AMERICANS WERE MOVING west. Restless, hopeful, yearning for another big chance somewhere out in the distant fields and plains where the rich soil ran six feet deep, so it was said, families sold off possessions from the “old place,” loaded up horses and wagons, spoke farewells to a circle of envious, skeptical neighbors, and left to fulfill dreams of independence and abundance. People often moved in short jumps, from state to next-door state; sometimes they meandered up or down a fertile valley; but the great current flowed inexorably along parallel lines toward the nation’s heartland, with the setting sun as its pole star.
Up-country yeomen of the Old South struck out for cheap and good land in Tennessee and Kentucky. Planters, their soil exhausted, moved through the Gulf states looking for new acreage to meet the demand for cotton stimulated by the gin, South Carolinians through the Saluda Gap into eastern Tennessee, Georgians into southern Alabama and Mississippi along two main routes linked at Fort Mitchell. They were helping to found a new cotton kingdom to the west of the Old South. Middle-staters used the Wilderness Road and the Cumberland Gap Road to debouch into the Ohio Valley and the farmlands of Indiana and Illinois. New Englanders spread westward in a steady stream into upper and central New York State, northern Pennsylvania, northeastern Ohio, and beyond into Michigan and even Wisconsin, planting churches and schools along the way.
For years the queen of the roads across the Alleghenies was the Conestoga wagon, with its four to six horses, its broad wheels to cope with muddy roads, and, between a high aft and stern, its ample low bed that kept families and goods from spilling out as the wagon pointed up and down steep hills. Many settlers had to do with less. Journeying along the National Road through Pennsylvania in 1817, Morris Birkbeck noted that with many families a “small waggon (so light that you might almost carry it, yet strong enough to bear a good load of bedding, utensils and provisions, and a swarm of young citizens,—and to sustain marvelous shocks in its passage over these rocky heights), with two small horses, sometimes a cow or two, comprises their all; excepting a little store of hard-earned cash for the land office of the district; where they may obtain a title for as many acres as they possess half-dollars, being one fourth of the purchase money. The waggon has a tilt, or cover, made of a sheet, or perhaps a blanket. The family are seen before, behind, or within the vehicle, according to the road or the weather, or perhaps the spirits of the party.” Birkbeck noted also that some families traveled only with horse and packsaddle, and often “the back of the poor pilgrim bears all his effects, and his wife follows, naked-footed, bending under the hopes of the family.”
In later years some families traveled in far grander style, as transportation improved on the waterways. Certainly the most extraordinary trip west was via the Allegheny Portage Railroad. Nothing really could compare with awakening in one’s own canal barge on top of an Allegheny mountain. “The whole family was comfortably located in the cabin of their boat, which appeared to glide up the heights of the Alleghenies, unconscious of its being a fish out of water, whilst some of the family were preparing the coming meals and others were lying on their downy pillows,” the Hollidaysburg Aurora wrote enthusiastically of the first trip. Next day “our boat and crew left the sunny summit and smoothly glided down her iron way to Johnstown, astonishing the natives.” Another editor compared the mountaintop barge to Noah’s Ark on Ararat. Even without hyperbole the portage railroad, with its huge hoists with stationary engines, carefully inclined planes, and elaborately balanced ascending and descending cars carrying barges, soon became world-famous.
But for most travelers the lasting memory was passage along the Erie Canal: gliding along mile after mile, watching the boy driver ahead manage the horses and keep the towline taut and untangled, talking with lockkeepers and farmers as the great basins were filled and emptied, stopping off in canal shops, showboats, and floating saloons, matching wits with thimblerig experts, gypsy fortune tellers, peddlers of tempting goods,…hearing the double blast of the cow horn as a packet captain signaled that he was “coming through,”…chatting with the tobacco-chewing steersman as he kept his craft off-angle while avoiding rocks and abutments,…and enjoying a good meal prepared by a canalboat chef. And always the slowly passing scenery: the blue smoke in the morning rising from cottages and shanty boats, farmers pulling out stumps or sowing their cleared land with great sweeping movements of their arm, the “gentle slap of water against the boats, the riffle of towropes, the swish of wind in the water grass, the splash and murmur of widening circles when a muskrat slid into the canal, the warning horns of craft coming in from the feeders…the gentle tinkle of cowbells across open fields, the song of fiddle and jew’s-harp, riding the wind, punctuated by the measured plop-plop of oxen hoofs as they plodded westward,” in Madeline Sadler Waggoner’s words. And always the excited talk with other passengers about the adventures and opportunities lying ahead “out west.”
Not all canal passengers traveled elegantly or comfortably. There was a kind of caste system among boats. The grandee of the Erie was the long and lean canal packet, carrying only passengers and hand luggage and offering good meals, “settles” on top of the cabin from which passengers could enjoy the canal scenery, and separate sleeping spaces for men and women. The emigrant’s boat, or line boat, took on families and their furniture and stoves and chickens, and provided sleeping space on the floor at best. Next down in the hierarchy came the freighter, whose owner might live on board with the horses he carried along the canal; the cabin boat, built by the migrants to carry their families west; the shanty boat, a one-room hovel on a flatboat, which housed thousands of canallers along the Erie and moved occasionally by hitching a ride on another craft; and, lowest in caste of all, the timber raft, a collection of piles of logs lashed together and topped by a shanty for the crew.
But sometimes all passengers were tumbled into one existence, when the steersman’s warning of “low bridge ahead,” or bad weather, drove the nabobs out of their “settles” and into the cabin below. Because of the narrow beam of canalboats, the cabin was usually a jumble of clothes, bags, blankets, food, clotheslines, and people. Passengers had to sleep on foot-wide berths that appeared to Charles Dickens to be “hanging bookshelves, designed apparently for volumes of the small octavo size.” Like most natives, the famous English visitor found he could get into his shelf, which was the bottom one, only by lying on the floor and rolling in. Dickens could cope with this, but not with the habits of his fellow passengers. “All night long, and every night, on this canal,” he complained, “there was a perfect storm and tempest of spitting.”
Spitting. This “filthy custom,” as Dickens called it, repelled other visitors from abroad as well. “It was a perfect shower of saliva all the time,” Fanny Kemble noted on her boat. Tobacco-chewing Americans seemed to spit everywhere—in carriages, boardinghouses, law courts, the Capitol, even on carpets in living rooms—but especially in the raw new towns of the West. Americans were slouchers too; they seemed to slouch sitting down. The “bearing and attitudes of the men” at the theater struck Mrs. Frances Trollope as “perfectly indescribable; the heels thrown higher than the head, the entire rear of the person presented to the audience, the whole length supported on the benches, are among the varieties that these exquisite posture-masters exhibit.” Her remarks on slouching became so famous that American theatergoers spotting an egregious sloucher in the pit would set up the cry, “A trollope! a trollope!”
Americans, especially frontier Americans, were vulgar: this was the report brought back from the inscrutable continent to the west by many of the scores of visiting Europeans. Americans were also materialistic, avaricious, selfish, boastful, rude, gluttonous, cruel, violent. Yet other travelers—sometimes the same travelers—returned with different observations about the American character, especially on the frontier: “Jonathan” was friendly, generous, helpful, natural, unspoiled, hospitable, affectionate. Americans, in short, were complicated and contradictory.
Frontier people had a way of destroying generalizations and shibboleths. Not only European observers but also eastern Americans traveling into the West came to conclusions only to have them invalidated. American frontier people were long painted as rugged individualists, but these individualists were also resolute collectivists, or at least cooperators, in joining with their spouses and children in clearing land and building homesteads, with their townspeople in cabin raisings, logrollings, law enforcing, with the authorities in laying roads, fighting Indians, erecting forts, financing schools. Western settlers, supposed to be materialistic, set up schools and churches, libraries and literary societies, almost as fast as they established saloons and stables. Western frontier people were, on the whole, more daring, more restless, more mobile, more “middle-income” (the rich had the money to go West but little motive, the poor had the motive but no money) than the rest of the population. They were also generally outsiders who, it was said, had “sought the West to escape a society in which distinctions of birth and possession had put them at a disadvantage.”
Their hallmark was diversity. They were diverse in their environments, for people were “settling in” behind a constantly moving frontier while hunters and trappers were advancing ahead of it. They were diverse in occupation: speculators, merchants, lawyers, farmers, riverboatmen, blacksmiths, flour millers, road builders, printers, distillers, teachers. They were self-contradictory, now friendly and now suspicious, generous and stingy, religious and blasphemous, nationalistic and parochial, hard-working and self-indulgent, rowdy and respectable. They were ambitious but lacking in lofty ambition, observers concluded. “They talked up liberty but restricted its practice.…They loved change but dreaded revolution.…They were avid readers but preferred newspaper gossip to literature. They were in a constant ‘election fever’ but cold to political principles. They had appetites but no passions.” They knew how to make money but not how to spend it. They were, in short, bundles of complexities, contrarieties, and possibilities.
Out of the frontier rose a man—a migrant, an outsider, a hard worker, but also a man on the make—who embraced its contradictions. Born poor and fatherless in the Carolina uplands, Andrew Jackson rebelled from the start against schools, restrictions, and his mother’s plans for him to become a Presbyterian minister. Foul-mouthed, mean-tempered, and combative even as a child, he grew into a wild youth who led his companions in wrestling, foot-racing, drinking, card playing—and in carting off neighbors’ gates and outhouses. When provoked or thwarted, he choked with rage and could hardly speak. His mother, who had lost her husband four months before Andrew was born, suddenly left her last-born when he was fourteen in order to nurse American prisoners of war in far-off Charleston, and died there. This ultimate desertion left the boy more bellicose, restless, and mischievous than ever.
