by H. W. Brands
Donelson didn’t have to kill anyone, and in fact went on to graduate from the academy second in his class. But Jackson continued to offer his protégés advice that, while honorable in spirit, was potentially lethal. John Eaton was a college man, a lawyer, a soldier under Jackson, the coauthor (with the deceased John Reid) of a Jackson biography published in 1817, and most recently senator from Tennessee. As a Jackson man he ran afoul of Andrew Erwin, another Tennessean, who had hitched his star to William Crawford. Erwin and Eaton quarreled over something minor, then something larger, till a duel seemed the only way to settle the affair. Eaton’s second, Richard Call, asked Jackson for advice. Jackson didn’t like Erwin, either, and provided a primer on how to kill him with honor.
In prosecuting the business you have taken charge of for your friend Major Eaton, you must steadily keep in mind that the man you have to deal with is unprincipled. You will be guarded in your acts. Have every thing in writing, and hold no conversation with him unless in the presence of some confidential person of good character. He is mean and artful. It is possible, from what I think of the man, that he will propose rifles or muskets. These are not weapons of gentlemen, and cannot and ought not to be yielded to. Pistols are the universal weapons (with one solitary exception) of firearms gentlemen use. These, or swords, ought to be selected, and as neither of those concerned are in the habit of using swords, the offending party will make choice of this weapon.
The next choice in the opponent is distance. Ten paces is the longest, and although the defendant may choose as far as ten paces, still if the offended is not as good a shot as the defendant, custom and justice will bring them to a distance that will put them on a perfect equality.
Position: To prevent accident, let them keep their pistols suspended until after the word “fire” is given. The first rule is to let each man fire when he pleases, so that he fires one minute or two after the word. Charge your friend to preserve his fire, keeping his teeth firmly clenched, and his fingers in a position that if fired on and hit, his fire may not be extorted. Some times when the distance is long it is agreed that both or either may advance and fire. If this arrangement is made, charge your friend to preserve his fire until he shoots his antagonist through the brain, for if he fires and does not kill his antagonist, he leaves himself fully in his power.
Jackson suspected that Erwin’s animus was actually against him rather than against Eaton. He also believed that Erwin was a coward who might try to evade the duel with Eaton by declaring that he really wanted to challenge Jackson. “He may think that I will have nothing to do with him, and in this way get off.” Jackson advised calling Erwin’s bluff. “I charge you agree on my part without hesitation. He is a man I cannot challenge, but if a villain will run from one danger and hold out ideas of bravery, they ought always to be taken in.” Jackson went so far as to specify terms of combat. “At seven feet, placed back to back, pistols suspended until after the word ‘fire.’ . . . I will soon put an end to this troublesome scoundrel. . . . If my pistol fires, I kill him.”
Nothing came of this, either. Erwin, Eaton, and their seconds found a formula that spared both body and spirit. Jackson was disappointed, partly for missing the thrill of another duel but mostly that Erwin remained alive to act as cat’s paw for William Crawford. The bad blood between Jackson and Crawford antedated the Florida war, of course, but that conflict provided the Georgian a fresh opportunity to attack the general. Crawford likely believed most of the vicious things he said about Jackson, but he also aimed to keep Jackson from becoming the successor to Monroe. Conceivably Crawford hoped to undermine Monroe himself, to put the presidency into play as early as 1820. This was a trickier maneuver, at least as long as Crawford remained in the administration. How could he bring the administration down without being caught in the rubble? It was hard to say, but those who knew him didn’t put the effort past him.
Jackson prepared to defend himself, in part by defending Monroe. “I am not insensible of the implacable hostility of Mr. Crawford towards me,” he wrote Monroe in November 1818. “Nor have I any doubt of his hostility to you.” Jackson suggested that Crawford had deliberately scrambled communications regarding the operations in Florida. “In this he would have the double object of injuring both you and myself in the estimation of our country. . . . To accomplish an object so desirable to himself and his colleagues, the injury, nay the ruin, of his country would interpose no barrier.”
