GETTING BACK TO Jackson, his victory over the Creeks brought him back into favor again in Washington, and a couple of months later, he was given the rank of major general in the regular army rather than the volunteers. Then he heard a rumor that Spanish officials were helping out their British friends in areas of Florida still held by Spain, and he sent a scout to Pensacola to see if he could get information about that. The scout reported back that the British were definitely being allowed to use Pensacola as a naval base, and Jackson moved down there immediately and captured the town.

Then Jackson learned that the British were planning to capture New Orleans and headed over there. In New Orleans, Jackson put through some extremely strict measures to make sure that the city and his men were completely prepared for the British assault if and when it came; he dismissed all local officials, including the state legislature, and placed the city under martial law, and he also ordered the execution of some American soldiers who deserted and were then recaptured, saying, in effect, that he expected the British force to be much larger than his own and had to prevent his army from becoming even smaller through increased desertions. Some people felt he was only doing what he had to do, but others felt his actions were high-handed and excessive, and a federal judge finally served him with a writ of habeas corpus. (For people who don’t know what “habeas corpus” means, which certainly included me during the early part of my life, it’s a Latin phrase that translates as “you have the body,” and it was used at first in situations when some person or some authoritative group might be imprisoning someone unlawfully - holding the prisoner without telling him the charges against him or without a proper trial or something of that sort. The judge issued a writ of habeas corpus to require the person or the people doing the imprisoning to produce “the body of the prisoner” to determine if he was receiving due process. Habeas corpus was then broadened to allow judges to ask questions in any situations where liberties were possibly being violated or reduced beyond the needs of an existing emergency, and that was the situation with the writ in Jackson’s case.) Jackson, however, ignored the writ, and the judge fined him $1,000, which he paid.

But he was absolutely right in his information about the impending British assault on New Orleans, and in his prediction that the British force would be much larger than his own. On December 23, 1814, a combined force of British soldiers and soldiers led by General Sir Edward Michael Pakenham, an outstanding officer who had served under Wellington and helped him defeat the French in Europe, landed a few miles east of New Orleans and headed toward the city. Ironically, as you’ve probably already realized, this was just one day before the Treaty of Ghent was signed, and the terms of the treaty had already been worked out and agreed upon by both sides; but communications were so slow in those times that neither the British nor the Americans facing each other near New Orleans knew it, and fighting was fierce and continuous.

Jackson and his men managed to stop the British for a while, but then they retreated to an old, unused canal four miles outside New Orleans and built a defensive wall out of logs and mud alongside the canal. British soldiers and sailors kept arriving until Pakenham had about 10,000 men, as compared to Jackson’s less than 5,000 soldiers, and that including every fighting man Jackson could round up - even the young pirate Jean Lafitte and his followers. The British had approached and offered LaFitte £30,000 and a commission in the British navy if he served with them, but he chose instead to help out the Americans in return for a pardon for himself and his men, and Jackson accepted at once.

On January 8, 1815, a thick fog developed, and the British decided to take advantage of the fog cover and move on New Orleans. But again, as the British had done in some battles in the Revolutionary War, they marched forward in strict formation and in their bright uniforms, and Jackson and his men were ready for them behind their mud and log wall. In the battle that followed, Pakenham was killed, and 2,600 of his men were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, as compared to eight Americans killed and thirteen wounded.

Pakenham’s body was sent back to England for burial, and Franklin Roosevelt told me a story about that in the White House one day, but I think I’d better ask people to skip this paragraph if they’re squeamish. When they went to ship the body back to Britain, according to the story, they pickled Pakenham in alcohol and tied the barrel of alcohol in which he was pickled to the mast. But the sailors down below found out that there was a barrel of alcohol attached to the mast, and they took a gimlet and bored a hole in it and got the alcohol out and drank it, so Pakenham was not in any condition to be buried when he got back to England. That’s the story told to me by Franklin Roosevelt. I don’t know where he got it, or whether it’s true or not, but it’s an interesting story. I think it’s probably true. I don’t think there’s any doubt that if those sailors found out that there was a barrel of alcohol attached to the mast on the main deck, they wouldn’t have hesitated to bore holes in it to get the alcohol regardless of what else was in the barrel.

Anyway, the Battle of New Orleans was the only real American victory of the War of 1812, and even though it was an unnecessary battle because the war had officially ended two weeks previously, it made Jackson famous and admired throughout the United States. Congress even gave Jackson back that $1,000 fine, though, to tell the truth, he didn’t actually collect it until thirty years later.