Yet there was always another side to Andrew Jackson. If he swore, he swore with style. If he bullied, he was the kind of bully who could win followers and even admirers. And if he was cruel and violent, it was the only way he knew how to cope with the wild frontier around him until it too could be mastered. He experienced that environment at a remarkably young age. A guerrilla at thirteen, he fought the British in bitter skirmishes; captured by the enemy, he was slashed across the head when he refused to clean a British officer’s boots and demanded to be treated as a prisoner of war. Thrown into a prisoner-of-war camp, he was robbed of his clothes and, ravaged by smallpox, he was freed in an exchange, only to lose his remaining brother to the pox.
Somehow the youth was steeled by these ordeals rather than broken. At eighteen he read law; a year later he was practicing as a licensed attorney; and a year after that he was the public prosecutor for western North Carolina. Then he moved west, finally settling in Nashville, where he continued to prosper: attorney general for the Moro district at twenty-four, delegate to the Tennessee constitutional convention four years later, elected the first member of Congress from Tennessee at twenty-nine, United States senator at thirty, a judge in the Supreme Court of Tennessee a year later. During this meteoric rise, however, a wild outsider seemed to be struggling with the insider on the make. For years he and his after-work cronies acted the hooligans, stealing outhouses. He courted the vivacious Rachel Robards before she was divorced. He speculated recklessly in land, traded in slaves and cotton, brawled and quarreled incessantly, flirted with the Burr conspiracy, coolly and deliberately killed a man in a duel, fought others with cane, fists, and gun; maintained smoldering hatreds for Indians, Spanish, and Englishmen. He owned about eighty black men and women.
To old Republicans like Jefferson, Jackson was a dangerous man, a demagogue, utterly unfit to be President. Among those close to him, he could be elaborately courteous to men, gentle and courtly to women, and generous to a fault—he was often in debt for signing shaky notes for friends. To plain Americans, Jackson became—after the Indian campaigns and New Orleans—the nation’s hero. If his views were hazy, his image was clear—a lean, ramrod figure topped by a seamed and wrinkled face, a hard-set lantern jaw, piercing eyes, under a corona of bristling white hair.
The simplest definition of politics is the conflict of outs versus ins. This is also the most simplistic definition, for the battle between those who hold office and those who seek it becomes enmeshed with ideological, policy, ethnic, geographical, religious, and other conflicts that may turn the contest into something more fundamental than a struggle to keep or seize power and pelf; some persons, indeed, reject office out of conviction. If ever a political contest was reduced to the simplest definition of politics, however, it was Jackson’s campaign against John Quincy Adams in 1828, when a coalition of “insiders” united around a few great national issues was assailed by a coalition of outsiders agreed on hardly any issues at all.
Since the election sharpened not merely major policy issues but personal and psychological ones, it turned into the ugliest presidential contest in a generation. However divided, the outsiders were agreed on the man they wanted—Andrew Jackson—and they were united by the conviction that they had been excluded from the citadels of the political and financial system, from the centers of social status and deference. They were Westerners and Southerners incensed against the East; growers and consumers angered by abominable tariffs; mechanics and small businessmen indignant over “monopoly”; farmers hostile to middlemen and speculators.
Listen to young Congressman James K. Polk inveigh against what had come to be known as Adams’ and Clay’s American System: “Since 1815 the action of the Government has been…essentially vicious; I repeat, sir, essentially vicious.” The American tripod was a “stool that stands upon three legs; first, high prices of the public lands…sell your lands high, prevent thereby the inducements to emigration, retain a population of paupers in the East, who may, of necessity, be driven into manufactories, to labor at low wages for their daily bread. The second branch of the system is high duties…first, to protect the manufacturer, by enabling him to sell his wares at higher prices, and next to produce an excess of revenue. The third branch of the system is internal improvements, which is the sponge which is to suck up the excess of revenue.”
All of which sounded like the poor man against the rich, the People against the Elite, the rebels against the Establishment, until one looked at the Jacksonian leaders. They were—most of them—not mechanics or farmers or paupers but capitalists, planters, traders, landowners and speculators, slave owners, lawyers, journalists, and indeed men, like Jackson himself, who had already enjoyed the fruits of office as legislators and administrators. Still, they had acute feelings of political and psychological exclusion. And nothing had aroused both feelings as forcibly as Adams’ and Clay’s “deal” of January 1825—the deal that they were certain had kept Andrew Jackson out of the White House.
The campaign of 1828 began just after the “corrupt bargain” became known, when Jackson, fuming over the Judas of the West, resigned his Senate seat and started home. Neither time nor travel assuaged his feelings. He was weeping for his country’s experiment in liberty, he wrote a friend, when “the rights of the people” could be bartered for promises of office! By the time he reached his Hermitage home he was talking darkly of “usurpation of power” and the “great constitutional corrective in the hands of the people” against it. Soon men in Nashville and Virginia and Washington and New York were laying plans for 1828.
A motley group was gathered behind the Old Hero—its acknowledged leader, Martin Van Buren. Small, amiable, plumpish, cautious, calculating, urbane, the New Yorker seemed almost the antithesis of the Hero, but both had made their way without much education, knew what it was to be on the outs with dominant factions in their states, and shared prejudices about bankers, entrenched federal officials, and Easterners unaware of the need to settle the western lands. Van Buren had shown himself a master political broker and coalition builder, as a leader of the “Albany Regency” and United States senator.
Jackson’s old-time advisers had been mainly Westerners: Major John H. Eaton, a Florida land speculator and Tennessee politico; William B. Lewis, also of Tennessee, who had helped him as political lieutenant and fixer; Judge John Overton, an old confidant and loyalist. The most colorful by far was Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Expelled from the University of North Carolina for thieving from his roommates, he had moved to Tennessee, gained admission to the bar, won a seat in the state senate, served as Jackson’s aide-de-camp, then moved to Missouri and within five years won election as United States senator. He and Jackson, who earlier had brawled ferociously in Tennessee, were now reconciled. A handsome, solidly built man, of considerable intellectual power, Benton had a vanity so grand and serene that friends came to accept it, like a national monument.
These men and their allies across the nation slowly worked out a simple but formidable double strategy to elect Old Hickory President. They would broaden out Jackson’s personal coalition and entrench it solidly in the democratic and agrarian ranks of the old Republican party. Crucial to the first strategy was winning support from southern leaders disaffected by Adams, and the key man in this region was Vice-President Calhoun, who had broken with the President and plumped for Jackson. Although Calhoun had been elected Vice-President in 1824, he had been disturbed by the flouting of the popular will in Adams’ selection by the House—and even more disturbed that two Adams terms, followed by two terms for the heir apparent, Henry Clay, would close off the presidency for sixteen years. Calhoun was already in his mid-forties. Within two years of Adams’ (and his own) inauguration, having moved solidly into Jackson’s camp, the dour South Carolinian was sending the Hermitage optimistic reports about 1828 prospects.
“Every indication is in our favor, or rather I should say in favor of the country’s cause,” he wrote Jackson in January 1827. “The whole South is safe, with a large majority of the middle states, and even in New England strong symptoms of discontent and division now appear, which must daily increase.” He looked forward to the triumph of “the great principles of popular rights, which have been trampled down by the coalition.” Within another year the general’s lieutenants had extended their counter-coalition throughout the twenty-four states. The heart of this strategy was what Van Buren called an alliance between the “planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North.”
An even more crucial task was to build a firm foundation of popular support beneath the broadening cadre of Jackson’s leaders. Van Buren & Co. decided on the bold strategy of the “substantial reorganization of the Old Republican party”—in plainer words, to build a Jackson party within the disheveled ranks of the cumbrous party of Monroe, Adams, and Clay. The key to this effort was unprecedented political organization. In Nashville, Jackson himself established and supervised a central committee composed of stalwarts like Lewis and Overton. In Washington, an informal caucus of members of Congress safeguarded Jackson’s interests on Capitol Hill. Throughout the states, Hickory Clubs organized parades and barbecues and rallies, printed up handbills, pamphlets, and leaflets, and canvassed the voters in their homes. The Jackson men, ostentatiously taking their case “to the people,” established an extraordinary number of new dailies and weeklies to combat the established newspapers that spoke for Adams and Clay. All this required money, but the Jacksonians seemed to have plenty of it. Edward Pessen estimated that the election of Jackson cost about one million dollars—a formidable sum in 1828.
The contest was largely devoid of issues, and it was meant to be. Jackson did not rally the masses by appeals to ideals of justice and equality; he stayed home and stayed quiet, except for occasional pieties and ambiguities. In vain did Adams supporters try to raise questions like the tariff and internal improvements. “The Hurra Boys” were all for Jackson, one Administration man sneered, but he had to admit that they constituted a “powerful host.” The “National Republicans”—as the anti-Jacksonians came to be called—seemed unable to compete with a Hickory Leaf in every hat and hickory-pole raisings in every town square. Increasingly, the Jacksonians themselves were becoming known as “Democratic-Republicans,” or simply “Democrats.”
Slander and abuse pushed aside issues. Adams was called a monarchist, squanderer of the taxpayers’ dollars on silken fripperies, Sabbath breaker, pimp. Partisans of the President in turn labeled Jackson as blasphemer, bastard, butcher, adulterer. As usual, the invective had a tiny morsel of truth. John Quincy Adams a pimp? Well, it seemed that in St. Petersburg, corrupted as he was by his long service in sinful foreign capitals, he had “prostituted a beautiful American girl to the carnal desires of Czar Alexander I.” A fiction, of course, but a rumor to be handled only by attributing even baser acts to Jackson. The Old Hero an adulterer? Well, Jackson had indeed married Rachel Robards before she was divorced, and he may have done so knowingly, but the Jackson men had to put out sworn statements as to his innocence.
