coming a new sort of politics. Jackson meant to serve the people
faithfully, but he entered upon the duties of his great office in the
spirit of a victorious general. The sort of politics most in accord with
his feeling was the sort of politics which prevailed in New York and
Pennsylvania. Jackson once declared, "I am not a politician, but if I
were, I should be a New York politician." Before long, a leading New
York politician, Senator Marcy, expressed the sentiment of his fellows
when he said, "To the victors belong the spoils." That was a sentiment
which a soldier President could understand. In that letter to Monroe
which Major Lewis wrote for him twelve years before, and which won him
votes, he had urged that partisan considerations should not control
appointments; but before he had been President a year he removed more
men from office than all his predecessors had removed since the
beginning of the government. When he left Washington, the practice of
removing and appointing men for political reasons was so firmly
established that the patient work of reform has not to this day
destroyed it. That, to many historians, was the gravest fault of
Jackson's administration. It was, however, merely New York methods
applied to national politics, and it was a perfectly natural outcome of
Jackson's conviction that the people had sent him there to drive out the
men who had control of the government.
In fact, unless we understand President Jackson himself, we cannot
possibly understand his administration; for President Jackson, though he
was now somewhat subdued in manner, and "By the Eternal" was not quite
so often on his lips, was still Jackson of the duelling pistol and
Jackson of the sword; and he was also still the Jackson whom Benton saw
with the lamb and the child between his knees. All men were still
divided for him into friends and enemies. The party opposed to him came
soon to call itself the National Republican Party, and later the Whig
Party, while his own followers were called Democratic Republicans, or
Democrats. But to Jackson the National Republicans were the friends of
Henry Clay, as the Democrats were his own friends. So, too, of the great
questions he had to deal with. In every case he was fighting not merely
a policy or an institution but a man.
For a time, however, his arch-enemy, Clay, disappeared from the scene.
Until the autumn of 1831, he was in retirement in Kentucky. Jackson had
the field to himself, and was at first occupied with his friends rather
than his enemies.
Van Buren, as Secretary of State, was the head of the new Cabinet. The
other members were not men of great distinction. They had, however, one
thing in common: in one way or another, they had all opposed Mr. Clay.
On other points they differed. Half of them were friends of Calhoun, and
wished to see him President after Jackson. They were also divided into
married men and a widower, Mr. Van Buren being the widower. That, as
things turned out, was a very important division indeed.
Jackson did not treat his Cabinet as other Presidents had treated
theirs. He had a soldier's idea of organization, and did not think it
necessary to consult the Cabinet members about all the measures he
planned. He treated them somewhat as a general treats his inferior
officers, though with several of them, especially Van Buren and Eaton,
his relations were very cordial and intimate. When he wished advice,
however, he was more apt to seek it of his friend, Major Lewis, whom he
had persuaded to accept an appointment, and who lived with him at the
White House, or of Isaac Hill, who had come to Washington after fighting
the Adams men in New Hampshire, or of Amos Kendall, who had dared to
oppose Clay in Kentucky, or of General Duff Green, editor of "The
Telegraph," the Jackson organ. These men, personal friends of the
President, came to be called the "Kitchen Cabinet;" and at least three
of the four were shrewd enough to justify any President in consulting
them. Hill and Kendall were both New England men by birth, and had all
the industry and sharpness of mind proverbially characteristic of
Yankees. Even Major Lewis did not surpass Kendall in political
cleverness and far-sightedness; he was a "little whiffet of a man," but
before long the opposition learned to see his hand in every event of
political importance anywhere in the country. If a Democratic convention
in Maine framed a resolution, or a newspaper in New Orleans changed its
policy, men were ready to declare that it was Kendall who pulled the
wire. Historians are fond of saying that it was such men as Kendall and
Lewis who really ruled the country while Jackson was President; and it
is true that by skilful suggestions, by playing upon his likes and
dislikes, much could be done with him. But it is equally true that when
he was once resolved on any course his friends could no more stop him
than his enemies could. A clerk in the State Department won his favor by
a happy use of the phrase, "I take the responsibility," and from that
time was safe even against the displeasure of Secretary Van Buren. A
member of Congress began a successful intrigue for office by begging for
his father the pipe which the President was smoking, ashes and all. A
clerk in the War Department attracted his attention by challenging a man
to a duel, and so started himself on a career that ended in the Senate.
