In 1825 a group of Creek Indians agreed to a treaty to turn over land to the state of Georgia, but a tribal council quickly repudiated the deal as unrepresentative of all the Creek. One problem lay in the fact that whites often did not know which chiefs, indeed, spoke for the nation; therefore, whichever one best fit the settlers’ plan was the one representatives tended to accept as “legitimate.” Before the end of the year troops from Georgia had forced the Creek out.
A more formidable obstacle, the Cherokee, held significant land in Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. The Cherokee had a written constitution, representative government, newspapers, and in all ways epitomized the civilization many whites claimed they wanted the tribes to achieve. Land hunger, again, drove the state of Georgia to try to evict the tribe, which implored Jackson for help. This time Jackson claimed that states were sovereign over the people within their borders and refused to intervene on their behalf. Yet his supporters then drafted a thoroughly interventionist removal bill, called by Jackson’s most sympathetic biographer “harsh, arrogant, and racist,” passed in 1830, with the final version encapsulating Jackson’s basic assumptions about the Indians.62 The bill discounted the notion that Indians had any rights whatsoever—certainly not treaty rights—and stated that the government not only had that authority, but the duty, to relocate Indians whenever it pleased. In fact, the Removal Bill did not authorize unilateral abrogation of the treaties, or forced relocation—Jackson personally exceeded congressional authority to displace the natives.63 Jackson’s supporters repeatedly promised any relocation would be “free and voluntary,” and to enforce the removal, the president had to ride roughshod over Congress.
Faced with such realities, some Cherokee accepted the state of Georgia’s offer of $68 million and 32 million acres of land west of the Mississippi for 100 million acres of Georgia land. Others, however, with the help of two New England missionaries (who deliberately violated Georgia law to bring the case to trial), filed appeals in the federal court system. In 1831, The Cherokee Nation v. Georgia reached the United States Supreme Court, wherein the Cherokee claimed their status as a sovereign nation subject to similar treatment under treaty as foreign states. The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Marshall, rejected the Cherokee definition of “sovereign nation” based on the fact that they resided entirely within the borders of the United States. However, he and the Court strongly implied that they would hear a challenge to Georgia’s law on other grounds, particularly the state’s violation of federal treaty powers under the Constitution.
The subsequent case, Worcester v. Georgia (1832), resulted in a different ruling: Marshall’s Court stated that Georgia could not violate Cherokee land rights because those rights were protected under the jurisdiction of the federal government. Jackson muttered, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it,” and proceeded to ignore the Supreme Court’s ruling. Ultimately, the Cherokee learned that having the highest court in the land, and even Congress, on their side meant little to a president who disregarded the rule of law and the sovereignty of the states when it suited him.64
In 1838, General Winfield Scott arrived with an army and demanded that the “emigration must be commenced in haste, but…without disorder,” and he implored the Cherokee not to resist.65 Cherokee chief John Ross continued to appeal to Washington right up to the moment he left camp: “Have we done any wrong? We are not charged with any. We have a Country which others covet. This is the offense we have ever yet been charged with.”66 Ross’s entreaties fell on deaf ears. Scott pushed more than twelve thousand Cherokee along the Trail of Tears toward Oklahoma, which was designated Indian Territory—a journey in which three thousand Indians died of starvation or disease along the way. Visitors, who came in contact with the traveling Cherokee, learned that “the Indians…buried fourteen or fifteen at every stopping place….”67 Nevertheless, the bureau-cracy—and Jackson—was satisfied. The Commissioner on Indian Affairs in his 1839 report astonishingly called the episode “a striking example of the liberality of the Government,” claiming that “good feeling has been preserved, and we have quietly and gently transported eighteen thousand friends to the west bank of the Mississippi” [emphasis ours].68 From the Indians’ perspective, the obvious maxim With friends like these…no doubt came to mind, but from another perspective the Cherokee, despite the horrendous cost they paid then and in the Civil War, when the tribe, like the nation, had warriors fighting on both sides, ultimately triumphed. They survived and prospered, commemorating their Trail of Tears and their refusal to be victims.69
Other Indian tribes relocated or were crushed. When Jackson attempted to remove Chief Black Hawk and the Sauk and Fox Indians in Illinois, Black Hawk resisted. The Illinois militia pursued the Indians into Wisconsin Territory, where at Bad Axe they utterly destroyed the warriors and slaughtered women and children as well. The Seminole in Florida also staged a campaign of resistance that took nearly a decade to quell, and ended only when Osceola, the Seminole chief, was treacherously captured under the auspices of a white flag in 1837. It would be several decades before eastern whites began to reassess their treatment of the Indians with any remorse or taint of conscience.70
Internal Improvements and Tariff Wars
If John Quincy Adams wished upon Jackson a thorn in the flesh, he certainly did so with the tariff bill, which continued to irritate throughout the transition between administrations. By the time the smoke cleared in the war over the so-called Tariff of Abominations, it had made hypocrites out of the tariff’s major opponent, John C. Calhoun, and Andrew Jackson, who found himself maneuvered into enforcing it.
