by Jill Lepore
The nullification crisis was less a debate about the tariff than it was a debate about the limits of states’ rights and about the question of slavery, an early augury of the civil war to come. South Carolina had the largest percentage of slaves of any region in the country. Coming in the wake of David Walker’s Appeal and the challenge posed by the Cherokee Nation to the State of Georgia, nullification represented South Carolina’s attempt to reject the power of the federal government to set laws it found unfavorable to its interests.
Jackson responded with a proclamation in which he called Calhoun’s theory of nullification a “metaphysical subtlety, in pursuit of an impracticable theory.” Jackson’s case amounted to this: the United States is a nation; it existed before the states; its sovereignty is complete. “The Constitution of the United States,” Jackson argued, “forms a government, not a league.”79 In the end, Congress adopted a compromise tariff and South Carolina accepted it. “Nullification is dead,” Jackson declared. But the war was far from over. The nullification crisis hardened the battle lines between the sectionalists and the nationalists, while Calhoun became the leader of the proslavery movement, declaring that slavery is “indispensable to republican government.”80
Jackson’s feud with Calhoun meant that he had not the least wish for him to continue as his vice president during a second term. Reluctant simply to drop Calhoun from the ticket for fear of political reprisal, Jackson cast about for a subtler means by which he could get rid of his cast-iron man. His eyes fell upon a new and short-lived political party, the Anti-Masons. In September of 1831, the Anti-Masons held the first presidential nominating convention in American history. Founded on the opposition to secret cabals, like Masons or political caucuses, the Anti-Masons had decided to borrow the idea of holding a gathering of delegates, like the constitutional conventions that had been held, year after year, in the states. Unfortunately, the man the Anti-Masons chose as their nominee turned out to be . . . a Mason. But the Anti-Masons’ nominating convention left two legacies: the practice of granting to each state delegation a number of votes equal to the size of its delegation in the Electoral College, and the rule by which a nomination requires a three-quarters vote. Two months after the Anti-Masons met, yet another short-lived party, the National Republican Party, held a convention of its own, in which roll was called of states, not in alphabetical order but in “geographical order,” beginning with Maine, and working down the coast, causing no small consternation among the gentlemen from Alabama.81 Henry Clay, asked by letter if he would be willing to be nominated by the short-lived National Republicans, wrote back to say yes but added that it was impossible for him to attend the convention in Baltimore “without incurring the imputation of presumptuousness or indelicacy.” Clay accepted the nomination, and set a precedent that lasted until Franklin Delano Roosevelt: for more than a century, no nominee accepted the nomination in person, and Roosevelt only did it because he was trying to put the point across that he was promising to offer Americans a “new deal.”82
Still, the practice of nominating a presidential candidate at a national party convention might not have become an American political tradition if Jackson hadn’t decided that the Democratic Party ought to hold one, too, so that he could get rid of his disputatious vice president. Jackson and his advisers realized that if they left the nomination to the state legislatures, where Calhoun had a great deal of support, they’d be stuck with him again. Jackson therefore contrived to have the New Hampshire legislature call for a national convention and to nominate Jackson as president and his pliable former secretary of state, New York governor Martin Van Buren, as his running mate.
The election of 1832 turned on the question of the national bank. Like the battles over Indian removal and the tariff, Jackson’s battle with the bank tested the power of the presidency. The issue was longstanding. Because the Constitution barred states from printing money, banks chartered by state legislatures printed their own money, not legal tender but banknotes, signed by bank presidents. Three hundred forty-seven banks opened up in the United States between 1830 and 1837. They printed their own money, producing more than twelve hundred different kinds of bills. Under this notoriously unstable arrangement, counterfeiting was rife, and so was swindling, especially by land banks, set up to speculate on western land.
