CHAPTER 15
IN THE FIRST week of July 1832, Jackson turned his energies from the prayer veto toward the Bank. The bill to recharter had passed both houses and reached the president’s desk. Biddle thought he had Jackson where he wanted him. “He was offended with the course General Jackson had pursued towards the institution, and was strongly opposed to him, and determined to place him in what he supposed would be a dilemma,” Roger Taney said of Biddle. “He persuaded himself that General Jackson would hardly dare to meet the bill with an absolute and unqualified veto. But if he did, [Biddle] felt confident that the popularity of the Bank and the influence it could exercise would defeat his reelection. And if he assented to the bill, or appeared to temporize and evade the issue presented to him, it would be regarded as proof that he feared the Bank, and destroy the high place he then held in the confidence and affections of the people.” The Senate passed the bill on Monday, June 11, 1832; the vote in the House was expected to be close. One story sheds light on the Bank’s machinations:
On a rainy day during the deliberations in the House, Taney shared a carriage up Capitol Hill with a Jacksonian congressman from North Carolina, Samuel Price Carson. Carson wanted Taney to look over a draft of an anti-Bank speech the congressman was to deliver in the House debate, saying he planned to publish the address and, as Taney recalled it, “was anxious therefore to put it upon grounds that would bear the closest examination.”
Taney demurred, citing the press of business before the Supreme Court, but, given his own opposition to recharter, was pleased that Carson was so determined to vote with Jackson against the Bank. After the vote, Taney was surprised to hear that Carson had voted with Biddle. “Upon my return I mentioned what had passed to a friend … who[said]that[Carson] … had obtained a loan of twenty thousand dollars from the Bank, and had changed his opinion.” Reflecting on the sequence of events, Taney was philosophical about what had transpired, seeing in it evidence of both perennial human weakness and the threat that an institution such as the Bank posed in a democracy:
Now I do not mean to say that he was directly bribed to give his vote. From the character he sustained and from what I knew of him I think he would have resented anything that he regarded as an attempt to corrupt him. But he wanted the money, and felt grateful for the favor, and perhaps thought that an institution which was so useful to him, and had behaved with so much kindness, could not be injurious or dangerous to the public, and that it would be as well to continue it. Men when under the influence of interest or passion often delude themselves thoughtlessly, and do not always acknowledge even to themselves the motives upon which they really act.… It was one of the dangers arising from this mammoth money power, that its very duties as collecting and disbursing agent brought it constantly in contact with members of Congress and other public functionaries and made it acquainted with their wants and enabled it to place them under obligations and create a feeling of dependence or even gratitude without the direct and offensive offer of a bribe.
Rumors of such transactions helped Jackson’s cause enormously. The Bank, Andrew Donelson said, “is becoming desperate: caught in its own net.” After the House voted, Jackson sent Taney, who was in Annapolis, a note asking him to return to Washington. Arriving at the White House after breakfast, Taney was taken to Jackson’s office. Kendall had drafted a veto message, and Donelson was editing it, but Jackson wanted Taney to join in. Taney said of course.
Taney joined Donelson in Ralph Earl’s room, where the private secretary was at work; Levi Woodbury joined them on the second day. For three days Jackson came in and out, listening and dictating and debating. Earl was there, going about his painting and paying no attention to the matters of state unfolding before him; Taney did not think Earl was “even hearing what was said.” Amid the faint smell of oil paints and in the northern light, Jackson and his team crafted one of the most significant veto messages in American history.
JACKSON’S DECISION WAS framed in sweeping terms, arguing that the goal of government should be to better the lives of the many, not reward the few. That the Bank was most likely not as guilty of the latter offense as Jackson believed was, politically, beside the point. Near the end of the message, he made a sophisticated point about human nature and the role of government, a point that reflected both realism and hope. “It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes,” Jackson said, continuing:
Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.
Jackson was oversimplifying—some classes of people and some enterprises require more protection, more resources, and more attention than others. In this passage, however, he was oversimplifying in the service of a philosophical point, arguing that an end to privilege would mark the beginning of a truly democratic era. That is not, of course, how supporters of the Bank saw it. But they were even more outraged by a passage in the middle of the message in which Jackson asserted that no single institution in American life or government was all-controlling, and that as president he had to do what he thought was right. “The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution,” Jackson wrote, saying:
Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them for passage or approval as it is of the supreme judges when it may be brought before them for judicial decision. The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both. The authority of the Supreme Court must not, therefore, be permitted to control the Congress or the Executive when acting in their legislative capacities, but to have only such influence as the force of their reasoning may deserve.
