PART II
Late 1830 to 1834
CHAPTER 12
NOTHING FELT QUITE right, either in Nashville or in Washington. By the middle of October 1830, little Mary Rachel, just over thirteen months old, took her first steps at the Mansion, but her father was not there to celebrate. The toddler’s older brother, Jackson, now four, cross-examined his mother about when life was going to be turned right side up again. “Jackson begins to learn finely and the babe walks a little,” Emily wrote Andrew on Friday, October 15, 1830. “Jackson talks a great deal about you, and he wants to know very much if you have sent us word to come on in the winter.” She did not even try to conceal her own sadness: “I feel quite as anxious, and hope you will let me know as soon as possible.”
President Jackson was unhappy, too. Sitting up late on an October Sunday evening, he wrote Mary Eastin. “Major Donelson has informed you that the house appears lonesome, and on his account”—and on Jackson’s as well—“it would give me great pleasure that you and Emily and the sweet little ones were here.” He knew what the Donelsons were feeling with their young family split apart; though capable of cruel remarks and seemingly irreversible ultimatums, he was equally given to tenderness and generosity. Thinking about the Donelsons’ plight, his mind drifted across the years. “I have often experienced in life the privation of leaving my dear wife when contending against poverty [and] there I can feel for him.” At the moment, though, sympathy did not translate into mercy.
Jackson was engaged in an exhausting two-front war to reunite his family and defeat nullification in South Carolina. He viewed both struggles in the same light: as battles in which kinsmen had to find ways to live together, under the same roof, no matter how vehement their quarrels, for the benefits of family outweighed the dangers of division, both at home and in the country at large. He fought both campaigns with vigor, driven by violent emotions that veered from the cruel to the conciliatory.
Like many mercurial fathers, Jackson was like a summer storm—all darkness and ferocity one moment, giving way to light and calm the next. Such emotions might be contradictory but they were commingled within Jackson, who led as he lived: sometimes with his heart, sometimes with his mind, sometimes with both. In this critical phase of his life and his presidency, from the lonely autumn of 1830 through the election of 1832 to the showdown with South Carolina in 1833, Jackson expended great stores of private energy on his family while expanding the powers of the White House, all the while facing virulent critics who thought him unbalanced and dictatorial. It is true that he had his regrettable moments of fury, but Jackson was always more rational and more calculating than his enemies supposed. He was also genuinely committed to the ideal of democracy and to the preservation of the American experiment.
From Jefferson forward, contemporaries and commentators have argued that Jackson was a prisoner of his passions, suggesting that there could be no method in a man as mad as Jackson. In fact, as the arduous wars of Jackson’s White House years show, in the end he could rise above his own pride—and he had to do so regularly, since his pride was so often on display—to govern the nation far more wisely, and with more personal warmth for its people, than his opponents ever recognized. The journey from Jackson’s early, often inflammatory words on an issue to politically sensitive and shrewd results was not easy, or clean, or pretty, but frequently chaotic and highly charged. Yet the journey was made.
The struggle between Washington and South Carolina would in many ways be shaped by the tensions between Jackson and Calhoun, both of whom saw their own positions in absolute terms. Privately Calhoun believed nullification “to be the fundamental principle of our system, resting on facts as historically certain as our Revolution itself.” To Jackson, such talk was treason, and he could not imagine that South Carolina would push the matter too far. “I had supposed that every one acquainted with me knew that I was opposed to the nullifying doctrine, and my toast at the Jefferson dinner was sufficient evidence of the fact,” Jackson wrote to Joel Poinsett, a former South Carolina congressman and Jackson ally, in late October. With hope in his tone, he added, “The South Carolinians, as a whole, are too patriotic to adopt such mad projects as the nullifiers of that state propose.” The collision between Calhoun and Jackson—like the collision between Emily and Jackson—had far-reaching emotional and political consequences.
THE DOMESTIC ARRANGEMENTS within the presidential circle were of intense interest and debate far from the Donelsons’ Mansion and Jackson’s White House. In Tennessee, the Eaton issue was proving central in a congressional race, and the question of Andrew Donelson’s place in the president’s universe was a subject of open conjecture and controversy. Robert Burton was running for the House of Representatives on a pro-Eaton—and therefore pro-Jackson—ticket, and he attacked the incumbent, Robert Desha (who was not in the race himself but was supporting Burton’s opponent), saying that Jackson had asked Burton to run in order to test the country’s support for the president. Burton and Desha had encountered each other at the races in Tennessee and held an impromptu debate, with Burton lashing out at the Eatons’ foes as foes of Jackson. Before a crowd of about six hundred people, Burton was particularly rough on the Donelsons’ role in the story and, Emily told Andrew, “informed the people of the unfortunate split (as he called it) in the Donelson family.” Burton singled Andrew out for attack, publicly implying that Jackson himself thought Andrew was being disloyal, even treacherous, for in Jackson’s mind support of the Eatons translated into support for him, and opposition to the Eatons translated into opposition to him and to everything the administration was trying to do.
