CHAPTER 5
THE EATON CRISIS began, in a way, in the vice president’s boardinghouse, an exclusive enclave run by Mrs. Eliza Peyton on the northwest corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourth Street. Frightened by a spate of sickness among their children the year before—sickness they believed was exacerbated by Washington’s humidity—the Calhouns had given up their Georgetown mansion, Oakly (later known as Dumbarton Oaks), and were planning to move the family back to South Carolina. With the big house above Rock Creek gone, the Calhouns took lodgings at Mrs. Peyton’s.
The boardinghouse was well known and high toned, home at different times to men such as Webster and Clay. It was here, a dozen blocks from the White House, that the Eatons, in the weeks after their New Year’s 1829 marriage, came to pay a call on the Calhouns. Even if Margaret had been diffidently charming or subtly ingratiating—and she was neither—she stood little chance of winning Floride over. Mrs. Calhoun was a complex woman, demanding in private one moment, attentive and caring among others the next. “You could not fail to love and appreciate, as I do,” one of her Washington friends wrote of her, “her charming qualities; a devoted mother, tender wife, industrious, cheerful, intelligent, with the most perfectly equable temper.”
Calhoun himself might have dissented on this last point. Diminutive but powerful, Mrs. Calhoun had what her husband called a “suspicious and fault-finding temper.” She came from South Carolina aristocracy. Each summer her family had climbed into a beautiful coach to be driven from their mansion on the Cooper River to spend the season in Newport, Rhode Island. Calhoun would neither confront nor contradict her. Once, after a quarrel between Floride and the couple’s eldest son, Calhoun wrote the son: “As to the suspicion and unfounded blame of your Mother, you must not only bear them, but forget them.” Floride’s stormy temperament, Calhoun added, had long been “the cause of much vexation in the family,” and “I have borne with her with patience, because it was my duty to do so, and you must do the same, for the same reason. It has been the only cross of my life.”
As Floride went, so went the Calhoun clan. She had brought the money to the marriage and was the kind of established Southern woman whose embrace and acceptance Emily Donelson, as a daughter of the Southwest, felt she needed to thrive in Washington. Tennesseans could be socially insecure around old South Carolina families. The frontier was newer and rougher, the silver not quite as old, the oil portraits not quite as ubiquitous. Calhoun had married up when Floride accepted him, and felt a disparity in the social calculus of their household. She was not a tyrant, not exactly. The toll she exacted on her husband appears to have been more insidious, more gradual, a sure and certain drain on his emotional reserves.
Now, sitting alone—the vice president was out—as Floride looked up to find that she had callers, she was about to become a sure and certain drain on his political ones.
AS THE EATONS entered the room, Floride did not know who Margaret was; the servant had failed to announce the guests by name. It was only when she recognized Eaton, who had served in the Senate over which her husband presided, that she realized who had come to call. The visit does not appear to have lasted long, though it passed decorously enough. “She of course treated them with civility,” Calhoun said of his wife and the Eatons. “She could not with propriety do otherwise.”
The Eatons left, and when Calhoun returned, as he later drily wrote, “The relation which Mrs. Eaton bore to the society of Washington became the subject of some general remarks”—general remarks, one suspects, that most likely touched on charges of adultery. The conversation was more than idle gossip: Floride had to decide whether to pay a visit to the Eatons—a sign, in the etiquette of the day, that Mrs. Calhoun recognized Mrs. Eaton as a respectable member of the Washington society in which the wives of the great lived.
She made her decision overnight: she would not return the call. To Floride, who was about to leave town in any event, the rumors about Margaret’s sexual transgressions were credible enough to keep the wife of the vice president of the United States from being on social terms with the wife of the secretary of war. Calhoun acquiesced, a choice that put the vice president in conflict with the president, for the political consequences of one’s decision about whether to accept the Eatons as social equals were already clear. To acknowledge the Eatons was to side with Jackson; to snub the Eatons was to oppose Jackson.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS liked to think of himself as a man removed from the strife of party and the scramble for power. Yet for all his scholarly interests—his readings in the classics, his writing of poetry, his meditations on scripture—Adams could never fully control his addiction to politics and public intrigue. His diaries and correspondence are replete with rumors and reports about the White House and the Capitol, the departments and the drawing rooms. In his diary in early 1829, Adams noted that a friend of his was “much scandalized by the ascendancy of Mrs. Eaton; lately Mrs. Timberlake.” Writing his son about the Calhouns and the Eatons, Adams said that the vice president “forsooth was a Man of Morals, and his wife had been the first to exclaim … ‘I so hate a whore.’ ” (Adams marked through the word “whore,” but not so much that it could not be read.) At the time of the inauguration in 1829, in the aftermath of the Eaton call, Adams added, Floride gave “public notice … that sooner than submit to the contamination of [Margaret’s] society, she would not show her face at Washington.”
