by Jon Meacham
But the king understood what the commoners wanted, and needed. They wanted a champion, and needed—or at least thrilled to—the drama of the new kind of campaigning. Michel Chevalier, one of the many foreign observers touring the country in the Jackson years, took in a mile-long Jackson parade in New York in which people carried torches and banners. The procession, Chevalier said, “stopped before the houses of the Jackson men to fill the air with cheers, and halted at the doors of the leaders of the opposition, to give three, six, or nine groans.”
Duff Green watched the rise of the new techniques with envy and gloom. “Lewis has gone on to Nashville, no doubt to be present and aid in the party deliberations,” Green told Calhoun on Tuesday, October 23, 1832. “Kendall and Company have organized a Hickory Club here which is intended to give tone and character to all other clubs throughout the country; and one of the principles of faith is opposition to nullification. You may rest assured they do not intend to sleep.”
Neither did Jackson, who used the convenient excuse of his autumn journey from Tennessee to Washington to be seen, shake hands, and, in Clay’s Kentucky, show himself at a Democratic barbecue in Lexington, not far from Ashland. “This is certainly a new mode of electioneering,” said the pro-Clay National Intelligencer. “We do not recollect before to have heard of a President of the United States descending in person into the political arena.” Blair helpfully published the words of the campaign theme song, “The Hickory Tree,” which was to be sung by torchlight in campaign parades: “Hurra for the Hickory Tree! / Hurra for the Hickory Tree! / Its branches will wave o’er tyranny’s grave.”
Clay was playing by the old rules, and it cost him. He declined invitations like the ones Jackson accepted, saying he had promised that “whilst I continued before the public … as a candidate for its suffrage, I would not accept of any invitation to a public entertainment proposed on my own account.”
The political class expected a close-run election. Many wise observers did not think Jackson could prevail. “His opponents (and they are not few or unimportant) denounce him as a person acting upon impulse, of an obstinate and irascible character, and as being surrounded by private Counsellors unworthy of his confidence or public support,” Charles Bankhead, an English diplomat, wrote to Viscount Palmerston from Washington on Sunday, October 28, 1832. Bankhead believed the race would probably end up in the House, where Jackson would lose.
Beyond the capital, though, Kendall’s Hickory Clubs were creating a sense of excitement around Jackson’s reelection, a sense, for voters, of belonging to a larger and grander cause than the ordinary work of their days. It was, in a way, politics as entertainment, but it was also a serious, even sacred undertaking. Chevalier compared Jackson’s torchlight parades to Catholic processions, saying that the images of Jacksonians surging through the streets “belong to history, they partake of the grand; they are the episodes of a wondrous epic which will bequeath a lasting memory to posterity, that of the coming of democracy.”
THE FRENCHMAN WAS right. When the time came, Jackson won overwhelmingly. He carried the Electoral College by a convincing 219–49 margin over Clay. The popular vote was closer, with Wirt’s Anti-Mason ticket pulling 8 percent, leaving Jackson with close to 55 percent and Clay with about 37 percent. Jackson’s popularity was “so unbounded,” Charles Bankhead reported to London, that he was able to “overcome all anticipated difficulties, and to obtain … a great majority of the voice of the people.” The closing weeks of the campaign, Bankhead added, had been especially emotional. “The excitement during the last fortnight has been very great, and no exertions have been wanting by the friends and supporters of the rival candidates.”
For Clay, the campaign might be over, but he would not rest. “The dark cloud which had been so long suspended over our devoted country, instead of being dispelled as we had fondly hoped it would be, has become more dense, more menacing, more alarming,” Clay said to Charles Hammond on Saturday, November 17, 1832. “Whether we shall ever see light, and law, and liberty again is very questionable. Still, we must go on to the last, with what spirit we can, to discharge our duty. It is under feelings of this kind that I expect, a week or two hence, to go to Washington.”
Seven days later, in Columbia, the South Carolina convention nullified the Tariff of 1832, directly challenging the authority of the president of the United States. Should Jackson choose to use force to bring the state into line, the convention declared, South Carolina would “at every hazard” consider itself “absolved from all further obligation to maintain or preserve their political connection with the people of the other states, and will forthwith proceed to organize a separate government and do all other acts and things which sovereign and independent states may of right do.”
