CHAPTER 30
THE POLITICS OF 1836—the first presidential election in a dozen years in which Jackson, who was retiring in accordance with George Washington’s two-term tradition, would not be a candidate—were already moving quickly. For years now, Jackson had dreamed that Van Buren would succeed him, and the Democratic convention in Baltimore in May 1835 had duly nominated the vice president. But Jackson’s fellow Tennesseans, unhappy with the prospect of a Van Buren presidency, had nominated one of their own, Judge Hugh Lawson White, a former Democrat, for the White House. Jackson was furious, but he could do nothing about it—except ensure that the Democratic Party he was building was behind Van Buren, not White. The Whigs in the North ultimately settled on William Henry Harrison as their nominee (Daniel Webster was also in the field), and White was the candidate in the South.
The reaction to Van Buren’s rise had been vicious. “He is not of the race of the lion or the tiger,” Calhoun said of Van Buren; rather, he “belongs to a lower order—the fox.” Van Buren, said fellow New Yorker William Seward, was “a crawling reptile, whose only claim was that he had inveigled the confidence of a credulous, blind, dotard old man.”
Jackson could not help Van Buren too overtly. Since 1824, Jackson had argued that the selection of a president belonged to the people, not to the bankers or to the politicians. The will of the voters had been thwarted with Adams’s victory in 1825, and Jackson believed Biddle and his allies had long maneuvered to manipulate elections. In his first inaugural address, the memories of Clay and Adams still fresh, Jackson had said: “The recent demonstration of public sentiment inscribes on the list of Executive duties, in characters too legible to be overlooked, the task of reform,which will require particularly the correction of those abuses that have brought the patronage of the Federal Government into conflict with the freedom of elections.” In the Jackson years, in other words, the only kingmakers would be the people. A fine expression of principle—but politics has a way of complicating the application of such principles.
Jackson felt compelled to make his alleged neutrality explicit in an effort to convince the public that he had been steadfast in his view that the selection of a president should be in the hands of the people. “All my friends know that since I have been in the Executive Chair, I have carefullyabstained from an interference in the elective franchise,” Jackson claimed.
The president’s assertions were unconvincing. Not even a full year into his administration, Jackson was promoting Van Buren for president. “Permit me here to say of Mr. Van Buren that I have found him everything that I could desire him to be, and believe him not only deserving my confidence, but the confidence of the nation,” he wrote John Overton in December 1829, adding that Van Buren “is not only well qualified, but desires to fill the highest office in the gift of the people.” In the autumn of 1834, when Jackson was en route from Nashville to Washington, he had a conversation about the 1836 presidential election with Orville Bradley, a prominent east Tennessean. As Jackson and Bradley rode through Hawkins County, Bradley recalled, “the subject of succession was freely discussed.” Bradley explained the state’s support for White, but “General Jackson entered warmly into a vindication of Van Buren; spoke of him in the highest terms, said that he was the man to whom the party, generally, out of Tennessee was looking to be his successor; that White could hardly get a vote out of Tennessee, and that Tennessee must not separate from the rest of his friends.” The solution, Jackson told Bradley, was to nominate White for the vice presidency. “Judge White is yet young enough to come in after Mr. Van Buren,” Bradley recalled Jackson saying, “and such an arrangement will make all right now, and secure the certain elevation of Judge White after Mr. Van Buren.”
This was hardly the conversation of a disinterested incumbent. Jackson’s opponents cleverly sounded more sorrowful than angry. In July 1835, the Nashville Republican wrote that “much as the people of Tennessee love Gen. Jackson—much as they venerate his name—they will never surrender, even at his dictation, the glorious prize for which he and they so bravely contended at the Battle of New Orleans—THEIR INDEPENDENCE.” The paper continued, in all capital letters: “WE WILL NOT FOR AN INSTANT BELIEVE THAT HE WILL DESCEND FROM HIS HIGH ESTATE TO TAKE AN ACTIVE PART IN THE ENSUING ELECTION OR CONSENT TO LEND AN IMPROPER AND UNREPUBLICAN INFLUENCE IN THE APPOINTMENT OF HIS SUCCESSOR.”
