American Lion

by Jon Meacham

  Nine days after Sérurier’s encounters with Clay, the Frenchman made his first visit to the White House since the news of the Chamber’s adjournment. “It was a tricky situation,” Sérurier wrote. He was prepared for any eventuality. He would be patient, and “had decided to counter any anger or threats with cold respect.” But Jackson was not yet ready to strike, and Sérurier reported that “I didn’t have to use any of my defensive weapons.” Everything was correct—painfully so, to Sérurier, who knew the calm could not last.

  “The President was very cold, but very polite, and spoke little to me, and only in generalities,” Sérurier said. “He made no reference to the treaty. During the half-hour I spent in his living room, his attitude was one of great dignity … but the explosion is only just being delayed.” A month later, on June 20, 1834, Sérurier and his wife visited the White House to, as Sérurier put it, “take the political temperature.” Jackson was again kind, and “his circle of friends seemed struck by this”—a small detail suggesting that Jackson was saying and thinking quite unkind things about the French when the minister was not in the room. Speaking with subtlety, Jackson told Sérurier, “I have always loved France, and it would only be with the deepest sorrow that I would have to change my feelings.” But he would, as always, do what he had to do.

  CHAPTER 26

  A DARK, LAWLESS,

  AND INSATIABLE AMBITION!

  AFTER THE CENSURE vote in the Senate, Jackson struck back on Tuesday, April 15, 1834, with a document entitled “Protest,” in which he defended himself and his presidency with a mixture of sarcasm and rage. Alluding to the censure resolution, which simply spoke of “the President,” Jackson said: “Having had the honor, through the voluntary suffrages of the American people, to fill the office of President of the United States during the period which may be presumed to have been referred to in this resolution, it is sufficiently evident that the censure it inflicts was intended for myself. Without notice, unheard and untried, I thus find myself charged on the records of the Senate, and in a form hitherto unknown in our history, with the high crime of violating the laws and Constitution of my country.”

  The Senate’s motives were not difficult to fathom, Jackson said, framing the matter in personal and familial terms: “The judgment of guilty by the highest tribunal in the Union, the stigma it would inflict on the offender, his family, and fame, and the perpetual record on the Journal, handing down to future generations the story of his disgrace, were doubtless regarded by them as the bitterest portions, if not the very essence, of that punishment.” A blow against Jackson was, to Jackson, a blow against his family, too—and since his definition of family could include the nation, the sting of the Senate vote was all the more painful.

  Should the precedent stand—or, worse, should the legislature begin to deploy censure resolutions as a routine weapon against the president—Jackson believed that the effective power of government would shift from the presidency as Jackson envisioned it to the legislature, which, in the case of the Senate, would mean to those unelected by the people. “If the censures of the Senate be submitted to by the President, the confidence of the people in his ability and virtue and the character and usefulness of his Administration will soon be at an end, and the real power of the Government will fall into the hands of a body holding their offices for long terms, not elected by the people and not to them directly responsible.”

  For Jackson, “responsibility” was an essential element of the debate. To whom much was given, much was expected, and he was prepared, given the power of his station, to, as he liked to say, “take the responsibility” on the grounds, as he told the Senate, that “the President is the direct representative of the American people.”

  In the spring of 1834, that idea was still radical. No other president had ever made such an assertion in such terms. The significance of the censure lay in the test it posed for Jackson’s conception of the presidency. If it stood, future presidents might follow rather than lead.

  The censure was at once an attack on his power and an assault on his honor. In the conclusion to his protest, he referred to the scar left on his head by that long-ago British officer and noted how much easier his life and presidency might have been had he allowed himself to be bought by the wealth of the Bank:

