Andrew Jackson

by H. W. Brands

  By both accounts the two disputants retrieved their horses and rode off, each cursing the other for cowardice, poltroonry, and conduct unbecoming any kind of gentleman. In Knoxville each told his version of the story to friends and followers, who amplified the competing versions in the area newspapers. “Let us ask,” wrote one Sevier partisan, “how many hundreds of respectable characters are in this and several other states who have been eyewitnesses of the governor’s courage? . . . Is he not the man whose exertions have taken from the numerous hordes the savage wilds and placed on them a rising, growing, and respectable republic?” The governor had no need to prove his courage. As for Jackson: “The judge, shark-like, intending to grasp the prey into his voracious jaws, has unfortunately darted himself out of the water flat on his own back, upon a dirty beach, from where it will be impossible for him, with all his serpentile windings, to make his retreat with credit.”

  A Jackson advocate answered that the blame all lay with Sevier, for “vulgar and ungentlemanly expressions” drawn from “the most secret recesses of his infernal disposition.” The governor had claimed his greater age as reason not to fight Jackson. “If you had saw the ease with which his Excellency dismounted, and the good use he made of his heels after he had dismounted, you would have thought him a youth of not more than eighteen.”

  The affair afforded entertainment for months afterward, as each side spent the autumn and winter recounting the insults and outrages committed and suffered by their champions. Few minds, apparently, were changed by all the words and ink.

  Yet for those paying close attention to Jackson, the spat with Sevier revealed something significant. Sevier never took Jackson’s challenge seriously because he considered it politically motivated, which it was in part. And for Sevier, politics was politics, a game that didn’t lack importance but hardly rose to the level of putting one’s life in jeopardy.

  Jackson didn’t play games, at least not with politics. He took politics very seriously, for politics involved honor, reputation, and principle. These meant more to Jackson than life itself. He would have fought Sevier over politics even if he had expected to die in the duel.

  And he certainly didn’t play games with Rachel’s reputation. When Sevier, having affronted Jackson politically, compounded his sin by slandering Rachel, there was no chance Jackson would forgive him. And he never did.

  In radical youth Thomas Jefferson sometimes uttered sentiments he learned to regret. Of the executions of the early French Revolution, he asserted, “My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs of this cause, but rather than it should have failed I would have seen half the earth desolated; were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.” Later, watching settlers spread beyond the mountains into the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, he remarked, “If they see their interests in separation, why should we take sides with our Atlantic rather than our Mississippi descendants? God bless them both, and keep them in union, if it be for their good; but separate them, if it be better.”

  The Reign of Terror and Napoleon Bonaparte took the edge off Jefferson’s enthusiasm for revolution; the Louisiana Purchase and Aaron Burr compelled him to reconsider trans-Appalachian separatism. Jefferson’s election as president in 1800 marked a shift in the tone and direction of American politics. John Adams’s single term had divided the country deeply; Jackson’s complaints against the Federalists for their egregious Anglophilia were echoed and amplified by Republicans across the South and West, who soon found cause for additional complaints. After the confrontations on the Atlantic between French and American vessels escalated to an undeclared naval war, the Federalist Congress approved the Alien and Sedition Acts, which exploited the troubles with France to outlaw much domestic dissent. Jefferson, Adams’s vice president under the awkward original scheme for choosing the chief executive, secretly penned a resolution for the Kentucky legislature asserting the right of states to judge the constitutionality of federal laws and to nullify—prevent the enforcement of—those measures that failed the test. James Madison drafted a similar resolution for Virginia. Three decades later, the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions would be thrown defiantly at Andrew Jackson; for the time being they fueled a campaign for president, between Adams and Jefferson, that set scurrility standards not approached till Jackson ran against Adams’s son. Jefferson won a bruising victory that his Republican supporters lauded as a triumph for the people and his Federalist rivals damned as a harbinger of anarchy.