In part, the tariff issue was the flip side of the internal improvements coin. Since Jefferson’s day there had been calls for using the power and wealth of the federal government to improve transportation networks throughout the Union. In particular, advocates of federal assistance emphasized two key areas: road building and river and harbor improvements. In the case of road building, which was substantially done by private companies, Congress had authorized a national highway in 1806, from Cumberland, Maryland, westward. Construction actually did not start until 1811, and the road reached Wheeling, Virginia, in 1818. Work was fitful after that, with Congress voting funds on some occasions, and failing to do so on others. By 1850 the road stretched to Illinois, and it constituted a formidable example of highway construction compared to many other American roads. Paved with stone and gravel, it represented a major leap over “corduroy roads,” made of logs laid side by side, or flat plank roads. More typical of road construction efforts was the Lancaster Turnpike, connecting Philadelphia to Lancaster, and completed in 1794 at a cost of a half million dollars. Like other private roads, it charged a fee for use, which tollhouse dodgers carefully avoided by finding novel entrances onto the highway past the tollhouse. Hence, roads such as this gained the nickname “shunpikes” for the short detours people found around tollhouses. The private road companies never solved this “free rider” problem. While the Pennsylvania road proved profitable for a time, most private roads went bankrupt, but not before constructing some ten thousand miles of highways.71
Instead, road builders increasingly went to the state, then the federal government for help. Jefferson’s own treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin, had proposed a massive system of federally funded canals and roads in 1808, and while the issue lay dormant during the War of 1812, internal improvements again came to the fore in Monroe’s administration. National Republicans argued for these projects on the ground that they (obviously, to them) were needed, but also, in a more ethereal sense, that such systems would tie the nation together and further dampen the hostilities over slavery.
When Jackson swept into office, he did so ostensibly as an advocate of states’ rights. Thus his veto of the Maysville Road Bill of 1830 seemed to fit the myth of Jackson the small-government president. However, the Maysville Road in Kentucky would have benefited Jackson’s hated rival, Henry Clay, and it lay entirely wi
thin the state of Kentucky. Other projects, however—run by Democrats—fared much better. Jackson “approved large appropriations for river-and harbor-improvement bills and similar pork-barrel legislation sponsored by worthy Democrats, in return for local election support.”72 In short, Jackson’s purported reluctance to expand the power of the federal government only applied when his political opponents took the hit.
