policy recently favored by his superior, General Jacob Brown, and any
one who knew Jackson might have guessed that the holding of a civil
office would never keep him from violent courses, particularly in
Pensacola. He held the office only a few months, for he was in wretched
health. His wife, who was with him, tells in one of her letters how pale
and solemn he was when he rode into Pensacola for the third time, and
how ill he was while he was there. He resigned in October, but before he
resigned he had made another cause of dispute with Spain. The retiring
Spanish governor, Callava, was accused of attempting to carry away
papers which were necessary to establish the property rights of a
quadroon family. The correspondence on the subject led to a series of
misunderstandings, and General Jackson was soon convinced that villainy
was afoot. The upshot of the dispute was that the American governor put
the Spanish governor in jail; and when the United States judge of West
Florida, a curious character named Fromentin, tried to mend the matter
with a writ of habeas corpus, he fared little better than Judge Hall of
New Orleans had fared before him.
Mr. Parton's laborious investigation of this comical affair enables him
to show that the estate over which the trouble arose was of no value
whatever, and that Jackson's chivalrous impulse to defend a family he
thought wronged led him into a very arbitrary and indefensible action.
As usual, his motives were good, but his temper was not improved by his
illness or by the fact that Callava, who seems to have been a worthy
gentleman, was a Spaniard, and had been governor of Florida. Jackson had
a rooted dislike of Spanish governors, and doubtless congratulated
himself and the country that there would be no more of them in Florida,
when, for the last time, he turned northward from Pensacola to seek The
Hermitage and the rest which his diseased body sorely needed.
The Hermitage was by this time a good place to rest in, for it had grown
to be a Southern plantation home, quite unlike the bare homes which
sheltered the first settlers of that neighborhood, and it had its full
share of the charm that belonged to that old Southern life. It was the
seat of an abundant hospitality. The fame of its master drew thither
interesting men from a distance. His benevolence, and the homely charity
of his wife, made it a resort for many of the neighborhood whom they two
had befriended, for young people fond of the simple amusements of those
days, and for ministers of the Gospel, whom Mrs. Jackson, an extremely
pious woman, liked especially to have about her. For his wife's sake,
the general built a tiny church on the estate, and always treated with
profound respect the religion which he himself had not professed, but
which he honored because Mrs. Jackson was a Christian. Indeed, there is
nothing in the man's whole life more honorable than his perfect loyalty
to her. She was a simple, uncultivated, kind-hearted frontier woman, no
longer attractive in person, and a great contrast to the courtly figure
by her side when she and the general were in company. It is certainly
true that the two used to smoke their reed pipes together before the
fire after dinner, and that custom, to one ignorant of American life in
the Southwest, would stamp them as persons of the lowest manners. Yet it
is also true that "Aunt Rachel," as Mrs. Jackson was commonly called by
younger people of the neighborhood, was loved and honored by all who
knew her. The general had not merely fine manners, but that which is
finer far than the finest manners: he had kindness for his slaves,
hospitality for strangers, gentleness with women and children. Lafayette
was at The Hermitage in 1825, and his noble nature was drawn to Jackson
in a way quite impossible to understand if he was nothing more than the
vindictive duelist, the headstrong brawler, the crusher out of Indians,
the hater of Britons and Spaniards, which we know that he was. Lafayette
found at The Hermitage the pistols which he himself had given to
Washington and which, with many swords and other tokens of the public
esteem, had come to the hero of New Orleans. The friend of Washington
declared that the pistols had come to worthy hands, notwithstanding that
his host was equally ready to display another weapon with the remark,
"That is the pistol with which I killed Mr. Dickinson."
