CHAPTER 16
AS SEPTEMBER GAVE way to October, Jackson set out from the Hermitage for Washington on what amounted to the first major personal presidential campaign tour. The 1832 contest featured much that was to become commonplace in American politics: national nominating conventions, intense tactical organization, considered use of the incumbent’s time and energies in appearances before the public, and an interesting but unsuccessful third-party bid. Though not all of this began with Jackson and his men, much of it did, particularly the shaping of the candidate’s image and the marshaling of his personal charisma. In Baltimore in late May 1832, a nominating convention chose Martin Van Buren for vice president. (Jackson’s candidacy for another term as president was taken as a given.) Two other conventions had already met: the Anti-Masons and the National Republicans.
Anti-Masonry had grown out of the 1826 disappearance and suspected murder of William Morgan, an upstate New Yorker and disaffected member of the fraternal order who was threatening to publish a book revealing the secrets of Freemasonry. A strong political force in New York, New England, and parts of the Midwest, the Anti-Masons wanted to field a ticket to oppose Jackson and Clay, both of whom—like George Washington and many other important leaders of the early Republic—were Masons. Meeting in Baltimore in 1831, the Anti-Masons nominated William Wirt for president, who would face Jackson and Clay, the National Republican nominee.
As the campaign progressed, more and more “Hickory Clubs” were created to promote Jackson and his cause. There were barbecues—lots of barbecues—parades, songs, and cheers. The style of the Jackson campaign was linked to its substance: with the Bank veto as its central exhibit, the Jackson men insisted that a vote for Jackson was a vote for the people while a vote for Clay was a vote for the privileged. The means, then, matched the message, for both were about the aspirations of the enfranchised masses. “The Jackson cause is the cause of democracy and the people, against a corrupt and abandoned aristocracy,” the president’s supporters wrote. The National Republicans struck back, arguing that Jackson was power-mad. One opposition headline read: “THE KING UPON THE THRONE: The People in the Dust!!!”
But the king understood what the commoners wanted, and needed. They wanted a champion, and needed—or at least thrilled to—the drama of the new kind of campaigning. Michel Chevalier, one of the many foreign observers touring the country in the Jackson years, took in a mile-long Jackson parade in New York in which people carried torches and banners. The procession, Chevalier said, “stopped before the houses of the Jackson men to fill the air with cheers, and halted at the doors of the leaders of the opposition, to give three, six, or nine groans.”
Duff Green watched the rise of the new techniques with envy and gloom. “Lewis has gone on to Nashville, no doubt to be present and aid in the party deliberations,” Green told Calhoun on Tuesday, October 23, 1832. “Kendall and Company have organized a Hickory Club here which is intended to give tone and character to all other clubs throughout the country; and one of the principles of faith is opposition to nullification. You may rest assured they do not intend to sleep.”
Neither did Jackson, who used the convenient excuse of his autumn journey from Tennessee to Washington to be seen, shake hands, and, in Clay’s Kentucky, show himself at a Democratic barbecue in Lexington, not far from Ashland. “This is certainly a new mode of electioneering,” said the pro-Clay National Intelligencer. “We do not recollect before to have heard of a President of the United States descending in person into the political arena.” Blair helpfully published the words of the campaign theme song, “The Hickory Tree,” which was to be sung by torchlight in campaign parades: “Hurra for the Hickory Tree! / Hurra for the Hickory Tree! / Its branches will wave o’er tyranny’s grave.”
Clay was playing by the old rules, and it cost him. He declined invitations like the ones Jackson accepted, saying he had promised that “whilst I continued before the public … as a candidate for its suffrage, I would not accept of any invitation to a public entertainment proposed on my own account.”
The political class expected a close-run election. Many wise observers did not think Jackson could prevail. “His opponents (and they are not few or unimportant) denounce him as a person acting upon impulse, of an obstinate and irascible character, and as being surrounded by private Counsellors unworthy of his confidence or public support,” Charles Bankhead, an English diplomat, wrote to Viscount Palmerston from Washington on Sunday, October 28, 1832. Bankhead believed the race would probably end up in the House, where Jackson would lose.
Beyond the capital, though, Kendall’s Hickory Clubs were creating a sense of excitement around Jackson’s reelection, a sense, for voters, of belonging to a larger and grander cause than the ordinary work of their days. It was, in a way, politics as entertainment, but it was also a serious, even sacred undertaking. Chevalier compared Jackson’s torchlight parades to Catholic processions, saying that the images of Jacksonians surging through the streets “belong to history, they partake of the grand; they are the episodes of a wondrous epic which will bequeath a lasting memory to posterity, that of the coming of democracy.”
THE FRENCHMAN WAS right. When the time came, Jackson won overwhelmingly. He carried the Electoral College by a convincing 219–49 margin over Clay. The popular vote was closer, with Wirt’s Anti-Mason ticket pulling 8 percent, leaving Jackson with close to 55 percent and Clay with about 37 percent. Jackson’s popularity was “so unbounded,” Charles Bankhead reported to London, that he was able to “overcome all anticipated difficulties, and to obtain … a great majority of the voice of the people.” The closing weeks of the campaign, Bankhead added, had been especially emotional. “The excitement during the last fortnight has been very great, and no exertions have been wanting by the friends and supporters of the rival candidates.”
For Clay, the campaign might be over, but he would not rest. “The dark cloud which had been so long suspended over our devoted country, instead of being dispelled as we had fondly hoped it would be, has become more dense, more menacing, more alarming,” Clay said to Charles Hammond on Saturday, November 17, 1832. “Whether we shall ever see light, and law, and liberty again is very questionable. Still, we must go on to the last, with what spirit we can, to discharge our duty. It is under feelings of this kind that I expect, a week or two hence, to go to Washington.”
Seven days later, in Columbia, the South Carolina convention nullified the Tariff of 1832, directly challenging the authority of the president of the United States. Should Jackson choose to use force to bring the state into line, the convention declared, South Carolina would “at every hazard” consider itself “absolved from all further obligation to maintain or preserve their political connection with the people of the other states, and will forthwith proceed to organize a separate government and do all other acts and things which sovereign and independent states may of right do.”
According to a story making the rounds, Jackson had summoned Congressman Warren R. Davis to urge him “to go back home and tell the people of South Carolina to quit their foolishness and to return to their allegiance to the United States.” When Davis replied that “the people at home were in … earnest,” Jackson opened a drawer and said, “Warren, in that drawer I have offers of three hundred thousand volunteers to march to South Carolina.” John Randolph of Roanoke was supposed to have said that “South Carolina would not yield, that she would fight; that General Jackson would be [eager] to get Hamilton, Calhoun, McDuffie and Hayne into his power; that [Randolph] had no doubt that if a war came, as some feared it must, General Jackson would hang those gentlemen if he could get hold of them … and there would be a bloody war of it.”
In this tumultuous season—the presidential election, the meeting of the convention in South Carolina, the maneuvers to station loyal troops at Charleston—William Gaston of North Carolina, no fan of Jackson’s, recognized the stakes of the showdown. “It is no longer to be doubted or denied that there is a party in our land—how numerous I know not—who desire a dissolution of our Union and hope to erect upon its ruins a Southern Confederacy,” Gaston wrote to friends in Montgomery, Alabama.
JACKSON’S FOES WERE braced for the worst. He had spent his life confounding his enemies—turning cool when they thought he would be hot, or fierce when they expected him to be gentle. As the fires burned in the South, Jackson sat in the White House weighing his options. Which Andrew Jackson would show up for this fight? The diplomat or the despot? Or both?