  Jackson proposed a truce in his inaugural address. “We are all republicans; we are all federalists,” he said. No one really believed him, but the gesture indicated a desire to restore civility to American political life. It helped Jefferson’s purposes that the Federalists were too busy sniping at one another to maintain their attacks upon the Republicans. (This sniping was partly responsible for Jefferson’s election; in the 1800 campaign the most virulent criticism of Adams came not from the Republicans but from Alexander Hamilton’s wing of the Federalists.)

  At the level of substance, although Jefferson’s victory didn’t commence an age of popular rule, it did install the party more sympathetic to that notion. Hamilton and the high Federalists hardly disguised their disdain for the masses; Jefferson embraced the masses philosophically even if his own life of leisure and erudition often seemed removed from their workaday sphere. “It is rare that the public sentiment decides immorally or unwisely, and the individual who differs from it ought to distrust and examine his own opinion,” Jefferson declared, in words Hamilton would have choked on before uttering. Jefferson’s policies reflected his concern for the common folks. He worked to reduce government spending and to shift the tax burden from consumers to businesses; where a choice existed between action by the federal government and action by the states, he generally deferred to the states, as being closer to the people.

  In one area, though, Jefferson materially increased the scope of federal power. The decennial census of 1800 showed an American population of 5.3 million, including one million slaves. This total was a third larger than that of ten years earlier, reflecting what most Americans were happy to deem a healthy rate of growth. But the rapid growth, combined with another statistic from the census—that almost nineteen Americans out of twenty lived on or near farms—occasioned worry in the more prescient. The national domain in 1800 was no larger than it had been in 1783, when the population was little more than half its current size. All those farmers, and certainly their children and grandchildren, would need more land lest they crowd upon one another and suffer the social and political ills Americans associated with densely populated Europe.

  The problem was especially acute for Jefferson. As the leader of the party of the more rural regions, the president felt a special responsibility to ensure that America’s farmers had room into which to expand. The West—meaning, at the time of Jefferson’s election, the states of Kentucky and Tennessee, the western part of Georgia, and the territories of Ohio, Indiana, and Mississippi—was by no means full. But one didn’t have to be a mathematician to realize that at America’s current rate of growth, the West would be as populated in a few generations as the East was now.

  Consequently, when the opportunity arose to purchase the Louisiana territory—the western half of the Mississippi Valley—Jefferson couldn’t resist. Napoleon had lately dreamed of reviving France’s American empire; to this end he extorted Louisiana back from Spain. But a rebellion persisted in the French sugar colony of Haiti, and yellow fever decimated the expeditionary force Napoleon sent to suppress it, forcing a change of the Bonaparte mind. Jefferson meanwhile dispatched James Monroe to join Robert Livingston in Paris and try to purchase New Orleans. “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy,” Jefferson explained. “It is New Orleans.” To the astonishment of Livingston and Monroe, Napoleon countered their offer to purchase New Orleans with an offer to sell all of
Louisiana.

  The offer was too tempting to refuse, but Jefferson first had to quiet his conscience. Nothing in the Constitution explicitly authorized the acquisition of new territory, and Jefferson had always insisted that what the Constitution didn’t explicitly authorize couldn’t legitimately be done. He briefly considered an amendment to the Constitution but decided that the mercurial Bonaparte might change his mind again. The Federalists gloated at Jefferson’s discomfiture, and some complained that the last thing the country needed was more western farmers. But neither he nor they could bring themselves to let political consistency, political advantage, or anything else block the bargain of their lifetimes. Jefferson accepted Napoleon’s offer, the Senate ratified it, and the House joined the Senate in funding the $15 million deal.