Secretary Van Buren called on Peggy Eaton and supplanted Calhoun as the
heir apparent to the presidency. Jackson in good humor was the easiest
of victims to an artful intriguer; but, unlike the weak kings whom
scheming ministers have shaped to their purposes, he could not be
stopped when once he was started.
It was Peggy Eaton who made a division between the married men and the
widower of the Cabinet. She was the wife of Senator Eaton, who was now
Secretary of War, and the widow of a naval officer named Timberlake. Her
father was a tavern-keeper named O'Neill, and both Jackson and Eaton had
lived at his tavern when they were Senators, and Mrs. O'Neill had been
kind to Mrs. Jackson. The O'Neills had no place in Washington society,
and there were ugly stories about the conduct of Mrs. Timberlake with
Senator Eaton before the death of Timberlake, who killed himself at sea.
Washington society believed these stories. President Jackson refused to
believe them, and became Mrs. Eaton's champion. His zeal in her cause
knew no bounds, and he wished his secretaries and their wives to help
him. But the Cabinet ladies would not visit or receive Mrs. Eaton, and
their husbands refused to interfere. Calhoun, the Vice-President, also
declined to take up Mrs. Eaton's cause. Mr. Van Buren, a widower, showed
the lady marked attention.
For once in his life, Andrew Jackson was defeated. Creeks and Spaniards
and Redcoats he could conquer, but the ladies of Washington never
surrendered, and Peggy Eaton, though her affairs became a national
question, never got into Washington society. Jackson, however, did not
forget who had been his friends in a little matter any more than if it
had been the greatest affair of state.
It was already a question whether Calhoun or Van Buren should lead the
Jackson party at the end of the one term which Jackson had declared to
be the limit of his stay in the White House. Calhoun's friends in the
Cabinet, and General Duff Green, of "The Telegraph," were active in his
interest. Van Buren, however, was constantly growing in favor with the
President. When at last Jackson discovered that Calhoun, as a member of
Monroe's Cabinet, had wished to censure him for his conduct in Florida,
he and the Vice-President broke forever. Meantime, a great public
question had arisen on which the two men stood out as representatives of
two opposite theories of the Union. The estrangement begun over Peggy
Eaton widened into a breach between a State and the United States,
between the nullifier of the laws and the defender of the Union.
For the pendulum had swung, and it was no longer the Federalist
merchants of New England, but the planters of the South, and
particularly of South Carolina, who were discontent with the policy of
the government. New England had turned to manufactures some of the
energy she had formerly given to commerce and seafaring, and was now in
favor of a protective tariff. Webster, her foremost man at Washington,
had voted against the tariff of 1816, but had changed his mind and
supported a higher tariff in 1824, and a still higher in 1828. The
planters of the South had not found it easy to develop manufactures with
their slave labor. They had little or nothing, therefore, to protect
against the products of European countries. On the contrary, they
exported much of their cotton to England, and imported from England and
other countries many of the things they consumed. Accordingly, they
were, as a rule, opposed to the whole system of tariff taxation, and
desired free trade. Many of them also opposed the system of internal
improvements, both on constitutional grounds and because they felt that
the tariff made them pay more than their share of the expense of such
undertakings.
On the question of internal improvements Jackson soon took a stand
entirely pleasing to the opponents of the system. In his first message
to Congress he declared against it, and when Congress passed a bill
subscribing money to the stock of the Maysville and Lexington road, one
of the chief internal improvements so far undertaken, and an enterprise
specially favored by Clay, he promptly vetoed it. Other such measures he
vetoed unless it was clear that a two-thirds majority in each House
would pass them over his veto. He preferred that the money received from
the sale of public lands should be distributed among the States,
believing that they, instead of the general government, should undertake
the improvements necessary to the development of the country.
