American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  A political tempest had blown in from the west. Now the nation awaited Jackson with anticipation and apprehension. Nobody knew what he would do when he arrived in Washington, Webster wrote to friends in Boston. “My opinion is, that when he comes he will bring a breeze with him. Which way it will blow, I cannot tell.…My fear is stronger than my hope. ” Old John Randolph of Roanoke, as passionate and apocalyptic as ever, cried that the country was ruined past redemption. “Where now could we find leaders of a revolution?”

  Thousands of job seekers throughout the country had their idea of a good revolution: rotate the ins out of federal office, and rotate the outs in. Some stayed home in hopes of taking over as postmasters or customs collectors, but hundreds flocked to Washington, settled down in hotels and boardinghouses, and haunted the White House and the departments. “Spoilsmen” put heavy political pressure on the Administration. “I take it for granted that all who do not support the present administration you will not consider your friends, and of course will lose your confidence,” a New York politico wrote to Van Buren. “The old maxim of ‘those not for us are against us,’ you have so often recognized that its authority cannot be denied.” Arriving late in Washington to join the Administration, Van Buren was besieged by applicants who followed behind him into his room. Reclining ill on a sofa, he patiently heard them out.

  A wave of fear passed through Washington officialdom. “The great body of officials,” James Parton wrote, “awaited their fate in silent horror, glad when the office hours expired at having escaped another day.…No man deemed it safe and prudent to trust his neighbor, and the interior of the department presented a fearful scene of guarded silence, secret intrigue, espionage, and tale-bearing.” From Braintree, Adams heard that a clerk in the War Office had “cut his throat from ear to ear, from the mere terror of being dismissed,” and that another clerk had “gone raving distracted.”

  Two Kentucky job seekers ran into each other in Washington. “I am ashamed of myself,” one said, “for I feel as if every man I meet knew what I came for.” The other replied: “Don’t distress yourself, for every man you meet is on the same business.” Despite the furor, the number of actual removals was not large—less than 10 percent after the first eighteen months of the new administration. Probably a somewhat larger number of non-college men of lower socioeconomic station got hired. Some of the clerks and agents had been Jackson men; others had been neutral. Many other changes resulted simply from death or retirement. But a few removals were enough to put Washington in shock.

  Jackson defended the removals on the ground of principle, not party. Men long in office, he said, were apt to become indifferent to the public interest: “Office is considered as a species of property, and government rather as a means of promoting individual interests than as an instrument created solely for the service of the people.…The duties of all public officers are, or at least admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance.…In a country where offices are created solely for the benefit of the people no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another.” Pitching his case on the level of good republicanism did not endear the President to Washington bureaucrats—or win support from old Jeffersonians like Madison, who privately criticized rotation.

  The new President’s inaugural address had given little concrete idea of his plans, aside from revamping of the civil service. He had straddled the issues of internal improvements, the tariff, the currency, all in a voice so low that it reminded veteran Washingtonians of Jefferson’s inaudible remarks twenty-eight years before. Jackson did promise a proper regard for states’ rights, economy in government, and a “just and liberal” policy toward Indians, but this was standard politicians’ fare. Nor did his cabinet-building offer many clues. The two principal appointees, Van Buren as Secretary of State and Samuel D. Ingham at Treasury, came from the swing states of New York and Pennsylvania. John Eaton, Jackson’s old Tennessee friend, was the new Secretary of War; other appointees came from North Carolina, Georgia, and Kentucky. Pro-South in substance, anti-Clay in sentiment, the Cabinet hardly looked like an instrument for governing. It met infrequently, usually on major occasions, but less to deliberate than to hear Jacksonian pronouncements worked up in the inner circle. Administrative policy questions were usually settled by the President and department heads in private conferences. The Cabinet rarely discussed major policy issues in the manner of a council of state.

  It was the “kitchen cabinet” that both expressed and shaped the President’s program. This was not a cabinet, nor of course did it meet in the kitchen; it was, rather, a shifting group of advisers on whom Jackson called as he needed them. The most influential was Amos Kendall. Born on a poor Massachusetts farm in 1789, Kendall had attended Dartmouth, taught at Groton, and studied law; unrequited by both the girl and the profession he loved, at the age of twenty-five he moved to Kentucky, where he was befriended by Mrs. Henry Clay and made tutor to the Clays’ children. Later he turned to newspaper work and soon became editor of the Argus of Western America in Frankfort. For years a supporter of Clay and Adams, Kendall finally was caught between the Clay and Jackson factions. For reasons of both opportunism and principle he broke with Clay, moved to Washington, and was taken on as fourth auditor of the Treasury.

  Another key adviser—and another former Kentuckian—was Francis Preston Blair. He looked like Kendall’s political clone, having broken with Clay, embraced Jacksonian oppositionism, and succeeded Kendall as editor of the Argus. He was brought to Washington to edit the new Democratic paper, the Washington Globe, whose columns he filled with “demonstrations of public opinion” drawn from remote country newspapers that allegedly he penned himself. Less close to Jackson was Isaac Hill, born of an impoverished New Hampshire family, a scourge of the New Hampshire squirearchy as editor of a small Concord weekly, until he moved to Washington.