  In vain do I bear upon my person enduring memorials of that contest in which American liberty was purchased; in vain have I since periled property, fame, and life in defense of the rights and privileges so dearly bought; in vain am I now, without a personal aspiration or the hope of individual advantage, encountering responsibilities and dangers from which by mere inactivity in relation to a single point [the Bank] I might have been exempt.… In the history of conquerors and usurpers, never in the fire of youth nor in the vigor of manhood could I find an attraction to lure me from the path of duty, and now I shall scarcely find an inducement to commence their career of ambition when gray hairs and a decaying frame, instead of inviting to toil and battle, call me to the contemplation of other worlds, where conquerors cease to be honored and usurpers expiate their crimes. The only ambition I can feel is to acquit myself to Him to whom I must soon render an account of my stewardship, to serve my fellow-men, and live respected and honored in the history of my country.… If the Almighty Being who has hitherto sustained and protected me will but vouchsafe to make my feeble powers instrumental to such a result, I shall anticipate with pleasure the place to be assigned me in the history of my country, and die contented with the belief that I have contributed in some small degree to increase the value and prolong the duration of American liberty.

  He was, he insisted, the defender of the liberties of the people. The Senate, however, was, as he put it, seeking to “concentrate in the hands of a body not directly amenable to the people a degree of influence and power dangerous to their liberties and fatal to the Constitution of their choice.”

  Such language was incendiary, but Congress, John Quincy Adams noted in December 1833, had itself frequently drawn on such imagery. “The domineering tone has heretofore been usually on the side of the legislative bodies to the Executive, and Clay has not been sparing in the use of it,” Adams said. “He is now paid in his own coin.” Still, to Webster the protest amounted to the absolutist claim of Louis XIV: “I am the state.”

  Calhoun was even angrier, crying: “Infatuated man! Blinded by ambition—intoxicated by flattery and vanity! Who, that is the least acquainted with the human heart; who, that is conversant with the page of history, does not see, under all this, the workings of a dark, lawless, and insatiable ambition …? He claims to be, not only the representative, but the immediate representative of the American people! What effrontery! What boldness of assertion! The immediate representative! Why, he never received a vote from the American people. He was elected by electors.”

  ODDLY, PERHAPS, THE rough-hewn Jackson understood the poetry of politics better than Calhoun, Clay, or Webster. His foes were speaking in prose, making technical arguments. Jackson was formulating a poetic narrative drama in which he was the hero defending the interests of the people against the powerful.

  Charges of kingship, common in the Jackson years, touched core American anxieties. John C. Hamilton, son of Alexander and brother of James, recounted an interview with a Jefferson biographer, Professor George Tucker, who had implied that Alexander Hamilton harbored monarchial sympathies. Denying it, Hamilton fumed a bit, saying the “charge” meant that men like his father “are to be handed down to posterity as traitors to the feelings of the people and to the Constitution they had formed and sworn to maintain.” Hamilton’s passion on the point illuminates how Americans felt about the question of a king, both at the birth of the Republic and decades on. The persistent suggestion that Jackson was overreaching in a fashion more suited to a monarch than to a president was a political problem for the White House.

  The deposits issue was the occasion, therefore, for a broad struggle—and the conflicts of the spring of 1834 brought a new forc
e to life: a formal second party in opposition to Jackson’s Democrats. On Monday, April 14, 1834, Clay referred to Jackson’s foes as Whigs—the British term for those who opposed the monarchy. It was, Clay said on the Senate floor, “a denomination which, according to the analogy of all history, is strictly correct. It deserves to be extended throughout the whole country.” Only an American Whig party can, Clay said, rescue the nation from “a Chief Magistrate who is endeavoring to concentrate in his own person the whole powers of government.”

  Though worn down by the strife with Jackson, Clay stayed in the arena, helping fellow anti-Jackson lawmakers carry a motion declining to enter the protest into the Senate record. At the same time Clay kept up the antimonarchial rhetoric. Claiming to have heard a rumor that Jackson “stated to the brother of Napoleon that he has made the Emperor of France his model,” Clay said that the “army and the navy, thank God, are sound and patriotic to the core. They will not allow themselves to be servile instruments of treason, usurpation, and the overthrow of civil liberty, if any such designs now exist.”

  JACKSON DOMINATED EVERYONE’S thinking, from Clay to Sérurier. On Wednesday, July 2, 1834, when John Forsyth of Georgia replaced McLane as secretary of state—McLane left the administration—Sérurier wrote that “Mr. Forsyth is neither pro-English, nor pro-French. He will probably act according to the circumstances and impetus that the President will give him.”

