Andrew Jackson

by H. W. Brands

  The next day Jackson sent Gaines after the escapees with two days’ provisions. Gaines didn’t catch them, but he did seize more of their supplies, and he concluded that though they were free they would soon be very hungry. Jackson burned Bowlegs’s village and prepared to call the war a success. “I believe I may say that the destruction of this place, with the possession of St. Marks, . . . will end the Indian War for the present,” he told Calhoun.

  Jackson turned out to be right. Although Seminole resistance to American power would revive and, during Jackson’s presidency, erupt again, for the time being the insurgents were destitute and demoralized. The soggy earth of Florida was harder to scorch than that of the Red Sticks’ Mississippi homeland, but Jackson went far toward making it uninhabitable for enemies of the United States.

  As Jackson headed back west and north he tied up some loose ends of the conflict. He convened a special court at St. Marks to determine the fate of the captured Britons, Ambrister and Arbuthnot. Gaines headed the court, and other officers drawn from the regular army and the militia filled out the tribunal. The prisoners were charged with various crimes of which the common theme was incitement to war against the United States and giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies. Though the court lacked any authority besides an order from Jackson, it observed certain legal forms. Witnesses were sworn and heard. The accused were permitted to defend themselves and their actions. The proceeding lasted three days, at the end of which the court delivered its verdict and its sentence recommendation to Jackson. Both men were found guilty. Arbuthnot was sentenced to death by hanging. Ambrister was initially sentenced to death by firing squad, but the court reconsidered and changed the sentence to fifty lashes and twelve months at hard labor.

  Jackson could approve the sentences, modify them, or set them aside. He asked himself, in the case of Ambrister, whether a prison sentence was practical where no prisons existed and whether a whipping accorded with the gravity of waging war against the United States. Early the day after he received the court’s findings, he left St. Marks for Mississippi and home. From the road outside the town he sent back a message conveying his decision.

  The Commanding General orders that Brevet Major A. C. W. Fanning, of the corps of artillery, will have, between the hours of eight and nine o’clock, A.M., A. Arbuthnot suspended by the neck, with a rope, until he is dead, and Robert C. Ambrister to be shot to death, agreeably to the sentence of the court.

  During the half decade after the War of 1812, the money problem so long a source of vexation to westerners became a crisis of national proportions. Gold fled the country for foreign bourses, driven out by cheap banknotes. Silver was almost as scarce. The federal government had issued Treasury notes to fund the war, but because these weren’t convertible into specie and because the government couldn’t resist printing more of them, they depreciated rapidly. Sound banks suffered for the sins of the flimsy, leaving sellers reluctant to accept notes from any issuer. Merchants fell back on barter. Potential lenders were demoralized by the ruinous rates of inflation.

  So dire was the financial anarchy that the Republicans were driven to a measure the founders of the party had long considered Federalist anathema. In 1816 the Republican Congress resurrected the Bank of the United States. The original bank had been the brainchild of Alexander Hamilton, who hoped to marry wealth to power by granting the bank—a privately owned institution dominated by some of the richest men in the country—control over the financial business of the federal government. Republicans condemned Hamilton’s bank as unconstitutional and as prima facie evidence of the Federalist plot to sacrifice liberty to profit. They lacked the votes in 1791 to prevent its charter but swore they would have if they could have. And when the bank’s charter expired in 1811, with the Republicans firmly in control of Congress, the bank’s opponents gleefully watched it die. The Federalists could do nothing to save it. But those Federalists who survived the War of 1812 had the satisfaction of seeing the worm turn and James Madison, one of the harshest critics of the first Bank of the United States, compelled by the financial crisis of the postwar period to call for its resurrection. In April 1816 the Republican Congress approved a bill chartering a second Bank of the United States for twenty years, and Madison signed it into law.

