Andrew Jackson

by H. W. Brands

  Leaning into the wind, Adams continued to defend Jackson. Adams may have seen Crawford and Clay as greater threats than Jackson to his succeeding Monroe. Or he may simply have believed what he said about Jackson’s being right. But whatever his motives, he argued on the general’s behalf with the determination Jackson later would come to dread. To the Spanish minister, Onís, the secretary of state justified Jackson’s intrusion as the necessary consequence of Spain’s failure to police Florida. To Albert Gallatin, his partner from the Ghent negotiations, Adams explained that Jackson had no alternative to executing Arbuthnot and Ambrister. He couldn’t hold the two men as prisoners without provoking Britain. Yet “to dismiss them with impunity would have been not only to let them loose to renew the same intrigues and machinations, but to leave their example a pernicious temptation to others to offend in like manner.” A sentence short of death would have had “little or no effect upon men to whom infamy was scarcely equivalent to any punishment at all.” Jackson was right: “The necessity of a signal example was urgent and indispensable.”

  Had Jackson been even a little repentant, he would have made Monroe’s task much easier. But he saw no reason to repent. “I have destroyed the Babylon of the South, the hot bed of the Indian war and depredations on our frontier, by taking St. Marks and Pensacola,” he wrote Rachel a few days after occupying the latter (and a few weeks after likening St. Marks to either Sodom or Gomorrah). He had delivered “the just vengeance of heaven, having visited and punished with death the exciters of the Indian war and horrid massacre of our innocent women and children.” To Monroe he defended his course as “absolutely necessary to put down the Indian war and give peace and security to our southern frontier.” His occupation of Florida sprang from the highest ideals. “In all things I have consulted public good and the safety and security of our southern frontier. I have established peace and safety, and hope the government will never yield it.”

  Monroe could only shake his head at his impetuous general. The Spanish minister was demanding to know whether the president had ordered Jackson’s invasion of Florida; Monroe couldn’t decide how to respond. He couldn’t claim, in truth or politics, that he had. But to disavow and censure Jackson would make the administration look inept, besides angering the general and his many supporters. “Had General Jackson been ordered to trial,” Monroe told James Madison after the fact, “I have no doubt that the interior of the country would have been much agitated, if not convulsed.”

  Monroe split the difference by ordering the return of the Florida forts to Spain but refusing to censure Jackson. That the president feared Jackson as much as he did the Spanish became clear from the effort Monroe made to mollify the general. “If the executive refused to evacuate the posts, especially Pensacola, it would amount to a declaration of war, to which it is incompetent,” Monroe told Jackson. “It would be accused with usurping the authority of Congress and giving a deep and fatal wound to the Constitution.” Publicly Monroe defended Jackson by blaming the Spanish for the anarchy they had allowed to develop in Florida. Jackson may have exceeded orders—Monroe made no secret of that—but he did little more than any conscientious field commander would have done under like circumstances. Florida had become “the theatre of every lawless adventure,” the president informed Congress. “With little population of its own, the Spanish authority almost extinct and the colonial governments in a state of revolution . . . it was in a great measure derelict.”

  Spain got its forts back, but it couldn’t hold the land on which they stood. Jackson’s seizure of St. Marks and Pensacola forced the Spanish to acknowledge what had been implicit for some time: that with the American population of Georgia and Mississippi growing rapidly and the Spanish population of Florida growing not at all, Spain’s days in Florida were dwindling. John Quincy Adams made this point repeatedly in discussions with Luis de Onís regarding Florida and other boundary issues between the United States and the Spanish territory to the south and west. Adams’s strong support of Jackson signified not merely the secretary of state’s desire to frustrate his rivals for the presidency but his appreciation of how Jackson’s audacity strengthened his—Adams’s—bargaining position with Onís. What Spain couldn’t defend on the ground it couldn’t well claim at the negotiating table.

  Yet Adams was diplomatic enough not to leave Onís bereft. While insisting, with Jackson’s aid, on having Florida, Adams gave up Texas. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the southwestern frontier of Louisiana remained vague. Thomas Jefferson claimed the Rio Grande, making Texas American. Spain said the border was the Sabine, making Texas Spanish. For ten years no one much bothered about Texas, as it was far from the settled regions of both Mexico and the United States and not on the way to anything important. But the war with Britain, and especially the attack on New Orleans, drew the American gaze southwestward, and after Adams assumed responsibility for the State Department, he set about reducing the uncertainty as to what was American and what wasn’t. Texas remained distant and largely unpopulated (even by Indians, who had been ravaged by smallpox and other diseases), and Adams felt little compunction about swapping the American claim to Texas for Florida and Spain’s claim to Oregon. Florida would pay off in the short term, rounding out the southeast. Oregon was a bet on the distant future, when the United States would require an outlet to the Pacific. Texas got lost in the middle.

