JOHN CALHOUN COULDN’T know that Webster’s reply to Hayne would come to be considered the greatest speech in American political history. He didn’t anticipate that generations of schoolchildren would study it and commit large parts to memory. But he recognized that Webster had landed a powerful blow against South Carolina and the philosophy of states’ rights, and he ached to deliver a riposte.
He felt the constraints of the vice presidency more than ever. The office had been a promising post when he first sought it, in 1824. He had recognized that the Republican party was crumbling, as the four-way contest for the presidency demonstrated. By offering himself for vice president, he dodged the cross fire and positioned himself to support, and win the support of, whichever candidate became president. He supposed it would be Jackson, whose popularity grew by the month. But when Adams nabbed the prize, Calhoun was there to lend a hand. He could see that Adams was out of step with the times and likely wouldn’t last more than one term. Calhoun could be his successor. When Jackson made plain his determination to avenge his loss to Adams and mounted a campaign for 1828, Calhoun again suppressed his presidential ambitions. There would be no defeating the general and hence nothing gained by trying. He would hold on to the vice presidency, awaiting the next election.
He assumed, as did nearly everyone else, that Jackson would serve only one term. Jackson was not a politician but a soldier; the presidency was not a career ambition but a post-career reward. Anyway he was in poor health, sustained by whiskey, tobacco and gall at his enemies. He should be happy to return to the Hermitage after four years and tend to Rachel’s grave.
Calhoun, by contrast, was aging well. He would celebrate his fiftieth birthday in 1832. Gray tinged the auburn in his hair, which he let grow longer than when he was a young man, in keeping with fashion. Swept back, it revealed more of his high, square forehead. His eyes glowed as brightly as ever, with a color that changed according to the light and his mood. He still stood erect; his step was firm. He made an impressive figure, one his compatriots could readily imagine as their president. Or so he thought when he looked at himself in the mirror.
But others too saw presidents in their panes of silvered glass. Henry Clay’s ambitions were no secret. Adams’s 1828 defeat by Jackson carried Clay into exile with him, but the Kentuckian would certainly be back. And he would return as the foe of Jackson and whoever assumed the Jackson mantle.
Martin Van Buren, another mirror-gazer, believed the mantle should be his. And he had reason to think it would be. Floride Calhoun’s campaign against Peg Eaton had proved counterproductive, as even Daniel Webster could see from beyond the Jackson circle. “Mr. Van Buren has evidently, at this moment, quite the lead in influence and importance,” Webster wrote to a friend in early 1830. “He controls all the pages on the back stairs, and flatters what seems to be at present the Aaron’s serpent among the President’s desires, a settled purpose of making out the lady, of whom so much has been said, a person of reputation. It is odd enough, but too evident to be doubted, that the consequence of this dispute in the social and fashionable world is producing great political effects and may very probably determine who shall be successor to the present chief magistrate.”
The Eaton affair indeed went far toward determining Jackson’s successor, but the succession was delayed. Jackson’s words and demeanor initially supported the view that he would serve one term and retire. He lacked the passion for politics that drove the likes of Clay, Calhoun and Webster, and he didn’t consider himself a member of the political class. He thought presidents should be restricted to single terms; in his first annual message he advocated amending the Constitution to bar second terms (although he would have made the one term six years long). Yet Jackson discovered what nearly every other president discovered: that his work remained unfinished as his first term ran out. He let it be known that he would serve a second term if the people saw fit to award it to him.
Jackson’s change of mind compelled others to reconsider their plans. Calhoun and Van Buren, maneuvering to become his successor, had to decide whether to bide their time for another four years or strike out and challenge him now. Van Buren, holding the inside track, adopted the former course. Calhoun took the latter. The choice wasn’t hard. Jackson already blamed Calhoun for Floride’s shunning of Peg Eaton, and he increasingly doubted Calhoun’s loyalty to the Union amid the South Carolina affront to the tariff.
The rift between the president and the vice president became public at a celebration of Jefferson’s birthday in the spring of 1830. Though Jefferson had died—on July 4, 1826, the same day as John Adams, and the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—and his party had fractured, the remnants of the party still gathered under the portrait of the Sage of Monticello each April 13. Dinner was followed by toasts, with each short speech evincing the beliefs, ambitions, sensibilities or grievances of the toaster. The event this year took place at Washington’s Indian Queen Hotel, where proprietor Jesse Brown set places for a hundred guests. Whether all would come was uncertain. The tariff had antagonized the South, and the Webster-Hayne debate had drawn a line between the states’ rights men and the Unionists. Yet the pressing question of the hour was the attitude of the president and the vice president toward each other. Jackson’s small-government principles were well known; he judged the states better placed in prudence and constitutionality to legislate on most matters. But he was the chief executive of the United States, under oath to protect and defend the Constitution. Calhoun had been an ardent centralizer, yet he had become the principal theorist of South Carolina’s opposition to the tariff and to the federal government’s authority to enforce it. Calhoun hadn’t acknowledged his role in the opposition, but neither did he deny it. Both men would speak this night; all present were keen to hear them.
The toasts unfolded slowly. Jefferson was honored in the first; the Declaration of Independence in the second. Jefferson’s epitaph was quoted in the third. The fourth edged slightly into the fray when Jefferson’s Kentucky resolves were hailed. Madison’s Virginia resolves, the companion pieces in the original nullification set, were praised in the fifth. The rest of the scheduled twenty-four toasts carried the group further into the weeds of states’ rights, and deeper into their cups.
The unscheduled toasts were to follow. All heads turned toward Jackson’s table. As president he would deliver the first, if he chose to exercise his prerogative. Jackson had never been a public speaker, certainly not of the caliber of Clay, Webster or Calhoun. He let actions do his speaking for him. And no one in the room—no one in the city, no one in the country—had acted with greater determination or result on behalf of the United States. He was carefully groomed, as always, yet those close to him could see the toll the years and his struggles had taken on him. His thin face had grown haggard, his once-firm step was now tentative. His cheeks had hollowed from loss of teeth.