It seems clear that Jackson honestly meant to spend the rest of his days
at the Hermitage. His friend Eaton, a Senator from Tennessee, had
already written his life down to New Orleans, and probably he would have
been content, so far as his public career was concerned, to let _finis_
follow the name of his greatest victory. But Eaton himself, and Major
Lewis, and other friends, and the vast public which his deeds had
stirred, would not let him alone. Within a year of his retirement, a
group of his friends were working shrewdly to make him President of the
United States. In 1823, John Williams, who was an enemy to Jackson, came
before the Tennessee legislature for reelection to the United States
Senate. Jackson's friends were determined to beat him, and found they
could do it in only one way. They elected Jackson himself. In that, as
in all the clever political work that was done for him, Major Lewis was
the leading man. Before the time came to choose a successor to President
Monroe in 1824, Tennessee had declared for her foremost citizen, and
Pennsylvania, to the surprise of the country, soon followed the lead.
The sceptre was about to pass from the Virginian line, and from all the
great sections of the Union distinguished statesmen stepped forward to
grasp it. From Georgia came William H. Crawford, a practiced politician;
from South Carolina, John C. Calhoun, the subtlest of reasoners; from
Kentucky, Henry Clay, the orator; from Massachusetts, John Quincy Adams,
the best trained of public servants. Only Tennessee offered a soldier.
It was twenty-six years from the end of Jackson's first service in
Congress to his second appearance in the Senate. Again he showed himself
unfit to shine as a legislator, but in spite of that he was now clearly
the most marked figure in the upper house. None of his rivals were
Senators. Clay was the Speaker of the House; Adams, Crawford, and
Calhoun were in the Cabinet. Jackson probably did not occupy more than
ten minutes of the Senate's time during the whole session, but his fame
and his candidacy made his votes on the tariff and internal improvements
important data to politicians. The country was already entered upon the
second period of its history, in which there was to be no French party
and no English party; in which a voter should choose his party on
account of its position on such questions as the tariff, internal
improvements, and the bank, or on account of the general view of the
Constitution which it favored. But as yet no clear division into such
parties had come about. The old Federalist party was no longer in the
field, and no other had arisen to take its place. It was a time of
personal politics. The first question was, Who is to succeed Monroe? and
the next question, Who is to succeed the successor of Monroe?
Jackson found some firm friends awaiting him in Washington, and he soon
added to their number by becoming reconciled to some old enemies. Among
the old friends was Livingston, now Congressman from Louisiana. One of
the old enemies was the Senator from Missouri, whose chair was next his
own; for the Senator from Missouri, a rising man in Washington, was
Thomas H. Benton. According to Benton's account, Jackson made the first
advance, and they were soon on friendly terms, though Benton continued
to support Clay, whose niece he had married. General Winfield Scott made
an overture, and Jackson cordially responded. Even with Henry Clay he
was induced by mutual friends to stand on a footing of courteous
friendliness, though there never was any genuine friendship between
them.
Against Crawford, the Georgian candidate, and at first the leading
candidate of all, he had a grudge that dated from 1815. Crawford was
Secretary of War at that time, and, contrary to Jackson's advice, had
restored to the Cherokees certain lands which Jackson had got from the
Creeks by the treaty of Fort Jackson, but which the Cherokees claimed.
When Crawford offered himself against Monroe in 1816, Jackson was
ardently for the Virginian; and now, when it was apparent that the
caucus of Republican Senators and Representatives would probably
nominate Crawford, Jackson's friends joined the friends of other
candidates in opposing the caucus altogether, so that in the end only
sixty-six persons attended it, and its action was deprived of the weight
it had formerly had in presidential contests. Before the election,
Crawford was stricken with paralysis, and this greatly weakened his
chances.
Both Calhoun and Adams were on friendly terms with Jackson. Jackson
still supposed that Calhoun had defended the Florida campaign in the
Cabinet. His good feeling toward the South Carolinian was doubtless
strengthened when Calhoun, who had relied on the support of
Pennsylvania, gracefully yielded to Jackson's superior popularity in
that quarter, and withdrew from the contest. It was then generally
agreed that he should be Vice-President, and probably General Jackson,
like many others, was willing that he should restore the old order of
things according to which the Vice-President, instead of the Secretary
of State, stood in line of succession to the presidency.