According to a story making the rounds, Jackson had summoned Congressman Warren R. Davis to urge him “to go back home and tell the people of South Carolina to quit their foolishness and to return to their allegiance to the United States.” When Davis replied that “the people at home were in … earnest,” Jackson opened a drawer and said, “Warren, in that drawer I have offers of three hundred thousand volunteers to march to South Carolina.” John Randolph of Roanoke was supposed to have said that “South Carolina would not yield, that she would fight; that General Jackson would be [eager] to get Hamilton, Calhoun, McDuffie and Hayne into his power; that [Randolph] had no doubt that if a war came, as some feared it must, General Jackson would hang those gentlemen if he could get hold of them … and there would be a bloody war of it.”
In this tumultuous season—the presidential election, the meeting of the convention in South Carolina, the maneuvers to station loyal troops at Charleston—William Gaston of North Carolina, no fan of Jackson’s, recognized the stakes of the showdown. “It is no longer to be doubted or denied that there is a party in our land—how numerous I know not—who desire a dissolution of our Union and hope to erect upon its ruins a Southern Confederacy,” Gaston wrote to friends in Montgomery, Alabama.
JACKSON’S FOES WERE braced for the worst. He had spent his life confounding his enemies—turning cool when they thought he would be hot, or fierce when they expected him to be gentle. As the fires burned in the South, Jackson sat in the White House weighing his options. Which Andrew Jackson would show up for this fight? The diplomat or the despot? Or both?
CHAPTER 17
A DREADFUL CRISIS OF
EXCITEMENT AND VIOLENCE
A WEEK BEFORE Christmas 1832, Pierce M. Butler, a politically connected bank president in Columbia, South Carolina, sat down by his fireside to write a short note to James Henry Hammond, the Southern radical. In the nullifiers’ camp, Robert W. Barnwell, a South Carolina congressman, predicted that Jackson was “bent on enforcing his mandate at the point of the bayonet.” Worse, Barnwell “feared Congress or a majority [of the people] would sustain” Jackson in such a course.
Hammond was prepared to take up arms for the state’s cause, and volunteered his military services to Robert Hayne, whom the South Carolina legislature had elected governor on Monday, December 10. “I shall immediately set about arranging my private affairs for taking the field at an early day, not to quit it until all is settled,” Hammond told Hayne on Thursday, December 20, 1832. The next day, Hayne appointed a new military aide-decamp, who was “charged with the duty of raising, inspecting, and granting commissions to volunteer companies” during what Hayne called “this crisis in our affairs, when everything dear to our country is at stake.”
The governor issued detailed secret orders to form a corps of “Mounted Minute Men” to be instantly summoned to the defense of the state. “My plan is this,” Hayne told his aide. “Let a number of men (every one of whom keeps a horse), agree to repair at a moment’s warning to any point which may be designated by the Governor in any emergency. Let them then come prepared with guns or rifles, or arms of any description, with a supply of powder and ball, and come in the shortest time possible.” Predictably—South Carolinians being Sou
th Carolinians, to whom appearances often mattered rather more than even to other Southerners—Hayne closed his directive by advising that his staff’s uniforms should have “a short yellow crane Plume” and advising them of the best places to purchase “Palmetto Buttons of a beautiful pattern” to wear.
In Washington, Jackson read Joel Poinsett’s intelligence reports with fascination. “Keep me constantly advised,” he told Poinsett, who obliged with detailed letters that reached the White House by express. “I have on every occasion told my fellow citizens that the Executive of the United States would act decidedly and vigorously,” Poinsett wrote Jackson in the autumn of 1832. After the nullification vote in November, Jackson was embarking on perhaps the most delicate mission of his life—how to preserve the Union without appearing so tyrannical and power-hungry that other Southern states might join with South Carolina, precipitating an even graver crisis that could lead to the secession of several states. The Old World nations followed the trouble with great interest. Perhaps a crack-up would open the old British colonies to new exploitation, eliminating or at least weakening the United States as a global rival.