  It was an unlikely-looking lot: Kendall, nearsighted, asthmatic, prematurely white-haired, bundled up in a white greatcoat even on a blazing hot day; Hill, short, cadaverous, and lame; Blair, with an elfin body of hardly a hundred pounds. They had been outsiders to a society that prized good appearance in face, form, manners, and speech. But they were the perfect instruments to a President who needed men both committed and skeptical, both articulate and polemical, to help him with his speeches and papers, and often with his decisions. Many a morning the President would lie in bed, under a portrait of his lost Rachel, blurting out his ideas, chewing and spitting or puffing out great clouds of acrid smoke from his long pipe, while Kendall or others would take down the words, smooth them out, read them back over and over until their chief was satisfied. Several other aides helped too—Lewis and others from the old Tennessee days carried on for a time—and Van Buren had a most powerful triple role as the leading cabinet member, head of the foreign-policy-making establishment, and member of the inner group.

  Personal and social squabbles in Jackson’s first year were harbingers of the storm to come. A few weeks before the Inaugural, Secretary of War John Eaton had married Margaret (Peggy) O’Neale Timberlake, the vivacious daughter of a Washington tavernkeeper and the widow of a navy purser who had recently committed suicide. Rumors were put out—by Jackson’s political enemies, it was said—that Timberlake had cut his throat on discovering Peggy’s involvement with the wealthy young Eaton. Jackson had approved the marriage as a way of stilling the rumors, but the enamored pair waited only four months after the purser’s death. Tongues waggled faster than ever as Washington watched to see if the wife of John Eaton would be received in society. Floride Calhoun, consort of the Vice-President, proceeded to shun Peggy Eaton, and the cabinet wives followed suit. It was the kind of situation—as Jackson’s enemies should have known—guaranteed to tap his unbounded concern for young women treated cavalierly, as he believed his wife Rachel had been. For Jackson’s adored—and in his view maligned—wife had died only a few weeks before he was inaugurat
ed.

  “I did not come here,” he asserted, “to make a Cabinet for the Ladies of this place, but for the Nation.” Van Buren, himself a widower, moved into the breach by acting the gallant toward Peggy, while the President blamed first Clay, and then Calhoun, for the embarrassment.

  The great battles of Jackson’s presidency began with the congressional session that got under way in December 829. From then on, the President took on the barons of the Senate—Clay, Hayne, and the others—his own Vice-President, his own Cabinet, the opposition party, the banking elite, the Supreme Court, secessionists. At the end, Clay himself would cry out that Jackson had “swept over the Government, during the last eight years, like a tropical tornado.” But if Jackson’s presidency was filled with conflict, it was in large part because he embodied it, and so did the men he confronted. It was a blast out of the west that precipitated the sectional storm that would dominate the rest of Jackson’s first term.

  THE DANCE OF THE FACTIONS

  The chamber of the United States Senate, noon, Tuesday, January 26, 1830. An air of high expectancy hangs over the packed hall, as Washington personages push their way in from the blustery cold outside and crowd into the aisles and vestibules. A score or more fashionably dressed women, their round bonnets trimmed with drooping plumes, look down from the front row of the balcony. They are watching Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a full, almost portly figure in his old-fashioned long-tailed coat with bright gilt buttons, buff waistcoat, and large white cravat. Webster is looking toward the Vice-President of the United States, John Calhoun, in the presiding chair, erect and stern. All the Washington notables seem to be here, except for the distant man in the White House—famous senators like Hayne of South Carolina, Benton of Missouri, Woodbury of New Hampshire, celebrities of the past like John Quincy Adams and Harrison Gray Otis still haunting Washington, and so many visitors from the House that little business can be done there.

  The occasion is Webster’s reply to Hayne of South Carolina. A week earlier, Webster had dropped into the Senate, after finishing his legal business in the Supreme Court just a few steps away, in time to hear the South Carolina senator call for an alliance of the West and the South against the “selfish and unprincipled” East. Over the next few days, while Benton, Hayne, Webster, and other senators argued over the usual questions of national politics—public lands, internal improvements, the tariff—Webster became aware that a far more ominous set of issues was dominating the debate: those of nullification, secession, the very nature of the American Constitution. Even so, the famous orator, affluent and successful, recently remarried after the death of his first wife, might have shunned the battle except that Hayne, unusually impassioned, sarcastic, and aggressive for a young man ordinarily so moderate and courteous, had dealt him some punishing blows.

  Now Webster would answer Hayne’s climactic speech. Hayne’s supporters were so elated by their champion’s performance that Webster’s own backers became apprehensive. But not Webster. When his friend Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story called on him to offer help, he replied, “Give yourself no uneasiness, Judge Story! I will grind him as fine as a pinch of snuff.” And the next morning, asked on entering the Senate whether he was “well charged”—a reference to the four fingers of powder needed to charge a muzzle-loading gun—the orator replied jauntily, “Seven fingers!”