In January 1819 Jackson traveled to Washington to report on the Florida campaign and confront his accusers. Henry Clay had just given a long, critical speech to the House. “The combination formed was more extensive than I calculated on,” Jackson observed, citing “Mr. Clay’s anxiety to crush the executive through me.” But Jackson was pleased to note that Clay’s efforts were failing. “The whole Kentucky delegation except Clay, I am told, goes with me, and Clay is politically damned.” A week later he wrote Rachel, “The insidious Mr. Clay will sink into that insignificance that all those who abandon principle and justice and would sacrifice their country for self-aggrandizement ought and will experience.”
After Clay’s attempt to sanction Jackson came to nothing in the House, criticism of the general shifted to the Senate. A committee stacked with Crawford allies conducted an investigation and filed a report condemning the invasion of Florida in general and Jackson’s execution of Arbuthnot and Ambrister in particular. The report intimated that Jackson had speculative interests in Pensacola—despite explicit contradictions by other participants in the alleged scheme—and that these, not a concern for national defense, motivated his seizure of that town.
Jackson naturally bridled at the report. He grew angrier on hearing rumors—exaggerated but not wholly without basis—that Crawford was its actual author. As the battle lines were drawn, each side arranged its forces. Crawford and Clay brought Thomas Cobb, a congressman from Georgia, and others annoyed, affronted, or threatened by Jackson into open and covert alliance against the Tennessee general. Jackson’s friends rallied around him. Willie Blount thought anyone who couldn’t see the merits of the Florida campaign didn’t warrant notice. “What poor minded bitches are Messrs. Cobb and Clay,” Blount wrote Jackson. “You have the people and the Government on your side. . . . The Floridas are at last ours.” John Clark was a Georgian who liked Crawford as little as Jackson did. Clark said he had intelligence linking some of Crawford’s associates—including Andrew Erwin—to a slave-smuggling scheme, and he offered to share that intelligence with the world. Jackson was delighted. “I am happy to be informed that you are preparing a publication that will give to the world a full portrait of Mr. Wm. H. Crawford. If the painting is well drawn, from my own knowledge of the man, it will portray hypocrisy surrounded with all its horrid deformity, depravity, and baseness of human character.”
Lacking military enemies for the first time in nearly a decade, Jackson took comfort in his political foes. For months he spoke of Crawford, Clay, and Cobb as an unholy cabal. “Having laboured from my youth to establish a character founded upon uprightness of conduct . . . ,” he told a supporter, “the only solicitude I had upon the subject was that I should not be deprived of that character by the falsehood of a conspiracy formed by designing demagogues, of which I found William H. Crawford the chief, surrounded by his minions, Clay, Cobb, and company, who he wielded with the dexterity that a shewman does his puppets, to exalt himself by prostrating the executive through me and thereby raise himself to the Presidential chair.”
As of early 1820 their efforts had failed. Monroe seemed to have secured his renomination. Jackson reveled in his enemies’ discomfiture. “Like Lucifer they have politically fallen, never to rise again,” he said.
He spoke too soon—much too soon. Jackson’s grasp of national politics didn’t yet match his grasp of military strategy, and his indirect acquaintance with his principal rivals left him unable to appreciate the full extent of their gifts and their guile.
The gifts and guile of Henry Clay became
apparent to the world in the months that followed Jackson’s forecast of his Luciferian fall. By 1820 Missouri had passed the sixty-thousand-person threshold for statehood, and its inhabitants clamored for the recognition and self-government statehood conveyed. But larger issues intruded. By now the population of the North exceeded that of the South, and the disparity seemed certain to grow. This meant that the preservation of southern interests depended on the Senate, where the southern states still balanced the northern. Foremost of the southern interests—or the one, at any rate, that most clearly distinguished the South from the North—was slavery. The Ordinance of 1787 still barred slavery from the Northwest, leaving the trans-Mississippi region—the Louisiana Purchase—as the hope for slavery’s future. The state of Louisiana had been admitted to the Union with slavery inherited from its French and Spanish days. But not till after the War of 1812 did any other district beyond the Mississippi possess the population to qualify for statehood. Missouri seemed a harbinger of the fate of the West.