When Monroe became president in 1816, he offered Jackson the job of secretary of war, but Jackson turned it down and said he preferred to stay on in active military service. The Seminoles were attacking American settlements in Florida frequently at this time, coming out of the Spanish parts of Florida and with fugitive slaves fighting along with them, and Jackson was sent to see what he could do about the situation. Monroe instructed Jackson to enter Spanish territory only if it was absolutely necessary to do so because he was “pursuing the enemy,” but Jackson told Monroe that there’d always be trouble in that part of the country if Florida remained under Spanish control to give sanctuary to Seminoles on the warpath there, and he also pointed out that there were British residents in Spanish Florida busily stirring up the Indians against United States citizens. Jackson hinted that it might not be a bad idea to try to take Florida away from the Spanish while he was down there fighting the Seminoles, and the result was that he got permission to do a lot more than the official orders, if things pointed in that direction. So, again, Jackson went a lot further than expected and did what some people thought was only his duty and others thought was excessive: He took over some Spanish forts, threw out the Spanish governor of the territory and put in one of his own officers as governor, and ordered the execution of two British citizens, Robert Ambrister and Alexander Arbuthnot, as ringleaders in plots to get the Seminoles to attack Americans. And, again, he found himself in plenty of trouble.

The ringleaders in that movement were the two men that Jackson later came to despise more than anyone else in the world, John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay. (To get ahead of the story just a little bit, Jackson was asked, after he left the White House, to name two things he had left undone that he thought he ought to have done. He said that he should have hanged John C. Calhoun and shot Henry Clay. If you’re wondering about the distinction between the different ends he yearned to give the two men, the answer is that Jackson thought he should have fought a duel against Clay for insulting Mrs. Jackson and shot him, and he thought he should have hanged Calhoun as a traitor.)

At this point, Clay was speaker of the House and asked that Congress condemn Jackson’s actions in Florida, and Calhoun was Monroe’s secretary of war, the job Jackson had refused, and went to Monroe and suggested that Jackson should be arrested, though he asked Monroe not to make it public that the suggestion had come from him. Spain also put up a considerable protest, saying it would declare war on the United States if its forts and control of its territory weren’t returned immediately. But Congress refused to censure Jackson and Monroe refused to have him arrested, and Jackson found himself more popular than ever. We straightened things out with Spain by buying their Florida territory for $5 million, and Jackson was appointed governor of the territory in 1821.

Jackson stayed in that job just long enough to make sure that things in Florida were running smoothly, and then, in 1823, he became a senator again. You’ll recall that I mentioned that the first time he was in the Senate, which was back in 1797, he was so bored by what he considered the snail’s pace of that august body that he quit after five months, but this time he lasted two years before quitting again. There were a couple of interruptions or almost-interruptions: in 1824, President Monroe offered him the job of minister to Mexico, and Jackson thought about that for a while before turning it down, and then, later that year, as you’ll also recall, he ran for president against John Quincy Adams and did better in both electoral and popular votes than Adams but lost out when the House of Representatives picked Adams. After that happened, Jackson stayed on in the Senate into 1825, then resigned again to devote himself full-time to building up alliances and increasing his popularity even more so that he’d win for sure over Adams the next time, in 1828.

When Jackson was in the Senate that second time, incidentally, an interesting bit of irony occurred the first time he showed up to take his seat and his desk. The fellow at the desk right next to his was Thomas Hart Benton, the man who’d pumped him full of lead back in 1813, and now a senator from my home state of Missouri. Jackson knew, of course, that Benton was now in the Senate, but he didn’t expect to find his old enemy sitting inches away from him. For a minute, the two men stared at each other, and then Jackson, who respected strong enemies as much as the Indians he’d fought a while back, reached out and shook Benton’s hand. In time, even though Jackson still had Benton’s bullets in his body, the two men became close friends, and Benton campaigned all over the place for Jackson when Jackson ran again in 1828.

In those days, it wasn’t considered proper for a presidential candidate to campaign for himself; the candidates were expected to stand on a pedestal, aloof from the hurly-burly of politics, and let other people tell the country how good they were. But Jackson considered that tradition nothing more than a bunch of baloney, and when he was invited to New Orleans in 1828 to celebrate the thirteenth anniversary of his victory over Pakenham and his soldiers and sailors, he hurried down there and did a lot of talking, in that city, and on the way down, about his presidential hopes and plans.