In a contest of invective and personality, no Adams could win out. Jackson beat him in the popular vote, 647,292 to 507,730. The general won the electoral college 178 to 83; Adams carried only New England and parts of the central Atlantic region. Jackson brought off a clean sweep of the rural hinterland west of New Jersey and south of the Potomac. Swept out of office by this gale of southern and “western” ballots, the National Republicans saw the results as presaging ominous changes, as their political fathers had twenty-eight years before. “Well,” said an Adams backer, “a great revolution has taken place…” Another wrote: “It was the howl of raving Democracy.”
It was, at least, the howl of the outsiders. With the approach of Inauguration Day 1829, plain people by the hundreds descended upon Washington, crowding the lodging places and thronging the streets. They massed in front of the Capitol to hear their hero pledge reform to all and the ending of the national debt. Then they followed the new President down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, pushed into the mansion, and fought their way toward the punch and the ice cream. As the visitors trampled on the chairs and carpets of the house just vacated by an Adams of Boston, as they smashed china and glasses, it seemed as though a new day had dawned in Washington. Truly the outsiders were now inside the citadel of power.
A political tempest had blown in from the west. Now the nation awaited Jackson with anticipation and apprehension. Nobody knew what he would do when he arrived in Washington, Webster wrote to friends in Boston. “My opinion is, that when he comes he will bring a breeze with him. Which way it will blow, I cannot tell.…My fear is stronger than my hope. ” Old John Randolph of Roanoke, as passionate and apocalyptic as ever, cried that the country was ruined past redemption. “Where now could we find leaders of a revolution?”
Thousands of job seekers throughout the country had their idea of a good revolution: rotate the ins out of federal office, and rotate the outs in. Some stayed home in hopes of taking over as postmasters or customs collectors, but hundreds flocked to Washington, settled down in hotels and boardinghouses, and haunted the White House and the departments. “Spoilsmen” put heavy political pressure on the Administration. “I take it for granted that all who do not support the present administration you will not consider your friends, and of course will lose your confidence,” a New York politico wrote to Van Buren. “The old maxim of ‘those not for us are against us,’ you have so often recognized that its authority cannot be denied.” Arriving late in Washington to join the Administration, Van Buren was besieged by applicants who followed behind him into his room. Reclining ill on a sofa, he patiently heard them out.
A wave of fear passed through Washington officialdom. “The great body of officials,” James Parton wrote, “awaited their fate in silent horror, glad when the office hours expired at having escaped another day.…No man deemed it safe and prudent to trust his neighbor, and the interior of the department presented a fearful scene of guarded silence, secret intrigue, espionage, and tale-bearing.” From Braintree, Adams heard that a clerk in the War Office had “cut his throat from ear to ear, from the mere terror of being dismissed,” and that another clerk had “gone raving distracted.”
Two Kentucky job seekers ran into each other in Washington. “I am ashamed of myself,” one said, “for I feel as if every man I meet knew what I came for.” The other replied: “Don’t distress yourself, for every man you meet is on the same business.” Despite the furor, the number of actual removals was not large—less than 10 percent after the first eighteen months of the new administration. Probably a somewhat larger number of non-college men of lower socioeconomic station got hired. Some of the clerks and agents had been Jackson men; others had been neutral. Many other changes resulted simply from death or retirement. But a few removals were enough to put Washington in shock.
Jackson defended the removals on the ground of principle, not party. Men long in office, he said, were apt to become indifferent to the public interest: “Office is considered as a species of property, and government rather as a means of promoting individual interests than as an instrument created solely for the service of the people.…The duties of all public officers are, or at least admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance.…In a country where offices are created solely for the benefit of the people no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another.” Pitching his case on the level of good republicanism did not endear the President to Washington bureaucrats—or win support from old Jeffersonians like Madison, who privately criticized rotation.
The new President’s inaugural address had given little concrete idea of his plans, aside from revamping of the civil service. He had straddled the issues of internal improvements, the tariff, the currency, all in a voice so low that it reminded veteran Washingtonians of Jefferson’s inaudible remarks twenty-eight years before. Jackson did promise a proper regard for states’ rights, economy in government, and a “just and liberal” policy toward Indians, but this was standard politicians’ fare. Nor did his cabinet-building offer many clues. The two principal appointees, Van Buren as Secretary of State and Samuel D. Ingham at Treasury, came from the swing states of New York and Pennsylvania. John Eaton, Jackson’s old Tennessee friend, was the new Secretary of War; other appointees came from North Carolina, Georgia, and Kentucky. Pro-South in substance, anti-Clay in sentiment, the Cabinet hardly looked like an instrument for governing. It met infrequently, usually on major occasions, but less to deliberate than to hear Jacksonian pronouncements worked up in the inner circle. Administrative policy questions were usually settled by the President and department heads in private conferences. The Cabinet rarely discussed major policy issues in the manner of a council of state.
It was the “kitchen cabinet” that both expressed and shaped the President’s program. This was not a cabinet, nor of course did it meet in the kitchen; it was, rather, a shifting group of advisers on whom Jackson called as he needed them. The most influential was Amos Kendall. Born on a poor Massachusetts farm in 1789, Kendall had attended Dartmouth, taught at Groton, and studied law; unrequited by both the girl and the profession he loved, at the age of twenty-five he moved to Kentucky, where he was befriended by Mrs. Henry Clay and made tutor to the Clays’ children. Later he turned to newspaper work and soon became editor of the Argus of Western America in Frankfort. For years a supporter of Clay and Adams, Kendall finally was caught between the Clay and Jackson factions. For reasons of both opportunism and principle he broke with Clay, moved to Washington, and was taken on as fourth auditor of the Treasury.
Another key adviser—and another former Kentuckian—was Francis Preston Blair. He looked like Kendall’s political clone, having broken with Clay, embraced Jacksonian oppositionism, and succeeded Kendall as editor of the Argus. He was brought to Washington to edit the new Democratic paper, the Washington Globe, whose columns he filled with “demonstrations of public opinion” drawn from remote country newspapers that allegedly he penned himself. Less close to Jackson was Isaac Hill, born of an impoverished New Hampshire family, a scourge of the New Hampshire squirearchy as editor of a small Concord weekly, until he moved to Washington.
It was an unlikely-looking lot: Kendall, nearsighted, asthmatic, prematurely white-haired, bundled up in a white greatcoat even on a blazing hot day; Hill, short, cadaverous, and lame; Blair, with an elfin body of hardly a hundred pounds. They had been outsiders to a society that prized good appearance in face, form, manners, and speech. But they were the perfect instruments to a President who needed men both committed and skeptical, both articulate and polemical, to help him with his speeches and papers, and often with his decisions. Many a morning the President would lie in bed, under a portrait of his lost Rachel, blurting out his ideas, chewing and spitting or puffing out great clouds of acrid smoke from his long pipe, while Kendall or others would take down the words, smooth them out, read them back over and over until their chief was satisfied. Several other aides helped too—Lewis and others from the old Tennessee days carried on for a time—and Van Buren had a most powerful triple role as the leading cabinet member, head of the foreign-policy-making establishment, and member of the inner group.
Personal and social squabbles in Jackson’s first year were harbingers of the storm to come. A few weeks before the Inaugural, Secretary of War John Eaton had married Margaret (Peggy) O’Neale Timberlake, the vivacious daughter of a Washington tavernkeeper and the widow of a navy purser who had recently committed suicide. Rumors were put out—by Jackson’s political enemies, it was said—that Timberlake had cut his throat on discovering Peggy’s involvement with the wealthy young Eaton. Jackson had approved the marriage as a way of stilling the rumors, but the enamored pair waited only four months after the purser’s death. Tongues waggled faster than ever as Washington watched to see if the wife of John Eaton would be received in society. Floride Calhoun, consort of the Vice-President, proceeded to shun Peggy Eaton, and the cabinet wives followed suit. It was the kind of situation—as Jackson’s enemies should have known—guaranteed to tap his unbounded concern for young women treated cavalierly, as he believed his wife Rachel had been. For Jackson’s adored—and in his view maligned—wife had died only a few weeks before he was inaugurated.
“I did not come here,” he asserted, “to make a Cabinet for the Ladies of this place, but for the Nation.” Van Buren, himself a widower, moved into the breach by acting the gallant toward Peggy, while the President blamed first Clay, and then Calhoun, for the embarrassment.
The great battles of Jackson’s presidency began with the congressional session that got under way in December 829. From then on, the President took on the barons of the Senate—Clay, Hayne, and the others—his own Vice-President, his own Cabinet, the opposition party, the banking elite, the Supreme Court, secessionists. At the end, Clay himself would cry out that Jackson had “swept over the Government, during the last eight years, like a tropical tornado.” But if Jackson’s presidency was filled with conflict, it was in large part because he embodied it, and so did the men he confronted. It was a blast out of the west that precipitated the sectional storm that would dominate the rest of Jackson’s first term.
The chamber of the United States Senate, noon, Tuesday, January 26, 1830. An air of high expectancy hangs over the packed hall, as Washington personages push their way in from the blustery cold outside and crowd into the aisles and vestibules. A score or more fashionably dressed women, their round bonnets trimmed with drooping plumes, look down from the front row of the balcony. They are watching Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a full, almost portly figure in his old-fashioned long-tailed coat with bright gilt buttons, buff waistcoat, and large white cravat. Webster is looking toward the Vice-President of the United States, John Calhoun, in the presiding chair, erect and stern. All the Washington notables seem to be here, except for the distant man in the White House—famous senators like Hayne of South Carolina, Benton of Missouri, Woodbury of New Hampshire, celebrities of the past like John Quincy Adams and Harrison Gray Otis still haunting Washington, and so many visitors from the House that little business can be done there.