Louisa Adams, the former president’s wife, was even more explicit. “War is declared between some of the ladies in the city, and … ladies’ wars are always fierce and hot,” she wrote their son.
SUCH WAS THE atmosphere when Martin Van Buren arrived at the White House on his first evening in Washington on Sunday, March 22, 1829. Greeting Jackson in the shadows of the president’s office—there was just one candle burning—Van Buren, in town to begin his work as secretary of state, thought Jackson’s health “poor, and his spirits depressed as well by his recent bereavement of his wife.” He was right on both counts. Intuitive about the intricacies of power, Van Buren assessed the reality of life in the White House. “The cast of the Cabinet carried a suspicion to the minds of many … that Eaton and Lewis had exerted a preponderating influence in its construction,” Van Buren recalled. The result: “Jealousies and enmities accordingly sprang up … many of which were never healed.” Andrew Donelson, Van Buren added, “partook largely of this feeling.”
Small in stature—he was about five feet six inches tall—Van Buren was the son of a tavern keeper and farmer in Kinderhook, New York, near Albany. Born in 1782, he grew up around the politicians who gathered in his father’s establishment—guests included Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr—and, after training as a lawyer, he entered politics himself, serving as a state senator and New York attorney general before becoming a U.S. senator in 1821. A careful dresser, Van Buren was also careful about revealing too much of his own thinking or convictions; it was as though the son of the tavern keeper always wanted to keep his doors open and please as many people as he could. With his gift for building alliances, Van Buren engineered the Jackson-Calhoun victory in 1828 by, as he put it, uniting “the planters of the South and the plain republicans of the North.”
VAN BUREN WAS a practical man, and his pragmatism faced an immediate test when he arrived in the capital. “You might as well turn the current of the Niagara with a ladies’ fan as to prevent scheming and intrigue at Washington,” he once said, and many intriguers were thinking about life after Jackson.
The president himself was the architect of the constant campaign: he had begun running for 1828 on his way home from Washington in 1825. In politics, as in so many other spheres of life, success breeds imitation. As 1829 began, many expected Jackson to be a one-term president, if that. He was an old, wounded warrior, scarred, bullet-ridden, susceptible to all sorts of sickness. He suffered intermittent hemorrhages, which he would relieve by cutting his arm with a penknife to bleed himself. It was entirely possible he would not live to see 1833. The rumors of his death before the inauguration had been plausible enough, and he often referred to his own poor health, calling on Providence to see him through.
Calhoun, Van Buren, and Clay were three of the men who longed for the presidency, obsessed over it, and judged what they did in the light of whether a given issue or question would advance or hinder their path to ultimate power. For them, succession was all. Clay would use any weapon that came to hand, including gossip, in hopes of winning the presidency four years hence. The current administration, Clay believed, was dangerous and usurping; Clay thought Jackson’s election “a calamitous event,” he wrote privately, and Jackson himself to be “feeble in body and mind, and irresolute.” If he was to lead a restoration campaign, Clay knew he had to keep himself before the people. “We must never forget that we cannot make them lose sight of me,” Clay wrote an ally. “I cannot withdraw from the gaze of the public eye.”
Inside the administration, the Van Buren–Calhoun contest was obvious to the political world even before Jackson’s inauguration. “Disguise it as we may, the friends of Van Buren and those of Calhoun are becoming very jealous of each other,” Pennsylvania congressman James Buchanan said on Thursday, January 22, 1829. Van Buren, meanwhile, was hearing from sympathetic South Carolinians that Calhoun might be vulnerable on the home front if attacked in Washington. “A display there [in Washington], adverse to him, will enable us to triumph over him and his friends there,” a foe of Calhoun’s, David R. Williams, wrote Van Buren in 1829. It was interesting intelligence for Van Buren, a rival of Calhoun’s.
