by H. W. Brands
Overton inquired if the two were ready. They nodded. He gave the command: “Fire!” Dickinson raised his pistol and pulled the trigger in a smooth, experienced motion. The crack of the discharge was lost in the surrounding trees as the smoke wafted away. Dickinson stared in amazement as Jackson stood his ground, apparently unhit. Jackson, his face grim as death, raised his own pistol, looked implacably into Dickinson’s stricken eyes, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Jackson examined his pistol and saw that the hammer had been but half-cocked. He completed the cock, aimed again, and fired. The bullet penetrated Dickinson’s abdomen below the ribs. Dickinson slumped over and fell to the ground. Catlet and his other friends hurried to his side.
Only after Dickinson was beyond seeing him did Jackson move, and as he did, Overton discovered that he had been hit by Dickinson’s bullet. Dickinson’s aim had been true, but Jackson’s loose coat, over his angular body, disguised the location of his heart. Dickinson’s bullet missed Jackson’s heart by little more than an inch. The bullet shattered itself against Jackson’s breastbone and rib cage, inflicting a painful and bloody but not life-threatening wound—assuming infection didn’t set in. Jackson mounted his horse and rode with Overton back to Miller’s tavern.
Dickinson declined rapidly. In shock, he bled internally, and his friends could do nothing to stop the flow. They carried him to Harrison’s house, where he lingered for several hours. A rider was dispatched to Nashville to fetch his young wife, who hurried north in horror. She arrived too late. Dickinson died with the dusk.
Jackson may have been surprised to discover that James Robertson was right about a duel’s damaging a man’s reputation. Not that he would have altered his course: for Jackson a duel was about personal honor more than about public opinion. Even so, he didn’t anticipate the strongly negative reaction to the news that he had killed Dickinson. Seventy-two members of the Nashville community, including most of its mainstays and guiding lights, petitioned the city’s two papers—the Tennessee Gazette and the Impartial Review—to drape their pages in mourning for Dickinson, which the papers did.
Some of Jackson’s friends tried to laugh off the reaction. “There is a few long faces in town,” John Overton, Thomas Overton’s brother, asserted two days after the duel, “though but a few, for it seems this new-fangled Ajax had even went so far as to bet in town, before he went over, that he would kill General Jackson.” But Jackson found nothing funny in the matter. He wrote to the papers and angrily demanded the names of the petitioners. “The thing is so novel,” he told the Review, “that the names ought to appear, that the public might judge whether the true motives of the signers ‘were a tribute of respect for the deceased’”—as the paper had represented—“or something else that at first sight does not appear.” Preferring to avoid the wrath of one still hot from the dueling ground, twenty-six of the petition’s signers removed themselves from the list, but the other forty-six allowed their names to be printed.
Armed with the names, Jackson went after the man he took to be the instigator of the petition. Thomas Watkins was a Nashville doctor who didn’t like Jackson and especially didn’t like dueling. Which dislike took precedence in his petition campaign is unclear to history, although it didn’t seem unclear to Jackson at the time. “To dupe the citizens you held out to them that the thing was only intended to console the widow’s tears, when from your late conduct it plainly appears that under the hypocritical garb of being moved by the widow’s sorrow you were preparing in the background to give my reputation a stab, with the hidden shaft that none but base minds and cowardly assassins use.”
Before Jackson printed this letter he sent Donelson Caffery, one of Rachel’s many nephews, to Watkins’s office with a copy. Caffery had collected statements from other petition signers explaining their motives, and he asked Watkins to reveal his thinking similarly. Watkins read Jackson’s letter and indignantly refused. As Caffery recounted, “He observed that he was not bound to explain his motives to any man. . . . If Jesus Christ had called on him he should not consider himself bound to give his motives.”
Briefly it appeared that another duel—perhaps more than one—might take place. Jackson’s critics seized on the failure of his pistol to fire at first pull of the trigger and claimed that his second try was unethical. Misfires in duels generally counted as shots. The question in the current case was whether the miscock counted as a misfire. Jackson thought it didn’t. His second, Thomas Overton, concurred, as did Dickinson’s second, Catlet. Catlet went so far as to sign a statement certifying that “every circumstance in the affair which lately took place between General Jackson and Mr. Dickinson was agreeable to the impressions that Mr. Dickinson and myself were under.”
Yet the criticism of Jackson persisted, publicly and privately, till Jackson’s friends wondered where it all would end. John Overton, then in Jonesboro, heard disturbing rumors from the Cumberland. “A report arrived here that you and Swann”—who was trying to get back into the quarrel—“had fought, that both fell, Swann shot through the heart, of which he died in six minutes, and you through the head, from which instant death ensued.” Had Overton fully credited the report he wouldn’t have been writing Jackson. But he feared that enough was true to warrant reiterating the advice of James Robertson (with whom Overton may well have been in communication). “You have several warm friends here, and if you knew the uneasiness they suffered, and their impressions, I’m sure it would have some effect.” To duel Swann would permanently damage Jackson’s reputation. “It would be said that you delighted in human blood.” Enough was enough. “No man, not even your worst enemies, doubts your personal courage. . . . You would gain much more by not noticing anything these people may say than otherwise. Be assured that their slander can do you no harm among your friends.” Moreover, in dueling, Jackson jeopardized greater things. “Besides the mortification to your friends, you might in this way deprive yourself of that life which ought to be preserved for better purposes.”