  Two weeks later Congress approved another measure similarly fraught with significance. The Constitution had always allowed Congress to regulate commerce, by means including the levying of tariffs on imports. Until the troubles that produced the war, tariffs were treated as tools for raising revenue, and in fact import duties were the primary source of revenue for the federal government. With revenue as the object, rates were kept low, lest customers turn away and collections fall. Things changed during the war. The trans-Atlantic dislocations caused by the conflict allowed domestic industries—iron, arms, tools, and others—to emerge. As they did so, they developed political constituencies: owners, employees, distributors, suppliers. The constituents found friends in Washington who sponsored tariff legislation based on the novel principle of protection rather than revenue. The point was to maximize not the government’s income but the incomes of the interested parties. The friends of industry, forming crucial alliances with cotton and woolen producers, persuaded Congress to pass the first explicitly protective tariff in American history.

  Andrew Jackson contributed nothing toward the charter of the new bank or the passage of the protective tariff, though both the bank and the tariff would figure centrally in his career as president. By contrast, actions he had already taken made him the foremost author of a development that would transform American politics and the American economy no less than the bank and the tariff did.

  Since the late sixteenth century, when hostile Indians had destroyed the first English colony planted in North America (at Roanoke Island on the Carolina coast), the indigenous peoples had been the principal barrier to the westward expansion of the American colonies and the states that became their successors. By crushing the Creeks and intimidating the other tribes of the Southwest, Jackson opened large swaths of land to settlement. Almost before the British sailed away from Louisiana after the Battle of New Orleans, the migration to the Southwest began, and during the next few decades what had been Indian-controlled wilderness when Jackson and his Tennessee volunteers first marched through became the center of a burgeoning American cotton industry. The deep black soil of the Gulf coastal plain grew long-staple cotton better than almost anywhere else on earth. With the help of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, which separated cotton seeds from fiber; Robert Fulton’s steamboat, which transported the cotton to market; and tens of thousands of black slaves, who planted, hoed, and harvested the cotton, the cotton farmers who followed in Jackson’s footsteps became wealthy and powerful. Slavery had been an institution with a doubtful future in the late eighteenth century, as the eastern lands on which the slaves worked grew tired and unproductive. Now slavery, or rather the slaveholders, ruled a cotton kingdom with a future limited only by the slaveholders’ ambitions.

  Some people seek danger as a way of making themselves feel alive. They scale mountains or explore jungles when they feel existence becoming mundane, as they often do. Others seek confrontation, for similar reasons. Jackson wouldn’t have admitted to seeking confrontation. He would have said he simply stood on principle, which was where confrontation found him. But the number and gravity of his duels and shooting affrays, and the frequency of his ignoring and exceeding orders suggest that confrontation wasn’t some side effect of a boisterous personality but the raison d’être of Jackson’s spirit—at least that portion of his spirit he showed the world at large. The private Jackson—the gentle husband to Rachel, the doting father to Andrew Jr. and his foster brothers, the solicitous uncle to Rachel’s kin, the patron to the junior officers who served beneath him—was another character entirely. Within the circle he defined as family—and he defined it generously—he displayed all the tenderness he had been storing up since the early demise of his chil
dhood family. But to the rest of the world—the world of hostile Indians just beyond the fringe of settlement, of partisan Tories burning and looting his home village, of imperious British officers demanding their boots blackened or invading American soil, of feckless Spanish commandants endangering the American South by their dereliction—he was always the embattled warrior.

  More than a few of his battles he brought upon himself. In early 1817 the War Department reassigned one of his engineers without sending the reassignment order through Jackson’s Nashville headquarters. Jackson protested the lack of courtesy, and when Washington failed to assure him it wouldn’t happen again, he commanded the officers in his division to ignore any future directives from the War Department. They must listen only to him. “There is a chain of communication that binds the military compact, which, if broken, opens the door to disobedience and disrespect and gives loose to the turbulent spirits who are ever ready to excite mutiny.”

  Mutiny was exactly what some of Jackson’s critics saw in the headstrong general’s order. Hadn’t Caesar and every other military dictator come to power by tying their men more closely to themselves than to the government all had pledged to serve?

