All eyes turned to Jackson. Scowling at Calhoun as he signaled the crowd to rise, the old general toasted, “Our Federal Union—it must be preserved. ” Van Buren, who had climbed up on a chair to witness the scene, saw the noisy company turn utterly silent, dumbfounded. Calhoun’s hand shook, spilling a little wine down the side of his glass. But he was ready with his answering toast: “The Union—next to our liberty the most dear.…”
A great Virginia reel of politics was under way, as politicians chose partners and changed them, in a dance of sections and interests, issues and ideologies. Not for half a century had the nation possessed such compelling sectional leaders—the spare, consecrated Calhoun, champion of the South; the droll, sparkling, restless Clay, still “Harry of the West”; New England’s hero, the imposing, magnetic Webster, “the great cannon loaded to the lips,” as Emerson pictured him; the consummate politician Van Buren, keen, dexterous, opportunistic, the supple representative of New York and the other swing states. But these men were more than leaders of sections. They were statesmen with a vision of the national purpose, and they were politicians who hungered for the presidency. Hence they had to protect their standing in their state and section, while gaining national recognition and building national coalitions. They were trapped in the rising sectional feeling of Americans. And they had to deal with the unpredictable, prickly, opinionated man in the White House.
The speeches of Webster and Hayne in the Senate, the toasts of Calhoun and Jackson at Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel, were the opening salvos of the 1832 presidential election campaign. Van Buren had attached his fortunes firmly to the President’s, and the political foxiness of the “Little Magician,” combined with the leonine presence and power of the President, made an invincible combination. Jackson struck first at Clay, his old western rival. The issue was the venerable one of internal improvements. In his December 1829 message to Congress, Jackson had questioned the constitutionality and the desirability of federal aid to roads and other projects. When Congress passed a bill authorizing government subscription of stock in a turnpike connecting Maysville and Lexington and lying wholly within Kentucky, the President vetoed it. Clay was outraged. Not only was he the author of the “American System” but only the year before he and his family had spent four days negotiating the steep curves and bottomless mud of the existing Maysville road. Still, the deliberate slap administered by Jackson helped confirm Clay as the National Republican candidate for President. Webster backed him too.
“On the whole, My Dear Sir,” Webster wrote Clay two days after the veto, “I think a crisis is arriving, or rather has arrived. I think you cannot be kept back from the contest. The people will bring you out, nolens volens. Let them do it.…”
Jackson’s most dangerous enemy was still Calhoun. Each man thought the other was plotting against him. If there was a “plotter,” it was Van Buren, who had every reason to widen the break between the President and Vice-President. In fact, political issues, temperaments, and ambitions were the main dividers, but the Secretary of State was quick to take advantage of them. The Peggy Eaton business sputtered along for some time, as she was ostracized not only by Floride Calhoun and cabinet wives but even by Emily Donelson, the wife of Jackson’s nephew, who served as White House hostess for the President. Van Buren went out of his way to accept the Eatons. He coyly made his chief privy to the proceedings. “Tell Mrs. Eaton,” he wrote Jackson, “if she does not write me I will give her up as a bad girl.”
Even more divisive was the resurrection of decade-old charges that Calhoun as Secretary of War had wanted General Jackson to be censured for improper conduct in pursuing Seminole Indians during the invasion of Florida. The President now asked Calhoun for an explanation. Incensed that this old issue would be revived by his enemies, Calhoun properly challenged the right to question his conduct as Secretary of War; but he wrote fifty more pages trying to defend his action. Having prejudged the affair, Jackson coldly ended any further discussion of it. If Calhoun seemed paranoid about attempts to isolate him, he really did have enemies. Blair was chosen to set up the Washington Globe as a Jackson organ, to counter the United States Telegraph, edited by Duff Green, a Calhounite. Federal officials were told to take the Globe or lose their jobs. They took the Globe.
