CHAPTER 17
AWEEK BEFORE Christmas 1832, Pierce M. Butler, a politically connected bank president in Columbia, South Carolina, sat down by his fireside to write a short note to James Henry Hammond, the Southern radical. In the nullifiers’ camp, Robert W. Barnwell, a South Carolina congressman, predicted that Jackson was “bent on enforcing his mandate at the point of the bayonet.” Worse, Barnwell “feared Congress or a majority [of the people] would sustain” Jackson in such a course.
Hammond was prepared to take up arms for the state’s cause, and volunteered his military services to Robert Hayne, whom the South Carolina legislature had elected governor on Monday, December 10. “I shall immediately set about arranging my private affairs for taking the field at an early day, not to quit it until all is settled,” Hammond told Hayne on Thursday, December 20, 1832. The next day, Hayne appointed a new military aide-decamp, who was “charged with the duty of raising, inspecting, and granting commissions to volunteer companies” during what Hayne called “this crisis in our affairs, when everything dear to our country is at stake.”
The governor issued detailed secret orders to form a corps of “Mounted Minute Men” to be instantly summoned to the defense of the state. “My plan is this,” Hayne told his aide. “Let a number of men (every one of whom keeps a horse), agree to repair at a moment’s warning to any point which may be designated by the Governor in any emergency. Let them then come prepared with guns or rifles, or arms of any description, with a supply of powder and ball, and come in the shortest time possible.” Predictably—South Carolinians being South Carolinians, to whom appearances often mattered rather more than even to other Southerners—Hayne closed his directive by advising that his staff’s uniforms should have “a short yellow crane Plume” and advising them of the best places to purchase “Palmetto Buttons of a beautiful pattern” to wear.
In Washington, Jackson read Joel Poinsett’s intelligence reports with fascination. “Keep me constantly advised,” he told Poinsett, who obliged with detailed letters that reached the White House by express. “I have on every occasion told my fellow citizens that the Executive of the United States would act decidedly and vigorously,” Poinsett wrote Jackson in the autumn of 1832. After the nullification vote in November, Jackson was embarking on perhaps the most delicate mission of his life—how to preserve the Union without appearing so tyrannical and power-hungry that other Southern states might join with South Carolina, precipitating an even graver crisis that could lead to the secession of several states. The Old World nations followed the trouble with great interest. Perhaps a crack-up would open the old British colonies to new exploitation, eliminating or at least weakening the United States as a global rival.
Three days after the passage of the nullification ordinance, Samuel Cram Jackson, a Presbyterian minister from New England who happened to be in South Carolina and kept a diary of events, thought Charleston more worried than exuberant. “Aspect gloomy,” he wrote. “Anxiety and fear pervades many hearts. Many are looking for civil war, and scenes of bloodshed. The general government has ordered troops to the forts in the harbor.” The next day the city remained in a “most anxious state; feelings excited; all uncertainty as to prospects. The nullifiers are trumpeting and carrying highhanded measures; and the Union men are determined not to submit. Things seem to be preparing for a dreadful crisis of excitement and violence.”
There was danger on every side. Writing of reinforcing the federal installations in Charleston harbor, Poinsett told Jackson that “the custom house where the battle will be fought is crowded with nullifiers; ought they not be removed?” The Unionists did not trust the post office, either, and they knew they must not give the rebels cause to go to arms. “We are not disposed to make any riotous or tumultuous resistance, but we are ready to support the laws if legally called upon to do so at the hazard of our lives,” Poinsett said.
Four days after Poinsett posted this letter, Samuel Cram Jackson recorded a near massacre in the streets of Charleston. A band of nullifiers staked out King Street downtown in order to challenge those Unionists who were leaving a gathering; an officer in the nullifiers’ ranks sent word to Poinsett that the Union men should use Meeting Street in order to avoid a confrontation. The warning infuriated the Unionists. As the Reverend Jackson wrote, “their blood was up, to think that the nullifiers should dictate the street they should walk in. The cry resounded, ‘King Street, King Street.’ Before they left their hall, they organized into companies, chose their leaders, and promised implicit obedience. Both parties were armed with clubs and dirks.” The nullifiers numbered about five hundred, the Unionists a thousand, and the rebels “hissed, and called opprobrious names, but chose not to assault.”
Hotheads in the Union ranks wanted to strike, but those in charge restrained them. “The merest trifle, a word from a leader, would, it is confidently stated by moderate and Christian men, have led to a combat in which hundreds would have lost their lives; fathers and sons and brothers would have slain each other,” Samuel Cram Jackson said. “The parties themselves were afterwards astounded at the pitch of excitement to which they were brought.… It was owing entirely to the firmness and wisdom of the leaders that the streets of Charleston did not run down with blood.”