Sensible and sophisticated beyond her years—she had turned twenty-three the previous June—Emily suspected she knew how Burton had come by the hard words of Jackson’s he had quoted about the Donelsons. Jackson, she wrote Andrew, “may have used some expression to Mr. B[urton] when he imagined himself ill-treated by us that he never intended to be mentioned again.” The essential thing, she told Andrew, was to remain calm and steady: “My Dear husband, let me beg you not to let it ruffle in any way your feelings toward Uncle Jackson, for such a thing would be more acceptable to your enemies than anything you could do. Mr. B shows plainly that they are all jealous of Uncle’s friendship to you and are making use of every exertion in their power to separate you.… Burton’s meaning will recoil upon his own head and there let it rest.”
She was thinking of her husband, of course, but also of her broader circle of friends. “I had the great pleasure yesterday evening of receiving my dear husband your affectionate letter and need not tell you how much I was gratified at its contents, and I wish it had been twice as long,” Emily told Andrew. “There are a great many things that I should like to hear about that you have not mentioned. I shall expect you to write oftener and detail every thing that passes.” Her anguish in exile was palpable, and his letters to her were her only means of connection to the world she loved. “I was thinking of you all the evening and would have given anything to have been there,” she said, evoking the image of her sitting in the Tennessee night, her mind on the imagined glitter of Washington.
In a postscript, Emily scribbled: “Is Major L[ewis] still at the President’s house?” Behind those few words lay a tangle of emotions. If Lewis remained in the White House, then his daughter Mary was the only woman there, and Emily knew Jackson’s need for female company could not be suspended. Would Mary Lewis rise to fill Emily’s place, providing Jackson with a sense of family and home? Mary was thought to be romantically interested in Abraham Van Buren, the secretary of state’s son, and such a flirtation would only bring her closer to Jackson, given the president’s own intimate connection to the potential beau’s father. For Emily all of these prospects were horrifying, and there is evidence that her friends in Washington sought to allay her fears by writing of Mary in harsh terms. “Mary Lewis is here.… Strange girl, she acts in such a way as to have a good many malicious remarks made on her,” Rebecca Branch told Emily in October. “I pity her sometimes. She is very friendly with me, I believe she has a good heart—Madame Rumour says she is terribly smitten with A.V.B.… They met here a few evenings ago and her conduct on the occasion was truly ridiculous.”
Reassuring, but Rebecca’s letter had its troubling elements, too. She did not paint a portrait of Andrew Donelson that his distant wife wanted to see. Describing a party, Rebecca recounted a chat with Andrew: “I saw your good man,” she told Emily. “He says if you don’t come on soon he will commence dancing”—which may well have been the last thing Emily wanted to hear reported, even in friendly jest, since she was so far from Washington. Emily was reduced to recounting the revealing adventures of her children, telling Andrew that young Jackson “sometimes … mounts his stick horse, rides off, and comes back and tells me he has been to Washington and brings me many fine messages from you.”
IN SOUTH CAROLINA in these October weeks, the voters went to the polls to elect state legislators, who in turn chose the governor. The stronger states’ rights elements took a majority of the legislative seats, and James Hamilton, Jr., who favored nullification, won the governorship. While there were not enough votes in the legislature to call a special state convention to consider nullification, South Carolina’s course was beginning to be set. As governor, Hamilton wanted to take a stand on turning back the tariff in order to establish a precedent that would protect slavery. “I have always looked to the present contest with the government, on the part of the Southern states, as a battle at the out-posts, by which, if we succeeded in repulsing the enemy, the citadel would be safe,” he said just before assuming office. The legislature passed six resolutions related to nullification, with three in particular giving the radicals hope for the future. One supported Hayne’s understanding of the Union over Webster’s, asserting that “each party” to the Constitution—that is, the states, not the people—could decide whether certain laws amounted to “infractions,” and they could then decide “the mode and measure of redress.”
As South Carolina debated the nature of the American family, Jackson entered into a new, pitched battle with Andrew Donelson over the nature of theirs. On Monday morning, October 25, 1830, the two clashed again over the terms on which Emily might return to the White House. The argument became so ugly that Andrew made a tactical retreat in order to rejoin the battle by note.
Writing with candor and verve, Andrew was honest with Jackson about his own fears for himself and about his love for the man who raised him. Tired, he wrote, of “intimations” from the Eaton camp “that my power to hold my place here depended upon my subserviency to the wishes of Mrs. Eaton,” Andrew acknowledged that he could see why Jackson was angry with him—yet he refused to give in.
Jackson was determined to exert power over his household and beyond. But Andrew was equally determined to control—and to be seen by the wider world as controlling—his own family’s affairs. To surrender now would be personally humiliating and politically debilitating for Andrew—he would be viewed not as his own man, a distinguished secretary to the president of the United States and a potential force in his own right, but as yet another casualty of Jackson’s ambition and will. In a painful turn of events, Andrew’s future depended on declaring his independence from the patron of his past and his present.
There was calculation in Andrew’s course. He knew that as a man of strength, Jackson respected men of strength. The president admired in others what he valued in himself and was capable of epic reversals of opinion. A close student of Jackson’s life would understand this, and Andrew Donelson was such a student.
