Andrew Jackson

by H. W. Brands

  A few weeks after the memorable dinner, Jackson wrote Calhoun a letter on an entirely different subject. The occasion for the letter was a message to Jackson from William Crawford, of all people, raising questions about Calhoun’s behavior during the Seminole War. Jackson hadn’t forgiven Crawford for what he considered Crawford’s past sins, but at this point he considered him harmless, and potentially useful in building a case against Calhoun. “The submission, you will perceive, is authorised by the writer,” Jackson explained in forwarding to Calhoun the Crawford letter. “The statements and facts it presents, being so different from what I had heretofore understood to be correct, require that it should be brought to your consideration.” He invited Calhoun to explain the discrepancies.

  The vice president responded curtly. “I cannot repress the expression of my indignation,” he told Jackson, while adding snidely, “I must express my gratification that the secret and mysterious attempts which have been made by false insinuations for political purpose for years to injure my character, are at length brought to light.” He said he would answer Jackson’s request for explanation “as soon as my leisure may permit.”

  Calhoun was still angry two weeks later. “However high my respect is for your personal character and the exalted station which you occupy,” he wrote Jackson, “I cannot recognize the right on your part to call in question my conduct. . . . I acted on that occasion in the discharge of a high official duty, and under responsibility to my conscience and my country only.” All the same, he devoted a long letter to justifying his actions during the Seminole War and impugning the integrity of his critics.

  He was wasting his breath. Jackson didn’t want the truth in the Seminole affair. He knew what he had done, and could live with that. What Calhoun had done mattered, at this point, only to the degree it gave Jackson plausible grounds for rendering the vice president a pariah, for reasons that transcended the Seminole War. Calhoun’s past position on Florida was nothing next to his current position on the Union. This was the danger, and why he had to be cast into the outer darkness.

  Nor was Calhoun the only one who had to go. Certain members of the cabinet, while not exactly nullifiers, were wobbly on issues Jackson considered vital to reforming the government. Treasury Secretary Ingham urged the president to move slowly against the Bank of the United States. “It must be admitted to be a field of experiment, in which no certain results can be calculated upon,” Ingham explained. Attorney General Berrien was no bolder. “Whenever that subject shall be presented to the legislative body,” Berrien said, “it will without doubt create a strong sensation.” Ingham and Berrien, with Navy Secretary Branch, were generally accounted allies of Calhoun, and Jackson didn’t want them around while he isolated the vice president. Anyway, he bridled at stories in the opposition press—which these days included Duff Green’s Telegraph—that he dare not offend Ingham and the others, who had backing among groups whose support Jackson was thought to require. “The combination and coalition believed they had got me in the trap set for me, and that I could not extricate myself,” Jackson wrote to Andrew Donelson. “My cabinet was divided, and I could not, nay durst not, remove those who had become the favorites of the Virginia senators, because they were also the favorites of Pennsylvania, and covered by the wand of Calhoun, who with Duff Green thought they could raise up and destroy empires, or make and unmake presidents at will.” To John Coffee he commented, “How little do they know me.”

  As much to prove the smug reckoners wrong as to jettison the dead weight of his useless advisers, Jackson did something no president had ever done (and none would ever do more dramatically): he overthrew the whole cabinet. He didn’t fire Ingham and the others, partly because there was some question regarding a president’s authority to remove cabinet officers without the consent of the same body that had to approve their appointment—the Senate—but also because he didn’t wish to bruise political feelings any more than necessary. (Andrew Johnson would be impeached over the removal issue.) Instead he accomplished his purpose by an artfulness few suspected in the old soldier. He asked John Eaton and Martin Van Buren to resign, the former on suggestions that he might return to the Senate, the latter to take a post as minister to England, with the vice presidency awaiting his return from London. With Eaton and Van Buren, the most ardent loyalists in the cabinet, setting the example, Ingham and the others required only modest nudges to be persuaded to submit their resignations as well. Jackson accomplished his palace coup near the end of the legislative session, a timing that provided the finishing touch. The Senate wouldn’t be ready to receive nominations for replacements till the following year, allowing tempers to cool before Jackson had to put new names forward. “I have changed my cabinet, and strengthened my administration thereby,” he told Coffee in the denouement. “What a contrast!!”