The occasion is Webster’s reply to Hayne of South Carolina. A week earlier, Webster had dropped into the Senate, after finishing his legal business in the Supreme Court just a few steps away, in time to hear the South Carolina senator call for an alliance of the West and the South against the “selfish and unprincipled” East. Over the next few days, while Benton, Hayne, Webster, and other senators argued over the usual questions of national politics—public lands, internal improvements, the tariff—Webster became aware that a far more ominous set of issues was dominating the debate: those of nullification, secession, the very nature of the American Constitution. Even so, the famous orator, affluent and successful, recently remarried after the death of his first wife, might have shunned the battle except that Hayne, unusually impassioned, sarcastic, and aggressive for a young man ordinarily so moderate and courteous, had dealt him some punishing blows.
Now Webster would answer Hayne’s climactic speech. Hayne’s supporters were so elated by their champion’s performance that Webster’s own backers became apprehensive. But not Webster. When his friend Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story called on him to offer help, he replied, “Give yourself no uneasiness, Judge Story! I will grind him as fine as a pinch of snuff.” And the next morning, asked on entering the Senate whether he was “well charged”—a reference to the four fingers of powder needed to charge a muzzle-loading gun—the orator replied jauntily, “Seven fingers!”
The long-gathering conflict now culminating in this debate was explosive enough. It had its main source in dramatic social and economic changes in the South—especially in South Carolina—which had set that section in a radically different direction from the North. A decade or two before, South Carolinians had exhibited much the same constellation of interests and attitudes as most other states in the Union. Highly nationalistic, they gloried in the fame and achievements of John Calhoun and the other southern war hawks of 1812. As consumers of products from abroad, they hated tariffs, but many South Carolinians grew or made their own products that needed protection, and they also accepted tariffs as strengthening American manufactories in the event of war.
As for slavery, most members of the South Carolinian delegation in Congress favored the compromise of 1820. To be sure, old Charles Pinckney—the same Charles Pinckney who had brought his young bride to Philadelphia in 1787 and helped write the Constitution there—warned that if Congress was ever accorded the right even to consider the subject of slavery, “there is no knowing to what length it may be carried,” but most of the state’s political leaders shared the moderate attitudes of nationalists like Calhoun and William Lowndes.
Then—almost overnight, it seemed later—the mood of South Carolina had altered sharply. For rice and cotton growers, the 1820s were a time of rapid economic change, price and demand instability, credit squeezes, and depression, all tending toward a rising sense of social and economic insecurity, which in turn fostered a powerful parochialism and sectionalism. The Tariff of 1828 excited the worst southern fears; it was to them literally a tariff of abominations, to be despised and shunned. In a decade of peace they could no longer accept the tariff as a defense measure. Federal policy on internal improvements and other questions also continued to antagonize South Carolinians. But behind all the old issues always loomed the specter of northern interference with slavery. An alleged slave conspiracy, led by Denmark Vesey of Charleston, along with rumors of other planned slave revolts, aroused dread over threats from inside; the stepped-up efforts of the American Colonization Society in the North aroused fears over threats from outside.
By the late 1820s the balance of South Carolina politics had changed. If the cleaving issue in the state, and in much of the South, had been nationalism versus sectionalism, that issue now was: what kind of sectionalism? to be carried how far? and how accomplished? Steadily shifting away from his old nationalism, Calhoun still had to deal more with fire eaters who wanted secession than with moderates who wished to attain South Carolina’s aims within the Union. News of the abominable tariff catalyzed powerful forces already building. Calhoun wrote a brilliant tract—the South Carolina Exposition—in which he flayed national tariff policy as unconstitutional and oppressive, “calculated to corrupt the public virtue and destroy the liberty of the country”; contended that no government based on the “naked principle” of majority rule could “preserve its liberty even for a single generation”; and claimed the right of “interposition” by state governments—that is, to declare null and void “unconstitutional” acts of the national government. If the federal government did not recognize the constitutional powers of the states, South Carolina would claim the right of nullification. South Carolinians had waited through Jackson’s first year, hopeful that he—a slave owner himself, after all—would redress their grievances, but in vain. Hayne’s hard line in the Senate, reflecting Calhoun’s arguments, showed that southern patience was running out.
So now, Webster waited to take the floor. The chamber hushed as the Vice-President recognized him. Standing majestically as he faced the chair, resting his left hand on his desk while swinging his right hand up and down, he spoke in a low but compelling tone. The orator held the floor for three hours, pausing only once or twice to consult some notes. He ridiculed Hayne’s fear of federal tyranny. “Consolidation!—that perpetual cry, both of terror and delusion—consolidation!” The federal government, he declared, was the instrument not of the will of the states but of “We the People”; the national interest was the controlling one; the effort of a state to nullify a law of Congress was a revolutionary and illegal act. As Webster warmed to the attack, his granite face seemed to come alive; his eyes burned with fervor; his “mastiff-mouth” bit off his sentences with the finality of a spring trap. A connoisseur of all the arts of oratory, he moved from exposition to argumentation to irony to banter to scorn to eloquence to pathos. When he said, “I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts; she needs none,” but proceeded to do so, Bay State men clustered in the gallery were said to “shed tears like girls.” Webster had never felt an audience respond more eagerly and sympathetically. His peroration would soon be on New England schoolboys’ lips:
“When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance, rather, behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as, What is all this worth? Nor those other words of delusion and folly, Liberty first and Union afterwards; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart—Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”
A few weeks later, Calhoun & Co. received another oratorical setback. The Webster-Hayne debate had been an interparty encounter, and politically the Massachusetts senator could be dismissed as a New Englander and an old Federalist. But what was the attitude of Andrew Jackson, a Southwesterner and a Democrat? Rather rashly, states’ rights Democrats organized a celebration of Jefferson’s birthday for April 13, 1830, in Washington to glorify their cause and symbolize the Democratic party alliance between East and West. Jackson and Van Buren attended, along with an array of other party leaders. The banquet in Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel was hardly over and chairs pulled back from the board when the Southerners launched into speeches and toasts that evoked the Jefferson of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Defying Jackson to his face, George Troup, a Georgia planter-politician and states’ rights extremist, toasted the government of the United States as more absolute than the rule of Tiberius, but as less wise than that of Augustus, and less just than that of Trajan.
All eyes turned to Jackson. Scowling at Calhoun as he signaled the crowd to rise, the old general toasted, “Our Federal Union—it must be preserved. ” Van Buren, who had climbed up on a chair to witness the scene, saw the noisy company turn utterly silent, dumbfounded. Calhoun’s hand shook, spilling a little wine down the side of his glass. But he was ready with his answering toast: “The Union—next to our liberty the most dear.…”
A great Virginia reel of politics was under way, as politicians chose partners and changed them, in a dance of sections and interests, issues and ideologies. Not for half a century had the nation possessed such compelling sectional leaders—the spare, consecrated Calhoun, champion of the South; the droll, sparkling, restless Clay, still “Harry of the West”; New England’s hero, the imposing, magnetic Webster, “the great cannon loaded to the lips,” as Emerson pictured him; the consummate politician Van Buren, keen, dexterous, opportunistic, the supple representative of New York and the other swing states. But these men were more than leaders of sections. They were statesmen with a vision of the national purpose, and they were politicians who hungered for the presidency. Hence they had to protect their standing in their state and section, while gaining national recognition and building national coalitions. They were trapped in the rising sectional feeling of Americans. And they had to deal with the unpredictable, prickly, opinionated man in the White House.
The speeches of Webster and Hayne in the Senate, the toasts of Calhoun and Jackson at Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel, were the opening salvos of the 1832 presidential election campaign. Van Buren had attached his fortunes firmly to the President’s, and the political foxiness of the “Little Magician,” combined with the leonine presence and power of the President, made an invincible combination. Jackson struck first at Clay, his old western rival. The issue was the venerable one of internal improvements. In his December 1829 message to Congress, Jackson had questioned the constitutionality and the desirability of federal aid to roads and other projects. When Congress passed a bill authorizing government subscription of stock in a turnpike connecting Maysville and Lexington and lying wholly within Kentucky, the President vetoed it. Clay was outraged. Not only was he the author of the “American System” but only the year before he and his family had spent four days negotiating the steep curves and bottomless mud of the existing Maysville road. Still, the deliberate slap administered by Jackson helped confirm Clay as the National Republican candidate for President. Webster backed him too.
“On the whole, My Dear Sir,” Webster wrote Clay two days after the veto, “I think a crisis is arriving, or rather has arrived. I think you cannot be kept back from the contest. The people will bring you out, nolens volens. Let them do it.…”
Jackson’s most dangerous enemy was still Calhoun. Each man thought the other was plotting against him. If there was a “plotter,” it was Van Buren, who had every reason to widen the break between the President and Vice-President. In fact, political issues, temperaments, and ambitions were the main dividers, but the Secretary of State was quick to take advantage of them. The Peggy Eaton business sputtered along for some time, as she was ostracized not only by Floride Calhoun and cabinet wives but even by Emily Donelson, the wife of Jackson’s nephew, who served as White House hostess for the President. Van Buren went out of his way to accept the Eatons. He coyly made his chief privy to the proceedings. “Tell Mrs. Eaton,” he wrote Jackson, “if she does not write me I will give her up as a bad girl.”
Even more divisive was the resurrection of decade-old charges that Calhoun as Secretary of War had wanted General Jackson to be censured for improper conduct in pursuing Seminole Indians during the invasion of Florida. The President now asked Calhoun for an explanation. Incensed that this old issue would be revived by his enemies, Calhoun properly challenged the right to question his conduct as Secretary of War; but he wrote fifty more pages trying to defend his action. Having prejudged the affair, Jackson coldly ended any further discussion of it. If Calhoun seemed paranoid about attempts to isolate him, he really did have enemies. Blair was chosen to set up the Washington Globe as a Jackson organ, to counter the United States Telegraph, edited by Duff Green, a Calhounite. Federal officials were told to take the Globe or lose their jobs. They took the Globe.
