Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  Monroe would follow his fellow Virginians and retire after two terms, having blended Jeffersonism with Hamiltonism, and having recovered some of Franklin’s talent for diplomatic finesse, which seemed to give America a greater weight in the world than it really possessed. And the ill-conceived embargoes had been successful shields for the launch of manufacturing. That was not what was expected to happen by the squires of Monticello and Montpelier (Jefferson’s and Madison’s homes), but it was the beginning of an industrial capacity Hamilton had foreseen and that in the centuries to come would stupefy the world. After five presidencies and 50 years after the American Revolution began, the new republic was fairly launched.

  Taken as a whole, in just one lifetime, from the start of the Seven Years’ War to 1824, the Americans had had an astounding rise, from a colony with two million people to one of the world’s six or seven most important countries, with over 11 million people. The problem of being half slave-holding and half free was the only shadow over America’s prospects, but it was a dark and lengthening shadow. Jefferson, the unimpoverishable optimist, in his final years, yet had “twinges of fear of an impending disaster whose sources he never fully understood. He and his colleagues had created” (and nurtured) “a Union devoted to liberty that contained an inner flaw that nearly proved to be its undoing.” Madison, who died 10 years after Jefferson and Adams, in 1836, left the posthumous word that “There was a serpent creeping with his deadly wiles” in the American “paradise.”72 So there was, and the great strategic challenge now was to keep the Union together until the forces of federalism in the North and West would be adequately motivated and powerful to suppress the slave states, if either moral revulsion at slavery or a preemptive insurrection made that necessary to preserve the Union.

  War of 1812. Courtesy of the U.S. Army Center of Military History

  10. THE 1824 ELECTION AND PRESIDSENT JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

  As the Virginia Dynasty ended, there was jockeying for the succession in Monroe’s talented cabinet. John Quincy Adams, William Crawford, and John C. Calhoun were all presumed to be running for president, as was the populist general Andrew Jackson. The country was practically a one-party state, and the states objected to the practice of the Democratic-Republican caucus of the House of Representatives choosing the party’s nominee and, effectively, the president. The Tennessee legislature selected General Jackson as a candidate in 1822, which was a year after Calhoun had thrown his hat in the ring, and so fierce was the rivalry that Crawford, who had great influence in the Senate, blocked the promotion of officers favored by Calhoun as war secretary, sometimes even when they were supported by the president himself. The Massachusetts and Kentucky legislatures nominated their favorite sons, Adams and the Speaker of the House, Henry Clay, all in 1822. Monroe launched the concept of the “lame duck” president, well before it was called that.

  A stroke effectively eliminated Crawford, who had been selected by the House caucus in the traditional manner, in 1823, and Calhoun withdrew to run for vice president with both Jackson and Adams. Jackson ran in favor of popular election of the president, but against federally paid internal improvements, which were held to be intrusive by the federal government, and if permitted, likely to be followed by federal meddling in the status of slavery. Most of the candidates favored tariff protection for American manufacturing. The ballot yielded 99 electoral votes for Jackson, 84 for Adams, 41 for Crawford, and 37 for Clay. As there was no majority, the election went to the House of Representatives, which would consider only the top three candidates. Clay urged support for Adams and, as Speaker, exercised considerable influence, starting with causing the Kentucky congressmen to ignore the instruction of the state legislature to vote for Jackson, and vote for Adams instead. Adams won 13 states to seven for Jackson and four for Crawford. Clay accepted Adams’s offer of secretary of state, leading to the allegation of a “corrupt bargain” by the two to throw the House election to Adams. There was never any evidence of this, but it was much bandied about, including by the erratic and volcanic John Randolph, who also described Adams and Clay as “the Puritan and the blackleg.” This led to a duel, in which neither aggrieved party (Clay and Randolph) was injured. Calhoun was easily elected vice president.

