by H. W. Brands
What Sevier advocated, and what most Tennesseans wanted, was the right to settle all the way south to the great bend of the Tennessee River. The region around Muscle Shoals was especially strategic, as it was a short portage from the Tennessee to the Tombigbee River, which connected to the Gulf of Mexico via Mobile Bay. The importance of this link was obvious to anyone in Tennessee, for it saved several hundred river miles en route to the outside world and it mooted questions about Spanish control of the Mississippi. Of course it raised new questions about Spanish control of Mobile Bay, as part of Florida, but more than a few westerners judged that Florida wouldn’t stay Spanish for long. In any event, access to Muscle Shoals was a crucial first step on the way to the Gulf and to freedom and happiness for the West. “The prevention of a settlement at or near the Muscle Shoals is a manifest injury done the whole western country,” Sevier told Jackson. “And as long as it is the case, we shall be debarred from the navigation which leads by the way of Mobile, perhaps an outlet to commerce equal if not superior to any in the United States.”
Jackson shared Sevier’s view and represented it in Philadelphia. He and the other members of the Tennessee delegation met with President Adams, and they laid before Congress a remonstrance from the Tennessee legislature asking for authorization to take control of the public lands in the state.
But neither the administration nor Congress was willing to sign over hundreds of thousands of acres simply because the Tennesseans wanted them. Tennessee wasn’t the only state where the issue of public lands arose, and policy had to take account of larger questions. Besides, neither the Federalist administration nor the Federalists in Congress had any desire to encourage emigration to Tennessee, where something in the air made otherwise sensible men turn incorrigibly Republican. Adams agreed in principle to new negotiations with the Cherokees regarding the line of permitted settlement, but a fresh treaty remained far off and a resolution of the land issue even farther.
Across the Atlantic the affairs of Europe took a spectacular and ominous turn. The excesses of the French Revolution had precipitated a powerful royalist reaction, which the desperate republicans countered by appealing to a young artillery officer who had shown a gift for command in the Italian theater of the continuing and now almost continent-wide war. Napoleon Bonaparte rose to the occasion and rescued the republic. And he continued rising, like one of the rockets his artillerymen used to illuminate targets at night, till he held the fate of France in his hands. And because France figured so centrally in the affairs of Europe, he seemed to have much of the continent at his fingertips.
Andrew Jackson never met Napoleon, but in early 1798 he cheered him from afar. Many Republicans looked on the general as the savior of the French Revolution, but none embraced him more enthusiastically than Jackson—in large part because, in addition to saving the revolution, Napoleon appeared poised to spread it to England. “Bonaparte with 150,000 troops inured to conquer is ordered on the coast,” Jackson wrote excitedly to James Robertson. “Do not then be surprised if my next letter should announce a revolution in England. Should Bonaparte make a landing on the English shore, tyranny will be humbled, a throne crushed, and a republic will spring from the wreck—and millions of distressed people restored to the rights of man by the conquering arm of Bonaparte.”
Jackson’s enthusiasm for Napoleon and France was accompanied by a disdain for John Adams and the Federalists. Though Adams showed less zeal for Britain than such arch-Federalists as Alexander Hamilton (whom Adams despised, and vice versa), he still leaned toward Britain in the war between those countries. And when the French commissioned privateers to prey on British-bound American shipping, he was inclined to treat their sins as mortal and those of Britain, which was still seizing French-bound American ships, as venial. He sent a high-level commission to Paris to register America’s upset and demand satisfaction.
The diplomacy went slowly. “No news that can be relied on from our commissioners at Paris,” Jackson wrote to his brother-in-law John Donelson in late January 1798. “But it is reported, and I believe on good authority, that France will not declare war on us.” Yet that didn’t mean the crisis was over. “There are a number in Congress, and to their strength I may add the Heads of Departments, that have a wish to declare war against that nation, or, in other words, do such acts as would in their consequences be similar to a declaration of war.” The Adams administration made no attempt to be fair-minded between Britain and France, Jackson complained. “The partiality for Britain has too evidently appeared.” Moreover, the Anglophiles in the administration were purging those with dissenting views. “They have fallen on a plan to remove from office every man who professes Republican principles, and fill those offices with men who will bend to the nod of the Executive. This is not mere conjecture, but is openly avowed by some of the Heads of Departments to be the rule lately established by the Executive, and this day openly avowed on the floor of Congress.” Virtue, talent, and experience no longer counted, only loyalty to the administration. Jackson was deeply alarmed. “If a man cannot be led to believe as the President believes in politics (and God forbid that a majority should), he is not to fill an office in the United States. This, sir, I view as more dangerous than the establishment of religion, for it is truly an attempt to establish politics and to take away the right of thinking.”
Jackson’s disdain for the policies of the Adams administration was matched by his disgust at the manners of the Federalists and other easterners. To Willie Blount, the stepbrother of William Blount, Jackson wrote a description of how folks in Philadelphia settled their quarrels. “Sticks and spittle are substituted by the Eastern representatives in place of pistols. Two engagements of this kind have lately taken place on the floor of the representative branch, the first with spittle or tobacco juice, the second with a club and tongues.” The result? “The expense of sixteen days spent in debating the subject in the House of Representatives. In their disgrace and expense of the Union, twelve thousand dollars. This will serve for a specimen of Eastern quarrels.”
