CHAPTER 20
NEITHER HENRY CLAY’S health nor his spirits could have been helped by the spectacle of Inauguration Day 1833—a ceremony Clay had hoped would be his own hour of glory. The day was wretchedly cold, so cold that the outdoor festivities were canceled and the ceremonies moved indoors to the House chamber. Flanked by Andrew Donelson and Martin Van Buren, Jackson gave a brief but important address, a much more substantive speech than the first inaugural on the nearby steps four years before. Putting an intellectual frame around the previous months of brinkmanship and negotiation, in his own way Jackson was as eloquent as Clay had been about the importance of compromise—and, unlike Calhoun, to support his conclusions he invoked not theory but his own hard-earned history, squarely placing himself, and the presidency, in the center of the national drama. “My experience in public concerns and the observation of a life somewhat advanced confirm the opinions long since imbibed by me, that the destruction of our state governments or the annihilation of their control over the local concerns of the people would lead directly to revolution and anarchy, and finally to despotism and military domination,” Jackson said.
A sentence later, addressing the question of nullification, he went on: “Solemnly impressed with these considerations, my countrymen will ever find me ready to exercise my constitutional powers in arresting measures which may directly or indirectly encroach upon the rights of the states or tend to consolidate all political power in the general government. But of equal, and, indeed, of incalculable, importance is the union of these states, and the sacred duty of all to contribute to its preservation by a liberal support of the general government in the exercise of its just powers.” Having reassured the states’ rights elements in the country—which included his new vice president, Van Buren—his passions fully engaged, Jackson then delivered one of the great passages of oratory of his long public life, a passage little remembered and little quoted:
Without union our independence and liberty would never have been achieved; without union they can never be maintained. Divided into twenty-four, or even a smaller number, of separate communities, we shall see our internal trade burdened with numberless restraints and exactions; communication between distant points and sections obstructed or cut off; our sons made soldiers to deluge with blood the fields they now till in peace; the mass of our people borne down and impoverished by taxes to support armies and navies, and military leaders at the head of their victorious legions becoming our lawgivers and judges. The loss of liberty, of all good government, of peace, plenty, and happiness, must inevitably follow a dissolution of the Union. In supporting it, therefore, we support all that is dear to the freeman and the philanthropist.
The time at which I stand before you is full of interest. The eyes of all nations are fixed on our Republic. The event of the existing crisis will be decisive in the opinion of mankind of the practicability of our federal system of government. Great is the stake placed in our hands; great is the responsibility which must rest upon the people of the United States. Let us realize the importance of the attitude in which we stand before the world. Let us exercise forbearance and firmness. Let us extricate our country from the dangers which surround it and learn wisdom from the lessons they inculcate.
The most enduring political rhetoric both inspires and instructs, lifting an audience outside its natural selfish cares to see how a certain course will, in the end, serve a nation and its people well. This is a matter of more than soaring prose or vivid imagery, though both are crucial. It is also about arming the audience with facts or thoughts they have not yet known or contemplated. Jackson’s second inaugural address met both tests. Withstand the temptations of the moment, Jackson was saying, and the nation would be all the stronger for it, all the more respected, all the more special. Jackson’s words were not those of an incipient tyrant, or a shallow thinker, or a barely restrained bully. They were the words of a man who thought of himself as an American first and last—not a Carolinian, not a Tennessean, not a Westerner, not a Southerner, but an American.
A different, less emotionally nationalistic president in these middle years of the Republic might not have been able to balance the forces of respect for the essential rights of the states with a devotion to the cause of the Union. Jackson was perfectly able to do this, for he believed in both, and he knew that both would be forever in tension and sometimes in conflict. It could be no other way in a democratic republic formed from the elements that had formed America. He wanted the power to act as freely as he could because he believed his judgment would serve the country well, for he made no distinction between himself and a broad idea of “the people.” Egotistical, yes; arrogant, probably. But to some degree politics and statecraft always involve the character of the leader, and the character of Andrew Jackson was, in the end, well suited for the demands of the White House. He was strong and shrewd, patriotic and manipulative, clear-eyed and determined.
Closing his inaugural address, he said he longed to “foster with our brethren in all parts of the country a spirit of liberal concession and compromise, and, by reconciling our fellow-citizens to those partial sacrifices which they must unavoidably make for the preservation of a greater good, to recommend our invaluable government and Union to the confidence and affections of the American people.” Evincing a practical understanding of how a leader could make real an idealistic vision of public life, Jackson was engaged in presidential leadership of the highest order, for he was being forthright about a central truth of a democratic republic: that if each part made a sacrifice of some kind, then the whole could thrive, producing, hopefully, what Jackson called “a united and happy people.”
SUCH WAS THE covenant Jackson offered the nation at a critical moment. If the different parts of the country would surrender something dear to them for the sake of a larger cause, then they would be repaid with more liberty, more prosperity, and more happiness than if each element chose to guard its selfish interests, sacrificing the whole and foreclosing the possibilities of democracy. What Jackson once called “the prudence, the wisdom, and the courage” of a good people will leave a better, freer nation to the next generation, which will in turn, it is hoped, be faithful stewards of the American experiment in liberty. That, at least, was Jackson’s “most fervent prayer” for America to “that Almighty Being before whom I now stand,” he said in closing, beseeching God to deliver the country “from dangers of all kinds.” As a soldier of the people, Jackson would do all he could in the cause. For him it was the work of a lifetime.
