by Jon Meacham
Strong words, and Jackson knew that if things came to such a pass it would mean civil war. “It is very late and my eyes grow dim,” he told Poinsett. “Keep me well advised, and constantly.” There was much to monitor. “I understand that Governor Hayne is making every preparation for warlike measure,” Washington Irving wrote the next day. “I hope and trust that this will all turn out a game of brag.”
On Thursday, January 31, South Carolina held a day of fasting to pray for the success of its cause. It was cloudy and cool in Columbia, where the Reverend Thomas Goulding, a Presbyterian clergyman, preached a sermon Samuel Cram Jackson thought “rather a slim affair,” but outside the pulpit things were moving: “All went to the Methodists to see the military parade their companies of volunteers.”
IN WASHINGTON, THE weather was clear as the congressional debate over nullification began. Fanny Kemble, the British actress, was in the capital to perform and left a diary of the city. “We walked up to the Capitol,” Kemble wrote. “The day was most beautifully bright and sunny, and the mass of white building, with its terraces and columns, stood out in fine relief against the cloudless blue sky.”
The women of the city, as was their custom, flooded into the House and Senate chambers. In the Senate, spectators climbed the narrow steps and walked through the door to the gallery, past a sign saying:
GENTLEMEN WILL BE PLEASED NOT TO PLACE
THEIR FEET ON THE BOARD IN FRONT OF THE GALLERY,
AS THE DIRT FROM THEM FALLS UPON SENATORS HEADS.
According to John Coffee, who was in Washington, gentlemen were having a difficult time getting anywhere near the action, let alone close enough to put their feet up. The women, Coffee said, “fill the legislative halls when it is understood that some lofty spirit is to speak, so that it is very difficult for the members to retain their seats or a backwoodsman to be allowed to stand near the door and look in.”
No one knew what to expect. “I can give you no definitive opinion as to what will be done here,” Clay wrote to his son from Washington on Thursday, January 3, 1833. “There is a general feeling of great instability in the present state of things. The Union is not believed to be free from danger whatever course may be pursued.” True to his nature, though, Clay was pursuing a course of compromise, looking for a middle ground before it was too late.
Friday, February 1, 1833, was the first deadline, the date South Carolina had announced it would suspend the collection of the federal tariff, possibly leading to violence. From Washington, Calhoun urged the state to hold off for a bit. “To take issue now would be to play into the hands of the administration,” Calhoun said. “I feel confident we want time only to ensure victory. The cause is a great one; greater than that of the Revolution.” The nullifiers agreed. They would wait to see what Congress, and Jackson, would do. The first deadline thus passed quietly. “The famous day fixed for the operation of one ‘Ordinance,’ ” Samuel Cram Jackson wrote in his diary on February 1, “but all is calm—no bloodshed—a beautiful day.”
CLAY HAD BEEN at work on a compromise tariff since the middle of December, and spoke in the Senate to make the case for reform on Tuesday, February 12, 1833. Fix the tariff, and foil nullification. Foil nullification, and undercut the Force Bill. Undercut the Force Bill, and check Jackson.
Praising “that great principle of compromise and concession which lies at the bottom of our institutions,” Clay was able to do what Jackson could not, for Jackson, though privately working for resolution, stood by his public position, which was one of implacability. South Carolina, Clay said, should be treated with respect, not contempt, so long as she gave up nullification in exchange for the lower tariff.
“If there be any who want civil war, who want to see the blood of any portion of our countrymen spilt, I am not one of them,” Clay said. “I wish to see war of no kind; but, above all, I do not desire to see civil war.… God alone knows where such a war would end.”
Subtly alluding to the impression that Jackson was intent on punishing the state in general and Calhoun in particular, Clay urged the Senate to rise above animosity. South Carolina, he said, “has been with us before, when her ancestors mingled in the throng of battle, and as I hope our posterity will mingle with hers, for ages and centuries to come, in the united defense of liberty, and for the honor and glory of the Union, I do not wish to see her degraded or defaced as a member of this confederacy.”