It also seemed a harbinger of the fate of the Union. Till now the North had acquiesced in the adoption of slavery by new states Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama. But each of those states had been created in territory that belonged to the Union at the end of the Revolutionary War, territory that seemed a natural extension of the southern states to their east. That Kentucky had been part of Virginia and Tennessee part of North Carolina simply reinforced the idea that the Southwest belonged to the South and slavery, just as the Northwest belonged to the North and freedom. The Louisiana Purchase was different, having been acquired after independence by the nation as a whole. Little could be done about the neighborhood of New Orleans and the exotics who lived there, but the rest of the purchase was virgin country, a tabula rasa upon which republican values might be inscribed at the dawn of the region’s political life.
So thought James Tallmadge, at least. The New York congressman proposed to admit Missouri, which as a territory allowed slavery, on condition that she gradually free her slaves. The Tallmadge amendment produced applause among northerners, who wished to see the new West free and perceived this as a comparatively painless step in that direction.
The reaction in the South was quite different. A generation earlier, many in the South had perceived slavery as dying, and by no means did all of these expect to mourn its demise. But the cotton boom made slavery a much bigger issue economically than it had been. Whole states were settled on the premise that slaves would be available to tend the cotton. Their masters weren’t the aristocracy of the Chesapeake or the Carolina coast, who owned their land clear and might have absorbed the shock of shifting from bound labor to free. The new planters were often speculators juggling debts that would crush them should anything shake the system they had inherited. These were the hard men of the frontier, men in the mold of Andrew Jackson. Even if they had suffered pangs of conscience for their slaves—and few seem to have suffered any more than Jackson did—they couldn’t have afforded the remedy.
Southerners read the Tallmadge amendment as foretelling the future not of Missouri alone but of the South. And it was a future—of creeping manumission, of the destruction of the southern way of life—they could not accept. Thomas Cobb of Georgia glared at Tallmadge and vowed, “If you persist, the Union will be dissolved. . . . You have kindled a fire which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood can only extinguish.”
Till now Tallmadge had denied wanting to extend his Missouri principle to the South. “I would in no manner intermeddle with the slaveholding States, nor attempt manumission in any of the original States in the Union,” he avowed. But under Cobb’s cross-examination he abandoned his diffidence. “Sir, if a dissolution of the Union must take place, let it be so! If civil war, which gentlemen so much threaten, must come, I can only say, let it come!”
Into the arena strode Henry Clay. The House Speaker had been hinting at retirement. He owed more money than he could ever repay on a congressman’s salary—which placed him in much the same predicament as many of those new planters who couldn’t afford to free their slaves. “No man is more sensible of the evils of slavery than I am, nor regrets them more,” he wrote a friend. “Were I the citizen of a State in which it was not tolerated, I would certainly oppose its introduction with all the force and energy in my power.” But Kentucky was a slave state, and Clay a slave owner—besides being a politician. And the fact of his owning slaves gave him standing among other slave owners that northern politicians lacked. When the Missouri question grew virulent, Clay put off his return to the private practice of law in order to shape a statute that might hold the Union together in the face of threats like those of Cobb and Tallmadge.
