CHAPTER 11
ON MONDAY, April 12, 1830, Duff Green published a piece in the Telegraph detailing the plans for a dinner to take place the next night at the Indian Queen Hotel in commemoration of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. At the White House, Jackson decided that the program, with its toasts and speakers, would be “a nullification affair altogether.”
The dinner, Webster told Clay, “was to found the party on Southern principles.” Surveying the field, Jackson rose early on the thirteenth and wrote out three different toasts. Lewis and Andrew Donelson were together in the president’s office going through the newspapers when Jackson appeared. He handed Lewis the three pieces of paper and asked which he “liked best.” Lewis chose one, and Jackson repeated the exercise with Donelson, who selected the same one Lewis had. Jackson was pleased. “He said he preferred that one himself for the reason that it was shorter and more expressive,” Lewis recalled. “He then put that one in his pocket and threw the others into the fire.”
At the Indian Queen, the room was crowded with politicians as Robert Hayne and others rhapsodized about the greatness of Jefferson’s “glorious stand” against John Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts. The implications were clear: it was time to recover that anti-Federalist spirit to undo the tariff and secure slavery. At last it was Jackson’s turn. Van Buren, who was seated across the room, climbed atop his chair to take in the scene. The words that had come to Jackson in the morning now produced a gasp among the Southerners and nullifiers: “Our Union—it must be preserved.”
Calhoun then rose to speak. The vice president interpreted Jackson’s toast as a direct threat to the Southern cause. “The Union—next to our liberty the most dear,” he said, adding, “May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States and distributing equally the benefit and burden of the Union.” There it was, then: a decisive rallying cry from Jackson and a legalistic, but still defiant, manifesto from Calhoun.
Van Buren tried to relieve the tension. “Mutual forbearance and reciprocal concessions: through their agency the Union was established—the patriotic spirit from which they emanated will forever sustain it.” Sitting amid what Van Buren called “the bustle and excitement of the occasion,” Robert Hayne reeled from this third assault on the cause of state sovereignty. First Webster, then Livingston, and now the president himself was weighing in against Hayne’s beloved South Carolina. Hurrying over to Jackson, Hayne asked whether they might add the word “Federal” to the text of his toast to be made public. “This was an ingenious suggestion,” Van Buren recalled, “as it seemed to make the rebuke less pungent although it really had no such effect.” Jackson agreed; he had meant to say “federal” anyway. Perhaps Hayne thought the country would interpret “Our Federal Union” differently than “Our Union”—in the event, it did not—but the editorial feint was typical of the Southern wing, which, since Webster and Livingston, was finding that the Unionists had more of a claim on the nation’s passions while it struggled to argue with constitutional precision.
Nothing, however, was going to assuage the Southerners’ loss on this long evening. “The veil was rent,” said Van Buren, revealing that Jackson, as the National Intelligencer put it in its coverage of the dinner, was in effect saying: “ ‘You may complain of the tariff and perhaps with reason, but so long as it is the law it shall as certainly be maintained as my name is Andrew Jackson.’ ” The paper had it right.
An old opponent understood it all—and knew that Jackson’s triumph at the Jefferson dinner foreshadowed victory after victory. “That Jackson will be a candidate for reelection, if, when the time of election comes, he has a fair prospect of success, I do not doubt,” said John Quincy Adams. “That his personal popularity, founded solely upon the Battle of New Orleans”—Adams’s bitterness was all too evident here—“will carry him through the next election, as it did through the last, is altogether probable. The vices of his administration are not such as affect the popular feeling. He will lose none of his popularity, unless he should do something to raise a blister upon public sentiment; and of that there is no present prospect. If he lives, therefore, and nothing external should happen to rouse new parties, he may be re-elected, not only once, but twice or thrice.”
Still, some Southerners seethed. “I seriously apprehend a civil war if something is not done to conciliate the discontents which prevail at this time and for aught that I can see will increase,” William Crawford of Georgia wrote Van Buren the month after the Jefferson dinner.
EMILY’S WINTER AND early spring followed the now familiar but still difficult pattern. Close to Jackson, she and Andrew and the babies were able to cheer him most of the time, greeting his guests and presenting a gracious face to the outside world. Then, in April, Emily’s father died, robbing her of a source of wisdom and counsel. Captain Donelson had been stoic and sensible to the end. He had been sick for three months, William Donelson wrote to John Coffee, “which he bore with great fortitude and resignation.” It was, Donelson said, “only in the few last days of his existence [that] he expressed some impatience at remaining here so long. His only fear was that he would be a long time dying.… Yet parting with a father who had so long watched over our best interests in childhood and in riper age and who was so kind and affectionate to all his children and had grown venerable with time [will] not be a thing of light moment.”
IN LATE MAY, two essential issues—the tariff and internal improvements such as federally funded roads, bridges, and canals—converged to mark a crucial moment in the evolution of presidential power. Roughly put, proceeds from the tariff filled the national treasury, and those funds helped pay for projects that were of most immediate benefit to the middle states and the West (the Deep South was a long way from seeing its own region linked with the others). However logical and appealing the idea may have seemed, skepticism about a large federal government—which was, at least in Jackson’s mind, a different thing altogether from skepticism about the virtues of Union—remained the political reality of the era. Internal improvements were the pork of the age (though the term would not be coined for several more decades); Van Buren watched with bemusement as congressmen “brought forward under captivating disguises the thousand local improvements with which they designed to dazzle and seduce their constituents.”