  Amid the coup, Jackson received a letter on a topic he almost never discussed in public and seldom in private. His religious views were orthodox for his time and place. Raised in the Presbyterian church of his Scots ancestors, he believed in a providential plan for humanity, though he doubted that humans could discover its details. He believed that religion supported personal and public morals and that morality conduced to personal and public prosperity and the general welfare. He thanked heaven for his victories and blamed himself—or other humans, but not God—for his defeats. He had supported Rachel’s devotion, to the point of building her a chapel at the Hermitage so she would never miss a service, even if he missed more than a few himself. As president he alternated attendance between the First Presbyterian Church and St. John’s Episcopal, reserving seats in both places by paying pew rent. He promoted efforts to Christianize the Indians of the West, along with the many frontier whites whose behavior suggested they could stand a dose of the gospel themselves.

  This last matter was what elicited an exchange of correspondence regarding religion. A society promoting the establishment of Sunday schools in the West had scheduled a meeting in Washington. Its organizers requested Jackson’s endorsement, and he casually complied. A few weeks later an alarmed constituent wrote inquiring why he was taking sides among sects. Jackson pleaded honest ignorance. “The first intimation I have received that the meeting . . . was sectarian is from your letter now before me,” he answered. “I was induced to believe that it was a plan for disseminating the Gospel by a union of all Christians in the valley of the Mississippi, where it was considered from the late settlement of the country the circulation of the Bible, the education of the poor, and an observance of the Sabbath by children might be beneficial to their morals, and in the end prove essentially serviceable to the indigent.” A federal unionist in politics, Jackson was an ecumenical unionist in religion, at least among Christians.

  I am no sectarian, though a lover of the Christian religion. I do not believe that any who shall be so fortunate as to be received to heaven, through the atonement of our blessed Saviour, will be asked whether they belonged to the Presbyterian, the Methodist, the Episcopalian Baptist, or Roman Catholic [church]. All Christians are brethren, and all true Christians know they are such because they love one another. A true Christian loves all, immaterial to what sect or church he may belong.

  The president reiterated that he had understood the Sunday school project to be nonsectarian. “As such it had my best wishes, and as such will ever have them. But should it appear that the object is to give ascendancy and preference to any sect or denomination over others, then my constitutional notions will compel me to frown down such an attempt because in my opinion freedom and an established religion are incompatible.”

  Jackson subsequently revealed a bit more about his religious convictions. The early summer of 1832 produced an epidemic of cholera in the eastern part of North America. It apparently started in Quebec, where an infected ship dropped anchor in June and unleashed its cargo of pathogens on the inhabitants. Spreading through water supplies tainted by the waste of its victims, it invaded upper New York state, then traveled down
the Hudson to New York City. Many thousands sickened, and eventually thousands died.

  No one knew what caused the disease or understood how it spread. The only prophylactic that appeared to offer hope was religion. Henry Clay, returned to the Senate from Kentucky, sponsored a resolution asking the president to declare a national day of fasting and prayer. The Senate approved the measure but the House couldn’t agree on language, and the bill died. Many churches, however, believing that politics shouldn’t stand between Christian citizens and their God, called on the president directly, begging him to show moral guidance in this time of distress.

