A HISTORY OF
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
BY
WOODROW WILSON, PH.D., LITT.D., LL.D.
IN FIVE VOLUMES
VOL. IV.
Critical Changes and Civil War
[Illustration: ANDREW JACKSON]
A HISTORY OF
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
BY
WOODROW WILSON, PH.D., LITT.D., LL.D.
PRESIDENT OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS, MAPS,
PLANS, FACSIMILES, RARE PRINTS,
CONTEMPORARY VIEWS, ETC.
IN FIVE VOLUMES
VOL. IV.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
MCMVII
Copyright, 1901, 1902, by WOODROW WILSON.
Copyright, 1901, 1902, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION 1
II. THE BANK AND THE TREASURY 41
III. THE EXTENSION OF SLAVERY 88
IV. ARMED DIVISION 145
V. THE CONFEDERATE STATES 265
APPENDIX 313
NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
ANDREW JACKSON _Frontispiece_
HENRY CLAY AT THE AGE OF FORTY-THREE.—From a portrait by Mathew
H. Jouett 2
ROBERT FULTON.—From a portrait by Benjamin West, painted in 1805 4
FULTON’S FIRST STEAMBOAT.—Redrawn from an old print 6
GENERAL ANDREW JACKSON.—From a portrait in the city hall, New
York, painted by John Vanderlyn in 1819, when Jackson was
fifty-two years of age 8
CARPENTERS’ HALL, PHILADELPHIA.—From a photograph 11
MARTIN VAN BUREN.—From a portrait by Henry Inman, in the
possession of W. Duer, Esq. 13
JAMES KENT.—Redrawn from an old print 15
JEREMIAH MASON.—Redrawn from an old print 17
MODEL OF THE JOHN STEVENS LOCOMOTIVE. THE FIRST IN AMERICA.
1825.—Redrawn from an old print 20
MODEL OF THE STOCKTON AND DARLINGTON LOCOMOTIVE. BROUGHT
FROM ENGLAND. 1826.—Redrawn from an old print 22
DANIEL WEBSTER.—From a daguerrotype in the possession of
Charles Lanman, Esq. 24
ROBERT YOUNG HAYNE.—From an engraving after a drawing by
J. B. Longacre 26
TITLE-PAGE OF SPEECH OF DANIEL WEBSTER.—From the original in
the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 29
THE DE WITT CLINTON TRAIN WHICH RAN IN 1830 BETWEEN ALBANY
AND SCHENECTADY.—Photographed from the original locomotive
and carriages by A. P. Yates, official photographer of the
New York Central Railroad 31
DANIEL WEBSTER.—From the painting by G. P. A. Healy, now in
Faneuil Hall, Boston, Mass. _Facing p._ 32
BELL’S STEAMBOAT COMET, 1812.—Redrawn from an old print 33
FREIGHT AND PASSENGER CARS, 1848.—From an old print 36
THE FIRST CAPITOL OF TEXAS.—Redrawn from an old print 38
THE OLD UNITED STATES BANK, NOW THE CUSTOM HOUSE,
PHILADELPHIA.—From a photograph 42
ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS.—From a photograph by Brady 45
NICHOLAS BIDDLE.—Engraved by J. B. Longacre and T. B. Walsh
after a painting by Rembrandt Peale 50
ROGER B. TANEY.—From Coffin’s _Life of Lincoln_ 55
LOUIS MCLANE.—Redrawn from an old print 57
ELECTORAL TICKET OF 1836.—From a photograph from the original
ticket 60
A NORTH CAROLINA MANSION OF THE OLD STYLE.—From _Harper’s
Encyclopaedia of United States History_ 63
JOHN C. CALHOUN.—From the painting by De Bloch, in the
possession of John C. Calhoun, Esq. _Facing p._ 64
SILAS WRIGHT, JR.—From an engraving after a daguerrotype
by Brady 67
SAM HOUSTON.—Redrawn from an old print 69
CYRUS HALL MCCORMICK.—Reproduced from an engraving kindly
loaned by the McCormick Company of Chicago 71
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER.—From an engraving by Wilcox after a
daguerrotype 73
EDGAR ALLAN POE.—From _Harper’s Monthly Magazine_ 75
WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT.—From an old stipple engraving 77
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.—From a photograph by Black 79
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.—Redrawn from an engraving after a
daguerrotype 81
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.—From Howells’s _Literary Friends and
Acquaintance_ 83
HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.—From an old print 84
PRESIDENTIAL TICKET, 1840.—From a photograph of the original
ticket 85
WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON.—From Lossing’s _Field-Book of the War
of 1812_ 86
JOSEPH STORY.—From an engraving after a portrait by Chester
Harding 89
CAMPAIGN SYMBOL OF 1840.—Redrawn from a copy of the campaign
cartoon 93
JOHN TYLER.—Redrawn from an engraving from a daguerrotype 95
THE HANCOCK HOUSE, BOSTON.—Redrawn from a sketch made in 1833.
Showing rail-fence around the Boston Common, which was used
originally as a cow pasture 97
TITLE-PAGE OF ANTI-ABOLITION PAMPHLET.—From Sparks’s _The Men
Who Made the Nation_ 99
BROADWAY, EAST SIDE, BETWEEN GRAND AND HOWARD STREETS,
NEW YORK, 1840.—From an old lithograph 103
GENERAL SANTA ANNA.—Redrawn from an old print 106
WENDELL PHILLIPS.—From a photograph 109
TITLE-PAGE OF A CAMPAIGN PAMPHLET.—From the original in
the New York Public Library (Astor Building) 111
HENRY CLAY.—From a drawing by Davignon _Facing p._ 112
TITLE-PAGE OF “THE CLAY SONGSTER.”—From a photograph from
the original 113
JAMES K. POLK.—Redrawn from an old print 116
ZACHARY TAYLOR.—From an old lithograph 119
WINFIELD SCOTT.—From an engraving after a daguerrotype 121
THE DEPARTURE OF THE PHILADELPHIA VOLUNTEERS FROM
PHILADELPHIA.—From a humorous drawing by F. O. C. Darley 123
CHARGE OF THE “PALMETTOS” AT CHURUBUSCO.—From a drawing by
Döpler, in _Harper’s Monthly Magazine_ 125
MAIN STREET IN AUSTIN, TEXAS, ABOUT 1845.—Redrawn from an
old print 126
SALMON PORTLAND CHASE.—From _Harper’s Monthly Magazine_ 127
LEWIS CASS.—From _Harper’s Monthly Magazine_ 129
THOMAS WILSON DORR.—Redrawn from an old print 130
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, IN 1848.—Redrawn from an old print 131
ENGLISH POWER LOOM FOR WEAVING COTTON, 1847.—Redrawn from an
old print 133
CASTLE GARDEN, NEW YORK, IN 1850.—From _Harper’s Monthly Magazine_ 135
EMIGRANT TRAIN CROSSING THE PLAINS.—Redrawn from an old print 136
A TYPICAL HOTEL IN THE MIDDLE MINES, CALIFORNIA, ABOUT
1850.—From a sketch from nature by A. V. S. Anthony 137
SLUICE WASHING FOR GOLD IN THE MIDDLE MINES, CALIFORNIA,
ABOUT 1850.—From a sketch from nature by A. V. S. Anthony 139
OLD SPANISH FORT AT MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA, IN 1848.—From
_Harper’s Monthly Magazine_ 141
TITLE-PAGE OF A CONTEMPORARY PAMPHLET.—From Sparks’s _The
Men Who Made the Nation_ 149
MARTIN VAN BUREN.—From a portrait by Daniel Huntington,
painted for Mr. Van Buren and presented by him to a
collection of notable statesmen now in the State Library
at Albany, New York 155