In 1816, Congress had chartered a Second Bank of the United States, to help the nation recover from the devastation of the war with England. In 1819, the Supreme Court had upheld the constitutionality of the bank.83 The Bank of the United States served as the depository of all federal money; it handled its payments and revenues, including taxes. Nevertheless, it was a private bank reporting to stockholders. Its economic influence was extraordinary. By 1830, its holdings of $35 million amounted to twice the annual expenses of the federal government. To its severest critics, the national bank looked like an unelected fourth branch of the government.84 Jackson hated all banks. “I do not dislike your bank any more than all banks,” he told the bank’s president, Nicholas Biddle. Jackson believed that the Bank of the United States undermined the sovereignty of the people, defied their will, and, like all banks, had “a corrupting influence” on the nation by allowing “a few Monied Capitalists” to use public revenue, to “enjoy the benefit of it, to the exclusion of the many.”85
In January 1832, with Jackson nearing the end of his term, Biddle submitted to Congress a request to renew the bank’s charter, even though that charter wasn’t due to expire until 1836. Congress obliged. Clay promised, “Should Jackson veto it, I will veto him!”86 But in July 1832, Jackson did veto the bank bill, delivering an 8,000-word message in which he made clear that he believed the president has the authority to decide on the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress.
“It is maintained by the advocates of the bank that its constitutionality in all its features ought to be considered as settled by precedent and by the decision of the Supreme Court,” Jackson said. “To this conclusion, I cannot assent.”87 Biddle called Jackson’s veto message “a manifesto of anarchy.” But the Senate proved unable to override the veto. The Bank War, said Edward Everett, “is nothing less than a war of Numbers against Property.”88 Jackson, man of the people, King of Numbers, won in a rout.
IV.
JACKSON’S BANK VETO unmoored the American economy. With the dissolution of the Bank of the United States, the stability it had provided, ballast in a ship’s hull, floated away. Proponents of the national bank had insisted on the need for federal regulation of paper currency. Jackson and his supporters, known as “gold-bugs,” would have rather had no paper money at all. In 1832, $59 million in paper bills was in circulation, in 1836, $140 million. Without the national bank’s regulatory force, very little metal backed up this blizzard of paper, American banks holding only $10.5 million in gold.89
Both speculators and the president looked to the West. “The wealth and strength of a country are its population, and the best part of the population are cultivators of the soil,” Jackson said, echoing Jefferson.90 Fleeing worsening economic conditions in the East and seeking new opportunities, Americans moved west, alone and with families, on wagons and trails, on canals and steamboats, to Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Michigan. They homesteaded on farms; they built cabins out of rough-hewn logs. They started newspapers and argued about politics. They built towns and churches and schools. “I invite you to go to the West, and visit one of our log cabins, and number its inmates,” said one Indiana congressman. “There you will find a strong, stout youth of eighteen, with his better half, just commencing the first struggles of independent life. Thirty years from that time, visit them again; and instead of two, you will find in that same family twenty-two. This is what I call the American multiplication table.”91
Still, slavery haunted every step of westward settlement. Elijah Love-joy, born in Maine, settled in St. Louis, where he printed abolitionist tracts, the distribution of which was illegal in slave states, leading
abolitionists to call for “free speech” against southerners’ demands for “free trade.” In 1836, proslavery rioters destroyed Lovejoy’s press. Lovejoy moved across the river, to the free state of Illinois, where he and his black typesetter, John Anderson, reopened their business with a new press. That press, too, was destroyed by a mob, and when a third press arrived, Lovejoy, who was armed, was shot in the chest and killed, a martyr to the cause of free speech.
To survey land and supervise settlement, Congress chartered the General Land Office. Surveyors laid the land out in grids of 640 acres. These they divided into 160-acre lots, as the smallest unit to be offered for sale. By 1832, during a boom in land sales—the office was receiving 40,000 patents a year—that minimum purchase was reduced to 40 acres. In 1835, Congress increased the number of clerks working at the Land Office from 17 to 88. Yet still they could not keep up with the volume of paperwork.