WITH STEEL IN his tone, then, Andrew went to the brink, believing that Jackson, like many leaders, truly settled matters only when a crisis was at hand. Declining to have any further face-to-face exchanges on the Eaton topic, Andrew wrote: “You have decided the question as you have a right to do. The only remaining one for me to consider is also depending in some degree upon your decision: how long shall I remain separated from my family?” He would leave; he would not come back; there would be no Emily, no children in the White House, nor a familiar face across the way. “It may be best for you to look to some one to take my place at once, and in the meantime to allow me to be employed in putting in more intelligible files the papers of the office, preparatory to my retirement from it,” Andrew told Jackson.
Jackson read Andrew’s note with deepening gloom. He was tired; he hated that Andrew would not come talk to him; he was staying up late, plagued by headaches. Alternating between sorrow and anger, Jackson replied on Saturday, October 30, telling “my dear Andrew” that “I have determined, like Mr. Jefferson, to live without any female in my family.” He asked Andrew to remain in Washington through the congressional session, then they would part permanently.
Andrew’s bid had failed. Undeterred, however, he wrote again in the autumn dusk. “In your house, my dear Uncle, as your guest I acknowledge that the same comity and politeness are due to Mrs. Eaton that are to the ladies of the other Cabinet officers or those of other gentlemen.… Out of your house I claim only the same general discretion in behalf of my family that is possessed by all others.” Struggling to find a way to break through to Jackson on this point, Andrew reached back into Jackson’s personal history, linking the present question with the first great test of Jackson’s honor. “You did not when a prisoner in the Revolutionary War obey the order of the enemy who had you in his power to clean his boots,” Andrew wrote. “Yet you find fault with my determination merely to keep out of the way of insult.”
It was almost midnight when Jackson read these words. Though tired, he could not let the matter rest. He was wounded. “My dear Andrew, for so I must still call you,” Jackson wrote, “you are pleased to say in your letter ‘In your house my dear Uncle as your guest I acknowledge the same comity and politeness are to Mrs. Eaton … etc.’ When, my dear Andrew, were you my guest or how and when treated only as such? The term … is surely unjust. You and Emily and Mary were considered by me as my family. You were so considered by the world, so introduced, and so treated, and in that situation as the representative of my dear and ever to be lamented wife was Mrs. Donelson here considered by me, and as such received and treated by all.”
Emily and Andrew, the president insisted, were not guests. “You were my family, my chosen family,” Jackson wrote, “and were placed where I was delighted to see you, and where, had it not been for bad advisers … we would have been living in peace with all, and in my bosom forever.” He could say no more. “Every time the subject is named it makes my heart bleed afresh.”
The note was carried across the hall and, reading Jackson’s emotionally charged reply, Andrew saw he had been imprecise in his own language. He had not meant to refer to his family as guests, but to Mrs. Eaton. Replying yet again, Andrew said, “Nothing was farther from my mind than to express such an idea as that we considered ourselves, or were considered by others, as guests in your house.”
And so the president of the United States and his secretary were reduced to an epistolary battle over grammar, sniping at and professing love for each other, often in the same paragraph. Power and affection were at stake and in play, indistinguishable. To Jackson, hostility to the Eatons continued to be “evidence of hostility to me.”
Andrew’s only solace came from Emily, who wrote to reassure him that all would be well even if he lost his Washington skirmish and joined her in Tennessee. “Still, I think you should not come to me if you can possibly avoid it,” Emily told her husband. “It would be the most gratifying thing to your enemies as well as to the General’s that could happen, [and] it might become the subject of a newspaper paragraph and be the means of the General’s losing some ground and then the whole of the blame will be put on your shoulders.”
Torn between the personal and the political, between her sense of right and wrong and her ambition, Emily went a step further in a letter a few days later: “I would be willing, were I to return to the City, to visit Mrs. E. sometime officially; this I do not think would be inconsistent as I have done it before,” she wrote. “I am willing to make this apparent change of opinion to please our dear old uncle.… It will convince him of your desire to please him who has always been to you a kind father.”
To Emily, as to Jackson, power was paramount, and she had now spent enough time in Tennessee to realize that she did not want to surrender her place in the great world. As she read accounts from friends of the things she was missing, she grew firmer in her resolve to return. She would wait as long as it took, reassure Andrew, and offer concessions on the Eaton question, but she was in her way as inflexible and shrewd as Jackson himself when it came to surviving and thriving in life and politics. Though Jackson had raised Andrew as a son, Emily was more a child of Old Hickory—strong, smart, tenacious, tough, and wily.
ON SATURDAY, November 6, at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts, John Quincy Adams briefly noted in his diary the news of the evening’s paper: he had been elected as a member of the House in the Twenty-second Congress. In that entry, he wrote nothing more than the returns—no reactions, no emotions. Indeed, since the moment, on a cold September morning, when a loyal newspaper editor and the retiring incumbent had approached him about putting his name on the ballot, he had written little about whether he desired to win or not. He would only demur that he had “not the slightest desire to be elected,” but if elected, it was possible that he would “deem it my duty to serve.”