But Jackson and Van Buren believed the less government interference with the market, the better, and they worried that federally funded internal improvements in single states would lead to corruption and an unequal distribution of national resources. This was the prevailing presidential thinking when bills authorizing a number of projects, including funding for a sixty-mile Maysville Road that happened to fall within Kentucky (it was to be a leg of a north-south road like the east-west Cumberland Road), came to the White House for Jackson’s signature.
Van Buren was against it and made the case to Jackson while they were on horseback. It was not a difficult sell. “The road was in Mr. Clay’s own state,” Van Buren said, “and Mr. Clay was, the General thought—whether rightfully or not is now immaterial—pressing the measure and the question it involved … rather for political effect than for public ends.”
Van Buren warned Jackson that the White House’s foes wanted “to draw you into the approval of a bill most emphatically local, and thus endeavor to saddle you with the latitudinarian notions upon which the late administration acted, or to compel you to take a stand against internal improvements generally, and thus draw to their aid all those who are interested in the ten thousand schemes which events and the course of the government for the past few years have engendered.” The answer: approve interstate projects but veto anything that did not cross state lines.
Word about Jackson’s veto intentions leaked out in Washington, and the whispers grew so persistent that Colonel Richard Johnson of Kentucky, now a member of the House, called on Jackson at the White House. There Johnson found Jackson and Van Buren alone, going over a report on the Treasury. Johnson and Jackson began to speak of the possible Maysville veto, and Johnson, fearful that Clay could turn the issue on Jackson, grew emotional and extended his hand with a flourish.
“General! If this hand were an anvil on which the sledgehammer of the smith was descending,” Johnson said, “he would not crush it more effectually than you will crush your friends in Kentucky if you veto that bill!”
Jackson rose from his chair, as did Johnson, and the two faced each other.
“Sir,” Jackson said, “have you looked at the condition of the Treasury—at the amount of money that it contains—at the appropriations already made by Congress—at the amount of other unavoidable claims upon it?”
“No, General, I have not!” Johnson said. “But there has always been money enough to satisfy appropriations and I do not doubt there will be now!”
Jackson was determined to pay down the debt, which he abhorred, and he watched the growing number of bills proposed in Congress with alarm—noting, in a memorandum on the veto, that they would “far exceed by many millions the amount available in the Treasury for the year 1830” if passed. “I stand committed before the country to pay off the national debt at the earliest practicable moment,” he told Johnson. “This pledge I am determined to redeem, and I cannot do this if I consent to increase it without necessity. Are you willing—are my friends willing to lay taxes to pay for internal improvements?—for be assured I will not borrow a cent except in cases of absolute necessity!”
“No,” Johnson said of the threat of a tax increase, “that would be worse than a veto!”
Jackson told Johnson that he was trying to find a way to veto the bill without bringing all internal improvements to a stop. As Van Buren recalled it, Jackson said “he was giving the matter a thorough investigation and that their friends might be assured that he would not make up his mind without looking at every side of it”—a classic piece of political tradecraft, for Jackson did not want an upset Johnson to spread the word that all was decided. Jackson never foreclosed his options until he had to, and the Maysville moment had not yet come.
When it did, on Thursday, May 27, 1830, Jackson vetoed the bill and three others but approved two land measures—a survey law that affected more than one state, and money for the Cumberland Road, which was already an interstate project—after what he described as “much, and, I may add, painful reflection to me.” He truly did not believe there was enough money for Maysville, and he was more interested in paying down the debt than in spending federal resources on state enterprises. By crushing Maysville, he was distinguishing between national and local projects, though in the legislative world, such distinctions are in the eye of the beholder. One man’s pork is another man’s steak. “What is properly national in its character or otherwise is an inquiry which is often extremely difficult of solution,” Jackson said in a veto message drafted by Van Buren. “The appropriations of one year for an object which is considered national may be rendered nugatory by the refusal of a succeeding Congress to continue the work on the ground that it is local.” He spoke of his grand design to return surpluses to the states and, characteristically, said the people should amend the Constitution if they wanted the federal government to pay for local improvements. (Still, by the end of his second term, Jackson spent more on internal improvements than all previous presidents combined.)
With a flourish, Jackson also denounced taxes in terms similar to those he had used in his exchange with Johnson in the White House. Noting that “many of the taxes collected from our citizens through the medium of imposts have for a considerable period been onerous,” Jackson said that the burdens of these taxes “have borne severely upon the laboring and less prosperous classes of the community, being imposed on the necessaries of life” (clothing and the like). Americans were not complaining—not yet. But let federal dollars begin to be spent in seemingly indiscriminate ways, and there could be trouble. The taxes, Jackson said, “have been cheerfully borne because they were thought to be necessary to the support of government and the payment of the debts unavoidably incurred in the acquisition and maintenance of our national rights and liberties. But have we a right to calculate on the same cheerful acquiescence when it is known that the necessity for their continuance would cease were it not for irregular, improvident, and unequal appropriations of the public funds?”