Clay might think Jackson heavy-handed, but the president was deftly maneuvering behind the scenes. Reassuring Poinsett that the Unionists would not be abandoned, Jackson nevertheless asserted again and again that the nullifiers would have to make the first move. “Notwithstanding all their tyranny and blustering conduct, until some act of force is committed or there is an assemblage of an armed force by the orders of your Governor … to resist the execution of the laws of the United States, the Executive of the United States has no legal and constitutional power to order the militia into the field to suppress it, and not then, until his proclamation commanding the insurgents to disperse has been issued,” Jackson wrote on February 7. Be firm, Jackson said, but know, too, that there was hope. “The tariff will be reduced to the wants of the government, if not at this session of Congress, certainly at the next,” he told Poinsett—a sign that Jackson believed a compromise was not only possible but likely.
The prospects for a peaceful resolution were rising, but Calhoun thought Jackson was another Macbeth who dreamed of “the image of a Crown.” Over two days, February 15 and 16, he held the floor of the Senate, making the case for state sovereignty and against the Force Bill. The argument meant everything to him.
THE FORCE BILL, Calhoun said, was “a question of self-preservation” to South Carolina. If it passed and if Jackson used its powers, “it will be resisted, at every hazard—even that of death itself,” Calhoun said. “Death is not the greatest calamity: there are others still more terrible to the free and brave, and among them may be placed the loss of liberty and honor. There are thousands of her brave sons who, if need be, are prepared cheerfully to lay down their lives in defense of the State, and the great principles of constitutional liberty for which she is contending. God forbid that this should become necessary! It never can be, unless this government is resolved to bring the question to extremity, when her gallant sons will stand prepared to perform the last duty—to die nobly.”
It was a classic Calhoun performance. “Mr. Calhoun is not a fine looking man, so far from it he looks more like his Satanic Majesty when he gets into one of his violent passions (as he always does when he speaks himself or hears any one of the opposite side),” Mary Coffee wrote, “with clenched fists, teeth grinning from ear to ear, and his great white eyes.… Poor creature, I am sorry for him when he is not in a passion, for then he has a very melancholy expression.” Clay could find Calhoun more than a little tiresome, even self-dramatic. Calhoun, Clay said, seemed “careworn, with furrowed brow, haggard and intensely gazing, looking as if he were dissecting the last abstraction which sprung from the metaphysician’s brain, and muttering to himself, in half-uttered tones, ‘This is indeed a real crisis.’ ”
When Calhoun was done, Webster, who favored the Force Bill, rose. “The people of the United States are one people,” he said. “They are one in making war, and one in making peace; they are one in regulating commerce, and one in laying duties of imposts. The very end and purpose of the Constitution was to make them one people in these particulars; and it has effectually accomplished its object.”
The next day, Sunday, February 17, Jackson wrote Poinsett: “The bill granting the powers asked will pass into law. Mr. Webster replied to Mr. Calhoun yesterday, and, it is said, demolished him. It is believed by more than one that Mr. C. is in a state of dementation—his speech was a perfect failure; and Mr. Webster handled him as a child.”
“WELL, CLAY, THESE are fine fellows,” Delaware senator John Clayton remarked, gesturing toward Calhoun and his followers. “It won’t do to let old Jackson hang th
em. We must save them.” What emerged was the Compromise of 1833, in which there was tariff reform for the South (though with higher rates over a longer period of time than many Southerners would have liked), a Force Bill for the nationalists, and distribution of public land revenues for the West (Jackson pocket vetoed this last measure). Clay’s tariff bill very gradually lowered duties over the next decade. This was, in Clay’s words, the olive branch to the sword of the Force Bill.
