American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  But sometimes all passengers were tumbled into one existence, when the steersman’s warning of “low bridge ahead,” or bad weather, drove the nabobs out of their “settles” and into the cabin below. Because of the narrow beam of canalboats, the cabin was usually a jumble of clothes, bags, blankets, food, clotheslines, and people. Passengers had to sleep on foot-wide berths that appeared to Charles Dickens to be “hanging bookshelves, designed apparently for volumes of the small octavo size.” Like most natives, the famous English visitor found he could get into his shelf, which was the bottom one, only by lying on the floor and rolling in. Dickens could cope with this, but not with the habits of his fellow passengers. “All night long, and every night, on this canal,” he complained, “there was a perfect storm and tempest of spitting.”

  Spitting. This “filthy custom,” as Dickens called it, repelled other visitors from abroad as well. “It was a perfect shower of saliva all the time,” Fanny Kemble noted on her boat. Tobacco-chewing Americans seemed to spit everywhere—in carriages, boardinghouses, law courts, the Capitol, even on carpets in living rooms—but especially in the raw new towns of the West. Americans were slouchers too; they seemed to slouch sitting down. The “bearing and attitudes of the men” at the theater struck Mrs. Frances Trollope as “perfectly indescribable; the heels thrown higher than the head, the entire rear of the person presented to the audience, the whole length supported on the benches, are among the varieties that these exquisite posture-masters exhibit.” Her remarks on slouching became so famous that American theatergoers spotting an egregious sloucher in the pit would set up the cry, “A trollope! a trollope!”

  Americans, especially frontier Americans, were vulgar: this was the report brought back from the inscrutable continent to the west by many of the scores of visiting Europeans. Americans were also materialistic, avaricious, selfish, boastful, rude, gluttonous, cruel, violent. Yet other travelers—sometimes the same travelers—returned with different observations about the American character, especially on the frontier: “Jonathan” was friendly, generous, helpful, natural, unspoiled, hospitable, affectionate. Americans, in short, were complicated and contradictory.

  Frontier people had a way of destroying generalizations and shibboleths. Not only European observers but also eastern Americans traveling into the West came to conclusions only to have them invalidated. American frontier people were long painted as rugged individualists, but these individualists were also resolute collectivists, or at least cooperators, in joining with their spouses and children in clearing land and building homesteads, with their townspeople in cabin raisings, logrollings, law enforcing, with the authorities in laying roads, fighting Indians, erecting forts, financing schools. Western settlers, supposed to be materialistic, set up schools and churches, libraries and literary societies, almost as fast as they established saloons and stables. Western frontier people were, on the whole, more daring, more restless, more mobile, more “middle-income” (the rich had the money to go West but little motive, the poor had the motive but no money) than the rest of the population. They were also generally outsiders who, it was said, had “sought the West to escape a society in which distinctions of birth and possession had put them at a disadvantage.”

  Their hallmark was diversity. They were diverse in their environments, for people were “settling in” behind a constantly moving frontier while hunters and trappers were advancing ahead of it. They were diverse in occupation: speculators, merchants, lawyers, farmers, riverboatmen, blacksmiths, flour millers, road builders, printers, distillers, teachers. They were self-contradictory, now friendly and now suspicious, generous and stingy, religious and blasphemous, nationalistic and parochial, hard-working and self-indulgent, rowdy and respectable. They were ambitious but lacking in lofty ambition, observers concluded. “They talked up liberty but restricted its practice.…They loved change but dreaded revolution.…They were avid readers but preferred newspaper gossip to literature. They were in a constant ‘election fever’ but cold to political principles. They had appetites but no passions.” They knew how to make money but not how to spend it. They were, in short, bundles of complexities, contrarieties, and possibilities.