With the Jackson-Calhoun feud heating up, and with the Peggy Eaton wounds still throbbing, Van Buren made an adroit move, offering to resign from the Cabinet so the President could refashion it. Realizing that he could thus eliminate the Calhoun influence in his inner circle, Jackson agreed, on condition that Van Buren become Minister to Great Britain so that the Calhounites would gain no satisfaction. The plan worked. Jackson was now able to create a Cabinet of past and future notables: Edward Livingston as Secretary of State; Louis McLane, Treasury; Lewis Cass,War; Levi Woodbury, Navy; Roger B. Taney, Attorney General. Calhoun got a brief revenge when Van Buren’s nomination as minister came before the Senate; as presiding officer, he cast the deciding vote against the New Yorker.”
“It will kill him, sir, kill him dead. He will never kick sir, never kick,” Calhoun said to a friend. But he was quite wrong. On hearing of the rejection, Jackson erupted into a stream of denunciations of the South Carolinian. And he planned his own revenge: the substitution of Van Buren for Calhoun as Vice-President.
Calhoun had a more portentous situation to deal with in his home state. Anti-tariff and anti-abolitionist feeling had steadily been rising in South Carolina; polarization between unionists and nullifiers had sharpened to the point that the two factions called each other “submissionists” and “secessionists” and even held separate Fourth of July celebrations. No longer could the Vice-President bridge the gap. He was a leader; he must go with his state, or his followers would abandon him. Under intense pressure from the nullifiers, he wrote his “Fort Hill Letter”—an announcement to the nation that he was taking his stand for nullification. For Calhoun, in William Freehling’s words, “the collapse of presidential prospects was a shattering experience. The bright young man who had always enjoyed success at last endured the agony of overwhelming setback. The signs of his despair were visible everywhere: in the slouch of his shoulders as he paced the Senate corridors; in his increasing tendency to make conversations into soliloquies, in his long dirges on the decline of the Republic.” Still, he would be the southern candidate for President, if only to strengthen the hand of the nullifiers.
Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams’ successor as head of the National Republican party, proposed to be the national candidate for President. On the eve of 1832 his party met in convention in the saloon of the Atheneum in Baltimore, with 155 delegates present from virtually all the states outside the Deep South. Former Democrat Peter Livingston of New York placed Clay’s name in nomination in what was probably the first nominating speech in convention history. Clay was unanimously chosen. At another convention in Washington several months later, Clay accepted the nomination, in a speech warning that “the fate of liberty, throughout the world, mainly depends upon the maintenance of American liberty.” Proudly the National Republicans presented their credo: against the spoils system, executive tyranny, and Jackson’s treatment of the Indians; in favor of American capitalism in general, and in particular, of a protective tariff to foster American industry—which they defended as protecting workers as well as owners—internal improvements at federal expense, the use of public land revenues for such improvements, the maintenance of the national banking system and a stable and uniform currency.
The Democrats also met in convention in Baltimore, but the large number of delegates—334, from every state save Missouri—compelled a move to a Universalist church. The convention, did not nominate Jackson; it simply “concurred,” amid much enthusiasm, in a nomination already made in many states. The delegates adopted a two-thirds rule for the nomination of a Vice-President—the only real issue before the convention—and a unit rule, authorizing the majority of each delegation to cast the entire vote of the state. Van Buren easily scored far more than two-thirds of the votes on the first ballot. They did not need a positive platform; Jackson and Van Buren would run against the bank and the “aristocratic influences” favored by the National Republicans.
So the two parties confronted each other, but each was beset by factional problems. Calhoun threatened to draw votes from Jackson; and the leaders of the Webster faction, while publicly supporting Clay, were privately pessimistic about his chances and looking forward to a Webster candidacy in 1836, if not somehow in 1832. But the greatest threat to Clay lay in the strangest faction of all, a movement that called itself the Anti-Masons. For years Americans had been suspicious of secret societies, including the Masons, even though Washington and other heroes had been members. In the fall of 1826, an upstate New Yorker named William Morgan, an apostate Mason who had threatened to “expose” the secrets of Masonry, had been spirited away in a yellow carriage, driven to the Niagara frontier, and so disposed of that no trace of him was ever found.
The resulting uproar precipitated an explosive movement of moral protest, centered in New York but radiating powerfully throughout the Northeast. The movement received much of its force from antislavery and temperance New Englanders and New Yorkers, and much of its direction from a remarkable array of leaders including William H. Seward, Thurlow Weed, and Thaddeus Stevens. Even before the National Republicans and the Democrats had convened in Baltimore, the Anti-Masons had met there, in the first presidential nominating convention in history, and chosen as their candidate William Wirt, a dignified sixty-year-old Virginia Republican of the old school. Wirt had been on his way to the National Republican convention, ready to vote for Clay; he claimed to be shocked at his nomination by the Anti-Masons, but nonetheless accepted the honor.
Which of the presidential candidates could pull enough factions and sub-factions together to win a majority in the electoral college? As the campaign heated up during 1832, it became apparent that Jackson was in control. For one thing, the Democrats in the states seemed far more enthusiastic and organized than the followers of Calhoun, Clay, or Wirt. For another, the President proved himself a master in taking a moderate but clear-cut position on the issues that left other candidates appearing to be extremists. As the election campaign neared, the Administration took a more benevolent view toward reducing the tariff, lowering the cost of public lands, and even toward internal improvement.
Jackson even seemed conciliatory toward nullification, as a curious episode suggested. For years land-hungry Georgia settlers had been encroaching on Indian lands, and for years the Cherokees in particular had been resisting the tide, even to the point of setting up a kind of independent state under treaties with the federal government. Georgia refused to recognize Cherokee autonomy. Two New England missionaries were convicted and sentenced to four years at hard labor when they defied a Georgia law that compelled white residents in the Cherokee country to obtain a license and to take an oath of allegiance to the state. On the condemned men’s appeal to the Supreme Court, old John Marshall, speaking for the majority, held that the national government had exclusive jurisdiction and that the Georgia law was unconstitutional. The prisoners were ordered released. When Georgia defied the decision; Jackson aided and abetted the nullifiers. “John Marshall has made his decision,” he was reported to have said, “now let him enforce it. ”
Still, mollifying nullifiers and other factions was not much of a campaign strategy. What Jackson needed was a single, compelling issue that would transcend the ordinary play of interests and sections—an issue that would mobilize an electoral majority behind his cause. And he found it, by conviction and by contingency, in Nicholas Biddle’s Second National Bank of the United States.
The first and second banks had always been a staple of Republican party controversy, and few were surprised when Jackson, determined as he said to “prevent our liberties” from being “crushed by the Bank,” challenged the bank’s constitutionality in his first message to Congress in 1829. With the bank’s charter not due to expire until 1836, the President was content to ask Congress to curb the power of the bank and thus to delay a showdown with it until the second term. He knew that Biddle was a power in the politics of Pennsylvania and other key states. Webster and Clay knew this too, and for that reason they advised Biddle to call Jackson’s hand before the 1832 election by forcing him either to support the bill for recharter or to face the power of the bank at the polls. The bank chief initiated hostilities by having a recharter bill introduced in Congress, which passed it by strong majorities after a long and angry debate.
Visiting Jackson in the White House, Van Buren found the old general lying on a couch looking pale and exhausted. “The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me,” he said, “but I will kill it. ”
Kill it he did, with a veto and a bristling message that attacked monopoly and special privilege and boldly accepted the challenge of the “rich and powerful” to make the bank the central issue of the campaign. His own appeal would be to the “humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors for themselves.” Thus the people would decide. This was the first time, according to Robert Remini, that a President “had taken a strong stand on an important issue, challenging the electorate to do something about it if they did not approve his position.” Even Jackson was surprised by the popularity of his stand on the bank. “The veto works well,” he said, “instead of crushing me as was expected and intended, it will crush the Bank.” Calhoun and his fellow nullifiers handed Jackson the other great national issue of the campaign. As feeling about the tariff and slavery issues boiled over in South Carolina during 1832, the nullifiers won a legislative majority in favor of a state convention that would adopt an ordinance canceling national tariff legislation. Hayne prepared to resign as United States senator, to be elected governor; Calhoun would resign as Vice-President, to succeed Hayne in the Senate. Jackson, after taking military precautions in South Carolina, prepared a “Proclamation to the People of South Carolina” that termed nullification an “impracticable absurdity” and ended flatly, “Disunion by armed forces is treason. ”
The Jacksonians versus Philadelphia bankers and southern nullifiers—how could the Democrats lose? The response of the voters was decisive. Sweeping the electoral college over Clay, 219 to 49, Jackson won the electoral votes of sixteen of the twenty-four states and ran well ahead of Clay in the popular vote, 687,000 to 530,000. Jackson polled strongly in the South (except in South Carolina), well in the West, fairly well in the middle Atlantic states, and decisively in the swing states of Pennsylvania and New York. Aside from his own Kentucky, Clay’s main strength lay in southern New England. Still, considering Jackson’s position as national hero, and his brilliant positioning of his administration on the issues of the day, as well as the siphoning off of National Republican votes by the Anti-Masons, Clay had done well in the popular vote—a harbinger of the day when a revitalized Whig party would rise out of the ashes of the National Republicans.
Armed with his election mandate, Jackson now moved against nullification. The reaction of Carolina hotheads against his proclamation—the “mad ravings of a drivelling dotard,” Congressman George McDuffie called it—only hardened his will. Although the nullifiers put up a show of resistance, enlisting 25,000 volunteers and even setting up a cannonball factory, it was clear that they were not eager for a military confrontation, especially after learning that the rest of the South opposed drastic action. In mid-January 1833 the President asked the Congress for a “Force” bill that would allow him to enforce the revenue laws by military action if necessary, but the bill actually tried to avert the use of force by working out procedures, including “floating customs houses” off Charleston, to avert encounters in the city.
