Elite politicians also tried to distract attention from policy programs that served oligarchic factions by painting their opponents as poke-easies undeserving of voters’ respect. Florida territorial governor Richard K. Call, leader of a clique of land speculators, described his campaign strategy as “riding” his opponent “with a stiffer bit and a ranker rowel” than he had been ridden before—verbally humiliating him and threatening violence until the opponent backed down, tail between legs.
Political honor-violence could be as meaningful to voters as policy programs and oratory. Yet new voters who built their log cabins on the poor land far from the rivers did not want their representative to tell them he wasn’t going to listen to them. Sometimes voters could be as brutal with their rebukes as the Georgia constituent who assassinated a Yazoo-man state senator for giving away his birthright of land yet-to-be-stolen from the Creeks. Given the option, poor white men preferred politicians like Franklin Plummer. Plummer arrived in Mississippi with no more money than Poindexter, settling in the hardscrabble piney woods of the state’s southeast, rather than Natchez. When he decided to run for Congress in 1829, the state’s ruling factions “considered it a great piece of impertinence,” as a fellow politico from those days later recalled. The Natchez machine sent notorious duelists to heckle him during speeches, seeking to humiliate him as an unmanly coward. Plummer “coolly took the stump and routed them” with clever mockery. His ability to connect with the common voter made him virtually invincible. During one election campaign, Plummer traveled the district in company with a competitor, and one night the two of them stayed at the same settler cabin. When Plummer’s opponent walked outside early the next morning, he found the woman of the house milking, while Plummer—grinning at his rival—held the cow’s hungry calf back by its tail. At another stop Plummer helped a farmer’s family pick parasitic red bugs out of their toddler’s hair. In a different campaign he printed up a mock advertisement that asked readers for help in locating opponent Powhatan Ellis’s allegedly lost trunk, which supposedly contained such items as “6 lawn handkerchiefs; 6 cambric shirts; 2 [cambric] night [shirts]; 1 nightcap; 1 pr. Stays; 3 pr. Silk stockings.” Ellis lost the election.18
THE KIND OF WHITE man who supported Franklin Plummer—or Bob Potter—wanted even more than mockery of the arrogant. That kind of white man wanted politics to change—to incorporate white male equality in both political practice and policy outcomes. Ironically, no Potterizing politician planted more fruitful seeds of that kind of change than a Tennessee cotton planter and slave trader, a man who on March 5, 1829, woke up aching in Washington, DC. The capital was in the middle of a long, deep cold snap. Local firewood stockpiles had gone up the capital’s chimneys. Andrew Jackson’s wiry old body felt the frost. He had never quite recovered from his campaigns, and under the knife scars that cicatrized his body was a void in his heart, where Rachel fit. Jackson believed that the scurrilous pamphlets published by John Quincy Adams’s campaign had killed his wife. Mortified by charges that she had committed adultery when she took up with Andrew in the 1790s before finalizing her divorce from her abusive first husband, Rachel declined rapidly after Jackson’s November victory.
Now, as Jackson rose to his feet, a slave waiting outside the door heard the old man and entered the room. A few minutes later, the president-elect emerged: washed, shaved, and buttoned into mourning-black pants, waistcoat, coat, and overcoat. On his head, where Jackson had once favored a white beaver hat, he settled a black one. At the bottom of the stairs he found a group of younger men whom he and Rachel, a childless couple, had essentially adopted. Many had served as his officers. As they breakfasted, people collected in the cold outside the hotel at Sixth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Right on time at 11 a.m., Jackson opened the front door. A deafening shout of joy erupted.