With the Jackson-Calhoun feud heating up, and with the Peggy Eaton wounds still throbbing, Van Buren made an adroit move, offering to resign from the Cabinet so the President could refashion it. Realizing that he could thus eliminate the Calhoun influence in his inner circle, Jackson agreed, on condition that Van Buren become Minister to Great Britain so that the Calhounites would gain no satisfaction. The plan worked. Jackson was now able to create a Cabinet of past and future notables: Edward Livingston as Secretary of State; Louis McLane, Treasury; Lewis Cass,War; Levi Woodbury, Navy; Roger B. Taney, Attorney General. Calhoun got a brief revenge when Van Buren’s nomination as minister came before the Senate; as presiding officer, he cast the deciding vote against the New Yorker.”
“It will kill him, sir, kill him dead. He will never kick sir, never kick,” Calhoun said to a friend. But he was quite wrong. On hearing of the rejection, Jackson erupted into a stream of denunciations of the South Carolinian. And he planned his own revenge: the substitution of Van Buren for Calhoun as Vice-President.
Calhoun had a more portentous situation to deal with in his home state. Anti-tariff and anti-abolitionist feeling had steadily been rising in South Carolina; polarization between unionists and nullifiers had sharpened to the point that the two factions called each other “submissionists” and “secessionists” and even held separate Fourth of July celebrations. No longer could the Vice-President bridge the gap. He was a leader; he must go with his state, or his followers would abandon him. Under intense pressure from the nullifiers, he wrote his “Fort Hill Letter”—an announcement to the nation that he was taking his stand for nullification. For Calhoun, in William Freehling’s words, “the collapse of presidential prospects was a shattering experience. The bright young man who had always enjoyed success at last endured the agony of overwhelming setback. The signs of his despair were visible everywhere: in the slouch of his shoulders as he paced the Senate corridors; in his increasing tendency to make conversations into soliloquies, in his long dirges on the decline of the Republic.” Still, he would be the southern candidate for President, if only to strengthen the hand of the nullifiers.
Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams’ successor as head of the National Republican party, proposed to be the national candidate for President. On the eve of 1832 his party met in convention in the saloon of the Atheneum in Baltimore, with 155 delegates present from virtually all the states outside the Deep South. Former Democrat Peter Livingston of New York placed Clay’s name in nomination in what was probably the first nominating speech in convention history. Clay was unanimously chosen. At another convention in Washington several months later, Clay accepted the nomination, in a speech warning that “the fate of liberty, throughout the world, mainly depends upon the maintenance of American liberty.” Proudly the National Republicans presented their credo: against the spoils system, executive tyranny, and Jackson’s treatment of the Indians; in favor of American capitalism in general, and in particular, of a protective tariff to foster American industry—which they defended as protecting workers as well as owners—internal improvements at federal expense, the use of public land revenues for such improvements, the maintenance of the national banking system and a stable and uniform currency.
The Democrats also met in convention in Baltimore, but the large number of delegates—334, from every state save Missouri—compelled a move to a Universalist church. The convention, did not nominate Jackson; it simply “concurred,” amid much enthusiasm, in a nomination already made in many states. The delegates adopted a two-thirds rule for the nomination of a Vice-President—the only real issue before the convention—and a unit rule, authorizing the majority of each delegation to cast the entire vote of the state. Van Buren easily scor
ed far more than two-thirds of the votes on the first ballot. They did not need a positive platform; Jackson and Van Buren would run against the bank and the “aristocratic influences” favored by the National Republicans.
So the two parties confronted each other, but each was beset by factional problems. Calhoun threatened to draw votes from Jackson; and the leaders of the Webster faction, while publicly supporting Clay, were privately pessimistic about his chances and looking forward to a Webster candidacy in 1836, if not somehow in 1832. But the greatest threat to Clay lay in the strangest faction of all, a movement that called itself the Anti-Masons. For years Americans had been suspicious of secret societies, including the Masons, even though Washington and other heroes had been members. In the fall of 1826, an upstate New Yorker named William Morgan, an apostate Mason who had threatened to “expose” the secrets of Masonry, had been spirited away in a yellow carriage, driven to the Niagara frontier, and so disposed of that no trace of him was ever found.
