by Jon Meacham
They appealed the state decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. Chief Justice Marshall found for the missionaries and, in a larger sense, for the Cherokees. It was a far different decision than 1831’s. Release the missionaries, Marshall said, announcing that the Court believed Georgia’s anti-Cherokee laws were “repugnant to the Constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States.” Justice Joseph Story suspected the matter was not over: “The Court has done its duty,” he said. “Let the nation now do theirs.”
As word of the decision spread, Jackson remained in the White House, largely silent. His stillness unnerved his foes. “Our public affairs are evidently tending to a crisis,” Clay wrote on Thursday, March 10, 1832. “The consequences of the recent decision of the Supreme Court must be very great. If it be resisted, and the President refuses to enforce it, there is a virtual dissolution of the Union. For it will be in vain to consider it as existing if a single state can put aside the laws and treaties of the U.S. and when their authority is vindicated by a decision of the S. Court, the President will not perform his duty to enforce it.”
In Washington, Susan Donelson, a daughter of William Gaston’s who had married into the Donelson clan, heard an account of Jackson’s views on the matter. “We were at the Capitol yesterday,” she wrote her father, a North Carolina legislator and judge, on Saturday, March 12. “A gentleman who dined with General Jackson heard him say he thought the decision of the Supreme Court erroneous on the Cherokee Case and tis doubted here whether he would see it executed—a pretty thing indeed, for him to give such an opinion of the highest tribunal and to hesitate about executing its decrees.” Horace Greeley later claimed that Jackson had said: “Well, John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”
THE “NOW LET him enforce it” remark is like the more colorful images from holy scripture: historically questionable but philosophically true. What Jackson did say, to John Coffee, was: “The decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that it cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.” The circumstances were rather mundane for such a momentous case: the Court had adjourned after handing down the decision. As the scholar Edwin A. Miles reconstructed the chronology of the case, according to Section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789, the Court could not render a final decision—a decision that would then have to be enforced, or not—until a case had already been “remanded once without effect.” In this instance, the Court’s opinion was sent to the Superior Court of Georgia. No one expected the Georgia court to follow the Supreme Court’s directive, but because the Supreme Court was now in recess, nothing could be done until Marshall and his colleagues reconvened in January 1833. In the strictest sense of the law, then, Jackson was powerless to act until there was a final judgment in roughly ten months’ time.
All true enough, but it is also true that Andrew Jackson never allowed anything, much less legal niceties, to stand in his way if he was determined to do something. Had he wanted to reverse Georgia’s course toward the Cherokees, it is easy to imagine his declaring the enforcement of a decision of a branch of the national government a solemn presidential duty, and, if necessary, threatening the state with invasion by forces that he himself might lead—all things he contemplated in his battle against South Carolina. But he had no desire to reverse Georgia’s course. There were at least two factors at work. First, he thought Georgia’s pressure on the tribe would expedite removal, and second, he did not want to antagonize another Southern state at a time when he was isolating South Carolina in its drift toward nullification. As usual, then, Jackson did what he liked. (In the end, the administration convinced the governor of Georgia to release the missionaries, and their counsel, William Wirt, stood down.)
ON FRIDAY, May 18, 1832, Emily gave birth to her third child, a boy, and all again went well. From a letter to her mother four weeks after the delivery, it is clear that the Eaton affair has receded, for Jackson is spoken of as virtually a third parent: “I am thankful that I have it once more in my power to write to you and inform you of my convalescence, and of the good health and growth of our dear little boy. He was a month old Friday last.… We have been undecided about his name, that is Andrew and Uncle said he had better be called Samuel and I wished him called John, so we have concluded to join the two names together and call him John S. Donelson, which will distinguish him from the other Johns.”
As always, Emily was pushing herself. “I have been very well all the time except a slight cold I took when he was two weeks old. I was so well that I was walking about and the weather being very changeable took cold which threw me back a little.” As the weather grew warmer, she hoped to come home but was uncertain when they might be able to; politics was too consuming. “I do not know yet what we shall do this summer about going to Tennessee as Congress has not adjourned and [there is] no prospect of it soon. Uncle says we must go, if only to stay ten days.…”
Jackson’s eagerness to escape Washington was understandable. A tariff reform bill was wending its way through Congress, and it was unclear whether the final result would calm the South or lead to nullification. The Bank recharter was also likely to pass—though not with a veto-proof two-thirds majority—and would probably reach the White House before long. “I had hoped before this to be on my way to Tennessee, but Congress continuing so long in session has made my trip now almost impossible,” Andrew Donelson wrote to his brother-in-law Stockley in Nashville. “The Tariff bill will pass pretty much as you see it reported to the Senate: and so will the Bank as reported to the House. The latter bill will however not be approved by the President.”
