CHAPTER 31
SUNDAY, AUGUST 16, 1835, Jackson, Emily, and the Donelson children left the Rip Raps to return home to the White House. All in all, the sun and sea had done their work, and Donelson was happy to have fresh distractions from the Republican attacks. Jackson would need his reserves of strength in the autumn, which was to be a season of war—and not simply political war.
First mapped by the Spanish in 1519, Texas had become a state of the Republic of Mexico in 1821 after Spain ended its three hundred years of control of Mexico. Like Florida, Texas had long tantalized Americans; it was, a visiting U.S. senator wrote in 1829, “a most delicious country.” Led in part by Stephen Austin, the son of a St. Louis banker who had been granted the right to settle Anglo-Americans while Texas was still in Spanish hands, Anglo-American settlers began making their homes in Texas in the 1820s, and the region’s cotton economy readily accommodated slavery. An 1826 rebellion against Mexican authority—an Anglo-American named Hayden Edwards founded the short-lived Republic of Fredonia—foreshadowed conflicts to come. Worried about the influx of settlers, Mexico began skirmishing with Texans. By Friday, October 2, 1835, the Texas Revolution had begun with a battle at Gonzales, when a hastily assembled army of Texans fought Mexican soldiers who had come to seize the town’s cannon. “I cannot remember that there was any distinct understanding as to the position we were to assume toward Mexico,” said a Texan who was there. “Some were for independence … and some for anything, just so it was a row. But we were all ready to fight.”
Jackson appreciated that spirit. From his perspective in Washington, Texas was another Florida: a rich prize that could endanger American security if left in hands other than his own. He had long maneuvered to win Texas, dispatching an envoy, Anthony Butler, to Mexico City with a commission to see if $5 million could convince the Mexicans to part with it. A land speculator in Texas, Butler had been a ward of Jackson’s as a child and had fought under him during the Battle of New Orleans; when Jackson became president, Butler came to Washington to see if he could turn his connections into a position with the government. For his part, Jackson regarded Butler’s time in Texas and his sympathetic opinions about acquiring Texas to secure the country’s borders to be strong qualifications, and appointed him as a chargé d’affaires.
Butler was even more aggressive in his pursuit of annexation than Jackson and at one point suggested bribing the Mexican government. (“A. Butler: What a scamp,” Jackson wrote on one of Butler’s letters.) It is possible—and perhaps probable—that Butler was simply taking the latitude that Jackson himself seemed to suggest. “This must be an honest transaction,” Jackson had written Butler when describing his duties as envoy, but he went on to say: “I scarcely ever knew a Spaniard who was not the slave of avarice, and it is not improbable that this weakness may be worth a great deal to us, in this case.” Mexico’s answer to Butler’s (and Jackson’s) offer was no, but Butler continued pushing for annexation.
News of the fighting in the fall of 1835 sent Mexico into “a perfect tempest of passion in consequence of the Revolt in Texas and all breathe vengeance against that devoted Country,” Butler told Jackson. Antonio López de Santa Anna, the powerful leader of Mexico, was, Butler said, “perfectly furious, mad, and has behaved himself in a most undignified manner.” Sounding more than a little Jacksonian, Santa Anna had told a gathering of diplomats, including the British and French ministers, that he was convinced the Americans had fomented the rebellion (the settlements led by Austin were a chief culprit in this view) and, Butler told Jackson, the Mexican leader said that he “would in due season chastise us.… Yes, sir, he said chastise us.” Bowing to the British representative in an allusion to 1812, Santa Anna said he would “march to the capital” and “lay Washington city in ashes, as it has already been once done.” By this time, Sam Houston was advertising for Americans to join the cause. He circulated posters saying: “Volunteers from the United States will … receive liberal bounties of land.… Come with a good rifle, and come soon.… Liberty or death! Down with the usurper!”
AS SANTA ANNA gathered his forces and American volunteers struck out for Texas in December 1835, Jackson received news of war on another front. The removal of the Seminoles from Florida had been fraught and bloody, and was about to grow more so. Osceola led the Seminole war party, and the conflict had the usual elements: white greed, internal Indian divisions (Osceola had murdered a rival Seminole who had chosen to comply with removal), and, for whites, alarming word that escaped slaves were finding sanctuary among the Seminoles.