Jackson had, indeed, great respect for the rights of the States under
the Constitution, and warned Congress not to go beyond the powers which
were clearly given to the general government. The State of Georgia had
long been discontent because the Indians were not removed from her
borders, and the President sympathized strongly with her feeling. As
soon as he was elected, the Georgia legislature passed an act dividing
up the Cherokee country into counties, and extending over them the civil
laws of the State. The act was plainly contrary to treaties between the
Indians and the Federal government, but the President refused to
interfere. On the contrary, he withdrew all United States troops from
the Indian country, and left the State to deal with the Indians as it
chose. Later on, the Supreme Court of the United States decided that the
Georgia law was unconstitutional because it took away the treaty rights
of the Cherokees. "John Marshall has made his decision," said Jackson,
"now let him enforce it." The President, in fact, was heartily in favor
of removing the Indians, and before he went out of office the last of
the Southern tribes had given up its old home for a new one in the
West.
Jackson's collision with Chief Justice Marshall over this question had
very far-reaching effects, which historians have somewhat neglected in
their study of the consequences of his course on other questions. No
statesman, no President, had done so much as the great Chief Justice to
make the general government strong and to restrain the States. Jackson,
disagreeing with some of Marshall's views, never lost an opportunity to
put on the bench a man of his own way of thinking. The result was that
many years later, when, in a great crisis, the supporters of the
national government and the leaders of States about to break away from
the Union looked to the Supreme Court to decide between them, the voice
that came from the august tribunal spoke words which Marshall and Story
would never have uttered, but which the champions of the States heard
with delight.
On these important questions, then, President Jackson acted like an
extreme Jeffersonian Democrat. But the South Carolinians soon found that
if he was ready to keep the general government from interfering with
any right that could reasonably be claimed for a State, he was equally
ready to stand up for the Union when he thought a State was going too
far.
He had nothing to do with the tariff of 1828. In his first message he
suggested that some modifications of it were desirable, and pointed out
that the public debt would soon be paid, and it would be advisable to
reduce certain of the duties. But modification was too mild a word to
suit the South Carolinians. The law was the outcome of the clamor of
many selfish interests, and Congressmen opposed altogether to protection
had helped to make it as bad as possible, hoping that it might in the
end be defeated. When it passed, the South Carolina legislature
vigorously protested, and began at once to debate about the best plan of
resistance. The plan finally preferred was for the State to declare the
law unconstitutional, and therefore null and void, and call on other
States to join in the declaration. If the national government tried to
enforce the law in South Carolina, she would protect her citizens, and
as the final resort withdraw from the Union. The plan was first placed
before the American people in an "Exposition and Protest" adopted by the
South Carolina legislature in 1828; and the real author of that famous
document, though the fact was not then known, was the Vice-President,
Calhoun. The associate of Clay in those acts which had made a beginning
of internal improvements and of protection, long a statesman of the
strong-government school, Calhoun had been led by the distress and
discontent of his own people to examine the Constitution again, "in
order," as he said afterwards, "to ascertain fully the nature and
character of our political system," and had now come to a change of
views.
The nullification doctrine came before Congress in the winter of
1829-30, and was debated in the most famous of American debates. Clay
was not there to speak for his tariff system, but a greater orator than
Clay took up the challenge. In the greatest of all American orations
since Patrick Henry spoke for liberty, Webster spoke for union _and_
liberty, and Americans will never forget his words until liberty and
union are alike destroyed. Jackson was the last man in the country to
miss their force. No orator himself, he yet knew how to give words the
power of a promised or a threatened deed. Not long after the debate,
there was a public dinner of the States'-Rights men in Washington to
celebrate Jefferson's birthday. Jackson did not attend, but he sent a
toast, and probably the seven words of his toast were more confounding
to the nullifiers than all the stately paragraphs of Webster's oration.
