CHAPTER 13
SINCE HIS CHILDHOOD hiding in the Carolina countryside on the lookout for Tarleton’s redcoats, Jackson loved being in on what he called “secretes.” As president he was no different, and he maintained an informal network to gather bits and pieces of political intelligence. In the South, Joel Poinsett, the diplomat, world traveler, and firm Unionist who was Jackson’s main source of information in the region, was hearing talk of conspiracy and rebellion. “I know not how things are moving over in Charleston, but with us the nullifiers are in motion, and … are endeavoring to rally their scattered forces for a new contest in 1832,” Alexander Speer, a former comptroller general of South Carolina, wrote to Poinsett early in 1831 from Church Hill in Abbeville, near the western edge of South Carolina. “I will not be at all surprised if at the next presidential election Mr. Calhoun’s name should be brought forward as a candidate.”
A repeat of 1824, with Calhoun and Henry Clay in the villainous roles, was under consideration, Speer said, and he thought his information sound. “The understanding appears to be that Mr. Calhoun’s name is to be run as a candidate, not because it is expected he can be elected, but to defeat the election by the people, and thus throw it into the House of Representatives, where it can be managed as to their best … interests.… This junto are at this time making open declarations of hostility to the Union, and expect roundly that … civil war must and shall be the consequence. As to Genl. Jackson their hostility is unequivocal.…”
The Cabinet breakup led to a national debate over Jackson’s first three years of leadership and whether he should have another term. With the presidential campaign at hand, partisans on all sides—Jackson’s, Calhoun’s, Clay’s, and others’—chattered about the resignations. The governor of Pennsylvania, George Wolf, wrote Ingham of allegations that “Jackson had turned you and Branch out because he detected you in conspiracy to turn him out and put Calhoun in his place.”
The opposition continued to fear Jackson’s mysterious power over so many people. “His administration is absolutely odious, and yet there is an adherence to the man,” John Sergeant, a former congressman from Pennsylvania, wrote to Clay. “It remains to be seen whether this will not yield to the conviction that his continuance must be destructive of everything that is worthy to be cherished.”
Civility in Washington—rare enough since the election of Adams by the House in 1825—disappeared. Writing to her son Charles Francis Adams, Louisa Adams called the battles within the Jackson administration “altogether as mean and scurvy a piece of business as I ever saw.” John McLean of Ohio, appointed by Jackson to the Supreme Court in 1829, believed that “the Jackson party is a good deal dispirited” in the wake of the resignations. “Gen. Jackson will not get on as successfully as many are inclined to think,” McLean wrote Ingham in May. “The general’s qualifications for the office begin to be questioned by many who have believed him capable of managing the government by the superior powers of his own mind.” In Kentucky and Ohio, McLean said, Jacksonians “have lost the enthusiasm they once possessed in the cause.” In South Carolina, the radicals thought the crisis would help them. “The administration at Washington cannot recover from the retreat precipitate of the late Cabinet,” James Hamilton, Jr., wrote to James Henry Hammond from Charleston, “and consequently Jackson’s reelection is placed in such hazard as scarcely to be a probable event.”
THE CABINET PURGE did not bring peace to John Eaton, either. He was out of power, open to charges that his resignation proved what his enemies had been saying about his wife, and felt disoriented by his sudden official distance from Jackson—he had served with Jackson in three different decades, in wars hot and cold, and was now in an ambiguous position in Washington, close to the president but not in office. Not surprisingly, then, Eaton began to lose control of his temper. In the pages of the Telegraph on Friday, June 17, 1831, Duff Green, firmly allied with Calhoun, told the Eaton story, and Branch, Berrien, and Ingham were (accurately) said to have snubbed the wife of the secretary of war on moral grounds. In response, Eaton issued a challenge to the three men in a note written that evening to “know of you, whether or not you sanction, or will disavow” this “vile abuse of me, and of my family.” Ingham was the one most willing to answer.
Thus began three days of incendiary correspondence and confrontation. Ingham would not dignify the question of his having sanctioned the Telegraph piece with a reply, he wrote Eaton the next day, and then snarled: “In the meantime I take the occasion to say that you must be not a little deranged to imagine that any blustering of yours could induce me to disavow what all the inhabitants of this City know and perhaps half the people of the U.S. believe to be true.” Answering later that Saturday, Eaton called Ingham’s note “impudent and insolent” and raised the stakes: “I demand of you satisfaction, for the wrong and injury you have done me. Your answer must determine whether you are so far entitled to the name and character of a gentleman, as to be able to act like one.”
So it was that the former secretary of war decided to kill the former secretary of the Treasury. When there was no immediate reply from Ingham to the challenge to duel, a brother-in-law of Eaton’s, Dr. Philip G. Randolph, forced his way in to see Ingham on Sunday morning with what Ingham called “a threat of personal violence.” Affecting a condescending tone—and thereby infuriating Eaton all the more—Ingham wrote: “I perfectly understand the part you are made to play in the farce now acting before the American people. I am not to be intimidated by threats or provoked by abuse to any act inconsistent with the pity and contempt which your condition and conduct inspire.”
At this Eaton went nearly mad. “Your contempt I heed not, your pity I despise,” he replied. “It is such contemptible fellows as yourself that have set forth rumors of their own creation, and taken them as a ground of imputation against me.… But no more; here our correspondence closes. Nothing more will be received short of an acceptance of my demand of Saturday, and nothing more be said to me until face-to-face we meet. It is not in my nature to brook your insults; nor will they be submitted to.”