Senators and congressmen who could see past the issue of the moment realized that Jackson had just expanded the influence of his office yet again. From the Maysville veto on, he had moved to shift power from the Capitol to the White House, and his assertions in the Bank message went further still. Jackson had made it clear that he interpreted the Court’s ruling in McCulloch v. Maryland, the case that had established the constitutionality of the Bank, as inconclusive. But he also had made it clear that it hardly mattered—that he was bound to interpret the laws as he understood them regardless of what the Court said. His foes thought him power-mad. “Sir, no President and no public man ever before advanced such doctrines in the face of the nation,” Daniel Webster said on the floor of the Senate. “There never before was a moment in which any President would have been tolerated in asserting such a claim to despotic power.”
In practice, however, Jackson was not declaring himself emperor. He was not preaching defiance or despotism. His message concluded, in fact, with an acknowledgment that life would go on if he lost the war against the Bank. “I have now done my duty to my country,” he said. “If sustained by my fellow-citizens, I shall be grateful and happy; if not, I shall find in the motives which impel me ample grounds for contentment and peace.”
His larger argument was that a president should not simply defer to the will and wishes of the Congress or the judiciary. Instead, Jackson was saying, the president ought to take his own stand on important issues, giving voice as best he could to the interests of the people at large. Whose vision would prevail—the president’s, the Congress’s, or the judiciary’s—was an open question, but such questions are perennially open in American politics. Unless there is a complete breakdown—some kind of history-changing coup—there are remedies for the people to bring the government back into balance. In the case of the Bank, Jackson and Biddle were taking the issue to the public in the presidential election.
American politics is organic, power fluid. One era’s unquestioned good is another’s certain evil. The president and the people of a given moment are not always right, but Jackson believed that “the intelligence and wisdom of our countrymen” would provide “relief and deliverance” from the “difficulties which surround us and the dangers which threaten our institutions”—in every era.
THE BANK WAS neither as venal as the Jacksonians argued nor as indispensable as Biddle’s friends asserted. Was Jackson right to destroy the Bank? Interpretations, naturally, differ sharply. On balance, it seems most reasonable to say that the nation’s interests would have been best served had the Bank been reformed rather than altogether crushed, but balance was not the order of the day once Jackson decided—as he had done early on—that the Bank was a competing power center beyond his control. The history of banking and finance and the American economy in the nineteenth century would have been different had the Bank survived. The more important point for the generations after Jackson, though, is that the president of the United States made a bold bid to place himself at the absolute center of the country’s life and governance, eliminating a rival by building an emotional case, repeating his point over and over again, largely through friendly newspapers, then seeking and winning vindication at the polls.
Constitutional philosophy and economics aside, Jackson’s Bank message was supremely good politics, and Jackson was fortunate that his foes were blind to the fact that with the veto he had successfully identified himself forever with the aspiring (and now voting) masses. The veto message “has all the fury of a chained panther biting the bars of his cage,” Biddle wrote Clay from Philadelphia on Wednesday, August 1, 1832. “It is really a manifesto of anarchy … and my hope is that it will contribute to relieve the country from the dominion of these miserable people.”
But Jackson was willing to take his chances come November.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS recognized that there was much “profound calculation” in Jackson, and experience bore out the former president’s observation. Had Jackson been a truly wild man—blustery, threatening, and senselessly violent, both in his emotions and in his actions—then he would not have risen so far. Of course he had his moments of bluster, and he made threats, and he could, at times, seem senselessly violent, but on the whole Jackson gambled only when he liked his odds, and when he had taken care to protect himself from the worst that could happen.
A test of his ability to balance pride with pragmatism in foreign affairs came as he was finishing the Bank veto. American merchants had long enjoyed a lucrative pepper trade with Sumatra, in the East Indies. A year before, in February 1831, the Friendship, of Salem, Massachusetts, had arrived, as usual, in Quallah Battoo, a Sumatran port, to pick up a cargo of pepper. There was also a good deal of specie—hard money—on board, as well as opium. While the captain of the Friendship was ashore attending to the weighing of the pepper, armed Malays—some of whom, it was later reported, were opium smokers “rendered desperate by their habits”—came aboard the ship and stabbed Charles Knight, the first officer (he was struck in his side and in his back), killing him and two seamen, John Davis and George Chester. As the men died on the deck and other crew members dove overboard to swim for it, the Malays plundered the ship.
From shore, the captain, Charles Endicott, and a few of his officers and crew tried to return to the Friendship only to be chased, first, by a ferry with eight to ten men brandishing spears and knives, and second, by three Malay boats filled with nearly fifty natives. Endicott managed to escape the port and, traveling twenty-five miles to nearby Muckie, joined forces with three other American ships. The assault was no small thing: it was, in effect, a direct attack on the United States. A local rajah, Chute Dulah, accepted specie and opium from the plunderers and refused American demands for the return of the Friendship. Endicott, with help, retook his ship and soon landed at yet another Sumatran port, South Tallapow. The crowds of natives there jeered him and his men: “Who great man now, Malay or American?” “How many American dead?” “How many Malay dead?” As Endicott came to the end of his report of the incident, including the details of the crowds, he wrote: “May the mistake under which they rest, that the Americans have not the power to chastise them, be corrected with all convenient dispatch!”