On Friday, December 18, 1835—a week before Christmas—Osceola attacked a Florida militia wagon train at Kanapaha. Ten days later a force of 180 Seminoles routed an advance guard of Major Francis Dade’s force near the Fort King road. By the time the fighting was over, Dade’s soldiers—roughly a hundred—were all dead.
The conflict that ensued, the Second Seminole War, would last seven years. It was to become the nation’s longest and most expensive Indian war, and while Jackson grew impatient and angry with the American commanders who lost battle after battle to the Seminoles, he never doubted that total victory was the only acceptable answer, no matter how costly. “I have been confined to my room all this day taking medicine,” Jackson wrote during the conflict. “I have been brooding over the unfortunate mismanagement of all the military operations in Florida, all [of] which are so humiliating to our military character, that it fills me with pain and mortification—the sooner that a remedy can be afforded the better.” Without security—from Indians, from Mexico, from Spain, from Britain, from whomever—Jackson believed that everything else about the American republic was at risk. He was anguished about the Seminoles’ success. In a meeting with Florida’s territorial delegate, the president denounced the people of Florida. “Let the damned cowards defend their country,” Jackson said of Florida’s militia. He fumed that if five Indians had come into a white settlement in Tennessee or Kentucky—Jackson’s territory—“not one would have ever got out alive.” Yet the war went on.
IN NORTHERN GEORGIA in these late autumn and early winter months of 1835–36, Jackson’s men were completing the work of Cherokee removal. On Tuesday, December 29, 1835, the administration signed the Treaty of New Echota, a pact purportedly with the Cherokee Nation setting terms for the final removal of the tribe west of the Mississippi.
The Cherokees who signed the treaty, however, were not representative of the tribe as a whole. They were part of what was known as the “Treaty party,” a group in opposition to Chief John Ross’s “National party.” Ross, who represented an estimated 16,000 out of 17,000 Cherokees, was against removal and, if removal had to come, he wanted to hold out for a more advantageous deal with the government. But the Treaty party took the current offer, and the administration chose to believe that the signers had the authority to commit the entire Cherokee Nation. (The Senate ratified New Echota by one vote.) The deadline for removal was set for 1838—the year after Jackson left the White House.
The time came, but the vast majority of Cherokees had not left their lands. Thus began the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of Cherokees to the West. The military could be brutal, and an estimated 4,000 of the 16,000 Cherokees who were forced out died along the way. “I fought through the Civil War and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew,” said one Georgia volunteer.
Van Buren was by then president, but the policy that led to the deaths was Jackson’s. Rather than living up to the promise of his many warm words on the subject of his concern for the Indians as their “Great Father,” Jackson did not ensure that removal was done humanely (if such a thing were possible). Jackson knew how to exercise power, and had he chosen to do so, he could have used his power to bring about a fairer implementation of his removal policy. In his farewell address in March 1837, Jackson said that “the philanthropist will rejoice that the remnant of that ill-fated race has been at length placed beyond the reach of injury or oppression, and that the paternal care of the General Government will hereafter watch over them and protect them.” Did Jackson believe this? Probably; the human capacity to convince oneself of something one wants to think true is virtually bottomless. Given facts such as Indian removal, it has to be.
WITH VIOLENCE IN Texas, bloodshed in Florida, misery for the Cherokees, and the question of the White House succession open for another year, Jackson was buffeted from hour to hour and day to day. Emily, as always, did her best to create a kind of sanctuary for him at home. As Emily’s eldest daughter recalled it decades later, Emily organized a large party for Christmas Day 1835. There were six children in the White House: four of Emily and Andrew’s, ranging from eighteen months to nine years old, and two of Sarah and Andrew Jackson, Jr.’s, one eighteen months and the other three years old. On Saturday, December 19, 1835, Emily dispatched the invitations:
“The children of President Jackson’s family request you to join them on Christmas Day, at four o’clock p.m., in a frolic in the East Room.”
How Jackson loved both the idea and the reality of his own clan. For Jackson, home remained the center of order in a chaotic world. Surrounded by family, he tended to be more cheerful amid tribulation than if he were alone. Both Emily and Sarah had been in residence in Washington in the autumn of 1835, an interlude that brightened even Jackson’s grimmest days.
