PROLOGUE
April 13, 1830
Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel
Washington City, District of Columbia
A Toast.
The banquet in honor of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday was a splendid one, even by the standards of the national capital, “unsurpassed for richness and variety, elegance and abundance.” More than one hundred congressmen, leaders of the American military, and members of the president’s cabinet sat at two tables the length of the hall terminating in a perpendicular head table occupied by the president of the United States.
By tradition, the hosts of the gala would share their sentiments, called the “regular toasts.” Subsequently, “volunteer toasts” were given in order of standing.
As members of an ascendant political party presiding over a prosperous, growing country, the banqueters should have been enjoying a night of pure celebration. But an uneasy tension hung over the room, perhaps more palpable than the scent of the evergreen branches that adorned the walls. Dividing this once happy family was the doctrine of nullification, the principle that a state could refuse to be bound by national laws with which it disagreed. The tariffs of 1828 and 1832, which boosted northern manufacturers but burdened southern agriculture, gave rise to a movement in South Carolina to “veto” what was believed to be an unconstitutional policy. The planners of this event had chosen to use it to make a statement. The regular toasts, twenty-four in all, embraced this controversial new doctrine, even seeking to give it Jefferson’s imprimatur.
When the regular toasts had concluded, the president of the United States was called on to give the first volunteer toast. Andrew Jackson had listened long enough. Though known as an ardent supporter of states’ rights, Jackson’s remarks would sorely disappoint the nullifers.
“Our Union—” Jackson said “—it must be preserved.”
The president’s toast “electrified the country,” recollected one senator, who had chosen to stay at the dinner while others walked out. The tough old general had issued a challenge, setting forth the terms of debate in what would become the gravest crisis yet presented to the young Union. Jackson had chosen his words carefully. The day before, he had read a newspaper article alerting him that the nullifiers had hijacked the gala. He drafted three possible toasts and, after consulting with trusted friends, decided on the one that “fell among the nullifiers like an exploded bomb!” as one biographer put it.
Vice President John Caldwell Calhoun of South Carolina, the leading exponent of nullification, was next in order. He did not shrink from the challenge offered by the chief executive. “The Union—next to our liberty the most dear; may we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the states and distributing equally the benefit and burden of the Union.”
Next was the secretary of state, Martin Van Buren of New York. “Mutual forbearance and reciprocal concessions; through their agency the Union was established—the patriotic spirit from which they emanated will forever sustain it.”
Three toasts at the end of a long evening. From the president came the view that the Union was sacred and permanent, paramount to other considerations. From the vice president, the Union was important but subject to the South’s unique standard of liberty, dissolvable in the event that the Union was no longer advantageous. From the secretary of state, a reminder that the Union in its origins and preservation had always been the product of compromise. These divergent perspectives would clash, compete, and come to define the presidency of Jackson and those of his successors, not to be resolved until the close of a great war, some seeds of which were planted that evening at the Indian Queen.
Several days later a South Carolina congressman came to visit the president on his way out of town. Jackson “received him with great kindness, offering his hand, and begging him to be seated.”
After a brief conversation, the congressman rose to leave. Was there anything the president wished to convey to his friends in South Carolina?
“No, I believe not,” said Jackson. After a moment, however, the president reconsidered. “Please give my compliments to my friends in your state,” he said. “And say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.”
But neither Calhoun’s threat nor Jackson’s promise would be tested until another generation. Rather, Van Buren’s philosophy of compromise would rule the day, in the presidency of Jackson and in that of his successors. Beginning with Van Buren himself, the heirs to Jackson saw the role of president as conciliator-in-chief, containing the elements that threatened the Union, often by concessions made to southern interests. But a surprise victor in a bitterly divided presidential election, at the head of a new political party, would upset the old order of things, and redefine the nature of the presidency.
George Nicolay and John Hay, the young private secretaries of the president-elect, Abraham Lincoln, observed that beneath their boss’s quiet demeanor, he was “undergoing most anxious and harassing labors. Day by day the horizon of politics gathered gloom, and the theory of secession became the theme of every newspaper and the staple question of his daily visitors.”
Lincoln shared with them his thoughts on the gathering crisis as southern states considered leaving the Union, and what he believed he would have to do. “The very existence of a general and national government,” Lincoln said, “implies the legal power, right, and duty of maintaining its own integrity. This, if not expressed, is at least implied in the Constitution. The right of a state to secede is not an open or debatable question. It was fully discussed in Jackson’s time, and denied not only by him, but by the vote of Congress. It is the duty of a president to execute the laws and maintain the existing government.”
The Springfield Journal, Lincoln’s party newspaper, summarized his thinking on the day South Carolina seceded. Its headline: THE UNION—IT MUST BE PRESERVED. Soon Lincoln would take the oath of office as the sixteenth president of the United States. He would face the greatest military, moral, and political crisis of anyone to hold that office. Living witnesses to the Civil War included five of his presidential predecessors. Each, in their way, had attempted to arrest the gathering storm. And each, in their way, had brought it about. All had opposed Lincoln’s candidacy, for in him they saw a threat to the institution itself. These five former presidents, who had occupied the highest of roles in a former epoch, now searched for their place in a new one.