Adams was Secretary of State, and as such he had rendered Jackson
important services by defending his actions in Florida. Adams, in
diplomacy, believed in standing up for his own country quite as
resolutely as the frontier general did in war. Nor were they far apart
on the tariff and internal improvements, the domestic questions of the
day. Adams's diary for this period shows a good feeling for Jackson. In
honor of the general, Mrs. Adams gave a great ball January 8, 1824, the
anniversary of New Orleans.
The election turned, as so many others have turned, on the vote of New
York, which Martin Van Buren, an astute politician, was trying to carry
for Crawford. He did not succeed, and there was no choice by the people.
Jackson led with ninety-nine votes in the electoral college; Adams had
eighty-four, Crawford forty-one, Clay thirty-seven. In some States the
electors were still chosen by the legislature. Outside of those States
Jackson had fifty thousand more votes than Adams, and Adams's vote was
nearly equal to Crawford's and Clay's combined. For Vice-President,
Calhoun had a large majority.
Under the Constitution, the House of Representatives had now to choose a
President from the three leading candidates. Clay was Speaker, and had
great influence over the House, but his own name had to be dropped.
Beaten himself, he had the power to make any one of his three rivals
President of the United States.
It was a trying situation for him and for the three citizens whose fate
he seemed to hold in his hands. Crawford was so ill that Clay could not
seriously consider him. Adams had never liked Clay, though they
generally agreed about public questions, and the ardent Kentuckian
could never have found the cold manners of the New England statesman
attractive. But from the first he preferred Adams to Jackson, thinking a
mere "military chieftain" unfit for the office. On the 9th of February,
Adams was elected. That evening he and Jackson met at a presidential
reception. Of the two, the defeated Westerner bore himself far more
graciously than the successful candidate from New England.
Up to this time, no unseemly conduct could be charged against any one of
the four rivals. But the human nature of these men could not bear to the
end the strain of such a rivalry. For many years the jealousy and hatred
and suspicion it gave birth to were to blacken American politics.
Jackson was guilty of a grave injustice to Clay and Adams; and they, by
a political blunder, delivered themselves into his hands. Jackson and
his friends charged them with "bargain and corruption." Adams, by
appointing Clay Secretary of State, and Clay, by accepting the office,
gave their enemies the only evidence they ever had to offer of the truth
of the charge. Every other semblance of a proof was shown to be
worthless, and the characters of the two men have convinced all candid
historians that the charge was false. But there was no way to prove that
the charge was false. Jackson believed it, and from this time he made
war on Clay and Adams. He believed he had a wrong to right, a
combination of scoundrelly enemies to overthrow, a corrupted government
to purify and save. The election had shown him to be the most popular of
all the candidates, and his friends, of whom Benton was now the
foremost, contended that the House ought to have chosen him in obedience
to the people's will. Until he should be elected, he and his followers
seemed to feel that the people were hoodwinked by the politicians.
Hitherto, since his second entrance into public life, he had borne
himself as became a soldier whose battles were already fought. Webster
had written of him: "General Jackson's manners are more presidential
than those of any other candidate. He is grave, mild, and reserved."
But now he was once more the Jackson of the tavern brawl, of the
Dickinson duel. Politics had come to be a fight, and his friends had no
more need to urge him on. He resigned his place in the Senate, and was
at once, for the second time, nominated for President by the Tennessee
legislature. With untiring industry and great political shrewdness,
Lewis, Eaton, Benton, Livingston, and others of his friends set to work
to get him elected. The campaign of 1824 was no sooner ended than the
campaign of 1828 was begun.
It was an important campaign because it went far to divide the old
Republican party, to which all the candidates of 1824 had belonged, into
the two parties which were to battle for supremacy throughout the next
quarter of a century. The division was partly a matter of principles and
policies, but it was also a matter of organization.
