ferocious criticism. His National Republican foes, showing a new skill at cartooning, pictured him as a maniacal king sitting on a crumbling throne beside a hovering bat and behind deserting rats; as a doctor, scalpel in hand, lancing Uncle Sam, with blood and specie flowing from the wound; as a tyrant receiving a crown from Van Buren and a scepter from the devil.
Inevitably, he divided the American people and polarized American politics. More than any other President, more even than Jefferson, he was loved and he was hated, and many of those who had loved Jefferson and were still living—though by no means all—also loved Old Hickory. Like all gre
at leaders, he not only caused conflict, he cultivated it and embodied it.
Jackson’s divisive impact was so powerful, indeed, as to serve as the catalyzing force in a reordering of parties. Twice beaten at the polls, the National Republicans were demoralized after his re-election, but the Jacksonian “tyranny” helped bring them back to life in the mid-1830s as the Whig—and proudly Whiggish—party. Unable to agree on slavery or tariffs or internal improvements or even the bank, the Whigs could unite against “King Andrew.” A hodgepodge of old-time Federalists, conservative Democrats, staunch National Republicans, and opportunistic Anti-Masons, eastern capitalists and labor, conservative midwestern farmers, southern merchants and planters, the Whigs could unite against the city rabble, the backwoodsmen, the spoilsmen, the non-gentlemen who, they felt, dominated the Democratic party.
But what could the Whigs unite for? Could they get behind a candidate, a platform, and a major effort to win control of the federal government? One resource the Whigs possessed in abundance was leadership, or really a cornucopia of leaders. Aside from the “Big Three,” all of whom were still politically in their prime, the Whigs could boast of a second cadre of men of keen political insight: Senator Hugh Lawson White of Tennessee, onetime friend of Jackson’s, a strict constructionist of the old school, a critic and rival of Van Buren; Edward Everett, magnetic preacher and orator who had been chosen pastor of Unitarianism’s Brattle Street Church before he was twenty, then had become an influential congressman, in sentiment pro-bank and anti-“Levellers,” as he termed them; William Henry Harrison of Ohio, famed Indian fighter, hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe, more recently a United States senator and diplomat; Supreme Court Justice John McLean, some kind of Republican-Democrat-Whig, now sheltered from partisanship by the court, but available.
Jackson’s expected choice of Van Buren as his heir apparent brought the Whig leaders into a fleeting unity. Not yet a truly national party, even more sectional than the Democrats, the Whigs decided on an ingenious strategy for winning in 1836: running several candidates who were strong in their states and who could capitalize on regional hostility to Jackson and Van Buren. Collectively, they hoped, the Whig candidates would rack up enough electoral votes to throw the issue into the House of Representatives, where they could combine against the Jacksonians. Henry Clay, still ambitious for the White House but doubtful of beating Van Buren, stood apart from these strange proceedings, as a nationalist and unifier. Heavily pressured by Webster’s friends, a caucus of 315 Whig members of the Massachusetts legislature unanimously nominated Webster for the presidency. A caucus of anti-Jackson congressmen in Tennessee nominated White, who accepted the call despite threats from Jackson that he would ruin this apostate Democrat if he did. A Whig state convention in Pennsylvania endorsed William Henry Harrison. By early 1836 all the Whig parties were off and running.
Under Jackson’s stern eye, and with Van Buren’s manipulative hand, the Democrats had little difficulty in uniting their forces. Unlike the Whigs, who declined to hold a national party convention because it would have dramatized their divisions, the Democrats were happy to convene in Baltimore in May 1835 to eulogize Old Hickory and anoint his successor. But the meeting was more than a celebration; it was an opportunity for 600 or more third-cadre Democrats—town and county notables, local professional men, farm and business leaders—to come together, exchange views and information, and then return to their home bailiwicks ready to do their part in the battle ahead.
It was not much of a battle, with several regional candidates providing scant direct confrontation to the “Little Magician.” Since personalities abounded, the campaign became largely one of invective. The young Whig leader in New York, William H. Seward called Van Buren “a crawling reptile, whose only claim was that he had inveigled the confidence of a credulous, blind, dotard, old man.” Van Buren’s running-mate, Senator Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, though billed by the Democrats as the personal slayer of Tecumseh, was pilloried by southern Whigs as a man who had taken up with a mulatto woman and, when she ran off with an Indian (Tecumseh’s revenge?) and was recaptured, had her sold down the river while he moved on to her sister. Still, some of the orators and editorial writers were able to rise above invective and to present the voters with a fairly coherent sense of choice between Whiggism and Jacksonianism.
