CHAPTER 14
IN HIS OFFICE at the State Department on Wednesday, March 28, 1832, Edward Livingston issued a revealing directive to American diplomats around the globe. From Rio to Saint Petersburg, envoys were instructed to ask foreign governments to change long-standing protocol in the usual form of address in letters between nations. Though the order affected only six words, it represented a dramatic shift in Jackson’s Washington in the opening months of 1832. “It is observed that official communications from foreign powers intended for the Executive of the United States, have been usually addressed to the President and Congress of the United States,” Livingston wrote. Such a convention was fine in the pre-1787 days of the Articles of Confederation, but now, Livingston said, “its inaccuracy is apparent—the whole executive power, particularly that of foreign intercourse, being vested in the President. You will, therefore, address a note to the Minister for Foreign Affairs apprising him that all communications made directly to the head of our executive government should be addressed ‘To the President of the United States of America,’ without any other addition.”
Dropping the House and the Senate from diplomatic correspondence was ceremonial but telling. Jackson was consolidating presidential power, and the fight at hand was against the Bank, a struggle in which Jackson appealed to the people for support on the grounds that he—more than Congress, more than the courts, more than anything or anyone else—represented them.
Mrs. Smith had been on to something when she speculated about the possibility of Louis McLane turning into trouble for Jackson. The larger cause was the Bank; McLane believed the institution should be reformed, not abolished, and was open about his views. A former congressman who had chaired the House Ways and Means Committee, McLane was, his Cabinet colleague Roger Taney said, “an ambitious man; loved power, and aspired to the Presidency, which he confidently expected to reach.” McLane’s time as minister to England had confirmed his longtime support of the Bank—he had, Taney said, a “close intimacy with Mr. Biddle and with Barings in England”—and he came to the Treasury in late 1831 with a plan to save the Bank and accomplish much else besides. Linking most of the questions of the day, McLane proposed to pay off the national debt as Jackson had long planned, sell the government’s stock in the Bank, sell the federal lands to the states, and modify the tariff—then, in future years, recharter a reformed Bank. The political price for the scheme: McLane wanted Jackson to remain largely silent on the Bank issue in the annual presidential message so that McLane could use the occasion of the Treasury secretary’s annual report to discuss his broad proposals—including the Bank’s ultimate recharter. When Jackson agreed, McLane believed he had carried the day on all fronts and rescued the Bank.
It seemed a reasonable surmise. At a meeting convened in Jackson’s office so that the Cabinet could listen as Andrew Donelson read a draft of Jackson’s annual message aloud, the language about the Bank was so mild that it “startled” Roger Taney, who believed the phrasing suggested Jackson “would now defer to the representatives of the people and abide by the decision of Congress”—even though the president opposed recharter. As best Taney could recall it, the original wording about the Bank was:
Having conscientiously discharged a constitutional duty I deem it proper without a more particular reference to the subject to leave it to the investigation of an enlightened people and their representatives.
New to the circle and nervous—he recalled that he was “comparatively a stranger to General Jackson”—Taney nevertheless felt he should speak up. He knew it would annoy McLane, and possibly anger Jackson. The natural tendency in a meeting like the one taking place in Jackson’s office, especially when it is a meeting of politicians, men who make a business of the art of appearing agreeable, is to nod one’s head, not shake it, to murmur affirmation, not mount counterattacks. “The duty of making this objection I felt to be an unpleasant one,” Taney said. Yet he made it.
McLane rose to defend the paragraph, which he had written, as it was. No one else in the office came to Taney’s side as McLane “objected strongly to any alteration.” The other secretaries were either silent or backed McLane. “The discussion continued for some time,” Taney said, and soon “the President was worried and desired it to end.” McLane outranked Taney, and Jackson saw no reason to contradict McLane in open session. Jackson “always listened reluctantly to any criticism upon the language of a paper prepared under his directions,” Taney said, “and he seemed to apprehend that the writer might feel mortified if it was determined that he had imputed to him opinions he did not entertain—or failed to execute the instructions under which the paper was written.” It was clear “from the earnestness and tenacity with which Mr. McLane defended this paragraph” that “he himself had prepared it.… The President I am sure was the more unwilling to make alterations because he saw that Mr. McLane would be dissatisfied and perhaps a little hurt if the paper was materially changed.”
