American Lion

by Jon Meacham

  When Jackson and the Donelsons arrived in Nashville, it was the first time they had been home since the inauguration more than a year before. The last few weeks had been good for Jackson, who was heartened by the public reaction to his Maysville veto—he believed it “very popular” with “a large majority of the people.”

  Within the family, though, the journey ended, and the visit began, on a note of tension. Jackson had expected Andrew and Emily to stay with him at the Hermitage. Andrew and Emily, eager to avoid the Eatons and perhaps exhausted by the exacting emotional minuet with “Uncle,” insisted on going to the Mansion, the Donelson family seat. Jackson was surprised and hurt, for, he told Andrew, he had “expected you and Emily to go to my house and remain with me as part of my family.” A seemingly small thing, but the sudden physical separation, though only a few miles, gave more pronounced geographic form to the differences of opinion that had long divided them across the hallway in the White House.

  Grumpy and wounded, sensitive and wary of conspiracy, Jackson was further surprised by developments at home. When he had last been in Nashville, he had been enveloped in grief for Rachel but certain that he was surrounded by loving friends who would rally in any storm. Now he was not so sure: he discovered that a formidable element of Nashville society was armed against the Eatons. Led by rivals—including General Edmund Pendleton Gaines, a great frontier fighter who opposed Indian removal—what Jackson called “a combination” refused to bow to his plans for the Eatons’ reception in Tennessee. Seeing Emily and Andrew on the same side as some of his political enemies infuriated him.

  Denouncing Emily and Andrew’s “folly and pride”—he was quick to see in others what he could not acknowledge in himself—Jackson said: “My duty is that my household should bestow equal comity to all, and the nation expects me to control my household to this rule. Would to God my endeavors by counsel and persuasion had obtained this.” But they had not, and Jackson readied for a permanent break with Andrew and Emily. “My connections have acted very strangely here,” he told Lewis, “but I know I can live as well without them as they can without me, and I will govern my Household, or I will have none.”

  Back home in a place where they did not have to make their status and standing clear, Emily and Andrew might have felt some relief that others shared their views, but the affirmation of Nashville society only widened the gap between the Hermitage and the Mansion, where the broader Donelson circle felt more sympathy with Emily and Andrew than with Jackson, a fact that could not elude Jackson.

  Far from improving in Nashville, then, the struggle was deteriorating into bitterness. Andrew wrote John Branch that “affairs [are] so bad” he would not even try to detail them. Consumed with “speculations upon the future” of his own “destiny,” Andrew was stoic: “I am ready for the worst.”

  The day after Andrew wrote these words, Jackson attended a large barbecue in the Eatons’ honor in nearby Franklin, Tennessee, and the turnout added to Jackson’s sense that his family was in the wrong. At 3:30 on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 28, 1830, a crowd of five hundred fêted the secretary of war and his wife, and Jackson was delighted “to shake hands with my old acquaintances, neighbors and soldiers.” Why, Jackson wondered as he took in the hospitable spectacle, could such courtesies and graces not rule the day at the Hermitage and at the Mansion? Why was Franklin doing what he wanted, but neither Nashville nor Washington would? “The ladies of the place had received Mrs. Eaton in the most friendly manner, and have extended to her that polite attention due to her,” Jackson said. “This is as it should be, and is a severe comment on the combination at Nashville, and will lead to its prostration.”

  ALWAYS, ALWAYS, THE language of combat, and as the days grew hotter in the depths of summer, the words of war were more and more frequently directed at Emily and Andrew. Seeing Calhoun at the root of all things evil, Jackson blamed the vice president, but hardly stopped there. “That my Nephew and Niece should permit themselves to be held up as [the] instruments, and tools, of such wickedness, is truly mortifying to me,” Jackson said on July 28.

  Most of Washington remained largely unaware of the gathering darkness in Tennessee. A letter from Rebecca Branch, the daughter of Secretary John Branch, indicates that she, and presumably the larger presidential circle, expected Emily to return with Jackson after the summer: “With the pleasing anticipation of seeing you soon … I close my letter.”