Three days after the passage of the nullification ordinance, Samuel Cram Jackson, a Presbyterian minister from New England who happened to be in South Carolina and kept a diary of events, thought Charleston more worried than exuberant. “Aspect gloomy,” he wrote. “Anxiety and fear pervades many hearts. Many are looking for civil war, and scenes of bloodshed. The general government has ordered troops to the forts in the harbor.” The next day the city remained in a “most anxious state; feelings excited; all uncertainty as to prospects. The nullifiers are trumpeting and carrying highhanded measures; and the Union men are determined not to submit. Things seem to be preparing for a dreadful crisis of excitement and violence.”
There was danger on every side. Writing of reinforcing the federal installations in Charleston harbor, Poinsett told Jackson that “the custom house where the battle will be fought is crowded with nullifiers; ought they not be removed?” The Unionists did not trust the post office, either, and they knew they must not give the rebels cause to go to arms. “We are not disposed to make any riotous or tumultuous resistance, but we are ready to support the laws if legally called upon to do so at the hazard of our lives,” Poinsett said.
Four days after Poinsett posted this letter, Samuel Cram Jackson recorded a near massacre in the streets of Charleston. A band of nullifiers staked out King Street downtown in order to challenge those Unionists who were leaving a gathering; an officer in the nullifiers’ ranks sent word to Poinsett that the Union men should use Meeting Street in order to avoid a confrontation. The warning infuriated the Unionists. As the Reverend Jackson wrote, “their blood was up, to think that the nullifiers should dictate the street they should walk in. The cry resounded, ‘King Street, King Street.’ Before they left their hall, they organized into companies, chose their leaders, and promised implicit obedience. Both parties were armed with clubs and dirks.” The nullifiers numbered about five hundred, the Unionists a thousand, and the rebels “hissed, and called opprobrious names, but chose not to assault.”
Hotheads in the Union ranks wanted to strike, but those in charge restrained them. “The merest trifle, a word from a leader, would, it is confidently stated by moderate and Christian men, have led to a combat in which hundreds would have lost their lives; fathers and sons and brothers would have slain each other,” Samuel Cram Jackson said. “The parties themselves were afterwards astounded at the pitch of excitement to which they were brought.… It was owing entirely to the firmness and wisdom of the leaders that the streets of Charleston did not run down with blood.”
BUT NO ONE could know whether caution would continue to trump confrontation. In Washington, after reading Poinsett’s early letters, President Jackson dispatched George Breathitt, the brother of the governor of Kentucky and a kinsman of John Eaton’s, to scout the territory under the cover of a postal inspection. Breathitt’s real task, according to Jackson’s confidential orders: to “collect all the information … that you can obtain which may be serviceable to the government.” As Breathitt assessed the situation, Poinsett briefed Jackson on the political divisions within the enemy camp. McDuffie, still a member of Congress, was pressing for secession; Calhoun, still vice president, argued for a more moderate course to allow his theories time to be tested. “Both parties [of the nullifiers] are anxious and indulge the hope that the general government will commit some act of violence which will enlist the sympathies of the bordering states: provided it be not their own, they care not how soon blood is shed,” Poinsett told Jackson. “It will be necessary therefore to proceed with great caution in counteracting their schemes.”
Poinsett was an able man, and Jackson was fortunate to have him on the ground. He was loyal, canny, and wise. When Jackson moved to send new officers, Poinsett offered good advice, asking that Jackson dispatch “a Southern man if possible. I say Southern because prejudices have been excited against Northerners, and as it is considered a Southern question exclusively, it might be politic to have it settled by Southern men.”