  This was where Aaron Burr entered the picture, and not far from where Andrew Jackson’s political career almost ended three decades prematurely. Burr was a handsome fellow with persuasive gifts he might have inherited from his grandfather Jonathan Edwards, the Congregationalist minister whose terrifyingly vivid sermons sometimes drove listeners to suicide. But not everyone was persuaded; as a young lieutenant in the Revolutionary War, Burr incautiously intimated that he knew more about military strategy than General Washington did. Washington rid himself of this pesky boy, and Burr learned his lesson, at least for a time. He served gallantly and effectively during the American retreat from Long Island, at Valley Forge, and during the New Jersey campaign of 1778.

  But the war wasn’t moving fast enough for him, and when ill health afforded an excuse for a furlough he extended it to retirement. He shocked his erstwhile comrades by marrying an English officer’s widow, whose money helped him launch a lucrative postwar practice at the New York City bar. His clients and friends landed him appointment as New York state’s attorney general and then, after the adoption of the 1787 Constitution, election by the state legislature to the United States Senate. In this election he defeated the father-in-law of Alexander Hamilton. Whether or not this contributed to Hamilton’s ill feeling toward Burr, the two became bitter rivals, with Hamilton heading New York’s Federalists and Burr the state’s Republicans.

  Burr joined Jefferson on the losing Republican ticket in 1796, and again on the Republican ticket in 1800. When the electoral votes—under the rules giving each elector two votes, with the first-place finisher becoming president and the second-place candidate vice president—were tallied, Jefferson and Burr each had seventy-three votes. This hadn’t been the plan, or at least it hadn’t been the plan of Jefferson and nearly all those who voted for the Virginian. That it might have been Burr’s plan occurred to some observers when Burr declined to step aside in favor of Jefferson. The House of Representatives required dozens of ballots to make Jefferson president, with the impasse ending only after Hamilton, choosing what seemed to him the lesser of evils, urged his Federalist followers to vote for Jefferson. “He is by far not so dangerous a man and he has pretensions to character,” Hamilton said of Jefferson. “As to Burr, there is nothing in his favour. His private character is not defended by his most partial friends. He is bankrupt beyond redemption except by the plunder of his country. . . . If he can, he will certainly disturb our institutions to secure himself permanent power and with it wealth.”

  Burr’s behavior as president of the Senate (the sole chore constitutionally assigned the vice president) was above reproach. But between Jefferson’s understandable suspicions and Hamilton’s continuing animus, Burr’s future seemed dim. He reasonably anticipated his exclusion from the ticket for another Jefferson term and so ran for governor of New York in the spring of 1804. His loss owed much to the opposition of Hamilton, who continued to deprecate his character and motives to all who would listen and read.

  Burr thereupon challenged Hamilton to a duel, demanding satisfaction for the damage done his honor and career. Hamilton accepted the challenge, albeit with ambivalence. He had lost his eldest son in a duel, and if he himself died he would leave his wife and children deeply in debt. But he couldn’t discover an alternative acceptable to his notions of honor. The two New Yorkers crossed the Hudson to evade New York’s ban on dueling, and at sunrise below Weehawken confronted each other at ten paces. Hamilton had spoken to friends of wasting his shot: of firing into the air. Whether Burr heard of this is impossible to know. He certainly couldn’t count on it. Besides, at the critical moment Hamilton gave every indication of shooting to kill, and at ten paces he had an excellent chance of succeeding. The witnesses disputed who fired first, but there was no disputing the mortal wound Hamilton suffered. He lingered, in pain and intermittent delirium, till the following day, when he finally succumbed.

  Burr emerged from the encounter physically unscathed but politically ruined. A New York grand jury, ignoring that the duel had taken place in New Jersey, indicted him for murder. The Federalists were livid and vengeful toward the slayer of their founder, while most Republicans considered Burr an embarrassment and a liability.

  In his predicament Burr did what generations of Americans before and after him did: he looked to the West for a new start. He had gifts many prospective emigrants lacked. He was handsome in a way that attracted both the elegant and the rough, and men as much as women. He elevated plausibility to an art form, spinning the daydreams of his listeners into castles in their minds’ eyes. He could prevaricate effortlessly and was just clever enough to stay a step ahead of his own contradictions.

