THE AGE OF HICKORY; OR, JACKSON’S EPOCH.
1829–1837.
Military Men, domesticated to Civil Life, like tamed Animals.—General
Jackson’s Camp Traits in the White Den at Washington.—His Prehensile
Habits claw out the Eyes of several Measures.—How he foraged on his
Political Enemies, and turned his Troops of Friends into the Public
Pastures.—Lord Palmerston’s Remark upon Gladstone; and its American
Application.—An Insurrection among the Household Cabinet Troops.—How
the vigorous Hickory Club, wielded chivalrously for a Woman, quelled
it.—The President moves on the Bank and captures all its Fortified
Points.—Chicago starts in 1830.—Why it did not overtake and annex the
United States.—South Carolina threatens Nullification, and is
threatened.—Mr. Calhoun violently promised an elevated Position
between two Posts. Mr. Clay’s Compromise.—Horace Greeley starts the
First Daily Paper.—Its untimely End bewailed in Verse.—Black Hawk
caged and shown around.—Georgia, the Cherokees and the Supreme
Court.—Three Celebrities gained by the Seminole War.—Of Arkansas and
its Papal Little Rock.—Prospects for the Pope when flung from the
Tarpeian.—An Arkansas Paul preaching in the American Athens and
Corinth.—Old Hickory and the Nuts left to be cracked.
Naturalists tell us that certain animals, domesticated from a wild
state, retain some primeval habits so tenaciously as never to shed them;
that these animals, for example, never lie down on their new and softer
beds without turning around and beating about as in their forest lairs.
So military men, tamed down from the independence of camp into the
regulated routine of civil life, never lose their unrest in attempting
to adjust themselves to their new condition. General Jackson carried the
defiant bravery of his campaigns against the Indians into the white den
at Washington. He disdained to cover the prehensile claws of new
measures with the velvet sheath of official prudence.
Over the eyes of schemes or institutions which he designed to scratch
out he cast no glamour.
During his eight years of civil campaigning, he stormed several forts
that had become mossed by age through preceding administrations. His
first care was to live off the enemy, the Adamites, whose Federal
offices he took as forage for his own troops of friends; an example from
the military code which every successor, civil or uncivil, has
unfortunately hastened to follow. Lord Palmerston once declared “that
Mr. Gladstone had not a command of language, but that language commanded
him.” So it has resulted from this tough, hickory precedent, that the
offices now command the government.
This campaign over, his next exploit was to quell an insurrection among
the household troops led by Vice-President Calhoun, Mr. Ingham,
Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Branch, Secretary of the Navy, and Mr.
Berrien, Attorney-General. These officers were soon cashiered and their
places filled by Mr. McLane, Mr. Woodbury, and Mr. Taney. The lily-white
arm of a lady, whose social exclusion from the Calhoun set the vigorous
old warrior resented, moved the iron sinews of the hickory club which
cleaned out the Secretarys’ stables.
The General next moved on the United States Bank, up whose slopes,
although jagged with ores and hoary with legislative fortifications, he
rushed, carrying them at all points with a _coup de main_.
His first term, however, was made illustrious, not so much by these
destructions as by the first appearance of Chicago. This was in 1830. At
this time, fortunately, the population of the United States had reached
12,866,020, and were thus saved from being overtaken and immediately
annexed to that rapid and rapidly pushing place. This Northern cosmical
event attracted less attention, however, because the public mind was at
last and about this time fixed upon the State of Mr. C. C. Pinckney,
which, under the guidance of Mr. Calhoun, threatened to exclude the
Federal hickory government from its plantation, unless the Tariff Act
was repealed.
The old military chief issued a public proclamation, asserting his
determination to execute the laws over South Carolina, and private
threats to raise the main nullifier to a lofty post under the
government. Indeed, he promised to some of his close personal friends,
with ejaculations truly Jacksonian, to put him between two posts for the
rest of his life.
This was the first sprouting of the carefully engrafted scion of slavery
upon the stock of State rights.
Again, the Kentucky compromiser was ready with a harmonizing remedy,
which scaled the tariff rates for the next ten years, and then planed
them all down to the horizontal level of twenty per cent. South
Carolina, lying, like Achilles, near her ships, professed to be
appeased. Mr. Calhoun was saved his hempen elevation.
The year following, 1833, Horace Greeley started in New York “The
Morning Post,” the first daily paper ever projected, which lived only
three weeks, and wondered why it ever lived at all;
“Whose all of life, a morning ray,
Blushed into dawn then passed away.”
The Sacs, Foxes, and Winnebagoes, with tomahawks in their talons, and
led by Black Hawk, swooped in hovering circles around the white chickens
of Illinois; but were brought down by those practised marksmen, Generals
Scott and Atkinson. The old Hawk was captured and shown through the
United States in his drooping feathers. In Georgia, on the other hand,
the whites were the aggressors, seeking to push the Creeks and Cherokees
from their coveted possessions. The Indians fled to the Supreme Court of
the United States, which bade Georgia restore the poor Naboths to their
vineyards. The Ahab sovereignty of that State resisted. The President
refused to interfere. The nullification by Georgia of a decree of the
Supreme Court, restoring Indians to their rights, was, in the eyes of
the old Indian fighter, quite a different matter from the nullification
by Calhoun-led South Carolina of an act of Congress. So far from being a
hair-splitter, the General could not even see whole shocks, if the poll
was long, straight, and black. In 1835 arose another Seminole war in
Florida, caused by an attempt on the part of the government to remove
that powerful tribe, under a mock treaty, somewhere, nowhere, anywhere,
so that it was west of the Mississippi, and away from present cupidity.
On the public debt, now dwarfed to $291,089, this war was like an April
shower. Florida had the satisfaction, for the third time in sixteen
years, of increasing the obligations of the United States for, if not
to, her. In this peninsular campaign, we obtained three celebrities to
knob the flat surface of our history,—Generals Zachariah Taylor, Jessup,
and Gaines,—gains compared with which the loss of life and lucre are not
to be mentioned, except to stiffen our virtues by reproaching their
suggestion.
The red tribes began sensibly to experience the truth of that sad
tradition, which depicts their fate under the figure of a spirited bull,
Manitou, which, chased from Cordillera to higher peak, across plain and
river, ever westward, stands frequently on his reluctant retreat at bay,
and tosses in vain from his frontlet the burning spears whose arrowy
flames the waters of the Pacific only can quench.
After a pause of sixteen years, Arkansas, in 1836, strode, bowie-knife
in belt, into the American camp. With Little Rock for its capital, it
bids fair for the honor of sheltering the Pope when flung off from the
Tarpeian at Rome. Its Saul-like Legarès, having been struck down by
miraculous lights since 1861, we shall probably see, becoming zealous
Pauls, mending apostolic nets on the Red River, and preaching to the
ignorant worshippers of unknown gods, in the Athens of New England and
the Corinth of New York.
At threescore and ten, Old Hickory was transplanted to the Hermitage.
The merits and demerits of his administration, his political principles
and his personal character, constitute still the Flanders of American
parties, over which much hard swearing and fighting are still vigorously
carried on. The rough-nutted tree has been well shaken by friend and
foe; and its shaggy fruit we leave to be cracked, at family firesides,
to season insipid pauses and to flavor uneffervescing drowsiness.
[Illustration:
THE ROMANCE OF INDIAN WARFARE.
(p. 407)
]