by H. W. Brands
Politically speaking, the day of retribution came in the autumn of 1828. Not till decades later would Americans agree on the first Tuesday of November as the time to cast ballots for president. In 1828 they were still getting used to the idea that the people—as opposed to the state legislatures—should vote for the highest office in the land. Technically, of course, they still voted for electors, and substantial variation persisted regarding the manner in which the popular vote in a state bound its electors. Some states applied a rule of winner take all, with a popular majority for one candidate producing a unanimous vote for that candidate among the state’s electors. Other states allowed split decisions.
Had the contest been close, these differences might have mattered. But by mid-October it was shaping up to be a runaway. “The political news from all quarters is of the most flattering kind,” Jackson wrote Richard Call. “New York, it is constantly believed, will give against the administration 30, if not 33, votes. Ohio and Kentucky is believed to be safe for the people’s cause, but both sides are sanguine. Pennsylvania and Virginia, immoveable. New Jersey and Delaware against the administration, and Maryland a majority. A few days more will test the result.”
The result turned out to be overwhelmingly favorable. New England went for Adams, along with New Jersey and Delaware. New York and Maryland split between Adams and Jackson. But the rest of the country—all the West and nearly the whole South—voted for Jackson. The popular vote was 647,000 for Jackson against 508,000 for Adams. (The much larger totals than in 1824 reflected the continuing shift toward popular voting for electors in the states.) Jackson’s victory in the electoral college—178 to 83—was even more decisive. In the congressional elections, the Jacksonians, who were beginning to call themselves Democrats, handily defeated their opponents, gaining a large majority in the House and a small majority in the Senate.
Jackson accepted the judgment with satisfaction. “The suffrages of a virtuous people have pronounced a verdict of condemnation against them and their slanders, whilst it has justified my character and course,” he told John Coffee.
And then he said something that must have surprised Coffee: “Still, my mind is depressed.” He didn’t specify what weighed upon him in the hour of triumph, saying only, “I will write you more fully shortly.”
Not for two weeks did he write Coffee again. Congratulations from around the country poured into the Hermitage, and the obvious emotion of the letters pushed back whatever dark feelings haunted him. “Providence has procured for us a verdict of the people, which has condemned these wicked proceedings,” he told Coffee when he had a moment, “and has pronounced to an admiring world that the people are virtuous and capable of self-government. . . . The liberty of our beloved country will be perpetual.” On a more personal note, he commented that he was thankful that he and Rachel had survived the stresses of the campaign, against the wicked slanders of his enemies. “Providence has snatched us from the snares of the fowler,” he said.
Jackson didn’t return to the subject of his depression. But it almost certainly related to Rachel. A visitor to the Hermitage about this time—the daughter of an army officer—later remembered the master and mistress.
Picture to yourself a military-looking man, above the ordinary height, dressed plainly but with great neatness, dignified and grave—I had almost said stern—but always courteous and affable, with keen, searching eyes, iron-gray hair, standing stiffly up from an expansive forehead, a face somewhat furrowed by care and time, and expressive of deep thought and active intellect. . . .
Side by side with him stands a coarse-looking, stout, little old woman, whom you might easily mistake for his washerwoman, were it not for the marked attention he pays her, and the love and admiration she manifests for him. Her eyes are bright, and express great kindness of heart; her face is rather broad, her features plain; her complexion so dark as almost to suggest a mingling of races in that climate where such things sometimes occur. But, withal, her face is so good-natured and motherly that you immediately feel at ease with her, however shy you may be of the stately person by her side. Her figure is rather full but loosely and carelessly dressed, so that when she is seated she seems to settle into herself in a manner that is neither graceful nor elegant. . . . I have heard my mother say that she could imagine that in her early youth, at the time the General yielded to her fascinations, she may have been a bright, sparkling brunette, perhaps may even have passed for a beauty. But being without any culture, and out of the way of refining influences, she was, at the time we knew her, such as I have described. . . .
I remember my father’s telling an anecdote characteristic of Mrs. Jackson, which impressed my young mind forcibly. After the evening meal at the Hermitage, he and some other officers were seated with the worthy couple by their ample fire-place. Mrs. Jackson, as was her favorite custom, lighted her pipe, and having taken a whiff or two, handed it to my father, saying: “Honey, won’t you take a smoke?”
Mismatched physically, in manners, and in exposure to the world, the Jacksons were nonetheless soul mates. “Their affection for each other was of the tenderest kind,” the officer’s daughter said. “The General always treated her as if she were his pride and glory, and words can faintly describe her devotion to him.”
This was Rachel in her element. Jackson knew how she loved the Hermitage and how she hated Washington. And the beating she had taken in the Adams press during the campaign made her dread the capital more than ever. His victory vindicated him, but it sentenced her to a life she could hardly bear to ponder. Jackson knew that no one—no soldier, no political ally—had ever served him more faithfully than Rachel had. None had suffered such public abuse on his behalf. And now he would repay her loyalty and love by dragging her to the epicenter of the abuse, which would hardly end just because the election was over. The thought would have depressed any feeling man, and it cast a deep shadow over Jackson’s victory.