  There was a moment of hope for reconciliation when John Coffee, Emily’s brother-in-law and Jackson’s longtime friend, arrived on the scene and played peacemaker. It often requires a broker to bring serenity and stability to fraught familial situations—situations in which the main players have become so entrenched that the smallest incidents are magnified beyond their proper scope. Coffee, however, had credibility with all parties, and effected a compromise: Emily would be courteous to Margaret when Margaret arrived from Franklin for a visit in the neighborhood. According to family tradition, the bargain was struck on the Mansion’s lawn on Tuesday, August 3, 1830. An exultant Jackson wrote Eaton: “General Coffee has, since here, produced a visible and sensible change in my connections, and they will all be here to receive you and your Lady, who I trust will meet them with her usual courtesy and if a perfect reconciliation cannot take place, that harmony may prevail, and a link broken in the Nashville conspiracy.”

  After agreeing with Coffee to do her part, Emily walked into the Mansion, where she rejoined her children. Thinking things over—Margaret had been a constant concern for twenty months—Emily reconsidered her promise. To receive Margaret here, in Tennessee, under pressure and threat from Jackson, would betray the middle course she had charted and largely followed for more than a year and a half. If she caved in far from Washington, the distance would not matter: the news back to her friends and to the establishment whose approval she craved would be that the frontier Jackson circle—the people who were not even sure of their divorces before they married other men—had accepted a woman into their ranks whom they steadfastly refused to accept in the capital. Such a decision would make Emily look like a hypocrite and a provincial. And so sometime between the conversations with Coffee in the summer heat and the next morning, Emily changed her mind. She would not receive Margaret; she would not go to the Hermitage for dinner in the Eatons’ honor. The deal Coffee had brokered lasted less than twenty-four hours.

  The extent of Jackson’s anger at his niece’s reversal can be gauged by the iciness of his tone in a letter to Lewis written on Saturday, August 7, three days after Emily declined to leave the Mansion for the events involving the Eatons. There was little of the emotional Jackson’s usual thunderous prose or furious run-on sentences. He was crisp and matter-of-fact. “I shall have no female family in the City this ensuing winter,” he told Lewis. “Mrs. Donelson remains with her widowed mother.” Margaret would remain behind as well, in Franklin with her own mother, who had traveled south with the Eatons. Emily’s mother no doubt appreciated her daughter’s company, but Jackson revealed the real reason for the plan when he added that on her visit to Nashville, “Mrs. E. was met by all the ladies in the place with open arms, but one.”

  Andrew was in a terrible spot. Should he stay, or return to Washington? Make his life here, in Tennessee, or abandon his young family to serve a mercurial master? “Whether Mr. Donelson will or will not accompany me to the City has not as yet been determined on by him,” Jackson said with more than a trace of malice. “Whether he will leave his wife and little ones to whom he is greatly attached, he will determine today or tomorrow.”

  JACKSON AND EATON had invited the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Creeks to meet with them in middle Tennessee, but only the Chickasaws actually came; the others were holding out hopes that either the next meeting of Congress or the courts might spare them the fate Jackson intended for them. “Friends and Brothers: You have long dwelt on the soil you occupy, and in early times before the white man kindled his fires too near to yours … you were a happ
y people,” Jackson said to the gathered Chickasaws after mingling with those who were on hand and smoking the ceremonial pipe with them. “Now your white brothers are around you.… Your great father … asks if you are prepared and ready to submit to the laws of Mississippi, and make a surrender of your ancient laws … you must submit—there is no alternative.… Old men! Lead your children to a land of promise and of peace before the Great Spirit shall call you to die. Young chiefs! Preserve your people and nation.”