On the morning of Monday, June 20, 1831, Eaton and his friends searched the city for Ingham—Ingham’s office, his boardinghouse, streets where he was likely to be. It was a formidable company: Lewis, Randolph, Colonel John Campbell (the treasurer of the United States), and Major Thomas L. Smith (the register of the Treasury). In Ingham’s mind, there was no doubt about the mission: they were “lying in wait,” he said, “for the purpose of assassination.”
The Eaton party took up positions at the Treasury and in a grocery store near Ingham’s F Street lodgings. “While prowling about … the movements of the band were so suspicious as to induce Ingham’s son to go to his father’s lodgings to put him on his guard,” Duff Green told William Cabell Rives, the Virginia editor. Now “apprised of these movements,” Ingham armed himself and, guarded by his son and a handful of friends, he managed to go to work and come home without being attacked. Daylight may have deterred the Eaton forces, and Ingham’s own unexpected show of force probably played a part, too. Duff Green thought Ingham’s display of strength in the streets—what Green called “the firmness of the old gentleman backed by his friends”—had spooked Eaton, who, Green believed, had “felt his courage oozing out at his fingers’ ends and immediately left the building without noise or bloodshed.”
Whatever momentary failure of nerve may have afflicted Eaton, it lasted only a moment, for by nightfall he was back on the march. “Having recruited an additional force in the evening,” Ingham recalled, “they paraded until a late hour on the streets near my lodgings heavily armed, threatening an assault on the dwelling I reside in.” Beseeching Jackson to intervene “as the chief magistrate of the U. States and most especially of the District of Columbia, whose duties in maintaining good order among its inhabitants … cannot be unknown to you,” Ingham invoked Jackson’s public responsibilities rather than his personal feelings. On reflection, however, Ingham decided that hoping Jackson would side with him against Eaton was a bad bet, and since the stakes were now life and death, guessing wrong could be fatal. So, unwilling to risk his luck any further, Ingham fled the city at four o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, June 21, taking a stage to Baltimore.
THE ESCAPE PROBABLY saved his life. Far from policing the District or chastising the officials of his government—including Lewis, the acting secretary of war and a resident of the White House—Jackson was taking a kind of perverse pleasure in Ingham’s predicament and flight in the darkness. Replying to Ingham—who was already out of Washington, heading for safety—Jackson dismissed Ingham’s story about the posse, telling him that the men Ingham had named had denied the charge.
To Andrew Donelson, Jackson was more forthcoming. “The truth is Eaton alone did look for him and remained in a grocer’s store, after walking through the streets some time, until nearly the hour of three from ten in the morning,” Jackson wrote Andrew. It was Ingham’s guard that posed the real danger, Jackson said. Though he cited no source for the claim, Jackson believed the Ingham forces “had determined when Eaton made the attack to shoot three or seven balls through Eaton.” The most revealing part of that sentence is Jackson’s apparently blasé acknowledgment that Eaton did plan to assault, and most likely kill, Ingham.
Ingham was well out of it and sought security at home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Jackson left for the Rip Raps, and Eaton’s plans were unclear. Eaton had, a correspondent of Henry Clay’s said, “acted a most ridiculous and even crazy part,” and reason seemed to be playing even less of a role than usual in the Eatons’ private world. “Eaton still remains in the city and the rumor of the day varies as to his ultimate intention of leaving it for Tennessee,” Duff Green wrote Ingham on Monday, July 4. “I believe that [Margaret] will resist an attempt to send her into banishment.”
In New York City that April 1831, at Prince and Marion streets, near the Bowery, John Quincy Adams arrived at the Dutch-roofed house of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Gouverneur. Mrs. Gouverneur was a daughter of former president James Monroe, and her father had come to live with her in his great old age. General Lafayette always called when in the country, and a boy who was in and out of the Gouverneurs’ house in those years remembered President Monroe in satin knee breeches, sitting near a grate in the house’s “dingy” parlor.
Receiving Adams, Monroe—now old and failing, only a few months from death—savored the chance to talk politics and foreign affairs with a fellow member of the most exclusive club in the country: that of the former presidents of the United States. Washington, the senior Adams, and Jefferson were all dead: only Madison, at Montpelier, survived. As for the incumbent—well, the subject of Jackson consumed a good bit of Adams’s and Monroe’s time on this afternoon. The two old men moved from speaking of violence in Europe to talking about what Adams called “the recent quasi revolution at Washington,” and revolutions were serious things. The tumult within the Jackson administration offended the orderly sensibilities of two presidents who had, in their day, sought tranquillity. To another friend, Adams said: “If other revolutions partake of the sublime, this one entirely and exclusively belongs to the next step”—the ridiculous.
WHATEVER EATON SAID to Margaret to convince her that he had to resign, and despite Jackson’s enduring support, she had begun to feel the way those in Washington who have slipped from power often do—less important, the object of fewer eyes. As Van Buren recalled it, on a day “long enough after her husband’s relinquishment of office to make her sensible of the change in her position,” Margaret was at home when Jackson and Van Buren stopped by on a walk.
She was not the Margaret of old. “Our reception was to the last degree formal and cold, and what greatly surprised me was that the larger share of the chilling ingredient in her manner and conversation fell to the General,” Van Buren said. Jackson now saw what so many others—including Emily—had long seen: that Margaret was changeable, mercurial, and immature. On leaving the house, Van Buren said, “There has been some mistake here,” but Jackson did not want to talk about it.