  Jackson refused. “Whilst I concur with the synod in the efficacy of prayer and in the hope that our country may be preserved from the attack of pestilence . . . ,” he told the ruling body of the Reformed Church, “I am constrained to decline the appointment of any period or mode as proper for the public manifestation of this reliance. I could not do otherwise without transcending those limits which are prescribed by the Constitution for the President, and without feeling that I might in some degree disturb the security which religion now enjoys in this country in its complete separation from the political concerns of the General Government.” Jackson told the ministers to look to the states, and to themselves. “It is the province of the pulpits and the State Governments to recommend the mode by which the people may best attest their reliance on the protecting arm of the Almighty in times of great public distress. Whether the apprehension that cholera will visit our land furnishes a proper occasion for their solemn notice, I must therefore leave to their own consideration.”

  The pulpits and some of the states prayed, to no obvious avail. The disease ran its course in one city after another, till lack of victims and then cold weather stopped the pathogen from reproducing.

  Jackson escaped the disease, although neither he nor anyone else could have said why. Perhaps he didn’t drink water that summer, from his long-standing preference for alcoholic beverages and coffee. Perhaps he was just lucky.

  His overall health was better than it had been in some time. During his first year in Washington his friends noted an alarming decline. “His whole physical system seemed to be totally deranged,” William Lewis recalled. “His feet and legs, particularly, had been very much swollen for several months and continued to get worse every day, until his extreme debility appeared to be rapidly assuming the character of a confirmed dropsy.” Jackson’s worrisome condition was one thing that made the Calhoun question so important. No president had died in office or seriously threatened to. But Jackson looked as though he might. If he did, Calhoun would become president. If Jackson survived to be reelected, he might die during his second term, making Calhoun’s successor president. Till now the State Department had been the springboard to the presidency, but Van Buren wasn’t alone in reckoning that the advantage could be shifting to the vice presidency.

  Jackson had sought relief for his ailments on the Virginia shore, at a spa called the Rip Raps. The cure consisted of daily swims in the Atlantic. “I cannot yet determine whether I will be benefitted by the salt water bath,” he wrote after a few days. “It is very cold, though the day is clear and fine.” In fact, to the extent the regimen had any positive effect, it was probably the clear air rather than the cold water that did it. Whatever took city residents out of their neighborhoods in warm weather, when infectious agents multiplied most prolifically, and exposed them to fresh air and sun was good for their health.

  In subsequent summers Jackson traveled farther, usually home to Nashville. The vacations afforded him rest; they also allowed him to keep watch on the affairs of the Hermitage. His oversight wasn’t simply the indulgence of the planter but a matter of economic necessity. As he had guessed, the expenses of the presidency outran his salary. He received fifty thousand dollars per year, but from this he had to entertain on a scale appropriate to the head of state of an aspiring nation. The dinners and receptions he held weren’t sumptuous, but they were respectable and many. He couldn’t cut back without insulting the office and the people who had placed him there.

  His expenses went beyond entertainment. He insisted on dressing well. The firm of Tucker & Thompson was his tailor, and its monthly statements showed regular additions to his wardrobe, including a “white Valencia vest,” a “fancy silk vest,” a “velvet vest,” “blue cloth pants,” “black nankeen crape pants,” “Canton crape pants,” “broad summer cloth pants,” a “black bombazine coat,” a “fancy invisible frock”—whatever that might have been—“caster gloves,” “linen drawers,” and “Virginia drawers.”

  To support himself, Jackson depended on his income from the Hermitage to complement his salary. He monitored the price of cotton—at New Orleans, Liverpool, and other markets—as carefully as he ever had, and when it was low he fretted almost as much as he had in the days when his farming was his primary occupation. “This year, with the bad season, I will not clear from my farm what its culture has cost me,” he told neighbor Robert Chester at the end of 1830. Jackson might have covered some of his loss by selling slaves, but he disliked doing so, as it disrupted families. In at least one case, though, he made an exception—at the request of the slaves involved. He explained the unusual circumstance to Chester: “I received a letter from Mr. Steel, my overseer, informing me that Charlotte had applied to you to purchase her, being discontented where she is now. I bought her, being the wife of Charles, at his request. He now appears desirous that she with her children be sold. I have therefore come to the resolution to part with her.”