The resulting uproar precipitated an explosive movement of moral protest, centered in New York but radiating powerfully throughout the Northeast. The movement received much of its force from antislavery and temperance New Englanders and New Yorkers, and much of its direction from a remarkable array of leaders including William H. Seward, Thurlow Weed, and Thaddeus Stevens. Even before the National Republicans and the Democrats had convened in Baltimore, the Anti-Masons had met there, in the first presidential nominating convention in history, and chosen as their candidate William Wirt, a dignified sixty-year-old Virginia Republican of the old school. Wirt had been on his way to the National Republican convention, ready to vote for Clay; he claimed to be shocked at his nomination by the Anti-Masons, but nonetheless accepted the honor.
Which of the presidential candidates could pull enough factions and sub-factions together to win a majority in the electoral college? As the campaign heated up during 1832, it became apparent that Jackson was in control. For one thing, the Democrats in the states seemed far more enthusiastic and organized than the followers of Calhoun, Clay, or Wirt. For another, the President proved himself a master in taking a moderate but clear-cut position on the issues that left other candidates appearing to be extremists. As the election campaign neared, the Administration took a more benevolent view toward reducing the tariff, lowering the cost of public lands, and even toward internal improvement.
Jackson even seemed conciliatory toward nullification, as a curious episode suggested. For years land-hungry Georgia settlers had been encroaching on Indian lands, and for years the Cherokees in particular had been resisting the tide, even to the point of setting up a kind of independent state under treaties with the federal government. Georgia refused to recognize Cherokee autonomy. Two New England missionaries were convicted and sentenced to four years at hard labor when they defied a Georgia law that compelled white residents in the Cherokee country to obtain a license and to take an oath of allegiance to the state. On the condemned men’s appeal to the Supreme Court, old John Marshall, speaking for the majority, held that the national government had exclusive jurisdiction and that the Georgia law was unconstitutional. The prisoners were ordered released. When Georgia defied the decision; Jackson aided and abetted the nullifiers. “John Marshall has made his decision,” he was reported to have said, “now let him enforce it. ”
Still, mollifying nullifiers and other factions was not much of a campaign strategy. What Jackson needed was a single, compelling issue that would transcend the ordinary play of interests and sections—an issue that would mobilize an electoral majority behind his cause. And he found it, by conviction and by contingency, in Nicholas Biddle’s Second National Bank of the United States.
The first and second banks had always been a staple of Republican party controversy, and few were surprised when Jackson, determined as he said to “prevent our liberties” from being “crushed by the Bank,” challenged the bank’s constitutionality in his first message to Congress in 1829. With the bank’s charter not due to expire until 1836, the President was content to ask Congress to curb the power of the bank and thus to delay a showdown with it until the second term. He knew that Biddle was a power in the politics of Pennsylvania and other key states. Webster and Clay knew this too, and for that reason they advised Biddle to call Jackson’s hand before the 1832 election by forcing him either to support the bill for recharter or to face the power of the bank at the polls. The bank chief initiated hostilities by having a recharter bill introduced in Congress, which passed it by strong majorities after a long and angry debate.
