(1767-1845)
[Footnote 11: Reprinted from Harper's Magazine by permission.
Copyright, 1884, by Harper & Bros.]
[Illustration: Andrew Jackson. [TN]]
Dr. Von Holst, the most philosophic of historians, when he passes from
the period of John Quincy Adams to that of his successor, is reluctantly
compelled to leave the realm of pure history for that of biography, and
to entitle a chapter "The Reign of Andrew Jackson." This change of
treatment could, indeed, hardly be helped. Under Adams all was
impersonal, methodical, a government of laws and not of men. With an
individuality quite as strong as that of Jackson--as the whole nation
learned ere his life ended--it had yet been the training of his earlier
career to suppress himself, and be simply a perfect official. His policy
aided the vast progress of the nation, but won no credit by the process.
Men saw with wonder the westward march of an expanding people, but
forgot to notice the sedate, passionless, orderly administration that
held the door open and kept the peace for all. In studying the time of
Adams, we think of the nation; in observing that of Jackson, we think of
Jackson himself. In him we see the first popular favorite of a nation
now well out of leading-strings, and particularly bent on going alone.
By so much as he differed from Adams, by so much the people liked him
better. His conquests had been those of war, always more dazzling than
those of peace; his temperament was of fire, always more attractive than
one of marble. He was helped by what he had done, and by what he had not
done. Even his absence of diplomatic training was almost counted for a
virtue, because all this training was necessarily European, and the
demand had ripened for a purely American product.
It had been quite essential to the self-respect of the new republic, at
the outset, that it should have at its head men who had coped with
European statesmen on their own soil and not been discomfited. This was
the case with each of the early successors of Washington, and in view of
his manifest superiority this advantage was not needed. Perhaps it was
in a different way a sign of self-respect that the new republic should
at last turn from this tradition, and take boldly from the ranks a
strong and ill-trained leader, to whom all European precedent--and,
indeed, all other precedent, counted for nothing. In Jackson, moreover,
there first appeared upon our national stage the since familiar figure
of the self-made man. Other presidents had sprung from a modest origin,
but nobody had made an especial point of it. Nobody had urged Washington
for office because he had been a surveyor's lad; nobody had voted for
Adams because stately old ladies designated him as "that cobbler's son."
But when Jackson came into office the people had just had almost a
surfeit of regular training in their chief magistrates. There was a
certain zest in the thought of a change, and the nation certainly had
it.
It must be remembered that Jackson was in many ways far above the
successive modern imitators who have posed in his image. He was narrow,
ignorant, violent, unreasonable; he punished his enemies and rewarded
his friends. But he was, on the other hand--and his worst opponents
hardly denied it--chaste, honest, truthful, and sincere. It was not
commonly charged upon him that he enriched himself at the public
expense, or that he deliberately invented falsehoods. And as he was for
a time more bitterly hated than anyone who ever occupied his high
office, we may be very sure that these things would have been charged
had it been possible. In this respect the contrast was enormous between
Jackson and his imitators, and it explains his prolonged influence. He
never was found out or exposed before the world, because there was
nothing to detect or unveil; his merits and demerits were as visible as
his long, narrow, firmly set features, or as the old military stock that
encircled his neck. There he was, always fully revealed; everybody could
see him; the people might take him or leave him--and they never left
him.
Moreover, there was, after the eight years of Monroe and the four years
of Adams, an immense popular demand for something piquant and even
amusing, and this quality they always had from Jackson. There was
nothing in the least melodramatic about him; he never posed or
attitudinized--it would have required too much patience; but he was
always piquant. There was formerly a good deal of discussion as to who
wrote the once famous "Jack Downing's" letters, but we might almost say
that they wrote themselves. Nobody was ever less of a humorist than
Andrew Jackson, and it was therefore the more essential that he should
be the cause of humor in others. It was simply inevitable that during
his progresses through the country there should be some amusing shadow
evoked, some Yankee parody of the man, such as came from two or three
quarters under the name of Jack Downing. The various records of Monroe's
famous tours are as tame as the speeches which these expeditions brought
forth, and John Quincy Adams never made any popular demonstrations to
chronicle; but wherever Jackson went there went the other Jack, the
crude first-fruits of what is now known through the world as "American
humor." Jack Downing was Mark Twain and Hosea Biglow and Artemus Ward in
one. The impetuous President enraged many and delighted many, but it is
something to know that under him a serious people first found that it
knew how to laugh.
