WHAT ABBOTT LAWRENCE predicted was exactly what John Calhoun feared. Daniel Webster agonized until the end, his free-trade conscience wrestling with his protectionist constituents. “How I shall vote, if the final passage depends on me, nobody knows, and I hardly know myself,” Webster told an associate. He felt the eyes of the country upon him. “If you see the Telegraph of today, you will see how marked a bird I am.” His constituents ultimately won, and his conscience made excuses. “What reconciles me, in some measure, to the bill is that New England will, certainly, on the whole be benefitted by it; and some things which are wrong and bad we may hope to amend hereafter.”
It was the sectionalism of the vote that rankled Calhoun. The vice president had nothing against protection per se; unlike Webster, he told himself, he hadn’t changed his mind from the days when he had endorsed Henry Clay’s American System. Prudent protection of American industry against unfair competition made good sense. But this tariff, far from being a shield for the nation, was a sword swung by one section against the others. Calhoun wasn’t privy to Abbott Lawrence’s prediction to Webster that the South would be in debt to New England for a century, but from his chair as president of the Senate Calhoun heard the chortles of glee of the friends of the Northern manufacturers as they revised the bill to the satisfaction of Lawrence and his manufacturing colleagues.
Calhoun was hardly alone in feeling the South was being put upon. When discussion in the Senate turned to the appropriate title for the bill, John Randolph, with cynicism more accurate than was sometimes his norm, observed, “The bill, if it had its true name, should be called a bill to rob and plunder nearly one half of the Union for the benefit of the residue.” Soon after passage the South started calling the new measure the “tariff of abominations.”
Calhoun noted that the tariff hit the South at a vulnerable moment. A textile rebound of the early 1820s, after the effects of the 1819 panic wore off, had caused cotton prices to soar, prompting Southern planters to borrow money to bring new lands under cotton cultivation. Planters in other countries did the same, with the result that cotton glutted the market in 1828. Prices fell two-thirds between 1825 and 1828; leveraged planters found themselves over their heads in debt. “Never was there such universal and severe pressure on the whole South, excepting the portion which plants sugar,” Calhoun wrote to his brother-in-law. “Our staples hardly return the expense of cultivation, and land and negroes have fallen to the lowest price, and can scarcely be sold at the present depressed rates.” The tariff made bad matters much worse. “It is one of the great instruments of our impoverishment, and if persisted in must reduce us to poverty or compel us to an entire change of industry.”
PROUD SOUTHERNERS, NOT least Calhoun, wouldn’t stand for such treatment. The North had declared economic war on the South, they said; the South must defend itself. South Carolinians gathered during the summer of 1828 to voice their resistance to Northern tyranny. Many likened the moment to the era of the American Revolution and the tariff to the infamous Stamp Act, another tax measure passed over the objections of South Carolina. At one protest meeting Calhoun offered a toast: “The congress of ’76—they taught the world how oppression could be successfully resisted. May the lesson teach rulers that their only safety is in justice and moderation.”
The protesters sought a single voice to state their case. Calhoun came at once to mind, and with the encouragement of the organizers of the protest he set to work. He examined sources old and new, familiar and obscure, general and technical, legal and political. By the time he stopped reading and writing, he had produced a manifesto of thirty-five thousand words.
He didn’t publish at once. Calhoun recognized the combustible nature of his subject, and as the election of 1828 drew near, neither he nor other opponents of John Quincy Adams wanted a constitutional crisis to rescue Adams from executive eviction. Calhoun considered another run for the presidency, but such was the resentment among the Jacksonians against Adams that Calhoun could see that 1828 would be Jackson’s year. Calhoun hunkered down in the vice presidency, willing to pass from being Adams’s number two to being Jackson’s if the electors approved.
The electors did approve, and Calhoun eased into a second term. For the presidential candidates, though, the contest was anything but easy. Jackson’s advocates howled for Old Hickory, proclaiming to all who would listen that Adams and Henry Clay had stolen the last election and would steal this one if the honest people of the country didn’t unite against them. John Eaton, a Jackson intimate and senator from Tennessee, and Sam Houston, a Tennessee congressman and Jackson protégé, formed a committee of correspondence that helped pro-Jackson papers with the writing of editorials and supplied pro-Jackson speakers with prepared remarks.
The Adams side countered with assaults on Jackson’s character and accomplishments. Clay’s phrase “military chieftain” was revived and recirculated, and it was embellished with allegations of Jackson’s wrathfulness toward his soldiers. The Adams men printed and disseminated thousands of “coffin handbills”: posters that bore black images of six coffins, one each for soldiers Jackson was said to have executed for wanting to leave his army upon the expiration of their enlistments. The true story was more complicated; their terms had not expired and they were therefore deserters, according to the court-martial that had found them guilty. Jackson declined to stay the executions.