“It is strange,” Jackson said, and spoke of it no more.
It was not so strange to those who had assessed Margaret with a more clinical eye than Jackson had. She was selfish and grandiose. But what was done was done. The Eatons would be gone soon enough—by the end of the summer—and Jackson’s Tennessee friends wanted to see Emily back in the White House.
THE CLAY FORCES were already planning for the postelection phase in a close presidential contest in 1832. “Nothing now is more probable than that the Election may come to the House,” Josiah Randall, a Philadelphia lawyer, said to Henry Clay. From the safety of his home in Pennsylvania, Samuel Ingham wanted vengeance. Chased from Washington by Eaton, Ingham turned his anger on Jackson, telling a friend that when the people “know but a small part they will dispose of Genl J.… The magic of Genl J’s popularity is all a delusion. He has more unbearable points about him than I have ever seen in a public man.”
John C. Calhoun’s grandiose vision of himself and his own abilities was also on display in the critical early months of 1831. In Columbia, South Carolina, James Hammond rose early on the morning of Friday, March 18, to meet with Calhoun at the home of a Charleston lawyer. Hammond’s long account of the ensuing conversation sheds much light on Calhoun’s thinking at this juncture.
It was only seven o’clock in the morning, but Calhoun “immediately entered freely into the discussion of the affairs of the nation,” Hammond recalled. “He said that great changes had taken and were taking place now in the political elements … as extraordinary as it had been unexpected.” Calhoun believed that “three fourths of the members of Congress” were “with him,” as were Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky (which would have surprised Clay to hear). Jackson had let him down and was “as jealous of his military fame as ever was Othello of his wife and easily played upon with it by the cunning men by whom he is surrounded.” Calhoun’s plan, according to Hammond: “to throw himself entirely upon the South and if possible to be more Southern.” At two subsequent encounters—a dinner and a tea—Hammond found that “there is a listlessness about him which shows that his mind is deeply engaged and no doubt that it is on the subject of the Presidency. He is unquestionably quite feverish under the present excitement, and his hopes.”
Calhoun’s Southern strategy was risky, for it depended on having enough Southerners and enough voters in border states like Pennsylvania to cast their lot with a South Carolinian who was in the nullifying camp. His case was not helped when, in Charleston on Thursday, May 19, 1831, South Carolina congressman George McDuffie laid out his popular (if inaccurate) forty-bale theory—the idea being that the tariff cost each planter forty bales of cotton out of one hundred—and acknowledged that the struggle was less about money than power.
“I WILL READILY concede that a State cannot nullify an act of Congress by virtue of any power derived from the Constitution,” McDuffie said. “It would be a perfect solecism to suppose any such power was conferred by the Constitution.” Thus dismissing the more intellectual and labored theories—including Calhoun’s in the Exposition and Hayne’s debate with Webster—McDuffie said: “The Union, such as the majority have made it, is a foul monster, which those who worship, after seeing its deformity, are worthy of their chains.”
Reading about McDuffie’s remarks, Duff Green thought the South Carolinians were going too far; such hot rhetoric, he believed, put Calhoun in a vulnerable position nationally. Green’s fear, James Hamilton, Jr., said, was that the Southern extremists “intended to start into open rebellion and insure the empire of the whore of Washington (Mrs. E. I suppose),” Hamilton told Hammond on Saturday, June 11, 1831.
Worried about Jackson’s more precarious political position and disturbed by McDuffie’s May broadside, the Unionists in South Carolina hastily arranged a daylong Fourth of July rally in Charleston. Congressman William Drayton spoke vividly. In a civil struggle, he said, “all the kindly feelings of the human heart would be eradicated, and for them would be substituted those burning and savage passions … which pour rancours into the bosoms of friends” and which, in the end, could lead to “the spectacle of brother armed against brother, of parent against child, and of the child against his parent.”
Though he was secluded at the Rip Raps, Jackson had the last word of the day, in a letter that was read aloud to the meeting and echoed Drayton: “Every enlightened citizen must know that a separation, could it be effected, would begin with civil discord and end in colonial dependence on a foreign power and obliteration from the list of nations.” Yet even before such an eventuality could come to pass, Jackson wrote, he would hurl all the strength at his command, “at all hazards,” in order to “present an insurmountable barrier to the success of any plan of disorganization.”
Anxiety about civil war was widespread. “I fear from my observations to the South that our Union is in danger,” Stephen Van Rensselaer, a former congressman from New York, wrote Clay. “I had no idea of the violence of the planters. They are deluded by their ambitious leaders.”
IN HIS STUDY in South Carolina, Calhoun, the most ambitious of those “planters,” was having the most intense of summers. On Tuesday, July 26, 1831, Calhoun wrote what came to be known as his Fort Hill Address. It did not breathe fire. It did not summon the South to immediate disunion. In philosophical prose that tended to the dense, Calhoun argued, essentially, that the Union could survive only if the states, as the original parties to the Constitution, had the means to nullify a law if and until the Constitution were to be specifically amended to make the law in question part and parcel of the Constitution. It was an elegant theory, but largely impractical, for the place to fight those battles was in the Congress, where the Framers had taken care to ensure that the voices of the minority could be heard (chiefly, though not solely, through the granting of equal representation in the Senate regardless of a state’s population). There were the courts, too, established and maintained by a combination of executive and legislative power as a check over both.
