by Jon Meacham
To Andrew Donelson, Jackson was more forthcoming. “The truth is Eaton alone did look for him and remained in a grocer’s store, after walking through the streets some time, until nearly the hour of three from ten in the morning,” Jackson wrote Andrew. It was Ingham’s guard that posed the real danger, Jackson said. Though he cited no source for the claim, Jackson believed the Ingham forces “had determined when Eaton made the attack to shoot three or seven balls through Eaton.” The most revealing part of that sentence is Jackson’s apparently blasé acknowledgment that Eaton did plan to assault, and most likely kill, Ingham.
Ingham was well out of it and sought security at home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Jackson left for the Rip Raps, and Eaton’s plans were unclear. Eaton had, a correspondent of Henry Clay’s said, “acted a most ridiculous and even crazy part,” and reason seemed to be playing even less of a role than usual in the Eatons’ private world. “Eaton still remains in the city and the rumor of the day varies as to his ultimate intention of leaving it for Tennessee,” Duff Green wrote Ingham on Monday, July 4. “I believe that [Margaret] will resist an attempt to send her into banishment.”
In New York City that April 1831, at Prince and Marion streets, near the Bowery, John Quincy Adams arrived at the Dutch-roofed house of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Gouverneur. Mrs. Gouverneur was a daughter of former president James Monroe, and her father had come to live with her in his great old age. General Lafayette always called when in the country, and a boy who was in and out of the Gouverneurs’ house in those years remembered President Monroe in satin knee breeches, sitting near a grate in the house’s “dingy” parlor.
Receiving Adams, Monroe—now old and failing, only a few months from death—savored the chance to talk politics and foreign affairs with a fellow member of the most exclusive club in the country: that of the former presidents of the United States. Washington, the senior Adams, and Jefferson were all dead: only Madison, at Montpelier, survived. As for the incumbent—well, the subject of Jackson consumed a good bit of Adams’s and Monroe’s time on this afternoon. The two old men moved from speaking of violence in Europe to talking about what Adams called “the recent quasi revolution at Washington,” and revolutions were serious things. The tumult within the Jackson administration offended the orderly sensibilities of two presidents who had, in their day, sought tranquillity. To another friend, Adams said: “If other revolutions partake of the sublime, this one entirely and exclusively belongs to the next step”—the ridiculous.
WHATEVER EATON SAID to Margaret to convince her that he had to resign, and despite Jackson’s enduring support, she had begun to feel the way those in Washington who have slipped from power often do—less important, the object of fewer eyes. As Van Buren recalled it, on a day “long enough after her husband’s relinquishment of office to make her sensible of the change in her position,” Margaret was at home when Jackson and Van Buren stopped by on a walk.
She was not the Margaret of old. “Our reception was to the last degree formal and cold, and what greatly surprised me was that the larger share of the chilling ingredient in her manner and conversation fell to the General,” Van Buren said. Jackson now saw what so many others—including Emily—had long seen: that Margaret was changeable, mercurial, and immature. On leaving the house, Van Buren said, “There has been some mistake here,” but Jackson did not want to talk about it.
“It is strange,” Jackson said, and spoke of it no more.
It was not so strange to those who had assessed Margaret with a more clinical eye than Jackson had. She was selfish and grandiose. But what was done was done. The Eatons would be gone soon enough—by the end of the summer—and Jackson’s Tennessee friends wanted to see Emily back in the White House.
THE CLAY FORCES were already planning for the postelection phase in a close presidential contest in 1832. “Nothing now is more probable than that the Election may come to the House,” Josiah Randall, a Philadelphia lawyer, said to Henry Clay. From the safety of his home in Pennsylvania, Samuel Ingham wanted vengeance. Chased from Washington by Eaton, Ingham turned his anger on Jackson, telling a friend that when the people “know but a small part they will dispose of Genl J.… The magic of Genl J’s popularity is all a delusion. He has more unbearable points about him than I have ever seen in a public man.”