But Van Buren fought his wars with subtlety. He would begin his campaign for supremacy indirectly. Seeing the side the Calhouns had chosen, Van Buren—a widower—made the politically rational decision to take up the Eatons’ cause. James Parton looked back from the vantage point of the 1860s and, seeing that Van Buren had made it to the White House while Calhoun, and the South, were ruined, wrote that “the political history of the United States, for the last thirty years, dates from the moment when the soft hand of Mr. Van Buren touched Mrs. Eaton’s knocker.”
As Jackson saw things, Margaret was a convenient target for enemies who resented the president and the secretary of war. “If I had a tit for every one of these pigs to suck at, they would still be my friends,” Jackson said of Eaton’s foes. “They view the appointment of Eaton as a bar to them from office, and have tried here, with all the tools of Clay helping them on, to alarm and prevent me from appointing him.” Jackson’s interpretation of the Eaton affair was that he was acting for the common democratic good while aristocratic elites, jealous of his power in Washington, did everything they could to stop him. To Jackson, it was a matter of honor (he would not have his friend’s wife assaulted as his own wife had been) and of power, and he would not be moved.
It was a political affair, but its sexual elements also raised important questions for the women of the age. Cultural interpretations of the Eaton affair emphasize the significance of sexual purity to women in the early nineteenth century. Margaret Eaton was, fairly or not, a symbol of promiscuity. She was a threat to the domestic realm—the realm in which the women of Washington held power.
For Jackson’s foes, the intersection of Jackson’s loyalty to a friend with his vision of himself as the people’s tribune was a colossal misfortune, since the connection of these issues in Jackson’s mind meant that he would, as he put it, “sink with honor to my grave” before he would give in to those who opposed him over the Eatons.
JACKSON SAW HIS adversaries as threats to the common good—and he saw few larger threats than the Bank of the United States. In the 1828 campaign, Jackson heard allegations that Clay was manipulating the Bank to help Adams’s reelection. In January 1829, then-postmaster general John McLean, a Jacksonian who later joined the Supreme Court, wrote Nicholas Biddle about the “impression that during the late elections in [Kentucky], great facilities by the state branches were given to those persons who were favorable to the re-election of Mr. Adams.” McLean offered sensible counsel. Even if, he said, “the impression of unfairness” were “without any substantial foundation,” the wisest course for the Bank was “to guard against every appearance of wrong.” Biddle was a brilliant man, and even someone far duller than he should have understood McLean’s full meaning: Biddle had a political problem on his hands and needed to take care of it.
The president of the Bank ignored McLean’s advice. Biddle’s way was the right way, and he would not change course for anyone. In naming directors, Biddle told McLean, “their personal independence and their fitness for that particular duty must be the primary inquiry—their political preferences only a secondary concern. The great hazard of any system of equal division of parties at a board is that it almost inevitably forces upon you incompetent or inferior persons in order to adjust the numerical balance of directors.”
And that was how Biddle replied to his supporters. “Being friendly to the Bank myself,” McLean had added in his note to Biddle, “I should regret to see a political crusade got up against it. Some, I know, are ready to engage in this course, but I wish their number may be small.” McLean, Biddle, and the rest of the country were about to learn that when it came to President Jackson, a party of one was more than enough for a crusade.
JEREMIAH EVARTS ALREADY understood that about Jackson. Though he is largely forgotten, Evarts was one of the great American moral figures of the first decades of the nineteenth century. In speaking out against the forced removal of the Indians from their homes to lands west of the Mississippi, he was to Indian removal roughly what William Lloyd Garrison was to slavery: a force calling on the country to respect the rights and dignity of a persecuted people.
