by H. W. Brands
Andrew Jackson Jr. was better behaved than Hutchings, but he too required direction. The young man was twenty now and was managing the Hermitage in his father’s absence. Jackson was upset to learn from a Nashville neighbor of the death of one of the Hermitage slaves, a man named Jim. “I pray you, my son,” Jackson wrote Andrew, “to examine minutely into this matter, and if the death was produced by the cruelty of Mr. Steel”—the overseer—“have him forthwith discharged.” Andrew was new to the business of running a plantation, and Jackson urged him to seek the advice of family friends. But by whatever means, he must learn to manage slaves and especially overseers. “My negroes shall be treated humanely. When I employed Mr. Steel, I charged him upon this subject, and had expressed in our agreement that he was to treat them with great humanity, feed and clothe them well, and work them in moderation. If he has deviated from this rule, he must be discharged.” Jim’s was the latest in a disturbing string of deaths. “Since I left home I have lost three of my family. Old Ned I expected to die, but I am fearful the death of Jack, and Jim, has been produced by exposure and bad treatment. Your Uncle John Donelson writes that Steel has ruled with a rod of iron. This is so inconsistent to what I expected that I cannot bear the inhumanity that he has exercised towards my poor negroes. . . . Unless he changes his conduct, dismiss him.”
Other advice to Andrew was more personal. Jackson’s neighbors reported that Andrew was courting a young woman. From eagerness or ignorance, he had initiated the suit without gaining permission from the girl’s father. Jackson wrote to the father to apologize for Andrew’s mistake and to testify to his son’s good faith. “He has been reared in the paths of virtue and morality by his pious and amiable mother, and I believe has walked steadily in them.” To Andrew himself he offered the advice of a loving father. “My son, having your happiness at heart more than my own . . . you can judge of the anxiety I have that you should marry a lady that will make you happy. . . . You are very young, but having placed your affections upon Miss Flora, I have no desire to control your affections or interfere with your choice. Early attachments are the most durable. . . . I have only to remark that no good can flow from a long courtship. Therefore I would recommend to you to be frank with her, say to her at once the object of your visit, and receive her answer at once.”
Yet the young man must protect himself—and his heart. If Flora said yes, they should marry at once, and the two could come to the White House to live. If she said no, or if she vacillated, he should break off the suit. And in that case he should be in no hurry to form other attachments. “You have many years yet for the improvement of your mind, and to make a selection of a companion.” Jackson was thinking of Andrew, but he admitted he was thinking of himself as well. “Remember, my son, that you are now the only solace of my mind and prospect of my happiness here below, and were you to make an unhappy choice, it would bring me to my grave in sorrow.”
After a year consumed with the housekeeping of his administration—and the airing of more dirty linen than almost anyone outside Washington cared to see—Jackson turned his attention to the issues that faced the nation. Presidents’ annual messages were great events in those days, at a time before national politics became a year-round endeavor. First messages by new presidents were even more anticipated, as potentially setting the agenda for an entire administration. In the case of Jackson, who hadn’t actively campaigned for office and had said next to nothing on many important issues, the anticipation was doubled again. He didn’t disappoint, although he did provoke. The message he delivered to Congress on December 8, 1829, was a landmark document, the manifesto of democracy as defined by the man who embodied popular government in America. Since Alexander Hamilton had drafted speeches and papers for George Washington, presidents’ messages to Congress had always been collaborative affairs (and always would be). Jackson wrote out a sketch of what he intended to say and circulated it to his advisers; Martin Van Buren added thoughts and language, as did others. But the final draft was fully Jackson’s, summarizing his considered views on the appropriate role of the federal government in the life of the nation, and in particular in the lives of the ordinary people.
He began with foreign affairs. Those members of Congress who knew Jackson’s history—and they all knew something of it—must have been surprised at the mildness of his tone toward Britain, his lifelong bête noire. “With Great Britain, alike distinguished in peace and war, we may look forward to years of peaceful, honorable, and elevated competition. Everything in the condition and history of the two nations is calculated to inspire sentiments of mutual respect and to carry conviction to the minds of both that it is their policy to preserve the most cordial relations.” Was this the voice of Jackson, the hammer of Albion, the slayer of two British generals and a host of redcoat soldiers? In fact, this part of the message owed much to Van Buren, who as secretary of state would have to conduct diplomacy with Britain. But it also revealed that Jackson understood the difference between being a general and being president. Two issues pended between the United States and Britain: the rectification of the border between Maine and Canada, and the opening of the British West Indies to American trade. On each point Jackson recognized that a velvet glove and soothing words might accomplish more than a flung gauntlet and an aggressive challenge.
