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

by Conrad Black

  Following the reelection of Jackson, Clay and Calhoun joined forces to get a House vote approving retention of government deposits in the Bank of the United States. Jackson felt he had won a clear mandate to get rid of the Bank, and Biddle thought his position justified his replying to Jackson’s war on him and his Bank by tightening credit, which he did. By the end of 1833, Biddle’s tactics had induced significant financial distress in the country, and Jackson had overcome a divided cabinet to remove federal government deposits from the Bank and place them in 23 state banks.

  Jackson named Roger Taney, the attorney general, secretary of the Treasury to carry out the changes he sought, and as always with Jackson, there were insults and ruffled feathers all round. Clay got a censure vote against both Jackson and the Treasury through the Senate. Jackson’s transgression was that he refused to hand over to the Senate a paper he had read to his cabinet about the Bank recharter question. Jackson lodged a protest that he had been accused of an impeachable offense without being given an opportunity to defend himself. The Senate declined to confirm Taney at Treasury, but Jackson had him serve ad interim, and named him successfully, over strenuous opposition, as chief justice of the United States in 1835 when John Marshall died after 34 years in his office.77 Taney was the first senior American official who was a Roman Catholic; he would serve 29 years as chief justice, with very mixed results. Benton eventually had the censure of Jackson expunged.

  Inflation was abetted by the use of land-sale speculators’ notes as a form of transactional debt, and the huge increase in western land sales generated great increases in activity, and consequently in the de facto money supply, since these notes served as currency. Jackson ordered that only gold, silver, and in a few cases certain state-backed scrip would be accepted as payment in sales of federal lands. This turned inflation instantly into deflation, sharply reducing sales of federal lands and placing great strain on the state banks. Jackson’s unnuanced decrees in banking and monetary policy caused syncopated economic lurches that were often destructive to many, and reduced general levels of confidence in the rational administration of the country’s affairs.

  Presidents (J.Q) Adams and Jackson had both offered to buy Texas from Mexico, without success. American settlement in Texas began in earnest with Moses Austin and his son Stephen F. Austin, and was agreed by successive Mexican governments until 1830, when Mexico outlawed slavery in Texas and forbade further American settlement there. Stephen Austin went to Mexico to negotiate with the president, the charming and imperishable scoundrel General Antonio López de Santa Anna, who was nine times president of his country (though serving only seven years), and called himself “the Napoleon of the West” among other encomia. Santa Anna arrested Austin and imprisoned him for eight months. A group of Texans asserted their independence in 1835. Santa Anna set out to crush Texas militarily, and invested the San Antonio fortress, the Alamo, on February 23, 1836, with 3,000 men. The fortress was defended by only 188 men, including folkloric figures William Travis and Davy Crockett. After 10 days, Santa Anna overwhelmed the defenders and all the Americans were massacred, as were several hundred other Americans at different locations in Texas.

  On April 21, Sam Houston led several hundred men stealthily across the San Jacinto River, near what is today the city of Houston, and defeated about 1,200 Mexicans at San Jacinto and captured Santa Anna, who was released to secure Mexican recognition of the independence of Texas. The Mexicans rejected this and Houston was elected president of the independent Republic of Texas. There were resolutions from both houses of the Congress for recognition of Texas, which Jackson, uncharacteristically, was hesitant to do. He wished to honor treaty obligations with Mexico and claimed not to wish a war with that country, though he would normally find such a prospect appetizing. He was more concerned with causing a split in the Democratic Party between pro- and anti-slavery forces, but on his last full day as president, March 3, 1837, Jackson did send a chargé to Texas in an act of quasi-recognition. This was another time bomb that Jackson would leave for his successors.

  The National Republicans of Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams, favoring protective tariffs and a strong federal government, including a national bank, and cool to the spread of slavery, merged with former Democrats opposed to Jackson’s Bank policy, and with the more prosperous southern planters and northern industrialists, who found Jackson a dangerous rabble-rouser. They all joined, very implausibly, with southern opponents of Jackson’s anti-nullification policy, to form what was called, at Clay’s suggestion, the Whig Party. The remnants of the previous election’s Anti-Masonic Party (which had carried Vermont in 1832) joined the Whigs, a catchment of all those fragments that had been scattered in all directions by the onslaught of the Jackson juggernaut. In Congress, they were a relatively coherent group led by Clay and Webster and Calhoun, who were well-settled into their long domination of the Congress. But in the country, they were an incongruous hodgepodge of elements awkwardly lined up in opposition to the galvanizing figure of the president, who carried the torch of national unity in the North and wore the mantle and laurels of the regional defender of slavery in the South, and was a war hero to all. Andrew Jackson remains one of the seven or eight most important presidents in the country’s history—inventor of the spoils system, champion of the slaveholders, betrayer of the Indians, agent of financial disorder, but redeemer of an ill-considered war, leader of the populist Democrats, and conservator pro tempore of the American Union.