After some back-and-forth at the long table in front of the fireplace, McLane, it seemed, had won. “He was an accomplished diplomatist, and exercised as much diplomacy in Washington to carry his measures as he would at a foreign court,” Taney said. “He had great tact, and always knew whether he should address himself to the patriotism, the magnanimity, the pride, the vanity, the hopes or the fears of the person on whom he wished to operate. And he thus always had a clique about him wherever he was in power over whose opinions he exercised a controlling influence.”
Jackson tended to elude those who tried to control him. As Taney saw it, McLane’s “mistake was in underrating the strength and independence of the President’s mind; and the extent of his information. He expected to manage him.… He evidently believed that he would be able to change [Jackson’s] opinions, and induce him to assent to the continuance of the charter with some slight and unimportant modification, as a salve to the President’s consistency.”
Relieved by the apparent failure of Taney’s bid to change the wording, McLane—and, at a distance, Biddle—believed the battle won. Yet Jackson’s bureaucratic support in the Cabinet meeting did not mean he agreed with McLane’s fundamental argument that the Bank should go on. It meant only that Jackson was, depending on one’s point of view, either a courteous leader or a cleverly deceptive one, for Taney was soon in Andrew Donelson’s office for a private chat with the president. Jackson thought Taney had made a sound case against the wording of the message. Now, quietly and without involving McLane, Jackson made changes to the text and wanted to know Taney’s thoughts. The new passage read:
Having conscientiously discharged a constitutional duty I deem it proper on this occasion without a more particular reference to the views of the subject then expressed to leave it for the present to the investigation of an enlightened people and their representatives.
It was hardly a clarion call, but by Taney and Jackson’s estimation it was better, and gave Jackson room to maneuver. Few read it that way on publication, though, and many believed, as McLane did, that Jackson would allow the Bank to survive.
Biddle thought he saw an opening, and decided to apply for recharter in January 1832—challenging Jackson (never a good idea) to sign it, thus securing the Bank, or to veto it and invite defeat at the polls. Clay and Webster privately pressed for this course, and, like Calhoun, Biddle became enamored of his own logic and convinced himself that the world would see things as he did and do things as he would. He thought he could box Jackson in on the Bank’s terms. Using almost exactly the same words he used to describe McLane, Taney said Biddle was “an ambitious man, full of vanity, and loved power. He believed that by bringing the weight and influence of the Bank into the approaching election he could defeat General Jackson, and he wished political aspirants to see that he had defeated him—He led the Bank therefore into the political arena determined to show its strength in political contests.”
It was a terrible mistake. “If General Jackson does not kill the bank, the bank will kill him,” the ancient John Randolph of Roanoke wrote to Edward Livingston. Jackson used the same metaphor. “The Bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me,” Jackson said to his friend in July, “but I will kill it.” By 1832 the conflict over the Bank had become a struggle for power, and it was always risky to bet against Jackson in such a struggle. Still, Biddle pressed for recharter, believing he would defeat the president in Congress or, failing that, in the general election.
FOR THE PRESIDENT, the first half of 1832 was also a time of physical suffering, marital maneuvering, and financial fretting. In addition to fighting the flu, Jackson finally had the bullet he had carried in his left arm since the brawl with the Bentons removed. It was a brief, painful operation. Unflinching, Jackson had only his walking stick for solace; he gripped it as the doctor prepared to slice open the arm. “Go ahead,” Jackson said. The doctor made the cut, and the old slug popped out, falling to the floor.
