1831

by Louis P. Masur

  Visitors described Jackson as an aging man, careworn but still vital. Thomas Hamilton: “The countenance of General Jackson is prepossessing; the features are strongly defined, yet not coarse; and, even at his advanced age, the expression of his eye is keen and vivid. The manner of the President is very pleasing … . One sees nothing of courtly elegance, but, on the other hand, nothing which the most rigid critic could attribute to coarseness or vulgarity.” Gustave Beaumont: “He is an old man of 66 years, well preserved, and appears to have retained all the vigour of his body and spirit. He is not a man of genius. Formerly he was celebrated as a duelist and a hothead; his great merit is to have won in 1814 the battle of New Orleans against the English. That victory made him popular and brought it about that he was elected president, so true is it that in every country military glory has a prestige that the masses can’t resist, even when the masses are composed of merchants and business men.” Henry Tudor: “His visage is long, covered with wrinkles, expressing a gravity and sedateness almost approaching to melancholy, and bearing the strongest marks of hard service and the wasting care to which the vicissitudes of his active life have exposed him.”48

  However weary Jackson may have appeared at times, political conflicts energized him, none more so than his ongoing battle with the vice-president, John C. Calhoun. The South Carolinian had served three terms in the House before James Monroe picked him as his secretary of war. As vice-president under Adams, Calhoun did little but disavow his earlier nationalist and protectionist politics and plot his ascendancy. By uniting with Jackson, he provided legitimacy to the general’s campaign while positioning himself to take over for the sometimes feeble warrior, who had pledged to serve only one term. Described as ordinary-looking, “middle height, spare, and somewhat slouching in person,” Calhoun was no ordinary man: “His mind is bold and acute; his talent for business confessedly of the first order; and, enjoying the esteem of his countrymen, there can be little doubt that he is yet destined to play a conspicuous part in the politics of the nation.”

  Events in the past, as much as actions in the present, opened a chasm between the men. At a dinner on April 13, 1830, to celebrate Jefferson’s birthday, Jackson had offered a toast: “Our Federal Union; It must be preserved.” Calhoun followed with his own toast: “The Union: Next to our liberty, the most dear.” Several days later, Jackson received a letter from the Georgian William Crawford suggesting that Calhoun’s opposition to the president long preceded their emerging differences on the nature of the union. In 1818, Jackson, pursuing the Seminole Indians, had invaded Florida, a Spanish province, and established military control. The House, led by Henry Clay, condemned the general’s actions. But Jackson was led to believe that the Cabinet, particularly Secretary of War Calhoun, supported him. He now learned from Crawford, who had battled Calhoun politically for nearly a decade and was secretary of the Treasury under Monroe, that the secretary of war had proposed that “General Jackson should be punished in some form” for disobeying his orders. Jackson asked for an explanation and Calhoun squirmed in his response. He said he thought Jackson had long known what the Cabinet thought and, in any event, claimed to have been only a “junior member” of the administration. Though he confessed that “I was under the impression that you had exceeded your orders, and had acted on your own responsibility,” Calhoun declared, “I neither questioned your patriotism nor your motives.”49

  The matter might have rested there, but Calhoun became obsessed with the timing and mode of the revelations. “The secret and mysterious attempts,” he told Jackson, which had been made “by false insinuations for years to injure my character, are at last brought to light.” He started writing letters seeking vindication. He queried William Wirt, who had been attorney general. He questioned John Quincy Adams, who had been secretary of state. And he pestered James Monroe for documents and recollections. The correspondents worried about revealing secret Cabinet discussions, but each told the vice-president what he already knew: censure of the general had been discussed, and even Crawford had thought Jackson should be condemned for his actions in Florida. After Monroe received a letter from John Rhea, a retired House Member from Tennessee, stating that, through instructions to him in 1818, the president had authorized Jackson to seize Florida and then ordered him to destroy the document, Calhoun launched a new series of inquiries. Rhea’s letter turned out to be a hoax designed to vindicate Jackson, who thrived on his past military feats, at the expense of Monroe. “The deep gloom of Winter,” wrote Calhoun in the midst of a severe January snowstorm, “over hangs the face of nature.”50