The nullifiers liked to argue that they were working in the tradition of the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798, which had been passed to protest the Alien and Sedition Acts in particular and the federalism embodied by John Adams in general. Authored by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the resolutions as adopted did not go as far then as South Carolina wanted to go now. (In a draft that came to light in 1832, Jefferson did make extreme arguments, but in the end the Kentucky legislature had passed a less strident version.) And from retirement at Montpelier, Madison denied that the resolutions were intended to do what South Carolina was proposing. The states, Madison said, had the right to appeal for reform, but only through the national government. As articulated in the Fort Hill Address, nullification would create the mechanical means for the states to assert more power over the laws of the nation than the laws of the nation could assert over them.
The objections of most Americans of the time, including Jackson, had less to do with the broader states’ rights point—even when defending the cause of Union, men like Jackson spoke warmly and often of the old republican school of thought—than it did with what Calhoun’s doctrine would inevitably create: a confederacy, not a nation, with the member states choosing which laws they would follow. Defenders of nullification pointed out that Calhoun’s theory suspended the objectionable law only until such time as the Constitution might be amended, at which point the objection that the nullified bill was “unconstitutional” would be moot. At best, however, nullification would lead to a perpetual process of constitutional amendment, crippling the operations of the federal government. At worst, by codifying defiance, Calhoun’s plan tilted power toward the individual states to such a degree that Washington would be, to use a favorite term of the era, “prostrate” before the leaders and people of the different states, all of which had their own ideas, their own interests, and their own passions—ideas, interests, and passions that, as McDuffie’s speech at Charleston in May had shown, could rather easily carry nullification to secession. For once the principle of a state veto was established, who was to say that a state so outraged by an act of Congress—an act its representatives had played a role, if a losing one, in crafting—would graciously concede defeat in the event the rest of the Union chose to enshrine the objectionable legislation in the Constitution? It might do just that, as Calhoun said he hoped. Or it might not. One thing was clear: nullification was a step away from, not toward, investing a representative national government with the power it needed to expand America on the continent and establish it as a serious, substantive player on the global stage.
The question of the tension between the will of the majority and the rights of the minority raised in Calhoun’s doctrine was an essential one. “Let it never be forgotten that where the majority rules the minority is the subject,” he wrote, italicizing the words as though in direct reply to Jackson’s italicized “The majority is to govern” in the 1829 presidential message. Insofar as the personal can be removed from a political argument, this issue was the most profound disagreement between Jackson and Calhoun about the nature of government, and, as is often the case, neither extreme had it exactly right. Jackson’s vision of direct democracy opened the way to mob rule in which an exercised majority had the power to make bad policy and persecute those who, in the spirit of the Constitution, deserved protection.
Despite Jackson’s fervent and well-meaning convictions to the contrary, the “people” were not always right all the time. “The rule of the majority and the right of suffrage are good things, but they alone are not sufficient to guard liberty, as experience will teach,” Calhoun told a friend a few days after the Fort Hill Address was published. True, but a single state was not always right, either. Great issues should be debated and decided by the national means constructed by the Framers, with the three federal branches each playing their role in the work of government.
Nullification was a means of power, and even the most dedicated Unionists, if they were being honest, could envision a hypothetical situation in which they might find such a weapon useful—if, say, a given president and a given Congress were to pass a law they found morally abhorrent. But the fact that Jackson, Webster, Livingston, and the other anti-nullification leaders trusted in the Framers’ system of checks and balances was a tribute to their belief that the Union and the Constitution still seemed the finest—if sometimes flawed—practical way to govern a complex country. Reading Calhoun’s argument, John Quincy Adams observed: “I have been deeply disappointed in him, and now expect nothing from him but evil.”
As his manifesto made its way around the nation, Calhoun faced trouble at home. His wife lost a baby to miscarriage, rains destroyed large swaths of his crops for the year, and a slave named Aleck escaped, only to be captured shortly by a kinsman of Calhoun’s. “I wish you to have him lodged in jail for one week, to be fed on bread and water and to employ someone for me to give him 30 lashes well laid on at the end of the time,” Calhoun wrote. “I hope you will pardon the trouble. I only give it because I deem it necessary to our proper security to prevent the formation of the habit of running away.”
IT WAS A time of division, but the mere fact of political and cultural division—however serious and heartfelt the issues separating American from American may be—is not itself a cause for great alarm and lamentation. Such splits in the nation do make public life meaner and less attractive and might, in some circumstances, produce cataclysmic results. But strong presidential leadership can lift the country above conflict and see it through. When Jackson reached out to Roger Taney of Maryland to become attorney general, Taney, a former Federalist who did not know the president well, was surprised by the appointment, and his recollection of his state of mind when he accepted illustrates the strength of commitment so many Americans felt toward Jackson even as so many others hoped for a Clay or a Calhoun. “He was at that time vehemently assailed, not only by his old enemies but by new ones who before had been his friends”—Duff Green, among others. “I had scarcely any personal acquaintance with him; and knew him only from his public acts and the history of his life. But yet my feelings toward him were warmer than mere political confidence. Pains had been taken to wound not only his fame, but his feelings and affections.”
Taney was tall and thin with a weakness for stooping; a biographer noted that “some thought him … ugly.” More than two decades before his 1857 decision as chief justice in Dred Scott, Taney was a player in the Jacksonian struggle over the Bank. His words, set down in a memoir known as the “Bank War Manuscript” that was long lost to scholars, capture the unifying and energizing effect the Jackson scandals—from the charges about Rachel to the Eaton affair—had on Jackson’s followers. The controversies drove many away from Jackson’s ranks as his foes undertook to persuade voters in the middle to oppose him. Yet the attacks also brought his loyalists together by investing them and their hero with a shared sense of persecution and a strong incentive to defeat those bent on Jackson’s destruction.