The debate had provided Calhoun, Webster, and Clay an enormous stage, and they jousted with skill and verve. In telling the story of nullification, many historians have understandably portrayed Clay as the hero of the piece—“the Great Compromiser” at work. Even his enemies saw him in this light. John Randolph of Roanoke, a Southerner who had long opposed Clay, recognized the significance of Clay’s achievement in reconciling the conflicting interests. “Help me up,” said the dying Randolph as Clay spoke one day. “I have come here to hear that voice.” Webster is depicted as the thundering defender of Union, Calhoun as the tortured advocate for the states. When he makes an appearance, Jackson is sometimes painted the way his contemporary enemies (mistakenly) thought of him—as a trigger-happy warrior raging against Calhoun in the White House, eager to march south and fight.
It takes nothing away from Clay’s justified renown as a statesman to say that Jackson has not always been given his due for his own conduct in the crisis. Far from being a warmonger, Jackson was the first player in the drama to propose reforming the tariff; the Verplanck bill came from Treasury Secretary McLane, with Jackson’s approval.
Had Jackson been truly unwilling to compromise, he would have found the means to use military force against South Carolina. He held back only when he chose to hold back, and struck only when he chose to strike. He had an intuitive sense of timing that served him well, and this capacity to find the right moment for action never served America better than it did in the winter of 1832–33.
Operating on two levels, Jackson projected an image of strength while looking for a way out. In the White House, Jackson summoned senators to urge this maneuver and that device as the tariff bill made its way through Congress. Even at his most hawkish, Jackson was clear that he would resort to violence only after the South Carolinians did, not before. “I beg of you not to be disturbed by any thing you hear from the alarmists at this place,” he wrote Van Buren, adding: “Be assured that I have and will act with all … forbearance.”
Jackson sought the preservation of the Union, not personal vengeance; a powerful presidency, not a military dictatorship. He achieved that on Saturday, March 2, 1833, when he signed both the compromise tariff and the Force Bill into law. “We have beat the Nullifiers and things are quiet for a time—I verily thought we should have had a struggle and a short civil war, and was prepared once more to take the field,” Joel Poinsett wrote a friend on Monday, March 25, 1833. “I was exceedingly indignant with these Radicals and rather desired to put them down with a strong arm.… I have fought the good fight manfully and zealously, and now I am laying out grounds and making a garden.”
Poinsett was not alone in seeking ways to recover his strength. The toll of the season, and of the congressional session, had been heavy, and Henry Clay crashed with what he called “the most violent cold I ever had.”
JACKSON WAS, AS ever, vigilant yet optimistic. “Keep me constantly advised of matters relating to the conduct or movements of the nullifiers,” he wrote Poinsett on Wednesday, March 6, “and all will be well, and the federal union preserved.” Two months afterward, on Wednesday, May 1, 1833, Jackson observed in a letter that “the tariff was only the pretext, and disunion and southern confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro, or slavery question.” Six days later, the president named a postmaster for New Salem, Illinois, a twenty-four-year-old lawyer who had lost a race for the state legislature. He was a Clay man, but the post was hardly major, and Abraham Lincoln was happy to accept the appointment.
CHAPTER 20
GREAT IS THE STAKE
PLACED IN OUR HANDS
NEITHER HENRY CLAY’S health nor his spirits could have been helped by the spectacle of Inauguration Day 1833—a ceremony Clay had hoped would be his own hour of glory. The day was wretchedly cold, so cold that the outdoor festivities were canceled and the ceremonies moved indoors to the House chamber. Flanked by Andrew Donelson and Martin Van Buren, Jackson gave a brief but important address, a much more substantive speech than the first inaugural on the nearby steps four years before. Putting an intellectual frame around the previous months of brinkmanship and negotiation, in his own way Jackson was as eloquent as Clay had been about the importance of compromise—and, unlike Calhoun, to support his conclusions he invoked not theory but his own hard-earned history, squarely placing himself, and the presidency, in the center of the national drama. “My experience in public concerns and the observation of a life somewhat advanced confirm the opinions long since imbibed by me, that the destruction of our state governments or the annihilation of their control over the local concerns of the people would lead directly to revolution and anarchy, and finally to despotism and military domination,” Jackson said.