FRANKLIN PIERCE.—Redrawn from an old print 158
TITLE-PAGE OF “UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.”—From a copy of the first
edition of the work 161
COVER OF PAMPHLET ON THE BOSTON SLAVE RIOT.—From the original
in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 163
WILLIAM H. SEWARD.—From a photograph by Brady 168
GEORGE GORDON MEADE.—From a photograph by Brady 171
PIERRE SOULÉ.—Redrawn from an old print 173
JOHN CHARLES FRÉMONT.—From an engraving after a photograph
by Brady 175
STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS.—From a photograph by Brady _Facing p._ 176
GEORGE HENRY THOMAS.—From a photograph by Brady 177
JOSEPH ECCLESTON JOHNSTON.—From a photograph by Anderson 179
HARPER’S FERRY IN 1859.—From a sketch made in 1859 by a
staff artist of _Harper’s Weekly_ 181
JOHN BROWN.—Redrawn from an old print 183
THE DUNKER CHURCH, WHERE JOHN BROWN PREACHED THE NIGHT OF
THE RAID.—From a sketch furnished by Jeannie Chambers 184
COLONEL LEE’S MARINES BREAKING INTO THE ENGINE-HOUSE AT
HARPER’S FERRY.—Drawn from a sketch by a staff artist
of _Harper’s Weekly_ 187
FACSIMILE OF LINCOLN’S LETTER OF ACCEPTANCE.—From Nicolay
and Hay’s _Life of Lincoln_ 189
MR. SEWARD’S SUGGESTION FOR THE CLOSE OF MR. LINCOLN’S
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.—From Nicolay and Hay’s _Life of Lincoln_ 191
CLOSING PARAGRAPH, IN MR. LINCOLN’S HANDWRITING, OF THE
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.—From Nicolay and Hay’s _Life of Lincoln_ 191
JAMES BUCHANAN.—From a photograph 193
ALBERT SIDNEY JOHNSTON.—Redrawn from an old print 195
THE “GEORGE WASHINGTON” LOCOMOTIVE, 1835.—Redrawn from an
old print 199
VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI, 1863.—From a sketch made during
the Rebellion 201
A SNAG BOAT ON THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER.—Redrawn from an old
photograph 203
LINCOLN MAKING HIS FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS.—From a sketch made
by a staff artist of _Harper’s Weekly_ 205
FORT SUMTER ON NOVEMBER 10, 1863.—From a sketch made at the time 206
INTERIOR OF FORT SUMTER AFTER THE BOMBARDMENT, DECEMBER,
1863.—From a war-time sketch 209
FORT SUMTER, AS REBUILT.—From a photograph 211
SERGEANT HART NAILING THE COLORS TO THE FLAG-STAFF, FORT
SUMTER.—From _Harper’s Encyclopaedia of United States History_ 213
DAVID DIXON PORTER.—From a photograph by C. M. Bell 215
SIGNATURES OF THE COMMISSIONERS OF VIRGINIA AND THE SOUTHERN
CONFEDERACY.—From _Harper’s Encyclopaedia of United
States History_ 217
THE OSAGE, TYPE OF IRON-CLAD USED ON THE MISSISSIPPI
RIVER.—From a war-time photograph 219
THE CHICKASAW, TYPE OF IRON-CLAD USED ON THE MISSISSIPPI
RIVER.—From a war-time photograph 220
THE DE KALB, TYPE OF IRON-CLAD USED ON THE MISSISSIPPI
RIVER.—From a war-time photograph 221
PIERRE GUSTAVE TOUTANT BEAUREGARD.—From a photograph by Sarony 223
A CALL FOR REINFORCEMENTS.—From _Battles and Leaders_ 225
GEORGE BRINTON MCCLELLAN.—From a photograph by Conly 227
MILLARD FILLMORE.—From a photograph by W. Baker 230
FACSIMILE OF WAR SCRIP ISSUED BY THE CONFEDERATE LEGISLATURE
OF MISSOURI.—From _Battles and Leaders_ 233
STATUE OF FARRAGUT IN MADISON SQUARE, NEW YORK CITY.—From
a photograph 235
JOHN ERICSSON.—From an old steel engraving 238
THE MONITOR.—From a war-time sketch 239
BATTLE OF FREDERICKSBURG. VOLUNTEERS CROSSING THE RIVER.—From
a painting by C. S. Reinhart 241
FACSIMILE OF THE FINAL EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION OF
JAN. 1, 1863.—Nicolay and Hay 244, 245, 246, 247
THE HARTFORD, FARRAGUT’S FLAG-SHIP.—From a war-time sketch 250
UNITED STATES SLOOP OF WAR KEARSARGE.—From a war-time sketch 253
WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN.—From a photograph by Charles L. Ritzmann 255
TABLE USED AT THE SURRENDER AT APPOMATTOX COURT HOUSE.—From
_Harper’s Encyclopaedia of United States History_ 257
CHAIR USED AT THE SURRENDER AT APPOMATTOX COURT HOUSE.—From
_Harper’s Encyclopaedia of United States History_ 258
JOHN WILKES BOOTH.—Redrawn from an old print 260
THE WHITE HOUSE OF THE CONFEDERACY, RICHMOND.—From a photograph 266
JEFFERSON DAVIS.—From a photograph by W. W. Washburn 269
MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA, IN 1862.—Redrawn from a photograph 272
ABRAHAM LINCOLN.—From a photograph taken by McNulty in
Indianapolis, in 1861 _Facing p._ 272
THOMAS JONATHAN JACKSON.—Redrawn from an old print 275
ROBERT EDWARD LEE.—From the steel engraving published by the
Lee Memorial Association for the Erection of a Monument at
the Tomb of General Robert E. Lee at the Washington and
Lee University, Lexington, Va. _Facing p._ 276
THE SHELL ROAD, MOBILE.—From a drawing by W. H. Gibson 277
ARLINGTON, THE RESIDENCE OF GENERAL ROBERT E. LEE.—From a
sketch by Benson J. Lossing in 1850 279
WILLIAM LOWNDES YANCEY.—Redrawn from an old print 280
THOMAS R. R. COBB.—From a photograph in possession of President
Woodrow Wilson, Princeton, N. J. 283
FIRST PAGE OF THE ORIGINAL DRAFT OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE
CONFEDERATE STATES.—In the handwriting of General Thomas
R. R. Cobb 285
ANDREW JOHNSON.—From an old photograph 287
CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, IN 1862.—From a war-time sketch 291
A STREET HUCKSTER IN RICHMOND, VIRGINIA.—A sketch from
nature by W. L. Sheppard 293
SELLERS OF FIREWOOD IN RICHMOND, VIRGINIA.—A sketch from
nature by W. L. Sheppard 295
A SUPERANNUATED DARKY IN RICHMOND, VIRGINIA.—A sketch from
nature by W. L. Sheppard 297
A CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS IN ILLINOIS.—From a photograph from
the original poster 299
A SELLER OF RABBITS AND HARES, RICHMOND, VIRGINIA.—From a
sketch from nature by W. L. Sheppard 301
A WOOD PEDDLER, RICHMOND, VIRGINIA.—From a sketch from nature
by W. L. Sheppard 303
FACSIMILE OF MR. LINCOLN’S AUTOGRAPHIC COPY OF THE GETTYSBURG
ADDRESS, MADE BY HIM FOR THE SOLDIERS’ AND SAILORS’ FAIR
AT BALTIMORE, IN 1864.—From Nicolay and Hay’s _Life of
Lincoln_ 308, 309
LIST OF MAPS
TERRITORIAL ACQUISITIONS OF THE UNITED STATES, 1783-1853 _Facing p._ 28
TERRITORIAL CONTROVERSIES OF THE UNITED STATES, SETTLED
BETWEEN 1783-1850 _Facing p._ 80
THE UNITED STATES, MARCH 4, 1855 _Facing p._ 170
SLAVERY IN THE UNITED STATES, 1775-1865 _Facing p._ 208
A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
CHAPTER I
THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION
General Jackson’s friends had reason to be satisfied. The effect they