From the South, American settlers crossed the border into Mexico, which had won independence from Spain in 1821. Mexico had trouble managing its sprawling north; much of the land between its populous south, including its capital, Mexico City, and its most distant territory, Alta California, was desert, and chiefly occupied by Apaches, Utes, and Yaqui Indians. As one Mexican governor said, “Our territory is enormous, and our Government weak.” As early as 1825, John Quincy Adams had instructed the American minister to Mexico to try to negotiate a new boundary; the Mexican government needed the money but it wouldn’t sell its own land. As its minister, Manuel de Mier y Terán, argued: “Mexico, imitating the conduct of France and Spain, might alienate or cede unproductive lands in Africa or Asia. But how can it be expected to cut itself off from its own soil?”
Pioneers heading west gathered at settlements like Major John Dougherty’s trading post on the Missouri River. Mexico wouldn’t sell its own land, but the Mexican territories of Coahuila and Texas, along the Gulf of Mexico, and west of the state of Louisiana, proved particularly attractive to American settlers in search of new lands for planting cotton. “If we do not take the present opportunity to people Texas,” one Mexican official warned, “day by day the strength of the United States will grow until it will annex Texas, Coahuila, Saltillo, and Nuevo León.” (At the time, Texas included much of what later became Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.) In 1835, Americans in Texas rebelled against Mexican rule, waging a war under the command of a political daredevil named Sam Houston. In 1836, Texas declared its independence, founding the Republic of Texas, with Houston its president. Mexico’s president, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, warned that, if he were to discover that the U.S. government had been behind the Texas rebellion, he would march “his army to Washington and place upon its Capitol the Mexican flag.”92
When Houston sent a proposal to Congress requesting annexation, the measure failed, for three reasons. First, Jackson feared annexation would provoke a war with Mexico, which did not recognize Texas’s independence. Second, from the point of view of the United States, which, along with Great Britain and France, did recognize Texas’s independence, Texas was a foreign country, which meant that its annexation was an altogether different issue than it had been in 1825, when John Quincy Adams, as secretary of state, had sought to acquire the territory. Finally, if Texas were admitted to the Union, it would enter as a slave state. Quincy Adams, who, having lost the presidency, had become a member of the House, filibustered the annexation proposal for three weeks. The people of the United States, he said, “dearly as they loved the Union, would prefer its total dissolution to the act of annexation of Texas.” The American Anti-Slavery Society flooded Congress with tens of thousands of abolitionist petitions. When Quincy Adams tried to get the petitions a hearing, southern legislators silenced him under the terms of a “gag rule” that banned from the floor of Congress any discussion of antislavery petitions, another triumph for opponents of free speech.93
Southern slave owners, a tiny minority of Americans, amounting to about 1 percent of the population, deployed the rhetoric of states’ rights and free trade (by which they meant trade free from federal government regulation), but in fact they desperately needed and relied on the power of the federal government to defend and extend the institution of slavery. The weakness of their position lay behind their efforts to silence dissent. Beginning in 1836, Ohio Democrat Thomas Morris introduced petitions denouncing slavery, calling for its abolition in the District of Columbia and urging the overturning of a ban on sending abolitionist literature through the mail, only to have the petitions suppressed. Morris, uncouth and self-taught, had been raised by his Baptist preacher father to hate slavery. Early in 1838, he damned “the putrid mass of prejudice, which interest has created, to keep the colored race in bondage.” Later that year, he told an Ohio newspaper that he had “always believed slavery to be wrong, in principle, in practice, in every country and under every condition of things.” Unsurprisingly, he was not reelected. In February 1839, knowing that he would never again hold public office, he let loose, delivering the fiercest antislavery speech yet voiced on the Senate floor. Borrowing from the Jacksonian indictment of the “money power,” he coined the phrase “slave power.” Morris described the struggle as a battle between democracy and two united aristocracies: “the aristocracy of the North,” operating “by the power of a corrupt banking system, and the aristocracy of the South,” which operated “by the power of the slave system.” Morris closed by stating his faith that democracy would prevail, and “THE NEGRO WILL YET BE SET FREE.”94
The debate over Texas, along with the election of 1836, illustrated just how powerfully Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams shaped national politics, long after the end of each of their presidencies. Jackson held the strings of the Democratic Party, while Quincy Adams steered the erratic course of the Whig Party. Jackson decided not to run for a third term, but, just as he’d connived to rid himself of Calhoun in 1832, he was determined to choose his successor. Once again, King Andrew masqueraded as the champion of the common man.