It was the kind of attack best calibrated to wound Jackson, for it undermined his image of himself as the people’s champion. Unfortunately for Jackson, the administration’s maneuvers at Baltimore had given the opposition papers a lot to work with. When the moment had come to select a vice presidential nominee, Francis Blair, who had been on hand at the Democratic convention to help Van Buren, successfully backed Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky against William Cabell Rives of Virginia. It was widely believed that Blair was doing Jackson’s bidding.
Jackson’s attempt to control the succession—he believed he was right to choose Van Buren—took a toll on Andrew Donelson and Blair. In midsummer, while Jackson and Emily were still at the Rip Raps and Donelson was working in Washington, the Nashville Donelsons, led by Stockley, were worried about a series of attacks on Andrew and on Blair in the pages of the Republican, an opposition newspaper that favored White over Van Buren. The charge: that the private secretary to the president and the editor of the Globe had conspired to use Jackson’s frank—his privilege to send mail free of charge—to build up Van Buren for the presidency.
For the Republican, targeting Donelson and Blair was shrewd: frontal assaults on Jackson had never gotten very far. By striking at the men around the president, however, the editors of the paper were able to raise ethical questions about the White House without overtly damning Jackson—and simultaneously imply that Jackson was overly dependent on the Kitchen Cabinet.
STRIKE THEY DID, again and again in the summer weeks. The Republican declared itself, in the paper’s words, “For President HUGH WHITE, whose claim will be submitted not to a packed jury, dignified with the name of a National Convention—but to the impartial decision of a free and enlightened PEOPLE.” Van Buren, the paper was saying, had been anointed by Jackson and affirmed by a “packed jury” in Baltimore. The theme of Jacksonian overreach suffused the paper’s crusade against Donelson and Blair. On Tuesday, July 7, 1835, the Republican decried an influx of editions of the Globe into the Nashville congressional district. Blair’s newspaper, the Republican said, carried “the grossest calumnies against Judge White,” which had been sent “to many of the prominent citizens of this Congressional District, as well as other parts of this state, under the frank of the President.” Jackson himself, the Republican said, would never “lend himself to such uses knowingly and willfully. In this conviction we are confirmed by the subscriptions of those envelopes which we have seen, and which are not in the handwriting of the President, but in the handwriting of another individual, whose position gives him great facilities in affording these advantages to his political friends.”
Donelson had been ready for some kind of assault. “You must keep me advised of movements which will doubtless be made by the junta … intended to … injure me in the public estimation,” Donelson wrote Stockley in mid-July. Now that those movements were under way, he tried to project confidence. “My inclinations as well as my duty enjoin upon me silence and forbearance as far as they are consistent with the preservation of my character.”
His resolution was soon tested. The Republican’s denunciations were awaiting him on the day he returned to the White House, alone, from the Rip Raps. Away from Emily and from the president, Donelson had no one close to reassure him that all would be well, and the words were wounding. “I see that the Republican makes an ungenerous allusion to me as the cause of the President’s frank upon copies of the Globe addressed to persons in Tennessee,” he wrote Stockley on Tuesday, July 21. It was an outrage, Donelson thought, and the attack was not really on him but on Jackson. “It would be just as reasonable to assail the pen or the paper or the ink which the President uses as thus to charge upon those who are near him … with … responsibility for his acts,” Donelson wrote.
Angrily scrawling across the page, Donelson caught himself, and seems to have realized that he was hardly appearing unmoved by the criticism. “But I have no time at present to notice this subject,” he closed—after noticing it in detail, and with passion. Three days later, he took up the subject again, telling Stockley: “I have noticed the article you refer to in the Nashville Republican. He cannot hurt me if he would.” High hopes, perhaps, but Donelson had decided how he would view the matter—that the attacks directed at him were truly intended for Jackson, and that no reasonable person (Donelson prayed) would think otherwise. “It is … undoubtedly aimed at the General,” he wrote. Donelson was desperate to cast himself as a scapegoat because of his proximity to the president.