He also took the advice of experienced politicians in his party and accepted John C. Calhoun as his running mate, despite his personal dislike for Calhoun, because his advisors felt that Calhoun was needed to bring in southern votes. The reason was that Jackson and some of his followers had given halfhearted support to a protective tariff bill, a bill that northerners liked because it helped the growing textile industry by reducing foreign competition, which would be reluctant to bring in textiles and pay a tariff on the goods brought in, but that southerners hated because they felt that foreign manufacturers would retaliate by refusing to buy cotton and other raw American goods. The Jackson people really expected the bill to fail, which would give them points with northerners for trying and would not offend southerners too much because the bill hadn’t gotten through anyway. But the bill surprised everybody by passing and reduced Jackson’s popularity in the South even though he was, of course, a southerner himself.

He didn’t learn until after the election that Calhoun was the man who tried to get him arrested back in 1818, or I doubt that he would have agreed to his party’s choice for the vice-presidential candidate, despite the political value of the man. He also didn’t guess that Calhoun thought the opposite of the way he thought on practically every issue and would oppose him on practically everything. But the Jackson/Calhoun ticket was an extremely strong one, particularly since they were up against the aristocratic John Quincy Adams, running on the National Republican ticket, and the equally aristocratic fellow he picked as his running mate, Richard Rush, the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush, and a former attorney general of Pennsylvania, comptroller of the United States Treasury, attorney general in Monroe’s cabinet, and secretary of the treasury in Adams’ cabinet.

In a sense, the election came down to a contest between the symbol of the privileged upper class of the East, as represented by Adams, and the symbol of the average working man of the North and South and the settlers of the West, as represented by homespun Andy Jackson. And there were a lot more of the latter than the former. Jackson received 647,286 popular votes to Adams’ 507,064 votes, 56 percent to 44 percent, and 178 electoral votes to Adams’ eighty-three. Jackson received the majority of electoral votes in fifteen states - Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Virginia - and Adams received the majority in nine states - Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont. In those days, as you know, the vice president was voted for separately in the Electoral College, and Calhoun did almost as well, receiving 171 electoral votes to Rush’s eighty-three, with another fellow, William Smith of South Carolina, getting the other seven. And the Democrats were now in charge.

It was a return to real Jeffersonian democracy when Jackson came into power. Jackson was a great admirer of Thomas Jefferson, and he thought that Jefferson’s idea that the everyday man ought to have a hand in the government was the right thing. And that’s what he tried to do. The people who voted for Jackson were strongly in his corner because they felt he was interested in the welfare of the little man, the small farmer and the small businessman and other people like that, and he did his best to justify that belief in him. People have to have a leader, and when a leader senses what the people want and need and tries to help them in that direction, they’ll always stay with him. Jackson was a man who understood what the people wanted, and he tried to give it to them. The presidents after Jefferson became mixed up with special privilege, and Jackson was trying to break the stranglehold on the ordinary man in the programs he planned, in order to help the average person get along in his or her life. And people always look forward to a man who’ll arrive on the scene and try to do that.

The southern plantation owners and the eastern industrialists had every reason to be suspicious of Jackson and to dislike him because he was determined to take their special privileges away from them. That’s the reason they were suspicious of him. The rich and powerful people in the country had control of the money interests up to that point, and Jackson’s objective was to take that control away from them and see that the people who had little businesses, little farms, were properly taken care of. He wanted to help the people who needed help.

The country was ready for that sort of change, and Jackson was straightforward and honest and clearly for the people who had no real representation at the head of the federal government. The Declaration of Independence uses almost the exact words that Lincoln used in his Gettysburg Address, that all men are created equal, but it wasn’t practiced, fundamentally, in many of the policies of the various governments: city, county, state, and national. But Jackson made a really sincere effort to give the common people the place in the government where they belong. He was no demagogue. His policies were a development of the Democratic Party and of Jackson’s ability to understand what the country needed at that time. He wanted sincerely to look after the little fellow who had no pull, and that’s what a president is supposed to do. Jackson was a practical man, working for the welfare of the whole country, and I think he succeeded in his purpose, to a great extent, if not entirely. There’s the theory that Jackson showed no prior signs of being the kind of man he was as president, but I don’t agree with that at all. He was always for the common people. He always made it clear, when he was a judge and a member of the House of Representatives and a senator, that he represented the man with a hole in his pocket just as much as he represented the big shots; and when he became president of the United States, he followed through on the policy he had always followed.

