by H. W. Brands
Jackson was skeptical. Whether or not he recognized the words as Houston’s and Austin’s, Jackson had to doubt Santa Anna’s sincerity, as the man remained a prisoner of the Texans and rightly feared for his life. More to the point, Santa Anna no longer represented anyone besides himself. Maybe Mexico’s soldiers still loved him, but the men in charge of Mexico’s government wanted nothing to do with him. And it was these men with whom Jackson as American president had to deal. “Until the existing Government of Mexico ask our friendly offices between the contending parties, Mexico and Texas,” Jackson replied, “we cannot interfere.”
If Houston was surprised at Jackson’s coolness, he shouldn’t have been. Jackson had been prepared to fight if Santa Anna brought the Texas war to the American border, but he saw no reason to get tangled in a conflict the Texans had already won, at least for the present. Jackson could tell that a final resolution of the Texas question would require a settlement between the United States and Mexico. Mexico wasn’t Spain, which could be ejected from Florida (and North America) once and for all. Mexico would always be the neighbor of the United States, regardless of where the border between the two countries eventually fell. And there was one other thing: Jackson was beginning to look farther than Texas for America’s western boundary. He was eyeing California, which together with Texas would round out the American Southwest nicely. Forcing the Texas issue would make acquiring California more difficult.
Yet Houston was persistent. He sent Santa Anna to Washington, hoping that what he and Santa Anna hadn’t been able to accomplish by mail Santa Anna might manage in person. Jackson consented to an interview, which turned out to be one of the oddest diplomatic sessions of the era. In Jackson’s White House bedroom, the embodiment of American democracy discussed the fate of rebel Texas with the erstwhile Mexican caudillo. Jackson still insisted that any arrangement regarding Texas be made through official channels. Yet, realizing that official channels had a way of changing course in Mexico and that Santa Anna, currently deposed, might find his way back to power upon his return to Mexico City, the American president suggested that the Mexican government might wish to settle the Texas affair as part of a package including California. Jackson mentioned $3.5 million as an appropriate price.
Santa Anna seemed receptive, the more so when Jackson offered him transport home. An American frigate carried the defeated general to Veracruz, where he disappeared, for the time being, into the swirl of Mexican politics.
Jackson had been an old man when he entered the White House, and he was a very old man as he prepared to leave it almost eight years later. At the dying end of his seventh decade, his body bore the tracks of all those years: the smallpox scars and the crease in his skull from the Revolutionary War, the bullet wounds from his duels and shooting scrapes, the gaunt frame and hollow cheeks from a lifetime battling intestinal parasites, the sallow complexion from an equally protracted contest with malaria. His heart no longer ached as badly as it had during the first year after Rachel’s death, but his spirit still sagged under the conviction that he’d never know joy till they met again, in his own death. He was relieved to relinquish power, especially to one he trusted as much as he did Martin Van Buren. It didn’t strike him as odd that he, the champion of the people’s right to choose their leaders, should essentially appoint his own successor. Of course he had long since come to believe that he spoke for the people, and there was no denying that Van Buren was popular, at least among the Jackson loyalists. They nominated Van Buren unanimously at their Baltimore convention, partly because he was as charming as ever but mostly because he promised to carry on in the tradition of Old Hickory—“to tread generally in the footsteps of President Jackson, happy if I shall be able to perfect the work he has so gloriously begun.”
Yet while Van Buren inherited Jackson’s mantle, he also inherited Jackson’s enemies. The Whigs, of course, wanted nothing to do with Jackson or Van Buren. They nominated William Henry Harrison, the other hero from the War of 1812. More hurtful to Jackson was the defection of one-time allies. South Carolina’s hostility wasn’t surprising, after the nullification crisis, but the animus of much of Tennessee was. Jackson’s old rivals from the days when he tangled with John Sevier found new friends, including David Crockett, who had parlayed a reputation as a bear hunter, Indian fighter, and raconteur into election from western Tennessee to Congress. At first he identified with Jackson, but as his persona grew, so did his attractiveness to Jackson’s foes, who whispered in his ear that he might one day be president himself. They sent him on an eastern tour, which made him a national celebrity, the subject of popular plays and multiple biographies. He was touted as the anti-Jackson, living evidence that Jackson didn’t speak for all the common people, even of his home state. But Jackson spoke for enough of the common people, at least in Crockett’s congressional district, that Crockett lost his race for reelection in 1835, whereupon he told his constituents that “they might go to hell and I would go to Texas.” In Texas he became even more famous by dying at the Alamo.
Despite the rifts in the Democratic coalition, Van Buren managed to hold off Harrison and two lesser candidates (one being Daniel Webster) in the 1836 election. The result gratified Jackson, who prepared to usher Van Buren into the White House even as he was showing Santa Anna the door. The old man wished he could have tied up such loose ends as Texas before leaving office, but he had confidence that Van Buren’s views matched his on this issue and others. “They are, like my own, always based upon the just grounds of the prosperity for our country and the general good,” he assured himself in a letter to Van Buren.
