CHAPTER 29
IN THE SUMMER of 1835, Andrew Donelson, cheered by word that his cotton crop in Nashville was good, was in the market for new slaves. On the Fourth of July, Andrew told Stockley that he was “waiting for an inspection of some Negroes in Va.,” which went well enough that he “bought two boys” three weeks later. Before he could get them to Tennessee, however, Andrew had vexing news to report: “One of the boys I took … was accidentally drowned the other day: which I regret very much as I cannot replace him.”
Jackson shared his nephew’s view of slavery. To them it was an accepted part of life. Andrew Jackson, Jr., wrote to a friend about exchanging slaves—Southerners euphemistically referred to them as “servants”—in gratitude for seeing that his new wife’s “trunk and guitar” reached Nashville safely. The friend, Samuel Hays, apparently wrote to Andrew junior asking about the availability of a woman named Charlotte. “Late on yesterday evening your kind favor came to hand, and immediately I called up Charlotte to ascertain whether she was willing to leave Charles and her children and I find she is half willing to leave them and Charles. I had just taken her into the house and also as a washer. She is certainly a valuable servant and I hardly know how I can well spare her—and separate her from her children and Charles—and as to the other [girl] you are welcome to take her, but she is lazy and almost worthless.” Emily also spoke of slaves with an abhorrent breeziness. Writing her mother from the White House, Emily said: “Andrew has not yet bought me a girl and I am afraid will not have it in his power. Uncle’s expenses are so great that they will take the whole of his salary.” Jackson could be a harsh master. In an 1804 “Advertisement for Runaway Slave,” he offered a fifty-dollar reward for the return of a slave—“and ten dollars extra, for every hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of three hundred.” He owned about one hundred fifty slaves; he freed none in his will.
The direction of the nation’s thinking on slavery in the Jackson years did not bode well for the South. In 1829 David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World appeared; William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator newspaper, dedicated to the cause of abolition, had begun publication in January 1831. Jackson may have opposed states’ rights when it came to nullification, but on slavery, as on the Indian question, he was not interested in reform. Jackson, who believed in the virtues of democracy and individual liberties so clearly and so forcefully for whites, was blinded by the prejudices of his age, and could not see—or chose not to see, for other Americans of the age did recognize the horror of the way of life Jackson upheld—that the promise of the Founding, that all men are created equal, extended to all.
A slave at the Hermitage, Alfred, once had a revealing exchange with Roeliff Brinkerhoff, a tutor Andrew Jackson, Jr., had hired for his children (Brinkerhoff was later a prison reformer and the author of a seminal text on military logistics). “Alfred was a man of powerful physique, and had the brains and executive powers of a major-general,” Brinkerhoff recalled. “He was thoroughly reliable, and was fully and deservedly trusted in the management of plantation affairs.” Brinkerhoff ran into Alfred one evening on the grounds but found him “unusually reticent and gloomy.” Looking at Brinkerhoff, Alfred asked:
“You white folks have easy times, don’t you?”
“Why so, Alfred?” I asked.
“You have liberty to come and go as you will,” he replied.
I soon found that he was full of discontent with his lot, and I thought it wise to turn his attention to the brighter side.…
I showed him how freedom had its burdens as well as slavery; that God had so constituted human life that every one in every station had a load to carry, and that he was the wisest and the happiest who contentedly did his duty, and looked to a world beyond, where all inequalities would be made even. Alfred did not seem disposed to argue the question with me, or to combat my logic, but he quietly looked up into my face and popped this question at me:
“How would you like to be a slave?”
It is needless to say I backed out as gracefully as I could, but I have never yet found an answer to the argument embodied in that question.
Led by the president, the Jackson circle lived with a wrong, profited from it, and actively protected it. And so, while Andrew Donelson was in the White House, securing—or trying to secure—new slaves for Poplar Grove, Jackson, vacationing with Emily and the children at the Rip Raps, moved to curb the forces of abolition.
PREDICTABLY, THE BATTLE was joined again in South Carolina. From its headquarters on Nassau Street in Manhattan, the American Anti-Slavery Society dispatched thousands of abolitionist pamphlets to Charleston; on Wednesday, July 29, 1835, the mailings arrived aboard the steamboat Columbia.The question of what to do with them fell to Alfred Huger, the postmaster. Huger wanted guidance from above—specifically from Amos Kendall, now the postmaster general—and so he locked up the tracts and wrote Kendall for counsel.
Local newspapers ran stories on the contents of the cargo the next morning, and before long the streets of Charleston were once more out of control. It was nullification all over again. A mob came to the post office and burned the mailings—along with effigies of William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionist leaders—before forty-eight hours had elapsed.