  For Monroe, the controversy only added to his woes. Financially, the ex-president was nearly bankrupt. He advertised for sale his twenty-five-hundred-acre estate in Albermarle County and sold his slaves to a Florida colonel for five thousand dollars. (The proceeds went to pay off a personal debt to John Jacob Astor.) In 1825, he had made a claim with Congress for reimbursement of unpaid salaries and personal expenses incurred while in the nation’s service, expenses that dated to his mission in France during Washington’s administration. He received partial settlement and now had his claim again before Congress. A bill for relief of the ex-president passed the House and Senate, but the thirty thousand dollars awarded did little to ease Monroe’s situation. Physically, the seventy-three-year-old Virginian was in decline. A bad fall from his horse had left him motionless for twenty minutes and shaken for weeks. His wife had died the previous autumn, and Monroe relinquished his estate to live in New York with a daughter and son-in-law. On April 11, he wrote James Madison to say good-bye: “I deeply regret that there is no prospect of our meeting again, since so long have we been connected, and in the most friendly intercourse, in public and private life, that a final separation is among the most distressing incidents which could occur.” In response, Madison chastised Monroe for abandoning Virginia and pretended that the two might embrace again.51

  On April 27, John Quincy Adams visited Monroe in New York. What a contrast between the fortunes of the two ex-presidents. Adams had spent the two years since leaving the White House at leisure, attending public dinners, translating various psalms, and reading voraciously. At the moment, he was working his way through Jefferson’s Memoir, and in his diary he composed a complex psychological portrait of his father’s political antagonist: “a rare mixture of infidel philosophy and epicurean morals, of burning ambition and of stoical self-control, of deep duplicity and of generous sensibility.” Adams’s visit lasted half an hour, and he left shocked by the appearance of “the feeble and emaciated” man. “He is now dying,” wrote Adams, “in wretchedness and beggary.”

  At half past three on July 4, James Monroe died. In death he achieved what he never had in life—comparison on equal terms to two of the Founders, Adams and Jefferson, who had both passed away on July 4, 1826. Commentators saw providential design behind this: “These are really wonderful things.” During the summer, Monroe was the subject of numerous eulogies and orations. In Boston, the City Corporation invited John Quincy Adams to deliver an address and the former president could not refuse (he would repeat the task five years later, when Madison died). Through July and August, Adams struggled with the speech. On August 25, he traveled in the driving rain to the Old South Church. Before an audience “crowded to suffocation,” Adams offered a eulogy with the only theme possible: the passing of the Fathers and the grave responsibility of the children to preserve what the older generation had created. In the sweltering heat and deepening darkness of the evening, Adams spoke for an hour and a half. Anyone listening closely, or someone examining the hundred-page eulogy published two weeks later, might have detected a defensive, even apologetic tone to the oration: had Monroe been born ten years earlier, he would have been a signer of the Declaration of Independence; Monroe’s opposition to the ratification of the Constitution did not detract from his contributions; his administration offered no new policies.

  The eulogy failed and Adams knew it: “As the sun went down,
it grew so dark that it was becoming impossible for me to read my manuscript. I was forced to read so rapidly that my articulation became indistinct, and my voice and my eyes, both affected by the state of the atmosphere, were constantly threatening to fail me.” Another visitor to the Old South Church, Ralph Waldo Emerson, confirmed Adams’s fears: “There was nothing heroic in the subject, & not much in the feelings of the orator, so it proved rather spectacle than a speech.”52

  Calhoun expressed no remorse about disturbing Monroe in his final days. The vice-president’s actions in February had not only added to the former president’s anguish, but also hastened his own demise within Jackson’s administration. On February 17, the United States Telegraph published the exchanges on the Seminole affair and later issued a fifty-two-page pamphlet, The Correspondence Between General Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun. Edited by Duff Green, the Telegraph had been the voice of the administration, but it now supported Calhoun; a new paper, the Washington Globe, edited by Francis Blair, spoke for Jackson. It was one thing for some of these letters to circulate privately and for rumors about their content to appear in the press; it was another for a government official to release them publicly, reveal “sacredly confidential” transactions, and jockey openly for position within Jackson’s administration to further his own political standing. Webster confided to Clay that the correspondence “shows feelings & objects so personal—so ambitious—I may even say so factious, in some or all the parties, that it creates no small degree of disgust.” In a preface addressed to the People of the United States, Calhoun claimed he sought to vindicate his character and prove himself worthy of his position, but he accomplished the opposite. Calhoun and Green, snorted Jackson, “have cut their own throats, and destroyed themselves in a shorter space of time than any two men I ever knew.” 53