Around this time—it was January—Mary Eastin was planning her wedding to Captain William B. Finch of the U.S. Navy. An older man, Finch, Andrew Donelson told the Coffee family, was “very clever and highly respectable.” The wedding was set for Valentine’s Day. Jackson had long loved Mary quite as much as he loved Emily—sometimes finding the more easygoing Mary more approachable—and arranged to pay for a White House ceremony. They would use the East Room, as they had for Mary Rachel’s baptism. All was set—and then Lucius Polk, a cousin of James K. Polk’s, arrived in Washington from his home in Maury County, in middle Tennessee. He had heard of the impending marriage and had apparently been harboring an unspoken love for Mary for several years; emboldened by the imminent threat of losing her forever, young Polk made his case. Again the second floor of the White House became turbulent as Mary found herself choosing between Finch and Polk. It was evidently a difficult decision, for on Saturday, April 7, about three months after her engagement to Finch had become public, Jackson could only say that he thought Mary had settled on Polk. “I believe I may say that Miss Mary Eastin will be married on Tuesday evening next to Mr. Lucius Polk,” Jackson wrote Coffee. “The guests are all invited and I trust that it will take place.”
Money was also a concern. He had paid for Andrew junior’s wedding and now Mary Eastin’s, and he was short of cash. Discussing a land deal on Jackson’s behalf the previous fall, Andrew junior said: “We farmers generally are greatly pressed for money, owing to the depressed state of our cotton market, upon which, you will know, we have to place our sole dependence. My Father cannot command the means conveniently. His expenses here and at home are very heavy.”
Still, Mary Eastin’s romantic drama gave him some passing relief from what Andrew Jackson, Jr., called the “quite warm” politics of the moment—the press of negotiations over the Cherokees, the Bank, the tariff, and, beginning the week Mary and Polk were finally married, the outbreak of the Black Hawk War.
IT WAS PERHAPS inevitable that some Indian warriors would strike back amid, and after, removal. In April 1832, Black Hawk, a Sac whose people, along with the Foxes, had been forcibly removed from their lands near the Rock River in Illinois, came back across the Mississippi River to hunt, only to find white squatters in the way. Misled into believing that there would be British and fellow Indian support, Black Hawk and his band were essentially alone, facing hostile Illinois militia on the eastern side of the Mississippi. (Abraham Lincoln served in the Black Hawk War, but later said the only blood he shed was from mosquitoes.) On Tuesday, May 15, 1832, after a ceremonial feast of boiled dog with representatives of other Great Lakes tribes, Black Hawk sent emissaries to arrange a parley with the white soldiers. But the militiamen seem to have had a good deal to drink, and while accounts are confused, it appears clear that they, not Black Hawk’s warriors, shed first blood. Forty of Black Hawk’s men then crushed the Illinois militia, killing twelve (only three Sacs died, and they had been among those seeking a parley). Hearing the reports, Jackson ordered Winfield Scott into action, putting the general in command of a thousand federal troops.
Slowed by a deadly outbreak of cholera among his men, Scott did not make it to the front until after the war was over. Landing at Fort Gratiot, north of Detroit, some of Scott’s soldiers, in terror from watching the sick die on board, escaped to the forests, only to die on the run; their corpses, it was said, were eaten by wolves and wild hogs. Along the Mississippi, the Black Hawk War basically ended with the Battle of Bad Axe on Thursday, August 2, 1832, where hundreds of Indians, including women and children, were killed, many of them drowning as they tried to escape across the river.
JACKSON’S SWIFT RESPONSE to the bloodshed in Illinois in May 1832 was in contrast to his reaction to a new Supreme Court decision—this one supporting the Cherokees against the incursions of the state of Georgia. The year before, in 1831, John Marshall had flinched from forcing the issue of Indian sovereignty in Cherokee Nation v. The State of Georgia. In March 1832, just before Jackson intervened in the Black Hawk War, Marshall and the Court ruled in a second case that had come to them from Georgia. Two Christian missionaries had been arrested on the Cherokee lands after the state had passed its anti-Cherokee laws prohibiting unlicensed whites from living on Cherokee lands. The missionaries, Samuel Worcester and Elihu Butler, were convicted by a Georgia court and jailed. Their sentence was four years at hard labor.