The Force bill produced in the Senate another brilliant debate, rivaling the Hayne-Webster forensics. This time Webster took on Calhoun, who had been liberated from the silence of the presiding chair, and the remorseless logic-chopping of the new senator from South Carolina was judged to have bested the fulsome rhetoric of the New Englander. John Randolph, sitting in the gallery, found his view obscured by a lady’s bonnet. “Take away that hat,” he bleated, “I want to see Webster die, muscle by muscle.”
A combination of forces was working now against an explosion. Calhoun was pulling back from his earlier extremism, Van Buren was restraining Jackson from exercising his dearest wish of trying and hanging the secessionist leaders, and—most important of all—Henry Clay, the old compromiser himself, was coming in with a tariff bill designed to conciliate the Carolinians. The President signed both the Force bill and the compromise tariff bill on March 2, 1833, two days before he took the oath of office for a second term. Once again he had shown a masterly ability both to manipulate factions and to rise above them, to take a national and presidential posture, and to know when to stand firm and when to compromise.
But Andrew Jackson of Nashville was in no mood to compromise on the other great national issue. Nor was Nicholas Biddle of Philadelphia.
Only a historical novel, not history itself, could have plausibly pitted Jackson against so contrasting an antagonist. Born into an affluent old Quaker family of Philadelphia in 1786, Biddle entered the University of Pennsylvania at the age of ten; denied a degree three years later because of his youth, he gained admission to Princeton and won his degree there at fifteen. Successively a traveler in Europe, secretary to Minister James Monroe in London, and a Philadelphia lawyer, politician, and litterateur, he had married an heiress and moved into and upward through Philadelphia banking circles. He was everything Jackson was not: wellborn, superbly educated, urbane, genteel, and young. But both men were leaders, one in the world of politics, the other in that of economics.
Before confronting Biddle, the President decided on a trip north into the old Federalist hinterland. Like presidential heroes before him, he received the cheers of Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, but this presidential party traveled by steamboat, canal barge, and train—Jackson’s first train ride. The party even invaded Boston, where they expected the coolest of receptions. Greeted at the Massachusetts border by young Josiah Quincy, who had reluctantly accepted the duty of escorting the dragon, Old Hickory so charmed Josiah and other Bostonians that the young man’s father, President Quincy of Harvard College, called his overseers together and voted Jackson a degree of Doctor of Laws. Overseer John Quincy Adams boycotted the ceremony in Harvard Yard. He would not be present to watch Harvard’s disgrace, he said, in conferring “her highest literary honors upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.” Despite serious hemorrhaging of the lungs, Jackson moved on up the North Shore to Lynn and Salem and finally Concord, New Hampshire, where he collapsed and had to be borne back to Washington by steamer.
He was not too sick, however, to resume the project he had got under way soon after his inauguration: removing the government deposits from Biddle’s bank. Why did Jackson pursue the bank further, after his “veto victory” of ’32? In part because he feared that Biddle might use the three years remaining before charter expiration to manipulate money and politicians to gain recharter, or even to precipitate a financial panic just before the 1836 election and thus help pro-bank candidates. Withdrawing the sizable government deposits in the bank would be a body blow to Biddle’s “monster” financially—and a symbol around which Jackson men could rally.
But the President’s decision had a deeper, more personal source. He was immovably, fanatically, emotionally committed to breaking Biddle’s bank. Delegations of businessmen and bankers who came to ask him for relief could hardly get their first sentence out of their mouths before he would break in with his harangue. “Relief, sir!” he would burst out. “Come not to me, sir! Go to the monster.…You would have us, like the people of Ireland, paying tribute to London.…” Would to God all the “stockjobbers, brokers, and gamblers [were] swept from the land!” He always came back to the monster. “I’ve got my foot upon it and I’ll crush it.” Over and over again he declaimed that he would never—never—never give in. Jackson’s fanaticism, Michael Rogin has theorized, issued from a ferocious inner struggle that had its sources in childhood deprivation and adult trauma and conflict.
And he was officially almost alone. Treasury Secretary McLane had made clear from the start that he was against removal, so he was smoothly shifted to Secretary of State in the spring. Vice-President Van Buren, facing every day the full panoply of Democratic party factions arrayed in front of his Senate rostrum, dragged his heels, concerned as he was with the implications of the new struggle for party harmony and his own presidential ambitions. Jackson chose William J. Duane, a Philadelphia lawyer, to carry on the fight for repeal, only to discover that his new Treasury Secretary had no stomach to take on his fellow Philadelphian. The President sacked him, and substituted Attorney General Taney, who, along with Kendall and other members of the “kitchen cabinet,” had been a close adviser on the program. Late in September, Taney instructed federal tax collectors in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston to stop using the bank as a depository within five days. That was the kind of action Jackson liked.
Somberly Nicholas Biddle watched these proceedings from deep within the bowels of his marble, Corinthian-columned temple on Chestnut Street. Fighting desperately on both the political and economic fronts, he saw to it that his banking friends and allies inundated Congress with clamoring delegations and a shower of petitions, memorials, and letters. He worked so closely with Webster politically that the senator, after much consultation back and forth, often served as his Washington agent, so closely financially that Webster borrowed from the bank and complained at the height of the removal battle that “my retainer has not been renewed, or refreshed, as usual.” (Webster asked Biddle to burn all letters; Biddle replied primly that he did so “scrupulously,” but only when asked.) Through the Massachusetts senator Biddle had access to free legal advice from a United States Supreme Court justice, Webster’s friend Joseph Story.
Biddle’s loftiest political hope was that the great Senate triumvirate of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun would amalgamate their forces against the “banditti” in the White House. “I only repeat what I have said again & again that the fate of this nation is in the hands of Mr. Clay Mr. Calhoun & yourself,” he wrote Webster. “It is in your power to save us from the misrule of these people in place, but you can only do it while you are united.” He added that the enemies of the bank were hanging on every whisper of hostility among them. Here Biddle miscalculated. The celebrated trio were too far apart on major issues like slavery and the tariff, too self-protective of their own presidential ambitions, too suspicious of one another, to organize a grand coalition behind the bank. At most they managed to organize some committees hostile to Jackson in the new Congress that met in December 1833.
On the economic front Biddle could move on his own, and more boldly. During late 1833 the bank initiated a credit reduction that was in part a response to the Treasury’s deposit removals, but even more, enemies charged, an effort to put pressure on the government through the whole credit structure. The money, pressure in the business world became so acute that leading Boston and New York merchants met with Biddle and charged to his face that the contraction gave no protection to the bank and represented a transparent effort to extort a new charter from the government. Soon the bank returned to expansion.
The last act of the drama took place in the Senate. No one there had been more dismayed by Jackson’s exercise of presidential power than his great rival from the West, Henry Clay. The day after Christmas 1833 the Kentucky senator rose to offer resolutions of censure of the President. Jackson, Clay said, had seized powers not granted him under the Constitution, powers dangerous to popular liberty. He had abused the right of veto, made arbitrary appointments and removals, treated the judiciary with contempt, and had made the Treasury Secretary responsible to himself rather than to Congress. At this rate, he said, the great republic would become an elective monarchy, “the worst of all forms of government.” He closed with stirring and portentous warnings—of approaching tyranny, of a land filled with spies and informers, where people no longer spoke “in the fearless tones of manly freedom, but in the cautious whispers of trembling slaves.” Unless Congress acted quickly, “we shall die—ignobly die! base, mean and abject slaves—the scorn and contempt of mankind—unpitied, unwept, unmourned!”
After three months’ debate, during which the Jacksonians tried to pose the key issue as rechartering the bank rather than the Constitution, the Senate passed censure by decisive majorities. The President was furious, but bided his time. Then the Democrats swept the congressional elections of 1834, increasing their majority in the House. The result was seen as a test of Jackson’s bank policy; Biddle’s bank was now doomed. But the President tasted the full sweets of victory only when his fellow Democrats pulled the obnoxious resolution out of the archives, directed that heavy black lines be drawn around the offending words, and ordered the censure EXPUNGED.
Like all strong leaders, Jackson became the target of ferocious criticism. His National Republican foes, showing a new skill at cartooning, pictured him as a maniacal king sitting on a crumbling throne beside a hovering bat and behind deserting rats; as a doctor, scalpel in hand, lancing Uncle Sam, with blood and specie flowing from the wound; as a tyrant receiving a crown from Van Buren and a scepter from the devil.
Inevitably, he divided the American people and polarized American politics. More than any other President, more even than Jefferson, he was loved and he was hated, and many of those who had loved Jefferson and were still living—though by no means all—also loved Old Hickory. Like all great leaders, he not only caused conflict, he cultivated it and embodied it.
Jackson’s divisive impact was so powerful, indeed, as to serve as the catalyzing force in a reordering of parties. Twice beaten at the polls, the National Republicans were demoralized after his re-election, but the Jacksonian “tyranny” helped bring them back to life in the mid-1830s as the Whig—and proudly Whiggish—party. Unable to agree on slavery or tariffs or internal improvements or even the bank, the Whigs could unite against “King Andrew.” A hodgepodge of old-time Federalists, conservative Democrats, staunch National Republicans, and opportunistic Anti-Masons, eastern capitalists and labor, conservative midwestern farmers, southern merchants and planters, the Whigs could unite against the city rabble, the backwoodsmen, the spoilsmen, the non-gentlemen who, they felt, dominated the Democratic party.
