Andrew Jackson

by H. W. Brands

  He did comment on a related issue. The experience of the Cherokees redoubled the determination of the Seminoles to avoid a similar fate. A second Seminole war erupted in the mid-1830s. Larger than the one that had inspired Jackson’s invasion of Spanish Florida, this conflict involved at least a thousand Indians and several times that number of American soldiers. The War Department at first sent Winfield Scott, Jackson’s old rival, to Florida to deal with the uprising, but Scott accomplished nothing productive. “The whole Florida war from the first to the present time has been a succession of blunders and misfortune,” Jackson fairly said in disgust after several months. Scott was fired and eventually replaced by Zachary Taylor. Jackson urged Taylor to apply the lessons he—Jackson—had learned fighting Indians, to hit them where they were weakest. “The commanding general ought to find where their women are, and with his combined forces by forced marches reach and capture them,” he said. “This done, they will at once surrender.”

  Catching the women was harder than Jackson anticipated. Although the arrest of the Seminole chief Osceola, who was lured into American custody by a false flag of truce, broke the back of the armed resistance, fighting sputtered on till the early 1840s. At that point some of the Seminoles accepted that they had no choice but to move west of the Mississippi. They were joined during the following decade by nearly all their surviving cousins. But a stubborn few remained, determined to die in the land of their birth.

  Jackson sometimes wished he could treat his white rivals as summarily as he had dealt with the Indians. Though the Whigs had lost to Van Buren in 1836, they sensed his vulnerability. Van Buren had won on the basis of his connection to Jackson; the next time around he’d have to win on his own merits. These weren’t inconsiderable, but they were hardly on the order of Jackson’s.

  To ensure their triumph, the Whigs stole a page from the Democrats. They nominated Harrison again and touted his war record. Beyond this they cast him as the common man, the candidate who knew life as it was lived by ordinary men and women. The pose was a stretch, in that Harrison hailed from Virginia gentry and had a college education. But the formula had worked for Jackson, and the Whigs were determined to make it work for them.

  Jackson couldn’t decide which was worse: Harrison’s politics or his hypocrisy. Jackson identified the Whigs with the defunct and now almost forgotten Federalists, the better to damn them for the sins of days past. In Harrison’s case the connection was plausible, as he was old enough to have been a Federalist when that party still existed. “General Harrison, to shew his identity with the Federalists, pasted on his hat the black cockade,” Jackson declared, referring to the symbol for arch-Federalism. Jackson had this only secondhand, but he convinced himself it was true, and he repeated it several times.

  Jackson overstated the Federalist ancestry of the Whig party. It was true that most of those who would have been Federalists, had that party survived, now leaned Whig. But the Whigs also included many who for one reason or another had fallen out with Jackson and his interpretation of democracy. Jackson never appreciated, or at any rate never admitted, how the same passion that inspired his followers put off those who weren’t so devoted. His campaign against the Bank of the United States had alienated nearly everyone who looked to business to get ahead, a portion of the electorate that continued to grow. By the time Jackson left office, city dwellers constituted 10 percent of the population, which itself had passed fifteen million. The factory system was maturing in New England and creeping west. Railroads complemented canals and were starting to supplant them in linking cities to towns and towns to the countryside. The economy had never been more tightly woven, and the weave grew tighter by the year. The business class remained small, but the number of people affected by business was increasing rapidly. Even farmers, those yeomen who had been the backbone of the party of Jefferson, found themselves drawn into the nexus of the market. Some resented the commercialization of their calling; others embraced it eagerly. But almost none could ignore it. And more than a few were susceptible to the claims of the Whigs that their new party offered them more of what they valued most—economic opportunity, the chance for material security—than Jackson’s Democrats did.