had wrought was indeed dramatic, revolutionary. They had cut a line of
cleavage between epoch and epoch in the history of the country. They
had broken, once for all, the “Virginian dynasty,” “the succession of
Secretaries,” the leadership of trained and trusted men; had set aside
every tradition of national politics; and had begun the administration
of the executive office of the Union afresh upon their own plan. They
had not, indeed, won secure control of either house of Congress. Parties
were not fixed enough as yet for that. There were not a few “Democrats”
who still retained a covert liking for the liberal construction their
opponents put upon the constitution, and who upon occasion wavered in
their votes, or incontinently went over to the ranks of the “National
Republicans,” whom Mr. Clay led. In the Senate there could be found,
upon most questions, a majority against the new President. But the
whole atmosphere of affairs, the whole tone of the government changed,
nevertheless, with the coming in of General Jackson. The new nation,
its quality subtly altered, its point of view insensibly shifted by
the movement into the West, had smiled with some degree of patient
complacency upon Mr. Monroe, and had endured John Quincy Adams, but now
for the first time chose after its own kind and preferred General Jackson.
[Illustration: HENRY CLAY]
It was a second democratization of the government. And yet it differed
radically from the first, which Mr. Jefferson had so shrewdly contrived.
There was no kinship either in spirit or in method between Mr. Jefferson
and this new hero of democracy. Mr. Jefferson had, indeed, expressed the
greatest alarm “at the prospect of seeing General Jackson President.” “He
is,” he said, “one of the most unfit men I know of for the place. He has
had very little respect for laws or constitutions, and is, in fact, an
able military chief. His passions are terrible. He has been much tried
since I knew him, but he is a dangerous man.” And had Mr. Jefferson lived
to witness the result, he would hardly have altered his judgment. He had
stood, for all he was so full of democratic doctrine, for conservative
ways of political growth. General Jackson stood, it turned out, for
personal government, party proscriptions, and the self-willed choices of
personal power.
General Jackson professed to be of the school of Mr. Jefferson himself;
and what he professed he believed. There was no touch of the charlatan
or the demagogue about him. The action of his mind was as direct, as
sincere, as unsophisticated as the action of the mind of an ingenuous
child, though it exhibited also the sustained intensity and the range of
the mature man. The difference between Mr. Jefferson and General Jackson
was not a difference of moral quality so much as a difference in social
stock and breeding. Mr. Jefferson, an aristocrat and yet a philosophical
radical, deliberately practised the arts of the politician and exhibited
oftentimes the sort of insincerity which subtle natures yield to without
loss of essential integrity. General Jackson was incapable of arts or
deceptions of any kind. He was in fact what his partisans loved to
call him, a man of the people, of the common people. Mr. Jefferson was
only a patron of the people: appealed to the rank and file, believed
in them, but shared neither their tastes nor their passions. Moreover,
the effective rank and file of the nation had changed since his day
of ascendency. Step by step, one State following another, the old
restrictions upon the suffrage, taken for granted in Jefferson’s time,
had been removed, until in almost every part of the Union the men of
the masses had become the stuff of politics. These men Jackson really
represented, albeit with a touch of the knight and chivalrous man of
honor about him which common men do not have; and the people knew it;
felt that an aristocratic order was upset, and that they themselves had
at last come to their own.
[Illustration: ROBERT FULTON]
It must have seemed so in very fact at their President’s inauguration.
Washington filled with crowds come out of every quarter of the Union.
All ceremony was overridden, all decorum cast aside. It seemed as if the
place were in the possession of a good-natured mob, bent upon no serious
mischief, but not to be restrained, not to be forbidden even the drawing
rooms of the White House or the committee rooms and chambers of the
Capitol. There was scarcely room enough in the streets for the passage
of the procession which accompanied General Jackson to the place of
inauguration. So great a crowd rushed, unbidden, into the White House,
when General Jackson came to it from the Capitol, that he was himself
forced against the wall of the reception chamber by its pressure, and
was secured against serious danger only by a number of gentlemen linking
arms and forming themselves into a barrier. Everywhere it was proclaimed
that the people had come into possession of the government; that the
domination of professional statesmen and politicians had been thrown off:
that the rank and file were the victors, and that to the victors belonged
“the spoils of the enemy.”
That was unquestionably General Jackson’s creed. Men who understood him
could play upon him. He had allowed ill-informed men who believed it,
and designing men who pretended to believe it, to persuade him that
the government had not only been monopolized but also corrupted by
the politicians and statesmen who had hitherto controlled it; and he
meant to purify it very radically. Among his advisers were men, like
Mr. Martin Van Buren, of New York, who were past-masters in the art
of party organization, and whose methods he willingly adopted for the
establishment of the national power of his followers. They were methods
which he could readily understand, and which seemed almost to fall within
his own experience. He was a frontier soldier. Staunch comradeships,
personal devotion, the close, unhesitating cohesion of friends, the
intimate co-operation of men who knew and trusted one another by reason
of joint efforts in a common affair, seemed to him the natural and proper
basis for the discipline of a party no less than for the discipline and
success of a frontier levy of volunteers. He knew and cared nothing for
the orderly promotions of a regular service.
[Illustration: FULTON’S FIRST STEAMBOAT]
The suffrage had been thrown open in New York, as elsewhere, and Mr.