One of those better purposes hove into view at just this time. The conflict between Britain and France for mastery of Europe had become a death struggle, with the British controlling the waves and the French dominating the land. Napoleon tried to offset Britain’s naval advantage by closing most of the continent to British shipping and to any neutral ships that visited British ports. Violators, including Americans, were subject to seizure by those French warships that had escaped the British sweep. This policy predictably encouraged American captains to sail directly for France. But the British blockade targeted just such ships, putting American captains and shipowners in a vise that squeezed tighter than ever before.
Yet the law of supply and demand was inexorable, and one notable effect of the French closure and the British blockade was to drive up prices for those cargoes that did get through. Even as merchants and shipowners complained to the American government about the violation by Britain and France of American neutral rights, many of them sent vessels east in hopes of capturing fat profits. Most Americans not directly involved had difficulty getting indignant.
Impressment was a different matter. As the Anglo-French war grew more desperate, the British adopted sterner measures for supplementing the ranks of their sailors. Every captain had orders to augment crews by almost any means, including kidnapping. Naval “press gangs” were notorious for sweeping the slums of London and Liverpool and trawling up anything with two legs that couldn’t run fast enough to get away and two arms that couldn’t hold tightly to whatever bedpost or street lamp that provided the last terrestrial anchor for the unfortunate soul. A century later Winston Churchill, then first lord of the admiralty, described the unholy trinity of British naval life as “rum, buggery, and the lash.” The conditions predated Churchill by several generations of seamen.
Not surprisingly, Britain’s reluctant sailors abandoned ship at most opportunities, of which American ports provided many. So long as the United States remained neutral between Britain and France, American p
orts were open to British and French naval vessels, which stopped in to refit and reprovision. The merchants of the ports were glad for the business, even if the refitting and reprovisioning enabled the British (and to a lesser degree the French) to continue their depredations against American shipping. British sailors were even happier for the port visits, which allowed the most desperate of them to stretch shore leave into expatriation.
The deserters weren’t always welcome in their new country. Had they been upstanding types they probably wouldn’t have found themselves in the British navy to begin with. But American shipmasters, who had their own manpower problems, were happy to hire experienced seamen, and the deserters frequently shipped out again, under the American flag.
This practice caused the most acute problem with Britain. Those same British captains who went to all the trouble to recruit sailors didn’t stand idly by as their sailors deserted. They sent marines ashore to find the deserters and retrieve them, by force if necessary. The incursions wounded American pride, besides being bad for business along the waterfront. When the deserters found their way to American ships, British captains demanded the right to search the ships and haul off the deserters. This wounded American pride even more deeply, as it affronted not merely questionable waterfront neighborhoods but the American flag.
Impressment rankled Americans for years before becoming a casus belli—in the judgment of Andrew Jackson and many others—in early 1807. The incident that turned annoyance into outrage involved an American frigate, the Chesapeake, and the British frigate Leopard. The crew of the Chesapeake included several sailors who had deserted from the British navy. Some of these were British nationals but a few were native-born Americans previously impressed into British service. They weren’t deserting so much as escaping to home. The commander of the Cheseapeake, James Barron, accordingly believed that the British had no moral right to come after them. As for legal right, because the Chesapeake was a vessel of the United States Navy and the United States was not at war with Britain, the British had no right to stop or search her.
But the British commander ignored such niceties and insisted on a search. When Barron refused, the Leopard opened fire. Her cannon rounds battered the hull of the Chesapeake and blasted her masts, killing three Americans and wounding eighteen others. Barron struck the colors of his crippled ship and submitted to a British search, which resulted in the carrying off of four men, three of them American citizens.
Had all this happened in the mid-Atlantic the shock to American pride would have been grievous. That it happened off Hampton Roads, within sight and sound of the Virginia coast, made it even more infuriating. What completed the affront was that the Leopard nonchalantly returned to American waters, anchoring at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, presumably to await its next victim.
As news of the affair spread, so did the American anger. “British Outrage,” shouted the Washington National Intelligencer into the Republican administration’s ear. From Richmond a friend of the president wrote Jefferson regarding a public meeting just held. “All appeared zealously to vie who should be foremost in manifesting a patriotic indignation at the insult offered, and an invincible determination to avenge the wrong done to the government and to the people of our country.” An observer at Baltimore described a rally in that city. “There appeared but one opinion—War—in case that satisfaction is not given.” Jefferson himself acknowledged that the public mind was “made up for war.” The British had gone too far. “They have often enough, god knows, given us cause of war before,” the president said. “But it has been on points which would not have united the nation. But now they have touched a chord which vibrates in every heart.” Jefferson added, “Now, then, is the time to settle the old and the new.”