His wife and son were furious at the prospect of his return to the political arena; Louisa, who had been looking forward to a long retirement at their home in Quincy, had even threatened not to join him in Washington. But after hours of reflection the next evening, November 7, Adams admitted in an unusually emotional entry that his victory brought him relief from his trials—his loss to Jackson, the death of his son George, even his replacement as the president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. “It seemed as if I was deserted by all mankind,” he said.
“My return to public life in a subordinate station is disagreeable to my family, and disapproved by some of my friends,” he said. And yet, for all his professed desire for “an old age of quiet and leisure” and his lament about “the faithless wave of politics,” his election to Congress brought the greatest joy. “My election as President of the United States was not half so gratifying to my inmost soul. No election or appointment conferred upon me ever gave me so much pleasure.”
Adams could at times come across as an elitist—certainly Jackson thought so—but he, like his successor in the White House, cared for what the people thought. “This call upon me by the people of the district in which I reside, to represent them in Congress, has been spontaneous,” he wrote. The people had chosen him, and he was grateful to them.
AS THE LETTERS between uncle and nephew were going back and forth across the hall, Jackson welcomed a new member of his circle, Francis Preston Blair, who had moved from Kentucky to Washington to become the founding editor of a new administration newspaper. The brainchild of the politically brilliant Amos Kendall—who had run his newspaper in Kentucky, the Argus, with the help of Blair—the newspaper, to be called the Globe, was to be of what Jackson called “the true faith,” meaning it was to support the White House totally and without reservation.
Kendall was a critical figure in Jackson’s universe. Harriet Martineau, a British writer touring the United States, once recorded a brief Kendall sighting. “I was fortunate enough once to catch a glimpse of the invisible Amos Kendall, one of the most remarkable men in America,” Martineau said. “He is supposed to be the moving spring of the whole administration; the thinker, planner, and doer; but it is all in the dark.… Work is done, of goblin extent and with goblin speed, which makes men look about them with a superstitious wonder; and the invisible Amos Kendall has the credit of it all.”
Blair was Kendall’s friend, but he would soon become a force in his own right. And the most important force of all, Jackson, was feeling triumphant, as well he should have: Blair’s coming gave Jackson absolute power over his own newspaper—which in turn meant absolute power over how the country, or at least the part of the country that read the administration’s paper, saw the White House. Born in Virginia in 1791, a graduate of Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, Blair converted to Jacksonian politics after supporting Clay for president in 1824.
Jackson liked his new editor’s verve, spirit, and speed—qualities that matched the rapid rate of political strife in a nation of proliferating newspapers and burgeoning party mechanics. Papers had always been partisan, and previous presidents had favored this publication over that one. Jackson was, however, the first to set out to create his own from scratch. “I wish you to stand just as I do—the friend of General Jackson and his administration, having no future political views other than the support of his principles,” Kendall had written to Blair in October. With Kendall doing the wooing, Blair had decided to take up the task.
Kendall, who was facing Senate confirmation for a Treasury post, promised his friend adventure in the year to come, and the support of the president, for he knew that Jackson returned loyalty with loyalty. “Now, I want you to prepare your mind to come on here at the meeting of Congress and remain during the session,” he wrote to Blair that August. “You shall be welcome to live with me in my lonely way, so that the expense to you here shall be no more than you choose. Much depends on next winter. We shall have to war with the giants”—Clay in the 1832 presidential race, the Bank forces, and the South Carolinians. “I know the President will enter with zeal into my views. Your sentiments in relation to the Bank will make him zealous for you. I think he will be for a new paper any how. He told a friend of mine that if I were rejected, he would sustain me with half his fortune if necessary. All this between ourselves.”
THE MAN WHO came to the White House to see Jackson in late November 1830 did not look like a ferocious, history-changing operative and editor. This is how his friend and associate John C. Rives described Blair: “about five feet ten inches high.… He looks like a skeleton, lacks but little of being one, and weighed last spring, when dressed in thick winter clothing, one hundred and seven pounds, all told, about eighty-five of which, we suppose, was bone, and the other twenty-two pounds, made up of gristle, nerve, and brain—flesh he has none. His face is narrow, and of the hatchet kind, according with his meat-axe disposition when writing about his enemies. His complexion is fair, his hair sandy, and his eyes blue—his countenance remarkably mild.”
The journey from Kentucky with his family had been dangerous and long, with carriage wrecks, near misses, and, finally, an accident in which Blair cut himself severely. Lewis took one look at him and said, “Mr. Blair, we want stout hearts and sound heads here.” Appearances to the contrary, Blair had both, and something else, too: a gift for invective and rhetoric that invested Jackson’s ideas with currency and force.
Blair was swept away by Jackson’s charm, by his personality, and finally by his kindness. Invited that very first night to a dinner on the first floor of the White House full of formally dressed diplomats and politicians, the injured and unkempt Blair felt out of place, a rude provincial thrust among elegant cosmopolitans. He was, James Parton said, “abashed and miserable,” until Jackson, who should have anticipated that Blair might feel out of place on his initial evening in the capital, appeared and, seeing his new editor’s discomfort, took Blair by the arm and sat with him at the table—a gesture, Parton said, that “completed the conquest of his heart.” Francis Preston Blair would now fight any battle for Andrew Jackson.