  But it didn’t remain lost for long. The good times of the postwar period turned breathtakingly bad almost overnight just as Adams and Onís wrapped up their 1819 boundary treaty. The soaring price of cotton, which had been driving the settlement of the Gulf coastal plain, hit thirty-two cents a pound in Liverpool in 1818, but at year’s end it skidded and didn’t stop sliding till it broke fifteen cents going down. The American markets were granted a month’s grace by the same delay that had kept Jackson fighting weeks after Ghent, yet when the first reports of the collapse hit New York and New Orleans they sent brokers and sellers into a swoon. The turmoil in commodities spread to the financial markets, which were already shaky from efforts by the new Bank of the United States to restore solidity to the currency by favoring specie—gold and silver—over paper. When the accidental deflation from the commodity dive met the deliberate deflation of the money men, American finances went into free fall.

  “The years of 1819 and ’20 were a period of gloom and agony,” remembered Thomas Hart Benton, whose long career in the Senate featured an obsession with American finance.

  No money, either gold or silver. No paper convertible into specie. No measure, or standard of value, left remaining. . . . No price for property or produce. No sales but those of the sheriff and the marshal. No purchasers at execution sales but the creditor. . . . No employment for industry. No demand for labor. No sale for the product of the farm. . . . DISTRESS, the universal cry of the people. RELIEF, the universal demand thundered at the doors of all legislatures, state and federal.

  Amid the panic, Americans did what they had always done when times got hard. They looked to the West, where land was cheap and past failure the common experience. The panic set in motion a human wave, carrying thousands of men, women, and children west. Much of the migration followed previous patterns, to the Gulf Coast territories (soon states) of Mississippi and Alabama. Another stream crossed the Mississippi into the lands of the Louisiana Purchase. Arkansas filled with settlers, then Missouri. The most adventurous—or most desperate—forsook American territory entirely. Following the lead of Moses Austin, a debt-burdened Missourian, and, after his untimely death, his son Stephen, a hardy band ventured into Texas. They weren’t exactly ignoring the line John Quincy Adams had drawn between American territory and Spanish (which became Mexican territory upon Mexican independence in 1821). They knew they were leaving the United States and did so with the blessing of the Mexican government, which granted them land on which to settle. But their presence in Mexico threatened to blur the Adams line and eventually erase it.

  Of those whom the panic di
dn’t drive west, another group did what Americans have also habitually done when things turned bad: they went to court. The Bank of the United States was never without enemies, who included the partisans of state banks, unreconstructed Jeffersonians, and individuals damaged by the bank’s contractionist policies. Legislatures of various states, including Maryland, passed laws imposing taxes on the bank’s operations. The cashier of the Baltimore branch of the bank, James McCulloch, refused to pay the Maryland tax and was summoned to county court, which affirmed the state law. McCulloch appealed, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

  The oral arguments took place in February 1819, just as the pillars of American finance were crashing to earth. The high court sat beneath the Capitol, not having achieved architectural independence of the legislative branch. Into its cramped hearing room crowded many who hoped to see the Bank of the United States dismembered, a separate phalanx who wished to see it vindicated, and some simply eager for the rhetorical display that could be expected whenever Daniel Webster spoke. Webster had been a Federalist in New Hampshire and a congressman from that state for two terms, but the dim future of Federalism after the War of 1812 prompted his retirement from politics. He moved from the Granite State to Boston, which afforded greater scope for a man of ability and ambition, especially in the practice of law. He made his money defending well-heeled clients and his reputation defending the poorly shod, including his alma mater, Dartmouth College. “It is, sir . . . a small college, and yet there are those who love it,” he avowed in arguing that Dartmouth’s charter was covered by the contract clause of the Constitution and therefore stood beyond the power of states to revise. Chief Justice John Marshall agreed, as did a majority of the court. The ruling delivered a blow against state power and a boost to the career of Webster, who turned to the McCulloch case almost before the damp handkerchiefs went back in the pockets of his listeners.

  The Bank of the United States was a considerably less sympathetic client than plucky Dartmouth. Fortunately for Webster, Marshall was far beyond caring about popularity. Since defeating Jefferson in the Burr case, the chief justice had continued to bolster the judicial branch against the executive and the legislature, the federal government against the states, and property against the people. Federalists who relied on election for their paychecks had nearly all changed their tune and their stripes, but Marshall, ensconced in the court, beyond the reach of voters or competing government officials, continued to chart the course of the republic by Federalist stars.

  The questions in the McCulloch case were two: whether Congress had the authority to charter the bank in the first place and whether the states had the authority to tax it. Marshall swept aside the strict constructionism of the old Republicans in answering the first question affirmatively. “Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited but consist with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional.” On the question of whether the states could tax the bank, Marshall was equally unequivocal. “The power to tax involves the power to destroy.” If the states could tax the bank, they could tax—that is, destroy—any action or agency of the federal government. “This was not intended by the American people. They did not design to make their government dependent on the states.”

  In fact, what the American people had intended and designed in 1787 would vex the American political system for the next forty years (and, less acutely, for the century and a half after that). Marshall’s saying something didn’t make it so, even when the other six justices joined him, as they did in the McCulloch case. As for the bank, it lived for now, but its opponents plotted other ways to kill it.