The Republican savored baiting Donelson and those in Jackson’s shadow. In July, the paper kept raising the stakes. “We do not feel disposed, either from inclination or duty, to enter the lists against the great Jackson himself, but to all the would-be littleJacksons, who cloak their designs under his name, and hope to ride into office upon his back, we say—come on—stand out like men, and fight upon your own hook,” it said on July 14.
The opposition turned Jackson’s democratic pretensions about the succession against him. If Donelson did not frank the material, then Jackson did—and if Jackson did so, he was violating his own pledges of neutrality. “It has been the professed object of the Globe, the Union and other Convention papers to show that General Jackson never did, and never wished to interfere in the approaching Presidential election,” the Republican wrote on Saturday, July 18. Now, though, the Jackson press seemed to be saying that Jackson was behind the frank. “And yet it is now willing to admit, nay it even insists upon the fact, that the President himself is engaged in distributing these copies of a violent party paper. Does not the Union, by this admission, furnish at once the most abundant evidence to prove the charge which has been made against General Jackson of a wish to influence the selection of his successor?”
The Republican’s true agenda was becoming clear: to cast Jackson as a kingmaking hypocrite, but in language that was arch rather than bombastic, indirect rather than frontal.
It did, however, explicitly link Blair and Donelson to the scandal. “That the Editor of the Globe is a joint conspirator with Major Donelson in this business, is evident from the fact that all the documents thus distributed emanate from the Globe office. They are carefully enclosed in separate envelopes and, in that shape, no doubt, are regularly laid upon the President’s table that he might frank them. To have them laid upon the table is the business, we presume, of the Major.”
The next sentence underscored Jackson’s assurances of neutrality. “Always supposing that the members of his own household who do not possess the franking privilege would ask the favor of him to frank nothing but what honor and public duty would sanction, he makes no inquiries,” the Republican said of Jackson. “It would be idle to tell us that the President knows what he is about when he puts his frank upon these documents, and that their contents are well understood by him. It is impossible it should be so. He cannot read them. He would not have the time.…” The editorial was published on Tuesday, July 28, 1835.
THE PAPER REACHED Jackson at the Rip Raps by Saturday, August 8. In a stern letter to the editor of the Republican, Jackson defended Donelson and Blair absolutely, denouncing the charges as “a vile calumny, utterly destitute of truth.… I have never franked any letters or packages for Major Donelson without being informed of their contents.”
The Republican’s editors could hardly contain themselves: they had now drawn the president himself into the arena. “Does he know—is he quite certain—that Major Donelson has always correctly informed him of the contents of the letters and packages which might be laid before him?”
The likely truth is that Jackson was responsible for the franked mailings, or had at least created a climate within the White House that made Donelson and Blair comfortable undertaking such a pro–Van Buren campaign in Tennessee. The significance of the episode of the Republican’sattacks is how it illuminates Jackson’s determination to have everything arranged to suit himself, and to secure the image he so cherished. So it was that Jackson would authorize, or tacitly allow, political work for Van Buren while insisting that he would never do such a thing.
Who paid a price? Not Jackson. Even as ferocious an opponent as the Republican went out of its way to depict Jackson as, at worst, a dupe of the men around him. Closest to home, it was Donelson who absorbed the most blows on Jackson’s behalf. Donelson could not resist replying, and he could not suppress his anger. The letter he wrote to rebut the Republican’s charges, he told his brother-in-law, had been “drawn up in most haste and possibly with too much feeling.” The stakes, however, demanded it. “It is painful to me to be drawn into the strife about the next Presidency,” he wrote Stockley, but drawn he was, and his own political future was never far from his mind. The best way to defuse the current criticism, it seemed to him, was to argue that the questions about him and his conduct were the inevitable result of jealousy about his place in Jackson’s affections.