The editor wasted no time in getting to work. Andrew Donelson was to take the president’s annual message to Congress on Monday, December 6, 1830, and Blair and Kendall wanted it to be in circulation immediately thereafter in order to take the case for Jackson to the people. Blair loved the fight, writing editorials after nightfall in lead pencil, often in the White House, “in a great hurry,” John Rives said. As the deadline approached, “we had to keep two boys to run to him for copy. We have known him to send one of the boys after the other to overtake him and get the last word on the sheet sent off.”
Though Jackson urged moderation in most things in his message, he attacked nullification. “Every State cannot expect to shape the measures of the General Government to suit its own particular interests.… Mutual forbearance becomes, therefore, a duty obligatory upon all.…” Still, Jackson was not being blindly confrontational on the tariff. He understood that politicians who were absolutists did not long endure. He was accustomed to waiting for the right moment to strike, and he believed a compromise on the tariff was possible.
In his message, Jackson argued the merits of the issue. “It is an infirmity of our nature to mingle our interests and prejudices with the operation of our reasoning powers, and attribute to the objects of our likes and dislikes qualities they do not possess and effects they cannot produce,” he said. “The effects of the present tariff are doubtless overrated, both in its evils and in its advantages. By one class of reasoners the reduced price of cotton and other agricultural products is ascribed wholly to its influence, and by another the reduced price of manufactured articles. The probability is that neither opinion approaches the truth.”
An insightful passage, but understanding the roots of irrational political sentiment cannot make such sentiment disappear. Politics, as Jackson pointed out, can be largely about belief, not fact, and in South Carolina it looked as though no amount of public policy debate was going to counter the trend toward nullification. And while Jackson would do what he could to avoid violence, he also unleashed Blair, who told the readers of the Globe that “the right of nullification” was attractive to “certain men, who, like Caesar, would rather reign in a village, than be second in Rome.” His more sophisticated readers may also have heard an echo of John Milton’s description of Lucifer in Paradise Lost—the fallen angel who decided it was better “to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.”
CHRISTMAS CAME AND went quietly. There were no children in the White House, and at the Mansion, Emily and her little ones passed the holiday “soberly yet agreeably,” entertaining themselves with candy pullings and games. The season—freighted again, on this second anniversary, with memories of Rachel’s death—took a toll on Andrew and on Emily. They loved each other and they missed each other—so much that the political element in their lives was put to the side in an exchange of anguished and touching letters in the opening moments of the new year.
On New Year’s Day 1831, Donelson excused himself from the busy public rooms of the first floor of the White House to write Emily a short, heartfelt note. “I detached myself for a moment from the New Year crowd to offer you the salutations of the season and to enjoy those which I know are breathed by you for me.” He closed by quoting a poem: “Think not beloved time can break / The spell around us cast, / Or absence from my bosom take / The memory of the past; / My love is not that silvery mist / From summer blooms by sunbeams kissed—/ Too fugitive to last.”
The Emily who read this had lost a great deal of weight—she did not have much to lose in the first place—and looked, as one guest at the Mansion told her, “like a spectre.” She was depressed and lonely, and scolded Andrew for failing to write her the kinds of letters she longed for. “Although your letters are ‘like angels visits few and far between,’ yet when they do come you hardly say how do you do, and good-bye; do let me know everything that passes, how you get along and what you employ yourself about, and if you think much about us. You are never absent from my thoughts. When I lay down it is only to think of you, and when I sleep [I] dream of you.”
Having been a part of their marriage from the beginning, Jackson shared Emily and Andrew’s sadness. “Although we have been visited by a vast number of ladies and gentlemen, and inundated as usual by office hunters, still we have appeared lonesome—several times I have been left to sup alone,” Jackson wrote to Emily on Thursday, January 20, 1831. “The levee was numerously attended, but still, there being no lady of the house, there was something wanting, and ladies appeared without a pivot to move on.”
Gustave de Beaumont, who was traveling in America with Tocqueville, met Jackson the same week and found both the president and the presidency unexpectedly unimposing. Jackson, Beaumont wrote his mother, “is an old man of 66 years, well preserved, and appears to have retained all the vigor of his body and spirit. He is not a man of genius. Formerly he was celebrated as a duelist and hot-head.… If he has courtiers they are not very attentive to him, for when we entered the salon he was alone.”
The president and the White House seemed muted to Beaumont. “People in France have got an altogether false idea of the presidency of the United States,” Beaumont said. “They see in it a sort of political sovereignty and compare it constantly with our constitutional monarchies. Of a certainty, the power of the King of France would be nil if it were modeled after the power of the President of the United States.”
Power, and the efforts of those who sought to take it from him, was much on Jackson’s mind. To him, the enormity of the sins committed against the Eatons, and his abiding belief in the plot against him, kept him from accepting Emily back to the White House.
IN EARLY 1831 the Globe announced that Jackson would seek another term in the White House. “The conquering Hero is again in the field, and it must now be seen who are his friends and who are his foes,” the paper said. Twenty months before the election, however, Jackson was presiding over an administration riven with feuds and beset by scandal. His vice president was frozen out but still had alliances with three members of the Cabinet (Branch, Ingham, and Berrien); his secretary of state was viewed as the Iago of the White House, with Jackson cast in the role of the bewitched ruler in Van Buren’s thrall; and, of course, his own family was divided over Margaret Eaton’s status. In the late winter and early spring of 1831, several forces intersected to extricate Jackson from many of his tangled problems.