For two agonizing months—from October through November and into the first day or two of December—Poinsett wrote long, impassioned letters to Jackson, yet Jackson merely made the right Unionist noises in reply without offering a detailed plan of support. Poinsett grew worried. On Thursday, November 29, 1832, he sent Jackson a note begging for reassurance. “We had rather die than submit to the tyranny of such an oligarchy as J. C. Calhoun, James Hamilton, Robt. Y. Hayne and McDuffie, and we implore our sister states and the federal government to rescue us from these lawless and reckless men,” Poinsett told Jackson. Other Unionists, Poinsett said, believed that, in the event of nullification, “Congress will say to us, ‘Let South Carolina go out of the Union if she will go,’ … If such a course should be adopted, the Union must be dissolved in all its parts and foreign and domestic wars necessarily ensue. Whereas if these bad men are put down by the strong arm, the Union will be cemented by their conduct and by the vigor of the government, and you will earn the imperishable glory of having preserved this great confederacy from destruction.”
Jackson sympathized with Poinsett, and, on Sunday, December 2, made his own opinion as clear as he could: “I fully concur with you in your views of nullification. It leads directly to civil war and bloodshed and deserves the execration of every friend of the country.” Weapons were en route to arm the Unionists, but “calmness and firmness” were essential, and the law would be “duly executed, but by proper means.” Jackson was ready to take extraordinary steps, but only when he was forced into it. He did not want to exert his power until he absolutely had to.
The annual presidential message Andrew Donelson took to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, December 4, was drafted in something of a conciliatory spirit. “This is all we want, peaceably to nullify the nullifiers,” Jackson told Van Buren. In the wake of South Carolina’s defiance, Jackson kept his temper in check and issued a document that opposed nullification even as it advocated tariff reform and sounded like a defense of states’ rights. High tariffs—even the ones just passed—created, he said, “discontent and jealousy dangerous to the stability of the Union,” and as the national debt disappeared, the theoretical need for great sources of federal revenue would disappear, too, opening the way to cutting tariff rates even further.
HIS TONE WAS Jeffersonian. He evoked the simpler republican virtues of the previous generation, offering a comforting vision of life and government: “Limited to a general superintending power to maintain peace at home and abroad, and to prescribe laws on a few subjects of general interest not calculated to restrict human liberty, but to enforce human rights, this government will find its strength and its glory in the faithful discharge of these plain and simple duties.” Congressman John Quincy Adams said the message was “in substance a complete surrender to the nullifiers of South Carolina.”
At first, the message did seem difficult to reconci
le with Jackson’s movements behind the scenes. But that was the point: Jackson’s December strategy was threefold. With the annual message, he intended to isolate South Carolina rhetorically by appearing reasonable about the general principles at stake. With his secret military preparations, he bolstered the spirits of the Union Party in the state and put the federal government in position to fight if things came to that. Three days later, on December 7, Poinsett heard warming news from Secretary of War Lewis Cass: “The President has instructed me to inform you that the 5,000 stand of arms and 1,000 rifles, the propriety of placing which in depot at Charleston was suggested by you, have been ordered to that place, and that directions have been given to General Scott for issuing them for the use of any portion of the citizens of South Carolina for the defense of the laws of the Union.”
After reassuring those sympathetic to state sovereignty and a limited federal government by sounding vaguely Calhoun-like in the annual message, Jackson revealed the third element of his year-end attack on the forces of disunion: his proclamation of Monday, December 10, 1832.
CHAPTER 18
THE MAD PROJECT OF DISUNION
JACKSON WAS ALONE in his office, standing at his desk, when he began writing the document. With a steel pen in hand, he moved quickly from page to page—so quickly, in fact, that James Parton reported that Jackson had to spread the pages over his desk to let them dry: “A gentleman who came in when the President had written fifteen or twenty pages observed that three of them were glistening with wet ink at the same moment.” The pages were soon sent across Lafayette Square to Decatur House, where Edward Livingston was to polish Jackson’s rough draft. The final version was, then, the work of Jackson and Livingston—it drew on the ideas Livingston had outlined in the Senate in 1830—and its affirmation of the idea of Union and attack on nullification ran to roughly 8,700 words. As the document went to press, Lewis suggested a change that might mollify those Americans who believed in states rights’ but not nullification. Jackson heard Lewis out and said there would be no quarter given: “Those are my views, and I will not change them nor strike them out,” Jackson said.