In 1835, Jackson issued a call for a Democratic nominating convention, in an extraordinary letter published, first, in a Tennessee newspaper:
I consider the true policy of the friends of republican principles to send delegates, fresh from the people, to a general convention, for the purpose of selecting candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency; and, that to impeach that selection before it is made, or to resist it when it is fairly made, as an emanation of executive power, is to assail the virtue of the people, and, in effect, to oppose their right to govern.95
For all his flummery about the virtue of the people and their right to govern, the point of this convention was to assure the nomination of Jackson’s handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren, and to allow for Van Buren to contrive for his choice, Richard Johnson, to win the vice presidential nomination. The calumny did not go unnoticed. Tennessee, whose support for Jackson had long since begun to waver, refused to send a delegation to the convention, held in Baltimore. Unwilling to forfeit Tennessee’s fifteen electoral votes at the convention, Van Buren’s convention manager, New York senator Silas Wright, went to a tavern and found a Tennessean who just happened to be in the city—Edward Rucker, who became a one-man, fifteen-vote delegation. (“Ruckerize” became a verb: it means to commit political skullduggery by packing a convention.)96
During the Panic of 1837, a destitute family cowers when debt collectors come to the door, demanding hard money; fading portraits of Jackson and Van Buren hang on the wall behind them. But Quincy Adams’s party found itself in still greater disarray. Disorganized and dispersed, the Whigs failed to hold a nominating convention and could not decide on a single candidate; four different Whigs ran for president, splitting the party and leaving a wide path for the Democratic candidate, Van Buren, to ride to electoral victory.
Van Buren took office in March 1837. Five weeks later, the nation’s financial system fell apart in the worst financial disaster in American history, second only to the crash o
f 1929. “The stock market collapsed. The blackness of darkness still hangeth over it,” one New Yorker wrote from Wall Street that April. By the fall of 1837, nine out of ten eastern factories had closed. The poor broke into shops, only to find their shelves empty. What began with the Panic of 1837 ended only after a seven-year-long depression, well into a decade of despair known as “The Hungry Forties.”97
Whigs dubbed the new president Martin Van Ruin, which was unfair, since the fall was the result of Jackson’s decisions, not Van Buren’s, the consequence, above all, of unregulated banking industry. But if the suffering was Jacksonian, so was its relief: the Panic of 1837 democratized bankruptcy protection and led to the abolition of debtors’ prisons. In 1810, a New York lawyer named Joseph Dewey Fay, who claimed to have spent sixteen years in debtors’ prison, had estimated that in the aftermath of the Panic of 1809, 10 percent of New York’s freemen had been arrested for debt. “Americans boast that they have done away with torture,” Fay had written, “but the debtors’ prison is torture.” Fay had gone to Albany and successfully lobbied the legislature to pass an expanded insolvency law for imprisoned debtors. Twenty-five hundred debtors availed themselves of discharge in the law’s first nine months. Earlier bankruptcy laws had protected only stockbrokers, but the new law set a precedent: it was the first legislation anywhere to offer bankruptcy to everyone. In 1819, the Supreme Court had ruled it unconstitutional. Still, a turn had come: New York abolished debtors’ prison in 1831, and in 1841, Congress passed a federal law offering bankruptcy protection to everyone. Within two years, 41,000 Americans had filed for bankruptcy. Two years later, the law was repealed, but state laws continued to offer bankruptcy protection and, still more significantly, debtors’ prisons were gone for good. In Britain and all of Europe except Portugal, offenders were still being thrown in debtors’ prison (a plot that animated many a nineteenth-century novel); in the United States, debtors could declare bankruptcy and begin again.