It was a shrewd document, one that put the president at the center of the national drama—for he, not anyone else, would presumably decide what was “irregular, improvident, and unequal”—and gave him room to maneuver depending on the specifics of any legislative issue. “The veto message was a hodgepodge of constitutional and expedient arguments, but in its very logical fuzziness lay its political strength,” wrote the historian Daniel Feller. “The nebulous distinction between national and local works stung American System men to fury, for it freed Jackson to decide on individual bills precisely as he chose—a freedom he exploited to the utmost. None of his predecessors enjoyed such flexibility.” But Jackson would.
WRITING TO FRIENDS in the weeks and months after Maysville, Jackson was cheerful about his sharpening of a constitutional weapon, savoring his insight that the veto could be wielded as the president saw fit. His predecessors had limited themselves to sending back bills on constitutional grounds. The first six presidents of the United States vetoed a total of nine bills; Jackson alone, beginning with Maysville, vetoed a dozen. None of them had thought of the power in quite the way Jackson did. Even when they chafed against legislative restraints and tried to enlarge the presidential role, they accepted the essential premise that Congress was the prime power in the national government. “From motives of respect to the legislature,” wrote George Washington, who vetoed two measures in his eight years, “I give my signature to many bills with which my judgment is at variance.” Watching Jackson veto Maysville, John Quincy Adams said, “These are remarkable events.… The Presidential veto has hitherto been exercised with great reserve. Not more than four or five Acts of Congress have been thus arrested by six Presidents, and in forty years. He has rejected four in three days. The overseer ascendancy is complete.”
Jackson’s vision of himself as the embodiment of the people standing against entrenched interests, combined with his appetite for control and for power, led him to see the veto as more than an occasional tool. Congress should consult with the president in advance of sending legislation down Pennsylvania Avenue, Jackson said—a novel notion in 1830. “Jackson was the first President to advance the theory that the President was the representative of the people and that a mandate from the ballot box warranted his intervention in the legislative process,” wrote the scholar C. Perry Patterson in 1947, two years after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, a president who had adopted a Jacksonian view of the White House’s power. Jackson, Patterson said, had “asserted that the veto was a legislative power given to the President without directions or limitations, and that the President was even more competent than the Congress by virtue of his national and representative character to judge the wishes of the electorate.” Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR were happy heirs to the tradition Jackson created with Maysville. They used the veto, and the threat of it, as means to extend the president’s influence over Congress. By the middle of the twentieth century, the power that was so striking in Jackson’s time had become routine. Franklin Roosevelt, the scholar Richard Neustadt noted, occasionally asked for “something I can veto”—just to make the point that lawmakers should fall in line.
In the spring of 1830, with Maysville, Clay understood what Jackson was doing and wondered how to fight back. “We are all shocked and mortified by the rejection of the Maysville road,” Clay wrote a friend. Perhaps, Clay told Webster, they could back a constitutional amendment that would allow a simple majority of Congress, rather than two thirds, to override a presidential veto. In any event, Clay knew that the veto was now yet another front in the war against Jackson’s expansion of power. “We shall be contending against a principle which wears a monarchial aspect, whilst our opponents will be placed in the unpopular attitude [of] defending it,” he wrote an ally in June 1830.
Jackson looked forward to such a struggle. “The veto, I find, will work well,” he wrote friends. And why should he not think so? By signing a message and giving it to Andrew Donelson to take up Capitol Hill, his will had triumphed over all.
FOR JEREMIAH EVARTS, thwarting Jackson’s will on Indian removal had been a consuming passion since Jackson’s arrival in the capital. “The Great Arbiter of Nations never fails to take cognizance of national delinquencies,” Evarts wrote in one of his “William Penn” essays. “In many forms, and with awful solemnity, he has declared his abhorrence of oppression in every shape; and especially of injustice perpetrated against the weak by the strong, when strength is in fact made the only rule of action.” Yes, Evarts acknowledged, white America had already significantly sinned against the Indians, but what Jackson was proposing was of a different, vaster scale. “The people of the United States are not altogether guiltless in regard to their treatment of the aborigines of this continent; but they cannot as yet be charged with any systematic legislation on this subject, inconsistent with the plainest principles of moral honesty.”
That systematic legislation, formally entitled “The Bill for an Exchange of Lands with the Indians Residing in Any of the States or Territories, and for Their Removal West of the Mississippi,” was reported out of the Indian Affairs Committee of the Senate on Monday, February 22, 1830, and out of the House committee two days later. An essential point of contention was whether the Jackson administration could simply ignore previous treaties in order to remove the Indians. Jackson believed the treaties irrelevant, but the Indians did not, and neither did the Indians’ defenders in Congress. Led by Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, a devout Christian who was convinced that Evarts was right and Jackson was wrong, the opposition did what it could to help, as Frelinghuysen put it, “the poor Indians.” On the Senate floor, over the course of several days at the beginning of April 1830, Frelinghuysen, who had been in close contact with Evarts, gave a speech that concluded:
Mr. President, if we abandon these aboriginal proprietors of our soil—these early allies and adopted children of our forefathers, how shall we justify it to our country, to all the glory of the past and the promise of the future? … How shall we justify this trespass to ourselves?