If Jackson had been a president of consistent principle, the issue would have been clear. He was the defender of the Union, the conqueror of nullification, the hero of democracy. An American organization was exercising its constitutional right to free speech and was using the public mails—mails that were to be open to all—to do so. But Jackson was not a president of consistent principle. He was a politician, subject to his own passions and predilections, and those passions and predilections pressed him to cast his lot with those with whom he agreed on the question at hand—slavery—which meant suppressing freedom of speech. He had done the same in the case of the Cherokees and the state of Georgia, allowing a particular issue to trump his more general vision of government, a vision in which people who obeyed the laws were entitled to the protection of the president.
Watching from the Rip Raps, exchanging notes with Kendall, who was in Washington, Jackson spoke as a planter, not a president, referring to the Anti-Slavery Society mailings as a “wicked plan of exciting the Negroes to insurrection and to massacre.”
Modernity was working against the white order in practical ways. A Virginia congressman, John W. Jones, articulated the slaveowners’ conundrum on the floor of the House in the year of the Charleston debacle. Abolition societies, Jones said, had been formed, and “had gone on to collect large sums of money, and had put into operation printing presses, which were worked by steam.… Yes, sir, worked by steam, with the open and avowed object of effecting the immediate abolition of slavery in the Southern states.” Steam and the postal service were working in tandem, Jones said—tragic tandem, in his view, as “two great revolutionizers of the world … steam power and the press” were creating “large numbers of newspapers, pamphlets, tracts, and pictures, calculated, in an eminent degree, to rouse and inflame the passions of slaves against their masters, to urge them on to deeds of death, and to involve them all in the horrors of a servile war.” Jones’s view—and Jackson’s—was not an extreme one. Northern opinion was hardly enthusiastic about abolition in the mid-1830s, either.
JACKSON REFERRED TO the kinds of tracts that had reached Charleston as “unconstitutional and wicked.” In his annual message in December 1835, he asked Congress for a law to “prohibit, under severe penalties, the circulation in the southern States, through the mail, of incendiary publications, intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection.”
Calhoun and Jackson agreed on slavery, but the senator from South Carolina heard Jackson’s proposal as a call for more federal power, and the more federal power, Calhoun believed, the worse for the South in the long run. Calhoun moved, then, to suggest that the states, not the federal government, should have the right to determine what was incendiary, and what to do about it. The states, Calhoun said, “possessed full power to pass any laws they thought proper.” To give Jackson the authority he was asking for would, Calhoun said, “virtually … clothe Congress with the power to abolish slavery,” for the power to protect implied the power to control, and the power to control included the power to destroy.
Calhoun’s proposal instructed federal postmasters to take orders from the various states about what to deliver and what to suppress. The bill was conceived in a confrontational and divisive spirit. “If you refuse cooperation with our laws [forbidding the circulation of mailings regarding slavery] and conflict should ensue between your law and our law, the Southern States will never yield to the superiority of yours,” Calhoun said.
Calhoun’s bill failed, though, leaving Jackson where he liked to be: in charge. The reports of the violence in Charleston had made him uncomfortable. He thought he had secured that front, and he equated South Carolina’s renewed hostility to the federal government—which to Jackson meant hostility against him personally—with a slave insurrection. “This spirit of mob-law is becoming too common and must be checked,” he said, “or ere long it will become as great an evil as a servile war.” How to exert control over the mob, make clear his own powers, and yet not advance the abolitionist cause? Jackson and Kendall chose the simplest route: they tacitly allowed the suppression of the antislavery mailings.
THE EPISODE AFFIRMED the power of the president, and it captured the intransigence of the slaveholding class. “So the pamphlet controversy in that winter of 1835–36 first showed to the broad public of the new nation that the defenders of slavery were proposing an intellectual blockade,” wrote the scholar William Lee Miller. “And it began to suggest, therefore, that that institution, even if confined to the South, was incompatible with republican government. Not only was the enslaved black person denied every freedom, but now the white person was to be denied the freedom to talk about it.”
In the pages of the Globe, Blair could, on occasion, strike humane notes on the subject. “On principle, slavery has no advocates North or South of the Potomac,” the paper once wrote. “The present generation finds the evil entailed on it [and] Providence … will, no doubt, in the course of time, relieve the American people of their share of this misfortune.”
In the White House, however, the talk about slavery was mostly about the mundane business of acquiring slaves and transporting them back home. Andrew Donelson complained of the expense of sending the slaves he bought in Virginia down to Tennessee. “I had to employ a man, buy horses, wagon, tent, and traveling apparatus throughout for those Negroes,” Andrew wrote his brother. There was hope, though, of recouping some of the money: “The wagon and horses,” Andrew said, “will no doubt sell” at the conclusion of the journey.