Battles over internal improvements irritated Jackson’s foes, but the tariff bill positively galvanized them. Faced with the tariff, Vice President Calhoun continued his metamorphosis from a big-government war hawk into a proponent of states’ rights and limited federal power. Jackson, meanwhile, following Van Buren’s campaign prescription, had claimed to oppose the tariff as an example of excessive federal power. However distasteful, Jackson had to enforce collection of the tariff, realizing that many of his party’s constituents had benefited from it. For four years antitariff forces demanded revision of the 1828 Tariff of Abominations. Calhoun had written his “South Carolina Exposition and Protest” to curb a growing secessionist impulse in the South by offering a new concept, the doctrine of nullification.73
The notion seemed entirely Lockean in its heritage, and Calhoun seemed to echo Madison’s “interposition” arguments raised against the Alien and Sedition Acts. At its core, though, Calhoun’s claims were both constitutionally and historically wrong. He contended that the unjust creation of federal powers violated the states’ rights provisions of the Constitution. This was an Anti-Federalist theme that he had further fleshed out to incorporate the compact theory of union, in which the United States was a collection of states joined to each other only by common consent or compact, rather than a nation of people who happened to be residents of particular states. Claiming sovereign power for the state, Calhoun maintained that citizens of a state could hold special conventions to nullify and invalidate any national law, unless the federal government could obtain a constitutional amendment to remove all doubt about the validity of the law. Of course, there was no guarantee that even proper amendments would have satisfied Calhoun, and without doubt, no constitutional amendment on slavery would have been accepted as legitimate.
Many saw the tariff debate itself as a referendum of sorts on slavery. Nathan Appleton, a textile manufacturer in Massachusetts, noted that southerners’ hostility to the tariff arose from the “fear and apprehension of the South that the General Government may one day interfere with the right of property in slaves. This is the bond which unites the South in a solid phalanx.”74 Adoption of the infamous gag rule a few years later would reinforce Appleton’s assessment that whatever differences the sections had over the tariff and internal improvements on their own merits, the disagreement ultimately came down to slavery, which, despite the efforts of the new Democratic Party to exclude it from debate, increasingly wormed its way into almost all legislation.
Amid the tariff controversy, for example, slavery also insinuated itself into the Webster-Hayne debate over public lands. Originating in a resolution by Senator Samuel Foot of Connecticut, which would have restricted land sales in the West, it evoked the ire of westerners and southerners who saw it as an attempt to throttle settlement and indirectly provide a cheap work force for eastern manufacturers. Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, a staunch Jackson man who denounced the bill, found an ally in Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina. Hayne contended that the bill placed undue hardships on one section in favor of another, which was the essence of the dissatisfaction with the tariff as well. During the Adams administration, Benton had proposed a reduction on the price of western lands from seventy-five to fifty cents per acre, and then, if no one purchased western land at that price, he advocated giving the land away. Westerners applauded Benton’s plan, but manufacturers thought it another tactic to lure factory workers to the West.
Land and tariffs were inextricably intertwined in that they provided the two chief sources of federal revenue. If land revenues declined, opponents of the tariff would have to acknowledge its necessity as a revenue source. National Republicans, on the other hand, wanted to keep land prices and tariff rates high, but through a process of “distribution,” turn the excess monies back to the states for them to use for internal improvement.75
Closing western lands also threatened the slave South, whose own soil had started to play out. Already, the “black belt” of slaves, which in 1820 had been concentrated in Virginia and the Carolinas, had shifted slowly to the southeast, into Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. If the North wished to permanently subjugate the South as a section (which many southerners, such as Calhoun, feared), the dual-pronged policy of shutting down western land sales and enacting a high tariff would achieve that objective in due time. This was the case made by Senator Hayne in 1830, when he spoke on the Senate floor against Foot’s bill, quickly moving from the issue of land to nullification.
Hayne outlined a broad conspiracy by the North against westerners and southerners. His defense of nullification merely involved a reiteration of Calhoun’s compact theories presented in his “Exposition,” conjuring up images of sectional tyranny and dangers posed by propertied classes. The eloquent Black Dan Webster challenged Hayne, raising the specter of civil war if sectional interests were allowed to grow and fester. Although he saved his most charged rhetoric for last, Webster envisioned a point where two sections, one backward and feudal, one advanced and free, stood apart from each other. He warned that the people, not state legislatures, comprised the Union or, as he said, the Union was “a creature of the people.”76 To allow states to nullify specific federal laws would turn the Constitution into a “rope of sand,” Webster observed—hence the existence of the Supreme Court to weigh the constitutionality of laws. Liberty and the Union were not antithetical, noted Webster, they were “forever, one and inseparable.”77 The Foot resolution went down to defeat.