Appeals to white Americans’ sense of fair play were not completely wasted. Evarts’s essays and sentiments like the ones expressed by Frelinghuysen created a “Quaker panic” in Pennsylvania, Martin Van Buren said: the Indians’ allies had successfully raised questions about the bill.
Rather than make only moral arguments, however, those who opposed the administration decided to attack Jackson on the ground that he was seizing power, turning despotic and acting more like a monarch than the executive leader of a republic. If Jackson wanted a stronger presidency, then he would have to pay politically with charges of autocracy and overreaching. Jackson had, Frelinghuysen said, “without the slightest consultation with either House of Congress—without any opportunity for counsel or concert, discussion or deliberation, on the part of these co-ordinate branches of the government”—decided to end the decades of treaty making and coexistence. Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi were breaking ratified agreements, and Jackson was not only supporting them but was asking Congress to make removal law.
One of the results of Jackson’s coalition victory in 1828 was a rising sense of party identity. Soon to be known as “the Democracy,” and eventually as the Democratic Party, Jackson’s supporters in the House and the Senate found themselves the objects of White House wooing and lobbying. Those who backed Jackson stood to be rewarded by favorable coverage in administration newspapers and might be heeded on matters of local patronage. The political machine conceived by Van Buren and being built and maintained by Kendall and others would be at the disposal of lawmakers who voted with Jackson on key matters. On Tuesday, April 6, John Quincy Adams told his diary: “General Jackson rules by his personal popularity, which his partisans in the Senate dare not encounter by opposing anything that he does; and while that popularity shall last, his majorities in both houses of Congress will stand by him for good or evil. It has totally broken down in the Senate both the esprit de corps and the combination against the Executive, which, from the last session of Mr. Jefferson’s administration, had presided in many of their deliberations and governed many of their decisions.”
Evarts, too, complained of “the spirit of party” at work in Congress, saying that a Jacksonian congressman from Alabama had told him he believed in the Indians’ cause but would not cross the White House. “Now what can we do, when men will act in this manner?” Evarts said. “The question is already as plain in the Senate as any question of human conduct can possibly be. Not one question of theft, robbery, or murder, in ten thousand, is so perfectly free from all doubt or cavil … yet it is expected that men will vote by platoons, in regular rank and file, according to party drilling, on this question of public faith. I have never before seen such a commentary on human depravity.”
Jackson’s supporters made the usual arguments for removal—the states were sovereign, the Indians were irredeemable in current conditions, and a fresh start beyond the Mississippi, under the protection of the president, was the only way to ensure the survival of the tribes. The Senate vote was not particularly close, with the bill passing 28 to 19. The House, though, was a different story.
God, justice, and presidential power dominated the debate, which began on Thursday, May 13, 1830. The Evarts-Frelinghuysen case resonated more in the House, it seemed, than it had in the Senate. The Indian issue had become an emotional one, and congressmen were more likely to be roiled by popular passions. Pro-Jackson lawmakers had begun attacking the anti-removal forces, arguing that religious fervor was trumping deliberate judgment. In the House, Congressman Wilson Lumpkin of Georgia dismissed the Evarts contingent as “canting fanatics” who were unjustly attacking his people as “atheists, deists, infidels, and Sabbath-breakers laboring under the curse of slavery.”
Perhaps the most striking moment came when Congressman Henry R. Storrs of New York took the floor on Saturday, May 15, 1830. Past treaties had guaranteed the Indians’ rights, acknowledged their sovereignty, and promised them the protection of the federal government against the states. Now, Storrs told the House, “the treaties of this Government, made with them from its first organization and under every administration, to which they have solemnly appealed for their security against these fatal encroachments on their rights, have been treated as subordinate to the laws of these states, and are thus virtually abrogated by the Executive Department. The President has assumed the power to dispose of the whole question, and … proposes to us little more than to register this executive decree.” Jackson’s course, he said, had “shocked the public feeling, and agitated the country.”
Storrs was bluntest about Jackson’s bid for wide authority. The government, Storrs told the House, “was to be a government of law, and not of prerogative, and especially not of executive prerogative; for if his will was to have the force of law, that [would be], to a certain degree, despotism.” Finally, toward the conclusion of his long address, Storrs implicitly compared Jackson to Napoleon. Should Jackson succeed with Indian removal, Storrs said, sweeping away the earlier agreements, ratified by the Senate and signed by previous presidents, then America would look more like imperial France than a republic:
The eye of other nations is now fixed upon us. Our friends are looking with fearful anxiety to our conduct in this matter. Our enemies, too, are watching our steps. They have lain in wait for us for half a century, and the passage of this bill will light up joy and hope in the palace of every despot. It will do more to destroy the confidence of the world in free government than all their armies could accomplish.… It will weaken our institutions at home, and infect the heart of our social system. It will teach our people to hold the honor of their Government lightly, and loosen the moral feeling of the country. Republics have been charged, too, with insolence and oppression in the day of their power. History has unfortunately given us much proof of its truth, and we are about to confirm it by our own example.