  The continuing change in attitudes toward slavery likewise made the politics of the 1840s more complicated than the politics of previous decades. When Jackson had first run for president, the slave question hardly came up, but now it surfaced all the time. The Whigs were by no means abolitionist on principle. Clay still owned his slaves, comfortably enough. But abolitionists fit more easily into the Whig coalition than they did into the Democratic party. It didn’t help matters on this point that John Calhoun found his way back to the Jacksonian fold. Van Buren reported the moment of rapprochement to Jackson, and how Calhoun explained it. “Being sincerely with me in politics, and having out lived his personal prejudices against me, he took pleasure in thus putting an end to the non-intercourse which had so long prevailed between us.” Calhoun increasingly identified himself and the South with slavery. Though his support bolstered the Democrats in the South, it alienated those northerners who asked whether slavery was what America ought to stand for.

  Harrison wasn’t an abolitionist. No national candidate with any hopes of election could be. But the Democrats were happy to condemn him by association. “I have a letter today from Vermont,” Blair wrote Jackson in September 1840, “stating that the Abolition missionaries who have been busy in the election in that state applied the funds which they had collected for the emancipation of the Negroes, freely in promoting the election of Harrison’s friends.” Nor was it only domestic abolitionists who were said to be backing Harrison. Britain had abolished slavery in the early 1830s and since then had been sponsoring abolition abroad. Blair and other Democrats detected a new and especially insidious British influence in American life. “Having succeeded in effecting emancipation elsewhere, England now turns the whole force of the world, which she calls moral force, to accomplish her object in the South. She sends her missionaries and her money to our shores, and her old Federal allies are now found in strict alliance with the abolition proselytes whom she has so successfully encouraged in the North.”

  Jackson opposed abolition on several grounds. As a slaveholder, he had a large personal stake in the slave system. Abolition wouldn’t necessarily have bankrupted him, especially if the British model of emancipation—in which the government compensated slaveowners for their loss—were adopted. But it would have required him, or his heirs, to learn a radically new method of cotton culture. As a constitutionalist, he considered slavery a matter for the states to decide, and he couldn’t imagine the southern states giving it up voluntarily. As a student of human nature, he doubted the ability of white Americans to accept the presence of large numbers of black Americans on any basis approaching equality. Would the blacks have political rights? If not, what would that do to democracy? But most of all, as a Unionist, he recognized that holding the country together would be nearly impossible should the abolitionists seize control of a major political party. At the end of the nullification crisis with South Carolina, he had predicted privately that the next constitutional crisis would be over “the negro, or slavery, question.” Now he saw it approaching, and he knew it would be far harder to resolve than a fight about tariffs.

  Oddly, though, the thing that most provoked Jackson about the Harrison campaign was its plebian tone. Having learned from the Jacksonians how the common touch now ruled American politics, the Whigs applied the lesson with a vengeance, in what quickly came to be called the “log cabin and hard cider” campaign. Jackson had always bowed to the will of the people, at least in principle, but he had never thought this required him to demean himself—or, for that matter, to demean the people. The Whig campaign, he judged, demeaned Harrison and the people both. He could only hope the strategy would backfire. “The attempt by their mummeries to degrade the people to a level with the brute creation has opened the people’s eyes,” he asserted optimisti
cally after an especially raucous Whig rally in Nashville. “It is saying to them in emphatic language that they are unfit for self government and can be led by hard cider, coons, log cabins and big balls. . . . I have a higher opinion of the intelligence of the American people than this.”

  When Van Buren lost, Jackson had to reconsider. But he did so just long enough to conclude—on the basis of suggestive but hardly overwhelming evidence—that the people hadn’t been deceived so much as cheated again. “Corruption, bribery and fraud has been extended over the whole Union,” he wrote Van Buren in commiseration. And he predicted that the people would rise again. “The democracy of the United States has been shamefully beaten, but, I trust, not conquered. I still hope there is sufficient virtue in the unbought people of this union to stay the perjury, bribery, fraud, and imposition upon the people by the vilest system of slander that ever before existed. . . . I do not yet despair of the Republic. . . . I trust still in the virtue of the great working class.”