Clay and Calhoun were in the vanguard of fighting a political version of total war against Jackson, and those who believed in Jackson and in his causes did not desert the field. Instead, as Taney’s memoir shows, they answered in kind. Bloodthirsty bids for power often provoke equally bloodthirsty reactions—especially when the target is a man like Jackson, whose own appetite for control and for the elimination of enemies knew few bounds. Here is Taney’s explanation of his own abstract connection to Jackson—a connection formed before there was any intimacy between the two men:
His wife had been most wantonly and cruelly introduced into the electioneering contest. She had been defamed and traduced in the most ferocious spirit. The ungenerous and unmanly attacks upon her character had not been confined to the low and the base, but put forward again and again by every newspaper which supported the rival candidate; from the highest to the lowest; and if not instigated and encouraged, they were yet undoubtedly countenanced and encouraged by all the political leaders opposed to him. I should have grieved to see a high and noble spirit beaten down by those who had thus wantonly tortured him, and broken the heart of the excellent wife to whom he was so devotedly attached. It seemed to me that every man who by his support of him in 1824 had made him so prominent in the canvass of 1828 and by that means brought on him this vindictive rivalry, was bound to do more than give him a mere cold political support; was bound to make personal sacrifices if they were necessary to support his administration while he continued to deserve his confidence and continued to be unjustly assailed. Such sacrifices seemed to me to be necessary where new enemies were combining with the old ones to wage war against him in the same fierce spirit of hostility.
In a way, Taney was calling for followers to play a more consistent and demanding role in politics than might be comfortable for them. If a mass representative democracy were to work well, a leader’s troops could not be—to borrow a phrase from the Revolutionary War ethos so important to Jackson—sunshine patriots. They would have to be vigilant, keeping abreast of the shifting calculus of politics through the newspapers and standing ready to argue the party line with passion and conviction. A willingness to wage constant partisan combat, no matter what the issue, was an emerging requirement in the politics coming into being in the 1830s. Party organization was not new, but the machine Van Buren, Kendall, Blair, and others were building was larger and more complicated than any previous American political operation. And this early machine depended upon Andrew Jackson as its engine—a human engine that could inspire, charm, cajole, persuade, and, when necessary, coerce.
AS JACKSON PRESSED the known limits of presidential power, Edward Everett wrote Henry Clay asking his thoughts about whether the opposition should try to impeach the president. It was a radical thought, but Jackson was in many senses a radical president, conducting himself in ways that were difficult to fit into any generally accepted ideological category. On Maysville and in the Cherokee case, he respected states’ rights; on nullification, he threatened war. Though there was a relatively coherent creed guiding him—a kind of Jeffersonian republicanism in which the preservation of the Union was central, since without a union presumably there would be no theater for Jeffersonian republicanism of any sort—Jackson was a politician, not a philosopher, and politicians generally value power over strict intellectual consistency, which leads a president’s supporters to nod sagely at their leader’s creative flexibility and drives his opponents to sputter furiously about their nemesis’s hypocrisy.
As devoutly as Clay would have relished watching Jackson face impeachment, he believed Jackson too popular. “On the question of impeachment, suggested by you, I entertain no doubt of the President’s liability to it,” Clay said in reply to Everett on Sunday, June 12, 1831. “But, at present (what may be the state of the case hereafter we cannot say now) from the composition of the Senate, there is not the least prospect of such a prosecution being effectual. To attempt it, therefore, in the existing division of that body, would be unavailing, and, on that account, you would not be able to carry with you the judgment or the feelings of the public. Indeed there would be a danger of exciting the sympathies of the people in behalf of a person whom they have not yet altogether ceased to idolize.”
But Jackson understood the political difficulties he was facing. Though he believed he had done the right thing in sacking the Cabinet, he also knew that entire Cabinets did not fall in America; that was a European sort of thing. The purge could cost him politically, and he was still working out precisely how many opponents he would face in 1832. He knew about Clay, and he was awaiting final word about Calhoun.
“Mr. Calhoun will run for president if his friends believe he can be got into the House,” Jackson said. “This has been intended since 1828. The secret and precious plots are all leaking out.” Thinking of the Hermitage, he told John Coffee that the tranquillity of the plantation held enormous appeal at the moment. “Could I with honor … I would fly to it, there to bury myself from the corruption and treachery of this wicked world, where the wicked never cease troubling, and there the weary can have no rest. But this to me is denied, and I must submit.”
Suffering from headaches and loneliness, he hated the idea that Clay and Calhoun might be able to run against him as a dictator, sending the election to the House, where he could lose yet again. He could not afford to show his insecurities to a wide audience, and so Emily and Andrew found themselves, as his closest family, suffering the most from the emotional storms he unleashed when he was feeling overburdened, angry, anxious, misunderstood, and helpless. He lived for power. Take that away, or threaten to, and the mask would fall, revealing a vulnerable, often violent man torn between tenderness and wrath.