The very extreme, the perfectly needless extreme, of political
foreboding that marked the advent of Jackson furnished a background of
lurid solemnity for all this light comedy. Samuel Breck records in his
diary that he conversed with Daniel Webster in Philadelphia, March 24,
1827, upon the prospects of the government. "Sir," said Mr. Webster, "if
General Jackson is elected, the government of our country will be
overthrown; the judiciary will be destroyed; Mr. Justice Johnson will be
made Chief-Justice in the room of Mr. Marshall, who must soon retire,
and then in half an hour Mr. Joseph Washington and Mr. Justice Story
will resign. A majority will be left with Mr. Johnson, and every
constitutional decision hitherto made will be reversed." As a matter of
fact, none of these results followed. Mr. Justice Johnson never became
Chief-Justice; Mr. Marshall retained that office till his death in 1835;
Story and Washington also died in office; the judiciary was not
overthrown, nor the government destroyed. But the very ecstasy of these
fears stimulated the excitement of the public mind. No matter how
extravagant the supporters of Jackson might be, they could hardly go
farther in that direction than did the Websters in the other.
But it was not the fault of the Jackson party if anybody went beyond
them in exaggeration. An English traveller, William E. Alexander, going
in a stage-coach from Baltimore to Washington in 1831, records the
exuberant conversation of six editors, with whom he was shut up for
hours. "The gentlemen of the press," he says, "talked of 'going the
whole hog' for one another, of being 'up to the hub' (nave) for General
Jackson, 'who was all brimstone but the head, and that was aqua-fortis,'
and swore if anyone abused him he ought to be 'set straddle on an
iceberg, and shot through with a streak of lightning.'" Somewhere
between the dignified despair of Daniel Webster, and the adulatory slang
of these gentry we must look for the actual truth about Jackson's
administration. The fears of the statesman were not wholly groundless,
for it is always hard to count in advance upon the tendency of high
office to make men more reasonable. The enthusiasm of the editors had a
certain foundation; at any rate it was a part of their profession to
like stirring times, and they had now the promise of them. After four
years of Adams, preceded by eight years of Monroe, any party of editors
in America, assembled in a stage-coach, would have showered epithets of
endearment on the man who gave such promise in the way of lively items.
No acute journalist could help seeing that a man had a career before him
who was called "Old Hickory" by three-quarters of the nation, and who
made "Hurrah for Jackson!" a cry so potent that it had the force of a
popular decree.
There was, indeed, unbounded room for popular enthusiasm in the review
of Jackson's early career. Born in such obscurity that it is doubtful to
this day whether he was born in South Carolina, as he himself claimed,
or on the North Carolina side of the line, as Mr. Parton thinks, he had
a childhood of poverty and ignorance. He was taken prisoner as a mere
boy during the Revolution, and could never forget that he had been
wounded by a British officer whose boots he had refused to brush.
Afterward, in a frontier community, he was successively farmer,
shopkeeper, law-student, lawyer, district attorney, judge, and
Congressman, being first Representative from Tennessee, and then
Senator, and all before the age of thirty-one. In Congress Albert
Gallatin describes him "as a tall, lank, uncouth-looking personage, with
long locks of hair hanging over his brows and face, and a queue down his
back tied in an eel-skin; his dress singular, his manners and deportment
those of a backwoodsman." He remained, however, but a year or two in all
at Philadelphia--then the seat of national government--and afterward
became a planter in Tennessee, fought duels, subdued Tecumseh and the
Creek Indians, winning finally the great opportunity of his life by
being made a Major-General in the United States army on May 31, 1814. He
now had his old captors, the British, with whom to deal, and entered
into the work with a relish. By way of preliminary he took Pensacola,
without any definite authority, from the Spaniards, to whom it belonged,
and the English whom they harbored; and then turned, without orders,
without support, and without supplies, to undertake the defence of New
Orleans.