Van Buren had become one of a small group of astute men there who had
supplied the new voters, crowding without concert to the polls, with
the organization they could not contrive for themselves. These “Albany
regents,” as their opponents dubbed them, had effected their propaganda
and their nominations, through local caucuses, and through conventions
composed of delegates whom the caucuses selected. The lieutenants whom
they used to assist them in organizing the caucuses, superintending the
selection and the business of the conventions, and looking after every
local detail of party action, they rewarded when they could with offices
and nominations for themselves. It was this association of men who stood
by one another and served one another as personal allies and friends that
won the admiration of General Jackson. “I am no politician,” he said;
“but if I were one, I would be a New York politician.” Pennsylvanian
politics were of the same sort: the politics of intimate personal
association. There, too, democracy on the great scale had submitted
to the same organization, the same leadership of consummate, watchful
managers. It was the new organization of democracy. General Jackson both
understood and relished it. He saw nothing immoral in the promise that
when he came into office he would reward his friends and punish his
enemies. That, on the contrary, was a fundamental first principle of
morals on the frontier. He firmly believed his friends to be the friends
also of the government,—of the government as it had been and ought to
be; his enemies, enemies of the government as well. The earnestness
and sincerity with which he believed it, the frankness with which he
avowed the belief, were interesting proofs of his conscious integrity.
With all the intensity of his nature he wished for the welfare of the
country, the advancement of the Union, the success and permanency of its
government; with all the terrible force of his will he purposed to secure
both the one and the other. No doubt he had shown contempt for law, as
Mr. Jefferson said, when he was upon the frontier, hampered by treaties
and instructions; but his ideals were not those of the law-breaker. They
were those of the ardent patriot. The peril of the country lay in the
fact that he chose to disregard precedent and to interpret all laws for
himself,—the law of the constitution no less than the law of the statute
book.
[Illustration: GENERAL ANDREW JACKSON]
And so there was almost a clean sweep of the federal offices to make
room for General Jackson’s friends, and secure proper persons to
execute General Jackson’s purposes. That the men dismissed had been
long in office he deemed an additional argument for their discharge
rather than an argument for their retention. Long terms of service he
thought undemocratic. They slackened diligence, he believed, and made
office-holders too carelessly secure. No doubt they fostered corruption,
too. He did not himself conduct the proscription; he let those whom he
trusted conduct it in his name. By the time the first Congress of his
term assembled (December 7, 1829) it was estimated that fully a thousand
federal officials had been removed, as against seventy-three at the most
in all the previous history of the government. The Senate tried to stay
the tide where it could, in its action on the nominations sent to it;
but found the President imperious, irresistible, not to be gainsaid, and
public opinion out-of-doors astonishingly ready to support and applaud
him at every turn of the contest. “We give no reasons for our removals,”
said Mr. Van Buren; and apparently the mass of the voters wanted
none. They were content to know that General Jackson was changing the
government from top to bottom. Men without parts or reputation of course
got into office, in the general scramble. There could be little choice or
deliberation in that wholesale process. The men appointed were for the
most part men who had put themselves forward. There were very few men of
any experience at all in federal administration, and many adventurers, to
be found in the ranks of the new party. “Very few reputable appointments
have been made,” Mr. Adams, the ruthless General’s predecessor in
office, set down in his journal, “and those confined to persons who were
indispensably necessary to the office.” “The appointments are exclusively
of violent partisans, and every editor of a scurrilous and slanderous
newspaper is provided for.”
It was only fair to remember that the new party drew of necessity upon
its ranks, whether for ordinary officials or for leaders. If the minor
office holders were new men, so were their chiefs also, who stood close
about the President himself. The cabinet which General Jackson chose
seemed conventional enough, indeed, for a party so recently made up. Mr.
Van Buren had left the office of Governor of New York to become Secretary
of State. He had been merely a local politician, no doubt, though he
had served a term in the Senate, and had come but the other day into
national prominence; but he was at least as well known as many another
cabinet officer before him. The other heads of Departments, though even
less generally known to the nation than he was, had played a public part
in affairs, in Congress and out of it, and had been chosen for reasons
familiar enough in politics. Major John H. Eaton, of Tennessee, was
selected to be Secretary of War, because he was a trusted personal friend
of the President’s; the Secretaries of the Treasury and of the Navy and
the Attorney General owed their places to the fact that they were the
friends of Mr. Calhoun, the Vice President, who stood at the front of
the President’s party in the South. The Postmaster General had been a
candidate for the governorship of Kentucky in the Jackson interest, and
had been defeated by a nominee of the friends of Mr. Clay.
[Illustration: CARPENTERS’ HALL, PHILADELPHIA]
What was really singular and significant was, that these gentlemen did
not, under General Jackson, form a real cabinet at all. The country
presently learned that the President did not hold cabinet meetings: that
he took counsel, when he felt in need of it, with private friends, some
of whom had no recognized post or standing in the government at all.
Chief among these were one William B. Lewis, of Tennessee, a kinsman and
neighbor of General Jackson’s, and one Amos Kendall, a Massachusetts man
now identified with Kentucky. It was Major Lewis who, more than any other
man, had first forced him into candidacy for the presidency, who had set
the stage for him at every turn of his political career, who had set
afoot, superintended, fomented, and with an infinite art and diligence
brought successfully to a head the many influences, public and private,
which were to bring him finally into office and to the leadership of
his party. General Jackson consulted and used him without in the least
realizing that he had in him a consummate master of the arts whereby
opinion is made and individual men are set forward in their ambition. He
had made Major Lewis Second Auditor of the Treasury; but Lewis was not a
man who played for himself. He played for Jackson, and loved every subtle
turn of the game: used his gifts of management like one who played for
his own hand, and yet remained a man of honor and served his friend more
than he served himself. Amos Kendall was a master of the art political,
not in action, but upon paper. He had gifts as a writer which could be
turned to account in the composition of the most serious state papers. He
caught the impressive tone of public business and mastered its calm way
of reasoning as readily as he caught the tones of partisan controversy
and spent his force in its bitter energy. He could frame a significant
innuendo or prepare an editorial for the party press that bit as deep as
anything that Tom. Paine or William Cobbett could have written. He seemed
a statesman or a mere partisan by turns; it was difficult to tell which
he was either by nature or by choice. He was perhaps each in turn; but
nothing out of the closet.
[Illustration: MARTIN VAN BUREN]
There were others of the “Kitchen Cabinet” besides: the editors of
Jacksonian newspapers; but the heart of it lay in Major Lewis and Mr.
Kendall. Mr. Van Buren and Major Eaton, of Tennessee, the Secretary of
War, were freely admitted into this inner circle; but not as members of
the cabinet, only as personal friends and confidants of the President.
And so a veritable personal government was set up, so far as the
Executive and the discipline of the Executive’s friends in Congress were
concerned; and allegiance to General Jackson became the test of fidelity
for every Democrat who wished to be admitted to the party’s counsels.
The President’s mere audacity won many men to him, for the masses of
the country loved bold individual initiative. His rugged honesty, his
sincerity, his own power of devotion, his frank friendliness, his
confiding faith in his friends won more. Towards women he showed the
gracious, deferential courtesy of the man who would be every woman’s
knight and champion. Foreign ministers who had expected to find in him
the rough frontiersman were amazed at his natural dignity and ease, the
air almost of elegance and of majesty that hung about him because of his
quiet self-respect, his grave and unaffected courtesy, and the striking
sadness and reserve of his deep-set eyes. No President since Washington
had so taken hold upon the imagination, and every month he remained in
office his ascendency became the more assured.