John C. Calhoun’s grandiose vision of himself and his own abilities was also on display in the critical early months of 1831. In Columbia, South Carolina, James Hammond rose early on the morning of Friday, March 18, to meet with Calhoun at the home of a Charleston lawyer. Hammond’s long account of the ensuing conversation sheds much light on Calhoun’s thinking at this juncture.
It was only seven o’clock in the morning, but Calhoun “immediately entered freely into the discussion of the affairs of the nation,” Hammond recalled. “He said that great changes had taken and were taking place now in the political elements … as extraordinary as it had been unexpected.” Calhoun believed that “three fourths of the members of Congress” were “with him,” as were Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky (which would have surprised Clay to hear). Jackson had let him down and was “as jealous of his military fame as ever was Othello of his wife and easily played upon with it by the cunning men by whom he is surrounded.” Calhoun’s plan, according to Hammond: “to throw himself entirely upon the South and if possible to be more Southern.” At two subsequent encounters—a dinner and a tea—Hammond found that “there is a listlessness about him which shows that his mind is deeply engaged and no doubt that it is on the subject of the Presidency. He is unquestionably quite feverish under the present excitement, and his hopes.”
Calhoun’s Southern strategy was risky, for it depended on having enough Southerners and enough voters in border states like Pennsylvania to cast their lot with a South Carolinian who was in the nullifying camp. His case was not helped when, in Charleston on Thursday, May 19, 1831, South Carolina congressman George McDuffie laid out his popular (if inaccurate) forty-bale theory—the idea being that the tariff cost each planter forty bales of cotton out of one hundred—and acknowledged that the struggle was less about money than power.
“I WILL READILY concede that a State cannot nullify an act of Congress by virtue of any power derived from the Constitution,” McDuffie said. “It would be a perfect solecism to suppose any such power was conferred by the Constitution.” Thus dismissing the more intellectual and labored theories—including Calhoun’s in the Exposition and Hayne’s debate with Webster—McDuffie said: “The Union, such as the majority have made it, is a foul monster, which those who worship, after seeing its deformity, are worthy of their chains.”
Reading about McDuffie’s remarks, Duff Green thought the South Carolinians were going too far; such hot rhetoric, he believed, put Calhoun in a vulnerable position nationally. Green’s fear, James Hamilton, Jr., said, was that the Southern extremists “intended to start into open rebellion and insure the empire of the whore of Washington (Mrs. E. I suppose),” Hamilton told Hammond on Saturday, June 11, 1831.
Worried about Jackson’s more precarious political position and disturbed by McDuffie’s May broadside, the Unionists in South Carolina hastily arranged a daylong Fourth of July rally in Charleston. Congressman William Drayton spoke vividly. In a civil struggle, he said, “all the kindly feelings of the human heart would be eradicated, and for them would be substituted those burning and savage passions … which pour rancours into the bosoms of friends” and which, in the end, could lead to “the spectacle of brother armed against brother, of parent against child, and of the child against his parent.”
Though he was secluded at the Rip Raps, Jackson had the last word of the day, in a letter that was read aloud to the meeting and echoed Drayton: “Every enlightened citizen must know that a separation, could it be effected, would begin with civil discord and end in colonial dependence on a foreign power and obliteration from the list of nations.” Yet even before such an eventuality could come to pass, Jackson wrote, he would hurl
all the strength at his command, “at all hazards,” in order to “present an insurmountable barrier to the success of any plan of disorganization.”
Anxiety about civil war was widespread. “I fear from my observations to the South that our Union is in danger,” Stephen Van Rensselaer, a former congressman from New York, wrote Clay. “I had no idea of the violence of the planters. They are deluded by their ambitious leaders.”