They appealed the state decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. Chief Justice Marshall found for the missionaries and, in a larger sense, for the Cherokees. It was a far different decision than 1831’s. Release the missionaries, Marshall said, announcing that the Court believed Georgia’s anti-Cherokee laws were “repugnant to the Constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States.” Justice Joseph Story suspected the matter was not over: “The Court has done its duty,” he said. “Let the nation now do theirs.”
As word of the decision spread, Jackson remained in the White House, largely silent. His stillness unnerved his foes. “Our public affairs are evidently tending to a crisis,” Clay wrote on Thursday, March 10, 1832. “The consequences of the recent decision of the Supreme Court must be very great. If it be resisted, and the President refuses to enforce it, there is a virtual dissolution of the Union. For it will be in vain to consider it as existing if a single state can put aside the laws and treaties of the U.S. and when their authority is vindicated by a decision of the S. Court, the President will not perform his duty to enforce it.”
In Washington, Susan Donelson, a daughter of William Gaston’s who had married into the Donelson clan, heard an account of Jackson’s views on the matter. “We were at the Capitol yesterday,” she wrote her father, a North Carolina legislator and judge, on Saturday, March 12. “A gentleman who dined with General Jackson heard him say he thought the decision of the Supreme Court erroneous on the Cherokee Case and tis doubted here whether he would see it executed—a pretty thing indeed, for him to give such an opinion of the highest tribunal and to hesitate about executing its decrees.” Horace Greeley later claimed that Jackson had said: “Well, John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”
THE “NOW LET him enforce it” remark is like the more colorful images from holy scripture: historically questionable but philosophically true. What Jackson did say, to John Coffee, was: “The decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that it cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.” The circumstances were rather mundane for such a momentous case: the Court had adjourned after handing down the decision. As the scholar Edwin A. Miles reconstructed the chronology of the case, according to Section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789, the Court could not render a final decision—a decision that would then have to be enforced, or not—until a case had already been “remanded once without effect.” In this instance, the Court’s opinion was sent to the Superior Court of Georgia. No one expected the Georgia court to follow the Supreme Court’s directive, but because the Supreme Court was now in recess, nothing could be done until Marshall and his colleagues reconvened in January 1833. In the strictest sense of the law, then, Jackson was powerless to act until there was a final judgment in roughly ten months’ time.
All true enough, but it is also true that Andrew Jackson never allowed anything, much less legal niceties, to stand in his way if he was determined to do something. Had he wanted to reverse Georgia’s course toward the Cherokees, it is easy to imagine his declaring the enforcement of a decision of a branch of the national government a solemn presidential duty, and, if necessary, threatening the state with invasion by forces that he himself might lead—all things he contemplated in his battle against South Carolina. But he had no desire to reverse Georgia’s course. There were at least two factors at work. First, he thought Georgia’s pressure on the tribe would expedite removal, and second, he did not want to antagonize another Southern state at a time when he was isolating South Carolina in its drift toward nullification. As usual, then, Jackson did what he liked. (In the end, the administration convinced the governor of Georgia to release the missionaries, and their counsel, William Wirt, stood down.)
ON FRIDAY, May 18, 1832, Emily gave birth to her third child, a boy, and all again went well. From a letter to her mother four weeks after the delivery, it is clear that the Eaton affair has receded, for Jackson is spoken of as virtually a third parent: “I am thankful that I have it once more in my power to write to you and inform you of my convalescence, and of the good health and growth of our dear little boy. He was a month old Friday last.… We have been undecided about his name, that is Andrew and Uncle said he had better be called Samuel and I wished him called John, so we have concluded to join the two names together and call him John S. Donelson, which will distinguish him from the other Johns.”