The president-elect and his soldiers pushed their way down the steps in a loose tactical formation. “A military chieftain,” his critics had sneered, implying his appeal was that of the despot on horseback, whose forcefulness thrills the ignorant. But there was more to him. He and his allies and supporters were making a new kind of government. Not a dictatorship, not a republic, it built white men’s equal access to manhood and citizenship on the disfranchisement of everyone else. Yet it was still the first mass democracy in world history. And as he proceeded onto Pennsylvania Avenue’s frozen mud, Jackson didn’t ride. He walked.19
Jackson and his supporters had fought through two bitter national elections to reach this day. In 1824, Jackson had won a plurality of the popular votes, but he had been outmaneuvered in Congress after no candidate won an electoral-college majority. By 1828, however, he had joined forces with New York’s Martin Van Buren and his “Bucktail” faction. It was the Bucktails who had created the new state constitution in 1821, the one that disfranchised most property-owning African Americans and enfranchised all white men. New York votes were essential to Jackson’s 1828 victory. Jackson had also let his northern allies in Congress lock in their states’ votes in the spring of 1828 by passing a tariff bill laden with specific protections for Pennsylvania and New Jersey manufacturing districts. But his greatest strength came from slave-frontier states, including Kentucky, Alabama, and Tennessee. Here in the southwestern states, virtually universal support for the victor of New Orleans among non-planter white men made and sustained Jackson as a national force.
Previous inaugurations had attracted few spectators. But on this day, it seemed as if every single white rural laborer, tenant farmer, and urban workingman in the United States had come to Washington. The Jackson voters, sneered Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster, “really seem to think that the country is rescued from some dreadful danger.” Uniformed officers flanked Jackson as he marched up Pennsylvania Avenue, but so did a self-nominated escort of firewood carts and farm wagons. When Jackson reached the Capitol and entered via a basement door, the ocean of citizens lapped around the base of the building. Then the east doors swung open. The inauguration party walked from the Senate chamber onto the portico. Twenty thousand people jostled forward a few steps.20
When the tall man emerged from the pack of dignitaries and stood before them, they began to shout: “Huzza! Huzza!” Suddenly every man in the multitude took off his hat at once; a sign of respect for the apotheosis of their equality, their sovereign citizenship, their manhood. Every breath was drawn in. Cannons erupted in a twenty-four-gun salute. The Marine band struck up a tune. And the hero of New Orleans stood erect above the mist of twenty thousand exhaled breaths, and looked at the upturned white sea of faces. Then he bowed low.21
Andrew Jackson had risen spectacularly. Yet he still lived as simply as possible for the owner of more than a hundred slaves. Rachel had even smoked a pipe. And instead of insinuating that his voters were beneath him, he used Potterizing violence to defeat attempts to dishonor either him or his white male constituents. They gloried in vicarious wish-fulfillment as they heard about his confrontational behavior, like the time when his steamboat narrowly escaped a collision, prompting the presidential candidate to run on deck to threaten the other vessel’s reckless pilot with a loaded rifle. But Jackson also delivered more than the posture of white male equality. His victories at Horseshoe Bend and New Orleans had made Jefferson’s paper empire for white liberty into fact. On the millions of Indian acres he seized, tens of thousands of white men now strove to escape crusty hierarchies by becoming landowners.
When Jackson became president, the symbolism of his actions would become even larger. In 1832–1833 he stared down South Carolina’s elites (including his own vice president, John C. Calhoun) when they asserted that their state could simply “nullify” federal laws—in this case, the tariff of 1828. While claiming that he opposed tariffs in principle, Jackson took the nullifiers’ action as a direct challenge to the power of a national majority. So did a Tennessee constituent, who said, delighting in Old Hickory’s humiliation of the South Carolina planter elite, “The old chief could rally force enough . .
