by H. W. Brands
Had the spectacle closed here,” Margaret Bayard Smith wrote, “even Europeans must have acknowledged that a free people, collected in their might, silent and tranquil, restrained solely by a moral power, without a shadow around of military force, was majesty, rising to sublimity, and far surpassing the majesty of Kings and Princes, surrounded with armies and glittering in gold.”
Margaret Bayard’s forebears were Federalist, but she had married a Republican just weeks before the first election of Thomas Jefferson. She moved with her husband, Samuel Smith, to Washington and for the next forty years observed the evolution of American politics. Till Jefferson died, the philosopher of Monticello was her favorite among American political figures, which disposed her to favor the people in theory but not always in practice. She socialized with Henry Clay and others of the Adams administration and shared their reservations about Jackson. She attended the inauguration out of curiosity, to see how the new president and his horde of followers would behave.
She was pleasantly surprised. “It was grand—it was sublime!” she wrote a friend regarding the ceremony at the Capitol. “Thousands and thousands of people, without distinction of rank, collected in an immense mass round the Capitol, silent, orderly and tranquil.”
But the tranquility and sublimity couldn’t be sustained in the face of the people’s enthusiasm for their hero. “When the speech was over, and the president made his parting bow, the barrier that had separated the people from him was broken down and they rushed up the steps all eager to shake hands with him.” Jackson obliged for a time, but the crush became too great. Only with difficulty was a path forced through the Capitol yard and down the hill to the gate that opened onto Pennsylvania Avenue. He couldn’t get through the gate. “The living mass was impenetrable,” Margaret Smith said. Eventually another path was opened and the president’s horse brought forward. He mounted the white stallion and commenced the slow march to the executive mansion. “Such a cortege as followed him! Country men, farmers, gentlemen, mounted and dismounted, boys, women and children, black and white. Carriages, wagons and carts all pursuing him to the President’s house.”
Public receptions at the mansion had been a feature of inaugurations since Jefferson’s day. Distinguished Washingtonians paid their respects to the new president and reconfirmed their solidarity as the governing class. Margaret Smith and most other veterans of the capital had expected a similar soiree this afternoon. But the crowd at the inauguration and in the procession behind the president on Pennsylvania Avenue suggested that something different was afoot, quite literally. Mrs. Smith refused to throw herself into the surging sea of democrats. She repaired to a friend’s nearby home, to let the crowd diminish. Yet the torrent persisted. “Streams of people on foot and carriages of all kinds, still pouring toward the President’s house,” she noted more than an hour later.
Not till three o’clock did she manage to work her way through the crowd into the mansion. She thought she had stumbled on the aftermath of a battle.
What a scene did we witness! The Majesty of the People had disappeared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, negros, women, children, scrambling, fighting, romping. What a pity, what a pity! No arrangements had been made, no police officers placed on duty, and the whole house had been inundated by the rabble mob. . . . Cut glass and china to the amount of several thousand dollars had been broken in the struggle to get to the refreshments, punch and other articles had been carried out in tubs and buckets. . . . Ladies fainted, men were seen with bloody noses, and such a scene of confusion as is impossible to describe. Those who got in could not get out by the door again, but had to scramble out of windows.
After all her effort, Margaret Smith was disappointed at not meeting the president, who, having shaken some ten thousand hands, had escaped to his hotel.
The mob scene at the White House was what most people remembered about the inauguration. Even some Jacksonians were taken aback. “It was a glorious day yesterday for the sovereigns,” James Hamilton wrote wryly. “The mob broke in, in thousands. Spirits black, yellow, and grey, poured in in one uninterrupted stream of mud and filth, among the throng many subjects for the penitentiary.”
Those less favorably inclined toward the new president and the new democracy took a more skeptical view. Joseph Story, an associate justice of the Supreme Court, winced at what he called the “noise and tumult and hollow parade” of democracy’s hour, and he shook his head at the spectacle at the White House. “I never saw such a mixture,” he said. “The reign of King ‘Mob’ seemed triumphant. I was glad to escape from the scene as soon as possible.”
Yet even the skeptics couldn’t help perceiving that something remarkable had happened. Margaret Smith observed, “It was the People’s day, and the People’s President, and the People would rule.”
The first order of business for the Jackson administration was repairing the damage done to the White House by the overly enthusiastic friends of democracy. The second order of business, commenced almost simultaneously, was repairing the damage done to American liberty by the foes of democracy.
Such, at any rate, was how Jackson viewed his mission. His election, though not unexpected by the time it happened, turned the American political world on its head. Not since Jefferson’s victory in 1800 had there been a hostile takeover of the presidency, and no one expected Jackson to offer an olive branch like that put forward by Jefferson in his “we are all republicans; we are all federalists” inaugural address. A theme of the first Jackson administration would certainly be reform, after everything the Jacksonians had said about corruption in government. In time reform would mean all things to all people, and consequently nothing much to many, but to the Jacksonians it meant something specific. They were republicans before they were democrats, and a fundamental feature of republican thought in America, from the days of the Revolution, was an insistence on civic virtue. The revolutionaries of 1776 decried the corruption they saw in British politics: the perversion of government to the illegitimate pursuit of private gain. The rebels demanded independence lest the corruption cross the Atlantic and infect America. When the Jacksonians raised the cry of corruption against the Adams administration, they spoke against this background of revolutionary rhetoric and were so understood. The reform they demanded would stop short of a violent revolution—although after the sack of the White House some skeptics weren’t so sure—but it could hardly be less sweeping in its assault on entrenched power. The people had commenced the process by turning out Adams. The new president would continue the work by displacing the minions of the old regime.