Storrs was not being mindlessly anti-Jackson, he said, and took on a pleading tone toward the end. “Whether we favored his elevation to his present station or not, we may all unite in wishing that he may … advance the honor of his country beyond even the hopes of his friends,” Storrs said. “We are all interested in his fame, for it is now identified with his country.”
The words made no difference. After much back-and-forth and several procedural votes, Jackson won, narrowly, by a margin of 102 to 98. The vote was taken before the Congress knew about the Maysville veto; in the veto’s wake, the arguments about Jackson’s despotic tendencies seemed all the stronger. But it was too late: the Indian bill passed on Wednesday, May 26, 1830.
The last week of May 1830, then, was one of the finest of Andrew Jackson’s life. He had done what he set out to do: he had overturned the decades-long Indian policy put in motion by Washington and Knox. He now had the authority to purge the South of its native inhabitants and, with Maysville, he had taught Congress that he must be heeded. Jackson had thus made himself arguably the most powerful president since the creation of the office forty years before.
SHORTLY BEFORE FOUR o’clock on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 9, 1830, John Eaton came home from the War Department bearing an invitation from the president for the Eatons to dine at the White House. It was the moment, Margaret decided, for total war. Up to this point Margaret had complained of the Donelsons to Jackson, but not so strongly that Jackson could not choose to avoid a showdown. Even the ablest of politicians, however, cannot always control the timing of a crisis, and as Jackson read a note from Margaret written that afternoon, he realized his strategy of temporizing had run its course.
“Circumstances, my dear General, are such that under your kind and hospitable roof I cannot be happy,” Margaret wrote, playing to Jackson’s instinct that his house should be a shelter against the world for those he loved and cared for, and Margaret was one of those people. “You are not the cause,” Margaret assured him—needlessly but flatteringly—“for you have felt and manifested a desire that things should be different.” But things were not, and Emily and Andrew were at fault. “I could not expect to be happy at your house for this would be to expect a different course of treatment from part of your family.” Eaton had tried to talk her into going, arguing, she said, “that it may be a triumph to some if it may be said I were not invited, but what of that, it will only be another feast to those whose pleasure it is to make me the object of their censures and reproaches.”
Tough words: she was basically accusing Emily and Andrew of open hostility, for which there is scant evidence. They might fall short on occasion—Emily did not acquit herself well on the boat trip to Norfolk the previous year, and was cooler than she might have been on the social circuit in Washington—but all in all the Donelsons had not been vicious, which was the impression Margaret was trying to give Jackson. “I ask to say to you that whatever may be the cause of the unkind treatment I have received from those under your roof … I have done all in my power to avoid it.”
Unable to leave things there, Margaret went a beat further, asserting her own innocence in the whole affair. “I have spoken of your family in no other manner than a respectful one,” she said, adding, “I have ever endeavored to return good for evil”—an allusion to an exhortation in Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, which would have resonated with Jackson.
Margaret was almost certainly stretching the truth here: in her memoirs she had tart things to say about both Donelsons, and when she spoke privately with Jackson it is virtually impossible to imagine that her bluntness would have failed her. As Jackson came to the end of the letter, however, he was in her hands. She had struck the right notes to convince Jackson that his family had gone too far when his house—his home—was unwelcoming to the wife of his friend.
Jackson gave Andrew the letter, and by the time Andrew had finished reading it both men were furious. Jackson unleashed his rage on Donelson. He had been defied long enough. Emily and Andrew owed him their place in Washington, and if they could not live by his rules then they must leave. Jackson’s words were so painful that Andrew could not commit them to paper. There is no known record of the specifics of the conversation. Yet they were burned into Andrew’s memory. Standing before his guardian—before, really, his father—he realized he and his family might well be cast out. It may have been the first time Andrew felt the full, terrific force of Jackson’s anger. Even long afterward, the recollections of the scene were so raw that Andrew could speak of them only in the most formal of terms. In his anger and anguish Donelson distinguished what he called “my family” from what he referred to as “your house,” saying: “You have not forgotten the note of Mrs. Eaton in which she refused to dine with you because my family was in your house,” Andrew wrote to Jackson in October 1830. “I have not forgotten the language which you employed on that occasion, and the determination you then expressed of carrying us home and leaving us there.”
Incredulous that this woman had done so much damage, Andrew wrote a passionate note for the president’s files: “The only unkind treatment which my family can have practiced towards Mrs. Eaton is their refusal to acknowledge her right to interfere with their social relations. All else is imaginary or worse. This letter is abundant evidence of the indelicacy which distinguishes her character, and is disgraceful to her husband.” Jackson had grown tired of his own balancing act, of fighting to make Washington do his bidding while keeping up a more benign and patient face in his own house. He told Andrew and Emily that the three of them would leave for Tennessee in a week. Who came back was an open question.
