Andrew Jackson

by H. W. Brands

  Having vanquished the nullifiers of South Carolina, Jackson turned his attention to that other enemy stronghold, New England. The Federalists were long forgotten, and with them the secessionist tendencies that had inspired the Hartford convention, but their collateral descendants, calling themselves Whigs, included persons who were almost as distrustful of democracy as the high Hamiltonians had been, and they enjoyed a majority east of the Hudson River. New England Democrats, desperate for help, called to the White House. They suggested that a visit from Jackson would hearten their friends, discourage their enemies, and perhaps win a seat or two for the party in the next congressional elections. Jackson accepted the reasoning and the invitation, and headed north.

  The first leg was by ordinary horse but soon gave way to one of iron. Twelve miles from Baltimore a proud citizens’ committee met the presidential party in a spanking new train of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and insisted that Jackson join them for the journey back to their city. He had never ridden “the steam cars” (neither had any other president), and he enjoyed the ride, though it intensified the headache he often experienced these days. Large crowds turned out in Baltimore and followed him to the theater that evening. Also in the audience that night was the Sauk chief Black Hawk. Sour Whigs, unable or unwilling to fathom why anyone would want to see Jackson, contended that the crowds were for the Indian.

  The next city on the itinerary, Philadelphia, sent a delegation and a steamboat to fetch the president. Thirty thousand men, women, and children lined the pier at the Philadelphia navy yard, where a coach drawn by four white horses waited patiently till he arrived, at which moment all patience vanished. The crowd surged into the street, clamoring to be close to the great man. The coach was pinned in place, and the horses grew frantic, till armed cavalry rode to the rescue and forced a passage for the president’s vehicle. Jackson spent the Sabbath in the city of Friends, though he attended services with the Presbyterians. Afterward he shook the hand of a young boy. “And then—what a scene!” exclaimed a reporter covering the event. “One upon another’s head, they all extended their hands.” Jackson paused to consider, then declined to repeat his gesture. “The General, using his powers of foresight, soon perceived what would be the consequence, immediately sounded a retreat. . . . He wisely slipped out by a private door and eluded the mob.” The next day the city turned out for a presidential parade to the shrines of American independence. The crush stalled the progress of the participants, leaving Jackson sitting on his horse for five hours under a broiling sun. When he finally reached Independence Hall, his head sunburned and splitting, the building was packed so full the guests could hardly breathe. Someone managed to raise a window. “A ludicrous scene ensued,” said the same reporter. “Man, woman, and child came tumbling out from a height of six feet, some jumping, some diving, and some rolling.” Jackson gamely tried to greet his supporters, shaking the hands of all who offered till he could barely move his arm.

  Before he left Philadelphia he consulted the famous Dr. Physick, a practitioner of what later generations would call alternative medicine and what many in Physick’s own day called quackery. The president apparently decided that since real doctors hadn’t been able to cure what ailed him, he might as well go faux. “Now, Doctor,” he said as the examination began, “I can do any thing you think proper to order, and bear as much as most men. There are only two things I can’t give up: one is coffee, and the other is tobacco.” Perhaps the medicine man decided that if Jackson wouldn’t abandon those vices, there was nothing to be done. Maybe he reasoned he’d better not tamper with the presidential health. Whatever the cause, Physick left Jackson to his own nostrums.

  The crowds in New York were even larger than in Philadelphia. “From the moment of landing, all was confusion,” recorded Philip Hone, former New York mayor, leading Whig, and noted diarist. The confusion became bedlam when a bridge connecting the Battery to Castle Garden collapsed under the weight of thousands of onlookers who fell to the water and rocks below amid a tangle of wood and metal. Many were soaked and bruised, but miraculously no one drowned and none were seriously hurt. Not so lucky was a sailor aboard a customs cutter who touched off a cannon saluting the president but lost his hands and eyesight when the charge misfired. Jackson, who himself just missed being scorched by the wadding of another cannon and who was nearly thrown from his bucking horse after the roar of the discharge spooked it, found the experience as gratifying as it was unnerving. “I have witnessed enthusiasms before,” he wrote Andrew Jr., “but never before have I witnessed such a scene of personal regard as I have today. . . . I have bowed to upwards of two hundred thousand people today. Never has there been such affection of the people before, I am sure.”

  The enthusiasm eased as the president entered New England. Connecticut appreciated his stand against the nullifiers, with a Norwich women’s group waving banners recalling his Jefferson dinner toast in favor of the Union. But the heat of democracy diminished the closer he got to the cool heart of New England. Harvard had awarded honorary degrees to previous presidents visiting Boston, including James Monroe. Harvard’s president, Josiah Quincy, feared that failing to honor Jackson similarly would be taken for partisanship, which he shunned for himself and the college. But the earlier recipients had been well educated, while Jackson’s lack of schooling was famous. This lack, of course, was part of his appeal to ordinary folks, but it simply reminded Quincy and the board of Harvard’s overseers that their college wasn’t for ordinary folks. In Jackson’s favor, as Quincy reasoned, he had practical experience. The degree in question was a doctorate of laws, and Jackson had been an attorney and a judge, besides being the current chief executive of the laws of the nation. Yet Quincy had to ask himself, what if Jackson insisted on speaking at the ceremony? In the man’s ignorance he might make a fool of Harvard. Quincy couldn’t bear the thought.