After touching on relations with several other foreign countries, Jackson turned to his domestic agenda. The first item was a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college. In Jackson’s time the Constitution had yet to acquire the patina of semidivine revelation subsequent generations would accord it. “Our system of government was by its framers deemed an experiment, and they therefore consistently provided a mode of remedying its defects,” he said. Those in his audience who, like him, had known some of the framers, nodded in agreement as to principle if not detail. The primary defect was obvious to anyone who had observed the election of 1824. “To the people belongs the right of electing their Chief Magistrate; it was never designed that their choice should in any case be defeated.” Jackson was on tenuous historical ground here. The point of the electoral college had been to temper and interpret the will of the people, if not actually to defeat it. But in the age of democracy, his political argument was increasingly persuasive. “Experience proves that in proportion as agents to execute the will of the people are multiplied, there is danger of their wishes being frustrated.” Conversely, the danger would be diminished by reducing the number of agents, starting with the electors, who should be eliminated. Jackson proposed to leave alone the relative weight of the states in choosing presidents (he didn’t say precisely how), but the power of election must rest more directly upon the people. As an adjunct to such an amendment, he recommended limiting presidents to a single term, of perhaps six years.
Of matters legislative rather than constitutional, the tariff was the most controversial. The biennial temptation to fiddle with the rate schedules had proved irresistible in 1828, when Congress raised rates to new heights. No genuine principles, besides political self-interest, informed the 1828 tariff, which reflected instead the ability of various manufacturers, shippers, and growers to shield themselves from foreign competition and pass the burden of supporting the federal government to others. But one result was clear: southerners detested the tariff, as it taxed much of what they consumed while protecting next to nothing of what they produced. Southern planters were already hurting after a British financial panic caused the price of cotton to plunge, and the 1828 tariff—shortly labeled the “tariff of abominations” by southerners—added domestic insult to foreign injury.
Jackson, as a southerner and a cotton producer, sympathized with the abomination school of thought on the tariff. But as president he had to acknowledge political realities. He broached the tariff topic cautiously, identifying the dominant economic interests of the country as agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing, and declaring, “To regulate its conduct so as to promote equally the prosperity of these three cardinal int
erests is one of the most difficult tasks of Government.” His sympathies surfaced when he declared that the three interests, though all important, weren’t equal. “The agricultural interest of our country is so essentially connected with every other, and so superior in importance to them, that it is scarcely necessary to invite to it your particular attention. It is principally as manufactures and commerce tend to increase the value of agricultural productions and to extend their application to the wants and comforts of society that they deserve the fostering care of Government.” This pleased the anti-tariff party, as did some subsequent comments supporting the principle of free trade. But Jackson didn’t propose tearing down the tariff entirely. “The general rule to be applied in graduating the duties upon articles of foreign growth or manufacture is that which will place our own in fair competition with those of other countries.” Implicitly acknowledging a complaint of the southerners, he added, regarding the tariff, “Local feelings and prejudices should be merged in the patriotic determination to promote the great interests as a whole. . . . Discarding all calculations of political ascendancy, the North, the South, the East, and the West should unite in diminishing any burthen of which either may justly complain.”
Though the protectionists might protest, Jackson linked the tariff to the broader question of government revenues. (The protectionists wanted a tariff for protection, not for revenue.) The president reported that the federal debt—mostly from the War of 1812—stood at $49 million. Government revenues currently exceeded expenditures by several million dollars per year, creating the prospect, “in a very short time,” of paying off the debt. The American people would then face an important decision. Jackson didn’t think the tariff could be responsibly reduced so far as to eliminate the surplus entirely, nor did he think surpluses should be allowed to pile up in the federal treasury. Advocates of internal improvements wanted the federal government to spend the excess on roads and other public works. Jackson acknowledged the value of such projects, but he feared that federal control of spending would encourage corruption in the way the projects were approved and funded. Congressmen would be tempted to approve one another’s favorite projects regardless of the general good, while contractors would be tempted to bribe the lawmakers to land sweet deals. And the president had doubts regarding the constitutionality of many such projects. “To avoid these evils, it appears to me that the most safe, just, and federal disposition which could be made of the surplus revenue would be its apportionment among the several States according to their ratio of representation.” What a much later generation would call revenue sharing appealed to Jackson as a means of reconciling the national interest in roads and waterways serving the country as a whole with the greatest degree of state autonomy in determining which projects would receive funding.
Jackson was a Unionist first and last, as those who challenged him would discover. But the umbrella of his Unionism sheltered a healthy respect for the wisdom of the states in treating issues important to ordinary lives. “The great mass of legislation relating to our internal affairs was intended to be left where the Federal convention found it—in the State governments. Nothing is clearer, in my view, than that we are chiefly indebted for the success of the Constitution under which we are now acting to the watchful and auxiliary operation of the State authorities. This is not the reflection of a day, but belongs to the most deeply rooted convictions of my mind. I can not, therefore, too strongly or too earnestly, for my own sense of its importance, warn you against all encroachments upon the legitimate sphere of State sovereignty.”