Important as was this city, and plain as it was that the British
threatened it, the national authorities had done nothing to defend it.
The impression prevailed at Washington that it must already have been
taken, but that the President would not let it be known. The _Washington
Republican_ of January 17, 1815, said, "That Mr. Madison will find it
convenient and will finally determine to abandon the State of Louisiana
we have not a doubt." A New York newspaper of January 30th, quoted in
Mr. Andrew Stevenson's eulogy on Jackson, said, "It is a general opinion
here that the city of New Orleans must fall." Apparently but one thing
averted its fall--the energy and will of Andrew Jackson. On his own
responsibility he declared martial law, impressed soldiers, seized
powder and supplies, built fortifications of cotton bales, if nothing
else came to hand. When the news of the battle of New Orleans came to
the seat of government it was almost too bewildering for belief. The
British veterans of the Peninsular War, whose march wherever they had
landed had heretofore seemed a holiday parade, were repulsed in a
manner so astounding that their loss was more than two thousand, while
that of the Americans was but thirteen. By a single stroke the national
self-respect was restored; and Henry Clay, at Paris, said "Now I can go
to England without mortification."
All these things must be taken into account in estimating what Dr. Von
Holst calls "the reign of Andrew Jackson." After this climax of military
success he was for a time employed on frontier service, again went to
Florida to fight Englishmen and Spaniards, practically conquering that
region in a few months, but this time with an overwhelming force.
Already his impetuosity had proved to have a troublesome side to it; he
had violated neutral territory, had hung two Indians without
justification, and had put to death, with no authority, two Englishmen,
Ambrister and Arbuthnot. These irregularities did not harm him in the
judgment of his admirers; they seemed in the line of his character and
helped more than they hurt him. In the winter of 1823-24 he was again
chosen a Senator from Tennessee. Thenceforth he was in the field as a
candidate for the Presidency, with two things to aid him--his own
immense popularity and a friend. This friend was one William B. Lewis, a
man in whom all the skilful arts of the modern wire-puller seemed to be
born full-grown.
There was at that time (1824) no real division in parties. The
Federalists had been effectually put down, and every man who aspired to
office claimed to be Democratic-Republican. Nominations were irregularly
made, sometimes by a Congressional caucus, sometimes by State
legislatures. Tennessee, and afterward Pennsylvania, nominated Jackson.
When it came to the vote, he proved to be by all odds the popular
candidate. Professor W. G. Sumner, counting up the votes of the people,
finds 155,800 votes for Jackson, 105,300 for Adams, 44,200 for Crawford,
46,000 for Clay. Even with this strong popular vote before it, the House
of Representatives, balloting by States, elected on the first trial John
Quincy Adams. Seldom in our history has the cup of power come so near to
the lips of a candidate and been dashed away again. Yet nothing is surer
in a republic than a certain swing of the pendulum afterward, in favor
of any candidate to whom a special injustice has been done, and in the
case of a popular favorite like Jackson, this might have been foreseen
to be irresistible. His election four years later was almost a foregone
conclusion, but, as if to make it wholly sure, there came up the rumor
of a "corrupt bargain" between the successful candidate and Mr. Clay,
whose forces had indeed joined with those of Mr. Adams to make a
majority. For General Jackson there could be nothing more fortunate. The
mere ghost of a corrupt bargain is worth many thousand votes to the
lucky man who conjures up the ghost.
When it came the turn of the Adams party to be defeated, in 1828, they
attributed this result partly to the depravity of the human heart,
partly to the tricks of Jackson, and partly to the unfortunate
temperament of Mr. Adams. The day after a candidate is beaten everybody
knows why it was, and says it was just what anyone might have foreseen.