. to stand on Saluda Mountain [in northwestern South Carolina] and piss enough to float the whole nullifying crew into the Atlantic Ocean.” The way he saw it, Carolina’s planters blustered about mobilizing the militia and blocking federal tariff enforcement until the collected penises of Jackson’s supporters, like himself, cowed them, and they backed down.22
So Jackson stood tall before his supporters, symbolizing who they wanted to be—the unpretentious but assertive man who dominated his household and forced arrogant bullies into feminized submission. And as he took out his paper and began to read his first inaugural address, he was delivering to his faithful supporters a down payment of democracy, and not just in the pageantry of white male equality. His policies, he promised, would not cater to the powerful. He planned, he said, to correct “those abuses that have brought the patronage of the Federal Government into conflict with the freedom of elections.” This reminded voters of the chicanery that had been carried out in the House of Representatives four years earlier, which overruled popular will and elected John Quincy Adams. More important than any specific measure, however, was the fact that while Jackson was in office, his politically innovative allies, such as Martin Van Buren, used Jackson’s popularity to create new national political structures that put white male equality into gritty practice. They created the routines of a party system, welding ordinary citizens into mass electoral forces through precinct-level organization and emotional appeals for loyalty. The historical consequences of the Jacksonian reorganization of politics, which leveraged these Potterizing resentments on slavery’s frontier, were momentous. They stretch from that cold March day to our own.
Yet while the people in their majesty removed their hats, and Jackson bowed, Jackson still had on his own hat. Under it Jackson couldn’t help also carrying another set of programs. In fact, he often carried his ideas in his hat—seeds of thought jotted on scraps of paper and shoved into the interior band. And as his speech went on, Jackson signaled four policies that were destined to seed more slave labor camps on the southwestern frontier. These were not necessarily incompatible with the hopes and principles of common white men. But their outcomes would also deliver both financial benefits and unintended consequences to the entrepreneurs of the frontier.
First, Jackson announced that he planned to address the Indian issue according to the “feelings” of his countrymen. Almost 50,000 native people still lived on and held title to 100 million acres of land in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida. The “feeling” of Jackson’s countrymen was that they wanted that land in order to launch expanded cotton-and-slavery-induced booms. And over the next eight years, Jackson’s administrations forced all the surviving Indian tribes across the Mississippi to free up more land for white—and black—settlement.23
Jackson also said that “with foreign nations it will be my study to preserve peace and to cultivate friendship on fair and honorable terms,” but he had already made it known that he believed that with the Louisiana Purchase, the United States had actually also bought most of what eventually became the state of Texas. The independent nation of Mexico claimed this territory, but Jackson wanted to redraw the boundary line that the United States and Spain had negotiated in 1819 to incorporate most of today’s Texas as a new frontier for cotton seed.24
Jackson also mentioned his desire to adjust the tariff levied on foreign manufactured goods by the most recent Congress in 1828. This unwieldy compromise subsidized America’s still-weak manufacturing sector by levying import duties, such as the 280 percent surcharge on cotton broadcloth. American factories could undersell some British goods, but the consumer paid the cost. Although the tariff protected some of Jackson’s northern supporters, it hurt southern planter-entrepreneurs by taxing their consumption. South Carolina politicians were already pushing for a showdown over the issue. In his speech, Jackson suggested that the tariff was too high.25
Then there was “reform,” Jackson’s amorphous fourth goal. He was evasive in the short speech about what reforms he meant. Jackson would soon charge that the executive branch’s Adams-era holdovers—a hundred or so clerks—embodied corruption. But we know that the president was more concerned about the Second Bank of the United States. Many branches of the B.U.S. had deployed financial resources in the service of the Adams campaign, and Jackson wasn’t going to forget that. And although the B.U.S. had stabilized the nation’s financial structure, allowing many to recover from the Panic of 1819, many other Americans were not getting wealthier. Most of those Americans had voted for Jackson. He left the harshest B.U.S. lines out of his inaugural address, but he would soon launch attacks on the bank, attacks pitched as a reform program that enhanced the egalitarianism of white manhood citizenship.26