It was: "Our Federal Union: it must be preserved." Calhoun's toast was:
"The Union,--next to our liberties the most dear,"--and Jackson, who was
just learning that he had been mistaken about Calhoun in 1818, began now
to see clearly that the great South Carolinian was in sympathy with the
nullifiers. Many South Carolinians, however, were still hoping that the
President would not take any active measures to defeat their plan. Some
of them went on hoping until the Fourth of July, 1831, when there was
read, at a public dinner of Union men at Charleston, a letter from
Jackson which left no doubt of what he meant to do if they kept on. He
was going to enforce the laws and preserve the Union.
Having by this time broken utterly with Calhoun, he desired to rid
himself of those cabinet members who were Calhoun's friends, and to that
end took the bold and unexampled step of changing his cabinet
entirely,--only Barry, the postmaster-general, being kept in office. Van
Buren fell readily into the plan, gave up his portfolio, and was at once
appointed minister to Great Britain. Edward Livingston took his place. A
change in the "Kitchen Cabinet" followed. General Duff Green would not
desert Calhoun, and so "The Telegraph" ceased to be the organ of the
administration. Instead, Francis P. Blair, of Kentucky, who, like Amos
Kendall, had been first the friend and then the enemy of Clay, was
called to Washington, and set up "The Globe," which soon became a power
for Jackson. Nor were these the only consequences of the break with
Calhoun. Jackson and his closest friends were by this time bent on
making Van Buren, instead of Calhoun, President after Jackson, but were
doubtful of their ability to accomplish it at the next election. The
President was therefore persuaded to run again. The Democrats in the
legislature of Pennsylvania, acting on a hint from Lewis, sent him an
address urging him to stand. If for a time he hesitated, he ceased to
hesitate when it became apparent that Clay was going to be the candidate
of the National Republicans. Clay, yielding to the appeals of his party
friends, reappeared in the Senate at the opening of Congress in
December, 1831, and now the duel between the two great party leaders
grew fiercer than ever.
Clay returned to the Senate to find his tariff policy attacked by the
nullifiers, his internal improvements policy blocked by the President's
vetoes, and still a third policy which he and his party firmly supported
vigorously attacked by the terrible man in the White House. The
National Bank was in danger. Its charter expired in 1836, and the
President in both his annual messages had gravely questioned the wisdom
of granting another. He questioned the constitutionality of setting up
such an institution, and he questioned the value and safety of the Bank
as it existed. December 12, 1831, the National Republicans, assembled in
their first national convention at Baltimore, nominated Clay for
President, and called on the people to defeat Andrew Jackson in order to
save the Bank. Jackson dauntlessly accepted the issue and gave the
country to understand that either he or the Bank must go to the wall.
For the time, even Calhoun and the nullifiers yielded the first place
among his enemies to Clay, Biddle, and the Bank.
Biddle was president of the Bank, a handsome, accomplished man, a
graceful writer, and a clever, though not always a safe financier. His
ready pen first brought him into disfavor. Isaac Hill and Levi Woodbury,
the Democratic Senators from New Hampshire, made complaints of Jeremiah
Mason, an old Federalist, who was president of the Branch Bank at
Portsmouth. Their charges were various, but they and others gave Jackson
the idea that the Branch Bank in New Hampshire had used its power to
oppose his friends and to help the Adams men. Biddle was called on to
investigate. He did so, and defended Mason against all the charges. A
long correspondence ensued, and Biddle went from Philadelphia, where the
head Bank was, and made a visit to Portsmouth. His letters to the
Secretary of the Treasury were courteous, well written, but also
defiant. It was the Jackson men, he said, who were trying to draw the
Bank into politics, and the Bank had constantly refused to go into
politics in any way. He made out a very good case indeed, but the longer
the correspondence lasted the stronger grew Jackson's conviction that
the Bank was in politics, that it was fighting him, that it was corrupt,
that it was dangerous to the liberties of the plain people who had sent
him to the White House. Congress took up the matter, and committees of
both Houses reported in favor of the Bank. The Supreme Court had already
decided that the act establishing it was constitutional.