The inaugural address was a brilliant but exhausting effort. With his sense of theater, Jackson, who wore his great cloak to and from the ceremonies, showed no signs of strain in the House chamber. After his speech, he took the oath again from John Marshall—it was to be the last of the chief justice’s nine inaugurations—and returned to the White House through the brutal cold, where he stood with Emily to receive well-wishers. One guest, Philip Hone, glimpsed the troubling reality behind Jackson’s dignified demeanor. “I would bet large odds that he does not outlive the present term of his office,” Hone said—though people, including Jackson himself, had been futilely betting against his health for years. Still, by late afternoon it had already been a long day, and Emily did what Rachel would have done: she sent him to bed.
EMILY AND ANDREW led the White House circle to the inaugural party, again held at Carusi’s. Jackson settled in for a quiet night in the White House as Calhoun traveled south, fast, en route to Columbia. The tariff had not been cut as much as South Carolina had asked, but it had still been cut, and Calhoun thought it wisest for the state to hold its fire. As the historian William Freehling wrote, the Clay rates were twice what the Nullification Ordinance had called for, but even James Henry Hammond “confessed that he thought that a majority of Carolinians would accept the compromise.” Hammond was right.
A week after Jackson’s inauguration, on Monday, March 11, 1833, the South Carolina convention met to consider what to do in light of the compromise tariff and the Force Bill. According to Samuel Cram Jackson’s diary of the convention, George McDuffie “very eloquently, bitterly, and sarcastically” attacked the compromise tariff, “condemned the administration and bragged about the South. His speech [was] calculated to influence the South against the North,” and Hayne seemed “very bitter and violent.”
Still, the ferocity was the exception, not the rule. The combination of the reduced duties and the fact that Congress had given the president the power to strike militarily both pacified and sobered many of the nullifiers, who rescinded the ordinance and accepted the tariff. The Force Bill was different, though. South Carolina would stand down for now, but its pride would not allow Jackson’s expanded powers to go unnoticed. And so the convention nullified the Force Bill—a symbolic gesture, to be sure, but a telling one, for it signaled that though a battle over states’ rights had ended, the war had not.
To underscore the point, hard-liners pressed for a test oath for officeholders to pledge, according to one proposal, “primary and paramount allegiance” to the state. Calhoun urged moderation—“We must not think of secession, but in the last extremity,” he said in late January. “It would be the most fatal of all steps.” While the crisis was resolved, however, its causes endured.
Frustrated by Jackson’s apparent victory, the attorney general of South Carolina, Robert Barnwell Smith—who later changed his name to Robert Barnwell Rhett, after an ancestor—dispensed with politic indirection or code in remarks to the convention. “A people, owning slaves, are mad, or worse than mad, who do not hold their destinies in their own hands,” he said. A powerful federal government could do slavery no good, Smith said: “Let Gentlemen not be deceived. It is not the Tariff—not Internal Improvement—nor yet the Force Bill, which constitutes the great evil against which we are contending.… These are but the forms in which the despotic nature of the Government is evinced—but it is the despotism which constitutes the evil: and until this Government is made a limited Government … there is no liberty—no security for the South.”
From Jackson’s vantage point, however, the tariff was cut, the powers of his office expanded, and the crisis eased. For a few days in the middle of March, calm prevailed in the White House, a well-earned respite. Jackson even indulged in philosophy, a luxury his victory had afforded him. “Reason must, when exercised, always triumph over error,” he wrote Poinsett in March. Reason did not always triumph, but in this case Jackson believed it had, and he drew strength and renewed self-confidence from the struggle.
WELCOME FAMILY NEWS also cheered Jackson. In Tennessee, Mary Eastin Polk delivered a healthy girl, Sarah Rachel, and Jackson jocularly warned her of the competition in store with Sarah Yorke Jackson’s Rachel, who had been born just before the presidential election the year before. “You know I have always been an advocate for the harmony of connections and families,” he told Mary. “To insure this harmony between you and Sarah I would advise you to submit the sprightliness and beauty of your Sarah Rachel and her little Rachel to the adjudication of a court of inquiry to settle this important matter, for Sarah writes me that her Rachel is one of the most sprightly and beautiful she ever saw.…” Closer to home, across the hall in the Donelson nursery, John Samuel Donelson, approaching his first birthday, had been sick, Jackson reported, “but his teeth have appeared through the gums, and he is better.”
John Samuel’s mother, meanwhile, was worried about the end of the season. “Washington will be very dull this summer,” Emily wrote her mother on Monday, April 22, 1833. Cora Livingston was marrying; Louise, whom Emily called “one of my best friends,” was moving to France with her husband as he took up his post as minister. But as Emily should have known by now, Andrew Jackson’s Washington was never dull for long.