He began with the State Department, the first of the executive agencies. For secretary of state Jackson chose Martin Van Buren of New York. Van Buren had helped deliver the New York vote to Jackson and in the process had confirmed a reputation for political sorcery. His enemies intended to insult him by calling him a “magician,” but his friends—some of them, anyway—took up the epithet and made it a mark of honor. His reputation as a climber didn’t diminish when he resigned the New York governorship after less than three months in office to become the senior member of Jackson’s cabinet.
Pennsylvania contributed the head of the Treasury. The state’s support had been crucial in Jackson’s election, but beyond this the new president wanted to brace himself for trouble with the Bank of the United States, headquartered in Philadelphia and a hotbed of holdover Federalism. Samuel Ingham couldn’t expect to bring the bankers around, but he might keep their animus from infecting the entire Keystone State.
Jackson turned to Tennessee, to his friend and protégé John Eaton, for secretary of war. Eaton’s qualifications mattered less than his loyalty, in that Jackson intended to act as his own secretary of war should hostilities—with Britain, Spain, or the Indians—resume.
John Branch of North Carolina became secretary of the navy, an office of government Jackson knew little and cared less about. The navy should grow, but slowly, and any honest person ought to be able to handle that
. John Berrien of Georgia was named attorney general, and William Barry of Kentucky postmaster general.
Beyond his official cabinet, Jackson gathered a council of informal advisers. Unlike every previous president except Washington, Jackson had almost no intimates in the national capital upon his inauguration. (Washington had almost no intimates anywhere, being famously above mere mortals.) Jackson knew his cabinet secretaries, other than Eaton, by reputation alone. For this reason he turned for advice to men whose judgment and loyalty he had learned to trust during the long campaign. William Lewis of Tennessee stood first among the equals. Amos Kendall, an ardently pro-Jackson editor from Kentucky, came next. Duff Green, a Missouri transplant who now edited the fiercely Jacksonian United States Telegraph at Washington, and Isaac Hill, for years a lonely Jacksonian in New Hampshire, rounded out the clique. Andrew Donelson, the president’s nephew, surrogate son, and now personal secretary, was an ex officio member of the group.
Jackson’s informal council served him as a sounding board for policy, but it also provided emotional sustenance, especially now that Rachel was gone. The group took shape after William Lewis, having helped install Jackson in the White House, prepared to return to Tennessee to his farm. “Why, Major,” Jackson said, “you are not going to leave me here alone, after doing more than any other man to bring me here?” Lewis reconsidered and, when Jackson found him a minor post at the Treasury, stayed on. Kendall and Hill likewise received positions with the Treasury, while Green landed government printing contracts.
The cabinet appointments evoked little enthusiasm among outside observers but not much criticism either. John Eaton was charged with being merely a Tennessee favorite of the president—which prompted Jackson to embrace him all the tighter. “Great exertions have been made by Clay’s friends to raise a clamour about my taking Major Eaton into my cabinet, and some of my friends from Tennessee, weak enough to be duped by the artifice, were made instruments,” he told John Coffee. “The object was to intimidate me from the selection, and thereby destroy Major Eaton. I had to assume sufficient energy to meet the crisis. I did meet it, and Major Eaton will become one of the most popular men in the departments, be a great comfort to me, and will manage the department of war well.”
Critics concentrated their fire against the “kitchen cabinet,” as they derisively called Jackson’s informal circle. William Lewis was assailed as the president’s personal propagandist, while Amos Kendall, Duff Green, and Isaac Hill were branded hack writers remarkable only for their singular prejudice for all things Jacksonian. Even some of Jackson’s friends acknowledged that appearances weren’t good. “We lament to see so many of the editorial corps favored with the patronage of the Administration,” Thomas Ritchie wrote to Martin Van Buren. Ritchie edited the Richmond Enquirer and had backed Jackson strongly, although not so strongly as Kendall, Green, and Hill. “A single case would not have excited so much observation, but it really looks as if there were a systematic effort to reward editorial partizans, which will have the effect of bringing the vaunted liberty of the press into contempt.” Ritchie didn’t question the ability of Kendall and the others, and he positively admired their courage. All the same, their personal standing with Jackson made him uneasy. “Invade the freedom of the press and the freedom of election, by showering patronage too much on editors of newspapers . . . and the rights of the people themselves are exposed to imminent danger.”