Worried by the trouble Jackson was confronting inside and outside the White House, Jackson’s Tennessee friends—Overton; McLemore; Coffee; Alfred Balch, a Nashville lawyer; and John Bell, a Tennessee congressman—went to work in midsummer. They knew he needed signs of reassurance, respect, and affection—three essential elements in steeling presidents to engage hostile forces. They knew he needed Emily and Andrew. And they knew their man and spent hours with Jackson bashing Calhoun, praising Eaton, and bolstering Jackson’s confidence by assuring him that he was not truly alone. “Our true policy now is to effect a union of action of all the true hearted throughout the country,” Balch told Jackson. “Let us clear our decks for action. Prepare our friends at Headquarters to move in a solid column. And there will not be the slightest danger.”
In late July 1831, the Tennesseans gambled that Jackson’s need for family and comfort would outweigh all else, and they packed Emily, Andrew (who had returned to Tennessee in June), and the children off to Washington. On Friday, July 29, 1831, after “the most mature reflection,” McLemore and Bell wrote Jackson, the group “urged it on Major Donelson to set out with his family for Washington without further correspondence, just as he did at the commencement of your administration, as a part of your family. We doubt not that his course and that of his family will be such as to afford no uneasiness to yourself or any just protest for the censure of your enemies. We think there is no necessity for the specification of terms on one side or the other. If on pursuing the course advised, Major Donelson shall go on to the city contrary to your wishes, we and not him are to blame.”
THE WISE MEN of Tennessee believed that the sight of the family and the sounds of the children—along with the disappearance of the Eatons and the joining of the battle against the radicals in the South—would open a new, more peaceful period in the White House.
As a lawyer, a soldier, and a politician, Jackson had long seen and experienced life in sequential chapters—case followed case, battle followed battle, election followed election, legislative fight followed legislative fight. Never dumb (only stubborn), Jackson was also ready to turn the page in the White House. He had so many other political concerns that he did not derail the reunion. McLemore told Coffee that there was every reason to hope for serenity, at least inside the White House. “All things will work right after a while.”
Jackson, pen in hand, was writing a letter to Van Buren at the moment the Donelsons arrived at the front door of the White House. He had finished five paragraphs on politics, a diplomatic matter with France, and the tariff when the party from Tennessee began to come into the mansion; he had time to write one more section about the new Cabinet before his room flooded with his family, who immediately made the right moves, sending love to Van Buren and began busily resurrecting the world that had been dead for this long year of Jackson’s life. “This moment the ladies have entered, and Miss Mary Eastin and Mrs. Donelson, with the Major, have desired me to make a tender to you of their kind salutations,” Jackson said. “Uncle seems quite happy and everything is moving harmoniously and I sincerely hope it may remain so,” Emily told her sister.
The cause of harmony was helped immeasurably at seven o’clock on the morning of Monday, September 19, when Margaret and John Eaton set out for Tennessee. “He ought to have left before this,” Andrew Jackson, Jr., said of Eaton in early September.
But at least the Donelsons were back and things seemed to be veering toward order. As the Eatons’ carriage headed south, a warmth and a peace fell over the domestic life at the White House. The restoration could not have waited much longer, for Jackson needed all his strength. Telling Van Buren of Eaton’s departure, Jackson spoke of the reelection campaign, which he claimed to dread, saying, “Nothing reconciles me to my situation but the assurances of some virtuous men that it is now necessary for the preservation of the Union that I should permit my name to be continued for the next canvass for the Presidency.”
The words of the virtuous and his own high motives played their part, but so did vengeance: “This, with the determination never to be driven by my enemies or to succumb to them, continues me here again.” If he relinquished control, it would be on his timing and his terms. He had come too far to fall now, and the appetites and anxieties that drove him were the kinds of appetites and anxieties that even the presidency of the United States could not satisfy or quell.
GEORGE BANCROFT, THE historian and future secretary of the navy under President James K. Polk, called at the White House in late December 1831. He was, he wrote to his wife, “quite charmed” with Emily, and with Jackson. “Being determined to have a long and regular chat with the old man, the roaring lion I mean, I went in the evening,” Bancroft wrote. The president’s manners were perfect, the family warm, and the conversation touched on the centrality of virtue in a republic. Jackson, Bancroft said, “declares that our institutions are based upon the virtue of the community, and added that the moment ‘demagogues obtain influence with the people our liberties will be destroyed.’ ” Learned and intellectually polished, Bancroft was arch about Jackson’s lack of education. “He assured me that truth would in the eend (pronounce the word to rhyme with fiend) be every man’s best policy.” On his host’s “qualifications for President,” Bancroft said, “avast there—Sparta hath many a wiser son than he.…”
Another American man of letters, Nathaniel Hawthorne, recorded a conversation about Jackson that helps explain why Bancroft’s 1831 impression of Jackson was correct but incomplete. A man who had been at a gathering with Jackson, Hawthorne wrote in a journal, “told an anecdote, illustrating the General’s little acquaintance with astronomical science, and his force of will in compelling a whole dinner-party of better-instructed people to knock under to him in an argument about eclipses and the planetary systems generally.” Jackson’s personal force, in other words, swept away everything in its path. Hawthorne’s verdict: “Surely, he was the greatest man we ever had; and his native strength, as well of intellect as character, compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the [more] cunning … the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool.”