  Jackson, always Jackson. Summer was here, and the capital emptied, Sérurier told Paris, because of “intolerable heat and the contagious fevers of July, August and September.” Even at his age, Jackson rode part of the way home to the Hermitage on horseback; Sérurier marveled at the old man’s enduring vitality.

  Jackson and the Donelsons were bound for Tennessee, but by different routes. Politically it was a safe time to get away. For the moment, Jackson’s foes seemed either disoriented or disappointed. In Newport, Rhode Island, Sérurier came across Nicholas Biddle. “One of the first people I met here, M. le Comte, was the Monster, as the administration calls him,” Sérurier wrote to Paris in August. “I can assure your Excellency that this could not be a worse description of the man. Mr. Biddle, President of the Bank of the U.S., is a very distinguished person, well-mannered, who has traveled in Europe and especially in France. He speaks our language with a rare fluency, knows our literature and our art. He is well-read and well-spoken.”

  Biddle was all these things, certainly, but he seems to have been strangely disconnected from the new realities Jackson’s springtime deposits removal had created. “He believes that he will win the Bank’s struggle,” Sérurier reported on August 18, 1834. “He understands it to be more than just purely a question of money, but one of the country’s own institutions.” Biddle was in denial, the nullifiers in disarray. “The South seems to be asleep,” Duff Green wrote an ally. “There is no energy—no concert among the states’ rights men.”

  RELIEVED OF IMMEDIATE concerns, Jackson and Andrew Donelson were to go to the Hermitage directly; Emily and the four children were scheduled to pay a visit to friends in and around Charlottesville. (On April 19, 1834, a springtime Saturday in Washington, Emily had given birth to her fourth child, a daughter who was baptized Rachel Jackson Donelson. James K. Polk was godfather.)

  Jackson left Francis Preston Blair and his family in the White House. Blair’s wife, Eliza, and his daughter, known as Lizzie, were favorites of the president; Jackson was so fond of Lizzie that he gave her Rachel’s wedding ring. Mrs. Blair was a kind of features editor for the Globe, and they were given the run of the White House when Jackson was away. Replying to a letter of Jackson’s after a day at the races in 1834, Blair wrote that he and Lewis had drunk “Ice sangree, notwithstanding the cholera,” to celebrate the news that Jackson had safely arrived and was well in Tennessee. (In late 1836, the Blairs bought the house across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, and would bring the president a pail of fresh milk from their cows in the morning.)

  William Cabell Rives, the Virginia editor and former American envoy to France, asked Emily to visit at Castle Hill, his family estate in Albemarle County. “We are very much pleased at the prospect of a visit from Mrs. Donelson,” Rives wrote Van Buren. For Emily, the stay near Monticello was a kind of social vindication. Here she was, a daughter of the frontier, moving among old Virginia families on equal terms. Her niece Elizabeth Martin, who accompanied her, was being courted by Lewis Randolph, President Jefferson’s grandson. Randolph was, Emily told Andrew, “in his glory” as he showed off the fabled family estate and introduced Miss Martin to his formidable mother, Martha Jefferson Randolph, whom Emily had entertained at the White House. Still, Emily was not feeling her best. “I am well except [for] weakness and debility which is owing to my nursing,” Emily wrote Andrew from Castle Hill on July 20. She did not much improve in the ensuing days, and, on the trip home to Tennessee, changed her plans in order to stop at Virginia’s Warm Springs.

  CHAPTER 27

  THERE IS A RANK DUE TO

  THE UNITED STATES AMONG NATIONS

  BY AUGUST, EMILY was in Nashville, and, a decade into their marriage, she and Andrew turned their attention to the construction of the first home of their own: a splendid brick house to be named Poplar Grove. It was to be built about a mile from the Hermitage, designed by Joseph Reiff and William Hume (John Coffee had weighed in on the design as well). The proximity to Jackson’s own seat was both a sign of their mutual affection and a suggestion that after the White House, Donelson, who had now been at Jackson’s side for nearly a dozen years, would remain an essential member of the circle. As the house was being built, Emily managed the details, rearranging the windows when she found they were in the wrong places and ordering that the fireplaces be widened. She kept a crate of her china close at hand, in the cellar of the Hermitage, awaiting the day it could be moved down to a finished Poplar Grove.