Ritchie, who knew he was writing for the president’s eyes as much as for Van Buren’s, thought Jackson’s choice of advisers reflected on the broader issue of reform. “What is reform?” he asked Van Buren. “Is it to turn out of office all those who voted against him, or who decently preferred Mr. Adams? Or is it not rather those who are incapable of discharging their duties: the drunken, the ignorant, the embezzler? . . . It is surely not to put out a good and experienced officer because he was a decent friend of J. Q. Adams, in order to put in a heated partizan of the election of General Jackson.”
Ritchie had a point, and Jackson knew it. But the president responded defensively, as he often did to criticism, however well intended. “You may assure Mr. Ritchie . . . that the President has not, nor will he ever, make an appointment but with a view to the public good,” he told Van Buren. “He never has, nor will he, appoint a personal friend to office unless by such appointment the public will be faithfully served.” Having got that out of his system and on the record, Jackson continued in a more philosophical vein. “I cannot suppose Mr. Ritchie would have me proscribe my friends merely because they are so. If my personal friends are qualified and patriotic, why should I not be permitted to bestow a few offices on them?” Presidents Washington and Jefferson had rewarded friends, to the benefit of the public, as Ritchie certainly knew. “Before he condemns the tree, he ought to wait and see its fruit. The people expect reform. They shall not be disappointed. But it must be judiciously done, and upon principle.”
The principle Jackson decided on was that rotation in office, rather than permanent tenure, should be the norm in a democracy. As this was a departure from previous practice, and liable to misinterpretation, he took care to explain the reasoning behind it. “There are, perhaps, few men who can for any great length of time enjoy office and power without being more or less under the influence of feelings unfavorable to the faithful discharge of their public duties,” he said. “They are apt to acquire a habit of looking with indifference upon the public interests and of tolerating conduct from which an unpracticed man would revolt. Office is considered as a species of property.” Such thinking was wrong, and it was what Jackson intended to root out. “In a country where offices are created solely for the benefit of the people, no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another. Offices were not established to give support to particular men at the public expense. No individual wrong is, therefore, done by removal, since neither appointment to nor continuance in office is a matter of right.”
This was why rotation should be practiced. That it could be practiced without damage to the common welfare followed from the nature of the work. “The duties of all public officers are, or at least admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance.” Far from damaging performance, rotation would actually improve it. “I can not but believe that more is lost by the long continuance of men in office than is generally to be gained by their experience.”
Yet applying the principle of rotation wasn’t painless. The replacement of federal officials worked real hardship in some cases. “My husband, sir, never was your enemy,” the wife of one ousted official wrote Jackson. Her man had simply voted his conscience, and for this he had lost his job. “You were apprised of our poverty; you knew the dependence of eight little children for food and raiment upon my husband’s salary. You knew that, advanced in years as he was, without the means to prosecute any regular business, and without friends able to assist him, the world would be to him a barren heath, an inhospitable wild.”
Jackson couldn’t ignore the protests, but he recognized that, however heartfelt, they were usually one-sided. A woman correspondent berated him for firing a man named Hawkins, the husband of a friend. “You can have no idea of the integrity, honesty and good principles of the man you have prostrated, and literally taken the bread out of the mouths of a helpless wife and two small children,” she said. Jackson inquired after Hawkins and discovered that he habitually got drunk on the job. Yet he answered the woman tactfully. “It is a painful duty to be the instrument of lessening the resources of a family so amiable as that of Mr. Hawkins, but when the public good calls for it, it must be performed,” he wrote. “As a private individual, it would give me the greatest happiness to alleviate their distresses, but as a public officer, I cannot devote to this object the interests of the country.”
Jackson knew, and didn’t mind, that the fear of being fired would affect many more persons than those actually dismissed. A little fear would have a sober
ing effect on the tipsy, a vivifying effect on the lazy, a straightening effect on the wayward.
But the fear got out of hand. After four administrations of indulgence, the merest hint of accountability pushed some to paranoia. “The gloom of suspicion pervaded the face of society,” one officeholder asserted. “No man deemed it safe and prudent to trust his neighbor. . . . A casual remark, dropped in the street, would within an hour be repeated at headquarters; and many a man received unceremonious dismission who could not, for his life, conceive or conjecture wherein he had offended.” Another critic contended that whatever good the replacements had done was overshadowed by the harm. “I question whether the ferreting out treasury rats, and the correction of abuses, are sufficient to compensate for the reign of terror which appears to have commenced. It would be well enough if it were confined to evil-doers, but it spreads abroad like a contagion: spies, informers, denunciations—the fecula of despotism.”
Jackson had never let criticism turn him from the course his conscience dictated, and he didn’t let criticism turn him now. He hefted his shovel to “cleanse the Augean stables,” as he put it to Coffee. But an inevitable side effect almost caused him to wish he’d left the matter alone. Once word got out that the new administration considered most federal appointments subject to review, Jackson was besieged by applicants for the places made vacant. Battalions of hopefuls wrote reciting their qualifications. Regiments appeared in person. “I have been crowded with thousands of applicants for office,” Jackson lamented to Coffee, “and if I had a tit for every applicant to suck the Treasury pap, all would go away well satisfied; but as there are not offices for more than one out of five hundred who applies, many must go away dissatisfied.”