  Out of the frontier rose a man—a migrant, an outsider, a hard worker, but also a man on the make—who embraced its contradictions. Born poor and fatherless in the Carolina uplands, Andrew Jackson rebelled from the start against schools, restrictions, and his mother’s plans for him to become a Presbyterian minister. Foul-mouthed, mean-tempered, and combative even as a child, he grew into a wild youth who led his companions in wrestling, foot-racing, drinking, card playing—and in carting off neighbors’ gates and outhouses. When provoked or thwarted, he choked with rage and could hardly speak. His mother, who had lost her husband four months before Andrew was born, suddenly left her last-born when he was fourteen in order to nurse American prisoners of war in far-off Charleston, and died there. This ultimate desertion left the boy more bellicose, restless, and mischievous than ever.

  Yet there was always another side to Andrew Jackson. If he swore, he swore with style. If he bullied, he was the kind of bully who could win followers and even admirers. And if he was cruel and violent, it was the only way he knew how to cope with the wild frontier around him until it too could be mastered. He experienced that environment at a remarkably young age. A guerrilla at thirteen, he fought the British in bitter skirmishes; captured by the enemy, he was slashed across the head when he refused to clean a British officer’s boots and demanded to be treated as a prisoner of war. Thrown into a prisoner-of-war camp, he was robbed of his clothes and, ravaged by smallpox, he was freed in an exchange, only to lose his remaining brother to the pox.

  Somehow the youth was steeled by these ordeals rather than broken. At eighteen he read law; a year later he was practicing as a licensed attorney; and a year after that he was the public prosecutor for western North Carolina. Then he moved west, finally settling in Nashville, where he continued to prosper: attorney general for the Moro district at twenty-four, delegate to the Tennessee constitutional convention four years later, elected the first member of Congress from Tennessee at twenty-nine, United States senator at thirty, a judge in the Supreme Court of Tennessee a year later. During this meteoric rise, however, a wild outsider seemed to be struggling with the insider on the make. For years he and his after-work cronies acted the hooligans, stealing outhouses. He courted the vivacious Rachel Robards before she was divorced. He speculated recklessly in land, traded in slaves and cotton, brawled and quarreled incessantly, flirted with the Burr conspiracy, coolly and deliberately killed a man in a duel, fought others with cane, fists, and gun; maintained smoldering hatreds for Indians, Spanish, and Englishmen. He owned about eighty black men and women.

  To old Republicans like Jefferson, Jackson was a dangerous man, a demagogue, utterly unfit to be President. Among those close to him, he could be elaborately courteous to men, gentle and courtly to women, and generous to a fault—he was often in debt for signing shaky notes for friends. To plain Americans, Jackson became—after the Indian campaigns and New Orleans—the nation’s hero. If his views were hazy, his image was clear—a lean, ramrod figure topped by a seamed and wrinkled face, a hard-set lantern jaw, piercing eyes, under a corona of bristling white hair.

  THE REVOLT OF THE OUTS

  The simplest definition of politics is the conflict of outs versus ins. This is also the most simplistic definition, for the battle between those who hold office and those who seek it becomes enmeshed with ideological, policy, ethnic, geographical, religious, and other conflicts that may turn the contest into something more fundamental than a struggle to keep or seize power and pelf; some persons, indeed, reject office out of conviction. If ever a political contest was reduced to the simplest definition of politics, however, it was Jackson’s campaign against John Quincy Adams in 1828, when a coalition of “insiders” united around a few great national issues was assailed by a coalition of outsiders agreed on hardly any issues at all
.

  Since the election sharpened not merely major policy issues but personal and psychological ones, it turned into the ugliest presidential contest in a generation. However divided, the outsiders were agreed on the man they wanted—Andrew Jackson—and they were united by the conviction that they had been excluded from the citadels of the political and financial system, from the centers of social status and deference. They were Westerners and Southerners incensed against the East; growers and consumers angered by abominable tariffs; mechanics and small businessmen indignant over “monopoly”; farmers hostile to middlemen and speculators.