Ezekiel Webster, writing from New Hampshire, laid the result chiefly on
the candidate, whom everybody disliked, and who would persist in
leaving his bitter opponents in office. The people, he said, "always
supported his cause from a cold sense of duty, and not from any liking
of the man. We soon satisfy ourselves," he added, "that we have
discharged our duty to the cause of any man when we do not entertain for
him one personal kind feeling, nor cannot, unless we disembowel
ourselves, like a trussed turkey, of all that is human within us." There
is, indeed, no doubt that Mr. Adams helped on his own defeat, both by
his defects and by what would now be considered his virtues. The
trouble, however, lay further back. Ezekiel Webster thought that "if
there had been at the head of affairs a man of popular character like
Mr. Clay, or any man whom we were not compelled by our natures,
instinct, and fixed fate to dislike, the result would have been
different." But we can now see that all this would really have made no
difference at all. Had Mr. Adams been personally the most attractive of
men, instead of being a conscientious iceberg, the same result would
have followed, the people would have felt that Jackson's turn had come,
and the demand for the "old ticket" would have been irresistible.
Accordingly, the next election, that of 1828, was easily settled.
Jackson had 178 electoral votes; Adams but 83--more than two to one.
Adams had not an electoral vote south of the Potomac or west of the
Alleghanies, though Daniel Webster, writing to Jeremiah Mason, had
predicted that he would carry six Western and Southern States. In
Georgia no Adams ticket was even nominated, he being there unpopular for
one of his best acts--the protection of the Cherokees. On the other
hand, but one Jackson elector was chosen from New England, and he by
less than two hundred majority.
* * * * *
On the day of his inauguration the president was received in Washington
with an ardor that might have turned a more modest head. On the day when
the new administration began (March 4, 1829), Daniel Webster wrote to
his sister-in-law, with whom he had left his children that winter:
"To-day we have had the inauguration. A monstrous crowd of people is in
the city. I never saw anything like it before. Persons have come five
hundred miles to see General Jackson, and they really seem to think that
the country is rescued from some frightful danger." It is difficult now
to see what this peril was supposed to be; but we know that the charges
of monarchical tendency made against John Adams had been renewed against
his son--a renewal that seems absurd in case of a man so scrupulously
republican that he would not use a seal ring, and so unambitious that he
always sighed after the quieter walks of literature. Equally absurd was
the charge of extravagance against a man who kept the White House in
better order than his predecessors on less than half the
appropriation--an economy wholly counterbalanced in some minds by the
fact that he had put in a billiard-table. But however all this may have
been, the fact is certain that no president had yet entered the White
House amid such choruses of delight; nor did it happen again until
Jackson's pupil, Van Buren, yielded, amid equal popular enthusiasm, to
another military hero, Harrison.
For the social life of Washington the President had one advantage which
was altogether unexpected, and seemed difficult of explanation by
anything in his earlier career. He had at his command the most courteous
and agreeable manners. Even before the election of Adams, Daniel Webster
had written to his brother: "General Jackson's manners are better than
those of any of the candidates. He is grave, mild, and reserved. My wife
is for him decidedly." And long after, when the president was to pass in
review before those who were perhaps his most implacable opponents, the
ladies of Boston, we have the testimony of the late Josiah Quincy, in
his "Figures from the Past," that the personal bearing of this obnoxious
official was most unwillingly approved. Mr. Quincy was detailed by
Governor Lincoln, on whose military staff he was, to attend President
Jackson everywhere when visiting Boston in 1833; and this narrator
testifies that, with every prejudice against Jackson, he found him
essentially "a knightly personage--prejudiced, narrow, mistaken on many
points, it might be, but vigorously a gentleman in his high sense of
honor, and in the natural, straightforward courtesies which are easily
distinguished from the veneer of policy." Sitting erect on his horse, a
thin, stiff type of military strength, he carried with him in the
streets a bearing of such dignity that staid old Bostonians, who had
refused even to look upon him from their windows, would finally be
coaxed into taking one peep, and would then hurriedly bring forward
their little daughters to wave their handkerchiefs. He wrought, Mr.