  Jackson heard the criticism, at first indirectly. In August 1817 an anonymous correspondent in New York warned him against enemies in the Northeast, including Winfield Scott, who headed the First and Third military departments, based in New York. “The War Office gentry and their adherents, pensioners, and expectants have all been busy,” the nameless writer asserted, “but no one (of sufficient mark for your notice) more than Major General Scott, who, I am credibly informed, goes so far as to call the order in question an act of mutiny. In this district he is the organ of Government insinuations and the supposed author of the paper enclosed”—an unsigned newspaper article critical of Jackson and his order. “Be on your guard.”

  Jackson confronted Scott and demanded an explanation. “I have not permitted myself for a moment to believe that the conduct ascribed to you is correct,” he said, unpersuasively. “Candor, however, induces me to lay them”—the anonymous letter and the article—“before you that you may have it in your power to say how far they may be incorrectly stated.”

  Scott didn’t appreciate being haled into Jackson’s court, especially on the testimony of someone who lacked the courage or decency to give his name. He denied being the author of the critical article, but he refused to disavow the sentiments ascribed to him. He pointed out the impossible position in which Jackson’s order placed his subordinates. Suppose the president ordered one of Jackson’s captains to take a certain action. “If the Captain obeys, you arrest him; but if in compliance with your prohibition he sets the commands of the President at naught, he would find himself in direct conflict with the highest military authority under the Constitution.” Scott hoped Jackson would reconsider his order. But in any event, he wanted nothing more to do with the affair.

  Perhaps Jackson’s intestinal problems were particularly severe when he received Scott’s answer and responded. Had Jackson been a heavy drinker, Scott must have thought him drunk. For whatever reason, Jackson wrote Scott a letter as intemperate and abusive as anything he ever composed. Scott, Jackson said, had approached the issue “with the designs of an assassin lurking under a fair exterior. . . . Is conduct like this congenial with that high sense of dignity which should be seated in a soldier’s bosom? Is it due from a brother officer to assail in the dark the reputation of another and stab him at a moment when he cannot expect it? . . . I shall not stoop, sir, to a justification of my order before you, or to notice the weakness and absurdity of your tinsel rhetoric. . . . To the intermeddling pimps and spies of the War Department, who are in the garb of gentlemen, I hold myself responsible for any grievance they may labor under on my account, with which you have my permission to number yourself.”

  The outbreak of the Seminole War spared Americans the absurd and unseemly prospect of a duel between two of its ranking officers. Monroe calmed Jackson, who threatened to resign over the affair, by appealing to his sense of duty. “It is my earnest desire that you remain in the service of your country,” the president said. “Our affairs are not settled. . . . The Spanish government has injured us and shews no disposition to repair the injury. . . . Should we be involved in another war, I have no doubt that it will decide the fate of our free government.”

  Monroe’s contemporaries (and historians after them) often found the Virginian unimpressive. Yet he was shrewd enough to discover Jackson’s vulnerability: the incapacity of the soldier-patriot to resist a call to the service of his country. Besides, even Jackson recognized that there was more glory in thrashing Spaniards than in quarreling with Winfield Scott. But the rift between the two men persisted, and Scott joined the growing ranks of Jackson’s enemies.

  There are serious difficulties in this business, on which ever side we view it,” Monroe declared in July 1818. The business the president referred to was the diplomatic furor that followed Jackson’s latest Florida venture. The British were protesting the execution of Arbuthnot and Ambrister, the Spanish Jackson’s entire Florida campaign. To emphasize his point that Spanish power in Florida was a dangerous sham, Jackson had recaptured Pensacola on his way back from the Suwanee River. “This is justifiable on the immutable principles of self-defence,” he wrote the Spanish governor, José Masot, as he approached the town. “The Government of the United States is bound to protect her citizens, but weak would be her efforts and ineffectual the best advised measures if the Floridas are to be free to every enemy.” As it happened, the governor had fled to the Barrancas, the fort that commanded the bay below the town. Receiving no answer, Jackson sent a sterner note to the acting commander at Pensacola. “I am informed that you have orders to fire on my troops entering the city. . . . I wish you to understand distinctly that if such orders are carried into effect, I will put to death every man found in arms.” The commander, a mere lieutenant colonel, chose not to test Jackson’s sincerity, and Jackson took the town.