The campaign plumbed depths untouched in previous contests. Anonymous Adamsites attacked Jackson’s wife, Rachel. The circumstances of their wedding were clouded; Rachel had been married before, but her husband had abandoned her. She met Jackson, and the two fell in love. Word filtered west from Virginia, where her first wedding had taken place, that her husband had filed for divorce. Taking into account the slow pace of news in those days, Rachel and Jackson decided to act as though the divorce had gone through, and married. Only later did they learn that the divorce had not gone through and that Rachel was, in the eyes of the law, an adulteress and a bigamist. The irregularity was corrected after the divorce was finally completed; Rachel and Jackson repeated their vows. At the time the couple were young and unknown to the world, and no one in Nashville much cared. Love on the frontier often ran crooked. And the obvious tenderness and devotion Jackson and Rachel showed for each other during the next three decades made questions about the early days of their love seem petty and mean.
Yet the issue came up. It figured in a duel Jackson fought with a man named Charles Dickinson, which escalated from a squabble over a horse race to a deadly encounter at ten paces. Dickinson, firing first, placed a ball beside Jackson’s heart, but Jackson, unflinching, leveled his pistol at Dickinson and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened; the cock had been imperfect. The rules of dueling allowed Jackson to recock and fire. He did so remorselessly, and hit Dickinson in the torso. Dickinson was carried from the field bleeding; he died hours later. Jackson survived his wound with the bullet inside him; he never again coughed without reliving the moment.
Jackson’s rivals learned from Dickinson’s fate to leave Rachel out of their criticism of the general—until Jackson was too famous, and they too numerous, for him to come after each one. In the 1828 campaign they dredged up the old stories and invented new ones. Rachel was an adulteress, a bigamist, a whore. In the ultimate insult to a white woman in the South at that time, she was called a “dirty black wench” by a paper in Henry Clay’s Kentucky.
Jackson seethed. “When the midnight assassin strikes you to the heart, murders your family, and robs your dwelling, the heart sickens at the relation of the deed,” he told a friend. “But this scene loses all its horrors when compared with the recent slander of a virtuous female propagated by the minions of power for political effect.” Jackson understood his enemies’ game. “It is evident that it is the last effort of the combined coalition to save themselves and destroy me. They calculated that it would arouse me to some desperate act by which I would fall prostrate before the people.” He knew he couldn’t strike back, or even answer the libels, without exposing Rachel to further abuse. “For the present my hands are pinioned.” But they would not be bound forever. “The day of retribution and vengeance must come, when the guilty will meet their just reward.”
AFTER THE LONG and ugly campaign, the election itself was anticlimactic. New England stuck with Adams, who also carried New Jersey and Delaware. Adams and Jackson divided the electoral votes of New York and Maryland. Jackson swept the rest of the country, including the two biggest states, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and everything south of the Potomac and west of the Appalachians. He trounced Adams in the popular vote by a margin of 56 percent to 44 and swamped him among electors by 178 to 83.
Jackson judged his victory less a personal triumph than a vindication of America’s rising democracy. The label “Republican” had lost its meaning since the collapse of the Federalists, and Jackson’s supporters had started calling themselves Democrats. They were farmers and shopkeepers, mechanics and day laborers, flatboat men and sawyers, butchers and carpenters. Most had modest education, at best. Many were only recently enfranchised. They were strongest in the West and the South. As a group they resented the elites who had controlled the government since the founding. They claimed Andy Jackson—the backcountry orphan, the Indian fighter, the duelist, the scourge of the British and of John Quincy Adams—as their own. They put their hero in the White House, and they delivered Democratic majorities to the Senate and the House. In the name of democracy they prepared to remake the government in the image of the ordinary people of America—in the image of themselves.
Jackson’s part in the victory was spoiled almost at once by the greatest tragedy he ever suffered. The trials of the campaign had distressed Rachel tremendously; her health broke down, and in mid-December she suffered a heart attack. After lingering in pain for three days, she died.
Jackson was devastated. He buried her in the garden of the Hermitage, their home near Nashville. A winter rain soaked the ground, and drenched him, as he laid her to rest. He wondered if he could carry on. Rachel had been beside him in war and peace, in winter and summer, in sickness and health. Now he was supposed to go to Washington without her. He didn’t know if he could do it. “At the time I least expected it, and could least spare her,” he wrote, “she was snatched from me, and I left here a solitary monument of grief, without the least hope of happiness here below.”