  The long-gathering conflict now culminating in this debate was explosive enough. It had its main source in dramatic social and economic changes in the South—especially in South Carolina—which had set that section in a radically different direction from the North. A decade or two before, South Carolinians had exhibited much the same constellation of interests and attitudes as most other states in the Union. Highly nationalistic, they gloried in the fame and achievements of John Calhoun and the other southern war hawks of 1812. As consumers of products from abroad, they hated tariffs, but many South Carolinians grew or made their own products that needed protection, and they also accepted tariffs as strengthening American manufactories in the event of war.

  As for slavery, most members of the South Carolinian delegation in Congress favored the compromise of 1820. To be sure, old Charles Pinckney—the same Charles Pinckney who had brought his young bride to Philadelphia in 1787 and helped write the Constitution there—warned that if Congress was ever accorded the right even to consider the subject of slavery, “there is no knowing to what length it may be carried,” but most of the state’s political leaders shared the moderate attitudes of nationalists like Calhoun and William Lowndes.

  Then—almost overnight, it seemed later—the mood of South Carolina had altered sharply. For rice and cotton growers, the 1820s were a time of rapid economic change, price and demand instability, credit squeezes, and depression, all tending toward a rising sense of social and economic insecurity, which in turn fostered a powerful parochialism and sectionalism. The Tariff of 1828 excited the worst southern fears; it was to them literally a tariff of abominations, to be despised and shunned. In a decade of peace they could no longer accept the tariff as a defense measure. Federal policy on internal improvements and other questions also continued to antagonize South Carolinians. But behind all the old issues always loomed the specter of northern interference with slavery. An alleged slave conspiracy, led by Denmark Vesey of Charleston, along with rumors of other planned slave revolts, aroused dread over threats from inside; the stepped-up efforts of the American Colonization Society in the North aroused fears over threats from outside.

  By the late 1820s the balance of South Carolina politics had changed. If the cleaving issue in the state, and in much of the South, had been nationalism versus sectionalism, that issue now was: what kind of sectionalism? to be carried how far? and how accomplished? Steadily shifting away from his old nationalism, Calhoun still had to deal more with fire eaters who wanted secession than with moderates who wished to attain South Carolina’s aims within the Union. News of the abominable tariff catalyzed powerful forces already building. Calhoun wrote a brilliant tract—the South Carolina Exposition—in which he flayed national tariff policy as unconstitutional and oppressive, “calculated to corrupt the public virtue and destroy the liberty of the country”; contended that no government based on the “naked principle” of majority rule could “preserve its liberty even for a single generation”; and claimed the right of “interposition” by state governments—that is, to declare null and void “unconstitutional” acts of the national government. If the federal government did not recognize the constitutional powers of the states, South Carolina would claim the right of nullification. South Carolinians had waited through Jackson’s first year, hopeful that he—a slave owner himself, after all—would redress their grievances, but in vain. Hayne’s hard line in the Senate, reflecting Calhoun’s arguments, showed that southern patience was running out.

  So now, Webster waited to take the floor. The chamber hushed as the Vice-President recognized him. Standing majestically as he faced the chair, resting his left hand on his desk while swinging his right hand up and down, he spoke in a low but compelling tone. The orator held the floor for three hours, pausing only once or twice to consult some notes. He ridiculed Hayne’s fear of federal tyranny. “Consolidation!—that perpetual cry, both of terror and delusion—consolidation!” The federal government, he declared, was the instrument not of the will of the states but of “We the People”; the national interest was the controlling one; the effort of a state to nullify a law of Congress was a revolutionary and illegal act. As Webster warmed to the attack, his granite face seemed to come alive; his eyes burned with fervor; his “mastiff-mouth” bit off his sentences with the finality of a spring trap. A connoisseur of all the arts of oratory, he moved from exposition to argumentation to irony to banter to scorn to eloquence to pathos. When he said, “I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts; she needs none,” but proceeded to do so, Bay State men clustered in the gallery were said to “shed tears like girls.” Webster had never felt an au
dience respond more eagerly and sympathetically. His peroration would soon be on New England schoolboys’ lips:

  “When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance, rather, behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as, What is all this worth? Nor those other words of delusion and folly, Liberty first and Union afterwards; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart—Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”

  A few weeks later, Calhoun & Co. received another oratorical setback. The Webster-Hayne debate had been an interparty encounter, and politically the Massachusetts senator could be dismissed as a New Englander and an old Federalist. But what was the attitude of Andrew Jackson, a Southwesterner and a Democrat? Rather rashly, states’ rights Democrats organized a celebration of Jefferson’s birthday for April 13, 1830, in Washington to glorify their cause and symbolize the Democratic party alliance between East and West. Jackson and Van Buren attended, along with an array of other party leaders. The banquet in Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel was hardly over and chairs pulled back from the board when the Southerners launched into speeches and toasts that evoked the Jefferson of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Defying Jackson to his face, George Troup, a Georgia planter-politician and states’ rights extremist, toasted the government of the United States as more absolute than the rule of Tiberius, but as less wise than that of Augustus, and less just than that of Trajan.