by H. W. Brands
It was nearly a mile long. The democrats marched in good order, to the glare of torches. The banners were more numerous than I had ever seen them in any religious festival; all were in transparency, on account of the darkness. On some were inscribed the names of the democratic societies or sections: Democratic young men of the ninth or eleventh ward; others bore imprecations against the Bank of the United States; Nick Biddle and Old Nick here figured largely. Then came portraits of General Jackson afoot and on horseback; there was one in the uniform of a general, and another in the person of the Tennessee farmer, with the famous hickory cane in his hand. Those of Washington and Jefferson, surrounded with democratic mottoes, were mingled with emblems in all tastes and of all colors. Among these figured an eagle—not a painting, but a real, live eagle, tied by the legs, surrounded by a wreath of leaves, and hoisted upon a pole, after the manner of the Roman standards. The imperial bird was carried by a stout sailor, more pleased than ever was a sergeant permitted to hold one of the strings of the canopy in a Catholic ceremony. From further than the eye could reach, came marching on the democrats. I was struck with the resemblance of their air to the train that escorts the viaticum in Mexico or Puebla. . . . The democratic procession, also like the Catholic procession, had its halting-places; it stopped before the houses of the Jackson men to fill the air with cheers, and halted at the doors of the leaders of the Opposition, to give three, six, or nine groans.
Henry Clay, nominated by the anti-Jackson National Republican party, marshaled the support of the business classes, most newspapers and their editors, a majority of the well-educated elements of society, and assorted additional individuals and groups offended by Jackson on one topic or another. A separate wing of anti-Jacksonians mustered under the banner of the Anti-Masonic party, which nominated William Wirt of Maryland. (Jackson was a Mason, but that wasn’t the only thing for which the Anti-Masons faulted him.)
Against these Jackson claimed the support of a broad array of farmers, mechanics, casual laborers, small merchants, and others for whom the dream of democracy—that ordinary people might control their own destiny—seem inextricably tied to all that he stood for. Van Buren joined Jackson on the ticket, the two having been formally nominated by a convention at Baltimore whose delegates had no difficulty choosing a presidential candidate (Jackson, by wild acclamation), a bit more selecting a vice presidential candidate (Van Buren, by ballot), and still more settling on a name for themselves (Democrats, by exhausting the alternatives and themselves). Van Buren elicited nothing like the adulation felt for Old Hickory—no one in America did—but he helped secure New York and certain political figures who admired his cleverness and were willing to bet on his future.
The result was a resounding endorsement of Jackson and Jacksonism. The president received 219 electoral votes to Clay’s 49. He carried sixteen of the twenty-four states, including the entire West except Clay’s Kentucky home, nearly all the South except Calhoun’s South Carolina (which voted for an obscure protest candidate), and several states of the Northeast, including parts of New England. The popular vote was 688,000 for Jackson and 530,000 for Clay.
Jackson had little time to savor his victory. The very papers that brought the news of the election returns also brought reports of alarming developments in South Carolina. State elections there had produced a strong majority for nullification, whose sponsors proceeded to call a convention. The convention denounced the tariff of 1828 and an 1832 revision that had reduced rates without abandoning the principle of protection. The convention proceeded to adopt an ordinance formally nullifying the tariffs—that is, forbidding the collection of the duties within the boundaries of the state, effective February 1, 1833. Finally, the convention asserted that any act by Congress to authorize the use of force against South Carolina would be considered “inconsistent with the longer continuance of South Carolina in the Union.”
Secession had always been the implicit corollary of nullification, but by making the threat of secession explicit the South Carolinians brought the dispute to a head. Jackson had no choice but to act. He started by gathering intelligence from behind the enemy lines. Joel Poinsett had been minister to Mexico and was now back in his home at Charleston. A Unionist and a Jacksonian, Poinsett informed the president that the nullifiers had the bit in their teeth and were determined to run. “The impression on the minds of the Nullifiers undoubtedly is that no measures will be taken against them,” he wrote. Poinsett assured Jackson that the Union had friends in South Carolina, but they were outnumbered and required encouragement. Weapons would help—“two or three hundred muskets and some hand grenades”—but the central thing was a strong stand by the federal government. Much more was at stake than the future of South Carolina, Poinsett asserted. “On the issue of this contest between the federal government and a faction in this state depends the permanency of the Union.”