  After this election, the Adams and Clay groups became National Republicans, while the Jacksonians became the successors to Jefferson and Madison as Democratic-Republicans. Adams declined to politicize the civil service and dismissed only 12 federal government employees in his term, and those for objective cause. It was an admirable stance, but nothing was going to stop the charge of Jackson, swearing vengeance for the corrupt bargain and claiming to be the spear of the people as they seized control of government from the elites. In his address to the Congress in December 1825, Adams proposed an extensive program of roads and canals, a national university and observatory, and further exploration of the interior. It was an ambitious program, but one bound to offend the states’ rights advocates, which included all the South and much of the Southwest, essentially because of fear of attacks on slavery. This was the key to discussion of federal aid to public works, and was indicative of self-defeating government minimalism. It was held that if the federal government had the power to build public works all over the country, there would then be nothing to stop it from tampering with slavery. The South was already retreating into a slave mentality. Calhoun, as president of the Senate, elevated many opponents of the administration, as he was now the South’s leading political figure and used his position to advance his own status and not to support the administration (having probably received more votes for his office from followers of Jackson than of Adams).

  The whole first half of 1826 was taken up with debate over U.S. attendance at the Panama Conference. This was a pan–Latin American meeting organized by the liberator of much of South America, Simón Bolivar, who was seeking a tight alliance between all the states against Spain or any outside interloper. He sought a continental assembly and the right to require military support and solidarity from all constituent states. Colombia and Mexico insisted that the United States be invited, and Adams agreed to be represented. This created awkwardnesses; where Adams and Clay believed that American preeminence in the hemisphere required American representation, Calhoun and Senator Martin Van Buren, a devious New York wheelhorse who would hold almost every elective office and champion different sides of many issues, opposed U.S. attendance, ostensibly because the Senate had not been consulted before Adams accepted the invitation, and because attendance would violate American opposition to intrusion in the affairs of other countries. The real reason for the concern of the South was that there would be black national leaders present and they did not wish to exalt the dignity of “negroes” ethnically indistinguishable from slaves.

  The Congress supported the administration, after vigorous debate, but the representatives Adams sent did not arrive, one because of death en route. That there should have been a heated six-month debate on such a trivial issue illustrated the extreme sensitivity of the slavery issue. Southern leaders overreacted, reacted preemptively, and generally betrayed a nearly paranoid fear of criticism of slavery. Calhoun was the leader of this strain of opinion, and Van Buren went along with it only to cement his relations with Jackson, whom he saw more clearly than some as the coming man.

  Thomas Jefferson, aged 83, and John Adams, aged 91, died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Adams’s last words were alleged to have been that “Jefferson survives.” They had mended their quarrels of decades before and enjoyed an extensive and often eloquent correspondence. Adams had the pleasure, as the only president to this point to have been denied reelection, of seeing his son installed as president, at time of writing a feat replicated only by the Bushes. The senior Adams and Jefferson had seen a tremendous advance of the country they had done so much to establish, including a steady advance of popular government, a discarding of property and tax-paying qualifications for voting, and t
he movement in all states except Delaware and South Carolina of the selection of presidential electors from the state legislators directly to the voters.

  The North-South divisions were aggravated by the tariff debates of the late twenties. Northern and central manufacturing states wanted higher tariffs for textiles and steel and iron goods, to protect their ever-growing domestic market, while the South wanted those goods to be cheaper, and did not want to provoke tariff retaliation by the wide range of foreign countries to which the South exported agricultural products and cotton. The South was fiercely attached to the principle of absolute equality with the North, which it was losing demographically, though it was maintained in the Senate. As the North grew more quickly, and tariffs prospered its own industries while handicapping those of the South, and the North aspersed slavery and the ownership by people of other human beings, southerners came to question in increasing numbers the value and utility of the Union to them.