Born in Vermont in 1781, the son of a farmer, Evarts entered Yale in 1798. Under its president, Timothy Dwight, a grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the college was suffused with the idea of Christian service. “In whatever sphere of life you are placed, employ all your powers and all your means of doing good, as diligently and vigorously as you can,” Dwight preached in a sermon entitled “On Personal Happiness.” For Dwight and, ultimately, for Evarts, faith was about not only personal conversion but social transformation and the health of the nation. In their minds, and in the minds of thousands of American believers, there was a direct connection between the godliness of the people and the fate of the country.
Jackson believed, too, that virtue was essential to the maintenance of a republic, but he thought religious and philanthropic organizations were as corruptible and susceptible to manipulation by the powerful as any other human institution. Evangelical leaders he referred to as “religious enthusiasts” were standing in the way of Indian removal, one of his most cherished projects.
While religion was important in his private life (“Gentlemen, do what you please in my house,” Jackson would tell guests, but “I am going to church”), he believed in keeping religion and politics, as well as church and state, as separate as one reasonably could. Despite his lifelong commitment to Presbyterianism, Jackson had never taken the public step of what was known as “joining the church”—that is, making a public confession of faith in a particular congregation, which in turn enabled one to receive Holy Communion. Around 1826, according to an early biographer, he explained to Rachel the reasons for his reluctance: he did not want to appear to be making a show of his faith for public consumption—a show that might provoke attacks. “My dear, if I were to do it now, it would be said all over the country that I had done it for political effect,” Jackson said. “My enemies would all say so. I can not do it now, but I promise you that when once more I am clear of politics I will join the church.”
Jackson liked to think of himself as first and foremost a republican—a man who believed the best government was the one that meddled least in the affairs of the governed. For Jackson, the primary duty of federal power, once invoked, was to protect the many from the few. Like the Bank, like the radicals of South Carolina, like the Washington elite, the Christian movement for justice for the Indians and for public purity posed a threat to Jackson’s vision, which held that the people (or at least white male people) were sovereign and that intermediary forces were too apt to serve their own interests rather than the public’s. Jackson’s solution? Jackson. On the Indian question, he was determined to have his way, and few doubted that he would prevail. “I have not seen a single man, of any party, who thinks that anything effectual can be done to protect our weak red men of the forest,” Evarts wrote to the American Board of Commissioners.
THE SOUTH CAROLINIANS were coming to the same conclusion: when Jackson did not want to be moved, he did not move. Jackson had watched the stirrings of nullification the previous year and sensed trouble. “There is nothing that I shudder at more than the idea of a separation of the Union,” Jackson wrote James Hamilton, Jr., of South Carolina in June 1828. “Should such an event ever happen, which I fervently pray God to avert, from that date I view our liberty gone—It is the durability of the confederation upon which the general government is built that must prolong our liberty. The moment it separates, it is gone.” He believed the nullifiers were a mortal threat to the Union. “The South Carolinians get nothing,” Kendall wrote Blair on Saturday, March 7, 1829. “The General told me he should have taken a member of his cabinet from that state but for their movements last summer. They are fine fellows, but their zeal got the better of their discretion.”
As time went on, Jackson thought he detected something even more sinister than straightforward partisanship in what he viewed as the persecution of the Eatons: that Calhoun and some Southern radicals were using the affair to weaken Jackson and strengthen themselves. “Some foundation there must be to give rise to so much talk,” Louisa Adams wrote to her husband of Margaret’s reputation, “but my own belief is that it is a trick of the Carolina party to sow discord among the Administration and to get the W[ar] D[epartment] into their own hands.”
Mrs. Adams was on to something. Though it is true that Jackson initially blamed “Clay and his minions” and “these satellites of Clay” for the battle against the Eatons, he had long been suspicious of Calhoun. The vice president’s snubbing of Margaret only exacerbated existing tensions. The Calhouns had left Washington for their plantation at Pendleton, South Carolina, shortly after the inauguration. (In the custom of the age, vice presidents were largely legislative figures, presiding over the Senate, and thus tended to leave Washington when Congress was not in session, from, roughly, March to December each year.) Virgil Maxcy, a Maryland lawyer who had been an enthusiastic Jackson supporter, wrote Calhoun in April 1829, saying that “we must submit to the melancholy conviction, that the U.S. are governed by the President—the President by the Secretary of War—and the latter by his Wife.” Maxcy also confirmed that Calhoun’s hunch was right: according to rumor, Eaton was said to be “not friendly” to Calhoun.