[Illustration: JAMES KENT]
It made a startling difference to the country. It broke the course of
all settled policy, forced every question to square itself with the
President’s standards, altered the elements of parties. The country got
its first taste of the effect to be wrought upon policy in connection
with the troublesome question of the removal of the Indians from
Georgia and Alabama to lands beyond the Mississippi. Georgia had got
rid of the Creek Indians while Mr. Adams was President. Both Creeks
and Cherokees held their Georgia lands under treaties with the United
States such as the constitution explicitly authorized the President to
negotiate; the Creeks had relied upon the treaties and steadfastly
refused to sell their lands or suffer themselves to be driven out of the
State; and Mr. Adams had sought by every means in his power to protect
them. But Congress had supported him very lukewarmly, and Georgia had
succeeded at last in extorting from the unwilling chiefs of the tribe
terms which put their people forth into the West, where Congress was
ready to provide for them. The Cherokees were not to be so cajoled or
dealt with. They mustered thirteen thousand strong; had settled to
the occupations and learned the arts of peace; boasted a system of
self-government and of orderly obedience to their own laws which seemed
to promise, not extinction or decay or any decline of their power, but
a great development and an assured permanency; and would not entertain
any proposition whatever which involved the sale or relinquishment of
the rich lands they occupied. General Jackson, however, unlike his
predecessor, thought the State ought to be rid of them. Georgia and
Alabama, therefore, relying on his countenance, extended their laws over
the Indian country in despite of treaties; the President, when Georgia
requested him to do so, withdrew the federal troops stationed there; and
the Indians were obliged to yield. “I informed the Indians inhabiting
parts of Georgia and Alabama,” the President told Congress in his first
message, “that their attempt to establish an independent government would
not be countenanced by the Executive of the United States, and advised
them to migrate beyond the Mississippi or to submit to the laws of those
States.” Life on the frontier had left him no patience to consider the
rights of red men.
[Illustration: JEREMIAH MASON]
Their rights were duly tested in the courts. Three several times was the
matter taken, on appeal, to the Supreme Court of the United States, and
each time the court decided the question submitted to it in favor of the
Indians, upholding the treaties and denying the right of any State, or
any authority whatever, to violate or ignore them. But General Jackson
would not enforce its decisions. His attitude towards the Indians was
frankly that of the frontier soldier. They had no right, in his eyes,
to stand in the way of the white man. By the time the last of the
decisions of the Supreme Court was rendered in the matter (1832) another
presidential election was at hand and he was a candidate for re-election.
He said that he would leave the question to the people,—such was his
constitutional theory of right! The constitution did indeed give the
federal Executive the authority to negotiate treaties with the Indian
tribes, and Congress the right to regulate commerce with them, as if
they were to be treated in all respects like independent bodies politic,
in no way subject to the jurisdiction of the separate States. But the
constitution also explicitly commanded that no new State should be
“formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other State” without
the express consent of the legislature of that State and of Congress;
and the Cherokees were obviously in a fair way to create a virtually
independent commonwealth within the State of Georgia should they remain.
It was a nice point of law, which General Jackson should have recognized
the right of the Supreme Court to decide. But with him his own judgment
was more conclusive, and a vote of the people the solution of all doubts.
It was significant how quick the new democracy he stood for was to take
fire against the courts and turn, by way of ultimate appeal, to the
people in all things. In Mr. Jefferson’s day also the courts had seemed
the strongholds of Federalism, and the leaders of Congress had wished to
see their judges removed at pleasure upon the address of the houses. Now
they seemed again the barriers, the only barriers, set up against the
people’s will. Many an observant eye had remarked how dramatic a thing
it was that General Jackson, like Mr. Jefferson, should take the oath of
office from John Marshall, the steadfast champion of Federalist doctrine
and of the reign of law under a constitution which was itself the supreme
law of the land. When Mr. Jefferson took office John Marshall had but
just come to his power, a man in his prime, the incoming President’s
junior by a dozen years. Now he was the new President’s senior by as
many years, though General Jackson, for all his erect and slender height,
was a gray veteran of sixty-two. The aged Chief Justice was as straight
at seventy-four as the soldier to whom he administered the oath of
office, and bore his years as well; but General Jackson stood, his years
notwithstanding, for a new age coming in, the aged judge for an old order
passing away. The fire that shone in the eyes of the old soldier burned
hot against the authority that sat upon the quiet brow of the aged lawyer.
In the very inaugural address which he uttered that day of his coming
into office the grizzled President threw out his challenge to the court,
and made bold to give it upon a matter of graver moment for the whole
country than the rights of Indian tribes even and the sacredness of
the treaties which gave them a standing in the court. He doubted, he
gave the country to understand, whether Congress had acted within its
constitutional powers in creating the Bank of the United States. That had
once, as everybody understood, been a debatable question; but the Supreme
Court had given judgment upon it in the celebrated case of _McCulloch
vs. Maryland_ (1819), in which it had explicitly affirmed the right, as
drawn by just inference from the undoubted powers of Congress; and since
then it had been deemed a question settled once for all. But General
Jackson regarded no question as settled which altered circumstances could
reopen. The twenty-year charter of the Bank was not to run out, indeed,
until 1836, a year which lay beyond his term; but a reconsideration of it
was to come. Apparently he had no intention of going now beyond a mere
preliminary expression of opinion in the matter. He simply put this
forth as a companion thought to his declaration of the conviction that
the surplus revenue of the federal government ought to be distributed
among the States, not spent for objects, like internal improvements,
which the constitution, in his opinion, gave Congress no authority to
undertake or pay for. He was merely setting forth at the outset of his
time of power, after his usual blunt, uncompromising fashion, what he
conceived to be the true democratic creed in matters of national finance.
Other more pressing matters called for first attention, and for action.
[Illustration: MODEL OF THE JOHN STEVENS LOCOMOTIVE. THE FIRST IN
AMERICA. 1825]
These initial declarations of opinion and intimations of policy on the
part of the President were eminently satisfactory to the men of the South
and West whose candidate he had been. Here were the views of strict
construction for which they had looked. In his very first message he
solemnly warned Congress “against all encroachments upon the legitimate
sphere of state sovereignty”; and conservative men, whose thought
had been formed by Mr. Jefferson, drew about him with almost as much
confidence as was shown by those who had the adventurous and aggressive
spirit of the new age at their hearts and desired change.
But when the President was put to the test by the Carolinians for whom
Mr. Calhoun had formulated the extreme doctrine of state rights, they
suddenly saw him in another light. They then saw, what they might have
seen at first, that he was of the West, not of the South. He stood, as
all other western men did, for the principle that every community must
have its own life in the free partnership it had formed, and its own
unhindered, unbidden development, unchecked by the national government:
for he believed that to be the end and object of the Union, to make the
States secure of their individual development and set them forward in
their own ways. But there was an infection of national feeling, too, upon
the stirring frontier where he had been bred which no man could escape; a
sense as of a people’s life a-making upon a continental scale; an ardor
for broad schemes and vast achievement, in bands united and backed by
the nation’s power. “The legitimate sphere of state sovereignty” did
not, when projected there upon the prairies, encroach upon the equally
legitimate sphere of the federal power. The two were inseparable parts of
a single conception. No frontiersman reasoned subtly upon them: instinct
and the spirit of conquest resolved all doubts and discountenanced all
refinements. Argument was excluded. In any case General Jackson, as
President, would have excluded it. To challenge the authority of the
federal government now was to challenge his own authority; and there
need have been no doubt what he would do in that event.