But could he happily live apart from Emily and Andrew? They had been together so long now. Andrew and Emily had known Jackson all their lives, and he had come to cherish them as the flesh of his flesh. If a rupture were really so simple, it would have come much earlier and much more decisively. Jackson’s temporizing—angry one moment, calculating another, yet reluctant to take an irrevocable step—suggests that his emotions were churning, pressing him one way and then another, and that he did not know, finally, whether he could cut the Donelsons out of his innermost circle.
The trip would be a momentous one. Two of Jackson’s dearest causes were to be advanced over the summer. One was Indian removal: he was summoning tribal leaders to meet with him personally in Tennessee. To succeed, he believed he needed the man he could most depend on to make his wishes reality on removal. And so Jackson decided to add two others to the party in Nashville.
He invited Margaret and John Eaton.
WHEN HE LEARNED the Eatons would be joining them, Andrew seemed resigned to having lost his influence with Jackson. There were, he told John Coffee, “embarrassments that yet attend us,” and there would be no relief in Tennessee. “The Secretary of War and family”—Andrew could not bring himself to mention Margaret’s name—“have started [for Tennessee] … a circumstance which I very much regret.” In his own letter to Coffee, Jackson admitted that “there has been and are things that have corroded my peace and my mind and must cease or my administration will be a distracted one.”
When Jackson and the Donelsons arrived in Nashville, it was the first time they had been home since the inauguration more than a year before. The last few weeks had been good for Jackson, who was heartened by the public reaction to his Maysville veto—he believed it “very popular” with “a large majority of the people.”
Within the family, though, the journey ended, and the visit began, on a note of tension. Jackson had expected Andrew and Emily to stay with him at the Hermitage. Andrew and Emily, eager to avoid the Eatons and perhaps exhausted by the exacting emotional minuet with “Uncle,” insisted on going to the Mansion, the Donelson family seat. Jackson was surprised and hurt, for, he told Andrew, he had “expected you and Emily to go to my house and remain with me as part of my family.” A seemingly small thing, but the sudden physical separation, though only a few miles, gave more pronounced geographic form to the differences of opinion that had long divided them across the hallway in the White House.
Grumpy and wounded, sensitive and wary of conspiracy, Jackson was further surprised by developments at home. When he had last been in Nashville, he had been enveloped in grief for Rachel but certain that he was surrounded by loving friends who would rally in any storm. Now he was not so sure: he discovered that a formidable element of Nashville society was armed against the Eatons. Led by rivals—including General Edmund Pendleton Gaines, a great frontier fighter who opposed Indian removal—what Jackson called “a combination” refused to bow to his plans for the Eatons’ reception in Tennessee. Seeing Emily and Andrew on the same side as some of his political enemies infuriated him.
Denouncing Emily and Andrew’s “folly and pride”—he was quick to see in others what he could not acknowledge in himself—Jackson said: “My duty is that my household should bestow equal comity to all, and the nation expects me to control my household to this rule. Would to God my endeavors by counsel and persuasion had obtained this.” But they had not, and Jackson readied for a permanent break with Andrew and Emily. “My connections have acted very strangely here,” he told Lewis, “but I know I can live as well without them as they can without me, and I will govern my Household, or I will have none.”
Back home in a place where they did not have to make their status and standing clear, Emily and Andrew might have felt some relief that others shared their views, but the affirmation of Nashville society only widened the gap between the Hermitage and the Mansion, where the broader Donelson circle felt more sympathy with Emily and Andrew than with Jackson, a fact that could not elude Jackson.
Far from improving in Nashville, then, the struggle was deteriorating into bitterness. Andrew wrote John Branch that “affairs [are] so bad” he would not even try to detail them. Consumed with “speculations upon the future” of his own “destiny,” Andrew was stoic: “I am ready for the worst.”
The day after Andrew wrote these words, Jackson attended a large barbecue in the Eatons’ honor in nearby Franklin, Tennessee, and the turnout added to Jackson’s sense that his family was in the wrong. At 3:30 on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 28, 1830, a crowd of five hundred fêted the secretary of war and his wife, and Jackson was delighted “to shake hands with my old acquaintances, neighbors and soldiers.” Why, Jackson wondered as he took in the hospitable spectacle, could such courtesies and graces not rule the day at the Hermitage and at the Mansion? Why was Franklin doing what he wanted, but neither Nashville nor Washington would? “The ladies of the place had received Mrs. Eaton in the most friendly manner, and have extended to her that polite attention due to her,” Jackson said. “This is as it should be, and is a severe comment on the combination at Nashville, and will lead to its prostration.”
ALWAYS, ALWAYS, THE language of combat, and as the days grew hotter in the depths of summer, the words of war were more and more frequently directed at Emily and Andrew. Seeing Calhoun at the root of all things evil, Jackson blamed the vice president, but hardly stopped there. “That my Nephew and Niece should permit themselves to be held up as [the] instruments, and tools, of such wickedness, is truly mortifying to me,” Jackson said on July 28.
Most of Washington remained largely unaware of the gathering darkness in Tennessee. A letter from Rebecca Branch, the daughter of Secretary John Branch, indicates that she, and presumably the larger presidential circle, expected Emily to return with Jackson after the summer: “With the pleasing anticipation of seeing you soon … I close my letter.”