To tell the truth, Jackson didn’t look much like a man ready to take charge when he finally got in, in 1828. He was sixty-one years old, but he looked a lot older, and he was suffering now from tuberculosis, sick in body from that disease and sick in heart from the sudden death of his wife. But I guess another reason I admire him so much is that he was a take-over man who always knew what he had to do and went to work right away at the job of doing it. Some people, even some of the people who supported him when he was running for president, felt he looked so bad when he was sworn in that he wouldn’t last more than a year or two, but he surprised the worriers by working like a demon for eight full years in office and getting all sorts of good things accomplished.

As I’ve said, he didn’t get any help at all from Calhoun. The principal difference between the two men was that Jackson thought in terms of the welfare of the whole country, whereas Calhoun was much more concerned with the rights of the individual states, and particularly the southern states. Calhoun was for nullification, a belief that the Constitution could be interpreted as saying that states had rights that overrode federal rights, so that, for example, if a state like Calhoun’s South Carolina didn’t like a bill such as that protective tariff bill, which they certainly didn’t like, they could insist that that bill be nullified, meaning canceled out as though it didn’t exist. Jackson felt that the federal government spoke for all states and all parts of the country, and that, if the Congress passed a bill, the law created by that bill had to be obeyed by everybody, and that included all states which might not like that law.

Calhoun felt that the South was being neglected or ignored by the federal government because southern states were largely agricultural, and northern states were largely industrial, and he thought the government was favoring the North in its lawmaking because federal lawmakers believed that northern manufacturing and industry were more important to the financial health of the country than farming and agriculture. Jackson maintained that the government was dealing fairly and equally with all areas and elements of the country. Calhoun became more and more an apologist for slavery, and early hints that the South might consider separating itself from the United States, if a lot of states weren’t admitted to the union as slave states, showed up in some of his actions and statements.

Later on, he helped get Texas admitted to the Union as a slave state and fought to keep California out because it was coming in as a free state. His theory in trying to prevent territories coming in as free states was that the federal government didn’t really own those territories but just held them as a sort of trustee; the territories, he said, were owned jointly by all the states, so individual states could quite legitimately object to their property being allowed in as states if they wanted to do so. A nonsensical theory at best. And after he died, two books of his political philosophy were published, and they openly advocated secession “if necessary.”

Jackson, of course, like Lincoln a few decades later, felt that secession should never be necessary or permitted under any circumstances whatever and that the Union should be preserved at all costs. When he made his famous statement to that effect at that dinner, which incidentally was a dinner celebrating the eighty-seventh anniversary of the birth of Jackson’s idol, Thomas Jefferson, he stared at Calhoun with that cold hawk-stare of his as he said it.

Jackson didn’t get a whole lot of help from his cabinet during his first term in office, either, and the reason had very little to do with politics or government policy; it was mostly the result of another marital scandal that must have reminded Jackson constantly of his own problems regarding Mrs. Jackson. His campaign manager when he was running for the presidency was Senator John Eaton of Tennessee, who had been married to Jackson’s ward, Myra Lewis, and Jackson made Eaton his secretary of war following the election. (The Jacksons had no children of their own, which is why Myra Lewis, a distant relative, became Jackson’s ward. The Jacksons also adopted a nephew of Mrs. Jackson’s and named him Andrew Jackson, Jr.) But Eaton was now a widower, and sometime before the election, he had an affair with a young woman named Margaret O’Neale Timberlake, who was the daughter of the couple who owned the boardinghouse in Washington in which Eaton lived, and who worked as a barmaid in the tavern attached to the boardinghouse. (Most senators in those days didn’t have the funds to live in the equivalent of those beautiful Georgetown houses in which a lot of senators live today.) Jackson knew Peggy Timberlake because he had lived in that same boardinghouse when he was a senator himself, and he liked her, but the trouble was that she was married; her husband was John Timberlake, a purser in the Navy. And the scandal grew worse when Timberlake died at sea, possibly a suicide, because he’d learned of his wife’s affair with Eaton.

Jackson urged Eaton to cool down the scandal by marrying Peggy Timberlake quickly, especially since he was so much in love with her, and the Eatons were married two months before Jackson entered the White House. But the wives of most of the cabinet members stuck up their noses and wouldn’t invite the Eatons into their homes, partly because the affair had been such widespread public knowledge before the marriage and partly because of Peggy Eaton’s low social position as a former barmaid, and Jackson did another of those foolish, hotheaded things he sometimes did: He ordered his cabinet members to order their wives to socialize with Peggy Eaton and asked for the resignation of all cabinet people whose wives wouldn’t cooperate. The cabinet members refused to talk to their wives or to resign; they told Jackson calmly that they had no control over the social activities of their wives. And the leader of the cold-shoulder movement against Mrs. Eaton - as you might have guessed, it was the wife of that enemy in Jackson’s own camp, John C. Calhoun - redoubled her efforts to keep people away from Eaton’s wife.