  Helped along by bribes from Eaton and John Coffee, the chiefs agreed to Jackson’s terms. Though the deal ultimately fell apart, Jackson and Eaton’s mission to the South encapsulated much: Jackson’s persistent personal engagement in the issue, the role of incentives (leaders of factions open to removal were often promised larger gifts of land if they would sign treaties that would exchange land in the East for land in the West), and the miserable planning for actual removal that proved so deadly for so many Indians. After the Tennessee meeting, Eaton and Coffee traveled to Mississippi to arrange for the removal of the Choctaws. According to pattern, they found congenial tribal leaders open to making a deal for the right price. Signed on Wednesday, September 27, 1830, the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek ratified the exchange of five million Choctaw acres in Mississippi for thirteen million acres west of Arkansas. It was the first removal under the 1830 law. “Our doom is sealed,” said one Choctaw. “There is no other course for us but to turn our faces to our new homes toward the setting sun.”

  By happenstance it fell to the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville, who was in Memphis in the winter of 1831, to record the terrors of the Choctaws’ journey—terrors that were the rule, not the exception, as removal went forward. Watching the Choctaws cross the Mississippi, Tocqueville wrote: “It was then in the depths of winter, and that year the cold was exceptionally severe; the snow was hard on the ground, and huge masses of ice drifted on the river. The Indians brought their families with them; there were among them the wounded, the sick, newborn babies, and old men on the point of death. They had neither tents nor wagons, but only some provisions and weapons. I saw them embark to cross the great river, and the sight will never fade from my memory. Neither sob nor complaint rose from that silent assembly. Their afflictions were of long standing, and they felt them to be irremediable.”

  In March 1831, about the same time Tocqueville watched the Choctaws cross the river, the Supreme Court ruled on the first of two critical cases on the fate of the Cherokee tribe. Represented by William Wirt, attorney general under Monroe and Adams, the tribe argued that Georgia was acting illegally—in violation of decades of solemn and binding treaties—by trying to assert state law over the Cherokees on their own land.

  In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Marshall struck notes sympathetic to the Indians but announced that the Court would not render a verdict on the technical grounds that the Cherokees had filed suit as a “foreign nation” when, in Marshall’s view, the tribes would be better described as “domestic dependent nations.… Their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian.”

  It was a striking finding, for the government had long acted as though the Indians were a sovereign people, negotiating and signing numerous treaties with the tribes. With his opinion, Marshall was declining to take a stand in favor of the Indians, shying away from a confrontation with Jackson. (And with Georgia: the state had already demonstrated its contempt for the Supreme Court by hanging an Indian convicted of murder despite an order not to.) It is true that Marshall, while denying the Cherokees immediate help, wrote that the Court might make a different decision about Indian rights in what he called “a proper case, with proper parties.” The Cherokee Nation would be back before Marshall and his colleagues the next year with another case, but for now the decision of the Court stood as a stark reminder, as if any were needed, of the prevailing sense of fatalism about the Indians’ future. It was not just Jackson; even Marshall, often depicted as a hero in the story, harbored all too few hopes that the political reality of removal could be changed. “If it be true that the Cherokee nation have rights, this is not the tribunal in which those rights are to be asserted,” Marshall wrote. “If it be true that wrongs have been inflicted, and that still greater are to be apprehended, this is not the tribunal which can redress the past or prevent the future.” A sad verdict—but a true one.

  ROUGHLY A WEEK after Emily ensured her own exile from Washington, her husband chose to return to the White House by himself. Whether driven by loyalty and love for Jackson, by ambition and a stubborn refusal to surrender his place to the Eatons—or, in all likelihood, by some combination of these motives—Andrew Donelson could not give up his proximity to power.

  “No ladies will return with me,” Jackson wrote Lewis on August 15. “Major A. J. Donelson, my son [Andrew Jackson, Jr.] and Mr. Earl”—the portrait painter who lived at the White House—“will constitute my family, and I hope Major Eaton will accompany me, and leave his Lady until the rise of the waters.”

  While Emily readied herself for exile, Andrew remained at the call and under the command of the man who was breaking up his family. For now, Andrew was resigned to following orders. Yet in a very short time resignation would give way to resentment, and the president he served would find his loyal secretary a conflicted and angry man.