[Illustration: MODEL OF THE STOCKTON AND DARLINGTON LOCOMOTIVE. BROUGHT
FROM ENGLAND. 1826]
The issue that was to be joined and settled was first drawn to the light,
with painful vividness, by a debate in the Senate on the disposition
of the western lands. The New England men wanted the settlement of the
West held back as much as possible. So long as land was to be had there
almost for the mere asking, at no cost except that of the journey and of
a few farmer’s tools and a beast or two for the plough, the active men of
their own section, whom they counted on as skilled workmen in building
up their manufactures, must be constantly enticed away by the score and
hundred, to seek an independent life and livelihood in the West; high
wages, very high wages, must be paid to keep them, if indeed they could
be kept at all; and the maintenance of manufactures must cost more than
even protective tariffs could make good. Here was an issue between East
and West. The tariff itself was an issue between North and South, and
drew after it, when read into the question of the western lands, no less
a matter than the extension of slavery and the domination of sections in
the politics of the country. Heavy tariffs, which fostered manufactures
in the States where there were no slaves, insured growth of wealth and
population in the East and North, but left the South to stand still and
gain nothing. If her people could not go into the West and build up slave
states there to make good the altering balance of power in the Union,
they must look to see all things go steadily against them.
All these critical matters crept inevitably, as it seemed, into the
debate on the western lands; and the country was aroused by it almost as
it had been aroused ten years before by the debates on the admission of
Missouri. It turned upon a resolution to limit the sales of the western
lands which Mr. Foot, of Connecticut, introduced in the Senate late in
December, 1829. Ordinary men could not have raised it to such a climax
of interest; but the men engaged were not ordinary men. It was not Mr.
Benton’s hot protest that the men of New England should be always jealous
of the growth and prosperity of the West that caught the ear of the
country; it was the speeches of Mr. Hayne, of South Carolina, and Mr.
Webster, of Massachusetts. The debate, as they handled it, swung abroad
over the whole ground of the many closely related topics which lay upon
the borders of the immediate question it concerned. Mr. Hayne was of the
extreme school of South Carolina, and took occasion to expound at length
the doctrine of nullification which his colleagues in that school had so
lately perfected. It was out of the question, he said, that a State, when
wronged by an exercise of federal power, should leave the decision of
the matter of right entirely to the Supreme Court of the United States,
part and organ of the very government whose power was challenged. The
constitution was a compact, he maintained, the Union a free partnership;
States must stand ever upon the ground of the Kentucky and Virginia
Resolutions and effect their own protection against deliberate and
palpable excesses of power. Mr. Webster as fearlessly took the extreme
ground of the opposite view. It was this splendid audacity on either
side that quickened the pulses of all who listened, this hardy, intrepid
pushing of the issue to its last analysis,—and that issue nothing less
than the nation’s destiny.
[Illustration: DANIEL WEBSTER]
The debaters were already marked men. The Senator from South Carolina,
though not yet forty, had won his laurels as a lad in the war of 1812,
had been elected to the legislature of his State at twenty-three and made
Speaker of its House at twenty-five; made his way as much by personal
charm as by eloquence and a gift for business, had a grace and ardor in
his speech which won all men’s attention and liking, wore always the
air of a man of honor and high spirit, and used his singular powers of
persuasion with a fine force of conviction. Daniel Webster, his opponent,
had first come into Congress from New Hampshire, as the war with England
was drawing to a close (1813), and then, upon a change of residence, had
been sent first to the House (1823), finally to the Senate (1827), from
Massachusetts, and was now at forty-eight one of the most noticeable
figures of the country, an orator and constitutional lawyer whose mastery
every man acknowledged. Twice he had taken his stand, with a force of
argument it would have been difficult to enhance, against protective
tariffs; but, seeing his constituents deliberately and persistently
stake their whole economic fortune as a community upon them, he at last
had yielded, and was now the accepted champion of New England against
the violent onset of the South. He replied to Mr. Hayne that the
constitution was no compact, the Union no mere dissoluble partnership,
but a government, sovereign though not consolidated, a banded State
which nothing but revolution could dissolve, its laws to be set aside or
resisted only by acts of treason.
[Illustration: ROBERT YOUNG HAYNE]
No such charm hung about the person of Mr. Webster as that which made Mr.
Hayne so excellent an image of the courtly gentleman and the persuasive
orator. Alike in person and in utterance, Mr. Webster was compact, not
of grace, but of force. Mr. Hayne’s sentences rode high, upon rhetoric
that sought often an adventurous flight; Mr. Webster used words as if he
meant only to clarify and strengthen the thoughts he touched and cared
nothing for cadence or ornament. And yet he spread them in ranks so fair
that they caught and held the eye like a pageant. Beauty came upon them
as they moved as if out of the mere passion of the thought rather than by
the design of the orator. And he himself gave to the eye, as he stood, in
his own person the same image of clean-cut strength, beautiful only by
reason of its perfect action, so square was he, massive, and indomitable,
and with a head and face whose mass, whose calm breadth above the
deep-set, slumbrous eyes, seemed the fittest possible throne for the
powers he displayed. There was imagination wrought into all that he said,
but not the imagination of the rhetorician. Mr. Hayne’s speech seemed to
those who heard it worthy of the great reply it had called forth; but the
country did not read it as it read what Mr. Webster had said. That was
everywhere printed and read; and as the slow mails carried it forth it
was as if the national spirit had suddenly been cried wide awake by its
thrilling sentences. It was not the mere reasoner who won this triumph:
reason was here touched with fire. The imagination of every man who could
see the vision of a people united, indivisible, bound in sacred concord,
was taken captive by these sonorous periods; the conviction of every man
who saw the task and destiny of the nation as a whole was confirmed and
heartened and made glad. There was magic in the printed words, as there
was magic in the thrilling voice and the magnificent presence of the
man himself, in his massive stature and Olympian head, and in his eyes,
burning dark with steady fire within their deep covert.
There was no such magic in Mr. Hayne’s speech: only the force of argument
and of an able, clear-thinking man in earnest. Mr. Webster had taken new
ground. The men of the first generation of federal statesmen had not
spoken thus of the constitution, at whose conception and establishment
they had been present. They had admitted that it was an experiment,
though they had hastened at once to push it, if they could, beyond its
experimental stage. No man had attributed treason to the authors of
the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, whose language Mr. Calhoun and
Mr. Hayne now revived. Every man who felt the power and the hope that
were in the spirit of nationality as the men of the West did, as the
constructive statesmen did who had stood with Washington and Hamilton
in their generation, and with the young war enthusiasts who cried bravo
to Mr. Madison in the war with England in theirs, protested very hotly
when New England men talked of disunion, first because of the purchase
of Louisiana, and then because of the embargo. But they protested, not
as against rebellion; they protested as against mad folly, rather, and
narrow selfishness: as against those who would mar a great history to
push a sectional interest. Not until a whole generation had gone by from
the making of the government did this new doctrine of nationality which
Mr. Webster so eloquently and convincingly preached get its currency:
this doctrine of a national existence based, not upon sentiment and
agreement, but upon an imperative fundamental law.