The first was the reemergence of an ancient quarrel. A dozen years earlier, in the Monroe administration, Adams and Calhoun had been in the Cabinet when Jackson had preemptively invaded Florida, leading to great controversy in Washington. At the time, Adams, the secretary of state, had defended Jackson’s decision; others, including Calhoun, the secretary of war, had questioned it. Jackson, who had been aware that Calhoun had opposed his Florida campaign, had not pressed the matter in the late 1820s, a time when he needed Calhoun in order to bring along the South in the race against Adams. The calculating part of Jackson—a part of his character his foes tended to underestimate, much to their dismay—had tucked the Florida issue away until he needed it.
And now, amid threats of nullification and trouble in the Cabinet, he did. Over a period of months between 1830 and 1831, the president demanded to know (though he probably already knew) what Calhoun had thought and done in the Florida matter. Calhoun understood that the argument was being revived to complete his estrangement from Jackson. “I should be blind not to see that this whole affair is a political maneuver, in which the design is that you should be the instrument and myself the victim,” Calhoun wrote Jackson. The Florida history was suddenly of present value for those Jacksonians who hated Calhoun. Even the smooth-tempered John Overton, so often a conciliating force in Jackson’s private world, detected only danger when it came to Calhoun. “He is aspiring, we all know, and his eye has never been averted for a moment from the presidency, since he became a member of Mr. Monroe’s Cabinet,” Overton wrote Jackson. “This is not unnatural for talented men. Hence, no man saw with more pain (Mr. Clay not excepted) the rise and elevation of your character.”
Isolated, Calhoun decided to publish the correspondence about the Seminole affair, a pamphlet that first appeared in Green’s Telegraph on Thursday, February 17, 1831. Jackson feigned surprise and outrage that the vice president had taken the argument public and thus divided the party; Calhoun self-pityingly claimed that the entire controversy was “a conspiracy for my destruction.” (It is likely that Jackson knew, or at least strongly suspected, that Calhoun was about to publish and did not try to stop him, gambling that the move would make Calhoun look disloyal to the president—which it did.) Blair opened a counteroffensive. “The Globe you will have seen is determined to make a bold push to keep up the war if possible between the P. and the V.P.,” Ingham said, and, in Blair’s capable hands, it was surely possible. Blair, Ingham said, “came out pell mell … to make a war of extermination against Calhoun under the banner of Gen. Jackson.” Jackson was done with Calhoun forever. “A man who could secretly make the attempt … to destroy me, and that under the strongest professions of friendship,” Jackson said, “is base enough to do anything.”
Perhaps even to challenge Jackson in 1832. Clay was already running, and Jackson was in the field, and Calhoun was still assessing his own chances. On Wednesday, March 2, 1831, Calhoun went to Meridian Hill to see John Quincy Adams, with whom he had served in Monroe’s Cabinet and under whom he had been vice president. Adams received him coolly. “This is the first time he has called upon me since the last Administration closed,” Adams said. “I meet Mr. Calhoun’s advances to a renewal of the intercourse of common civility because I cannot reject them. But I once had confidence in the qualities of his heart. It is not totally destroyed, but so impaired that it can never be fully restored. Mr. Calhoun’s friendships and enmities are regulated exclusively by his interests. His opinions are the sport of every popular blast, and his career as a statesman has been marked by a series of the most flagrant inconsistencies.… Calhoun veers round in his politics, to be always before the wind, and makes his intellect the pander to his will.”
The next day, another caller, a journalist named Matthew L. Davis, came to Adams, and they spent two hours talking politics. Davis reported some bold words of Calhoun’s, telling Adams that Calhoun thought himself “the strong man of the South” who “expected to obtain the votes of all the Southern states except Georgia.” When Davis told Calhoun he would not back him, Calhoun had “only asked for fair play in public and if the election should come to the House of Representatives.”
AS CALHOUN DREAMED of the presidency and Clay planned for it, Jackson decided to bring order to his own house and dispatched Andrew on Tuesday, March 8, to bring Emily back. The reason for his relenting as Congress adjourned is unclear. It was most likely exhaustion at the battle combined with his characteristic belief that he would win in the end. There was the presidential campaign, the standoff with South Carolina, and the war with the Bank, and Jackson hated the idea of another lonely season. For Andrew, spring meant the promise of reunion. “The adjournment of Congress is to my feelings on this occasion what the melting of the ice and the spring navigation of the rivers is to the merchant—the source of my joy,” Andrew wrote Emily as he left by stage for Tennessee. “Kiss Jackson and the little red bird for me.” He was expected in Nashville shortly to collect his family and set back out for Washington, bound for the White House.