BUT NO ONE could know whether caution would continue to trump confrontation. In Washington, after reading Poinsett’s early letters, President Jackson dispatched George Breathitt, the brother of the governor of Kentucky and a kinsman of John Eaton’s, to scout the territory under the cover of a postal inspection. Breathitt’s real task, according to Jackson’s confidential orders: to “collect all the information … that you can obtain which may be serviceable to the government.” As Breathitt assessed the situation, Poinsett briefed Jackson on the political divisions within the enemy camp. McDuffie, still a member of Congress, was pressing for secession; Calhoun, still vice president, argued for a more moderate course to allow his theories time to be tested. “Both parties [of the nullifiers] are anxious and indulge the hope that the general government will commit some act of violence which will enlist the sympathies of the bordering states: provided it be not their own, they care not how soon blood is shed,” Poinsett told Jackson. “It will be necessary therefore to proceed with great caution in counteracting their schemes.”
Poinsett was an able man, and Jackson was fortunate to have him on the ground. He was loyal, canny, and wise. When Jackson moved to send new officers, Poinsett offered good advice, asking that Jackson dispatch “a Southern man if possible. I say Southern because prejudices have been excited against Northerners, and as it is considered a Southern question exclusively, it might be politic to have it settled by Southern men.”
For two agonizing months—from October through November and into the first day or two of December—Poinsett wrote long, impassioned letters to Jackson, yet Jackson merely made the right Unionist noises in reply without offering a detailed plan of support. Poinsett grew worried. On Thursday, November 29, 1832, he sent Jackson a note begging for reassurance. “We had rather die than submit to the tyranny of such an oligarchy as J. C. Calhoun, James Hamilton, Robt. Y. Hayne and McDuffie, and we implore our sister states and the federal government to rescue us from these lawless and reckless men,” Poinsett told Jackson. Other Unionists, Poinsett said, believed that, in the event of nullification, “Congress will say to us, ‘Let South Carolina go out of the Union if she will go,’ … If such a course should be adopted, the Union must be dissolved in all its parts and foreign and domestic wars necessarily ensue. Whereas if these bad men are put down by the strong arm, the Union will be cemented by their conduct and by the vigor of the government, and you will earn the imperishable glory of having preserved this great confederacy from destruction.”
Jackson sympathized with Poinsett, and, on Sunday, December 2, made his own opinion as clear as he could: “I fully concur with you in your views of nullification. It leads directly to civil war and bloodshed and deserves the execration of every friend of the country.” Weapons were en route to arm the Unionists, but “calmness and firmness” were essential, and the law would be “duly executed, but by proper means.” Jackson was ready to take extraordinary steps, but only when he was forced into it. He did not want to exert his power until he absolutely had to.
The annual presidential message Andrew Donelson took to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, December 4, was drafted in something of a conciliatory spirit. “This is all we want, peaceably to nullify the nullifiers,” Jackson told Van Buren. In the wake of South Carolina’s defiance, Jackson kept his temper in check and issued a document that opposed nullification even as it advocated tariff reform and sounded like a defense of states’ rights. High tariffs—even the ones just passed—created, he said, “discontent and jealousy dangerous to the stability of the Union,” and as the national debt disappeared, the theoretical need for great sources of federal revenue would disappear, too, opening the way to cutting tariff rates even further.
HIS TONE WAS Jeffersonian. He evoked the simpler republican virtues of the previous generation, offering a comforting vision of life and government: “Limited to a general superintending power to maintain peace at home and abroad, and to prescribe laws on a few subjects of general interest not calculated to restrict human liberty, but to enforce human rights, this government will find its strength and its glory in the faithful discharge of these plain and simple duties.” Congressman John Quincy Adams said the message was “in substance a complete surrender to the nullifiers of South Carolina.”
At first, the message did seem difficult to reconcile with Jackson’s movements behind the scenes. But that was the point: Jackson’s December strategy was threefold. With the annual message, he intended to isolate South Carolina rhetorically by appearing reasonable about the general principles at stake. With his secret military preparations, he bolstered the spirits of the Union Party in the state and put the federal government in position to fight if things came to that. Three days later, on December 7, Poinsett heard warming news from Secretary of War Lewis Cass: “The President has instructed me to inform you that the 5,000 stand of arms and 1,000 rifles, the propriety of placing which in depot at Charleston was suggested by you, have been ordered to that place, and that directions have been given to General Scott for issuing them for the use of any portion of the citizens of South Carolina for the defense of the laws of the Union.”
After reassuring those sympathetic to state sovereignty and a limited federal government by sounding vaguely Calhoun-like in the annual message, Jackson revealed the third element of his year-end attack on the forces of disunion: his proclamation of Monday, December 10, 1832.