Even God became an issue of contention as the congressional session went on, with Jackson and Henry Clay squaring off over church and state amid a plague. The trouble had begun in Quebec, when a ship arrived from Europe in June 1832. Forty-two of the passengers were dead or dying from cholera, a communicable illness spread through food and water and caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, which strikes the intestines, leading to diarrhea, vomiting, and, in the worst cases, death through dehydration. In two weeks the disease struck New York with such ferocity that the mayor canceled its Fourth of July parade; 2,565 people in the city ultimately died. From Philadelphia to Baltimore to Washington, west to Cincinnati and Chicago and south to New Orleans, the disease terrified the country. On June 27, 1832, Henry Clay proposed that Jackson declare a day of prayer and fasting to seek divine relief from the outbreak.
The proposition was good politics—people in the afflicted states might be grateful, and religious believers who were undecided in the presidential race could see Clay’s initiative as evidence of a good soul who shared the essence of their faith.
Yet as he had been when Ezra Stiles Ely made the case for the election of “Christian Rulers,” Jackson was reluctant to mix God and government so overtly. Reading the establishment clause in the First Amendment in its strictest sense, Jackson said he, too, believed in “the efficacy of prayer,” but felt that the president of the United States should “decline the appointment of any period or mode” of religious activity. “I could not do otherwise without transcending those limits which are prescribed by the Constitution for the President, and without feeling that I might in some degree disturb the security which religion now enjoys in this country in its complete separation from the political concerns of the General Government,” Jackson said.
LET THE PEOPLE, or even the states, tend to matters of faith. “It is the province of the pulpits and the state governments to recommend the mode by which the people may best attest their reliance on the protecting arm of the almighty in times of great public distress,” Jackson said. “Whether the apprehension that cholera will visit our land furnishes a proper occasion for their solemn notice, I must therefore leave to their own consideration.” It was yet another point on which Jackson and the evangelical movement failed to agree.
“I am no sectarian, though a lover of the Christian religion,” he said while in the White House. “I do not believe t
hat any who shall be so fortunate as to be received to heaven through the atonement of our blessed Savior will be asked whether they belonged to the Presbyterian, the Methodist, the Episcopalian, the Baptist, or the Roman Catholic [faiths]. All Christians are brethren, and all true Christians know they are such because they love one another. A true Christian loves all, immaterial to what sect or church he may belong.”
Jackson was prepared to veto Clay’s day of fast measure if it reached the White House. It did not: the resolution was tabled in the House, ending the episode. In a draft of a veto message written by Louis McLane, Jackson was to have said, “In the spirit and structure of our Constitution, we have carefully separated sacred from civilian concerns,” and to sign a resolution for a religious observance struck Jackson as “incompatible with my sense of duty under the Constitution.” He believed, he said, in the “efficacy of prayer in all times,” from “the day of prosperity” to the “hour of … calamity.” But he was the president, and his duties to the office, as he saw them, came first: “I deem it my duty to preserve this separation and to abstain from any act which may tend to an amalgamation perilous to both” church and state. There ended the lesson.
CHAPTER 15
THE FURY OF
A CHAINED PANTHER
IN THE FIRST week of July 1832, Jackson turned his energies from the prayer veto toward the Bank. The bill to recharter had passed both houses and reached the president’s desk. Biddle thought he had Jackson where he wanted him. “He was offended with the course General Jackson had pursued towards the institution, and was strongly opposed to him, and determined to place him in what he supposed would be a dilemma,” Roger Taney said of Biddle. “He persuaded himself that General Jackson would hardly dare to meet the bill with an absolute and unqualified veto. But if he did, [Biddle] felt confident that the popularity of the Bank and the influence it could exercise would defeat his reelection. And if he assented to the bill, or appeared to temporize and evade the issue presented to him, it would be regarded as proof that he feared the Bank, and destroy the high place he then held in the confidence and affections of the people.” The Senate passed the bill on Monday, June 11, 1832; the vote in the House was expected to be close. One story sheds light on the Bank’s machinations:
On a rainy day during the deliberations in the House, Taney shared a carriage up Capitol Hill with a Jacksonian congressman from North Carolina, Samuel Price Carson. Carson wanted Taney to look over a draft of an anti-Bank speech the congressman was to deliver in the House debate, saying he planned to publish the address and, as Taney recalled it, “was anxious therefore to put it upon grounds that would bear the closest examination.”