Rachel didn’t complain. “I could have spent at the Hermitage the remnant of my days in peace, and were it not that I should be unhappy by being so far from the General, no consideration could induce me again to abandon this delightful spot,” she wrote a friend on December 1. “But since it has pleased a grateful people once more to call him to their service, and since by the permission of Providence he will obey that call, I have resolved—indeed, it is a duty I owe to myself and my husband—to try to forget, at least for a time, all the endearments of home and prepare to live where it has pleased heaven to fix our destiny.” To another friend she spoke in a more somber tone. “Hitherto my Saviour has been my guide and support through all my afflictions (which I must confess for the last four years have been many and unprovoked), and now I have no doubt but he will still aid and instruct me in my duties which I fear will be many and arduous.”
Her fear didn’t diminish as she and her husband prepared for the move to Washington. It preyed on her till, on December 18, it apparently contributed to a heart attack. Jackson was writing a letter; Rachel was sitting across the room. Suddenly she felt an “excruciating pain in the left shoulder, arm, and breast,” as Jackson described it. He carried her to bed and called the doctor.
For three days, she held her own. The doctor bled her, at a loss as to any other treatment. On the fourth day she flagged. Jackson didn’t know what to do. Washington awaited his inauguration, and the journey would be long. But he couldn’t go. “I cannot leave her,” he told Richard Call.
And then she died. Her heart, wounded on her husband’s behalf, burdened by the strains of the election and the prospect of more, gave up its struggle.
Still he couldn’t leave her. A friend recalled that he held her so tightly after death that the body had to be pried from his arms to prepare it for burial. Another remembered that he looked “twenty years older in a night.”
He buried her in a corner of the Hermitage garden, in a gentle rain. For many months afterward his mind reverted to the moment when the ground closed over her. “Could I but w
ithdraw from the scenes around me,” he wrote from the White House the following summer, “to the private walks of the Hermitage, how soon would I be found in the solitary shades of my garden, at the tomb of my wife, there to spend my days in silent sorrow and in peace from the toils and strife of this world. . . . O, how fluctuating are all earthly things. At the time I least expected it, and could least spare her, she was snatched from me, and I left here a solitary monument of grief, without the least hope of happiness here below.”
In his grief, the only thing that enabled Jackson to carry on was the same thing that had allowed him to let his name be forwarded for the presidency in the first place: his sense of duty. The people had spoken; he must answer their call. But he wondered if this time duty didn’t ask too much. As a soldier he had never put Rachel in danger. As a soldier he had defended her, and all the other innocents at their homes and firesides. In politics, though, apparently not even women were safe from enemy fire. The cost of his latest victory was the life of the woman he loved. His various infirmities had long stolen sleep from his nights, but now they had a new ally in insomnia: the inescapable suspicion that this wouldn’t have happened, that she would be living yet, if he had heeded her wishes and kept clear of politics. He had killed a man with his own hand, had ordered the execution of several others, had been responsible for thousands of deaths in battle, and never lost a minute of sleep to guilt. But this was different, and it was agonizing. His victory hadn’t merely turned to ashes in his mouth. It turned to an ache in his heart that wouldn’t cease.
He had all he could do to make himself go to Washington for his inauguration. He delayed his departure, lingering by Rachel’s grave. Finally he set off, but with nothing like the joy he had felt at previous victories. And whatever victories might lie ahead, he was sure he would never experience happiness again.
General Jackson will be here about the 15th of February,” Daniel Webster remarked in Washington. “Nobody knows what he will do. . . . Many letters are sent to him; he answers none of them.” John Calhoun thought the silence eerie. “We have a dead calm in politics,” he wrote.
The city that awaited Jackson’s arrival was a work in progress. Residents of America’s few real cities laughed at Washington’s pretensions. “Our inimitable capital is a parody upon all other capitals that were ever actually built up and inhabited since the beginning of the world,” remarked the architecture critic for the Philadelphia Monthly. A visitor, he said, could wander for hours through the federal district before stumbling on the city itself. “Unless he should be told, . . . he would hardly know whether the few straggling blocks of bricks and mortar that he beheld at intervals few and far between constituted urbs in rure, or the vast surface of vacant sand and marsh that stretched around them was rus in urbe.” The most imposing structure was the Capitol. “It is a spacious edifice and a stately one, when seen out of doors, but strangers who are not au fait in the topography of the interior are often lost in the intricate passages and sudden sinuosities that have been contrived, probably as emblems of the crooked and narrow paths by which those for whose accommodation the house was built find their way to it.”
The plan of the city specified several grand avenues, named for the states. But only one—Pennsylvania—came anywhere near matching the ambitions of the designer. “This is the avenue par excellence,” the anonymous (in those un-bylined days) Philadelphia critic continued. “It conducts you from the capitol to the President’s House, which is an immense pile without any extraordinary pretensions to the sublime or beautiful. Along this flat and uninteresting highway, fashionable ladies and gentlemen who cannot sport their carriages promenade, and the brilliant equipages of ambassadors, ministers, and opulent gentry are in perpetual whirl.”