  Cotton was Jackson’s staple, but a Tennessee farmer had to watch other crops, and livestock as well. “Have your hogs put up early,” he wrote Andrew Jr. in the autumn of 1832, “so that they may be fatted before the cold weather, fattening none that will not weight 120 lbs., keeping all under as stock hogs by which next year you will have enough of large hogs for the family.” Jackson told Andrew that he had contracted to sell a Nashville packer ten thousand pounds of pork on the hoof at $2.25 per hundred. The rest would remain at the Hermitage. “This will give you a stock of good hogs that next year, with attention, will average 200 round.”

  Cotton and hogs paid the rent, but horses remained Jackson’s passion. His favorite was now a gray stud colt he called Bolivar, for the South American liberator. Jackson had sold the animal upon leaving for Washington at the beginning of 1829, but he bought him back a year later after suffering seller’s remorse. Bolivar’s bloodlines were noble; he descended from Truxton, Jackson’s first prize horse. From the distance of the capital Jackson supervised Bolivar’s management. He wanted him trained as a runner but not pushed too hard. “Knowing the merit of his blood, you see I am determined to keep its credit up until I can get it tested, by his offspring from a thoroughbred mare,” he wrote Hardy Cryer, his horse man. “I shall direct the Virginian”—a recently acquired filly—“to be put to him, as the best blood I have except those that are too nigh kin to him. . . . Her colt will test his merit as a foal getter and turf horse.”

  Nothing angered Jackson more than mismanagement of the horses. He discovered in the spring of 1832 that overseer Steel had been running the animals too soon and hard. “I was truly mortified,” he wrote Andrew Jr., “on being informed by Steel that he had turned them into training to run at the spring races in Tennessee.” They should have been resting and growing. “Your filly would, I have no doubt, have won the sweepstake in the fall. If she does, she is worth to you $8000.” To bar similar foolishness, Jackson ordered Andrew to take drastic measures at the Hermitage. “Have the turf closed, plowed up, and permit not a horse to gallop on it.”

  Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in America midway through Jackson’s first term as president. Like other students of politics, the French aristocrat was familiar with the concept of democracy, which history and reason informed him was the intermediate stage between republicanism and either despotism or civil war. Tocqueville was too young to have witnessed the degenerative process in France, having bee
n born after Napoleon seized power. But he assumed that the same influences—self-interest, demagoguery, ignorance—that had subverted popular government in his own country would tend to do so in America. The question was whether they would be offset by other factors, perhaps peculiar to the New World. Tocqueville traveled about America trying to answer this question. At Boston, Jared Sparks explained that the philosophy of American democracy could be summarized in one sentence: “The majority is always right.” Sparks, recently the editor of the North American Review and soon to be president of Harvard College, added, “By and large we are very well satisfied to have adopted it, but one cannot deny that experience often gives the lie to the principle.” At Baltimore, Tocqueville dined with a man named Finley, who explained that democratic politics could get rather rough. Finley was an anti-Jacksonian, and he had spoken at a town meeting against the president. At least he had tried to speak; the boos of the Jacksonians drowned him out. “Several men came to fisticuffs. There were several broken limbs.”

  Tocqueville asked if Finley saw political danger in such tumult. Finley said he did not. “Our people is accustomed to that type of election. They know just how far they can go. . . . Besides, the very excess of democracy partly saves us from the dangers of democracy. All public appointments are annual. The party that loses this year hopes to succeed the next. So why should it resort to illegal means?”

  Tocqueville knew that Americans had abandoned property qualifications for voting. Didn’t their absence cause problems? Finley acknowledged that it did. “I have seen elections swayed by the paupers from the alms house, whom one of the candidates had had fetched,” he said. This was a manifestation of what he considered the worst feature of American politics: that elections could be determined by “those who have no interest in stability, since they possess nothing and have but little understanding.”