As to principles and measures, Adams was disposed to revive those
policies which the old Federalist party had adopted in the days of its
power. He had left that party in 1808, not because he had given up its
early principles, but because he believed that its leaders, particularly
in New England, in their bitter opposition to Jefferson, had gone to the
point where opposition to the party in power passes into disloyalty to
the country. In the Republican party he always acted with those men who,
like Henry Clay, favored a strong government at Washington and looked
with distrust on any attempt of a State to set up its own powers against
the powers of the United States. As President, he wished the government
to take vigorous measures for defense, for developing the country by
internal improvements, for protecting American industries by heavy
duties on goods imported from other countries. He thought that the
public lands should be sold at the highest prices they would bring, and
the money used by the general government to promote the public welfare.
He had no doubt as to the government's power to maintain a national
bank, and thought that was the very best way to manage the finances.
Jackson himself was not a free-trader, and had committed himself to a
"proper" tariff on protection lines; but during the campaign he was made
to appear less of a tariff man than Adams. He had also voted for certain
national roads and other internal improvements, but he had not committed
himself sweepingly to that policy. He doubted the constitutionality of a
national bank. As to the public lands, he favored a liberal policy, with
the object of developing the western country by attracting settlers
rather than raising money to be spent by the government. On the general
question of the powers of the government he stood for a stricter
construction of the Constitution and greater respect for the rights of
the States than Adams believed in. So, notwithstanding Jackson's tariff
views, the mass of the people held him a better representative of
Jeffersonian Democracy than his rival.
But a party is an organization, and not merely a list of principles. It
is, as some one has said, a crowd, and not merely a creed. Jackson's
managers so organized his supporters that they became a party in that
sense much more clearly than in the sense of holding the same views.
Committees were formed all over the country somewhat on the order of the
committees of correspondence of Revolutionary times. Newspapers were set
up to attack the administration and hold the Jackson men together.
Everywhere Jackson was represented as the candidate of the plain people
against the politicians. In all such work Major Lewis was active and
shrewd, and before the end of the campaign, from another quarter of the
union, Jackson won a recruit who was already a past master in all the
lore of party politics. Martin Van Buren was a pupil in the political
school of Aaron Burr, and was recognized as the cleverest politician of
a State in which the sort of politics that is concerned with securing
elections rather than fighting for principles had grown into a science
and an art. New York was then thought a doubtful State, and the support
of Van Buren was of the utmost value.
It is probable that so far as Adams and Jackson differed on questions of
principle and policy, a majority of the people were with Jackson. But it
is also clear that the campaign was fought out as a sort of personal
contest between the Southwestern soldier and the two statesmen whom he
accused of bargain and corruption. It was a campaign of bitter personal
abuse on both sides. Adams, perhaps the most rigidly conscientious
statesman since Washington, was accused of dishonesty, of extravagance,
of riches, of debt, of betraying his old friends, the Federalists, of
trying to bring Federalists back into power. Against Jackson his enemies
brought up his many fights and duels, his treatment of Judge Hall and
Judge Fromentin, the execution of Woods and the six militiamen, of the
two Indians, of Arbuthnot and Ambrister. Handbills were distributed,
each decorated with a coffin bearing the name of one of his victims. His
private life was attacked. The scandal of his marriage was blazoned in
newspapers and pamphlets. Even the unknown grave of his mother was not
spared.
So it became largely a question of the two men, and which the people
liked best. Adams, coldly virtuous, would not turn his finger to make
himself better liked; even if he had attempted the arts of popularity,
he was, of all the eminent men of our history, the least endowed with
charm of manner, speech, and bearing. He sternly refused to appoint any
man to office for supporting him, or to turn any man out of office for
opposing him. He could not be winning or gracious on public occasions.