The ambitions of the gentry appeared in the manners they imposed on social life. “Every look, word and gesture in this aspiring city is regulated by the most fastidious etiquette. It is as much as your reputation is worth to transgress the rules provided for the defence of fashionable life.” Even the innkeepers enforced the code. “One of them, who holds a high rank among the aubergistes of fashion, is reported to have established at his table the most rigid code of polite discipline. All who can afford to sit at his board are expected, out of pure politeness, to partake of a few spoon-fulls of soup, whether they relish it or not.” The code extended no grace to the uninitiated. “Woe to the simple, unsophisticated visitor of Washington, who, in obedience to the promptings of nature and observance of the uncourtly manners which he had practiced in his native village or woods, ventures to speak, dress, look, eat, or perform any ordinary office of life without deference to fashion!”
Yet precisely such unsophisticates, an entire army of them, were descending on Washington. Jackson’s election inspired many thousands of his supporters to visit the capital. Having rescued the republic, as they saw it, by electing their hero, they came to install him, just to make sure. Their arrival astonished the residents of the city. “No one who was at Washington at the time of General Jackson’s inauguration is likely to forget that period to the day of his death,” one resident declared. “To us, who had witnessed the quiet and orderly period of the Adams administration, it seemed as if half the nation had rushed at once into the capital. It was like the inundation of the northern barbarians into Rome, save that the tumultuous tide came in from a different point of the compass. The West and the South seemed to have precipitated themselves upon the North and overwhelmed it. . . . Strange faces filled every public place, and every face seemed to bear defiance on its brow.” Other observers drew different historical analogies. The Philadelphia critic likened the arrival of the Jacksonians to the time when “the mighty Xerxes ferried or marched his mob of an army over the Hellespont, or Peter the Hermit led on his rabble of Christian vagabonds to drive the Musselmans from the Holy Sepulchre.”
Late February was quite cold, but March brought a break in the weather. March 4 dawned warm and springlike. The city awakened early when Jackson enthusiasts spontaneously fired cannons to herald democracy’s day. Spectators began streaming toward the Capitol grounds to claim seats and standing places for the inauguration ceremony. Jackson had spent the night at Gadsby’s House; at ten-thirty he reviewed a company of fifteen aging veterans of the Revolutionary War who had traveled to Washington to pay their respects. Now they insisted on escorting him to the Capitol.
Jackson and his white-haired guard drew a crowd along the way. The Marine Band struck up “Jackson’s March”—an air commemorating the Battle of New Orleans—as the general’s carriage entered the south gate of the Capitol grounds. Ten thousand people roared their approval when they caught sight of Jackson stepping out of the carriage; the roar faded only after he disappeared into the building.
The clock showed half past eleven as Jackson entered the Senate chamber, accompanied by the Committee of Arrangements and the marshal of the District of Columbia. He sat down directly before the desk of the secretary of the Senate. In the chair of the Senate was Vice President Calhoun, who had been reelected to that post as part of the Jackson triumph. Calhoun proceeded to administer the oath of office to the fourteen new members of the upper house.
Chief Justice John Marshall entered the chamber and sat to Jackson’s right. The associate justices followed Marshall and took their seats. The diplomatic corps—envoys from foreign countries—sat on Jackson’s left. Members of the House of Representatives filed in and filled the gallery on the west side of the Senate.
Promptly at noon Calhoun gaveled adjournment of the Senate and a procession to the east portico commenced. The crowd on the grounds, numbering perhaps fifteen thousand by now, had gathered below the portico, waiting intently to see their hero again. When Jackson emerged between the columns of the portico, the crowd erupted, louder than before. Their cheers rumbled across the grounds, joined shortly by twenty-four cannons booming the official salute.
Jackson remained standing before the crowd. He wore two pairs of eyeglasses: one cur
rently on his eyes, the other—his reading lenses—thrown on top of his head. While the tumult lasted he conversed with Calhoun, on his left.
The crowd composed itself somewhat when John Marshall stepped forward to administer Jackson’s oath. Marshall’s voice was strong, Jackson’s almost inaudible. Only those standing very close could hear him pronounce the words specified by the Constitution. When he finished he took up the Bible on which he had sworn, raised it to his lips, and kissed it. Then he turned to the people and bowed, as a minister in a monarchy might bow to his sovereign.
The crowd strained to hear the president’s inaugural address. It lasted but a few minutes. He emphasized the popular nature of his victory, crediting the “free choice of the people” for his elevation. He promised to interpret the Constitution strictly. “I shall keep steadily in view the limitations as well as the extent of the executive power.” He would respect the rights of the states, “taking care not to confound the powers they have reserved to themselves with those they have granted to the confederacy.” In foreign affairs he would seek “to preserve peace and to cultivate friendship on fair and honorable terms.” He would strengthen the army, but he looked to the people for the ultimate safety of the republic. “The bulwark of our defence is the national militia, which in the present state of our intelligence and population must render us invincible as long as our government is administered for the good of the people and is regulated by their will. . . . A million of armed freemen possessed of the means of war can never be conquered by a foreign foe.”