The question of legitimate sovereignty extended to relations with the Indian tribes. No president before Jackson (and none after) had such intimate experience of Indian relations. For this reason the members of Congress listened carefully as Jackson explained the philosophy that would guide his approach to the Indians. A controversy had arisen of late between the states of Georgia and Alabama, on one hand, and certain Cherokees and Creeks, on the other. The Indians asserted tribal autonomy and therefore exemption from state laws, which exemption the states refused to grant. The Indians appealed to the president for protection. Jackson denied the appeal, citing the constitutional prohibition against creating new states within existing states. Autonomy for the Indians, he said, was tantamount to creating such new states. Many of those supporting the Indians lived in the northern states. “Would the people of Maine permit the Penobscot tribe to erect an independent government within their State?” he asked. “Would the people of New York permit each remnant of the Six Nations within her borders to declare itself an independent republic under the protection of the United States? Could the Indians establish a separate republic on each of their reservations in Ohio?”
Jackson believed there would be no peace for the Indians east of the Mississippi. This was a harsh prediction, but history allowed no other.
Our ancestors found them the uncontrolled possessors of these vast regions. By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for a while their once terrible names. Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware is fast overtaking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek. That this fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limits of the States does not admit of a doubt.
Humanity and national honor demand that every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity. It is too late to inquire whether it was just in the United States to include them and their territory within the bounds of new States. . . . That step can not be retraced. A State can not be dismembered by Congress or restricted in the exercise of her constitutional power. But the people of those States, and of every State, actuated by feelings of justice and a regard for our national honor, submit to you the interesting question whether something can not be done, consistently with the rights of the States, to preserve this much-injured race.
What Jackson proposed was the legal transfer of land west of the Mississippi to the eastern tribes and the physical transfer of those tribes to the western land. This policy would circumvent the constitutional problem of states within states, as the transferred land would lie within no state but within federal territory. There the Indians could exist as autonomous tribes, “subject to no other control from the United States than such as may be necessary to preserve peace on the frontier and between the several tribes.” Jackson stressed that the emigration across the Mississippi must be voluntary. “It would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land.” But the Indians must know the alternative. “If they remain within the limits of the States, they must be subject to their laws.”
It was a long message, and Jackson was almost done. But he had to say a word about an issue that would arise soon. “The charter of the Bank of the United States expires in 1836, and its stockholders will most probably apply for a renewal of their privileges.” Jackson warned that he didn’t like the bank as it currently existed. “Both the constitutionality and the expediency of the law creating this bank are well questioned by a large portion of our fellow citizens, and it must be admitted by all that it has failed in the great end of establishing a uniform and sound currency.” Jackson didn’t rule out a substitute agency “which would avoid all constitutional difficulties and at the same time secure all the advantages to the Government and country that were expected to result from the present bank.” But he offered no details.
Having provided Congress, and through Congress the American people, an outline of the work that would fill his tenure as president, Jackson commended Congress “to the guidance of Almighty God, with a full reliance on His merciful providence for the maintenance of our free institutions.”
The message appealed to the American people, who hadn’t expected s
uch depth from their hero. But Congress proved a tougher audience—or, rather, the anti-Jacksonian minority in Congress did. And the Democratic majority proved less coherent in the halls of the legislature than it had been on the hustings. It was one thing to shout for Old Hickory and reform, and quite another to agree on the nature of reform.
Trouble initially arose with Jackson’s nominations to federal office. The Senate rejected Isaac Hill, the New Hampshireman who had been made part of the Kitchen Cabinet and offered a job at the Treasury. Certain senators claimed offense at Hill’s criticism of President and Mrs. Adams. Others, including some favorably disposed toward Jackson, protested the use of public pay to reward friendly editors. Like Thomas Ritchie, they thought this practice undermined freedom of the press. Finally, and perhaps most to the point, advocates of the Bank of the United States, alarmed at Hill’s editorial opposition to the bank and wishing to serve Jackson notice that they wouldn’t yield without a fight, wanted to make an example of his nomination. The sum of the complaints was sufficient to block the appointment. Yet Hill—and Jackson—had the last laugh when, a short while later, the legislature of New Hampshire named Hill that state’s new senator, and the man who might only have editorialized against the bank could now vote against it. Hill’s allies reveled in his foes’ discomfiture. “Were we in the place of Isaac Hill,” said a friendly fourth-estater, “we would reject the presidency of the United States, if attainable, to enjoy the supreme triumph, the pure, the unalloyed, the legitimate victory of stalking into that very Senate and taking our seat—of looking our enemies in the very eye—of saying to the men who violated their oaths by attempting to disfranchise citizens, ‘Give me room—stand back—do you know me? I am that Isaac Hill, of New Hampshire, who, in this very spot, you slandered, vilified, and stripped of his rights. The people, your masters, have sent me here to take my seat in this very chamber, as your equal and your peer.’”