  He traveled to New Orleans, the entrepôt to the inland empire just acquired from France. Returning east he stopped in Tennessee, where he was feted as a celebrity and a minor hero. No one in Nashville held his killing of Hamilton against him. Honor was honor, and, besides, to most Tennesseans, the fewer Federalists the better.

  Andrew Jackson and the other leading men of Nashville held a dinner for Burr, after which Jackson brought Burr home for a several-day visit. The two men discovered common interests, starting with horses. Burr loaned Jackson his best horseman, a slave named Sam. “He understands as well as any man living how to drive a carriage and manage horses and the care of horses, carriage and harness,” Burr told Jackson. “He knows nothing else and during thirteen years service his honesty has never incurred a suspicion. He will, I hope, in some way make himself useful to you.”

  Jackson and Burr also discovered a shared desire to answer the question that arose in nearly every conversation regarding America’s southwestern frontier: how long would the government at Washington suffer foreigners to threaten free use of the Mississippi? Too long already, Jackson and Burr agreed. The United States had purchased Louisiana from France, yet the Spanish held Florida and Texas. Jefferson was said to be negotiating for the purchase of Florida. “But notwithstanding the pacific temper of our government, there is great reason to expect hostility,” Burr told Jackson. He considered this a positive sign, though. He explained that an anti-Spanish band of South Americans at New York were outfitting an expedition to sail against their homeland. Burr supposed Spain would protest the use of American soil for this filibustering and might even seize American vessels. France, Spain’s ally, might take action as well. “It would not surprise me if on a knowledge of these facts at Paris and Madrid our vessels in the ports of those kingdoms should be seized and measures taken for the reduction of Orleans,” Burr said. He hoped for such a provocation, as it would give Americans a chance to settle the issue once and for all. He counted on Tennessee to do its part. “Your country is full of fine materials for an army and I have often said that a brigade could be raised in West Tennessee which would drive double their number of Frenchmen off the earth.” He urged Jackson, as commander of the Tennessee militia, to gird for war. “I take the liberty of recommending to you to make out a list of officers from colonel down to ensign for one or two regiments, composed of fellows fit for business and with whom you would trust your life and your honor.”

  Jackson compiled the list and sent it on. And he kept in touch with Burr, who spent the spring and summer
of 1806 in constant motion, traveling to New Orleans again and all across the West. In October Burr was back in Nashville, plying Jackson with stories of Spanish perfidy and the ease with which the Spanish lands might be taken. Jefferson’s attempt to purchase Florida, for a reported two million dollars, had failed. But neither Burr nor Jackson lamented the failure. “The certain consequence is war,” Jackson declared. “And no doubt but less than two millions can conquer not only the Floridas but all Spanish North America.”

  Jackson thrilled at the prospect. “At least two thousand volunteers can be led into the field at a short notice,” he told James Winchester, one of his brigade commanders. “That number, led by firm officers and men of enterprise, I think could look into Santa Fe and Mexico, give freedom and commerce to those provinces and establish peace and a permanent barrier against the inroads and attacks of foreign powers on our interior, which will be the case so long as Spain holds that large country on our borders. Should there be a war, this will be a handsome theater for our enterprising young men and a certain source of acquiring fame.”

  Jackson directed his brigadier generals to mobilize their troops. Relaying intelligence from Burr and others close to the frontier, he described threatening acts by a Spanish force operating along the Red River. “This armed force, under the sanction of their government, have imprisoned and transported five of the good citizens of the United States to the dominion of Spain. They have cut down and carried off the flag of the United States, which was erected in the Caddo nation of Indians and within the limits of the United States. They have compelled by force men in the employ of government when exploring the Red River to desist and come home, and they have taken an unjustifiable and insulting position on the east side of the river Sabine and within the Territory of New Orleans!!!” These affronts, Jackson declared, “make it necessary that the militia under my command should be in complete order and at a moment’s warning ready to march.”