  Listen to young Congressman James K. Polk inveigh against what had come to be known as Adams’ and Clay’s American System: “Since 1815 the action of the Government has been…essentially vicious; I repeat, sir, essentially vicious.” The American tripod was a “stool that stands upon three legs; first, high prices of the public lands…sell your lands high, prevent thereby the inducements to emigration, retain a population of paupers in the East, who may, of necessity, be driven into manufactories, to labor at low wages for their daily bread. The second branch of the system is high duties…first, to protect the manufacturer, by enabling him to sell his wares at higher prices, and next to produce an excess of revenue. The third branch of the system is internal improvements, which is the sponge which is to suck up the excess of revenue.”

  All of which sounded like the poor man against the rich, the People against the Elite, the rebels against the Establishment, until one looked at the Jacksonian leaders. They were—most of them—not mechanics or farmers or paupers but capitalists, planters, traders, landowners and speculators, slave owners, lawyers, journalists, and indeed men, like Jackson himself, who had already enjoyed the fruits of office as legislators and administrators. Still, they had acute feelings of political and psychological exclusion. And nothing had aroused both feelings as forcibly as Adams’ and Clay’s “deal” of January 1825—the deal that they were certain had kept Andrew Jackson out of the White House.

  The campaign of 1828 began just after the “corrupt bargain” became known, when Jackson, fuming over the Judas of the West, resigned his Senate seat and started home. Neither time nor travel assuaged his feelings. He was weeping for his country’s experiment in liberty, he wrote a friend, when “the rights of the people” could be bartered for promises of office! By the time he reached his Hermitage home he was talking darkly of “usurpation of power” and the “great constitutional corrective in the hands of the people” against it. Soon men in Nashville and Virginia and Washington and New York were laying plans for 1828.

  A motley group was gathered behind the Old Hero—its acknowledged leader, Martin Van Buren. Small, amiable, plumpish, cautious, calculating, urbane, the New Yorker seemed almost the antithesis of the Hero, but both had made their way without much education, knew what it was to be on the outs with dominant factions in their states, and shared prejudices about bankers, entrenched federal officials, and Easterners unaware of the need to settle the western lands. Van Buren had shown himself a master political broker and coalition builder, as a leader of the “Albany Regency” and United States senator.

  Jackson’s old-time advisers had been mainly Westerners: Major John H. Eaton, a Florida land speculator and Tennessee politico; William B. Lewis, also of Tennessee, who had helped him as political lieutenant and fixer; Judge John Overton, an old confidant and loyalist. The most colorful by far was Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Expelled from the University of North Carolina for thieving from his roommates, he had moved to Tennessee, gained admission to the bar, won a seat in the state senate, served as Jackson’s aide-de-camp, then moved to Missouri and within five years won election as United States senator. He and Jackson, who earlier had brawled ferociously in Tennessee, were now reconciled. A handsome, solidly built man, of considerable intellectual power, Benton had a vanity so grand and serene that friends came to accept it, like a national monument.

  These men and their allies across the nation slowly worked out a simple but formidable double strategy to elect Old Hickory President. They would broaden out Jackson’s personal coalition and entrench it solidly in the democratic and agrarian ranks of the old Republican party. Crucial to the first strategy was winning support from southern leaders disaffected by Adams, and the key man in this region was Vice-President Calhoun, who had broken with the President and plumped for Jackson. Although Calhoun had been elected Vice-President in 1824, he had been disturbed by the flouting of the popular will in Adams’ selection by the House—and even more disturbed that two Adams terms, followed by two terms for the heir apparent, Henry Clay, would close off the presidency for sixteen years. Calhoun was already in his mid-forties. Within two years of Adams’ (and his own) inauguration, having moved solidly into Jackson’s camp, the dour South Carolinian was sending the Hermitage optimistic reports about 1828 prospects.