Word of the episode reached Washington by summer, and on Tuesday, August 9, 1831, Jackson decided to dispatch the frigate Potomac to make clear, as the ship’s orders said, that the president of the United States believed that “the flag of the Union is not to be insulted with impunity.” Captain John Downes was in command, and his orders were specific. He was to “demand of the rajah, or other authorities at Quallah Battoo” restitution for the material losses and punishment for the murderers of Knight, Davis, and Chester. If talks failed, then Downes was authorized to arrest the murderers (if he could) and to destroy any ship or weapon used in the attack on the Friendship as well as any fortification that might have played a role. If things took this more violent course, Downes was to leave with this promise from the president: if restitution were not forthcoming, or if there were any other acts of piracy, “other ships-of-war will soon be dispatched thither, to inflict more ample punishment.” Negotiate first, but be willing to use force if necessary—and leave them worried about what might come next. From Jackson’s perspective, they were sound orders, tough but practical.
ARRIVING AT Quallah Battoo on Sunday, February 5, 1832, Downes decided that negotiation, though ordered by the president, would be pointless. (“No demand of satisfaction was made previous to my attack, because I was satisfied, from what knowledge I already had of the character of the people, that no such demand would be answered, except only by refusal,” Downes reported afterward.) An invading force of 250 sailors and marines effected an amphibious landing early the next morning. Thus began a day of close combat. Some of the Malays used javelins and darts; the Americans razed the town, overrunning forts and killing more than 100 natives, including, reportedly, women and children (two Americans were killed). The next day Downes bombarded what was left of Quallah Battoo. The only thing belonging to the Friendship that turned up was the ship’s medicine chest.
Five months later, as Jackson was about to veto the recharter of the Bank, Washington learned about the assault, and the anti-Jackson National Intelligencer used the destruction of Quallah Battoo to attack the president, arguing that the failure to negotiate before resorting to violence had served no purpose. A bloody, preemptive assault on “a settlement filled with a mixed population, and the killing and wounding of one or two hundred of the people, was not, perhaps, the best possible mode of obtaining satisfaction, or indemnity” for the loss of the cargo of the Friendship.
Jackson did not disagree. The president had directed Downes to attempt to negotiate, for even if diplomacy failed, an ensuing use of force would be more easily justified. If Downes had done as Jackson had instructed, America would have won all around: it would have appeared reasonable for having tried to talk, and strong for having asserted its rights by military means. Instead Jackson looked grasping and bloody-minded and had to defend himself against high-minded attacks. The opposition was addressing the subject, the National Intelligencer said, “from an impulse of national pride, which cherishes the nation’s honor as its most valuable property, and considers humanity and a strict regard to the rights of others as the brightest jewels which adorn its character.”
It was a strong argument, but Jackson, who understood better than most that commanders in the field did not always follow orders precisely, had protected himself politically. The orders to Downes were irrefutable evidence that the president had wanted to balance force with diplomacy. When the House asked for copies of the relevant papers on Thursday, July 12, 1832, Jackson was happy to comply. The documents were sent up without delay. Reading them, Congressman Edward Everett of Massachusetts, a committed National Republican, saw that the president had successfully eluded the opposition once again. “From the papers communicated, it might be inferred that Captain Downes had transcended his instructions,” Everett remarked. To avoid embarrassing Downes until he could reach Washington and defend himself, the House and the administration agreed not to publish the documents, and the episode, much to the opposition’s chagrin, faded away. Jackson had won—not by chance but by calculation.
IN THE MONTHS before the 1832 election, both sides considered themselves safely ahead. Jackson got away from Washington on Monday, July 23, 1832, after jotting a note to Kendall: “The veto works well.” The election was only four months away, and Jackson felt that he had repaired the political damage of 1831. With the Bank veto, Indian removal, moderate tariff reform—the Tariff of 1832 lowered rates from 1828 levels—and opposition to nullification, he had tried to give every region of the country something to like, and his popularity seemed strong. “I have been most kindly received by the old general, with whom I am much pleased as well as amused,” Washington Irving said in the summer of 1832. With a writer’s eye, Irving detected Jackson’s depths. “As his admirers say, he is truly an old Roman—to which I would add, with a little dash of the Greek;for I suspect he is as knowing as I believe he is honest.”
Believing himself smarter and sounder than Jackson, Clay suffered from a terrible case of overconfidence. “The campaign is over, and I think we have won the victory,” Clay said privately on Saturday, July 21, 1832. His certitude kept him from seeing—and thus combating—the roots of Jackson’s appeal. He thought Jackson a bullying despot and could not fathom, apparently, why anyone other than the most mindless Jackson partisans might see things differently.