Donelson believed his foes were hostile to him “not so much because my course was what it was in regard to Major Eaton and Mr. Calhoun, as that I did not allow it to separate me from the President,” he said in mid-August. Donelson needed all the fortifications he could muster, for the Republican was growing ever crueler as the weeks passed. “The Major, like all weak persons, has a constant itching for intermeddling with things and subjects above his caliber, and a few soft words and fair promises from a certain ‘sweet little fellow’ [read: Van Buren], who knows so well how to apply them, would almost set him upon his head,” the paper said in early September. The Republican closed the editorial contemptuously: “But we cannot afford to waste more of our time upon the Major today.”
Blair tried his hand at rearranging reality to cast Jackson, and Jackson’s circle, in a more flattering light. According to the Globe, Blair, Donelson, and Jackson were together in the president’s office one day in February 1835. An editorial headlined “General Jackson’s Preference” arrived in the mail, which Donelson was opening. Blair was idle; Jackson was immersed in correspondence. Holding the Republican in his hands, Donelson began to read aloud to Blair: “It must be apparent to the most superficial observer,” the paper said, that Van Buren supporters in Tennessee were trying “to create an impression that General Jackson would decidedly prefer Mr. Van Buren to any other person as his successor, and thus to bring the influence of his powerful name to bear upon the approaching election.” As Blair recalled it, “In the progress of the reading, it arrested the President’s attention, and at the conclusion, he observed in substance, with some strength of manner, that he would not allow himself to be so misrepresented—that he would not sacrifice his principles to personal partialities—that he would not have the impression made, that his preference was for any man, however he might esteem him as a friend.…” Refusing to plead to what Blair called “a charge of dictation,” Jackson “immediately, without waiting for a remark, glanced at the article, took up his pen and wrote a letter.”
IN TENNESSEE, THAT story sent White’s supporters into an operatic rage. “The indelicacy, presumption, and insincerity of this narrative cannot fail to strike the most hardened and credulous reader of the Globe,” the Republican said. The next lines illuminate the scope of the opposition’s fury at the Kitchen Cabinet, a fury so reflexive in this seventh year of Jackson’s presidency that it had become an inescapable element of the American political culture:
It is evident from the constrained and artificial manner in which this story is told that if … it should turn out to be true … it was only the execution of a preconcerted plot between Major Donelson and the Editor of the Globe. The industrious and vigilant Editor of a daily paper … was surely in the habit of opening his own packet of papers either overnight or, at all events, in the morning before he attended at the White House to assist the Private Secretary in opening the President’s mail. We venture to say that the wily Editor had thus got the start of the President, that he had read our article in his own copy of the Republican, and that he henceforth repaired to Maj. Donelson and arranged with him to have it brought to the notice of the President in a way that would take him by surprise and be calculated to excite him.
Donelson and Blair, the Republican admitted, were a “worthy pair of political jugglers or wirepullers.” Donelson knew the wars would go on; nothing less than the presidency was at stake. He put on a brave face. “You may rest assured that I have studied my ground well and feel that I am secure against all the assaults personal or political which … open enemies or pretended friends can make against me,” he told Stockley. He hoped that the “violence of party strife” would have a cleansing effect, and that the politicians devoted to division—any politician, in Donelson’s view, who opposed Van Buren and thus Jackson—would be dispatched in due course. “It will be among the best fruits of the administration to restore to private life many such men who have not the courage to defend the truth nor virtue enough to rejoice at the blessings of republicanism.” Hawkish talk aside, he remained worried that hatreds as old as the administration itself could rise up anew to roil the White House. The Donelsons longed to keep all that well in the past. “The Calhoun, the Eaton, and the ancient opposition interest have all … common feelings to [annoy] me,” Donelson said. But, he added, “I will not be the cause of opening afresh the old wounds.”
The back-and-forth was wearing on Jackson, too. One night at the shore, a messenger happened on Jackson kneeling before his miniature of Rachel, reading from her book of Watts’s psalms—“the stern man,” the observer reported, alone with his memories “with the meekness of a little child.”