Jackson, who sat in the audience during the Webster-Hayne debate, again abandoned the states’ rights-small government view in favor of the federal government. At a Jefferson Day Dinner, attended by Calhoun, Jackson, and Van Buren, Jackson offered a toast directed at Calhoun, stating, “Our Union. It must be preserved.”78 Calhoun offered an ineffectual retort in his toast—“The Union, next to our liberty most dear!”—but the president had made his point, and it widened the rift between the two men.
An odd coalition to reduce tariff rates arose in the meantime between Jackson and the newly elected congressman from Massachusetts, John Quincy Adams, who had become the only president in American history to lose an election and return to office as a congressman. The revised Adams-sponsored tariff bill cut duties and eliminated the worst elements of the 1828 tariff, but increased duties on iron and cloth. South Carolina’s antitariff forces were not appeased by the revisions nor intimidated by Jackson’s rhetoric. In 1832 the legislature, in a special session, established a state convention to adopt an ordinance of nullification that nullified both the 1828 and the 1832 tariff bills. South Carolina’s convention further authorized the legislature to refuse to collect federal customs duties at South Carolina ports after February 1, 1833, and, should federal troops be sent to collect those duties, to secede from the Union. Calhoun resigned the vice presidency and joined the nullification movement that advanced his theories, and soon ran for the U.S. Senate.
Jackson now faced a dilemma. He could not permit South Carolina to bandy about such language. Nullification, he rightly noted, was “incompatible with the existence of the Union.” More pointedly, he added, “be not deceived by names. Disunion by armed force is treason.”79 The modern reader should pause to consider that Jackson specifically was charging John C. Calhoun with treason—an accurate application, in this case, but still remarkable in its forthrightness and clarity, not to mention courage, which Old Hickory never lacked. Jackson then applied a carrot-and-stick approach, beginning with the stick: he requested that Congress pass the Force Act in January 1833, which allowed him to send military forces to collect the duties. It constituted
something of a bluff, since the executive already had such powers. In reality, both he and South Carolinians knew that federal troops would constitute no less than an occupation force. The use of federal troops in the South threatened to bring on the civil war that Jefferson, Van Buren, and others had feared. Yet Jackson wanted to prove his willingness to fight over the issue, which in his mind remained “Union.” He dispatched General Winfield Scott and additional troops to Charleston, making plain his intention to collect the customs duties. At the same time, Jackson had no interest in the central issue, and the underlying cause of the dissatisfaction with the tariff, slavery, nor did he intend to allow the tariff to spin out of control. While acting bellicose in public, Jackson worked behind the scenes to persuade South Carolina to back down. Here, Jackson received support from his other political adversary, Henry Clay, who worked with Calhoun to draft a compromise tariff with greatly reduced duties beginning in 1833 and thereafter until 1842. Upon signing the bill, Jackson gloated, “The modified Tariff has killed the ultras, both tarifites, and the nullifiers,” although he also praised the “united influence” of Calhoun, Clay, and Webster.80 Then Congress passed both the tariff reduction and the Force Bill together, brandishing both threat and reward in plain sight. After the Tariff of 1833 passed, Clay won accolades, again as the Great Compromiser; Calhoun had earned Jackson’s scorn as a sectionalist agitator, but Jackson, although he had temporarily preserved the Union, had merely skirted the real issue once again by pushing slavery off to be dealt with by another generation.
Far from revealing a visionary leader, the episode exposed Jackson as supremely patriotic but shallow. In his election defeat to Adams, then his clash with Calhoun, he personalized party, sectional, and ideological conflicts, boiling them down into political bare-knuckle fighting. He stood for Union, that much was assured. But to what end? For what purpose? Jackson’s next challenge, the “war” with the Bank of the United States, would again degenerate into a mano a mano struggle with a private individual, and leave principle adrift on the shore.
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