  Neither could John Quincy Adams, observing cousin Quincy’s dilemma from the distance of the village of Quincy (formerly Braintree, but renamed for all the Quincys about). Adams muttered to his diary as Jackson came north, complaining of the attention his old rival received. “The President must hasten back to Washington, or he will be glorified to his grave,” Adams said. “They so fagged him by their reception on Friday, and their presentations and addresses on Saturday, that he failed going to the Brattle Street Church with Governor Lincoln on Sunday morning.” Adams disbelieved that Jackson was as tired as he let on. “He is one of our tribe of great men who turn disease to commodity. . . . He is so ravenous of notoriety that he craves the sympathy for sickness as a portion of his glory. . . . Four fifths of the sickness is trickery, and the other fifth mere fatigue.”

  Adams’s envy sharpened to outrage when Josiah Quincy decided to go ahead and give the president a degree. Adams was invited as a matter of course, but on principle he refused. “I could not be present to see my darling Harvard disgrace herself by conferring a Doctor’s degree upon a barbarian and savage who could scarcely spell his own name,” he told Quincy.

  Jackson surprised Quincy and the other guests who likewise expected a barbarian. Or so Adams heard from a physician friend who attended the ceremonies honoring the president and confessed to having been “much captivated by the ease and gracefulness of his manners.” (This doctor took Jackson’s illness seriously. “He says Jackson is so excessively debilitated that he should not be surprised if he should never reach Washington again,” Adams wrote.) The proceedings were as windy as academic convocations often are. Several eminent persons held forth at length before Jackson received his degree and spoke with much-appreciated brevity. The guests adjourned to a reception at Quincy’s official residence, where Jackson shook hands with hundreds more and charmed the skeptics.

  Yet those who weren’t there weren’t prevented by their absence from circulating stories about the event. One that drew smiles from both sides had Jackson, after enduring the speeches in academic Latin, being urged to respond in kind, now that he was a doctor of laws. The
president rose to the occasion with splendid succinctness. “E pluribus unum, my friends,” he said. “Sine qua non.”

  An unrelated incident of Jackson’s summer travels wasn’t funny at all. On a brief trip to Alexandria, Virginia, the president was assaulted by a young man recently dismissed from the navy. Murder seems not to have been the motive, for the assailant simply struck Jackson in the face with his hand. He was instantly overpowered and hauled away, leaving the president lightly bloodied. A local stalwart, embarrassed at this breach of etiquette, offered to kill the attacker if Jackson would pardon him should he be convicted of the murder. Jackson declined the offer. “I can not do that,” he said. “I want no man to stand between me and my assailants, and none to take revenge on my account.” He wished only that he had been quicker to respond to the attack. He had been seated and unable to bring his cane to bear. “Had I been prepared for this cowardly villain’s approach, I can assure you all that he would never have the temerity to undertake such a thing again.”

  In 1832 John Marshall celebrated his thirty-first year as chief justice of the United States. But Marshall didn’t feel much like celebrating. At the end of the previous year, on Christmas Day, his wife of forty-eight years had died. No less than Jackson had Marshall devoted himself to his spouse; no less than Jackson was he prostrated emotionally at her passing. To his associates he never seemed the same after Mary’s death. He suddenly showed his seventy-six years; the joy of life that had carried him through the controversies of his tenure on the court abandoned him. He found solace in neither Washington, his place of work, nor Richmond, his home.

  Yet, like Jackson, he carried on. He lacked the energy of younger days, when he had made the court coequal with Congress and the presidency by the power of his will and intellect. Fortunately the big cases seemed fewer these days—but of course that wasn’t just luck. The great battles—over the role of the court, the nature of contracts, the scope of federal power—had been fought and won. It was a measure of the respect in which the court was held that the nullifiers of South Carolina hadn’t bothered appealing to the court for redress. They knew that with Marshall, the father of judicial nationalism, in charge they didn’t stand a chance.