Visiting Jackson in the White House, Van Buren found the old general lying on a couch looking pale and exhausted. “The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me,” he said, “but I will kill it. ”
Kill it he did, with a veto and a bristling message that attacked monopoly and special privilege and boldly accepted the challenge of the “rich and powerful” to make the bank the central issue of the campaign. His own appeal would be to the “humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors for themselves.” Thus the people would decide. This was the first time, according to Robert Remini, that a President “had taken a strong stand on an important issue, challenging the electorate to do something about it if they did not approve his position.” Even Jackson was surprised by the popularity of his stand on the bank. “The veto works well,” he said, “instead of crushing me as was expected and intended, it will crush the Bank.” Calhoun and his fellow nullifiers handed Jackson the other great national issue of the campaign. As feeling about the tariff and slavery issues boiled over in South Carolina during 1832, the nullifiers won a legislative majority in favor of a state convention that would adopt an ordinance canceling national tariff legislation. Hayne prepared to resign as United States senator, to be elected governor; Calhoun would resign as Vice-President, to succeed Hayne in the Senate. Jackson, after taking military precautions in South Carolina, prepared a “Proclamation to the People of South Carolina” that termed nullification an “impracticable absurdity” and ended flatly, “Disunion by armed forces is treason. ”
The Jacksonians versus Philadelphia bankers and southern nullifiers—how could the Democrats lose? The response of the voters was decisive. Sweeping the electoral college over Clay, 219 to 49, Jackson won the electoral votes of sixteen of the twenty-four states and ran well ahead of Clay in the popular vote, 687,000 to 530,000. Jackson polled strongly in the South (except in South Carolina), well in the West, fairly well in the middle Atlantic states, and decisively in the swing states of Pennsylvania and New York. Aside from his own Kentucky, Clay’s main strength lay in southern New England. Still, considering Jackson’s position as national hero, and his brilliant positioning of his administration on the issues of the day, as well as the siphoning off of National Republican votes by the Anti-Masons, Clay had done well in the popular vote—a harbinger of the day when a revitalized Whig party would rise out of the ashes of the National Republicans.
Armed with his election mandate, Jackson now moved against nullification. The reaction of Carolina hotheads against his proclamation—the “mad ravings of a drivelling dotard,” Congressman George McDuffie called it—only hardened his will. Although the nullifiers put up a show of resistance, enlisting 25,000 volunteers and even setting up a cannonball factory, it was clear that they were not eager for a military confrontation, especially after learning that the rest of the South opposed drastic action. In mid-January 1833 the President asked the Congress for a “Force” bill that would allow him to enforce the revenue laws by military action if necessary, but the bill actually tried to avert the use of force by working out procedures, including “floating customs houses” off Charleston, to avert encounters in the city.
The Force bill produced in the Senate another brilliant debate, rivaling the Hayne-Webster forensics. This time Webster took on Calhoun, who had been liberated from the silence of the presiding chair, and the
remorseless logic-chopping of the new senator from South Carolina was judged to have bested the fulsome rhetoric of the New Englander. John Randolph, sitting in the gallery, found his view obscured by a lady’s bonnet. “Take away that hat,” he bleated, “I want to see Webster die, muscle by muscle.”
A combination of forces was working now against an explosion. Calhoun was pulling back from his earlier extremism, Van Buren was restraining Jackson from exercising his dearest wish of trying and hanging the secessionist leaders, and—most important of all—Henry Clay, the old compromiser himself, was coming in with a tariff bill designed to conciliate the Carolinians. The President signed both the Force bill and the compromise tariff bill on March 2, 1833, two days before he took the oath of office for a second term. Once again he had shown a masterly ability both to manipulate factions and to rise above them, to take a national and presidential posture, and to know when to stand firm and when to compromise.
But Andrew Jackson of Nashville was in no mood to compromise on the other great national issue. Nor was Nicholas Biddle of Philadelphia.
Only a historical novel, not history itself, could have plausibly pitted Jackson against so contrasting an antagonist. Born into an affluent old Quaker family of Philadelphia in 1786, Biddle entered the University of Pennsylvania at the age of ten; denied a degree three years later because of his youth, he gained admission to Princeton and won his degree there at fifteen. Successively a traveler in Europe, secretary to Minister James Monroe in London, and a Philadelphia lawyer, politician, and litterateur, he had married an heiress and moved into and upward through Philadelphia banking circles. He was everything Jackson was not: wellborn, superbly educated, urbane, genteel, and young. But both men were leaders, one in the world of politics, the other in that of economics.
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