Taney demurred, citing the press of business before the Supreme Court, but, given his own opposition to recharter, was pleased that Carson was so determined to vote with Jackson against the Bank. After the vote, Taney was surprised to hear that Carson had voted with Biddle. “Upon my return I mentioned what had passed to a friend … who[said]that[Carson] … had obtained a loan of twenty thousand dollars from the Bank, and had changed his opinion.” Reflecting on the sequence of events, Taney was philosophical about what had transpired, seeing in it evidence of both perennial human weakness and the threat that an institution such as the Bank posed in a democracy:
Now I do not mean to say that he was directly bribed to give his vote. From the character he sustained and from what I knew of him I think he would have resented anything that he regarded as an attempt to corrupt him. But he wanted the money, and felt grateful for the favor, and perhaps thought that an institution which was so useful to him, and had behaved with so much kindness, could not be injurious or dangerous to the public, and that it would be as well to continue it. Men when under the influence of interest or passion often delude themselves thoughtlessly, and do not always acknowledge even to themselves the motives upon which they really act.… It was one of the dangers arising from this mammoth money power, that its very duties as collecting and disbursing agent brought it constantly in contact with members of Congress and other public functionaries and made it acquainted with their wants and enabled it to place them under obligations and create a feeling of dependence or even gratitude without the direct and offensive offer of a bribe.
Rumors of such transactions helped Jackson’s cause enormously. The Bank, Andrew Donelson said, “is becoming desperate: caught in its own net.” After the House voted, Jackson sent Taney, who was in Annapolis, a note asking him to return to Washington. Arriving at the White House after breakfast, Taney was taken to Jackson’s office. Kendall had drafted a veto message, and Donelson was editing it, but Jackson wanted Taney to join in. Taney said of course.
Taney joined Donelson in Ralph Earl’s room, where the private secretary was at work; Levi Woodbury joined them on the second day. For three days Jackson came in and out, listening and dictating and debating. Earl was there, going about his painting and paying no attention to the matters of state unfolding before him; Taney did not think Earl was “even hearing what was said.” Amid the faint smell of oil paints and in the northern light, Jackson and his team crafted one of the most significant veto messages in American history.
JACKSON’S DECISION WAS framed in sweeping terms, arguing that the goal of government should be to better the lives of the many, not reward the few. That the Bank was most likely not as guilty of the latter offense as Jackson believed was, politically, beside the point. Near the end of the message, he made a sophisticated point about human nature and the role of government, a point that reflected both realism and hope. “It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes,” Jackson said, continuing:
Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.
Jackson was oversimplifying—some classes of people and some enterprises require more protection, more resources, and more attention than others. In this passage, however, he was oversimplifying in the service of a philosophical point, arguing that an end to privilege would mark the beginning of a truly democratic era. That is not, of course, how supporters of the Bank saw it. But they were even more outraged by a passage in the middle of the message in which Jackson asserted that no single institution in American life or government was all-controlling, and that as president he had to do what he thought was right. “The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution,” Jackson wrote, saying:
Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them for passage or approval as it is of the supreme judges when it may be brought before them for judicial decision. The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both. The authority of the Supreme Court must not, therefore, be permitted to control the Congress or the Executive when acting in their legislati
ve capacities, but to have only such influence as the force of their reasoning may deserve.
Senators and congressmen who could see past the issue of the moment realized that Jackson had just expanded the influence of his office yet again. From the Maysville veto on, he had moved to shift power from the Capitol to the White House, and his assertions in the Bank message went further still. Jackson had made it clear that he interpreted the Court’s ruling in McCulloch v. Maryland, the case that had established the constitutionality of the Bank, as inconclusive. But he also had made it clear that it hardly mattered—that he was bound to interpret the laws as he understood them regardless of what the Court said. His foes thought him power-mad. “Sir, no President and no public man ever before advanced such doctrines in the face of the nation,” Daniel Webster said on the floor of the Senate. “There never before was a moment in which any President would have been tolerated in asserting such a claim to despotic power.”
In practice, however, Jackson was not declaring himself emperor. He was not preaching defiance or despotism. His message concluded, in fact, with an acknowledgment that life would go on if he lost the war against the Bank. “I have now done my duty to my country,” he said. “If sustained by my fellow-citizens, I shall be grateful and happy; if not, I shall find in the motives which impel me ample grounds for contentment and peace.”