  Proceeding to the Barrancas, he conveyed the same message to Masot in slightly more tactful fashion. “Resistance would be a wanton sacrifice of blood. . . . You cannot expect to defend yourself successfully, and the first shot from your fort must draw down upon you the vengeance of an irritated soldiery.” The governor, who had more at stake than the lieutenant colonel, insisted on contesting the American takeover, but mostly for form’s sake. The battle was brief and casualties were light.

  Had Jackson taken the town and marched away, as he did in 1814, the difficulties he created for Monroe would have been modest. But Jackson’s earlier experience convinced him that Spain couldn’t be trusted with Florida, and so he garrisoned Pensacola with American troops who, from all appearances, would remain there permanently. The Spanish were predictably outraged. Their minister at Washington, Luis de Onís, filed a protest with the State Department as soon as he heard the news. President Monroe, he insisted, must return Pensacola to Spanish control at once and punish General Jackson.

  Less predictably, certain Americans agreed with the Spanish minister. Though the American people, by and large, loved Jackson, many American politicians distrusted him deeply. Some honestly worried that he had the makings of a military dictator. Others feared for the Constitution if the executive branch—whether in the person of a general or of the president—could wage war without asking Congress. Still others saw in Jackson an impediment to their own political ambitions.

  This last group was well represented in Monroe’s own administration. The demise of the Federalists—who put up only token resistance to Monroe’s election in 1816 and wouldn’t nominate anyone in 1820—didn’t end national politics in America. It simply shifted politics to within the Republican party, where those men who wished to succeed Monroe were already maneuvering for advantage. William Crawford scarcely bothered to hide his ambitions, which made for tense cabinet meetings with John Quincy Adams, who did try to hide his ambitions but didn’t succeed. John C
alhoun had hopes, besides an unrecognized capacity for intrigue.

  “Mr. Calhoun is extremely dissatisfied with General Jackson’s proceedings in Florida,” Adams remarked after a series of meetings in which Jackson and Florida provided the consistent theme. “Thinks Jackson’s object was to produce a war for the sake of commanding an expedition against Mexico, and that we shall certainly have a Spanish war.” The South Carolinian’s sniping persisted. “Calhoun says he has heard that the court-martial at first acquitted the two Englishmen, but that Jackson sent the case back to them. . . . He says, also, that last winter there was a company formed in Tennessee, who sent Jackson’s nephew to Pensacola and purchased Florida lands, and that Jackson himself is reported to be interested in the speculation.”

  Less from love of Jackson than from enmity toward Crawford and Calhoun, Adams became Jackson’s strongest, and then only, defender in the cabinet. “The opinion is unanimously against Jackson excepting mine,” Adams wrote. Calhoun continued to attack Jackson for exceeding orders. Crawford joined in, predicting dire consequences from the general’s rash action. If the president didn’t restore Pensacola to Spain and reprimand Jackson, Crawford said, war would result, the economy would crash, and the administration would be punished by the American electorate.

  Jackson’s enemies within the administration had help from without. Henry Clay had been happy for a time to bask in Jackson’s triumphs. “The Eighth of January shall be remembered, and the glory of that day shall stimulate future patriots!” the House Speaker told his colleagues. But he was quick to criticize when he sensed a negative reaction to Jackson’s Florida impetuousness. Clay condemned the executions of Arbuthnot and Ambrister as illegal and reprehensible, and he asserted that Jackson’s Florida campaign had usurped the exclusive authority of Congress to declare war. The general’s disregard for the Constitution endangered everything America stood for. “We are fighting a great moral battle for the benefit not only of our country but of all mankind. The eyes of the whole world are in fixed attention upon us.” The enemies of liberty had foretold the emergence of a military despot; for Jackson to escape censure would prove them right. And it would presage the end of the American republic. “Remember that Greece had her Alexander, Rome her Caesar, England her Cromwell, France her Bonaparte. . . . If we would escape the rock on which they split, we must avoid their errors.”