That should not have been surprising to the vice president, for Calhoun was himself wary of Eaton. The states’ rights elements in South Carolina believed Eaton unreliable on the tariff and, by extension, an almost certain enemy of nullification, and because of these fears they were concerned about his influence over Jackson. When the so-called Tariff of Abominations was being debated in 1828, Senator Robert Hayne said, “Eaton and others … disregarded the South.” Eaton’s failure to follow the South Carolina line on the evils of the tariff as a senator from Tennessee, the scholar Richard Latner noted, troubled Calhoun, who said that Eaton had shaken “our confidence in General Jackson … at the critical moment when the passage of the bill cast so deep a gloom over the South, and menaced with so much danger the liberty and institutions of our country.” Serious words.
EMILY DONELSON HAD hated Margaret from the start. “To please Uncle, when we first came here we returned her call,” Emily wrote home in late March, but Margaret appears to have assumed an uncomfortable degree of familiarity. “She then talked of intimacy with our family and I have been so much disgusted with what I have seen of her that I shall not visit her again,” Emily said. “I am afraid it is to be a great source of mortification to our dear old Uncle.”
Emily grasped the politics of the problem. “I think if Eaton felt any disinterested friendship he never would have accepted the appointment,” Emily told her sister in a letter that was critical of both Eaton and William Lewis. “I believe there is very little of that article to be found here.… That sycophant Lewis that pretended to come along out of friendship to the Genl has got himself into a fat office and to save himself all expense has taken his quarters here for the next 4 years.” Arch words from a young woman who sometimes affected to be unmoved and uninterested in the vicissitudes of life in Washington. These lines were written twenty-three days after the inauguration—a sign that the White House stage was set for struggles for influence and pride of place in Jackson’s affections.
Andrew Donelson and John Eaton were uncomfortable with each other. To Eaton, Donelson was young, not particularly experienced, and in perhaps too much of a hurry. It had not been that long ago, Eaton knew, that he had been Donelson’s chaperone on a trip from Tennessee to West Point. To Donelson, Eaton seemed to be at once ascendant and condescending, wielding more power with Jackson than any other adviser.
Jackson’s household was therefore in more or less open warfare even before his first month in office had elapsed. The Donelsons formed one party, while down the hall, Lewis was allied with the Eatons. A bit farther along the passageway, Jackson himself longed for peace at home and victory in the city.
Part of the conflict stemmed from Andrew Donelson’s political ambitions, part from Emily’s social designs, and the two were inevitably linked. When it came to Lewis and Eaton—threats to her Andrew’s position—Emily fought with spirit. “I think as Uncle wanted to give offices to his immediate friends there were others that had done more for him and deserved more at his hands than either Eaton or Lewis,” Emily said.
There should be no friendship—or even the faint appearance of friendship—between the White House family and the Eatons. Visits had been paid and returned, and as far as Emily was concerned, that was that. She already knew, most likely from women such as Floride (before the Calhouns left) and the other Cabinet wives—particularly Mrs. John Branch, wife of the secretary of the navy, and Mrs. Samuel Ingham, wife of the Treasury chief—that proximity to the Eatons would mean social distance from the best families of Washington. “I am prepared to defend our course—and will not yield one inch of ground,” Mrs. Ingham wrote to Emily, who had no intention of living her life in exile from the upper reaches of capital society on account of Margaret Eaton.
As usual, Margaret was her own worst enemy. Her brashness in claiming connection to Jackson’s family made Emily’s revulsion all the stronger. Realizing that she would find no friend in Emily, Margaret, rather than keeping a decorous silence, began to speak of Emily as “a poor, silly thing,” and escalated her rhetoric from there. “I was quite as independent as they and had more powerful friends,” Margaret said of the Emily faction. “None of them had beauty, accomplishments or graces in society of any kind, and for these reasons—I say it without egotism—they were very jealous of me.”