In the spring of 1798 Jackson abruptly quit the Senate. He packed the few items he had taken to Philadelphia and, with little explanation to anyone, mounted his horse and headed home.
He afterward remarked vaguely that the man most likely to succeed him—Daniel Smith, who did indeed take his place—could serve Tennessee in the Senate better than he could. This may have been true, but it hardly tells the full story. Jackson didn’t lack confidence in his abilities. There were few things worth doing that he didn’t think he could do as well as the next man.
The crux of the issue was whether his work in the Senate was worth doing. Jackson gravely doubted it. So far as he could tell, the members spent their sessions in windy debates about matters of small consequence, casting ayes and nays for obscure amendments to minor bills, preening for the galleries, and treating the public business with derision. Had the senators been serious men, they wouldn’t have limited themselves to “sticks and spittle” in their disputes but would have settled their differences in the honorable fashion, with pistols. Jackson took himself too seriously to waste his time on such inanities.
There was another way of putting it, less uncharitable to his fellow legislators. After three months in the House and another three in the Senate, Jackson discovered he wasn’t cut out for politics, at least not legislative politics. His was an executive temperament. He could make decisions far more easily than he could make compromises. He had much greater confidence in his own judgment than in that of others. Action came naturally, patience harder. He believed a single honest man more likely to find truth than any committee. He was a born leader who couldn’t make himself into a follower.
His impatience at the antics of Congress was evident to the president of the Senate, the vice president of the United States. Thomas Jefferson first encountered Andrew Jackson in Philadelphia. Years later Jefferson reportedly told Daniel Webster that Jackson was the prisoner of overpowering emotions. “His pas
sions are terrible. When I was President of the Senate, he was Senator, and he could never speak from the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it repeatedly, and as often choke with rage.”
There is reason to question the strict accuracy of these secondhand remarks. Jefferson was speaking a quarter century after the fact, amid a bitter contest for president between Jackson and John Quincy Adams. Webster, an Adams man, was trying to get the former president to disqualify Jackson, which Jefferson obligingly did. “I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson President,” Jefferson asserted. “He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place. He has very little respect for law or constitutions. . . . He is a dangerous man.”
Jefferson may indeed have recalled Jackson choking with passion in the Senate, but if he did it probably had less to do with any inherently ungovernable anger in Jackson than with Jackson’s vexation at how much time of the members and expense to the public were being consumed with such little effect. Perhaps other men could put up with such nonsense, but Jackson couldn’t.
Another cause drew him back from Philadelphia. Jackson missed Rachel, and he knew that she missed him. In those days of slow and tedious travel, few members of Congress brought their wives with them to the capital. The eight hundred horseback miles from Nashville to Philadelphia were particularly difficult, and Jackson didn’t even consider inflicting them on Rachel. As a result, in contemplating a career in Congress he forecast many long months away from her. He didn’t think he could ask that of her, and he didn’t want to ask it of himself. Little of the correspondence between Jackson and Rachel survives, most having been destroyed in a fire in 1834. But what does survive reveals a husband devoted to his wife, longing to be reunited with her, and determined to make their separations fewer and shorter. As early as 1796, when personal business took him to Knoxville, Jackson wrote home: “I mean to retire from the business of public life, and spend my time with you alone in sweet retirement, which is my only ambition and ultimate wish.” He remarked that it was late at night, and he’d had a long day. But he couldn’t go to bed without writing to let her know he was thinking of her.
May it give you pleasure to receive it. May it add to your contentment until I return. May you be blessed with health. May the goddess of slumber every evening light on your eyebrows and gently lull you to sleep, and conduct you through the night with pleasing thoughts and pleasant dreams. Could I only know you were contented and enjoyed peace of mind, what satisfaction it would afford me whilst travelling the lonely and tiresome road. It would relieve my anxious breast and shorten the way. May the great “I am” bless you and protect you until that happy and wished for moment arrives when I am restored to your sweet embrace, which is the nightly prayer of your affectionate husband.
Perhaps more than some other wives, Rachel missed her husband when he was gone. She worried at his travels across long stretches of wilderness, knowing of many travelers who hadn’t come home. His departure for Philadelphia to take his Senate seat apparently tested her sorely. From Knoxville, Jackson wrote Robert Hays, the husband of Rachel’s sister, requesting that he look after Rachel. “I must now beg of you to try to amuse Mrs. Jackson and prevent her from fretting. The situation in which I left her (bathed in tears) fills me with woe. Indeed, sir, it has given me more pain than any event of my life.”
Rachel’s sorrow and fear evidently evoked physical illness, which aggravated her emotional state. Jackson inquired with every letter to friends in Nashville how she was doing, and he grew impatient when the news was scanty or absent. “It is such a neglect that I feel it sensibly,” he wrote. When the news did come through, and especially when it indicated improvement, he was gratefully pleased. “I hold myself much indebted to him for his letter,” he wrote of a message from one of their friends.