  “Every indication is in our favor, or rather I should say in favor of the country’s cause,” he wrote Jackson in January 1827. “The whole South is safe, with a large majority of the middle states, and even in New England strong symptoms of discontent and division now appear, which must daily increase.” He looked forward to the triumph of “the great principles of popular rights, which have been trampled down by the coalition.” Within another year the general’s lieutenants had extended their counter-coalition throughout the twenty-four states. The heart of this strategy was what Van Buren called an alliance between the “planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North.”

  An even more crucial task was to build a firm foundation of popular support beneath the broadening cadre of Jackson’s leaders. Van Buren & Co. decided on the bold strategy of the “substantial reorganization of the Old Republican party”—in plainer words, to build a Jackson party within the disheveled ranks of the cumbrous party of Monroe, Adams, and Clay. The key to this effort was unprecedented political organization. In Nashville, Jackson himself established and supervised a central committee composed of stalwarts like Lewis and Overton. In Washington, an informal caucus of members of Congress safeguarded Jackson’s interests on Capitol Hill. Throughout the states, Hickory Clubs organized parades and barbecues and rallies, printed up handbills, pamphlets, and leaflets, and canvassed the voters in their homes. The Jackson men, ostentatiously taking their case “to the people,” established an extraordinary number of new dailies and weeklies to combat the established newspapers that spoke for Adams and Clay. All this required money, but the Jacksonians seemed to have plenty of it. Edward Pessen estimated that the election of Jackson cost about one million dollars—a formidable sum in 1828.

  The contest was largely devoid of issues, and it was meant to be. Jackson did not rally the masses by appeals to ideals of justice and equality; he stayed home and stayed quiet, except for occasional pieties and ambiguities. In vain did Adams supporters try to raise questions like the tariff and internal improvements. “The Hurra Boys” were all for Jackson, one Administration man sneered, but he had to admit that they constituted a “powerful host.” The “National Republicans”—as the anti-Jacksonians came to be called—seemed unable to compete with a Hickory Leaf in every hat and hickory-pole raisings in every town square. Increasingly, the Jacksonians themselves were becoming known as “Democratic-Republicans,” or simply “Democrats.”

  Slander and abuse pushed aside issues. Adams was called a monarchist, squanderer of the taxpayers’ dollars on silken fripperies, Sabbath breaker, pimp. Partisans of the President in turn labeled Jackson as blasphemer, bastard, butcher, adulterer. As usual, the invective had a tiny morsel of truth. John Quincy Adams a pimp? Well, it seemed that in St. Petersburg, corrupted as he was by his long service in sinful foreign capitals, he had “prostituted a beautiful American girl to the carnal desires of Czar Alexander I.” A fiction, of course, but a rumor to be handled only by attributing even baser acts to Jackson. The Old Hero an adulterer? Well, Jackson had indeed married Rachel Robards before she was divorced, and he m
ay have done so knowingly, but the Jackson men had to put out sworn statements as to his innocence.

  In a contest of invective and personality, no Adams could win out. Jackson beat him in the popular vote, 647,292 to 507,730. The general won the electoral college 178 to 83; Adams carried only New England and parts of the central Atlantic region. Jackson brought off a clean sweep of the rural hinterland west of New Jersey and south of the Potomac. Swept out of office by this gale of southern and “western” ballots, the National Republicans saw the results as presaging ominous changes, as their political fathers had twenty-eight years before. “Well,” said an Adams backer, “a great revolution has taken place…” Another wrote: “It was the howl of raving Democracy.”

  It was, at least, the howl of the outsiders. With the approach of Inauguration Day 1829, plain people by the hundreds descended upon Washington, crowding the lodging places and thronging the streets. They massed in front of the Capitol to hear their hero pledge reform to all and the ending of the national debt. Then they followed the new President down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, pushed into the mansion, and fought their way toward the punch and the ice cream. As the visitors trampled on the chairs and carpets of the house just vacated by an Adams of Boston, as they smashed china and glasses, it seemed as though a new day had dawned in Washington. Truly the outsiders were now inside the citadel of power.