But what could the Whigs unite for? Could they get behind a candidate, a platform, and a major effort to win control of the federal government? One resource the Whigs possessed in abundance was leadership, or really a cornucopia of leaders. Aside from the “Big Three,” all of whom were still politically in their prime, the Whigs could boast of a second cadre of men of keen political insight: Senator Hugh Lawson White of Tennessee, onetime friend of Jackson’s, a strict constructionist of the old school, a critic and rival of Van Buren; Edward Everett, magnetic preacher and orator who had been chosen pastor of Unitarianism’s Brattle Street Church before he was twenty, then had become an influential congressman, in sentiment pro-bank and anti-“Levellers,” as he termed them; William Henry Harrison of Ohio, famed Indian fighter, hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe, more recently a United States senator and diplomat; Supreme Court Justice John McLean, some kind of Republican-Democrat-Whig, now sheltered from partisanship by the court, but available.
Jackson’s expected choice of Van Buren as his heir apparent brought the Whig leaders into a fleeting unity. Not yet a truly national party, even more sectional than the Democrats, the Whigs decided on an ingenious strategy for winning in 1836: running several candidates who were strong in their states and who could capitalize on regional hostility to Jackson and Van Buren. Collectively, they hoped, the Whig candidates would rack up enough electoral votes to throw the issue into the House of Representatives, where they could combine against the Jacksonians. Henry Clay, still ambitious for the White House but doubtful of beating Van Buren, stood apart from these strange proceedings, as a nationalist and unifier. Heavily pressured by Webster’s friends, a caucus of 315 Whig members of the Massachusetts legislature unanimously nominated Webster for the presidency. A caucus of anti-Jackson congressmen in Tennessee nominated White, who accepted the call despite threats from Jackson that he would ruin this apostate Democrat if he did. A Whig state convention in Pennsylvania endorsed William Henry Harrison. By early 1836 all the Whig parties were off and running.
Under Jackson’s stern eye, and with Van Buren’s manipulative hand, the Democrats had little difficulty in uniting their forces. Unlike the Whigs, who declined to hold a national party convention because it would have dramatized their divisions, the Democrats were happy to convene in Baltimore in May 1835 to eulogize Old Hickory and anoint his successor. But the meeting was more than a celebration; it was an opportunity for 600 or more third-cadre Democrats—town and county notables, local professional men, farm and business leaders—to come together, exchange views and information, and then return to their home bailiwicks ready to do their part in the battle ahead.
It was not much of a battle, with several regional candidates providing scant direct confrontation to the “Little Magician.” Since personalities abounded, the campaign became largely one of invective. The young Whig leader in New York, William H. Seward called Van Buren “a crawling reptile, whose only claim was that he had inveigled the confidence of a credulous, blind, dotard, old man.” Van Buren’s running-mate, Senator Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, though billed by the Democrats as the personal slayer of Tecumseh, was pilloried by southern Whigs as a man who had taken up with a mulatto woman and, when she ran off with an Indian (Tecumseh’s revenge?) and was recaptured, had her sold down the river while he moved on to her sister. Still, some of the orators and editorial writers were able to rise above invective and to present the voters with a fairly coherent sense of choice between Whiggism and Jacksonianism.
The election outcome demonstrated anew that political leaders, like military ones, must unite their armies. Van Buren won 170 electoral votes, a clear majority over the combined total of Harrison with 73, White with 26, Webster with only 14. Political analysts noted the electoral strength of Harrison, the weakness of the celebrated senator from Massachusetts. Van Buren carried the popular vote by 763,000 to 736,000 over his combined opponents—a narrow margin, but well distributed. Democrats and Whigs each picked up some strength in the opposition’s areas, helping produce a “converting election,” as Gerald Pomper called it, that reflected a shifting voter coalition and heralded the shape of presidential contests to come. For the moment, at least, sectional politics seemed to be declining, national party politics rising.
On Inaugural Day, Jackson and Van Buren rode together to the Capitol in a gleaming carriage behind four splendid grays. People were struck by the contrast between the two men as they alighted at the entrance to the Capitol, the one gaunt, careworn, ailing, the other half a foot shorter, plump, bouncy, but looking all his fifty-four years with his once reddish hair receding and his sideburns turning gray. The crowd seemed little stirred by the new President’s inaugural words, which stressed the need for forbearance and harmony, but it still appeared mesmerized by Jackson; when he moved slowly down the steps to his carriage bystanders broke into thunderous applause and cheers. Watching from a side window, Thomas Hart Benton was transfixed. Most such pageants were unreal and fleeting, empty and soulless, but “this was reality,” as Arthur Schlesinger wrote of Benton’s feeling, “the living relations between a man and his people, distilled for a pause in the rhythm of events, rising for a moment of wild and soaring enthusiasm, then dying away into the chambers of memory.”
Could Van Buren as leader engage his followers as Jackson had done? Buffed and burnished in his long years of state and national politicking, a believer in the political system in which he had risen steadily as Columbia County surrogate, state senator, New York state attorney general, United States senator, and, briefly, governor, a canny operator in the New York Regency, he had come to look on government as a vast network of pulls and pressures that needed only constant oiling for the clanking machinery and balm for the harried operatives. Thus he was above all a transactional leader—harmonizer, conciliator, consolidator, a man who, unlike Jackson, believed in dampening fires rather than kindling them. He saw the Democratic party as a means of unifying disparate groups and bringing them into accord behind a national program. Since Van Buren did not want or expect much action from the national government, he would not put much pressure on the political system. Clearly this kind of leadership would not engage the hearts and souls of Democrats. But could it cope with change and crisis?
The answer came with brutal impact within weeks of Van Buren’s Inaugural. He had hardly had time to collect a Cabinet around him—he kept most of Jackson’s men—when a financial disaster struck the nation. For some time danger signals had been warning that the boom conditions of the mid-1830s—the expansion of banks and bank loans, the mounting debts of planters and merchants alike, the dizzying rise of prices, especially for farmland—would tumble into financial chaos. Even as Van Buren took office, jobless New Yorkers were protesting against high rents and fuel and even sacking the city’s flour warehouses. In May the jerry-built state banking system favored by Jackson collapsed under the pressure for specie. Banks closed their doors; bustling ports along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts fell idle; men lost their jobs and crops rotted in the fields. The country seemed stunned; the conquest of the land by a foreign power, the British minister wrote home, could hardly have produced a wider sense of “humiliation and grief.”
Here was a dramatic test of leadership for the new President, but already there were signs that Van Buren would fail it. During his last year in office Jackson had issued a “Specie Circular” providing that payment to the government for public lands would be mainly limited to gold and silver. The circular was a clear expression of Jackson’s and “Old Bullion” Benton’s hard-money policy. As pressure on the state deposit banks rose during late 1836, Whigs helped push a rescinding of the circular through the Senate and House, but Jackson pocket-vetoed the measure. Now Van Buren was President, and pressure mounted on him to repeal the circular. Wavering between the pro and con arguments, Van Buren seemed haunted by Old Hickory, who from the Hermitage made known his opposition to repeal. The new President gave in to the old.
What then to do? With both his Cabinet and his party divided over possible measures, Van Buren decided to convene a special session of Congress. He cast about for a solution to the continuing panic, now flattening down into a depression. To ask for a rechartering of the national bank was unthinkable for a Jacksonian Democrat; to propose a tidying up of the state bank deposit system, which now lay almost in ruins, was equally unthinkable. But he hit upon a scheme advanced by William M. Gouge, a young Philadelphia editor and economist, who in his popular History of Paper Money and Banking had proposed that public funds should be kept in public custody and not deposited in private banks. This idea—the divorce of the government “from all connection with Banks”—Van Buren made the centerpiece of a spate of reforms that he presented to Congress.
For a time, prospects in Congress for the Independent Treasury, as it was called, seemed auspicious. Van Buren made the proposed divorce of Treasury and bank a party issue, and the Democrats seemed firmly in control of both chambers. In the Senate, Silas Wright, the plain-spoken Regency leader and longtime cohort of Van Buren, presided over the Finance Committee. In the House, another young New Yorker and ally of the President’s, Churchill C. Cambreleng, chaired the Committee on Ways and Means, and loyalist James Polk was Speaker. On the face of it, moreover, the Independent Treasury bill seemed the answer to a Democrat’s prayers. It carried on the hard-money tradition of the party; it blunted the charge that the Democrats were unduly influenced by state banks; it refreshed the Democrats’ claim that they spoke for the great number of people. Thus Cambreleng argued that the bill would keep the government “in the hands of the planting, farming, and laboring classes and save it from becoming a mere gambling machine to fill the country as in England with ‘palaces, poorhouses, and prisons.’”
Led by their forensic gladiators, Clay and Webster, the Whigs put up a furious resistance to Democratic dogma. Not only did they offer specific arguments that the Independent Treasury bill would draw specie out of circulation, unduly restrict loans and credits, and of course provide the Democrats with more patronage jobs. They maintained that government had positive obligations to help the people—to establish and maintain a sound currency, to secure and stabilize the nation’s financial system, and certainly not, in Webster’s words, to confine the constitutional obligation of government to the “mere regulation of the coins” and the care of its own revenues. He felt that “this could not be America when I see schemes of public policy proposed…leaving the people to shift for themselves. …”
In the end, though, it was Democrats rather than Whigs who doomed the divorce of state and bank. All along Van Buren had been forced to fight a rearguard action against a group of Democratic Conservatives who were clinging stubbornly to old Jacksonian hard-money positions. Led by Senator William Cabell Rives, a patrician Jeffersonian from Virginia, and Nathaniel P. Talmadge of New York, the conservatives denounced the Independent Treasury as really a new national bank in disguise, a Biddle-type institution that would threaten the rights of the states. The divorce bill passed the Senate by a comfortable vote, but failed in the House as Democratic conservatives voted with the Whig opposition. In two years an Independent Treasury bill would pass both houses and receive Van Buren’s signature, but by then it would be too late for the President and his party.