Quincy declares, "a mysterious charm upon old and young;" showed,
although in feeble health, a great consideration for others; and was in
private a really agreeable companion. It appears from these
reminiscences that the president was not merely the cause of wit in
others, but now and then appreciated it himself, and that he used to
listen with delight to the reading of the "Jack Downing" letters,
laughing heartily sometimes, and declaring: "The Vice-President must
have written that. Depend upon it Jack Downing is only Van Buren in
masquerade." It is a curious fact that the satirist is already the
better remembered of the two, although Van Buren was in his day so
powerful as to preside over the official patronage of the nation and to
be called the "Little Magician."
* * * * *
The two acts with which the administration of President Jackson will be
longest identified are his dealings with South Carolina in respect to
nullification, and his long warfare with the United States Bank. The
first brought the New England States back to him, and the second took
them away again. He perhaps won rather more applause than he merited by
the one act, and more condemnation than was just for the other. Let us
first consider the matter of nullification. When various Southern
States--Georgia at first, not South Carolina, taking the lead--had
quarrelled with the tariff of 1828, and openly threatened to set it
aside, they evidently hoped for the co-operation of the President; or at
least for that silent acquiescence he had shown when Georgia had been
almost equally turbulent on the Indian question and he would not
interfere, as his predecessor had done, to protect the treaty rights of
the Indian tribes. The whole South was therefore startled when he gave,
at a banquet on Jefferson's birthday (April 13, 1830), a toast that now
seems commonplace--"The Federal Union; it must be preserved." But this
was not all; when the time came he took vigorous, if not altogether
consistent, steps to preserve it.
When, in November, 1832, South Carolina for the first time officially
voted that certain tariff acts were null and void in that State, the
gauntlet of defiance was fairly thrown down, and Jackson took it up. He
sent General Scott to take command at Charleston, with troops near by,
and two gunboats at hand; he issued a dignified proclamation, written by
Livingston (December 10, 1832), which pronounced the act of South
Carolina contradictory to the Constitution, unauthorized by it, and
destructive of its aims. So far so good; but unfortunately the president
had, the week before (December 4, 1832), sent a tariff message to
Congress, of which John Quincy Adams wrote, "It goes far to dissolve the
Union into its original elements, and is in substance a complete
surrender into the hands of the nullifiers of South Carolina." Then came
Mr. Clay's compromise tariff of 1833, following in part the line
indicated by this message, and achieving, as Mr. Calhoun said, a victory
for nullification, leaving the matter a drawn game at any rate.
The action of Jackson thus accompanied settled nothing; it was like
valiantly ordering a burglar out of your house with a pistol, and adding
a suggestion that he will find a portion of the family silver on the
hall-table, ready packed for his use, as he goes out.
Nevertheless, the burglar was gone for the moment, and the president had
the credit of it. He had already been re-elected by an overwhelming
majority in November, 1832, receiving 219 electoral votes, and Clay 49,
while Floyd had the 11 votes of South Carolina (which still chose
electors by its Legislature--a practice now abandoned), and Wirt the 7
of Vermont. Van Buren was chosen vice-president, being nominated in
place of Calhoun by the Democratic National Convention, which now for
the first time came into operation. The president was now at his
high-water mark of popularity--always a dangerous time for a public man.
His vehement nature accepted his re-election as a proof that he was
right in everything, and he grew more self-confident than ever. More
imperiously than ever, he ordered about friends and opponents, and his
friends repaid it by guiding his affairs, unconsciously to himself.
Meantime he was encountering another enemy of greater power, because
more silent, than Southern nullification, and he was drifting on to his
final contest with the United States Bank.
Sydney Smith says that every Englishman feels himself able, without
instruction, to drive a pony-chaise, conduct a small farm, and edit a
newspaper. The average American assumes, in addition to all this, that
he is competent to manage a bank. President Jackson claimed for himself
in this respect no more than his fellows; the difference was in strength
of will and in possession of power. A man so ignorant that a member of
his own family, according to Mr. Trist, used to say that the general did
not believe the world was round, might easily convince himself that he
knew all about banking. As he had, besides all this, very keen
observation and great intuitive judgment of character, he was probably
right in his point of attack. There is little doubt that the Bank of the
United States, under Nicholas Biddle, concentrated in itself an enormous
power; and it spent in four years, by confession of its directors,
$58,000 in what they called self-defence "against politicians." When on
July 10, 1832, General Jackson, in a message supposed to have been
inspired by Amos Kendall, vetoed the bill renewing the charter of the
bank, he performed an act of courage, taking counsel with his instincts.