It got to the point where Jackson and his cabinet practically weren’t talking to each other, and the situation worsened when cabinet members wouldn’t back Jackson in his move against the Bank of the United States, which I’ll discuss in just a minute. But the result of all this trouble was something that presidents have used to great advantage ever since that time: the employment of advisors outside government staff. Jackson just stopped calling cabinet meetings for a while, which was a bad thing, but it made him turn more and more to people he knew would be loyal and honest to him - a group of men who became known as his kitchen cabinet. Jackson was loyal to his friends, just as all of us have been during our administrations, and I hope all presidents will be that way. And Jackson knew that he needed people who were loyal to him in turn, in order for him to have a program that he could carry through.

Fortunately, the people with whom he began to have policy meetings were some of the best minds in the country, including Francis Preston Blair, the editor of the Washington Globe, who later started another paper, the Congressional Globe, which became the Congressional Record, and whose residence, Blair House, I lived in when the White House was being fixed up; another newspaperman Jackson knew and trusted. Duff Green, former editor of the St. Louis Enquirer (though eventually Green sided with Calhoun on nullification and became more and more involved with southern rather than with national issues); Jackson’s adopted son, Andrew, Jr., who also served as his secretary, and, of course, John Eaton. Another member of Jackson’s real cabinet who became part of his kitchen cabinet was Martin Van Buren, former senator and former governor of New York and then Jackson’s secretary of state, who had no hesitation about accepting the Eatons socially, possibly because he was a widower and had no wife to snub them. He subsequently, of course, followed Jackson into the presidency.

But the problem of the Eatons remained a thorn in Jackson’s side, and in 1831, Eaton resigned as secretary of war, after which he challenged three members of the cabinet to duels, which they all refused. Eaton eventually became governor of Florida and minister to Spain. Then Van Buren resigned, a self-sacrificing move since he felt he’d also become too controversial because of his support of the Eatons and because he’d joined Jackson in showing his distaste for Calhoun. Jackson then appointed Van Buren minister to England, but Congress split evenly on approving the appointment, and this gave Calhoun the deciding vote, which he cast, spitefully, against Van Buren, despite the fact that Van Buren had been an excellent secretary of state and would almost certainly have been an equally excellent minister to England. As you can see, Calhoun, who was known in his day as the Gentleman from South Carolina, was no gentleman in a lot of ways.

Three other cabinet members also left in 1831, resigning on their own or finally succumbing to Jackson’s repeated suggestions that they leave: Samuel D. Ingram of Pennsylvania, the secretary of the treasury, John M. Berrien of Georgia, the attorney general, and John Branch of North Carolina, the secretary of the navy. That left only one member of the original Cabinet, William T. Barry of Kentucky, the postmaster-general; the job of postmaster general was a brand-new addition to the cabinet, and Barry stayed on until 1835. And then, early in 1832, as Jackson and Calhoun grew more and more at odds on the nullification question and on other things, and when Jackson made it clear that Van Buren and not Calhoun was going to be his running mate for his second term and his choice to follow him as president, Calhoun left the administration himself, the only vice president in our history to resign.30 That brought in an almost completely new cabinet of men who were much more loyal to Jackson and worked with him to get his programs through. And later in 1832, Jackson ran for his second term, with Van Buren as his running mate, opposed by Henry Clay on the National Republican ticket, with a fellow named John Sergeant of Pennsylvania, the lawyer for the Bank of the United States, looking for the vice presidency, and Jackson won again without difficulty. He got 687,502 popular votes to Clay’s 530,189 votes, 55 percent to 42 percent with the other 3 percent going to minor candidates, and 219 electoral votes to Clay’s forty-nine, the other nineteen electoral votes also going to minor candidates. Clay took only Connecticut, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, with South Carolina’s eleven votes going to a fellow named John Floyd and Vermont’s seven going to a fellow named William Wirt. Van Buren had to run on his own, of course, in those days when the presidential and vice-presidential jobs weren’t sewn together, and also did well, getting 189 electoral votes to Sergeant’s eighty-nine, and forty-eight other votes going to others.

The most important thing Jackson accomplished in office, I believe, was his opposition to Calhoun’s advocacy of nullification - not just because of that one interpretation of the Constitution, but because Jackson made it really clear for the first time that “United States of America” wasn’t just a name, but a country of people who were truly united and weren’t going to allow themselves to be torn apart permanently for any reason whatever. And many years later, when South Carolina and other states seceded at the time of the Civil War, they still understood the presidential position that the United States was a going concern and would not be allowed to be broken up by a minority.