  The defeat of Van Buren threatened to make Jackson irrelevant. The election of 1840 was the first test of Jacksonism separate from Jackson, of the Democratic party distinct from its hero, and it failed the test. Van Buren and the Democrats had looked to the Hermitage for counsel and legitimacy while they held the White House, but with the new men in charge, America looked elsewhere.

  This was especially irksome to Jackson, who turned seventy-three in the month of Harrison’s inauguration but felt better than in years. He credited the exertion of the campaign for his recovery, but he also acknowledged a medication he was taking. His current potion was something called the Matchless Sanative, a patent medicine whose secret recipe certainly included alcohol and may well have included opium, cocaine, or other powerful drugs that were legal in those days. Jackson became the medicine’s most ardent advocate. “Take as directed and you must live more freely than you have done,” he wrote Andrew Hutchings, who had complained of sundry physical and mental distresses. “In two months it will restore you to perfect health.”

  Jackson’s health was far from perfect, but it enabled him to tend to the affairs of his farm. He continued to liquidate his holdings to pay Andrew Jr.’s debts. “Should you meet with a rich Virginian who wants to come to our country and has money,” he told Andrew Donelson, “sell him the Hunter’s Hill tract”—which Jackson had reacquired in the early 1830s. “If an advance of $6,000 can be made, let it go for $14,000. It is now for sale to the first purchaser who presents himself and has money.” More painfully, he had to sell some of his best horses, including descendants of his first favorite, Truxton. His descriptions of the animals—“a beautiful dark bay or brown filly, fine size, form, and action . . . a beautiful rich sorrel stud colt . . . a beautiful bay filly . . . a large and fine dark bay mare . . . a fine bright sorrel mare”—were intended to entice the buyer into paying all they were worth, but they also reflected his own feelings about them and suggested the difficulty he had in letting them go.

  As word got out that Jackson was selling land and horses, his friends and supporters grew alarmed. One, a Boston Jacksonian of ample means, offered to underwrite his retirement. Jackson politely refused. “You may assure him,” he told William Lewis, the intermediary in the offer, “although I have been greatly pestered, and have had to make sacrifices of property, as well as has Andrew, that we are not broke.” Cash was short at the moment, as it had been so often, but Jackson’s capital foundation was solid. He owned the 980 acres of the Hermitage free and clear, and another 1,180 acres on the Mississippi River in the state of Mississippi. The latter investment hadn’t begun to pay but would before long. Most of it was covered with hardwood forest, which could be cut and sold as fuel for the steamboats on the river. And as the trees were removed, the land would be planted to cotton.

  Jackson didn’t want charity, but he did need a loan. “Six thousand dollars for six years, at six per cent, would be a great convenience to us, and save us from some sacrifices of property to meet our accruing liabilities,” he wrote Lewis. Such a loan would allow the settlement of Andrew’s debts and “restore us once more to perfect freedom.”

  A month to the day after Harrison’s inauguration, Francis Blair wrote to Jackson with stunning news. “At 12 o’clock last night President Harrison died,” Blair said. The shock was not so much that a president had died but that it had been Harrison. For most of Jackson’s eight years in office Americans had braced themselves for a White House funeral; his age and general ill health made him a prime candidate to test the constitutionally prescribed order of succession. But he hadn’t died, and Americans sighed with relief and assumed the danger of presidential death was past.

  Harrison undeceived them. The cause of death was pneumonia, but ardent Democrats read deeper meaning into his demise. “His temperament could not stand the weighty honors and the weighty functions devolved upon him,” Blair told Jackson. Harrison had campaigned as a man of the people but couldn’t hold the pose. “His pampered vanity added to the tension of the other passions which strained all his faculties beyond their capabilities, and at last every thing gave way at once.”

  Harrison’s death changed the political equation dramatically. There was some doubt as to what John Tyler, the vice president, inherited upon Harrison’s death. Was Tyler now president or merely acting president? The Constitution said that the “powers and duties” of the presidency should “devolve on the Vice President,” but not that the vice president should become president. It soon grew apparent, however, that the technical question was less important than the political one (which was why the technical question was allowed to linger till 1967, when the Twenty-fifth Amendment explicitly declared that upon the death of the president, “the Vice President shall become President”). Whether or not Tyler was actually president, he had almost no political legitimacy. He was the creature of the Whig leadership in Congress and evidently at their mercy.