Nearly all husbands feel protective toward their wives, but Jackson had special reason for feeling he needed to guard Rachel and shield her from a trying world. From the start of their relationship he had been her protector, her rescuer from an abusive and vengeful spouse. Yet the very rescue—their elopement—had created other problems, initially of law and persistently of social perception, which magnified his desire to protect her. And of course, though Nashville was more civilized and secure than it had been on his arrival a decade earlier, Indians still posed a threat. Rachel was nervous for him when he traveled; he was nervous for her when he was gone.
Had Jackson felt he was doing important work in Philadelphia, he might have pushed his worries about Rachel aside. In all probability nothing would happen to her, and she’d get over her sadness and worry at his departing. But when the politicians in Philadelphia spent their time—and his—bickering over trivia and bloviating over matters of merely personal concern, he decided he could do more good for Rachel back home than for Tennessee in Philadelphia. Let the politicians handle politics; an honest man had real work to do.
Jackson’s work in Nashville included much that was familiar. He resumed his land dealing and the farm operations his land acquisitions entailed. And he tried his luck at commerce again, not least because his farm operations required him to buy supplies and sell his crops, both in a market short of cash. A letter from Jackson to a Philadelphia merchant explained a typical barter arrangement: “I have come to a conclusion to purchase your merchandise, if they are assorted in such a manner as will suit the market of this country. . . . I would give four or five tracts of land of 640 acres each . . . the balance of the merchandise payable in cotton.”
He also undertook something new. A few months after arriving back in Nashville Jackson received a note from John Sevier. “It has been communicated to me by several respectable characters,” the governor said, “that was you appointed by the Executive one of the judges of the Superior Court of Law and Equity, they had reasons to believe you would accept the said appointment. This information is truly satisfactory to the Executive. . . . Please consider yourself as already appointed.”
Why Sevier offered Jackson the judgeship is unclear. The governor already recognized in Jackson a rival; perhaps he hoped that by putting him on the state’s supreme court he could divert Jackson’s ambition into harmless channels.
Why Jackson accepted the job is easier to explain. His dealings in land, farming, and commerce were going well enough that he and Rachel could live on a judge’s modest salary, but not so well as to entice him away from public life. Jackson hoped to achieve a certain level of material comfort, but what he really craved was respect. A seat on the state’s highest court was quite an accomplishment for the poor boy with no parents.
What Sevier offered, and Jackson accepted, was an interim appointment. But three months later the Tennessee legislature made the appointment permanent.
Yet if Jackson wasn’t cut out for writing laws, his talent for interpreting them was only marginally more obvious. His legal training had just sufficed to get him admitted to the bar, and since commencing his profession he had had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to delve more deeply into jurisprudence. Moreover, his temperament was all wrong. An impartial dispensing of justice would seem to require a dispassionate personality, but Jackson’s was just the opposite. His sense of right and wrong anchored his whole outlook on life; if justice pointed one way and the law another, the law would surely lose.
On the other hand, although Jackson’s personality didn’t fit the judge’s traditional mold, it suited his time and place. Most westerners had little patience for law per se, which often struck them as pettifoggery. Like Jackson they believed justice was something any honest man could discern. And they appreciated Jackson’s decisiveness. The duties of a superior court judge included riding a circuit of several towns and villages. A story was told how one day Jackson was dispensing justice at a crossroads when the proceedings were interrupted by a local rowdy. This man, either drunk or belligerent by nature, brandished a pistol and a sheath knife and threatened homicide against Judge Jackson, against the jury, a
nd against everyone else associated with that morning’s dispensation of justice. Jackson ordered the sheriff to arrest the rowdy for contempt of court. The sheriff tried but failed. The man was too violent to be apprehended, he said. Jackson then ordered the sheriff to summon a posse. The sheriff did so but had no better luck. The bully intimidated the posse and remained at large.
Jackson by now was thoroughly irked at both the bully’s bad manners and the paralysis of local law enforcement. He ordered the sheriff to summon him—Jackson—as a member of the posse. The sheriff was skeptical, but Jackson insisted and was duly enlisted to bring the bad man in.
Jackson declared a ten-minute recess in the trial. He doffed his judicial robe, took up his pistol, and strode out the door. The rowdy was ranting amid a crowd of people not far from the courtroom door. Jackson parted the crowd and approached the man, who had worked himself into a full lather. Jackson showed his gun and said, “Surrender, you infernal villain, this very instant, or I’ll blow you through.”
Everyone gasped, wondering how the bully would respond. To general amazement he meekly handed over his weapons and allowed himself to be led away. When the onlookers recovered their breath, one inquired why the ruffian had surrendered to a single man after holding an entire posse at bay.
“Why, when he came up, I looked him in the eye,” the prisoner said, “and I saw shoot. There wasn’t shoot in nary other eye in the crowd. So I says to myself, says I: Hoss, it’s about time to sing small, and so I did.”
Maybe things happened this way. Likely the story grew better with the telling. Whatever its strict accuracy, it captured an impression of Jackson that spread around Tennessee. Here was a man to watch, and respect.