Calhoun didn’t leave things alone, of course. Even when Jackson made that toast at that dinner, Calhoun responded with a counter-toast that didn’t go down too well with Jackson and other people there: “The Union - next to our liberty, the most dear!” And after Calhoun walked out of the vice presidency, he went back to South Carolina and got the legislature there to pass a law that said flatly that they had the right of nullification and would obey only the federal laws they wanted to obey and nullify the laws they didn’t want to obey, and one thing they weren’t going to obey right off the bat was a tariff law Jackson had gotten passed in 1832, even though it was a milder tariff law than the one that had been passed in 1828. And if the United States didn’t like it - why, they were prepared to secede from the United States.

Jackson didn’t take long to make it clear that he didn’t like it and wasn’t going to let it happen. Right after he was reelected, he issued a Proclamation on Nullification in which he stated that any attempt at secession would be considered treason, and he ordered thousands of former soldiers back into active duty and got Congress to allow him to send these troops into South Carolina if necessary. South Carolina soon postponed and then dropped their secession plans, and on March 15, 1833, which happened to be Jackson’s sixty-sixth birthday, they also canceled their nullification law.

The other important thing that Jackson achieved was his battle to dissolve the Bank of the United States, which was run by a Philadelphia financier named Nicholas Biddle, and even though it was a private enterprise, acted as financial agent for the country and controlled most of the country’s money. The bank had been started back in 1791 by Alexander Hamilton, who felt that a central bank was necessary to keep the country on a sound economic basis, but went out of business in 1811, and started up again in 1816. Jackson, however, hated the idea of a central bank in general and the Bank of the United States in particular; he pointed out that the bank was strictly for big-time industrialists, quick to make big loans to big companies but hostile and even contemptuous when asked for loans by farmers and small businessmen. He also felt that the idea of a private company that controlled so much of the country’s money gave that company too much power over the country and its lawmakers. He also disliked the fact that the Bank of the United States pretty much controlled the other banks around the country; small banks had to borrow money from the big bank, and the Bank of the United States could then punish them at will or even put them out of business by suddenly calling in notes on loans.

Just after his reelection, therefore, Jackson went to work to take the financial control of the country away from the Bank of the United States. The Bank’s charter ran until 1836, but Clay decided to make the matter a campaign issue and talked Biddle into making an application for early rechartering of the Bank during the pre-election period, assuring Biddle that he’d support the application if he was elected, and convincing Biddle that it wouldn’t matter even if Jackson won because Biddle’s pals in the Senate would get the new charter through. Clay also pointed out to Biddle that so many people owed money to the Bank of the United States and to other banks under that bank’s thumb - hell, he reminded Biddle, he even owed money to the Bank of the United States himself, or maybe Biddle reminded him of that in telling Clay that he’d better be nice to the big, powerful bank if he became president - that legislators and other people wouldn’t dare to oppose the new charter because they might then be called upon to repay their loans immediately if the Bank of the United States was going out of business.

And after Jackson won, the Senate did pass a bill okaying the new charter, but they forgot how tough Jackson could be when he felt it was necessary. He immediately vetoed the bill, pointing out that the Constitution never gave the government the right to charter a central bank in the first place, and saying in his plain-spoken way that when laws “make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society, the farmers, mechanics, and laborers, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government.” The Senate couldn’t muster up enough votes to override his veto, and Jackson followed up by withdrawing $11 million of government money from the Bank of the United States and spreading the money out in various state banks.

He ran into plenty of opposition here, too. Louis McLane, who became secretary of the treasury after Ingram left in 1831, refused Jackson’s order to transfer the money, so Jackson transferred him to the post of secretary of state; Jackson then put William J. Duane in the job, but he also refused to transfer the money, and Jackson fired him; Jackson then moved his attorney general, Roger Taney, to the job of secretary of the treasury because he knew that Taney was as much opposed to the Bank of the United States as he was. But Clay was still a power in the Senate even though he’d lost the presidential election, and he managed to get the Senate to say no to the appointment, the first time in American history that a cabinet appointment had ever been rejected. Jackson finally took his secretary of the navy, Levi Woodbury, and made him secretary of the treasury, and Woodbury moved the money.