  But to the amazement of nearly everyone, especially the Whig leadership, Tyler soon began acting like a real president—and something like a Democrat. He vetoed a new bank bill that Henry Clay pushed through Congress. “It will do Old Hickory’s heart good when he hears of the veto,” a Jacksonian in Washington remarked. Another declared, speaking of Tyler’s blunt veto message, “He has found one of old Jackson’s pens.”

  Jackson was indeed pleased that Tyler had done the right thing regarding the bank, but it didn’t change his view of the Whigs, whom he continued to consider a “clique who has got into power by deluding the people by the grossest slanders, corruptions, and vilest idolatry of coons and hard cider.” And he continued to believe that the man most likely to deliver the country from Whiggism was Martin Van Buren. This was by no means a universal opinion among the Democrats at this juncture. Van Buren had lost once, and many in the party feared he would lose again. John Calhoun was making a quiet comeback, telling the Democrats that the South was their natural home. Jackson was skeptical—more of Calhoun than of his argument—but even he was willing to lower his guard in the interest of what he considered the greater good. “I am happy to learn that Mr. Calhoun is got right,” he told Blair. “God send that he may continue so. . . . If Mr. Calhoun remains firm, I am sure I will not throw the least shade over him. To err is human, to forgive divine.” But Jackson wasn’t putting any faith in his old rival. “I have no confidence in Mr. Calhoun,” he told Van Buren, in whom he did have confidence. Of Van Buren he said, looking toward the 1844 nomination, “He is the strongest man that can be presented. If brought out, he will be triumphantly elected, and that by a larger majority than any other president has attained.”

  But fate, with the help of Sam Houston, intervened. The Democrats condemned the Whigs for corruption in the 1840 election and sniped at Clay and the party’s leadership on the bank, the tariff, and other issues dear to Whig hearts. But as the election of 1844 approached, the unresolved question of Texas crowded to the fore. That it did so revealed, among other things, an undiscovered aptitude for diplomacy
in Jackson’s prodigal son.

  Houston had intended all along for Texas to become part of the United States. Most of his fellow Texans shared his desire and required only an invitation from the American government to join their political destinies to that of the country from which the great majority of them sprang. But the antislavery forces in the United States, led by John Quincy Adams, refused to countenance annexation, with the result that the most Jackson could offer, in the final days of his administration, was diplomatic recognition of the Texas republic.

  Houston accepted the offer, on behalf of his fellow Texans, and during the next several years kept in touch with his now retired mentor. Writing as one soldier-president to another, he applauded Jackson’s abiding faith in the people and expressed thanks for what he had learned at Jackson’s knee. “To you, General, I find myself vastly indebted for many principles which I have never abandoned throughout life. One is a holy love of country, and a willingness to make every sacrifice to its honour and safety; next, a sacred regard for its Constitution and laws, with an eternal hostility and opposition to all banks.”

  What Houston left hanging was which country and constitution he loved: Texas and the Texan or the United States and the American? The ambiguity was deliberate, for Houston was engaged in a delicate double game. Some of his Texas compatriots had grown enamored of independence, to the point of envisioning a western empire for Texas that would have made Aaron Burr blush and would have blocked the westward expansion of the United States. As president of the Texas republic, and one who wanted the votes of its enfranchised inhabitants, Houston couldn’t well bad-mouth its prospects. But precisely because he was the president of Texas he knew how tenuous those prospects were. The finances of the republic were a wreck, the butt of many bad jokes. Crime, both organized and opportunistic, made life and property insecure. The borders of Texas were impossible to defend. Indians threatened the northwest, while Mexico, unreconciled to Texas independence, sent armies across the Rio Grande that twice recaptured San Antonio. Houston knew Texas needed help. He preferred that such help come from the United States, but he would take it where he could find it.