The election outcome demonstrated anew that political leaders, like military ones, must unite their armies. Van Buren won 170 electoral votes, a clear majority over the combined total of Harrison with 73, White with 26, Webster with only 14. Political analysts noted the electoral strength of Harrison, the weakness of the celebrated senator from Massachusetts. Van Buren carried the popular vote by 763,000 to 736,000 over his combined opponents—a narrow margin, but well distributed. Democrats and Whigs each picked up some strength in the opposition’s areas, helping produce a “converting election,” as Gerald Pomper called it, that reflected a shifting voter coalition and heralded the shape of presidential contests to come. For the moment, at least, sectional politics seemed to be declining, national party politics rising.
On Inaugural Day, Jackson and Van Buren rode together to the Capitol in a gleaming carriage behind four splendid grays. People were struck by the contrast between the two men as they alighted at the entrance to the Capitol, the one gaunt, careworn, ailing, the other half a foot shorter, plump, bouncy, but looking all his fifty-four years with his once reddish hair receding and his sideburns turning gray. The crowd seemed little stirred by the new President’s inaugural words, which stressed the need for forbearance and harmony, but it still appeared mesmerized by Jackson; when he moved slowly down the steps to his carriage bystanders broke into thunderous applause and cheers. Watching from a side window, Thomas Hart Benton was transfixed. Most such pageants were unreal and fleeting, empty and soulless, but “this was reality,” as Arthur Schlesinger wrote of Benton’s feeling, “the living relations between a man and his people, distilled for a pause in the rhythm of events, rising for a moment of wild and soaring enthusiasm, then dying away into the chambers of memory.”
Could Van Buren as leader engage his followers as Jackson had done? Buffed and burnished in his long years of state and national politicking, a believer in the political system in which he had risen steadily as Columbia County surrogate, state senator, New York state attorney general, United States senator, and, briefly, governor, a canny operator in the New York Regency, he had come to look on government as a vast network of pulls and pressures that needed only constant oiling for the clanking machinery and balm for the harried operatives. Thus he was above all a transactional leader—harmonizer, conciliator, consolidator, a man who, unlike Jackson, believed in dampening fires rather than kindling them. He saw the Democratic party as a means of unifying disparate groups and bringing them into accord behind a national program. Since Van Buren did not want or expect much action from the national government, he would not put much pressure on the political system. Clearly this kind of leadership would not engage the hearts and souls of Democrats. But could it cope with change and crisis?
The answer came with brutal impact within weeks of Van Buren’s Inaugural. He had hardly had time to collect a Cabinet around him—he kept most of Jackson’s men—when a financial disaster struck the nation. For some time danger signals had been warning that the boom conditions of the mid-1830s—the expansion of banks and bank loans, the mounting debts of planters and merchants alike, the dizzying rise of prices, especially for farmland—would tumble into financial chaos. Even as Van Buren took office, jobless New Yorkers were protesting against high rents and fuel and even sacking the city’s flour warehouses. In May the jerry-built state banking system favored by Jackson collapsed under the pressure for specie. Banks closed their doors; bustling ports along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts fell idle; men lost their jobs and crops rotted in the fields. The country seemed stunned; the conquest of the land by a foreign power, the British minister wrote home, could hardly have produced a wider sense of “h
umiliation and grief.”
Here was a dramatic test of leadership for the new President, but already there were signs that Van Buren would fail it. During his last year in office Jackson had issued a “Specie Circular” providing that payment to the government for public lands would be mainly limited to gold and silver. The circular was a clear expression of Jackson’s and “Old Bullion” Benton’s hard-money policy. As pressure on the state deposit banks rose during late 1836, Whigs helped push a rescinding of the circular through the Senate and House, but Jackson pocket-vetoed the measure. Now Van Buren was President, and pressure mounted on him to repeal the circular. Wavering between the pro and con arguments, Van Buren seemed haunted by Old Hickory, who from the Hermitage made known his opposition to repeal. The new President gave in to the old.
What then to do? With both his Cabinet and his party divided over possible measures, Van Buren decided to convene a special session of Congress. He cast about for a solution to the continuing panic, now flattening down into a depression. To ask for a rechartering of the national bank was unthinkable for a Jacksonian Democrat; to propose a tidying up of the state bank deposit system, which now lay almost in ruins, was equally unthinkable. But he hit upon a scheme advanced by William M. Gouge, a young Philadelphia editor and economist, who in his popular History of Paper Money and Banking had proposed that public funds should be kept in public custody and not deposited in private banks. This idea—the divorce of the government “from all connection with Banks”—Van Buren made the centerpiece of a spate of reforms that he presented to Congress.
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