A Van Buren presidency was one of Jackson’s parting gifts to the American people; a farewell address was another. Some of Jackson’s advisers cautioned him against emulating George Washington in this regard, saying he would be considered presumptuous or undemocratic or both. But he went ahead, in the belief that his decades of public life had taught him lessons worth passing on. Jackson had named Roger Taney to replace John Marshall as chief justice when the old Federalist finally died in 1835, and though Taney now headed the judicial branch of the government, he ignored the separation of powers long enough to help his friend and sponsor craft the farewell message.
“We have now lived almost fifty years under the Constitution framed by the sages and patriots of the Revolution,” Jackson said. “We have had our seasons of peace and of war, with all the evils which precede or follow a state of hostility with powerful nations.” The cost had been great but the accomplishment still greater. “Our Constitution is no longer a doubtful experiment. . . . We find that it has preserved unimpaired the liberties of the people, secured the rights of property, and that our country has improved and is flourishing beyond any former example in the history of nations.” Taney was always too wordy, and Jackson didn’t sufficiently rein him in. The message refought the battles of the past eight years till even the most devoted Jacksonian started to nod.
But the heart of the message was pure Jackson, and straight to the point of everything to which his years in public service had been devoted. Though the Union flourished, its permanence wasn’t assured. “The signs of evil are sufficiently apparent to awaken the deepest anxiety in the bosom of the patriot. We behold systematic efforts publicly made to sow the seeds of discord between different parts of the United States, and to place party divisions directly upon geographical distinctions, to excite the South against the North and the North against the South.” Jackson didn’t blame any party or section exclusively. Aggrandizers of the federal government, by encroaching on states’ rights, could be as threatening to national life as the nullifiers. But disagreement must never cross into disunion. “Delude not yourselves with the belief that a breach once made may be afterwards repaired. If the Union is once severed, the line of separation will grow wider and wider, and the controversies which are now debated and settled in the halls of legislation will then be tried in the fields of battle and determined by the sword.”
He
left the White House after a harder winter of illness than usual. “I was confined to my bed by a severe hemorrhage from the lungs, which threatened a speedy end to my existence,” he wrote as the electoral votes were being counted. The cause was a mystery that remained so as the symptoms eased. “My strength is slowly recovering, but much impeded by the onerous weight of official business now pressing upon me,” he declared as the weeks in office ran out. In fact the burden of business was less than earlier, but the closer he got to the end, the more each task seemed to weigh. Yet the end drew him on. “A few days more and I am again a free man.”
The journey home was a triumphal progress. “From the time I left you, I have been literally in a crowd,” he wrote Van Buren from Kentucky. “Such assemblages of my fellow citizens I have never before seen on my passage to or from Washington.” For a generation Jackson had embodied the dreams of ordinary Americans—dreams of valor at arms, of a voice in their own governance—and now he was departing. Men who remembered the wars against Britain and women who wanted their children to see the hero of the age turned out by the thousands along the roads he traveled and at the towns where his steamboat called. Even his enemies came to see him. “I have been every where cheered by my numerous Democratic Republican friends, and many of the repenting Whigs,” he said, doubtless conflating curiosity and repentance. “This is truly the patriot’s reward, and a source of great gratification to me, and will be my solace to the grave.”
The Hermitage had missed its master. The horses in particular wanted care. “I find my blooded stock in bad order and too numerous for empty corn cribs and hay lofts,” he wrote Andrew Hutchings. “I have determined to sell out part to enable me to feed the balance better.”
The horses proved to be the easy part of his reconstruction efforts. Jackson’s problems with overseers continued. They were alternately too lax and then too severe, in the former phase allowing behavior they felt obliged to punish harshly in the latter. By now Jackson owned some 150 slaves, whose management required skills he couldn’t find at the price he was willing to pay. But what he saved on overseers he expended on legal costs after a large gathering of slaves, including some of his own, turned into a riot in which one slave was killed. Especially since the Nat Turner rebellion of 1831, which claimed the lives of nearly sixty whites in Virginia, southern authorities had been acutely sensitive to anything hinting at a servile revolt, and the local sheriff indicted four of Jackson’s slaves for murder. Jackson became convinced of the men’s innocence, and he hired legal counsel to defend them. The defense succeeded but cost Jackson over a thousand dollars, which he didn’t have. He borrowed the cash, then sold some of his land to pay the debt.
His money problems persisted. As the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans approached, he was invited to return to the scene of his triumph. He at first declined. “I am out of funds,” he explained to Andrew Donelson. “And I cannot bear to borrow or travel as a pauper.” Besides, it still rankled that after he had saved the city from destruction, the court there had found him guilty of contempt. “I have sacrificed both property and health in the salvation of New Orleans . . . and the Legislature thereof has never attempted to have that unjust sentence removed.” In the event, common sense prevailed. New Orleans couldn’t celebrate without its hero, and Jackson couldn’t stay away. He borrowed against his cotton crop, friends paid some of his travel expense, and an initiative was put in motion to overturn his conviction.