As word of the Bank veto made its way through the country, Jackson relaxed in Tennessee, catching up on plantation business at the Hermitage and checking on Andrew and Emily’s nearby farm. The Donelsons did not join him on the trip south; from the letters of the period, it appears that Andrew was invested with great authority and confidence to keep the White House running in Jackson’s absence. For a short while, Emily took a trip to Baltimore and then the family spent a little over a week at a hot springs. Returning to the capital they found anxieties about cholera. The small White House circle—Emily, Andrew, the two children and the baby, Ralph Earl, and Mary McLemore, Emily’s latest companion from Tennessee—decided to decamp. “I regret the continuance of, and the virulence of the Cholera,” Jackson wrote Andrew Donelson on Thursday, September 13. “I pray you to take care of yourself and remove Emily, Mary, and the children into the country if the disease should appear to seize all persons, those of regular as well as those of irregular habits.”
Heading a letter to her mother “Mrs Somers, 5 mi. from Alexandria,” Emily described their sundry health difficulties and the flight from Washington. “My health had been very delicate before I went to Baltimore,” Emily wrote. “I had an attack of chills and fever.” She recovered, but the threat of cholera was terrifying. “We will not return to the city until the Cholera is over,” Emily said. From Tennessee, Jackson kept up cheerful communication. “We get several letters from Uncle giving us an account of everything at home and we were quite delighted to hear that our farm was in such fine order.”
Much of the South was growing ever more concerned about the future of slavery. In the early hours of Monday, August 22, 1831, Nat Turner, a slave in southern Virginia’s Southampton County, entered the house of his master, let in a small band of other slaves, and massacred the family in their beds, setting off a broader spree that killed about fifty-seven whites, a large majority of them women and children. Turner believed that “the Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days” had commissioned him to “fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first shall be last and the last shall be first.” A solar eclipse that year was a sign that the hour had come, Turner thought; the rebellion lasted about two days. It was answered in kind by whites, who decapitated blacks and broke the revolt with what one observer called “scenes … hardly inferior in barbarity to the atrocities of the insurgents”; many black victims had had nothing to do with the violence. Turner was captured, convicted, and hanged. Terrified that the uprising foreshadowed years of chaos and bloodshed, Virginia legislators opened a debate over partial and gradual emancipation, but decided, in the words of the House of Delegates, to “await a more definite development of public opinion.”
IN SOUTH CAROLINA, the Tariff of 1832 had failed to appease the state, and Calhoun was now fully engaged in the cause of nullification. As ambitious as he was, he had recognized early in 1832 that he had no clear path to the presidency, and in May it was announced that he would not be a candidate. “I heard one of [Calhoun’s] best former friends say … he ought to be hung as a traitor to the liberties of his country,” Jackson wrote Van Buren from Tennessee in late August.
The South Carolina legislature was to meet on Monday, October 22, 1832. The expectation was that the government in Columbia would move toward nullifying the federal tariff—a step that could mean the state would seize the federal forts and installations in Charleston harbor.
Jackson was hearing such rumors, and on Monday, September 17, 1832, from his study at the Hermitage, Jackson told Andrew Donelson of alleged plans for a possible mutiny among American military officers at Charleston. The president ordered Donelson and the secretary of war, Lewis Cass, to put men in place who could be trusted in the event things came to blows in South Carolina. Discretion was essential, Jackson said, as was speed. “I am confidentially advised that the nullifiers of the South have corrupted both the naval officers and those of the army in Charleston,” Jackson said. The president’s orders to Andrew were clear:
The nullies are determined to push matters to extremities and expect to get possession of the forts etc. etc. See the secretary of war and let the officers and men at Charleston be relieved by men who cannot be corrupted and the forts and defenses on that station ordered to be guarded against being taken by surprise. They are sure of getting possession of the forts on that station, and it is this belief that makes them so bold. Say to the secretary of war to look to this. It is useless to change the officers without the men—if the sentinel and [the] soldiers are corrupted the officer cannot defend the garrison. Therefore let the officers and men be relieved by a faithful detachment, and this carried into effect as early as possible—at farthest by the 20th of October, and before their assembly meets. Let it be done without a hint of the cause until it is effected and as the common routine of the army.…
“The Presidential question is hardly even spoken of here,” Calhoun told a friend in early October. “I think it not improbable this State will not vote at all. We think there is no principle involved in the contest worth struggling for.”
Had Calhoun learned nothing during Jackson’s reign? If Jackson had proved anything in his White House years, it was this: if he chose to, he would make himself a factor in deciding any question in American life. The trustworthy forces en route to Charleston were evidence enough of that.