A sentence later, addressing the question of nullification, he went on: “Solemnly impressed with these considerations, my countrymen will ever find me ready to exercise my constitutional powers in arresting measures which may directly or indirectly encroach upon the rights of the states or tend to consolidate all political power in the general government. But of equal, and, indeed, of incalculable, importance is the union of these states, and the sacred duty of all to contribute to its preservation by a liberal support of the general government in the exercise of its just powers.” Having reassured the states’ rights elements in the country—which included his new vice president, Van Buren—his passions fully engaged, Jackson then delivered one of the great passages of oratory of his long public life, a passage little remembered and little quoted:
Without union our independence and liberty would never have been achieved; without union they can never be maintained. Divided into twenty-four, or even a smaller number, of separate communities, we shall see our internal trade burdened with numberless restraints and exactions; communication between distant points and sections obstructed or cut off; our sons made soldiers to deluge with blood the fields they now till in peace; the mass of our people borne down and impoverished by taxes to support armies and navies, and military leaders at the head of their victorious legions becoming our lawgivers and judges. The loss of liberty, of all good government, of peace, plenty, and happiness, must inevitably follow a dissolution of the Union. In supporting it, therefore, we support all that is dear to the freeman and the philanthropist.
The time at which I stand before you is full of interest. The eyes of all nations are fixed on our Republic. The event of the existing crisis will be decisive in the opinion of mankind of the practicability of our federal system of government. Great is the stake placed in our hands; great is the responsibility which must rest upon the people of the United States. Let us realize the importance of the attitude in which we stand before the world. Let us exercise forbearance and firmness. Let us extricate our country from the dangers which surround it and learn wisdom from the lessons they inculcate.
The most enduring political rhetoric both inspires and instructs, lifting an audience outside its natural selfish cares to see how a certain course will, in the end, serve a nation and its people well. This is a matter of more than soaring prose or vivid imagery, though both are crucial. It is also about arming the audience with facts or thoughts they have not yet known or contemplated. Jackson’s second inaugural address met both tests. Withstand the temptations of the moment, Jackson was saying, and the nation would be all the stronger for it, all the more respected, all the more special. Jackson’s words were not those of an incipient tyrant, or a shallow thinker, or a barely restrained bully. They were the words of a man who thought of himself as an American first and last—n
ot a Carolinian, not a Tennessean, not a Westerner, not a Southerner, but an American.
A different, less emotionally nationalistic president in these middle years of the Republic might not have been able to balance the forces of respect for the essential rights of the states with a devotion to the cause of the Union. Jackson was perfectly able to do this, for he believed in both, and he knew that both would be forever in tension and sometimes in conflict. It could be no other way in a democratic republic formed from the elements that had formed America. He wanted the power to act as freely as he could because he believed his judgment would serve the country well, for he made no distinction between himself and a broad idea of “the people.” Egotistical, yes; arrogant, probably. But to some degree politics and statecraft always involve the character of the leader, and the character of Andrew Jackson was, in the end, well suited for the demands of the White House. He was strong and shrewd, patriotic and manipulative, clear-eyed and determined.
Closing his inaugural address, he said he longed to “foster with our brethren in all parts of the country a spirit of liberal concession and compromise, and, by reconciling our fellow-citizens to those partial sacrifices which they must unavoidably make for the preservation of a greater good, to recommend our invaluable government and Union to the confidence and affections of the American people.” Evincing a practical understanding of how a leader could make real an idealistic vision of public life, Jackson was engaged in presidential leadership of the highest order, for he was being forthright about a central truth of a democratic republic: that if each part made a sacrifice of some kind, then the whole could thrive, producing, hopefully, what Jackson called “a united and happy people.”