Ezekiel, the shrewd old brother of Daniel Webster, wrote to him after
the election that even in New England men supported Adams "from a cold
sense of duty, and not from any liking of the man." It took a New
England conscience to hold a follower in line for the New England
candidate. The man of the Southwest won many a vote where the voter's
conscience did but half consent. Wherever he went, he made bitter
enemies or devoted friends, rather than cold critics and lukewarm
admirers. Adams was an honest man, but nobody had ever called him "Old
Hickory." He was an ardent patriot, and could point to many wise state
papers he had written, to a report on weights and measures which had
cost him four years of patient labor; but he could not, like his rival,
journey down the Mississippi and celebrate the anniversary of a great
victory in the city he had saved. His followers might ably defend his
course on public questions, but what was it all worth if the people kept
on shouting, "Hurrah for Jackson"?
Of all the sections of the country only New England gave Adams a solid
support. Jackson swept the West and South and carried the great States
of Pennsylvania and New York. In Tennessee, nineteen men out of twenty
voted for him. There is a story of a traveller who reached a Tennessee
town the next day and found the whole male population pursuing with tar
and feathers two reckless citizens who had voted against "the general."
In the electoral college he had one hundred and seventy-eight votes to
Adams's eighty-three. Calhoun was again chosen Vice-President.
The poor boy had won his way to the White House, but it was a worn old
man, bowed down with a heavy sorrow, who journeyed across the mountains
to take the great prize. The cruel campaign scandal about his marriage
had aggravated a heart trouble from which his wife had long suffered.
She died in December, and his grief was appalling to those who gathered
at The Hermitage to do honor to "Aunt Rachel." It was not in Jackson's
nature, as indeed it would not have been in the nature of many men, to
forget, in his grief, the enemies who had helped to cause it. His old
age, like his youth, was to be cursed with hatred and the thought of
revenge.
VI
THE WHITE HOUSE
March 4, 1829, Andrew Jackson became President of the United States. A
great crowd of strange-looking men went to see him inaugurated. "They
really seem to think," wrote Webster, "that the country has been rescued
from some great danger." Whoever else may have thought so, Jackson
certainly held that opinion. As his wont was, he saw the danger and the
villainy which he thought himself commissioned to destroy in the person
of a man; and that man was Henry Clay. Martin Van Buren was to succeed
Clay as Secretary of State in the new Cabinet, but he did not reach
Washington until after the 4th of March. Jackson accordingly sent his
friend, Colonel Hamilton, of New York, to the State Department, ordering
him to take charge there the instant he should hear the gun which was
to announce that the new President had taken the oath of office.
Jackson and Clay were, in fact, the leaders of the two parties into
which the old Republican party was now divided. Their rise to leadership
meant that a new set of public men and a new set of questions had come
to the front; it meant a more thoroughgoing experiment of democracy than
had yet been tried in America. Adams's administration is properly
considered to have been the last of one series and Jackson's the first
of another. Under the earlier Presidents, national affairs were
committed mainly to a few trained statesmen, the people simply approving
or disapproving the men and the measures brought before them, but not of
themselves putting forward candidates for the higher offices or in any
wise initiating policies. The rule of the people was thus a passive sort
of rule, a rule by consent. But with the wide prevalence of manhood
suffrage, and the prominence of domestic questions,--of questions
concerning the business and the daily life of the Republic,--and with
the disappearance of the profound questions concerning the organization
of the government and the nature of government in general, the people
began to assert themselves. Under Jackson and his successors, they made
themselves felt more and more at Washington; their opinions and
sentiments, their likes and dislikes, their whims and prejudices, were
projected into their government. Henceforth, public men were to be
powerful not so much in proportion to their knowledge of statecraft as
in proportion to their popularity. They must represent the popular will,
or commend themselves and their policies to popular favor. The public
men of the old order, like Adams, might be wise and faithful, but they
lacked Clay's and Jackson's sympathetic understanding of the common
people. And of the two new leaders Jackson had by far the stronger hold
on the popular mind and heart. The people had sent him to Washington
because he was of them and like them, and because they liked him. Both
he and they felt that he was their President, and he held himself
responsible to them only.