Jackson appreciated the intelligence but hardly needed the advice. As soon as he read the state election results in South Carolina he directed the secretary of war, Lewis Cass, to prepare for trouble. Jackson told Cass to send orders to the commanders of the forts at Charleston, with a simple message. “They are to defend them to the last extremity.” The president simultaneously dispatched his own secret agent to Charleston. George Breathitt’s cover story was that he was a postal inspector coming to ensure prompt service to the citizens of South Carolina. His confidential instructions from Jackson were to gather all the information he could regarding the loyalty or disloyalty of federal officers in South Carolina and to assess the military situation in the harbor at Charleston. “You will observe the real situation of Sullivan’s Island, and see whether it could be assailed and carried in its rear. You will also observe the situation of the armaments of Castle Pinckney, and what space of dry land surrounds the forts.”
During the following weeks Jackson monitored the situation in South Carolina. Poinsett grew more and more nervous. The federal customs house at Charleston, he said, contained “many violent Nullifiers.” Several officers of the army had been “seduced.” Things were spinning out of the control of even those who had started the trouble. “The principal object of these unprincipled men has always appeared to me to be to embarrass your administration and defeat your election, but they have led the people on so far under other pretexts that they must proceed.” Poinsett saw a slight difference between radical nullifiers, for whom secession was the goal, and tactical nullifiers, who chiefly wanted to gain political ground. On one point, however, the two groups agreed. “Both parties are anxious and indulge the hope that the general government will commit some act of violence, which will enlist the sympathies of the bordering states. Provided it be not their own, they care not how soon blood is shed.”
The rising emotions in South Carolina simply solidified Jackson’s determination to meet defiance with force. He ordered five thousand stand of muskets to Castle Pinckney and dispatched two warships to patrol the coast. He told Poinsett to let the South Carolina Unionists know that he would never allow secession. “In forty days I can have within the limits of South Carolina fifty thousand men, and in forty days more another fifty thousand. . . . The wickedness, madness, and folly of the leaders and the delusion of their followers in the attempt to destroy themselves and our Union has not its parallel in the history of the world. The Union will be preserved.”
The president ordered Lewis Cass to gird for war against the secession movement. “We must be prepared to act with promptness and crush the monster in its cradle,” he declared. He specified what he wanted for the outset of the campaign: “three divisions of artillery, each composed of nine, twelve, and eighteen pounders.” He had Cass make arrangements to enlist volunteers for service against South Carolina and to transport the volunteers to Charleston.
To Cass, Jackson wrote as president and commander in chief. To John Coffee he wrote as an old friend and fellow soldier from the early days of the republic. Coffee was a westerner, a Tennessean, a person inclined by temp
erament and experience to favor states’ rights over federal authority. On all these points he was Jackson’s alter ego. For this reason, when Jackson explained his actions to Coffee, he was explaining them to himself as well. “Can any one of common sense believe the absurdity that a faction of any state, or a state, has a right to secede and destroy this Union, and the liberty of our country with it?” Jackson asked Coffee rhetorically. For Jackson, the linking of liberty and Union was crucial. Calhoun and the nullifiers contended that liberty allowed secession; Jackson believed that liberty forbade secession. Liberty didn’t preserve itself; it had to be defended against a world bent on its destruction. And liberty’s only sure protection was the Union. The Union had won American freedom from Britain; the Union had secured American liberty against numerous subsequent attacks. To damage the Union was to endanger liberty.