WITH THE 1832 presidential campaign at hand, Jackson’s adopted son, Andrew Jackson, Jr., wrote his kinsman William Donelson a chatty letter from the White House. “I have no very important news to communicate except to tell you of the safe arrival of Cousin Andrew and Emily and the young ladies,” he said on Friday, September 9, 1831. “They are well and we were very glad to see them.” Turning to politics, Andrew junior was optimistic but resigned to a long slog—a fair indication of Jackson’s own thinking, since Andrew junior spent time with his adopted father in Emily and Andrew’s absence. Andrew junior suspected that “the dissolution of the Cabinet will be a theme to harp upon for some time.… God only knows how they will settle it—I suppose [through] public opinion—vox populi; perhaps a little fighting will be had—etc. etc. and some thing else may come forth and too the reelection of the President is not too far distant.”
High hopes, for victory could not be certain, as Andrew junior himself admitted a moment later. “It is thought that three or four may be put in nomination to run against the Old Man,” he wrote. “They can hope to carry the election into the House of Representatives and there settle it by intrigue, bargain, etc etc etc.” Though he was skeptical, he was unwilling to dismiss the scenario that “Clay, Calhoun or Mr. Adams will one of them oppose the General, perhaps two.” Still, he believed “some of these men will have more sense—but I know that they have ambition sufficient.” Ambition sometimes divorced from sense was something the Jackson circle knew very well indeed. The “Old Man” had taught them a great deal about it—often inadvertently, perhaps, but indelibly.
IN THE AFTERMATH of the Cabinet breakup, Van Buren had accepted Jackson’s appointment as the envoy to England and moved to London to take up his duties. The Senate would have to confirm the posting, but few expected any problem there—until the nomination actually reached the floor in January 1832. In a sign of the divisiveness of the day, on Wednesday, January 25, 1832, the Senate voted 24–23—Vice President Calhoun broke a 23–23 tie—to reject Van Buren.
Calhoun was practicing the politics of vengeance, paying Van Buren in kind for Van Buren’s long campaign to turn Jackson against him. The hope was to embarrass Jackson and wreck Van Buren’s future; the first was more easily accomplished than the second. On hearing the news—word arrived as a White House dinner party was breaking up, with the president holding forth in the Red Room—Jackson said, “By the Eternal! I’ll smash them!” Ill and furious, Jackson said Calhoun’s refusal to confirm “has displayed a want of every sense of honor, justice or magnanimity” and asserted that Calhoun was “politically damned.” His enemies were out in the open, working together—what Jackson called a “factious opposition in the Senate with Calhoun and Clay at its head.”
For Calhoun, it was a rare—and brief—moment of triumph over Van Buren. “It will kill him, sir, kill him dead,” Calhoun said after the Senate vote. “He will never kick, sir, never kick.” Andrew Donelson gauged the politics more aptly than Calhoun. “The common sentiment on this subject is that Mr. Van Buren has been violently thrown overboard by the enemies of the Administration and that its friends are bound to avenge the insult,” Andrew wrote John Coffee. “This sentiment … will no doubt spread throughout the Union. If so there can scarcely be a doubt that Mr. Van Buren will be nominated at Baltimore as the candidate of our party for Vice President.”
Close to Jackson and again familiar with his thinking, Andrew saw what was coming: the New Yorker would replace the South Carolinian on the Jackson ticket, creating a Western-Northern axis against Clay and perhaps, if he were to run, Calhoun. In London, Van Buren was not feeling well when the news reached him. Still, wrote Washington Irving, the legation’s secretary, Van Buren “received the tidings of his rejection with his usual equanimity.” The British could not help but be impressed with the sheer scope of the Senate’s vicious attack. In a conversation with Irving, a Foreign Office official said that “he had never known a more naked and palpable party maneuver” than to turn down a former secretary of state to be minister to a single nation. “Every thing is going on well,” Clay wrote in February 1832. “V. Buren, Old Hickory and the whole crew will, I think, in due time be gotten rid of.”
The battle in the Senate had grown even uglier. Senator John Holmes introduced a resolution that the nomination go to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “and that said committee be instructed to investigate the causes which produced the removal of the late Secretaries of the Treasury and Navy Departments, and of the Attorney General of the United States, and also the resignations of the Secretaries of the State and War Departments.” Calling the dissolution a “novel and important political movement,” Holmes also wanted to know “whether the said Martin Van Buren, then Secretary of State, participated in any practices disreputable to the national character, which were designed to operate on the mind of the President of the United States.…” The motion was tabled, but the point was made: the opposition was going to make as much of the purge as it could.
In Tennessee, the Eatons tried to be cheerful. “To myself, I feel like a new man in the little sphere where now I am placed … standing in the ambitious way of no one, and hence not an object of envy and destruction,” Eaton wrote to Jackson after the return to Tennessee. Margaret wrote Jackson, too. Her anger had faded enough for her to realize that alienating Jackson was monumentally stupid. In her letter, she told him they were visiting the Hermitage: “Would to heaven you were here with us, for I believe you would be more happy; and when years shall roll round, and you shall again be the Cincinnatus of the West, you will see how devoted I have been in my attachment towards you. When the splendor of the President’s home shall be done with, then you will be better able to tell who are your real friends; and I do and can say with truth none will you find more sincere than my dear Husband and myself.”
THE TARGET OF Margaret’s not very veiled attack loved being back at the White House. Emily found the season of 1831–32 “very gay.” She was pregnant with her third child. Andrew Jackson, Jr., had fallen in love with and married a wonderful young woman from Pennsylvania, Sarah Yorke, who quickly became a favorite of Jackson’s and was friendly enough with Emily that, remarkably, there seems to have been little if any tension between the two women. “Cousin Andrew arrived last Sunday with his bride,” Emily wrote to her sister. “She is quite pretty, has black hair and eyes and is about an inch lower than myself—she is quite agreeable and we are all very much pleased with her, and Uncle seems much pleased.”