There was a moment of hope for reconciliation when John Coffee, Emily’s brother-in-law and Jackson’s longtime friend, arrived on the scene and played peacemaker. It often requires a broker to bring serenity and stability to fraught familial situations—situations in which the main players have become so entrenched that the smallest incidents are magnified beyond their proper scope. Coffee, however, had credibility with all parties, and effected a compromise: Emily would be courteous to Margaret when Margaret arrived from Franklin for a visit in the neighborhood. According to family tradition, the bargain was struck on the Mansion’s lawn on Tuesday, August 3, 1830. An exultant Jackson wrote Eaton: “General Coffee has, since here, produced a visible and sensible change in my connections, and they will all be here to receive you and your Lady, who I trust will meet them with her usual courtesy and if a perfect reconciliation cannot take place, that harmony may prevail, and a link broken in the Nashville conspiracy.”
After agreeing with Coffee to do her part, Emily walked into the Mansion, where she rejoined her children. Thinking things over—Margaret had been a constant concern for twenty months—Emily reconsidered her promise. To receive Margaret here, in Tennessee, under pressure and threat from Jackson, would betray the middle course she had charted and largely followed for more than a year and a half. If she caved in far from Washington, the distance would not matter: the news back to her friends and to the establishment whose approval she craved would be that the frontier Jackson circle—the people who were not even sure of their divorces before they married other men—had accepted a woman into their ranks whom they steadfastly refused to accept in the capital. Such a decision would make Emily look like a hypocrite and a provincial. And so sometime between the conversations with Coffee in the summer heat and the next morning, Emily changed her mind. She would not receive Margaret; she would not go to the Hermitage for dinner in the Eatons’ honor. The deal Coffee had brokered lasted less than twenty-four hours.
The extent of Jackson’s anger at his niece’s reversal can be gauged by the iciness of his tone in a letter to Lewis written on Saturday, August 7, three days after Emily declined to leave the Mansion for the events involving the Eatons. There was little of the emotional Jackson’s usual thunderous prose or furious run-on sentences. He was crisp and matter-of-fact. “I shall have no female family in the City this ensuing winter,” he told Lewis. “Mrs. Donelson remains with her widowed mother.” Margaret would remain behind as well, in Franklin with her own mother, who had traveled south with the Eatons. Emily’s mother no doubt appreciated her daughter’s company, but Jackson revealed the real reason for the plan when he added that on her visit to Nashville, “Mrs. E. was met by all the ladies in the place with open arms, but one.”
Andrew was in a terrible spot. Should he stay, or return to Washington? Make his life here, in Tennessee, or abandon his young family to serve a mercurial master? “Whether Mr. Donelson will or will not accompany me to the City has not as yet been determined on by him,” Jackson said with more than a trace of malice. “Whether he will leave his wife and little ones to whom he is greatly attached, he will determine today or tomorrow.”
JACKSON AND EATON had invited the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Creeks to meet with them in middle Tennessee, but only the Chickasaws actually came; the others were holding out hopes that either the next meeting of Congress or the courts might spare them the fate Jackson intended for them. “Friends and Brothers: You have long dwelt on the soil you occupy, and in early times before the white man kindled his fires too near to yours … you were a happy people,” Jackson said to the gathered Chickasaws after mingling with those who were on hand and smoking the ceremonial pipe with them. “Now your white brothers are around you.… Your great father … asks if you are prepared and ready to submit to the laws of Mississippi, and make a surrender of your ancient laws … you must submit—there is no alternative.… Old men! Lead your children to a land of promise and of peace before the Great Spirit shall call you to die. Young chiefs! Preserve your people and nation.”
Helped along by bribes from Eaton and John Coffee, the chiefs agreed to Jackson’s terms. Though the deal ultimately fell apart, Jackson and Eaton’s mission to the South encapsulated much: Jackson’s persistent personal engagement in the issue, the role of incentives (leaders of factions open to removal were often promised larger gifts of land if they would sign treaties that would exchange land in the East for land in the West), and the miserable planning for actual removal that proved so deadly for so many Indians. After the Tennessee meeting, Eaton and Coffee traveled to Mississippi to arrange for the removal of the Choctaws. According to pattern, they found congenial tribal leaders open to making a deal for the right price. Signed on Wednesday, September 27, 1830, the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek ratified the exchange of five million Choctaw acres in Mississippi for thirteen million acres west of Arkansas. It was the first removal under the 1830 law. “Our doom is sealed,” said one Choctaw. “There is no other course for us but to turn our faces to our new homes toward the setting sun.”
By happenstance it fell to the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville, who was in Memphis in the winter of 1831, to record the terrors of the Choctaws’ journey—terrors that were the rule, not the exception, as removal went forward. Watching the Choctaws cross the Mississippi, Tocqueville wrote: “It was then in the depths of winter, and that year the cold was exceptionally severe; the snow was hard on the ground, and huge masses of ice drifted on the river. The Indians brought their families with them; there were among them the wounded, the sick, newborn babies, and old men on the point of death. They had neither tents nor wagons, but only some provisions and weapons. I saw them embark to cross the great river, and the sight will never fade from my memory. Neither sob nor complaint rose from that silent assembly. Their afflictions were of long standing, and they felt them to be irremediable.”