Yet physical decrepitude made his indomitable will the more evident. His voice was not loud when he spoke this evening, but his words rang like rifle shots across the hushed room. “Our Federal Union,” Jackson said: “It must be preserved.”
That was all. The other toasters had rambled through long sentences and into paragraphs. The audience looked and listened to learn whether Jackson would go on. But he said no more. He sat down.
The heads swiveled as one toward Calhoun. The vice president must answer. Until now he had made his case for the states in writing, and semi-anonymously at that. The president had called him out, as plainly as any man had been called out to a duel.
Calhoun couldn’t match Jackson’s succinctness. Brevity wasn’t his style, and his case, in any event, was more complicated than Jackson’s uncompromising formula. He had prepared, not knowing just what Jackson would say. He adjusted on the spot. He raised his glass. “The Union…,” he said.
For a split second some in the audience thought he had surrendered. But he completed the thought: “The Union—next to our liberty the most dear.” He paused, and concluded, “May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the states and distributing equally the benefit and burden of the Union.”
Toasters were supposed to have but one chance to speak. Yet the crowd instinctively turned back toward Jackson. Would the president rejoin?
He would not. Jackson knew better than to debate Calhoun. It would demean the office of the presidency, besides putting him on ground Calhoun trod more confidently. Jackson let his terse imperative stand alone.
DAMNED ONCE BY Jackson for his wife’s treatment of Peg Eaton, and a second time for his nullifying philosophy, Calhoun was damned a third time when the president learned that Calhoun’s behavior during Jackson’s Florida campaign a decade earlier hadn’t matched the impression Calhoun gave at the time. Jackson’s capture of Pensacola, in excess of his orders but in line with the secret letter he had written to James Monroe, had prompted condemnation by most of Monroe’s cabinet. Jackson knew that John Quincy Adams had defended him; he gathered that Calhoun had done so too. But two weeks after the dinner of the dueling toasts, Jackson received a copy of a letter written by William Crawford asserting that such was not the case: Calhoun had condemned him with most of the rest.
“Mr. Calhoun’s position in the cabinet was that General Jackson should be punished in some form or reprehended in some form,” Crawford recounted. Crawford added that he—Crawford—had been wrongly identified as the chief condemner of Jackson, by none other, he thought, than Calhoun. “An extract of a letter from Washington was published in a Nashville paper, in which it was stated that I had proposed to arrest General Jackson but that he was triumphantly defended by Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Adams. This letter, I always believed, was written by Mr. Calhoun, or by his directions. It had the desired effect. General Jackson became extremely inimical to me, and friendly to Mr. Calhoun.”
Jackson sent Calhoun a copy of the Crawford letter. The president’s anger was evident beneath the polite language he employed in forwarding it. “Sir, that frankness which, I trust, has always characterized me through life towards those with whom I have been in the habits of friendship induces me to lay before you the enclosed copy,” he wrote. “The statements and facts it presents, being so different from what I had heretofore understood to be correct, requires that it should be brought to your consideration. They are very different from your letter to Governor Bibb, of Alabama, of the 13th May, 1818, where you state ‘General Jackson is vested with full power to conduct the war in the manner he may judge best,’ and different, too, from your letters to me at that time, which breathe throughout a spirit of approbation and friendship, and particularly the one in which you say, ‘I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 20th ultimo, and to acquaint you with the entire approbation of the President of all the measures you have adopted to terminate the rupture with the Indians.’ ”
Jackson offered Calhoun a chance to explain. “My object in making this communication is to announce to you the great surprise which is felt, and to learn of you whether it be possible that the information is correct; whether it can be, under all the circumstances of which you and I are both informed, that any attempt seriously to affect me was moved and sustained by you in the cabinet council, when, as is known to you, I was but executing the wishes of the Government and clothed with the authority to ‘conduct the war in the manner I might judge best.’ ”
Jackson likely overstated his surprise at hearing that Calhoun had not been supportive during the Florida campaign. Rumors to that effect had been circulating for years. Yet Jackson initially had not had other reasons to distrust Calhoun, and he declined to honor the rumors with his attention. Crawford’s letter, if accurate, now provided evidence Jackson couldn’t dismiss. His invitation to Calhoun to refute the letter threw down a fresh challenge to the vice president: Disprove it if you can.
CALHOUN COULDN’T DISPROVE, and so didn’t try. Rather, he took the offensive. In terms that echoed John Randolph before the Virginian’s duel with Henry Clay, Calhoun refused to answer for actions taken in his official capacity. “I cannot recognize the right on your part to call in question my conduct,” he told Jackson. “I acted, on that occasion, in the discharge of a high official duty, and under responsibility to my conscience and my country only.” He said he was responding to Jackson purely out of respect for the presidency. He demanded reciprocal respect. “My course, I trust, requires no apology; and if it did, I have too much self respect to make it to any one in a case touching the discharge of my official conduct.”
Yet he couldn’t leave it at that. Calhoun understood that Jackson wasn’t refighting the Florida campaign so much as launching the 1832 election campaign. The court that mattered was not a court-martial but the court of public opinion. And so Calhoun, having just said he wouldn’t defend his actions, undertook to do just that. In a series of long and eventually tedious letters, bolstered by the testimony of other parties and witnesses, he explained his position and actions during the time of Jackson’s Florida adventure.
JACKSON RESPONDED IN words that slammed the door on any chance of reconciliation. “I had a right to believe that you were my sincere friend,” he said, “and until now never expected to have occasion to say of you, in the language of Caesar, Et tu Brute.”