  The publication of the Seminole correspondence ended any “social intercourse” between the vice-president and president. The issue of social relations cut deeply in Jackson’s White House. On January 1, 1829, John Eaton, Jackson’s secretary of war and fellow Tennessean, married Margaret O’Neale Timberlake. Twenty-nine years old and a widow of only eight months, Peggy, according to rumor, had been Major Eaton’s mistress. But Jackson blessed the union, pronouncing Mrs. Eaton to be “as chaste as those who attempt to slander her.” His wife, Rachel, also hounded by false accusations of sexual impropriety, had just died. Here was a way to remain steadfast against the Washington gossip machine. The storm over Peggy Eaton, however, swirled out of control. Privately, politicians snorted, “Eaton has just married his mistress and the mistress of eleven doz. Others.” Governor Floyd of Virginia described Peggy Eaton as “a woman destitute of virtue and of morals,” adding, “I know myself that all is true which has been said of her.” Margaret Bayard Smith, the doyenne of Washington society, called Peggy Eaton “one of the most ambitious, violent, malignant, yet silly women you ever heard of.” When the Eatons paid a social call on the Calhouns and Floride Calhoun refused to return the courtesy, Jackson’s Cabinet flew into turmoil.54

  The “Eaton malaria” spread through the White House. In addition to the vice-president, the families of the secretary of the Treasury (Samuel Ingham), secretary of the navy (John Branch), and attorney general (John Berrien) avoided any social contact with the Eatons. Even Jackson’s niece Emily Donelson, who had come to Washington after Rachel Jackson’s death to serve as White House hostess, refused to have social relations with Mrs. Eaton. Only the postmaster general (William Barry) and, significantly, the secretary of state, Martin Van Buren, honored the president’s wishes and interacted with Peggy Eaton. As a bachelor, Van Buren had no need to worry about the social rules that governed Washington high society. With each visit to Peggy Eaton, Van Buren endeared himself that much more to the president, just as, with each rejection of her, Calhoun further alienated the general. It did not take long for Jackson to see Calhoun as the source of dissension in his White House and Van Buren as the man who should succeed him.55

  Jackson became preoccupied with tracing the source of all the rumors and refuting them. He wrote letters, conducted investigations, and called his Cabinet together to chastise them for their behavior toward “a virtuous and much injured Lady.” Jackson overflowed with anger and lashed out in all directions. One minister, Ezra Stiles Ely of Philadelphia, received a stinging rebuke after he not only spread rumors about Mrs. Eaton but also suggested that Mrs. Jackson, when she was alive, had disavowed the woman: “Female virtue is like a tender and delicate flower; let but the breath of suspicion rest upon it, and it withers and perhaps perishes forever. When it shall be assailed by envy and malice, the good and the pious will maintain its purity and innocence, until guilt is made manifest—not by rumors and suspicions, but by facts and proofs brought forth and sustained by respectable and fearless witnesses in the face of day. Truth shuns not the light; but falsehood deals in sly and dark insinuations, and prefers darkness, because its deeds are evil.”56

  Never one to abandon a friend, Jackson staunchly defended the Eatons and began to imagine some larger, nefarious design behind the slanders and “most unfounded lies ever propagated.” Culturally, he blamed the clergy for their moralistic exhortations and wondered “by what authority These ladies with their clergymen at their head has assumed for themselves this holy alliance and secrete inquisition to pass … upon the conduct of others.” Politically, he at first saw a “wicked combination” led by Henry Clay. But, coterminous with the Seminole inquiry, he fixed on “the wicked machinations of Calhoun and his adherents” as plotting the destruction of the administration. “I believe him now one of the basest and most dangerous men living—a man, devoid of principle, and would sacrifice his friend, his country, and forsake his god, for selfish personal ambition,” pronounced Jackson. Craving harmony in his Cabinet and reciting the scriptural pronouncement that “a House divided cannot stand,” the president took action.57