To celebrate the wedding—Jackson had stayed in Washington during the actual ceremony in Philadelphia—Emily and Jackson gave Sarah and Andrew junior a huge party. “We were quite gay last week,” Emily wrote home. “In the first place there was a large dining given to them of about forty persons, the cabinet and the diplomatic corps—The dinner party were invited at 5 o’clock, and at 8, three hundred were invited to spend the evening—the party was very brilliant and everything went off well—”
The dinner for Sarah and Andrew junior did not escape Margaret Bayard Smith’s scrutiny. At issue was who followed whom into dinner, and the new secretary of the Treasury and his wife, the Louis McLanes, back from England, where he had served as minister, were acutely conscious of their status in the capital. Mrs. Smith thought Mrs. McLane “the same frank, gay, communicative woman she ever was,” and found her “evidently very much elated with her past and present dignity.” Yet the first three years of Jackson’s administration had abundantly shown that being in Jackson’s Cabinet—or being married to someone in Jackson’s Cabinet—was no easy task. Chatting with Mrs. McLane after her husband’s appointment, Mrs. Smith said, “She will have as difficult a part to play in society as her husband will in office, as she, as well as he, must be under the influence, I was going to say despotism, of the President’s will.” At Decatur House, which they had taken after Van Buren resigned the State Department, the Livingstons were the leading lights of the moment, and the McLanes were unhappy about being overshadowed by the Livingstons. “Neither Mr. or Mrs. McLane are people who will willingly follow,” Mrs. Smith said, “and it is already rumored that much conflict and dissatisfaction exists in the Cabinet.”
On the evening of the wedding party for Andrew Jackson, Jr., it was announced that, in a break from custom, the secretary of state would precede the foreign diplomatic corps, followed by the rest of the Cabinet. The Treasury secretary disliked the innovation—it seemed to demote him—and told Andrew Donelson so before the walk in to dinner. “The argument was carried on some time,” Mrs. Smith said, and McLane won the point. Then the foreign ministers weighed in, upset at being behind the Cabinet, and Donelson told Jackson of the counteroffensive from his other guests. With tact, Jackson said, “Well, I will lead the Bride, it is a family fête,—and we will waive all difficulties.”
Relating the gossip in a letter, Mrs. Smith said: “Now, trifling as this affair will appear, it may have serious political consequences. The President and the foreign ministers are dissatisfied with the Secretary of the Treasury, and the poor man is not of a temper to conciliate dissatisfactions—and then too, the Secretary of State will resent the resistance made to the honor designed him by the President, and the ill will thus engendered between the two first members of the Cabinet will doubtless influence their deliberations. And the President himself never yet could bear opposition.”
Signaling that she understood the political climate in which the social maneuvers were taking place, Mrs. Smith added: “The Bank question has been another point of controversy, so much so … a member of Congress told a friend of ours, he should not be surprised at another blow up.” It had, after all, happened before. “Mrs. Eaton’s affair, at the beginning, was but a spark, but what a conflagration it did cause,” she said.
MRS. SMITH HAD personal reasons to look forward to a bonfire. She had hopes that Jackson would be bound for Tennessee after the election. Meanwhile, she liked the look of the new season. Chattering away in a letter, she said she and her husband had “several new neighbors. How we shall like them time must determine. An Empress, an ex-Minister’s widow and Mrs. Secretary McLane are among those nearest to us. Madame Iturbide, the former Empress of Mexico, is close to us. We could, were we so inclined, almost shake hands from our back windows.”
While Mrs. Smith soaked up the imperial, ex-imperial, and ministerial glamor, her friends Lucretia and Henry Clay arrived back in the city as winter set in. Clay was returning as senator from Kentucky. Despite a heavy snowstorm, a determined Mrs. Smith braved the ice to call on Lucretia, who could be mistress of the White House in a year’s time. Mrs. Smith “hastened to welcome her back and sat the whole of a long morning with her,” but found her a sadder woman than she remembered. That was understandable: one Clay son was currently battling drink, and another had been committed to “the Lunatic Asylum of Kentucky” in 1831. The former, Mrs. Smith remarked, was “irreclaimably dissipated, the other insane and confined in a hospital.”
Still, Senator Clay was buoyed by the coming combat. He readied for his return to Capitol Hill and, as 1832 wore on, for his return to presidential politics as Jackson’s chief rival in November. Washington Irving, who had come home to America from England, spent some time with Clay and found him in good form. “He tells me he has improved greatly in health since he was dismissed from office, and finds that it is good for man as well as beast to be turned out occasionally to grass. Certainly official life in Washington must be harassing and dismal in the extreme.” It was, but politics was Clay’s natural métier, and Mrs. Smith was confident for her returning friend. “Mr. Clay is borne up by the undying spirit of ambition—he looks well and animated, and will be this winter in his very element—in the very vortex of political warfare,” she said. “With his unrivaled and surpassing talents, his winning and irresistibly attractive manners, what is it he cannot do? We shall see, but I shall think it strange if he does not succeed in all his aims.”
The view from the White House, not surprisingly, was rather different. “Politics are waxing warmer every day,” Andrew Donelson wrote his brother-in-law Stockley in early 1832. “Every engine is at work to batter down the reputation and popularity of Uncle, but as far as I can perceive he is gaining new strength in the affection and love of the people.”