  Times are dreadful here,” Jackson wrote from Nashville in the summer of 1819. “Confidence entirely destroyed, specie payments suspended.” Debt suits clogged the courts; barter replaced money transactions; interregional trade had almost stopped. “Eastern paper is not to be obtained here, and there is no such thing as obtaining a draft on Philadelphia or New York.”

  Yet Jackson could speak with relative equanimity of the effects of the panic. The postwar boom had been good to him. The rising cotton prices had allowed him to expand operations at the Hermitage and speculate in additional properties in the newly opened districts to the south. The details of the partnerships formed for the speculations were unclear to outsiders then and have remained so to historians since. Equally unclear were the profits the speculations produced. Jackson certainly made money on the boom and lost money on the bust. Whether he wound up ahead or behind on the deals is impossible to say.

  But his standard of living didn’t suffer. His salary as a major general in the regular army was secure, and in fact appreciated in value as prices fell. He was sufficiently confident regarding his financial future to embark on a major construction project at the Hermitage. He had been intending for some years to replace the wooden house that came with the property when he had purchased it fifteen years before, but only got around to seeking bids about the time of the panic. The nation’s bad luck, in this instance, became his good luck, for with work hard to find, contractors in the Cumberland didn’t haggle on price. During the next several months the new house took shape: four rooms downstairs, four rooms up, with central hallways and high ceilings. Papered walls and carved balustrades ornamented the interior, while white columns adorned the facade. By the standards of southern gentry, the house was modest, even plain. But it stood comparison with the best in the neighborhood, as befit America’s most distinguished soldier.

  Housing aside, Jackson adapted less well to the end of the Seminole War than he might have expected. The old physical afflictions annoyed him, as they often did when he stopped campaigning. “I reached Nashville . . . in a bad state of health, much emaciated,” he wrote his nephew Andrew Jackson Donelson in July 1818. “I am still much pestered with a bad cough and pain in my left side and breast.” A few weeks later he told Isaac Shelby, “My health is bad. I am much debilitated.” The subsequent months brought little relief. “I was taken very ill and confined to my bed for ten days,” he wrote in September 1819. Even after he managed to get up and about, he felt the effects of this and previous ailments. “My hand shakes from debility, and I cannot write with facility.” Some days he didn’t think he’d ever recover. “My health is gone,” he told Andrew Donelson. “My constitution, I fear, will never bear up under another campaign.”

  On better days, though, he dreamed of fighting again. The American Senate had ratified the Adams-Onís treaty at once, but the Spanish government, beset by revolution throughout the Western Hemisphere and facing the loss of far more than Florida, balked. Jackson wasn’t surprised. “I have never believed that Spain would ratify the treaty,” he declared in the late summer of 1819. “I do not believe she will now.” Florida might have to be conquered a third time—and the thought alone made Jackson feel better. “Were you to see how much I am emaciated,” he wrote a friend, “you would scarcely believe I could ever again take the field. However, excitement has kept me alive, and it might raise me quickly to the necessary strength. I am beginning to eat with a good appetite.” The prospect of war persisted for several months, restoring Jackson to a semblance of health. He couldn’t understand why Congress didn’t simply declare war and force Spain’s hand. “Does Congress believe that it is consulting the feelings of the American nation when it is bearing with the perfidy and insults of Spain? . . . Are we thus to be humbled?” Jackson couldn’t speak for the people of the East, but he knew his neighbors, and he knew they wouldn’t suffer Spain to endanger, by incompetence or design, America’s southern border. “Believe me, sir, the people in the West are prepared to live free or die in the last ditch. They are prepared to surrender the last cent before they will surrender their independence.” For himself, he vowed to lead the army south again, this time taking more than Florida. Congress merely had to give the word. “If it will authorize the me
asure, Florida shall be in possession of the United States in three months . . . and if Congress should will it, with the regulars alone and the necessary equipment and naval aid, Cuba in six months.”

  Monroe had no desire to see Jackson loose again, and the war scare—war hope, in Jackson’s case—passed when Spain ratified the treaty. Jackson was left to find his therapeutic violence vicariously. Andrew Donelson was attending the national military academy at West Point, with his uncle’s partial approval. Jackson endorsed the soldier’s calling but distrusted the War Department types who ran the academy. Donelson, a soul after his uncle’s independent spirit, had defended a fellow cadet unfairly treated—in Donelson’s view—by the academy’s administration. Jackson applauded his nephew’s stand for the right. “My dear nephew, I rejoice in the interest you have taken in aiding to procure redress for innocence unjustly injured. Such acts are the buds of virtue.” Jackson told Donelson to watch out for himself as well. “If ever a superior forgets what he owes to you and to his station, and attempts to insult or maltreat you as has been the case with others, you have my permission to resign.” Should Donelson suffer physical abuse, he had his uncle’s permission—and encouragement—to retaliate in the most vigorous manner. “If the superior attempts either to strike or kick you, put him to instant death.”