Somehow Van Buren had failed to find a transcending issue in the economic crisis, one that would raise Congress and the people above the lesser questions dividing them in order to grapple with the kind of central question—or visible enemy—that Jackson had so brilliantly dramatized. Van Buren had found himself harmonizing myriad factions that could not easily be brought together, mediating among ideologies that did not want conciliation. Democrats were split sectionally, doctrinally, ideologically; even the small band of conservatives were divided. Some of the financial issues, hideously complex, were easy prey to facile simplification and demagoguery. And looming ominously over all the debate was the old, unresolved, and bitter issue of states’ rights, and behind that, the question of slavery.
A Calhoun Democrat from South Carolina, Francis Pickens, stoked the suppressed fire when he was allowed to give the first speech in the House on Van Buren’s Treasury scheme. Expected to reiterate Calhoun’s defense of the divorce bill in the Senate, the thirty-two-year-old congressman almost ignored the Treasury bill and, as “if drawn by some ineluctable force,” in James Curtis’ words, went on to a tirade against the North and a passionate defense of slavery. The whole banking system in the North, he declared, “is a political substitute for the standing armies of Europe.…We are not compelled to resort to those artificial institutions of society by which non-slave-holding regions seek to delude and deceive their victims. No, Sir, we avow to the world that we own our black population, and we will maintain that ownership, if needs be, to the last extremity!” Few in the House that day could have doubted the resolution of this young owner of several hundred slaves.
He could see in Jackson an approaching tyranny, Henry Clay had cried out during his Senate call for the censure of the President. “The land is filled with spies and informers; and detraction and denunciation are the orders of the day.…The premonitory symptoms of despotism are upon us; and if Congress do not apply an instantaneous and effective remedy, the fatal collapse will soon come on.…”
Every senator knew what Clay was talking about. Jackson had indeed swept into Washington like a tropical tornado. By the end of his two terms not only did Clay’s censure resolution lie expunged but Jackson had forced on Congress the key policies he wanted and vetoed those he did not; his twelve vetoes, indeed, would serve as the presidential record until the regime of the beleaguered Andrew Johnson. Jackson was no less a tornado to his Cabinet, breaking and remaking it almost at will, or to the bureaucracy, forcing officials out of office and putting his own men in. He got rid of one Vice-President and chose a new one, and even in the most delicate area of all, “states’ rights,” he recognized the claims of Georgia and denied those of South Carolina.
Andrew Jackson was one of the nation’s “strongest” Presidents, most historians agree, and probably one of the six or seven “greatest.” Some observers at the time viewed him as a dictator, some as the tool of Kendall or Van Buren or others, and historians have supported both arguments. But it took someone of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s insight to write: “Surely he was a great man, and his native strength, as well as of intellect as of character, compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cunning the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool.” Most of the public at the time saw him either as Tyrant or as Hero; there was little middle ground. The Jacksonian model of the presidency would become for at least a century and a half the model for the “strong” President.
But for what purposes was the Jackson presidency used? With what results? In terms of what vision or values or fundamental goals? If historians agree about the Jacksonian model of the strong President, they sharply disagree over the central thrust of the Jacksonian leadership. Were the Jacksonians mainly a great coalition of poor farmers and eastern labor against entrenched capitalists? Or were they capitalists themselves, seeking only to share more of the booty of an expanding prosperity? Or were they mainly agrarians, dreaming the Jeffersonian dream of the small, independent, simple yeoman farmer who would constitute the base of a virtuous, limited, decentralized republic—a dream already being punctured by the cotton gin and the steam engine? Above all, was the climactic struggle between Jacksonians-Democrats and Federalists-National Republicans-Whigs a battle between equality and laissez-faire liberty, between People and Property?
The answers to these questions have been elusive because Jacksonian leaders operated at three levels of political discourse and action, and the middle level—the vital “linking” level—is still hazy and vacuous. At the upper level of rhetoric and declamation, the Jacksonian message came across with power and clarity. To denounce Biddle and the “monster bank,” the southern nullifiers, the Whiggish “aristocrats,” came easily to the “outsiders” and nationalists from the West. Through their rallies and conventions and newspapers, moreover, the Jacksonian leaders knew how to carry their message back to the voters in their communities and homes. Van Buren, indeed, believed in a deliberate strategy of bypassing old party leaders and directly mobilizing the “mass of the parties” in order to substitute out leaders for in.
At the bottom level, the level of day-to-day policy making and administration, the positions of the Jacksonian leaders were also clear. Absolute opposition to soft money, destruction of the national bank, guarded and opportunistic opposition to high tariffs, limited support of internal improvements, opposition to privileged corporate charters, fear of public debt, doubt about public enterprise, antagonism to monopoly—these positions were solidified in congressional debate, executive action, party platform, and press. While the Jacksonians often compromised policy in the play of pressure-group and party faction, both their positive and negative policies left an indelible imprint on governance.
But few Jacksonian leaders had a comprehensive, consistent philosophy that could support a coherent program. Like their Jeffersonian forebears, they believed in liberty and equality, but it was not clear how these supreme values would be achieved—by strengthening government or minimizing it, by curbing business or favoring it, by protecting property or regulating it or destroying it. These general questions became specific options in the everyday consideration of practical policies—questions, for example, of how to deal with what kind of business or property, owned by whom, serving whose interests, with what actual economic or social effects—but explicit, substantive principles to guide these options were deficient. Jacksonianism was full of ambiguities. Thus a powerful belief in laissez-faire gripped the Jacksonian leadership, as it had the Jeffersonian. But these agrarian individualists feared business power as much as they did governmental. “Instead of setting man free,” Amos Kendall said, business power had “only increased the number of his masters.”
Jacksonian confusion over philosophy and program was reflected in his veto message returning the recharter bill to Congress. “It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes,” the President said. “Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions.” He inveighed against governmental award of exclusive privileges that would “make the rich richer and the potent more powerful.…” He went on: “There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.” But how turn government, which the Jacksonians controlled, into at least a qualified blessing? Should the government give special protection to the “humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers,” as Jackson called them, if Heaven and nature and the rich alike did not?
So in the end, the Jacksonian “wind from the west” blew noisily but left the structure of American capitalism largely intact. Nor did it move that other citadel of power, the slavocracy. Jackson and Van Buren carried the old North-South axis of the Republican party into the Democratic—the alliance built largely by Virginians and New Yorkers and devoted to Jeffersonian agrarianism, individual liberty, states’ rights, and non-interference with liberty. Western leaders and voters did not upset this political balance; rather they fortified it. Thus the southern Democrats were left with a veto against any effort, gradual or radical, to curb slavery and possibly head off an explosion. Such was the price of Democratic party union, the price of national Union—a price that could not yet be calculated.
The Whigs were hardly more coherent in their own political philosophy, in part because as a party of opportunistic anti-Jacksonians they took on much of the ideological eclecticism of their Jacksonian opponents, a movement originally of opportunistic outsiders, as the two parties tangled—and became entangled—with each other. Like the Democrats, Whigs could deliver grand rhetoric through the mouths of their Websters and Clays, and like the Democrats, they advanced a spate of concrete policies. But the middle, linking level was absent here too. If the Jacksonian leaders lacked a foundation of philosophical radicalism, the Whigs lacked that of philosophical conservatism. The materials of a class system—the aristocracies, peasantries, and proletariats—that had empowered European ideologies were absent in the United States; much of the combat on the American terrain lined up entrepreneurs against entrepreneurs. No wonder Louis Hartz was reminded of “two boxers, swinging wildly, knocking each other down with accidental punches.”
Still, Jacksonianism embodied an explosive force that Whiggism lacked. The Democratic leaders posed democracy itself as the ultimate issue and pitched their appeal to the masses. Jackson as an outsider “went to the people,” and as a popular hero he easily mobilized support from the masses. Van Buren contended that those “who have wrought great changes in the world never succeeded by gaining over chiefs; but always by exciting the multitude. The first is the resource of intrigue and produces only secondary results, the second is the resort of genius and transforms the face of the universe.” By the people the Jacksonian leaders still meant “adult white men only,” of course, but within those limits they were willing to guide and to follow the popular will as they defined it.
Sustained rhetoric, if honestly meant, has its own impact; orators may come to believe in what they say. As the leaders continued to apotheosize Mankind, the People, Popular Rule, the Majority of the People, and all the other targets of their windy appeals, they bound themselves politically and morally to respond to new popular majorities mobilizing behind rising new leaders.
Thus the Jacksonians were forced to look ahead. The Whigs, more skeptical of popular rule, more cautious about extending the suffrage to poorer persons, were less captive to their own rhetoric about Mankind. Hostile to presidential power, they rejected the kind of majority rule that could be most directly implemented through a plebiscitary presidency. They had a powerful rhetorical appeal of their own in “Liberty and Union,” but their notions of liberty were as cloudy as their foes’, and the two parties matched each other in their nationalistic appeals. During the 1830s the Whigs could find no national coalition builder to match Jackson or even Van Buren; indeed, they lost their own intellectual hero when John Marshall, still Chief Justice, died in July 1835.
It was said that the great bell in Philadelphia’s old State House—the bell that proclaimed “Liberty throughout all the land unto all the Inhabitants thereof”—was overtaxed as it tolled Marshall’s obsequies, leading to the fatal crack that appeared a decade later on Washington’s birthday. Symbolists could make of this what they wished. With his belief in national power, an independent judiciary, limited suffrage, rights of property, gradual abolition of slavery (while recognizing its constitutional validity), the old Federalist had become the Perfect Whig. Like the Whigs, he believed in “Liberty and Union,” in “ordered liberty,” but on the relation between these two—in a clear definition of these values in all their dimensions and amplitude, on the way in which these values could be realized so that they would broaden and strengthen rather than vitiate each other—on these matters of principle and purpose the Whig leadership was as divided and nebulous as were the Jacksonian leaders on the relationship of Liberty and Equality.
Lacking the political and intellectual leadership in either party that could engage with these transcending questions, the “People” one day might have to decide them, but again the question was posed—with ballots or bullets?