Jackson conceded that under the Articles of Confederation, the states had been sovereign and independent. But that first republican form had failed and had been deliberately replaced. “A constitution was proposed to the people,” he told Coffee, “and in the language of the instrument, ‘We the people, to make a more perfect union, do ordain and establish the following etc. etc.’ This more perfect union made by the whole of the people of the United States granted the general government certain powers and retained others. But nowhere can it be found where the right to nullify a law, or to secede from the Union, has been retained by the states.” The single way to amend the Constitution was by the method specified therein. “Every mode else is revolution or rebellion.” States had a right to peaceful protest against what they judged to be usurpation. But they had no right to destroy the Union. “Therefore when a faction in a state attempts to nullify a constitutional law of Congress, or to destroy the Union, the balance of the people composing this Union have a perfect right to coerce them to obedience. This is my creed.” It was also his mission. “The Union must be preserved. . . . I will die with the Union.”
While preparing for war, Jackson took his case for the Union to the American people. He issued a proclamation blistering the nullifiers and warning South Carolina to rescind its illegal ordinance. The nullifiers had driven South Carolina—“my native State,” he noted—to the “brink of insurrection and treason.” For what? For a tariff that they didn’t like and that they had magnified into a cause for sundering the Union. The people of South Carolina must pull back. “You are deluded by men who are either deceived themselves or wish to deceive you. . . . They are not champions of liberty, emulating the fame of our Revolutionary fathers, nor are you an oppressed people. . . . You are free members of a flourishing and happy Union.” South Carolinians would remain members of the Union, despite anything the nullifiers said or tried to do. “Their object is disunion. But be not deceived by names. Disunion by armed force is treason.” To resist treason was Jackson’s sworn duty. “The laws of the United States must be executed.”
The president followed his proclamation to South Carolina with a special message to Congress. South Carolina, he said, was engaged in “extraordinary defiance” of federal authority. If this defiance were not overcome, the Constitution would lose its meaning. A half century of American history—of struggle, of sacrifice, of devotion to the ideals of human liberty—would go for naught. The work of two generations was at stake. “They bequeathed to us a Government of laws and a Federal Union founded upon the great principle of popular representation. . . . We are called to decide whether these laws possess any force, and that Union the means of self-preservation.” Jackson knew how he would answer the call. “I have determined to spare no effort to discharge the duty which in this conjuncture is devolved upon me.” That no one would think he acted alone, he requested Congress to reaffirm his authority to use force to ensure that the laws of the United States be executed.
John Calhoun answered Jackson on behalf of the nullifiers. Calhoun had resigned the vice presidency after the 1832 election to accept a Senate seat from South Carolina. For eight years he had presided over the upper chamber but been constitutionally mute; now he spoke with all the vigor that had made him famous and all the frustration that had been building while Jackson and Van Buren pushed him aside. There was not a state in the Union, he said, less predisposed to belligerence than South Carolina. The federal government, not the government of South Carolina, was the provocateur of the present crisis. Jackson had neglected to inform Congress of the measures he had already taken to prepare for war; these were what had alarmed South Carolina and driven it to resistance. The president had pleaded the longevity of the Union as reason for it to remain intact; Calhoun asserted, to the contrary, that longevity brought decay. “The only cause of wonder is that our Union has continued so long—that at the end of forty-four years our Government should still retain its original form.” It could not retain that form much longer. “The time has at length come when we are required to decide whether this shall be a confederacy any longer, or whether it shall give way to a consolidated Government.” The latter, which Jackson obviously intended, could not emerge without irreversible damage to American freedom. “It must inevitably lead to a military despotism.” The president spoke of a government in which the central authority had the right to coerce the states. “South Carolina sanctioned no such government,” Calhoun said. “She entered the Confederacy with the understanding that a state, in the last resort, has a right to judge of the expediency of resistance to oppression or secession from the Union. And for so doing it is we that are threatened to have our throats cut, and those of our wives and children.” The president had asserted that the Union was in danger. So it was—but from the actions of the president himself in laying the foundation for a military despotism. “This is the greatest danger with which it is menaced, a danger the greatest which any country has to apprehend.”