This White House holiday was in many ways the pinnacle of Jackson’s lifelong project to construct a comfortable and loving universe for himself. On Christmas Eve afternoon—it was a warm, sunny winter day, Mary Donelson Wilcox (then named Mary Rachel) recalled, “more like May than December”—Jackson announced that he wanted the older children dressed to go for a ride with him in his coach: they were to meet him at the front door of the White House, next to Jimmy O’Neal’s office. The household mobilized into action; as Mary Rachel recalled, those around Jackson were “always granting, often anticipating, his wishes” and the family “never dared oppose or disobey his orders.” The children were marched to the front door and into the carriage, where they waited for Jackson, who soon appeared.
“To the Orphan Asylum,” Jackson told George, the coachman, settling in among the children. Jackson was a strong supporter of the orphanage, a favorite charity of Washington society. (The petition to incorporate the asylum, which was founded by Marcia Van Ness, had been signed by Mrs. Van Ness, Margaret Bayard Smith, and Dolley Madison.) On the way, Mary Rachel recalled, the children quizzed “Uncle” on the absorbing question of the hour.
John: “Uncle … did you ever see Santa Claus?”
The President, eyeing John curiously over his spectacles: “No, my boy; I never did.”
John: “Mammy thinks he’ll not come tonight. Did you ever know him to behave that way?”
The President: “We can only wait and see. I once knew a little boy who not only never heard of Christmas or Santa Claus, but never had a toy in his life; and after the death of his mother, a pure, saintly woman, had neither home nor friends.”
Chorus of children: “Poor little fellow! Had he come to the White House we would have shared our playthings with him.”
Arriving at the asylum, Jackson said, “Here I am with some Christmas cheer for your young charges.” He was a familiar figure to the orphans, and he seemed to relish his fatherly role. “The children gathered in the reception room, and it was gratifying to see their faces light up as, greeting each one, he distributed his gifts, and even more gratifying was it to note his pleasure at their grateful surprise,” Mary Rachel wrote.
As the carriage rolled back to the White House through Washington, past still-green parks, Jackson delivered packages Emily and Sarah had prepared. There was, Mary Rachel said, “a hand-painted mirror for Mr. Van Buren, who was reputed to be on very good terms with his looking-glass.”
The next morning the president was up early, and the children raced to his room to open their stockings. “Did Santa Claus come?” the children cried. “See for yourselves,” Jackson said, and watched as they surveyed their gifts—a small gun, a bridle and saddle, a hobby horse and drum, dolls and tea sets and rattles. It was typically indulgent of Jackson. “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” Emily would say in arguments about discipline with Jackson, who would reply: “I think, Emily, with all due deference to the Good Book, that love and patience are better disciplinarians than rods.”
At four that afternoon the children were dressed in their party clothes and took up their stations amid evergreens and flowering plants at the doors of the East Room, on the first floor. The guests flowed in, staying in the Red Room as the children found, Mary Rachel recalled, the East Room to be “an ideal play-ground, and the players, free and unrestrained as if on a Texas prairie, romping, scampering, shouting, laughing, in all the exuberance of childish merry-making.” At one point Van Buren lost a game of tag, and was forced to stand on one leg and say: “Here I stand all ragged and dirty, / If you don’t come kiss me I’ll run like a turkey!” No one came to kiss him, and so the vice president of the United States—and putative favorite to be president himself in fifteen months’ time—“strutted like a game gobbler across the room.” After two hours of games, the band in the hall connecting the East Room to the State Dining Room began to play “The President’s March,” and supper began.
The dining room on this Christmas Day had been transformed into a confectioner’s winter wonderland. Snowballs made of starch-coated cotton towered in the center of the room; there were iced fruits, frosted trees, toy animals, and goldfish. After the meal the children seized the snowballs and raced back down to the East Room for a snowball fight.
The great room seemed, for a moment, filled with flakes of snow. It had been a spectacular, enchanting day—of family ties and affection and gifts and grace. But like the snowball skirmish, which Mary Rachel found “exhilarating and inspiring” though “provokingly brief,” the day was soon over. Emily saw the guests out, and the tired children were tucked into bed upstairs.
She would be dead within the year.