Clay boldly determined to force the fighting both on the tariff and on
the Bank. The great measures of the Congress of 1831-2 were a new tariff
law and a new Bank charter. The public debt was now nearly extinguished,
and it was clearly advisable to reduce the revenue; but Clay and his
followers made the reductions almost entirely on articles not produced
in America, and so, in defiance of the nullifiers, made the new tariff
as protective as the old. Jackson had gradually given up most of his
protection ideas, and so the tariff did not please him. Clay, in fact,
declared that for his "American system," as he called it, "he would defy
the South, the President, and the Devil." Jackson was further defied by
the Senate when it refused to confirm the nomination of Van Buren to be
minister to Great Britain. The struggle raged through the whole session.
Benton sturdily defended the President; Clay, Webster, and Calhoun were
all, in one way or another, against him. It was a great session for the
orators, and so far as Congress was concerned Clay had his way. But
Lewis and Kendall were not idle; they were working not on Congress but
on the people. In May, the Democrats nominated Jackson for President and
Van Buren for Vice-President. In July, Congress finished its work with
the Bank charter, and Jackson promptly answered with a veto, and so the
two parties went to the country.
Jackson went into the campaign with an advantage drawn from his
successful conduct of two foreign negotiations. His administration had
secured from England an agreement by which the trade with the West
Indies, closed to Americans ever since the Revolution, was opened again,
and from France a promise to pay large claims for spoliations on
American commerce which had been presented many times before. He was
also undoubtedly supported by the great majority of the people in the
stand he took against the nullifiers. What the people would decide about
the tariff was doubtful; but as between a system, even though it were
called the American system, and an old hero, the Democrats were not
afraid of the people's choice. The great fight was over the Bank, and on
that question Jackson was supported by the prejudices of the poor, who
thought of the Bank merely as a rich men's institution, by the fears of
the ignorant, who believed the Bank to be a mysterious and monstrous
affair, and by the instinct of liberty in many others, who, though they
did not believe the charges against Biddle, did feel that there was
danger in so powerful a financial agency so closely connected with the
government.
Moreover, the opposition was divided. A party bitterly opposed to Free
Masonry had sprung into existence, and Jackson was a Mason. But the
Anti-Masons, instead of supporting Clay, nominated a third candidate.
South Carolina threw her votes away on a fourth.
Jackson got 219 electoral votes to 49 for Clay, 11 for Floyd, the
nullification candidate, and seven for Wirt, the Anti-Mason candidate.
His popular vote was more than twice Clay's, and he actually carried the
New England States of Maine and New Hampshire. If, during his first
term, he exercised his great office like a general, he entered upon the
second with even a firmer belief that he ought to have his way in all
things. The people had given an answer to Clay and Biddle and Calhoun
and Marshall; to the corrupters of the government and the enemies of the
President; to the nullifiers of the law and the slanderers of Peggy
Eaton. He understood his overwhelming victory as the people's warrant to
go on with all he had begun.
But neither the nullifiers nor the Bank were willing to give up. In
November, 1832, a South Carolina convention passed an ordinance, to go
into effect February 1, 1833, nullifying the tariff law, and took
measures to defend its action by force. Jackson promptly sent Winfield
Scott to South Carolina to make ready for fighting, employed a
confidential agent to organize the Union men in the State, and called on
Edward Livingston to help him with an address to his misguided
countrymen. The pen of Livingston and the spirit of Jackson, working
together, made the Nullification Proclamation a great state paper. It
was a high-minded appeal to the second thought and the better nature of
the Carolinians; an able statement of the national character of the
government; a firm defiance to all enemies of the Union. It was the most
popular act of the administration, and brought to its support men who
had never supported it before. Benton and Webster joined hands; even
Clay, who, like Jackson, loved his country with his whole heart,
supported the President. Calhoun, alone of all his famous
contemporaries, stood out against him. He left the Vice-President's
seat, came down upon the floor as a Senator, and defended nullification
against all the famous orators who crowded to assail it.