But when in the year following he performed the act known as the
"Removal of the Deposits," or, in other words, caused the public money
to be no longer deposited in the National Bank and its twenty-five
branches, but in a variety of State banks instead, then he took counsel
of his ignorance.
The consequence, immediate or remote, was an immense galvanizing into
existence of State banks, and ultimately a vast increase of paper money.
The Sub-Treasury system had not then been thought of; there was no
proper place of deposit for the public funds; their possession was a
direct stimulus to speculation; and the president's cure was worse than
the disease. All the vast inflation of 1835 and 1836 and the business
collapse of 1837 were due to the fact not merely that Andrew Jackson
brought all his violent and persistent will to bear against the United
States Bank, but that when he got the power into his own hands he did
not know what to do with it. Not one of his biographers--hardly even a
bigoted admirer, so far as I know--now claims that his course in this
respect was anything but a mistake. "No monster bank," says Professor W.
G. Sumner, "under the most malicious management, could have produced as
much havoc, either political or financial, as this system produced while
it lasted." If the bank was, as is now generally admitted, a dangerous
institution, Jackson was in the right to resist it; he was right even in
disregarding the enormous flood of petitions that poured in to its
support. But to oppose a dangerous bank does not necessarily make one an
expert in banking. The utmost that can be said in favor of his action is
that the calamitous results showed the great power of the institution he
overthrew, and that if he had let it alone the final result might have
been as bad.
Two new States were added to the Union in President Jackson's
time--Arkansas (1836) and Michigan (1837). The population of the United
States in 1830 had risen to nearly thirteen millions (12,866,020). There
was no foreign war during his administration, although one with France
was barely averted; and no domestic contest except with the Florida
Indians--a contest in which these combatants held their ground so well,
under the half-breed chief Osceola, that he himself was only captured by
the violation of a flag of truce, and that even to this day, as the
Indian Commissioners tell us, some three hundred of the tribe remain in
Florida. The war being equally carried on against fugitive slaves called
Maroons, who had intermarried with the Indians, did something to prepare
the public mind for a new agitation which was to remould American
political parties, and to modify the Constitution of the nation.
It must be remembered that the very air began to be filled in Jackson's
time with rumors of insurrections and uprisings in different parts of
the world. The French revolution of the Three Days had roused all the
American people to sympathy, and called forth especial enthusiasm in
such cities as Baltimore, Richmond, and Charleston. The Polish
revolution had excited universal interest, and John Randolph had said
"The Greeks are at your doors." All these things were being discussed at
every dinner-table, and the debates in Virginia as to the necessity of
restricting the growing intelligence of the slaves had added to the
agitation. In the session of 1829-30 a bill had passed the Virginia
Assembly by one majority, and had failed in the Senate, prohibiting
slaves being taught to read or write; and the next year it had passed
almost unanimously. There had been, about the same time, alarms of
insurrection in North Carolina, so that a party of slaves were attacked
and killed by the inhabitants of Newbern; alarms in Maryland, so that
fifty blacks had been imprisoned on the Eastern Shore; alarms in
Louisiana, so that reinforcements of troops had been ordered to Baton
Rouge; and a traveller had written even from Richmond, Va., on February
12th, that there were constant fears of insurrections, and special
patrols. Then came the insurrection of Nat Turner in Virginia--an
uprising described minutely by myself elsewhere; the remarkable
inflammatory pamphlet called "Walker's Appeal," by a Northern colored
man--a piece of writing surpassed in lurid power by nothing in the
literature of the French Revolution; and more potent than either or both
of these, the appearance of the first number of the _Liberator_, in
Boston. When Garrison wrote, "I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I
will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard,"
Andrew Jackson for once met a will firmer than his own, because more
steadfast and moved by a loftier purpose. Thenceforth, for nearly half a
century, the history of the nation was the history of the great
anti-slavery contest.