Clay then got the Senate to censure Jackson for moving the money without congressional approval, but the House of Representatives showed that it was on Jackson’s side by passing resolutions approving Jackson’s actions and calling for an investigation of the bank, and the censure was expunged from official records in 1837. The Bank of the United States went out of business when its charter ended in 1836 though it later turned up as a private bank until it finally collapsed entirely in 1841, and Biddle was indicted for fraud but wasn’t convicted.

It was a great thing that Jackson did, seeing to it that the government rather than private and outside interests controlled the finances of the country. And he wasn’t really undoing Hamilton’s work. He was meeting the situation as it developed, eventually, out of Hamilton’s work. No matter how good any situation is, or how good any organization, it can be turned into a racket if there isn’t somebody watching to see that that isn’t done. And that’s what Jackson accomplished when he enabled the United States government to regain control of our finances.

It wasn’t an instant or miracle cure for the country’s banking problems, of course; like most solutions to problems, it brought some new problems of its own. The state banks, rich with all the money that Jackson poured into them, became far too easy and careless in giving out loans. They felt that Jackson’s comments about the difficulties the average man had encountered in getting loans, when the Bank of the United States was in control, gave them a sort of mandate to loan out money quickly and at high interest charges, using the government money as a financial base and multiplying it by issuing paper money of their own.

Hundreds of other banks sprang up, so-called wildcat banks because they really had no resources at all, and they too issued carloads of paper currency and thrived by loaning out their own funny money. All these newly rich banks didn’t just give out loans for genuine need or solid business expansion, either; they began to give more and more loans for land speculation in the West, which became wilder every day. Between 1832 and 1836, land values in the West increased by more than 1,000 percent, and inflation gripped the country.

To counteract this, Jackson issued a proclamation he called the Specie Circular, which required that, henceforth, public lands could be bought only with hard currency - meaning gold and silver. That slowed down inflation and curbed wild land speculation, all right, but it also caused a lot of runs on banks by people who were nervous about the banks anyway or now wanted gold or silver to pay for their land speculation, gold and silver that the banks didn’t have. Within a short time, more than 900 banks went out of business, and this in turn, combined with a number of major crop failures around the country, brought on a terrible depression that lasted until 1843 and made Van Buren one of the most unpopular presidents in our history, even though it was hardly his fault.

But even this did some good in the long run, because it caused Van Buren to introduce some worthwhile financial measures of his own. He felt that the federal government should control government finances on its own, rather than banks of any kind, and he developed the system of subtreasuries around the country to hold federal funds. And, eventually, we also prohibited the issuance of currency by any institutions other than the United States itself, and instituted the policy of watchdogging all banks that exist today.

 

THERE WERE OTHER major accomplishments by Jackson as well, and one of these helped once again to make it clear, as we had to do frequently in our early history, that we were becoming a stronger and stronger country and wouldn’t always be a weak, upstart little nation that had to kowtow to the big European powers. This all happened because France had damaged a lot of American vessels during the Napoleonic Wars, and of course, Jackson asked France for reparation to the United States and to the shipowners. France, however, didn’t pay up and apparently expected Jackson to forget all about it. But Jackson didn’t forget it; he just broke off diplomatic relations with France and mobilized our army and our navy. France quickly sent payment in the form of four installments that Jackson had told them were past due.

I’ll just mention one other thing, and this was something that Jackson accomplished on his very last day in office. The territory of Texas was then owned by Mexico, as you know, but the people of Texas had been trying to separate themselves from Mexico for a number of years, and it all came to a head during Jackson’s administration. Mexico had itself been a sovereign nation only since 1823, when they broke loose from Spain, but when Texas tried to do the same kind of thing, Mexico sent large forces of soldiers into the territory to quell what they considered a revolution.

In particular, one man, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who became president of Mexico in 1833, was particularly tough; he sent more and more soldiers into the territory, and when Texans fought back, the Mexicans captured 300 men in a battle at Goliad and then killed them instead of imprisoning them, and then, as everybody remembers, wiped out the Texans at the Alamo, killing Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and about 180 other men. But “Remember Goliad!” and “Remember the Alamo!” became rallying cries for Texans, and on April 21, 1836, Sam Houston, who had served under Jackson during the fighting with the Creek Indians in 1814, managed to turn the tables on the Mexicans. In a battle at San Jacinto, he not only defeated the Mexican Army, but captured Santa Anna himself, and Mexico gave up the Texas territory. It became an independent republic and then asked to become a territory of the United States.