[Illustration: TERRITORIAL ACQUISITIONS OF THE UNITED STATES, 1783-1853
BORMAY & CO., N. Y.]
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF SPEECH OF DANIEL WEBSTER]
Here again, as in the broadening of the suffrage and the coming in of the
day of pure democracy which had brought General Jackson to the saddle
with its dawn, the subtle force of national expansion moved and brooded
upon the face of all things. The vast spread and movements of a people,
the growth and interlacings of industry, the springing up of States come
from the loins of the Union itself, all the visible increase of peaceful
empire bred this spirit as of a nation,—no longer merely confederated,
a nation knit and united for a common history of achievement. General
Jackson, coming from the frontier, where this mighty force of nationality
was visibly afoot, seemed to embody the new spirit of power in his rough,
imperious sense of a right, as President, to override and command. Mr.
Webster, though no friend of Jackson’s, clothed what was in effect the
same conception in terms of statesmanship and law. Under his touch
the constitution seemed to partake of the growth which it had only
engendered. It was of necessity, as he read it, no mere document, but a
vehicle of life. Its sanctions could be made to cover every change that
added to the unity or the greatness of the nation. Its quiet phrases
could always be heard to speak the spirit of the times.
[Illustration: THE DE WITT CLINTON TRAIN WHICH RAN IN 1830 BETWEEN ALBANY
AND SCHENECTADY
Copyright, 1893, by A. P. Yates.]
But what of those parts of the nation which had kept to the old models
of federal life, which did not change, and would accept no law but that
which read as it had always read since they were nurtured? The South
had had little part or lot in the transformations of the new age. Her
life was unaltered from of old. She lived and thought as she had always
lived and thought. The Union was still the same to her that it had been
to all the States alike in that first generation whose life and thought
she kept. There had been no amendment of the fundamental law. Could the
law change because men’s thoughts had changed and their interests? No
doubt, in her reaction against what she saw afoot, she stiffened the old
doctrines and exaggerated them. Mr. Madison, who had drafted the Virginia
Resolutions of ’98, rejected very warmly the nullification doctrines of
Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Hayne, not a little stirred and agitated in his quiet
retirement at Montpellier by this new threat of disunion. Any doctrine
would have worn a look of heightened rigor stated in Mr. Calhoun’s clear,
uncompromising way, and probably no man of the elder generation, had he
been willing to formulate it at all, would have stated it so absolutely.
The exigency and the sudden passion of opposition had given it this sharp
and novel phrase. Mr. Webster, with characteristic genius, had met it
with its opposite, as sharp and uncompromising, the ideal for which the
men of the constitutional convention had prayed and which since their day
had sprung into life while no man observed.
[Illustration: DANIEL WEBSTER]
The times seemed to bring all things to an issue. No doctrine which
touched practice so nearly could very long remain a thing of theory
while General Jackson was on the field of action, and the advocates of
nullification were of no mind to stop with the debate on the western
lands. On April 13, 1830, the leading Democrats at Washington celebrated
Mr. Jefferson’s birthday by a formal banquet, to which the President was
bidden. They took their cue from Mr. Calhoun and the southerners, and the
toasts they gave smacked shrewdly of nullification. When the President
saw their drift he got to his feet and bluntly proposed this sentiment
as his own: “Our federal Union: it _must_ be preserved.” “Liberty, dearer
than the Union,” cried the Vice President, in retort; but retort only
hardened the President’s temper; and Mr. Calhoun presently proved the
least likely person in the country to be able to soften it. The very
month that followed that memorable banquet General Jackson learned for
the first time that Mr. Calhoun, who had been Secretary of War during his
campaign against the Seminoles in 1818, had emphatically condemned his
unauthorized capture of Pensacola as a wanton act of war against Spain,
and had demanded an official investigation of it, with a view to its
repudiation. Hitherto he had deemed Mr. Calhoun his friend; now he deemed
him basely deceitful for having played his friend after such conduct in
cabinet against him. He could not separate official action in such a
matter from personal enmity; and no explanation that Mr. Calhoun could
make did more than increase his bitter anger. He turned from all who
followed or consorted with the South Carolinian.
[Illustration: BELL’S STEAMBOAT COMET, 1812]
Before another year was out he had reconstructed his cabinet, to
purge it of Mr. Calhoun’s friends, to constitute it of men really in
his confidence; partly also to discipline those members of the first
cabinet who had failed to satisfy him in a social quarrel. The ladies
of the cabinet circle refused recognition to Mrs. Eaton, the wife of
the Secretary of War, deeming her reputation not unimpeachable. General
Jackson believed her innocent of their charges,—was ready, indeed, to
believe any woman innocent, as his own wife had been, against whom cruel
things had been said unjustly; and was glad to show his resentment
against Mrs. Eaton’s enemies by putting the men forth from his counsels
whose wives had slighted her against his wishes.
The breach between the President and Mr. Calhoun was a serious sign of
the times. It not only embittered the President, it also cut all party
ties for Mr. Calhoun, and set him free to work out as he pleased the
opposition of his State to the burdensome tariff of 1828. It also made
Mr. Calhoun’s theories of nullification seem all the blacker, all the
more like treason, to the unforgiving old soldier, sure always of being
and of having been in the right. It freed Mr. Calhoun and his friends
from entangling alliances. They moved the straighter towards their
goal,—the vindication of the rights of the “staple States” against the
policy of federal tariffs. The hopes of 1828 had been dissipated and
the clash of sectional parties was at hand. In 1832 Congress, willing
to divert the rising storm by moderate concessions, passed a new tariff
Act, substituting for the “abominations” of 1828 a schedule of duties
substantially the same as those of 1824. But the new measure, like
the old, yielded nothing of the principle of protection, and the South
Carolinian leaders were in a humor now to contest the principle itself
and have done with it.
The year 1832 brought the season in which choice was once more to be
made of a President, and other matters waited a little until the choice
should be certainly known. A novel variety was lent to the field of
contest by the entrance of a new party. In 1826 one William Morgan, of
northwestern New York, had advertised a book which should make known
the secrets of Freemasonry, and had been kidnapped and was never seen
again. Popular indignation had fixed upon the society of Freemasons
itself as responsible for the crime, and an anti-Masonic party had
sprung up whose object it was to keep Freemasons out of places of public
trust. It had spread with surprising stir and persistency from State
to State, and in September, 1831, it summoned a national convention of
its partisans to display its strength and name candidates of its own
for the presidency and vice presidency. The regular parties followed
its cue. They also chose delegates out of the several States to meet in
nominating conventions and put their candidates in the field by formal
vote. The National Republicans nominated Mr. Clay, now leader of the
Senate and unquestioned leader of the party. The Democrats nominated
General Jackson, as of course, for a second term, and with him, for Vice
President, not Mr. Calhoun, but his own chosen lieutenant, Mr. Martin Van
Buren. The vote of the electors was decisive, as before. But six States
voted for Mr. Clay (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware,
Maryland, and Kentucky); seventeen voted for General Jackson. Vermont
gave her votes to the candidates of the Anti-Masons. The electors of
South Carolina, chosen as always by the legislature, held punctiliously
off from all parties and voted for candidates of their own.