  As early as 1813, an in camera Federalist convention had met and proposed a series of constitutional amendments that included elimination of the three-fifths rule regarding the counting of slaves in calculating congressional representation and the composition of the Electoral College; the admission of new states and declaration of embargoes or of war only with two-thirds majorities of both houses of Congress; and the prohibition of a second presidential term and of successive presidents from the same state. The report of this convention arrived in Washington as the Treaty of Ghent arrived, and the issues died, especially after the vibrant 1824 presidential contest between a Deep South candidate, a New Englander, and two frontiersmen. But it indicated the stresses the Virginia Dynasty and the War of 1812 had caused. The grievances and sensibilities of the South would not be so easily appeased. Three of the four 1824 presidential candidates were slaveholders, three-quarters of the people were not, 15 percent of the people were black, and 15 percent of those were free. It was bound to become very complicated, very quickly.

  Severe strains between the regions arose again over tariffs. The Jacksonians in control of the Congress determined to embarrass the president by proposing outrageously high tariffs (“The Tariff of Abominations”) on a wide range of products, to ensure that all sections voted against it, and Jackson’s supporters would take credit for its defeat in the South and West, which saw tariffs as a sop to the eastern and northern states, which would blame Adams for the defeat. This was the cynical design of the unholy alliance between Calhoun and Van Buren, and it backfired, because New England voted for the tariffs as supportive of the principle of protection, and the measure passed. Calhoun then baptized himself in political chicanery by total immersion, by leading South Carolina (six weeks after his reelection as vice president in 1828) to adopt a series of legislative resolutions protesting the constitutionality of the tariff Calhoun had himself co-sponsored on the assumption that it would be defeated. He also wrote, though he did not sign, a treatise that embraced the separatist concept of nullification—the ability of a state simply to declare that a federal law did not apply within that state. This was not compatible with any serious notion of the United States (though Jefferson had flirted with it after the Alien and Sedition Acts under the senior Adams). This constitutional heresy would prove almost inextinguishable, and was still being bandied about by southern segregationists in the 1960s. It was a public rumination on separatism: the acceptance of the benefits of the Union while eschewing anything thought to be burdensome. It was an outrage from the just-reelected vice president of the United States of America, Monroe’s war secretary, and the co-author of a tariff whose adoption he now purported to find unconstitutional. The rot at the core of the American Union was already a life-threatening tumor.

  11. THE RISE OF JACKSON

  Jackson had retired as a senator in 1825, following the Tennessee legislature’s nomination of him for president (presidential aspirants threw their hats into the ring much earlier in these times), and he accepted Calhoun as his running mate. Now, and henceforth, this party was called the Democrats, leaving “Republican” for adoption by a new force 30 years hence. President Adams was renominated by what was called the National Republican convention, meeting in Harrisburg. He took as his running mate, Richard Rush, former minister to Great Britain and attorney general and current secretary of war.

  Jackson was now, in 1828, an unstoppable political force: as the demographic center of the country moved across the Appalachians, he was the hero of the frontiersmen and of the Old South, and of all who admired the spirit of expansion, the Revolutionary drummer boy turned national military hero. (He had won probably the greatest land battle in the country’s history, the Battle of New Orleans, albeit after the end of the war in which it was supposedly fought. As Yorktown was largely won by the French, and as they were never at war again, it was certainly the greatest victory ever won by the Americans over the British.) Jackson was the selfless combat hero, the rugged man of the West, the guardian of the slave-holding South, and he was a slick political operator. He won the 1828 presidential election with 647,000 votes and 178 electoral votes to Adams’s 509,000 votes and 83 electoral votes. New York state went for Jackson by 5,000 out of 276,000 because of the exertions of Martin Van Buren and William L. Marcy, who between them would be amply rewarded in the coming decades with a cornucopia of great offices. They were the leaders of the Albany Regency, the ruling political machinery in New York from the retirement of Tompkins and DeWitt Clinton to the rise of William Henry Seward and Thurlow Weed in the late 1930s.