IN HIS STUDY in South Carolina, Calhoun, the most ambitious of those “planters,” was having the most intense of summers. On Tuesday, July 26, 1831, Calhoun wrote what came to be known as his Fort Hill Address. It did not breathe fire. It did not summon the South to immediate disunion. In philosophical prose that tended to the dense, Calhoun argued, essentially, that the Union could survive only if the states, as the original parties to the Constitution, had the means to nullify a law if and until the Constitution were to be specifically amended to make the law in question part and parcel of the Constitution. It was an elegant theory, but largely impractical, for the place to fight those battles was in the Congress, where the Framers had taken care to ensure that the voices of the minority could be heard (chiefly, though not solely, through the granting of equal representation in the Senate regardless of a state’s population). There were the courts, too, established and maintained by a combination of executive and legislative power as a check over both.
The nullifiers liked to argue that they were working in the tradition of the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798, which had been passed to protest the Alien and Sedition Acts in particular and the federalism embodied by John Adams in general. Authored by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the resolutions as adopted did not go as far then as South Carolina wanted to go now. (In a draft that came to light in 1832, Jefferson did make extreme arguments, but in the end the Kentucky legislature had passed a less strident version.) And from retirement at Montpelier, Madison denied that the resolutions were intended to do what South Carolina was proposing. The states, Madison said, had the right to appeal for reform, but only through the national government. As articulated in the Fort Hill Address, nullification would create the mechanical means for the states to assert more power over the laws of the nation than the laws of the nation could assert over them.
The objections of most Americans of the time, including Jackson, had less to do with the broader states’ rights point—even when defending the cause of Union, men like Jackson spoke warmly and often of the old republican school of thought—than it did with what Calhoun’s doctrine would inevitably create: a confederacy, not a nation, with the member states choosing which laws they would follow. Defenders of nullification pointed out that Calhoun’s theory suspended the objectionable law only until such time as the Constitution might be amended, at which point the objection that the nullified bill was “unconstitutional” would be moot. At best, however, nullification would lead to a perpetual process of constitutional amendment, crippling the operations of the federal government. At worst, by codifying defiance, Calhoun’s plan tilted power toward the individual states to such a degree that Washington would be, to use a favorite term of the era, “prostrate” before the leaders and people of the different states, all of which had their own ideas, their own interests, and their own passions—ideas, interests, and passions that, as McDuffie’s speech at Charleston in May had shown, could rather easily carry nullification to secession. For once the principle of a state veto was established, who was to say that a state so outraged by an act of Congress—an act its representatives had played a role, if a losing one, in crafting—would graciously concede defeat in the event the rest of the Union chose to enshrine the objectionable legislation in the Constitution? It might do just that, as Calhoun said he hoped. Or it might not. One thing was clear: nullification was a step away from, not toward, investing a representative national government with the power it needed to expand America on the continent and establish it as a serious, substantive player on the global stage.
The question of the tension between the will of the majority and the rights of the minority raised in Calhoun’s doctrine was an essential one. “Let it never be forgotten that where the majority rules the minority is the subject,” he wrote, italicizing the words as though in direct reply to Jackson’s italicized “The majority is to govern” in the 1829 presidential message. Insofar as the personal can be removed from a political argument, this issue was the most profound disagreement between Jackson and Calhoun about the nature of government, and, as is often the case, neither extreme had it exactly right. Jackson’s vision of direct democracy opened the way to mob rule in which an exercised majority had the power to make bad policy and persecute those who, in the spirit of the Constitution, deserved protection.
Despite Jackson’s fervent and well-meaning convictions to the contrary, the “people” were not always right all the time. “The rule of the majority and the right of suffrage are good things, but they alone are not sufficient to guard liberty, as experience will teach,” Calhoun told a friend a few days after the Fort Hill Address was published. True, but a single state was not always right, either. Great issues should be debated and decided by the national means constructed by the Framers, with the three federal branches each playing their role in the work of government.