There was no stopping the Tallmadge amendment in the House, where it passed on a sectional vote. The fight then moved to the Senate—as every fight on slavery during the next forty years eventually would. The South stood firm, blocking the amendment and keeping Missouri in limbo. It would have remained in limbo had Senate moderates not linked Missouri’s admission to that of Maine, which had voted to secede from Massachusetts and form a—free—state of its own. House hardliners rejected the Senate package, leading Clay to propose a joint committee to resolve the differences. After his proposal was accepted, he packed the committee with compromisers like himself. The committee’s report wrapped endorsement of the Senate bill in a promise of separate votes on each part of the package, which by now included a ban on slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of the line of latitude at 36 degrees 30 minutes. Legislative amateurs wondered what Clay was doing. The enemies of compromise, they said, would divide and conquer. But the professional politicians understood: Clay’s maneuver allowed his colleagues to vote their consciences on parts of the package and conciliation on the rest. By finagling the majorities, he’d get the compromise through, and they’d preserve their bona fides for constituents back home.
The result was a triumph of the legislative art. The Missouri Compromise averted the civil war of which Cobb, Tallmadge, and the hotheads spoke. It extended the line between North and South across the Mississippi. And it made Clay’s reputation as a man who could transcend section in the interest of the Union.
It would be years before Jackson appreciated that he and Clay were on the same side of the great political issue of their era. This was Jackson’s fault, for misjudging Clay, but also the fault of the times. Nationalism and sectionalism had long struggled for supremacy in American politics, but in the 1820s the orientation of the two ideas was shifting. For most of Jackson’s political life, the primary sectional division had been East versus West, and the principal chore of American nationalists was to keep the West from drifting away down the Mississippi. Jackson’s victory at New Orleans secured the West for the Union but in doing so let the divisions between North and South take precedence. The Missouri question wouldn’t have arisen without the security afforded by the defeat of the British and the Indians, which allowed Americans to cross the Mississippi in large numbers. Yet, having arisen, it signaled that the differences between North and South might be even deeper than those between East and West had been. Thomas Jefferson heard the Missouri debate as a “firebell in the night.” But Jefferson, who had promised equality to America and the world, suffered from a peculiarly bad conscience on slavery and therefore from particularly acute hearing. Less sensitive souls—like Andrew Jackson—were slower to recognize the new axis of danger to the Union for what it turned out to be.
Pensacola is a perfect plain,” Rachel Jackson wrote from the Florida capital to a friend back home in Nashville. “The land nearly as white as flour, yet productive of fine peach trees, oranges in abundance, grapes, figs, pomegranates, etc., etc. Fine flowers growing spontaneously. . . . The town is immediately on the bay. The most beautiful water prospect I ever saw; and from ten o’clock in the morning until ten at night we have the finest sea breeze. There is something in it so exhilarating, so pure, so wholesome, it enlivens the whole system.”
Rachel had come south with her husband for the transfer of authority in Florida from Spain to the United States. Monroe—who had been reelected in 1820 in the only uncontested presidential race in American history—needed someone of stature to supervise the transfer, and Jackson was a natural, for one obvious reason and one not so obvious. The obvious reason was that the conqueror of Florida should accept the surrender. Jackson’s many supporters expected as much. Monroe had gone to great lengths to keep the general happy, and this was an inexpensive way to continue doing so.
The less obvious reason was that Jackson had to be retired from the army. Congress had mandated the army’s shrinking. Some of the shrinkers were avowed anti-Jacksonians who calculated that a smaller army would have no place, or perhaps merely no appeal, for Jackson. Others were simply acting in the American tradition of disbanding the army between wars, lest it eat out the people’s means. Whatever the motives of the legislators, the new army would have room for one major general only, and Jacob Brown enjoyed seniority over Jackson. Monroe didn’t relish having to force Jackson out, but he had no choice.
Florida enabled both men to save face. The territory required a governor, and Jackson knew it well. If his administrative temperament left something to be desired—the general’s handling of martial law in New Orleans still roiled memories in the Crescent City—Monroe comforted himself that Jackson probably wouldn’t remain in Florida long. Careful soundings indicated that Jackson was willing to treat the Florida assignment as a victory tour. He would haul down the Spanish flag, raise the American flag, and go quietly into private life.