  14. STRATEGIC REVIEW

  It was 77 years from the start of the Seven Years’ War to the reinauguration of Andrew Jackson, and in that time America had deftly moved through eight distinct strategic phases. Franklin had had the vision of the Great Power of the New World, and had fastened it admirably onto Pitt’s vision of the British Empire to encourage the permanent expulsion of France from North America. This was the sine qua non to the possibility of American independence, which would have been impractical if France had remained in contention for control of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys (1756–1763). For the fulfillment of Franklin’s vision, France and Britain would both have to go from America, but France would have to go first.

  When the king and the king’s men refused to govern equitably as between the British of the home islands and of America, Washington’s genius for guerrilla war (for it was genius and it was guerrilla war) was married to Franklin’s diplomatic genius in enticing France self-destructively to the aid of republicanism, and to Jefferson’s genius for presenting the quarrel in epochal, libertarian terms, and independence was won (1764–1783). Washington then displayed a political cunning and integrity and resistance to the temptations of force no triumphant general in an important country would show again until Charles de Gaulle patiently awaited the collapse of the French Fourth Republic 170 years later (1783–1787). Washington and Franklin sponsored the constitutional efforts of Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, and a stable and durable and adequately flexible system of government resulted (1787–1789).

  Washington, Hamilton, and Adams launched the government of the new republic with surpassing insight and distinction, establishing strong economic policies and fiscal institutions, asserting federal authority and retaining sufficient military strength to be able to exchange non-aggression against Canada and the British West Indies for British liberality toward American commerce on the high seas, and used the status quo with Britain to lever a firm line against revolutionary and Napoleonic France (1789–1801).

  The opposition came peacefully to power, often the litmus test of a new national regime. And Jefferson and Madison retained Hamilton’s financial institutions and industrial policy, while expanding the country into the interior of the continent, broadening the franchise, and shrinking and decentralizing government. Their economic reprisals against Britain failed and Madison lost the opportunity to seize Canada, but at least registered again, in the otherwise pointless War of 1812, America’s determined autonomy opposite Britain (1801–
1817).

  Monroe and John Quincy Adams continued the wiser policies of all their predecessors and seized the coat-tails and the elbow of their late British adversary, preponderant in the post-Napoleonic world, as tightly as Britain would embrace America when the correlation of forces between them tipped three-quarters of a century later. For the United States, it was solidarity in apparent equality with the only potentially threatening adversary, all in the interest of American hemispheric preeminence (1818–1829).

  And Andrew Jackson would impose the acceptance of slavery where it existed and within its established latitude in implicit exchange for the inviolability of the Union, which the South, in its defensiveness about slavery, was already trying to redefine. Given demographic and economic trends, this would ensure the ability of the free states with skillful political leadership to prevail over the slave states, should the issue be forced, if the test of strength could be deferred by 20 or 30 years (1832–1860).

  If these trends of growth and development could be retained and the slavery threat resolved, the United States, barely 80 years after Yorktown, would be one of the greatest powers in the world, as Franklin had foreseen. Of the founders of the country, Madison was the only one still alive in 1833, and he saw the danger and the promise. It would all be down to the next great leader of the American project, a raw-boned young Illinoisan, teaching himself law and wondering about slavery.

  TWO

  THE PREDESTINED PEOPLE, 1836–1933

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Slavery

  The House Divided, 1836–1860

  1. THE PRESIDENCY OF MARTIN VAN BUREN

  Jackson respected the tradition of the founders and did not seek a third term (though like all of them, he could have won one), and he urged Martin Van Buren as his successor. Van Buren was nominated by the Democrats, with, for vice president, Colonel Richard M. Johnson, the supposed killer of Tecumseh and a successful militia leader and colorful figure who cohabited with a black woman, to whom he was not married, just a few blocks from the slave market in Washington. The disparate elements of the Whig movement could not agree on a candidate, so they adopted the tactic of nominating regional candidates in the hope of denying the Democrats a majority and pushing the election to the House of Representatives (where the likely Democratic majority would have elected Van Buren anyway). The dissident anti-Jackson Democrats nominated Hugh L. White of Tennessee; the New England Adamsites nominated Daniel Webster; and the Anti-Masonic elements reached back 25 years to try to tap the Jackson formula of the military hero above politics and chose Colonel Richard Johnson’s old commander, General William Henry Harrison, victor of Tippecanoe and Moravian Town.

  The election was essentially a referendum on Jackson, and Van Buren won, 762,000 to 550,000 for Harrison, 145,000 for White, and 41,000 for Webster. Van Buren had about 51.5 percent of the total vote but won more easily in the Electoral College, 170 votes to 73 for Harrison, 26 for White, and 14 for Webster. None of the four candidates for vice president was successful, so, for the only time in American history, the issue was decided by the Senate, where Richard Johnson was elected. Van Buren would be the only person in the history of the country, apart from Jefferson, who held the offices of president, vice president, and secretary of state. He had been state senator, U.S. senator, governor, and minister to Great Britain to boot, a political roué of great charm and cunning and no principles at all, and more of a maneuverer than a leader. After the four Virginia plantation owners and the two Boston academic lawyers, the country would alternately elect presidents who were generals or political wheelhorses, as it descended the slippery slope toward civil conflict.