In March 1831, about the same time Tocqueville watched the Choctaws cross the river, the Supreme Court ruled on the first of two critical cases on the fate of the Cherokee tribe. Represented by William Wirt, attorney general under Monroe and Adams, the tribe argued that Georgia was acting illegally—in violation of decades of solemn and binding treaties—by trying to assert state law over the Cherokees on their own land.
In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Marshall struck notes sympathetic to the Indians but announced that the Court would not render a verdict on the technical grounds that the Cherokees had filed suit as a “foreign nation” when, in Marshall’s view, the tribes would be better described as “domestic dependent nations.… Their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian.”
It was a striking finding, for the government had long acted as though the Indians were a sovereign people, negotiating and signing numerous treaties with the tribes. With his opinion, Marshall was declining to take a stand in favor of the Indians, shying away from a confrontation with Jackson. (And with Georgia: the state had already demonstrated its contempt for the Supreme Court by hanging an Indian convicted of murder despite an order not to.) It is true that Marshall, while denying the Cherokees immediate help, wrote that the Court might make a different decision about Indian rights in what he called “a proper case, with proper parties.” The Cherokee Nation would be back before Marshall and his colleagues the next year with another case, but for now the decision of the Court stood as a stark reminder, as if any were needed, of the prevailing sense of fatalism about the Indians’ future. It was not just Jackson; even Marshall, often depicted as a hero in the story, harbored all too few hopes that the political reality of removal could be changed. “If it be true that the Cherokee nation have rights, this is not the tribunal in which those rights are to be asserted,” Marshall wrote. “If it be true that wrongs have been inflicted, and that still greater are to be apprehended, this is not the tribunal which can redress the past or prevent the future.” A sad verdict—but a true one.
ROUGHLY A WEEK after Emily ensured her own exile from Washington, her husband chose to return to the White House by himself. Whether driven by loyalty and love for Jackson, by ambition and a stubborn refusal to surrender his place to the Eatons—or, in all likelihood, by some combination of these motives—Andrew Donelson could not give up his proximity to power.
“No ladies will return with me,” Jackson wrote Lewis on August 15. “Major A. J. Donelson, my son [Andrew Jackson, Jr.] and Mr. Earl”—the portrait painter who lived at the White House—“will constitute my family, and I hope Major Eaton will accompany me, and leave his Lady until the rise of the waters.”
While Emily readied herself for exile, Andrew remained at the call and under the command of the man who was breaking up his family. For now, Andrew was resigned to following orders. Yet in a very short time resignation would give way to resentment, and the president he served would find his loyal secretary a conflicted and angry man.
ON WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1830, Jackson rode in his carriage from the Hermitage to the Mansion to retrieve Andrew. Emily wept. The scene affected the sentimental side of Jackson, and he tried to reassure Emily in the best way he could, given the position he had staked out. “Uncle’s last words to me were that before he would do anything to injure the honor of yourself, who he had raised as a son, he would cut off his right arm,” Emily later wrote Andrew. Yet Jackson’s current course was set, and it was time to go. The wife and babies were left behind, and Emily prepared for a lonely winter as the carriage pulled away into the late summer light, headed for Washington.
The trip was miserable, the roads rough. As Jackson and Eaton and Donelson and Earl bounced their way north, their horses went thirsty for a long while. Then the rains came down, turning the journey into a muddy slog. Andrew missed his family already, staying up late one night at Knoxville to write to Emily. “We travel at the rate of about 30 miles a day, take a cup of coffee in the morning by candlelight, our breakfast at 10 or 11 after about 12 miles ride, our dinner at night, and then to sleep, but I, not without many thoughts about you and our dear little Jackson and Mary Rachel,” Andrew said, asking his young wife to “be happier than I can without you, kissing Jackson and Mary.”
Rather than dwell on Emily’s absence or the price he had just forced Andrew to pay, Jackson turned his attention to politics and policy, noting on arrival at the White House in late September that “business has greatly accumulated in my absence.” He had plenty of time—more than ever be-fore—to devote to whatever awaited him on his desk.
IN THE FAMILY quarters as fall came to Washington, all was silent. When Jackson opened his bedroom door and looked across at the Donelsons’ suite, he heard nothing. The nursery was empty and still. There were no children’s voices, no rustle of Emily’s skirts. A sulky but correct Andrew was there to serve, but he had less time for Jackson as he spent hours closeted, writing letters to his wife. What had been a home—of a toddling Jackson Donelson, of a cheerful baby Mary Rachel, of an attentive and charming Emily, of a genial and sweet Mary Eastin—was hushed. As the autumnal shadows lengthened and night fell, Jackson was in a place he had not been for five decades, not since the word of his mother’s death had reached Waxhaw. Then he had been fourteen, a scrawny boy soldier. Now he was sixty-three, a charismatic commander in chief. But with Emily and the children gone, one thing had not changed after Andrew Jackson’s odyssey from the Carolinas to the capital. He felt he was alone.