[Illustration: FREIGHT AND PASSENGER CARS, 1848]
The election over, General Jackson once more chosen, her party ties
broken, her principles of opposition still unsanctioned and untested,
South Carolina proceeded with her radical programme of redress. On the
24th of November (1832) a state convention, summoned for the purpose
and formed upon the model of a constitutional convention, adopted and
promulgated a formal Ordinance of Nullification, which declared the
tariff Acts of 1828 and 1832 null and void and without force of law
within the jurisdiction of South Carolina, and gave solemn warning to
the rest of the country that any attempt on the part of the federal
government to enforce the nullified laws within her limits would sever
South Carolina’s connection with the Union and force her to organize
a separate government. The legislature of the State immediately took
steps looking towards a resumption of some of the powers before formally
surrendered to the Union, and provided for putting the State in
readiness to resist coercion by force of arms. Mr. Hayne was recalled
from Washington to become governor of the State; and Mr. Calhoun resigned
the vice presidency to take his place upon the floor of the Senate, that
he might there contest every inch of the ground in debate.
The President acted as every one who really knew him knew that he would
act. Opposition itself would in any case have been sufficient incitement
to action; but now the tonic of the election was in his veins. The
natural, straightforward, unhesitating vigor of the man dictated what
should be done. “Please give my compliments to my friends in your State,”
said the imperious old soldier to a member of the House from South
Carolina who asked his commands, “and say to them that if a single drop
of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United
States, I will hang the first man I lay my hand on engaged in such
treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.” No one doubted
that he meant what he said. Before South Carolina’s convention met he had
instructed the collector of the port of Charleston to collect the duties,
resistance or no resistance; and when the Ordinance of Nullification
reached him he replied to it with a proclamation whose downright terms no
man could misread. For a little space he argued; but only for a little.
For the most part he commanded. “The laws of the United States,” he said,
“must be executed. I have no discretionary power on the subject,—my duty
is emphatically pronounced in the constitution. Those who told you that
you might peacefully prevent their execution deceived you.... Their
object is disunion, and disunion by armed force is treason.” It was
the doctrine of Webster in the mouth of a soldier. Congress voted the
President full power to deal with the crisis as circumstances should
demand.
[Illustration: THE FIRST CAPITOL OF TEXAS]
Even then South Carolina did not flinch or draw back; but men who loved
peace pressed forward on both sides to effect a compromise. Mr. Clay
planned and urged measures of accommodation with all the skill and
ardor and persuasiveness which made him so great a master of men, and
the tariff which was a thorn in South Carolina’s side, though not in
principle abandoned, was radically modified. A schedule of progressive
annual reductions was agreed upon (March, 1833) which should by July,
1842, bring practically all duties to the uniform rate of twenty _per
cent._ The Ordinance of Nullification was first suspended, then repealed;
and the conflict between the States and the Union was for a little while
put off.
The principal general _authorities_ for the interesting events
covered by this chapter are the second volume of Schouler,
the first and second volumes of Von Holst, the fourth volume
of Tucker, the fourth volume of Bryant and Gay; A. W. Young’s
_The American Statesman_; R. McK. Ormsby’s _History of the
Whig Party_; Edward Stanwood’s _History of the Presidency_;
Alexander Johnston’s _History of American Politics_; James
Parton’s _Life of Andrew Jackson_; William G. Sumner’s
_Andrew Jackson_ in the _American Statesmen Series_; Edward
M. Shepard’s _Martin Van Buren_, in the same series; Carl
Schurz’s _Henry Clay_, in the same series; Calvin Colton’s
_Life and Times of Henry Clay_; George Ticknor Curtis’s
_Life of Daniel Webster_ and _Life of James Buchanan_; John
T. Morse’s _John Quincy Adams_ and _Abraham Lincoln_ in the
_American Statesmen Series_; and Anson D. Morse’s _Political
Influence of Andrew Jackson_ in the first volume of _The
Political Science Quarterly_. With these are to be placed, as
general authorities for this, that, or the other special phase
or aspect of the time and its affairs, Jabez D. Hammond’s
_History of Political Parties in the State of New York_;
Arthur Holmes’s _Parties and their Principles_; Byrdsall’s
_History of the Loco Foco, or Equal Rights, Party_; John
McGregor’s _Progress of America_; F. W. Taussig’s _History of
the Tariff_; Henry A. Wise’s _Seven Decades of the Union_;
Alexander H. Stephens’s _Constitutional View of the War Between
the States_; the admirable articles on the several topics of
American history during these years by Alexander Johnston in
Lalor’s _Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy,
and United States History_; D. F. Houston’s _Critical Study
of Nullification in South Carolina_ (the third volume of the
_Harvard Historical Studies_); Frederick Law Olmsted’s _Cotton
Kingdom_; the second volume of W. W. Story’s _Life of Joseph
Story_; Henry C. Lodge’s _Daniel Webster_, H. Von Holst’s _John
C. Calhoun_, Theodore Roosevelt’s _Thomas H. Benton_, and A. C.
McLaughlin’s _Lewis Cass_ in the _American Statesmen Series_;
James Bryce’s _Predictions of Hamilton and De Tocqueville_ in
the fifth volume of the _Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical
and Political Science_; Lucy M. Salmon’s _History of the
Appointing Power_; and E. C. Mason’s _Veto Power_ (first volume
of the _Harvard Historical Studies_).
The chief _sources_ are the _Register of Debates_ and
_Congressional Documents_; _The Congressional Globe_, which
begins with these years; Thomas H. Benton’s _Abridgment of
the Debates of Congress_; _The Statesman’s Manual_, vol.
II.; _Niles’s Register_, volumes XXXV.-XLIV.; the _Tenth
Census, Population_; the first volume of Alexander Johnston’s
_Representative American Orations_; F. W. Taussig’s _State
Papers and Speeches on the Tariff_; the _American State
Papers_; Josiah Quincy’s _Figures of the Past_; George Tucker’s
_Progress of the United States in Fifty Years_; John Trumbull’s
_Autobiography_; Amos Kendall’s _Autobiography_; Alexis
de Tocqueville’s _Democracy in America_; S. G. Goodrich’s
_Recollections of a Lifetime_; Hugh McCulloch’s _Men and
Measures of Half a Century_; Nathan Sargent’s _Public Men
and Events_; John Quincy Adams’s _Memoirs_; J. A. Hamilton’s
_Reminiscences; Men and Events at Home and Abroad_; Thomas H.
Benton’s _Thirty Years’ View_; Ben. Perley Poore’s _Perley’s
Reminiscences_; Mrs. Chapman Coleman’s _Life of John J.
Crittenden_; Basil Hall’s _Travels in North America in the
Years 1827 and 1828_; John Finch’s _Travels in the United
States and Canada_ (1833); Mrs. Trollope’s _Domestic Manners
of the Americans_; Michael Chevalier’s _Society, Manners, and
Politics in the United States_ (1834-1835); Harriet Martineau’s
_Society in America_ (1834-1836); Seba Smith’s _Letters of
Major Jack Downing_ (satirical); Martin Van Buren’s _Inquiry
into the Origin and Growth of Political Parties in the United
States_; General Court of Massachusetts, _State Papers on
Nullification_; the _Letters_, _Speeches_, and _Works_ of the
leading public men of the day.