  But if the battles weren’t as central to American life as those earlier ones, this didn’t make them any less bitter. In 1831 the court heard a case from Georgia involving the Cherokees and the jurisdiction of state law. During the previous three decades various bands of the Cherokees had adopted different strategies for dealing with the whites. Some fought, others relocated, still others assumed white ways. The Cherokees of Georgia followed the third path. Taking their cue from Sequoyah, who had served with Jackson’s Cherokee allies in the Creek War and had later devised a written version of the Cherokee language, they produced a newspaper, books, and other accoutrements of what the whites called civilization. They prospered alongside their white neighbors, engaging in agriculture and commerce. In fact they prospered too well for the tastes of those neighbors, who conspired to dispossess them of the lands they retained under various treaties. The Georgia legislature passed laws transparently intended to make life miserable for the Cherokees, in order that they abandon their lands and follow their cousins west across the Mississippi. The Georgia Cherokees, showing again how much they had learned from the whites, sued to block the laws. They hired William Wirt, by now the most famous trial lawyer in America, to argue their case, which the Supreme Court agreed to hear. But the hearing went badly for the Cherokees. Marshall and the court’s majority ruled in favor of Georgia, declaring that the Cherokees weren’t a foreign nation, as they had contended, but a “domestic dependent nation.” Foreign nations might sue state governments; domestic dependent nations could not.

  This disappointing decision nonetheless guided Wirt and the Cherokees down a more promising path. The next year they brought suit under the 1789 Judiciary Act, which assigned to the Supreme Court jurisdiction over disputes involving treaties and the validity of state laws. The court agreed that the Cherokees had standing, and it listened to Wirt contend that the Georgia laws were invalid because they conflicted with federal treaties governing relations with the Cherokees. The court found for the Cherokees. “The acts of Georgia are repugnant to the constitution, laws and treaties of the United States,” Marshall declared. They were therefore null and void. The Cherokees could stay put, unmolested.

  Jackson yielded nothing to Marshall on the issue of nationalism. But he remained unconvinced—despite Marshall’s three decades of effort to the contrary—that the decisions of the courts bound the executive branch. And he remained convinced that the only long-term answer to the Indian question was for the tribes to move beyond the reach of the whites. In his annual message of December 1830 he had congratulated the Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes for accepting a swap of eastern lands for western. “Their example will induce the remaining tribes also to seek the same obvious advantages,” he declared, with perhaps more hope than conviction. He specified the advantages of relocation. “It puts an end to all possible danger of collision between the authorities of the general and state governments on account of the Indians. . . . It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites, free them from the power of the states, enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions; will retard the progress of decay, which is lessening their numbers; and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community.” Jackson avowed benign motives regarding the Indians. “Toward the aborigines of the country, no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself, or would go further in attempting to reclaim them from their wandering habits and make them a happy, prosperous people.” Yet one must look facts in the eye.

  Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country, and philanthropy has long been busily employed in devising means to avert it, but its progress has never for a moment been arrested, and one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth. To follow to the tomb the last of this race and to tread on the graves of extinct nations excite melancholy reflections. But true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another. . . . Philanthropy could not wish to see this continent restored to the condition in which it was found by our forefathers. What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?

  The policy of the administration was nothing but an extension of the process that had been under way for two centuries. Jackson didn’t deny that relocation would be wrenching. But hadn’t relocation been the story of America from the first settlements? And wasn’t it the story of America even now? “Our children by thousands yearly leave the land of their birth to seek new homes in distant regions.” The Indians were being asked to do no more.

  The Indians must either adopt the ways of the whites, including the laws of the states in which they lived, or move. To stay where they were, under their old customs, was not an option. Jackson knew the Indians’ neighbors, having dwelt among such people most of his life. They wouldn’t leave the Indians alone or let them keep large tracts of land lightly occupied. The status quo was untenable; for the Indians it risked “utter annihilation.”

  Jackson’s policy was self-serving but consistent. In matters not touching the integrity of the Union, he generally deferred to the states. Here he refused to stand between the states and the tribes. The Indians must make their peace with the states or relocate.

  Moreover, Jackson’s policy reflected a deep understanding of the life on the frontier. Georgia wasn’t as
wild as it had been, but wherever whites encountered Indians living apart, in tribes, the old frontier dynamics reemerged. The whites resented the Indians’ immunity from state laws, and they coveted the land the Indians owned. Congress might legislate, and the courts might rule, but the struggle that had begun the moment the first Europeans set foot in North America wouldn’t end until the descendants of those Europeans claimed the whole continent, or as much as they chose to take. Jackson was sincere—paternalistic, but no less sincere for that—in saying he had the best interests of the Indians at heart. His adoption of Lyncoya and the other Indian boys he and Rachel took in attested to his good intentions toward Indians as individuals. Perhaps moving the Indians across the Mississippi would merely buy them time. But the alternative was as grim as the future had always been for losers in the long struggle for North America—“utter annihilation,” as he bluntly put it.

  Jackson hadn’t liked John Marshall before becoming president. The old Federalist bowed to property and stole authority from the states, besides having frustrated Jefferson’s prosecution of Aaron Burr. Jackson’s opinion didn’t change after he became president, despite the fact that Marshall’s long record of nationalism made Jackson’s defense of the Union against the nullifiers easier than it would have been otherwise—easier, for example, than a similar defense by John Adams against the nullifiers of 1798 would have been.