Yet he never got out from under the shadow of debt. Andrew Jr. was demonstrating his incompetence at business; though well-intentioned, he managed to lose thousands to feckless partners and outright frauds. “No man has been more completely swindled than he has been,” his father remarked in sorrow. Jackson felt obliged to rescue his son, to the eventual extent of some fifteen thousand dollars. He sold land, unfortunately on a buyer’s market, to cover Andrew’s debt. A friend pointed out that he’d realize more if he waited. “This I well know,” Jackson answered. “But a little imprudence has caused this necessity, and I would always rather sacrifice property than the credit of my adopted son or myself.” To Andrew, who had married by now and started a family, he preached frugality and future care. “If I live to realise it, I will die contented in the hope that you will never again encumber yourself with debt that may result in the poverty of yourself and little family of so much promise, and whom I so much love.”
Perhaps to his surprise, Jackson discovered that politics afforded a respite from the vexations of farm and family. Or maybe he wasn’t surprised. Maybe he finally knew himself well enough to understand that struggle was the essence of his life. On several occasions the struggle had come close to killing him, but now he could see—or perhaps only feel—that the struggle was what kept him alive. He wished to be reunited to Rachel, but he wasn’t ready to join her just yet. Dangers to the Union remained and evildoers to be vanquished.
Nicholas Biddle never rested, or so it seemed to Jackson. The financial troubles that followed Jackson’s decision of the summer of 1836 to require specie payments for federal land only worsened, producing the most severe contraction in decades. Fingers of blame pointed to Jackson for bursting the bubble, to the speculators for inflating it in the first place, to the banking system for extending excessive credit on the bubble’s expansion and insufficient credit on the collapse. Jackson was sure Biddle was behind the new panic. The Bank of the United States, upon the expiration of its federal charter, had been reincorporated in Pennsylvania, and Biddle reinstalled as its president. He had as much incentive as ever to throttle the economy, in order to restore the primacy of banks, and nearly as much power as ever to do so. Van Buren must continue the struggle Jackson had started. “I have done my duty,” Jackson wrote Francis Blair. “My only anxiety now is for the success of the present administration. But if it listens to Biddle and his satellites . . . it will fall.” Jackson worried that Van Buren wouldn’t stay the course. He would feel pressure from the bankers and merchants and would be tempted to compromise to please them. Jackson urged the president to hold steady, citing his own experience during the bank war. “Remember the panic I passed through. The present will pass away as soon as all the overtraders, gamblers in stocks and lands, are broke.” Steadfastness was needed above all. “No temporising with the opposition, or it is lost.”
From the distance of Nashville, Jackson waged the fight against Biddle and the bankers with all the devotion he had exhibited as president. If Jackson believed that Van Buren ought to establish his own identity as chief executive, he gave no clue of it. He wrote Van Buren at least twice a month on matters of current interest, mostly held over from his own administration. “Biddle is in the field,” he warned Van Buren in the summer of 1837. “All the state banks have combined with him to resist the resumption of specie payments as long as possible, for now they are reaping great gains. Bank paper is depreciating daily, and Biddle expects to profit by it and to obtain a recharter of his Bank. You must meet this with firmness.” The struggle against the bankers never ended. “Nothing can be more dangerous to a republican government than their corrupting influence.”
The financial crisis eventually eased, but not before eroding Van Buren’s political base. An 1837 New York election, in which the Whigs trounced the Democrats, seemed an evil omen. Jackson never had trouble detecting the authority in the voice of the people when they agreed with him, but when they disagreed, as they did now, he concluded that they had been deceived by the “machinations and conspiracy” of the enemies of democracy. Yet he refused to be discouraged. “The recoil at the next elections in New York will be tremendous.” Jackson urged Blair and other patriot editors to rally to the cause. “Lash those conservators and traitors with the pen of gall and wormwood.”
Another crisis carried Jackson further into his past. Following Jackson’s refusal to enforce John Marshall’s decision in the 1832 Cherokee case, the state of Georgia had continued to make life miserable for that eastern remnant of the tri
be. Jackson’s Indian commissioners pressed the Cherokees to sign a treaty ceding their lands in exchange for money and for territory west of the Mississippi. To concentrate the minds of the tribe’s leaders, those who resisted a deal were arrested and held until the others put their signatures to a pact. The treaty provoked protests from a majority of the tribe and from many people around the United States. But Jackson rammed the treaty through the Senate. “The national policy, founded alike in interest and in humanity, so long and so steadily pursued by this Government for the removal of the Indian tribes originally settled on this side of the Mississippi to the west of that river, may be said to have been consummated,” he declared. The Cherokees had two years to depart for the West.
The exodus began in the autumn of 1838 and quickly became an appalling disaster. Traveling through rain and snow, lacking sufficient food, clothing, and shelter, the refugees succumbed to exposure, infectious disease, and simple exhaustion. Thousands died on the route that became known as the “trail of tears.” The debacle seemed to summarize all that was wrong with American policy toward the Indians and made a mockery of Jackson’s claim that his policy was founded in humanity. The least he could have done was express regret at the way the exodus was managed. But by this time he was no longer president and wasn’t required to comment. His silence said enough.