  John Quincy Adams is rivaled only by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Woodrow Wilson as the greatest intellect ever to hold the presidency of the United States. He was one of the nation’s very greatest secretaries of state and had an imaginative program as president, but was the representative of a region of declining importance and was saddled with the appearance and tone of a New England Brahmin and an overt opponent of slavery, as the fireball of Jacksonian democracy swept most of the country. Completely unaffected by the prestige of the presidency and of his family, he was elected to the House of Representatives, the only ex-president in the country’s history except for Andrew Johnson to serve again in elective office after leaving the White House, and became one of the leaders of the abolitionist movement. He was a man of the utmost intelligence and integrity, but not an overly effective president and not a particularly astute national politician. He was profoundly esteemed in his last 17 years in Congress, right to his death in 1848 at the age of 79.

  General Jackson was a startling change from the six Virginia and Massachusetts gentlemen who had preceded him to the nation’s highest office. In his inaugural address, Jackson was quite restrained, promising economy in government and respect for the jurisdictions of states, a “just and liberal policy” toward the Indians, and what appeared to be a reform of the civil service. He was silent or enigmatic about tariffs, internal improvements, and the status of the Bank of the United States. He threw the White House open to the populace, which included a tremendous rout of rumbustious and reveling frontiersmen, and a rather bacchanalian occasion ensued, with windows being used as doors and considerable alcoholic consumption, though no vandalism or violence. It was a symbolic notice of a distinct change in tone from the former occupants.

  Jackson did not hold regular cabinet meetings, and did not have a very distinguished cabinet, apart from Van Buren at State, but relied on a “kitchen cabinet” of less senior officials and friends. This would change in 1831. It shortly emerged that Jackson’s idea of reform of the civil service was to sack a large number of people not identified with his own political rise and movement and replace them with loyalists. This affected about 20 percent of all federal employees in the Jackson years, and was dubbed “the Spoils System” by New York Senator William Marcy (“To the winner go the spoils”), Van Buren’s side-kick in the Albany Regency.

  Jackson allowed the Calhoun sponsorship of nullificationist ideas in South Carolina to go publicly uncontradicted through the first yea
r of his administration, but it was known by the whole political community to be a ticking time bomb. A debate that began at the end of 1829 over the advisability of the federal government restricting and monitoring more closely the sale of public lands was soon represented by the formidable Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri as an attempt by northeastern interests to control and retard the growth of the West. This quickly escalated as Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina claimed that “the life of our system is the independence of our states” and imputed overbearing centralizing ambitions to the federal government. This smoked out the Senate’s most formidable orator of all, Daniel Webster, who attacked those southerners who “Habitually speak of the Union in terms of indifference, or even of disparagement.” The debate continued all through January 1830, as Hayne threw down the mask and espoused the sovereignty of the states and their right to unilateral nullification of federal laws. Webster replied that the states were sovereign only as far as the Constitution allowed that sovereignty is determined by the Constitution, that it resides with the government of the whole nation, and that state-federal disputes would be resolved by federal institutions and processes: federal courts, constitutional amendments, and free elections. Webster accused his opponents of sophistical arguments designed to weaken and undermine the national government in a dishonorable way. He concluded one of the most famous addresses ever rendered in the United States Senate: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” (January 27, 1830).

  Hayne, who was understood to be speaking for his fellow South Carolinian and president of the Senate, Vice President Calhoun, replied to this with the familiar “compact” theory, that the states formed the federal government and had the legal capacity to judge when their rights were being infringed, and that the right of the states to reject federal laws was undiminished from before the Constitution was adopted. Webster had the better of the constitutional argument, as the adoption of and more than 40 years of adherence to the Constitution clearly conferred legitimacy on it, subject to interpretation, as the governmental law established by “We the people . . . for the United States of America.” Calhoun and his fellow alarmed slaveholders were not going to render inoperative a document so thoroughly debated and ratified and enforced with specious arguments about a compact and with the miraculous revenance, after decades of invisibility and silence, of a selective right of nullification. These arguments were a goad, and a warning to the North, and the first stab at developing a plausible argument to justify secession, by force of arms if necessary.