Mr. Calhoun let off a little of his ire against me today in the Senate, but was so agitated and confused that he made quite a failure,” Jackson wrote Poinsett. Jackson was repeating what he had heard from friends in the upper house. Calhoun’s partisans naturally disagreed. But however well or poorly Calhoun had done at words, the president prepared to ensure that the federal government would win the battle at arms, if matters came to that. “Write me often and give me the earliest intelligence of the first armed force that appears in the field to sustain the ordinance,” he directed Poinsett. “The first act of treason committed unites all to it, all those who have aided and abetted in the incitement to the act. We will strike at the head and demolish the monster.”
Not surprisingly, the South Carolinians hoped for support from their southern neighbors. Virginia displayed a certain sympathy, reviving the Virginia resolutions of 1798 and sending a delegation to Charleston to commiserate with the nullifiers. Georgia spoke vaguely on behalf of states’ rights. But the other southern states were silent, doubtless sobered by Jackson’s threats, as he intended them to be. “They know that I will execute the laws, and that the whole people will support me in it and preserve the Union,” he told Poinsett in late January, several days before the nullification ordinance was to take effect. Those few who hadn’t got the message would get it soon. Jackson now said he could have two hundred thousand troops in South Carolina within forty days. And no one could stop him. “If the governor of Virginia”—the warmest of the outside sympathizers—“should have the folly to attempt to prevent the militia from marching through his state to put the faction in South Carolina down, and place himself at the head of an armed force for such a wicked purpose, I would arrest him at the head of his troops.”
It was at about this time that Jackson gave voice to a stronger warning against the nullifiers. A congressman from South Carolina called at the White House before returning home to his constituents. He asked if the president had a message for them. “Yes, I have,” Jackson replied. “Please give my compliments to my friends in your state, and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang th
e first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.”
Jackson’s ferocious posture was perfectly sincere. He was as ready to arrest governors and hang nullifiers as he had been to arrest and execute Arbuthnot and Ambrister in Florida. Yet he rattled his saber for effect as well. He didn’t want a civil war. He wanted the nullifiers to back down and any potential emulators to take the lesson to heart. And so, even while he conspicuously prepared to send the troops south, he quietly endeavored to provide the South Carolinians an avenue of retreat. He informed Poinsett that he would employ force only after South Carolina had done so. “Until some act of force is committed or there is an assemblage of an armed force by the orders of your Governor . . . the Executive of the United States has no legal and constitutional power to order the militia into the field to suppress it.” When South Carolina deferred the date the nullification ordinance was to take effect, he discreetly supported efforts by Henry Clay to modify the tariff that had triggered all the trouble.
The strategy succeeded. Congress approved Jackson’s force bill and the tariff revision almost in the same breath. The South Carolinians responded to the latter by rescinding their nullification ordinance. They responded to the former by nullifying it, but then they went home and the crisis passed.
Most of those involved claimed victory. Calhoun and the nullifiers pointed to the tariff revision. Henry Clay acknowledged his own genius for legislative compromise.
But the real victors were Jackson and the idea of the Union. Two days after he signed the tariff and force bills, Jackson was inaugurated for the second time. In his inaugural address he cited the twin pillars of American liberty: “the preservation of the rights of the several states and the integrity of the Union.” Jackson didn’t wave olive branches lightly, but having proved his point that the Union was indissoluble—at least while he was president—he assured his listeners that he wouldn’t trample the rights of the states. “The annihilation of their control over the local concerns of the people would lead directly to revolution and anarchy, and finally to despotism and military domination.” This must not happen, and in a Jackson administration it would not. Yet states’ rights presupposed a strong and vibrant Union. They always had and always would. “Without union, our independence and liberty would never have been achieved; without union they never can be maintained.”