No sooner had Andrew Donelson arrived in Tennessee, however, than another letter arrived from Jackson. He had changed his mind. “As much as I desire you, and your dear little family with me,” he wrote Andrew, “unless you and yours can harmonize with Major Eaton and his family I do not wish you here.” Stunned, Emily and Andrew determined to stay in Nashville. “Recent information from the General makes it impossible for me to return to Washington without hearing from him first,” Donelson wrote to Secretary Branch. “I need not tell you the cause, you can guess it too well.”
VAN BUREN HAD been thinking about what Ingham called “this disgusting petticoat business” for a long time. A triumphant two-term Jackson administration would reflect well on the architect of the initial 1828 victory, and Van Buren, like many others, hoped one day to have the White House for himself. In the first months of 1831, worried about “the plots, intrigues and calumnies by which I had been for two years surrounded,” Van Buren said, he settled on a plan: he would resign from the State Department, a move that, once accomplished, triggered a series of events that would ultimately free Jackson from scandal, strengthen him politically, and reunite the president’s family.
Jackson and Van Buren were on their daily horseback ride, when a thunderstorm drove them inside a nearby tavern. Jackson’s mood matched the weather. “His spirits were on that day much depressed and on our way he spoke feelingly of the condition to which he had been reduced in his domestic establishment, Major Donelson and the ladies and children, of whom he was exceedingly fond, having, some time before, fled to Tennessee to avoid the Eaton malaria,” Van Buren said. Unable to bring himself to raise the issue of his resignation, Van Buren left the president alone with his thoughts, passing the interlude in the tavern chatting with a farmer. The storm over, Jackson and Van Buren resumed their ride. Soon Jackson’s horse slipped on the wet road and “threatened to fall or to throw his rider,” Van Buren recalled. “I was near enough to seize the bridle and thus to assist him in regaining his footing.”
“You have possibly saved my life, sir!” Jackson said, then mumbled what Van Buren called “broken and half audible sentences which I understood to import that he was not certain whether his escape from death, if it was one, was under existing circumstances, worthy of much congratulation.” Van Buren saw that this was hardly the time to bring up anything as momentous as the loss of the secretary of state. On a later ride, however, Jackson’s humor was much improved, and the two were near the Potomac when Jackson, with more hope than certainty, said, “We should soon have peace in Israel.”
“No!” Van Buren said. “General, there is but one thing can give you peace.”
“What is that, sir?”
“My resignation!”
Three decades later, Van Buren said he could still exactly recall “the start and the earnest look” on Jackson’s face. “Never, sir!” the president said.
But Van Buren laid out the case, arguing that “the course I had pointed to was perhaps the only safe one open to us.” In his memoirs Van Buren is oblique about all that they discussed, but it is possible that he argued that his resignation from the Cabinet would enhance his chances of becoming Jackson’s successor, since he would be insulated from the chaos of the capital and could campaign the way Jackson had—as an outsider, not an insider in the tradition of Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams. Jackson’s victory—both his popular one in 1824 and his undisputed triumph in 1828—was creating a new template for the presidential candidate, and Van Buren was thinking of how he might cast himself in such terms. They rode so far and talked so much—though Van Buren lectured much of the time—that they “did not reach home until long after our usual dinner hour.”
They parted until morning. Van Buren fretted; Jackson did not sleep. Appearing the next day, Van Buren thought, “unusually formal and passionless,” Jackson said: “Mr. Van Buren, I have made it a rule through life never to throw obstacles in the way of any man who, for reasons satisfactory to himself, desires to leave me, and I shall not make your case an exception.” Jackson was wounded by his friend’s prospective abandonment, and he had summoned up the psychological defenses of an orphan who had learned that the people one loves can disappear.
Van Buren jumped up and swore his allegiance, insisting he was only thinking of Jackson’s interests, and that he would stay until the last hour if Jackson wished it.
“You must forgive me, my friend, I have been too hasty in my conclusions,” Jackson said. “I know I have—say no more about it now, but come back at one o’clock—we will take another long ride and talk again in a better and calmer state of mind.”
They did, and Jackson warmed to the idea, asking whether he might bring Barry, Eaton, and Lewis into the conversation. Van Buren agreed, and the next day the three men met at the White House, came to consensus that Van Buren’s plan was sound, and then went back across Lafayette Square to Van Buren’s for dinner.
AFTER THEY ENTERED Decatur House, Eaton said: “Why should you resign? I am the man about whom all the trouble has been made and therefore the one who ought to resign.” Such a development was, Van Buren admitted in his memoirs, “a consummation devoutly to be wished but one I would have assumed to be hopeless.” When Eaton brought it up yet again at supper, Van Buren raised the obvious question: What, he asked, would Mrs. Eaton “think of such a movement as he proposed”? Eaton was certain, he said, that “she would highly approve of it.” The more realistic and less certain Van Buren suggested that Eaton confer with his wife and then bring word again. The next day, Eaton claimed Margaret had said he should indeed leave the Cabinet, and, in the first week of April 1831, Van Buren said, “it was forthwith agreed that we should both resign with General Jackson’s consent, which was obtained on the following day.”
Van Buren would take over as the envoy to England, and Eaton was likely to return to Tennessee to stand for the Senate. “The long agony is nearly over,” Ingham wrote Berrien on Tuesday, April 19, 1831. “Mr. V. B. and Major Eaton have resigned.” Before Ingham could gloat for long, though, Jackson forced him, Berrien, and Branch to resign as well, completing the purge of the Cabinet.