Nullification was a means of power, and even the most dedicated Unionists, if they were being honest, could envision a hypothetical situation in which they might find such a weapon useful—if, say, a given president and a given Congress were to pass a law they found morally abhorrent. But the fact that Jackson, Webster, Livingston, and the other anti-nullification leaders trusted in the Framers’ system of checks and balances was a tribute to their belief that the Union and the Constitution still seemed the finest—if sometimes flawed—practical way to govern a complex country. Reading Calhoun’s argument, John Quincy Adams observed: “I have been deeply disappointed in him, and now expect nothing from him but evil.”
As his manifesto made its way around the nation, Calhoun faced trouble at home. His wife lost a baby to miscarriage, rains destroyed large swaths of his crops for the year, and a slave named Aleck escaped, only to be captured shortly by a kinsman of Calhoun’s. “I wish you to have him lodged in jail for one week, to be fed on bread and water and to employ someone for me to give him 30 lashes well laid on at the end of the time,” Calhoun wrote. “I hope you will pardon the trouble. I only give it because I deem it necessary to our proper security to prevent the formation of the habit of running away.”
IT WAS A time of division, but the mere fact of political and cultural division—however serious and heartfelt the issues separating American from American may be—is not itself a cause for great alarm and lamentation. Such splits in the nation do make public life meaner and less attractive and might, in some circumstances, produce cataclysmic results. But strong presidential leadership can lift the country above conflict and see it through. When Jackson reached out to Roger Taney of Maryland to become attorney general, Taney, a former Federalist who did not know the president well, was surprised by the appointment, and his recollection of his state of mind when he accepted illustrates the strength of commitment so many Americans felt toward Jackson even as so many others hoped for a Clay or a Calhoun. “He was at that time vehemently assailed, not only by his old enemies but by new ones who before had been his friends”—Duff Green, among others. “I had scarcely any personal acquaintance with him; and knew him only from his public acts and the history of his life. But yet my feelings toward him were warmer than mere political confidence. Pains had been taken to wound not only his fame, but his feelings and affections.”
Taney was tall and thin with a weakness for stooping; a biographer noted that “some thought him … ugly.” More than two decades before his 1857 decision as chief justice in Dred Scott, Taney was a player in the Jacksonian struggle over the Bank. His words, set down in a memoir known as the “Bank War Manuscript” that was long lost to scholars, capture the unifying and energizing
effect the Jackson scandals—from the charges about Rachel to the Eaton affair—had on Jackson’s followers. The controversies drove many away from Jackson’s ranks as his foes undertook to persuade voters in the middle to oppose him. Yet the attacks also brought his loyalists together by investing them and their hero with a shared sense of persecution and a strong incentive to defeat those bent on Jackson’s destruction.
Clay and Calhoun were in the vanguard of fighting a political version of total war against Jackson, and those who believed in Jackson and in his causes did not desert the field. Instead, as Taney’s memoir shows, they answered in kind. Bloodthirsty bids for power often provoke equally bloodthirsty reactions—especially when the target is a man like Jackson, whose own appetite for control and for the elimination of enemies knew few bounds. Here is Taney’s explanation of his own abstract connection to Jackson—a connection formed before there was any intimacy between the two men:
His wife had been most wantonly and cruelly introduced into the electioneering contest. She had been defamed and traduced in the most ferocious spirit. The ungenerous and unmanly attacks upon her character had not been confined to the low and the base, but put forward again and again by every newspaper which supported the rival candidate; from the highest to the lowest; and if not instigated and encouraged, they were yet undoubtedly countenanced and encouraged by all the political leaders opposed to him. I should have grieved to see a high and noble spirit beaten down by those who had thus wantonly tortured him, and broken the heart of the excellent wife to whom he was so devotedly attached. It seemed to me that every man who by his support of him in 1824 had made him so prominent in the canvass of 1828 and by that means brought on him this vindictive rivalry, was bound to do more than give him a mere cold political support; was bound to make personal sacrifices if they were necessary to support his administration while he continued to deserve his confidence and continued to be unjustly assailed. Such sacrifices seemed to me to be necessary where new enemies were combining with the old ones to wage war against him in the same fierce spirit of hostility.