  ON WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1830, Jackson rode in his carriage from the Hermitage to the Mansion to retrieve Andrew. Emily wept. The scene affected the sentimental side of Jackson, and he tried to reassure Emily in the best way he could, given the position he had staked out. “Uncle’s last words to me were that before he would do anything to injure the honor of yourself, who he had raised as a son, he would cut off his right arm,” Emily later wrote Andrew. Yet Jackson’s current course was set, and it was time to go. The wife and babies were left behind, and Emily prepared for a lonely winter as the carriage pulled away into the late summer light, headed for Washington.

  The trip was miserable, the roads rough. As Jackson and Eaton and Donelson and Earl bounced their way north, their horses went thirsty for a long while. Then the rains came down, turning the journey into a muddy slog. Andrew missed his family already, staying up late one night at Knoxville to write to Emily. “We travel at the rate of about 30 miles a day, take a cup of coffee in the morning by candlelight, our breakfast at 10 or 11 after about 12 miles ride, our dinner at night, and then to sleep, but I, not without many thoughts about you and our dear little Jackson and Mary Rachel,” Andrew said, asking his young wife to “be happier than I can without you, kissing Jackson and Mary.”

  Rather than dwell on Emily’s absence or the price he had just forced Andrew to pay, Jackson turned his attention to politics and policy, noting on arrival at the White House in late September that “business has greatly accumulated in my absence.” He had plenty of time—more than ever be-fore—to devote to whatever awaited him on his desk.

  IN THE FAMILY quarters as fall came to Washington, all was silent. When Jackson opened his bedroom door and looked across at the Donelsons’ suite, he heard nothing. The nursery was empty and still. There were no children’s voices, no rustle of Emily’s skirts. A sulky but correct Andrew was there to serve, but he had less time for Jackson as he spent hours closeted, writing letters to his wife. What had been a home—of a toddling Jackson Donelson, of a cheerful baby Mary Rachel, of an attentive and charming Emily, of a genial and sweet Mary Eastin—was hushed. As the autumnal shadows lengthened and night fell, Jackson was in a place he had not been for five decades, not since the word of his mother’s death had reached Waxhaw. Then he had been fourteen, a scrawny boy soldier. Now he was sixty-three, a charismatic commander in chief. But with Emily and the children gone, one thing had not changed after Andrew Jackson’s odyssey from the Carolinas to the capital. He felt he was alone.

  PART II

  I WILL DIE WITH THE UNION

  Late 1830 to 1834

  CHAPTER 12

  I HAVE BEEN LEFT TO SUP ALO
NE

  NOTHING FELT QUITE right, either in Nashville or in Washington. By the middle of October 1830, little Mary Rachel, just over thirteen months old, took her first steps at the Mansion, but her father was not there to celebrate. The toddler’s older brother, Jackson, now four, cross-examined his mother about when life was going to be turned right side up again. “Jackson begins to learn finely and the babe walks a little,” Emily wrote Andrew on Friday, October 15, 1830. “Jackson talks a great deal about you, and he wants to know very much if you have sent us word to come on in the winter.” She did not even try to conceal her own sadness: “I feel quite as anxious, and hope you will let me know as soon as possible.”

  President Jackson was unhappy, too. Sitting up late on an October Sunday evening, he wrote Mary Eastin. “Major Donelson has informed you that the house appears lonesome, and on his account”—and on Jackson’s as well—“it would give me great pleasure that you and Emily and the sweet little ones were here.” He knew what the Donelsons were feeling with their young family split apart; though capable of cruel remarks and seemingly irreversible ultimatums, he was equally given to tenderness and generosity. Thinking about the Donelsons’ plight, his mind drifted across the years. “I have often experienced in life the privation of leaving my dear wife when contending against poverty [and] there I can feel for him.” At the moment, though, sympathy did not translate into mercy.

  Jackson was engaged in an exhausting two-front war to reunite his family and defeat nullification in South Carolina. He viewed both struggles in the same light: as battles in which kinsmen had to find ways to live together, under the same roof, no matter how vehement their quarrels, for the benefits of family outweighed the dangers of division, both at home and in the country at large. He fought both campaigns with vigor, driven by violent emotions that veered from the cruel to the conciliatory.