Jackson’s political allies were puzzled by the unfolding drama. After Jackson gave Margaret’s father a federal position as an inspector of the District of Columbia prisons, James Hamilton, Jr., then a pro-Jackson South Carolinian, wrote Van Buren: “For God knows we did not make him president … to work the miracle of making Mrs. E. an honest woman, by making her husband Secy of War, or by conferring some crumbs of comfort on every creature that bears the name O’Neale.”
AT GADSBY’S HOTEL one morning after a big party hosted by Sir Charles Vaughan, the British minister, Margaret was the talk of the dining room. “Mrs. Eaton brushed by me last night and pretended not to know me,” one man said in front of four others at Gadsby’s table. “She has forgotten the time when I slept with her.”
Old Washington was at once horrified and thrilled by the scandal. After a visit to the Clays’ house on Lafayette Square, Edward Bates, a congressman from Missouri who lost his 1828 reelection bid, wrote his wife an inflated account of the Eatons’ history. Eaton, Bates said, “has just married Mrs. Timberlake, a lady with whom it is said he has been on very familiar terms for several years past. She was the wife of a purser in the Navy, whose duties called him to foreign parts; but the lady, notwithstanding her lonely condition, increased and multiplied surprisingly.”
Bates was reflecting the prevailing gossip. “I’ve just returned from Mr. Clay’s,” he said. The “hard-featured” Lucretia Clay was there, as was a sister of Dolley Madison’s. “Of course, there is no getting along in such a party without a little scandal,” Bates said. “Mrs. Eaton the bride above mentioned was of course talked of and I gathered that she had not received the accustomed visits of congratulation from the ladies of the city.”
On Sunday, March 8, 1829, four days after the inauguration, Lucretia and Henry Clay went to dine at the home of Margaret Bayard Smith and her husband, Samuel Harrison Smith, the president of the Washington branch of the Bank of the United States. The Smiths had come to Washington immediately after their wedding twenty-nine years before, in the autumn of 1800. Shortly thereafter John Adams became the first president to spend a night in the White House. Six years later Henry Clay came to Washington as a U.S. senator from Kentucky. He served in the Ninth Congress alongside his hostess’s brother, James A. Bayard of Delaware.
Dining on this Sunday—the Smiths lived on the square between Pennsylvania Avenue, Fifteenth Street, and H Street, near the White House—Samuel Harrison Smith and Clay talked, Mrs. Smith said, as “the patriot to the patriot,” men whose lives were intertwined with the history of the city and its more or less permanent powers. Smith had served as an interim secretary of the Treasury under Madison; Clay had risen through the Congress, becoming Speaker of the House, and now stood as the opposition’s heir apparent to reclaim the White House. Washington was home, the public’s business their business, the nation’s memories bound up with their own families’.
The weather outside was forbidding—cold and cloudy—but inside at the table Mr. Smith and Clay found a refuge in memories and stories from the days when, in their view, giants, not pygmies, lived in the White House. They did not mention Jackson. They did not have to. The “falling-off”—as the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father put it when he spoke of how low his wife had come in marrying the usurping Claudius—was obvious to all in the dining room. “The characters and administrations of Jefferson and Madison were analyzed, and many private anecdotes were drawn,” said Mrs. Smith. “Mr. Clay preferred Madison, and pronounced him after Washington our greatest statesman, and first political writer—He thought Jefferson had the most genius—Madison most judgment and common sense—Jefferson a visionary and theorist, often betrayed by his enthusiasm into rash and imprudent and impracticable measures, Madison cool, dispassionate, practical, safe.”
Mr. Smith listened, then begged to differ—politely and among equals, of course. The conversation was riveting; the dishes were being cleared away, yet everyone at the table, well fed and with full glasses of wine, listened intently.
“Your father,” Mrs. Smith wrote their son, “would not yield Jefferson’s superiority and said he possessed a power and energy, which carried our country through difficulties and dangers; far beyond the power of Madison’s less energetic character. ‘Prudence and caution would have produced the same results,’ insisted Mr. Clay. After drawing a parallel between these great men, and taking an historic survey of their political lives, they both met on the same point, viz. that both were great and good, and tho’ different—yet equal.”
Reasonable men of affairs, reaching reasonable conclusions about matters of history and statecraft—the scene is cozy, intimate, full of talk of great men with insight and familiarity and connections between the public and the personal. These were people who believed themselves noble members of a ruling class—an aristocracy in all but name.