  On April 8, Jackson accepted John Eaton’s resignation. Four days later, he acknowledged the “necessity” of Van Buren’s also resigning. The Eaton scandal had paralyzed the Cabinet, and just as Jackson saw Clay and Calhoun behind the petticoat politics, the opposition claimed that Van Buren was secretly plotting for his own succession to the presidency. Shrewdly, Van Buren recognized that his departure from the administration would allow Jackson to purge the Cabinet of men loyal to Calhoun while strengthening his own position as Democratic candidate down the line. (Van Buren hoped to serve out his time as minister to Great Britain, but Calhoun, seeking revenge, cast the vote denying him confirmation and gloated, “It will kill him, sir, kill him dead.”) Within a week Jackson secured the resignations of Ingham and Branch, Berrien resigned in June, and the president installed an entirely new Cabinet.

  “A revolution has taken place in the Capitol of the United States,” screamed the headlines. The reshuffling of the Cabinet shocked the nation and raised fears that the very structure of American government would be transformed. The resignations “constitute an epoch in the history of the United States,” declared the National Intelligencer. Pro-administration papers applauded the move, arguing that it would allow the president to focus on issues of national importance, but anti-administration papers viewed it as tearing an irreparable hole in the ship of state: “The ship is sinking and the rats are flying!! The hull is too leaky to mend, and the hero of two wars and a half has not skill to keep it afloat.”58

  In Philadelphia, a promising young artist, Edward William Clay, seized the moment and drew a cartoon that provided an indelible image of Jackson under siege. He executed two somewhat different versions. In the first, “The Rats Leaving a Falling House,” Jackson is shown slumped in his collapsing, thronelike chair. The Cabinet members, depicted as rats, scamper away while Jackson tries to prevent his secretary of state from escaping by stepping on his tail. All around, the pillars of government are collapsing and Jackson’s “Altar of Reform,” which swept hundreds out of government office, is shown to be guided over by a devi
lish imp. Jackson’s spittoon and broken pipe lie at the dazed president’s feet. John Quincy Adams—who was in Philadelphia, where the print first appeared in April—reported that two thousand copies were sold in a day and that ten thousand would be dispatched within a matter of weeks. The caricature, reported the National Gazette, “is now running, like wildfire, through the land.”59

  A version of the cartoon printed later in the year carried the title “,00001—The Value of a Unit with Four Cyphers Going Before It,” a reference to Jackson’s worthlessness in the eyes of opponents and a play on Jackson’s insistence that he must make his Cabinet a harmonious unit. Newspapers called his Cabinet “the smallest figure ever known in political arithmetic.” One editor gibed that the “rules of decimal arithmetic will not apply to the ex-Cabinet.—If report be true, they have dealt more in Vulgar fractions.”60 In this version, the president’s crumbling chair is identified as Hickory, a reference to his nickname “Old Hickory.” To the left, Van Buren reaches for the ladder of states that leads to the presidency, but Calhoun the terrier is there to stop him. Again, Cabinet members appearing like rats flee in all directions. Eaton says, “I’m off to the Indians,” Berrien heads for Georgia, and Branch and Ingham are swept into the “rat hole of oblivion.” A notice on the wall states, “Pollytickle mathewmatick taught here.” Webster and Clay stand at the window and joke that Jackson “has nullifide the whole concern.” “War! Pestilence! And Famin!,” they assert, “is better than this.”

  Another popular lithograph, “Exhibition of Cabinet Pictures,” offered a comprehensive condemnation of Jackson, who appears as an ape, a blind man, a jackass, and a grandmother. He is also the “sun” setting in a storm. The Cabinet library on the left contains numerous plays that refer to the Eaton scandals: “provoked husband,” “she would if she could,” “female stability,” and “family quarrels.” And a number of the pictures lampoon the power of petticoats. Jackson is shown washing one and slipping one on, and petticoats are even made part of the national seal.