  No formula short of the three-fifths rule would have attracted the South into the Union; no alternate strategy to Jackson’s, varied by Clay’s compromises, was going to keep the country together until 1860. Only a war in the 1810s would elevate Andrew Jackson to the point of electability, no one else could have devised and implemented his formula for preserving the Union, and the United States could not have become the greatest power in the world without the South. American history has been like a bouncing (American) football, in unpredictable directions, dependent again and again on indispensable and often unlikely individuals, elevated improbably. Beyond its natural resources and its Constitution, few Americans could explain why the United States has been such a felicitous country, but almost all of them sense that it has been.

  The U.S. economy, after Jackson’s draconian tinkering, hit the wall in 1837. Federal land sales collapsed, declining by almost 90 percent, foreclosures occurred in large numbers with the invalidation of the former notes used as consideration for land sales, and then commodity prices declined precipitously, especially cotton (by about half). In New York and other cities, there were mass protests against unemployment and food and fuel prices. New York’s main flour warehouse was ransacked. The relative absence of paper money created deflation, but the reliance on the banknotes of state banks made it very hard to monitor the money supply, and the lack of any supervision of financial institutions led to a great many bank failures, which was a condition facilitated and made more destructive by the disappearance of a large national bank. Van Buren advocated a paper currency, unsuccessfully.

  The slavery debate, which would never subside for long, until, as Lincoln said, “every drop of blood drawn by the lash is repaid by a drop of blood drawn by the sword,” flared up again with debate over petitions for the abolition of slavery and of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. The southern view was that endless discussion of the morality of slavery was abrasive to the well-being of the Union. Southern members of the Congress, led by Calhoun, considered these petitions insulting. When Senator James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, a distinguished ambassador and future secretary of state and president, had moved such a petition in January 1836, Calhoun had moved that such petitions be barred. Buchanan achieved a compromise by establishing their right to be presented and their automatic rejection, including of his own petition. (This was a little like Calhoun’s fierce denunciation of the tariff he himself presented, in 1828.) In the House of Representatives, former President Adams defended the right of abolitionists to petition, and was anti-slavery, but believed the Congress had no power to abolish slavery, as it had been established and implicitly accepted by the Constitution. Resolutions were passed in 1836 and 1837 receiving but tabling without debate any resolutions about slavery, including ones declaring that the Congress had no right to deal with slavery at all and that it was inexpedient for the Congress to discuss the status of slavery in the District of Columbia. There was a good deal of discussion among southern members of the Congress regarding a resolution endorsing the legality and permanence of slavery, and declaring that if it were not passed, this would justify secession. Such a resolution was never proposed, but hypotheses ending in the right or desirability of secession were becoming more frequent. The murder of the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy in Illinois in November 1837 caused a noteworthy inflammation of debate.

  In December 1837, Senator Benjamin Swift of Vermont presented resolutions opposing the admission of Texas or any other new state as a slave state and upholding the right of Congress to deal with the slave trade in the District of Columbia. This brought forth John C. Calhoun, ever the supreme fire engine of southern legislators, with a series of resolutions at the very end of 1837 that reaffirmed the compact theory of the Union (which implied a right to secede or nullify legislation); asserted that the federal government had to resist all attempts by one part of the Union to use it against the domestic institutions of another part; and prohibited attacks on the institution of slavery and declared attacks on slavery in the District of Columbia to be a “direct and dangerous attack on the institutions of all the slave-holding states.” The fact that Calhoun got all this adopted demonstrates the extent to which the South was blackmailing the North already with the specter of secession. Even Clay, who was a slaveholder but also a supporter of the move to encourage slaves to
move to Liberia (a supposedly sovereign African country created for them by American altruists who wanted slavery to end by emigration back to Africa) and a moral critic of slavery, periodically condemned abolitionists as insouciant about provoking a civil war. In debate in 1839, when advised by Senator Preston of South Carolina that he could lose support in the North, Clay uttered his most famous words: “I trust the sentiments and opinions [I expressed] are correct; I had rather be right than be president.” In 1844, John Quincy Adams, in one of the signal achievements of his very long and distinguished career, gained the repeal of the gag rule, which facilitated shutting down debate, and which he had consistently rejected as “a violation of the Constitution of the United States, of the rules of this House, and of the rights of my constituents.”

  Foreign affairs were relatively quiet in the Van Buren years, as Jackson’s last secretary of state, John Forsyth, who had been an anti-Calhoun Jackson loyalist from Georgia, continued in that office under the new president. There were some frictions with Britain, over asylum given to the Canadian rebel William Lyon Mackenzie, and over a disputed lumbering area between Maine and New Brunswick (Aroostook). Popular sentiment flared up from time to time, but Van Buren enforced existing agreements and the well-traveled General Winfield Scott patrolled the border to prevent private-sector liberators of Canada from crossing. When they did sneak into Canada they were captured or put to flight promptly. Van Buren played it sensibly and the Aroostook question was referred to an arbiter and resolved by treaty in 1842.