  That china was very nearly a casualty of calamity in the second week of October, when fire broke out at the Hermitage, destroying a good deal of Jackson’s beloved house. The fire began in the chimney, and a northwest wind spread the flames across the roof. It was an accident, and Sarah Yorke Jackson, who had been out riding, had returned to the house; Andrew junior was on the farm. “Oh, had I been there, it might have been prevented,” he wrote. “The cursed Negroes were all so stupid and confused that nothing could be done until some white one came to their relief.” In fact, the slaves who were on hand were critical in saving what they could. In Stockley Donelson’s account of the episode to Jackson, Sarah “acted with firmness and gave every necessary direction to save the furniture.”

  Sarah and Andrew junior were distraught, but Jackson was stoic. God, he wrote to his son, had given him “the means to build it, and he has the right to destroy it, and blessed be his name. Tell Sarah [to] cease to mourn its loss. I will have it rebuilt.” In Rachel’s memory he would not move the house or rebuild elsewhere on the farm. “Was it not on the site selected by my dear departed wife I would build it higher up the hill, but I will have it repaired.”

  He gave orders about construction and moving ahead, but he was mildly depressed about the loss of furniture, papers, and other mementos. His life had been spent in pursuit of domestic order, and now fate had intervened. In the White House, writing to his son, his mind drifted to the probable loss of some of the bright things of life. “I suppose all the wines in the cellar have been destroyed, with Mrs. Donelson’s box of china,” he wrote with a touch of gloom. (The china was fine.) “Give me as accurate an account of the loss of furniture as you can at as early a period as possible.” He would move forward. He always did.

  THE FRENCH REMAINED a problem. On Wednesday, October 22, 1834, John Forsyth, the new secretary of state, met with Sérurier. “The President was deeply hurt that a treaty ratified three years ago was still not carried out,” Sérurier reported Forsyth as saying. “Contrary to [Jackson’s] natural tendencies, he had been patient for a long time now, counting on justice in France and
my promises. However, the moment had come to speak out, and in front of everyone.”

  Behind the scenes, Jackson was ready for combat. The Cabinet secretaries were reluctant to endorse an unflinching stand on the French issue, but Jackson dismissed their concerns. “No, gentlemen,” he said, “I know them.… They won’t pay unless they’re made to.” In his annual message, sent to Congress on Monday, December 1, Jackson spent seventeen paragraphs describing foreign affairs, almost entirely cheerful and optimistic in tone. Then, in the eighteenth, he came to the French.

  “It becomes my unpleasant duty to inform you that this pacific and highly gratifying picture of our foreign relations does not include those with France at this time,” he wrote. The United States was “wholly disappointed” with the French approach to the treaty of 1831. Jackson believed “the whole civilized world must pronounce France to be in the wrong.” Should the Chamber not authorize payment at its next session, Jackson would ask Congress for a law approving “reprisals upon French property” as a means of demonstrating the “inflexible determination on the part of the United States to insist on their rights.” And should France answer in kind if reprisals became necessary, France “would but add violence to injustice, and could not fail to expose herself to the just censure of civilized nations and to the retributive judgments of Heaven.”

  SO THERE IT was: Jackson’s vision of what the preservation of America’s national honor required. “Threats are far from being avoided, and the worst possible measures are proposed,” Sérurier told Paris on December 2. “General Jackson, weary of his long constraint … gives way to his bad disposition. His flatterers tell him that nothing can resist him.” Three days later, after gauging reaction to the message, Sérurier fell back on the caricature of Jackson as a man beyond reason. “It is generally agreed … that this rash message, at least regarding France and its proposed measures, is entirely Jackson’s work.” The president, Sérurier said, could not be stopped: his “iron will subdued all resistance.”