As always, Emily was pushing herself. “I have been very well all the time except a slight cold I took when he was two weeks old. I was so well that I was walking about and the weather being very changeable took cold which threw me back a little.” As the weather grew warmer, she hoped to come home but was uncertain when they might be able to; politics was too consuming. “I do not know yet what we shall do this summer about going to Tennessee as Congress has not adjourned and [there is] no prospect of it soon. Uncle says we must go, if only to stay ten days.…”
Jackson’s eagerness to escape Washington was understandable. A tariff reform bill was wending its way through Congress, and it was unclear whether the final result would calm the South or lead to nullification. The Bank recharter was also likely to pass—though not with a veto-proof two-thirds majority—and would probably reach the White House before long. “I had hoped before this to be on my way to Tennessee, but Congress continuing so long in session has made my trip now almost impossible,” Andrew Donelson wrote to his brother-in-law Stockley in Nashville. “The Tariff bill will pass pretty much as you see it reported to the Senate: and so will the Bank as reported to the House. The latter bill will however not be approved by the President.”
Even God became an issue of contention as the congressional session went on, with Jackson and Henry Clay squaring off over church and state amid a plague. The trouble had begun in Quebec, when a ship arrived from Europe in June 1832. Forty-two of the passengers were dead or dying from cholera, a communicable illness spread through food and water and caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, which strikes the intestines, leading to diarrhea, vomiting, and, in the worst cases, death through dehydration. In two weeks the disease struck New York with such ferocity that the mayor canceled its Fourth of July parade; 2,565 people in the city ultimately died. From Philadelphia to Baltimore to Washington, west to Cincinnati and Chicago and south to New Orleans, the disease terrified the country. On June 27, 1832, Henry Clay proposed that Jackson declare a day of prayer and fasting to seek divine relief from the outbreak.
The proposition was good politics—people in the afflicted states might be grateful, and religious believers who were undecided in the presidential race could see Clay’s initiative as evidence of a good soul who shared the essence of their faith.
Yet as he had been when Ezra Stiles Ely made the case for the election of “Christian Rulers,” Jackson was reluctant to mix God and government so overtly. Reading the establishment clause in the First Amendment in its strictest sense, Jackson said he, too, believed in “the efficacy of prayer,” but felt that the president of the United States should “decline the appointment of any period or mode” of religious activity. “I could not do otherwise without transcending those limits which are prescribed by the Constitution for the President, and without feeling that I might in some degree disturb the security which religion now enjoys in this country in its complete separation from the political concerns of the General Government,” Jackson said.
LET THE PEOPLE, or even the states, tend to matters of faith. “It is the province of the pulpits and the state governments to recommend the mode by which the people may best attest their reliance on the protecting arm of the almighty in times of great public distress,” Jackson said. “Whether the apprehension that cholera will visit our land furnishes a proper occasion for their solemn notice, I must therefore leave to their own consideration.” It was yet another point on which Jackson and the evangelical movement failed to agree.
“I am no sectarian, though a lover of the Christian religion,” he said while in the White House. “I do not believe that any who shall be so fortunate as to be received to heaven through the atonement of our blessed Savior will be asked whether they belonged to the Presbyterian, the Methodist, the Episcopalian, the Baptist, or the Roman Catholic [faiths]. All Christians are brethren, and all true Christians know they are such because they love one another. A true Christian loves all, immaterial to what sect or church he may belong.”
Jackson was prepared to veto Clay’s day of fast measure if it reached the White House. It did not: the resolution was tabled in the House, ending the episode. In a draft of a veto message written by Louis McLane, Jackson was to have said, “In the spirit and structure of our Constitution, we have carefully separated sacred from civilian concerns,” and to sign a resolution for a religious observance struck Jackson as “incompatible with my sense of duty under the Constitution.” He believed, he said, in the “efficacy of prayer in all times,” from “the day of prosperity” to the “hour of … calamity.” But he was the president, and his duties to the office, as he saw them, came first: “I deem it my duty to preserve this separation and to abstain from any act which may tend to an amalgamation perilous to both” church and state. There ended the lesson.