At ten—late for Lucretia, who tended to retire earlier—the Clays said good night, concluding a kind of tribal ritual of a band of warriors, facing enemies in the darkness beyond, warming themselves with fire and story.
THE CHIEF ENEMY—at least as the old guard saw him—was not far away, at the White House, reviewing the capital establishment, deciding who would retain office and who would not. There was, Clay said, “the greatest … apprehension” among the Washington elite. “No one knows who is next to encounter the stroke of death; or, which with many of them is the same thing, to be dismissed from office.”
Jackson was not alone in drawing hostile fire. At a big Washington wedding uniting two important capital families—Dr. Henry Huntt, a physician who would later treat Jackson, was marrying the daughter of Tench Ringgold, a friend of President Monroe’s and marshal of the District—Van Buren was moving among the guests when Judge Buckner Thruston confronted him. The judge’s son had been fired as a State Department clerk. Now an “exceedingly indignant” Judge Thruston looked Van Buren in the eye and “very energetically” called him a “Scoundrel” loudly enough, Adams wrote in his diary, for a dozen other guests to hear.
People like the angry judge and the Clays and the Smiths saw the replacement of federal officials as the ruin of the country. Jackson saw it as the nation’s salvation. That a president would have wide power to reward loyalists with offices, both to thank them for their steadfastness and to ensure that he had a cadre of people at hand who would presumably execute his policies with energy and enthusiasm, is now a given, but Jackson was the first president to remake the federal establishment on such a large scale.
The old officeholders could be forgiven for imagining themselves immune to the vagaries of politics. By James Parton’s count, Washington and Adams had removed 9 people each; Jefferson, 39 (illustrating the victory of the Democrat-Republicans over the Federalists); Madison, 5; Monroe, 9; and John Quincy Adams, 2. By the time Jackson was done, he had turned out fewer than one might suppose, but still a historic number: about 919, just under 10 percent of the government. And he had made a particularly high number of changes among those civil servants directly appointed by the president himself.
Jackson’s vision was elementary yet expansive in the context of the early Republic. He wanted a political culture in which a majority of the voters chose a president, and a president chose his administration, and his administration governed by its lights in full view of the people, and the people decided four years hence whether to reward the president with another term or retire him—and them—from public life.
The human reaction to Jackson’s reform among the officeholders and their families was swift and fierce. “At that period, it must be remembered, to be removed from office in the city of Washington was like being driven from the solitary spring in a wide expanse of desert,” Parton wrote three decades after the purge. John Quincy Adams monitored the terror: “A large portion of the population of Washington are dependent for bread upon these offices.… Every one is in breathless expectation, trembling at heart, afraid to speak.”
Jackson’s decisions about federal appointments involved much more than the lingering historical image of the “spoils system,” a principle summed up by New York senator William Marcy in a speech he delivered about the new class of politicians: “They see nothing wrong in the rule, that to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.” Jackson was far from the last American president to arrive in Washington with the cry that the preceding administration had made a grand mess of things. Yet he firmly believed he was coming to power after a long period of sustained official corruption—he called the government “the Augean Stable,” seeing himself as Hercules—and viewed what he broadly referred to as “reform” as a moral as well as a political task. In Jackson’s mind, sins in the public sphere represented, as he said, a “struggle between the virtue of the people and executive patronage.”
There was always graft, which was regrettable, but what truly worried Jackson was what he saw as a pattern by Washington officials to deploy public money and means to perpetuate and promote themselves and their allies in office. Such corruption, as Jackson saw it, was possibly fatal to the American experiment, a fear grounded in the old notion that society was organic, and that an affliction in one part of the state could infect and even kill the whole.
STILL, JACKSON WAS susceptible to emotional appeals from officeholders facing dismissal. He was moved by stories of courage, admiring in others what he saw in himself. In the fever of the firings, the postmaster of Albany, New York, the War of 1812 veteran General Solomon Van Rensselaer, was slated for termination. According to the logic of the removals—to reward friends and eliminate foes—the Van Rensselaer maneuver made perfect sense. He was a Federalist who had supported John Quincy Adams, and Van Buren wanted him out, as did Silas Wright, Jr., a key New York politician, so the case seemed closed. To save his job, Van Rensselaer went to the White House and waited for Jackson to finish with his guests at a reception.