John Berrien, writing from Savannah on Sunday, April 24, was puzzled by the breakup. For all to resign, he told Ingham, “does not seem to be perfectly intelligible.” Van Buren and Eaton could leave for whatever reasons they chose, if the president agreed, Berrien said, “but how it could be believed, that the public would consider that circumstance as affecting you, Branch, or myself, it is difficult to discover.”
Jackson and Van Buren wanted them out of the way. Writing shortly after his firing, with a sense of irony, Ingham told the Pennsylvania lawmaker Samuel McKean that “to make up” for being forced to resign, he had had “a peculiar acknowledgement from Old Hickory of my skill in diplomacy by an invitation this day through the Secretary of State to go to Russia.” He declined.
The drama at Washington was moving quickly and, for the uninitiated, mysteriously. “You must read Tacitus and the Epistles of Pliny to understand this system of manoevering,” John Quincy Adams told his son Charles Francis. “That was the age of informers and spies—of denunciations and conversions.”
As Adams saw it, the rivalries in Washington represented a new iteration of an old and epic story. “You are disgusted with the diminutive rivalries [and] the paltry altercations … of our public men,” Adams wrote his son several days later. “They might indeed quarrel with a better choice of words, and as Addison says of Virgil’s Georgics, cast about their dung with an air of greater dignity. But you remember that in Homer Achilles tells Agamemnon to his face that he has the forehead of a dog and the heart of a deer. We think none the less for this either of Agamemnon or Achilles. Men have railed at each other in good set terms from that day to this. They will still do so as long as there are prizes to contend for which move their avarice or their ambition.”
Jackson would not have appreciated most of Adams’s literary allusions, but he agreed with the central point: politics is brutal because it engages the most fundamental human impulses for affection, honor, power, and fame. Great principles and grand visions are ennobling, but at its best politics is an imperfect means to an altruistic end.
What Van Buren had undertaken on horseback was now reality, and Jackson, at long last, emerged from the Eaton affair with a Cabinet he could control. It had come at a high price, but it had come. Beneath Jackson’s warmth and passionate attachments lay a coldheartedness essential to any great leader. “The President parts from [Eaton] with great reluctance, for he maintains the greatest affection towards him,” Blair said, “but he told me that he could always sacrifice every private feeling to what he considered a public duty.”
While Jackson believed the dissolution a good thing, he still hated the loss of the familiar. He needed Andrew Donelson, who had barely reached Tennessee, back in the White House, both to handle the complexities of the Cabinet crisis and to provide a steadying presence. “My labours have been incessant,” Jackson wrote Andrew on April 19. “I have great need of your aid.” Thrilled to read these words, believing them a reprieve, Andrew hurried back to Washington, telling Emily that he thought “every moment’s detention”—meaning delay on Andrew’s part—“will be felt by Uncle.” The opportunity to begin all over again was at hand, and Andrew did not want to miss it. Emily—though she, too, hated to be away from the center of action—stayed behind.
THE NEWS OF the Cabinet resignations broke in the Globe the next day, on Wednesday, April 20, 1831—a development startling enough to send diplomats in Washington scurrying to brief their governments. The British minister, Charles Vaughan, a neighbor of the Eatons’, wrote Viscount Palmerston, the foreign secretary, that “this day a complete change of the ministers comprising the Cabinet of the President of the United States has taken place.” The new secretaries—Edward Livingston at State, Louis McLane at Treasury, Lewis Cass at War, Levi Woodbury at Navy, and Roger Taney as attorney general—were, Vaughan said, strong appointments; in fact, he said to Palmerston, “the two persons who it is proposed should replace Major Eaton and Mr. Branch enjoy a higher reputation for talent than their predecessors.” Yet it was a treacherous period. On the day the Cabinet was dissolved, Vaughan told London to watch the South, warning the foreign secretary that the tariff issue, because of the “determined opposition to it of the Southern States,” could lead to “a dissolution of the Union.”
The Cabinet news, Bangeman Huygens reported home to the Netherlands, “provides scenes of unmatched scandal.” Recalling the 1830 provisional peace with Jackson over the Margaret question, Huygens wrote: “He was near the point of changing ministries for her sake, but … a compromise was made.” It was, however, “false” and “unnatural,” and now the president, Huygens said, felt it was time “to entirely remake his Cabinet.”
Jackson decided that gratitude to Eaton for resigning compelled him to insist that the new Cabinet receive Margaret on the same terms that had so divided his first Cabinet. Establishment observers like Margaret Bayard Smith were at a loss to explain the curiosities of the Jackson White House, so they put his tenacity down to senility. “In truth, the only excuse his best friends can make for his violence and imbecilities is that he is in his dotage,” Mrs. Smith said after the Cabinet dissolution. “The papers do not exaggerate, nay do not detail one half of his imbecilities.”
John Quincy Adams was preparing for a trip when word arrived of the mass resignations. Calling it the “explosion at Washington,” Adams reported to his son that “people stare—and laugh—and say, what next?”
It was a good question.