Jackson was undecided about the situation for a while, wanting Texas on the one hand, but hesitating on the other hand because Texas was a slave territory and a lot of northerners opposed any kind of alliance for that reason. (There was no question about Texas’ attitude toward slavery; the constitution of the Texas Republic was patterned after our own Constitution in most ways, but it also contained language expressly accepting slavery.) But on Jackson’s last day in office, he decided to recognize Texas’ independence officially, regardless of northern opposition, and this led to Texas’ eventual entry as a state. It became our twenty-eighth state in 1845, during James K. Polk’s administration.

Jackson left office on March 4, 1837, and had the satisfaction of seeing his friend and supporter, Martin Van Buren, follow him into office. The campaign in 1836 was again very bitter and nasty, with Jackson’s and Van Buren’s enemies calling Van Buren “Martin Van Ruin” and a puppet of “King Andrew the First,” and contrasting Van Buren unfavorably with his principal opponent, William Henry Harrison, saying that Van Buren was a man who grew up in wealth and luxury and Harrison was an honest, homespun fellow who grew up in a log cabin. The truth was that Harrison grew up in a mansion in Virginia, where his father, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and governor of Virginia from 1781 to 1784, owned a large plantation, while Van Buren was a self-made man whose father owned a small farm and a tavern in Kinderhook, New York.

And there were also some problems with the man chosen by Jackson to run for the vice-president’s job, Richard Mentor Johnson, a controversial and flamboyant fellow who was badly wounded at the Battle of the Thames during the War of 1812 and claimed to have killed Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief who allied himself with the British during the war, personally in that battle before he fell himself. (This was a big battle between an American force led by old William Henry Harrison and a British force led by a British general, Henry A. Proctor, plus about 1,200 Indians led by Tecumseh. It took place at the Thames River - not the one in England, but another Thames River in Chatham, Ontario, Canada.) Johnson was also hated by southerners because he’d taken a slave as his common-law wife and brought up their mulatto daughters as free people who, he said, were as good as anybody else.

None of these problems mattered in the end, anyway, for two reasons. First of all, both men were Jackson’s stated choices, the most important factor of all. And second, the opposition was pretty much in disarray; they’d re-formed as an entirely new party, the Whigs, but they couldn’t seem to agree on their presidential choice. They finally settled, if it can be called settling, by running their separate choices: The western faction put up Harrison, the easterners put up Daniel Webster, and the southern faction put up a man from Tennessee named Hugh Lawson White. There were also two separate Whig candidates for vice president, Francis Granger of New York and John Tyler of Virginia. The result was that Van Buren got more popular votes than his three opponents combined, 765,483 to 739,795, and 170 electoral votes to Harrison’s seventy-three, White’s twenty-six, and Webster’s fourteen. (A fellow who wasn’t even running, Willie P. Mangum of North Carolina, got the remaining eleven electoral votes.)

Johnson had a bit more trouble. He would have had a majority of electoral votes if he got Virginia’s votes, but the state’s electors refused to vote for him and gave their votes instead to a man named William Smith. This created a contest between Johnson and Granger - Tyler got only forty-seven electoral votes and was out of it - and put the matter in the hands of the Senate, the only time this has ever happened in a vice-presidential race. Well, the Senate finally gave Johnson thirty-three votes and Granger sixteen votes, and that was that.

Tyler, incidentally, happens to have been my great-great-uncle, and I guess you know that he finally became president himself in 1841, our tenth president, though he certainly wasn’t one of our great ones. My family never thought much of him because they said he had a mean disposition, and that all the family had mean dispositions as a result of being related to him. But he did some good things as president, and he established a couple of precedents that are still a part of the policy of all the presidents of the United States, which I’ll mention in a couple of sentences a little later on, so I guess I have a sort of soft spot for him. He was a stubborn son of a bitch in many ways, and I suppose that’s what’s called having a mean disposition. But when a man is stubborn and believes what he believes and carries it out, I think it’s a good trait. And when old John Tyler had to make some keynote decisions, he made the right ones.

Jackson returned to Tennessee after he left office and lived the remaining eight years of his life at the Hermitage, his 1,200-acre plantation. It wasn’t a period free of troubles for him. His tuberculosis had gotten worse, and he only had one functional lung; he was also blind in his right eye because of a cataract and had a case of dropsy that distorted his face. He was in such constant pain that he was unable to lie down and had to sleep sitting up in bed. But his good, tough old mind was as strong as ever, and when he was dying on June 8, 1845, his last thought was for the relatives and servants he heard crying nearby. “Please don’t cry,” he said. “Be good children, and I hope to see you all in heaven, both white and black, both white and black.” And then he was gone.