“General Jackson, I have come here to talk to you about my office,” Van Rensselaer said once he had the president alone. “The politicians want to take it away from me, and they know I have nothing else to live upon.”
Accustomed to such pleas and committed to his course, Jackson said nothing. Desperate, Van Rensselaer moved to strip off his own clothes.
“What in Heaven’s name are you going to do?” Jackson said. “Why do you take off your coat here?”
“Well, sir, I am going to show you my wounds, which I received in fighting for my country against the English!”
“Put it on at once, sir!” Jackson said. “I am surprised that a man of your age should make such an exhibition of himself.” Still, recalled Benjamin Poore, a journalist who recorded the story, “the eyes of the iron President were suffused with tears.” Van Rensselaer took his leave.
The image of the scarred old man stayed in Jackson’s mind overnight. As Poore told it, “The next day Messrs. Van Buren and Wright called at the White House and were shown into the President’s room, where they found him smoking a clay pipe.” Apparently unaware of Van Rensselaer’s preemptive strike the previous evening, Wright began to make the case for sacking him. Jackson “sprang to his feet, flung his pipe into the fire,” and virtually roared at his two friends.
“I take the consequences, sir; I take the consequences,” Jackson said. “By the Eternal! I will not remove the old man—I cannot remove him. Why, Mr. Wright, do you not know that he carries more than a pound of British lead in his body?” The postmaster was safe.
John Quincy Adams tracked everything. “The proscriptions from office continue, and, independent of the direct misery that they produce, have indirectly tragic effects,” Adams wrote on Saturday, April 25, 1829. “A clerk in the War Office named Henshaw, who was a strong partisan for Jackson’s election, three days since cut his throat from ear to ear from the mere terror of being dismissed. Linneus Smith, of the Department of State, one of the best clerks under the Government, has gone raving distracted, and others are said to be threatened with the same calamity.” Suicide and madness: it was the most unstable of seasons.
BUT JACKSON WAS getting his way, and Clay, returning to Kentucky as a private citizen, could not hold his tongue. “During the reign of Bonaparte, upon one of those occasions in which he affected to take the sense of the French people as to his being made Consul for life, or Emperor, an order was sent to the French armies to collect their suffrages,” Clay said in a Lexington speech on Saturday, May 16, 1829. “They were told, in a public proclamation, that they were authorized and requested to vote freely, according to the dictates of their best judgments and their honest convictions. But a mandate was privately circulated among them importing that if any soldier voted against Bonaparte he should be instantly shot.”
Not subtle—but then, Clay’s hatred of Jackson was running ever deeper as Clay tried to grow accustomed to exile after so many years of power and the anticipation of greater office. “Is there any difference, except in the mode of punishment,” Clay continued, bringing his listeners from Napoleonic France to Jacksonian America, “between that case and the arbitrary removal of men from their public stations for no other reason than that of an honest and conscientious preference of one Presidential candidate to another?”
Clay had learned a lesson from Jackson’s sojourn in the wilderness after the 1824 election: that the political future belonged to men who constantly made the case for themselves in the most accessible way possible for a mass audience. By relentless repetition, Jackson had turned the phrase “corrupt bargain” into a weapon that brought Adams down and forced Clay out of office. Jackson’s success suggested that the ambitions of the men who would be president were best served by total immersion in the mechanics and the substance of political life.
IN WASHINGTON, WHEN the Senate summoned up the gumption to strike back at the president over patronage, voting down several nominees, Jackson sent for Duff Green, the editor of the administration’s then-favored newspaper, the Telegraph. “Let Congress go home, and the people will teach them the consequence of neglecting my measures and opposing my nominations,” Jackson said. “The people, sir, the people will put these things to rights!” He depended on a single force against all the florid attacks in the world: his mystical link to the country.
Andrew Jackson was rapidly turning the presidency into what John F. Kennedy later called “the vital center of action.” Little wonder, then, that the Washington establishment believed the end of their reign had come. It had.