So Jackson closed. Then he strode down the steps and through the crowd to the rowdiest inauguration party in history. That evening, thousands of his excited supporters crowded into the White House, overwhelming attempts at crowd control. They drank and ate everything, broke furniture, teacups, and noses, and almost smothered their hero against the back wall of the house. Jackson had to escape through a back window. He spent the night back at the hotel. The party raged on without him, for, as Washington hostess Margaret Bayard Smith sniffed, it was indeed “the People’s Day.”27
The inauguration set the stage for four years of raucous conflict. Among other things, Jackson faced down half the members of his Cabinet because they and their wives labeled the wife of another a whore. And though Congress moved toward lowering tariffs, it didn’t move quickly enough for South Carolina politicians, who claimed that they could nullify the federal law. Some historians have claimed that the nullification movement anticipated the disunion threats of the South in the 1850s—threats that were issued in response to northern attempts to block the expansion of slavery—but this is false hindsight. In the late 1820s, South Carolina whites were scared. They had not mentally recovered from the alleged Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy of 1822, and they also sensed their decline relative to the southwestern region. In fact, few west of South Carolina supported threats of disunion, and in the winter of 1832–1833, Jackson demolished the logic of nullification in a brilliant defense of nationalism.28
Already in 1830, Jackson and his allies in Congress had proposed the Indian Removal Act, which forced southwestern Indians into present-day Oklahoma. Although some northerners criticized conquest and displacement as immoral, Congress passed the act, authorizing Jackson’s government to evict the remaining eastern nations. By the end of his second term, the vast majority of the Native Americans who had lived in the southwestern cotton states in 1828 had been driven from their homes.29
Before a single Cherokee or Chickasaw was driven from his homeland, however, came the day in November 1829 when B.U.S. President Nicholas Biddle traveled from his Philadelphia headquarters to the White House. Biddle was a dapper, poetry-publishing aristocrat, as close to a Renaissance man as nineteenth-century America produced. He had rooted out the institutional dysfunction that had led to the Panic of 1819 and rebuilt the B.U.S. into a sophisticated financial machine that regulated credit-granting sectors. More than any other individual, Biddle ensured that the massive productivity increases in frontier cotton fields since 1790 would be converted into steady nationwide economic growth. In fact, since the 1820 trough of the post-panic depression, the national economy had already grown by 38 percent. But the polished Biddle was anxious to sound out the frontier general. For Jackson’s source of power was his appeal to a newly enfranchised majority that was congenitally suspicious of the bank’s octopus-like ability to reach into their lives.30
In the meeting, the president thanked Biddle for the bank’s help in paying off the national debt. But Jackson also said something that struck Biddle as strange: “I do not dislike your Bank any more than all banks,” said the president, “but ever since I read the history of the South Sea Bubble I have been afraid of all banks.” Historians have used this exchange to depict Jackson as driven by a backward-looking broader
cultural anxiety—the fear that the paper money printed by banks was not “real” in comparison to precious metals such as gold and silver. Yet Jackson also represented interest groups that had more practical reasons to resent Biddle’s bank. All these sources of opposition would soon combine to fuel a confrontation between Jackson and the B.U.S. That struggle touched off a series of consequences that shaped both the process of slavery’s expansion and the political drama that is the more conventional narrative of US history from Jackson to Lincoln.31
THE LINK BETWEEN THE cotton field and politics can be found in the strange alchemy of banks. Everyone knows that banks take in deposits and lend out money, but they don’t always realize that when banks lend, they actually create money. We call that money credit. As we heard already, that means that money is based on “belief”—the root is the Latin credere, a verb meaning “to believe”—and people have to believe in the money for it to work, because banks lend out more money than they take in through deposits. This money has to be paper money, which in the nineteenth century the state-chartered banks printed themselves, or it can be numbers added to borrowers’ credit accounts on a paper ledger, loans against which the borrowers could write checks. Paper is useful, of course, because it is light. With it you can transfer large sums in an envelope, whereas even medium-sized amounts of specie are cumbersome (recall Georgia-man John Springs’s ride north to Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1806, in which the gold in his saddlebags beat up the sides of his horse).32
The Half Has Never Been Told Page 32