Jackson certainly believed the moment had come to settle affairs with the British. Those inveterate enemies of American freedom had left patriots no choice. “The degradation offered to our government by the British in the attack of our armed vessel the Chesapeake by the British ship Leopard within our waters . . . has roused every feeling of the American heart,” he declared. Jackson shuddered for his country at “this humiliating blow against our independence and sovereignty.” Britain must be chastised. The silver lining of the current ignominy was that the American people were finally alert to this fact. “War with that nation is inevitable.”
Inevitable perhaps, but not swift. Jefferson’s nature was more phlegmatic than Jackson’s; Jefferson also had a keener sense of the limits of American power. Better than Jackson, he realized that America wasn’t ready for war. Its navy was no match for Britain’s, and its army was undermanned and underfunded. Its people might be brave, but they were scattered over half a continent and were often more loyal to state and section than to the country as a whole. Jefferson also had a greater respect than Jackson for the separation of powers in the American federal government. For all his embrace of loose construction in the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson understood that only Congress could declare war. Congress wasn’t in session and wouldn’t return till the fall unless he brought the lawmakers back to the capital. But even that would take time, during which the iron of American anger would probably cool.
So instead of war he attempted diplomacy. He shut American waters to British warships and demanded an apology and reparations from the British government. He got the apology—London disowned the actions of the Leopard’s commander—and a promise of reparations. The British needed sailors but they didn’t want a war with the United States at a critical moment of the struggle against Napoleon. Yet London conspicuously refused to alter the stated policies of seizure and impressment that had given rise to the Anglo-American troubles in the first place. On the contrary, it tightened the noose around Europe and thereby increased the number of American ships stopped and cargoes seized.
Jefferson still declined to resort to war. Hoping to turn the economic weapon against the British—and the French—he persuaded the Republican Congress, now back in session, to embargo American trade with Europe. At a minimum the embargo would remove American ships from harm’s way. With better luck it would force one or both of the belligerents to back down, in the interest of restoring the valuable American trade.
The embargo exploded in Jefferson’s face. New England merchants and shipowners hated it as impinging on their commercial freedom. They responded by smuggling, by voting for Federalists, whose number in the House of Representatives doubled at the next election, and by talking of seceding from a country so dominated by Virginia planters. Nor was the rest of the country spared. Farmers in the West and South watched in alarm and then anger as their crops piled up on wharves awaiting ships forbidden to sail. Those regions that didn’t produce for export felt the embargo’s effects in falling prices from the overall glut the embargo created.
Jackson was already irked at Jefferson over the Burr-Wilkinson affair, and he grew more exasperated upon the failure of the president to confront the British and demand satisfaction for their crimes against American honor and interest. After the Chesapeake shelling he led a protest in Nashville against British arrogance and in support of a vigorous American response. Many at the rally were ready to march to war right then, declaration or no declaration. Jackson would have been happy to lead them.
The embargo brought the British challenge closer to home. The depression it produced aggravated the chronic money problems of the frontier, triggering numerous foreclosures and lawsuits for payment of debt. Jackson had to defend himself in several cases, including one involving a farm owned by his brother-in-law John Caffery, who had borrowed two thousand dollars from John McNairy and listed the farm as collateral. When Caffery found himself short of cash, Jackson bailed him out by purchasing the farm and letting Caffery and his family stay on it. McNairy sued Jackson on grounds that he—McNairy—should have had first option on purchasing the farm. Jackson sought to shame McNairy for trying to take advantage of Caffery’s difficulties, which, like those of everyone else caught in the edd
ies of the embargo and the vicissitudes of American finance, weren’t entirely his fault. “Is it possible under these circumstances that you in your exalted station . . . will endeavour to deprive a numerous and worthy family of a habitation or sustenance?” Jackson demanded. “Impossible—the whole world (when the thing would be known) would execrate the act, and the gods would frown on it with indignation.” McNairy, illiquid himself, refused to be shamed. He pressed the case, which dragged on for months till the courts compelled Jackson and Caffery to pay him $999 to clear the debt.
By then the defaults and foreclosures had become a blizzard. In Tennessee and across the West debtors demanded protection from creditors, asserting that they shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden of a decision made by the president and Congress for the presumed benefit of the country as a whole. Most asked for a period of grace, enforced by stay laws to prevent the collection of debts. Had all the creditors been the greedy bankers of the debtors’ rhetoric, the stay laws would have passed easily. But most of the creditors were themselves debtors who, if they couldn’t collect the debts owed them, risked defaulting on debts of their own. Where was the justice in that? they demanded.
Jackson was among the latter class, at once owed and owing. He recognized, not least because he felt in himself, the strains the embargo was inflicting. For this reason he urged his fellow citizens to concentrate on the real cause of their common distress: Britain. At a rowdy Nashville meeting of debtors and creditors, where the former demanded stay laws and the latter denounced the very idea, Jackson turned the debate outward. “Our enemies have long calculated on our divisions,” he said. New Englanders seemed bent on making those enemies right, but Tennesseans—united—must show them wrong. “All must feel the injuries we have received, all must be determined to resist them.” From Nashville the message would echo to the Atlantic and beyond. “Let the event of this day’s meeting prove to the world that no matter what privations we suffer, or inconveniences we feel, we are willing to expend the last cent of our treasure and the last drop of our blood in giving effect to any measures that may be taken in support of our liberty and independence.”
