by H. W. Brands
And indeed Jackson was a prophet: of an approaching democracy. In Jackson’s youth, the founders of the American republic had attempted to build a wall against excessive popular participation in government. The people’s house was the House of Representatives, but it was balanced in Congress by the Senate, whose members were chosen not by the people but by the state legislatures. And against Congress were set the executive, whose chief was chosen by the electoral college, and the Supreme Court, with members even more insulated from popular passions. The franchise was very far from universal. Only adult white males voted, in most cases only those who owned property. Beyond the institutional safeguards against democracy—a term of opprobrium at the time of the Revolution—was the habit of deference that had long caused Englishmen to select their representatives from among their betters, and which was expected to inspire Americans to do the same.
Yet the Revolution, or rather the revolutionary spirit of which the revolt against King George was the most obvious manifestation, was corrosive of many old habits. By declaring all men equal, for the purpose of justifying the revolt, Jefferson and the Continental Congress made Americans feel equal for other purposes as well. And if “no taxation without representation” applied to Parliament, why shouldn’t it apply to Congress and the state governments? The genie was out of the jar; having made a revolution in the name of the people’s right to govern themselves, Americans had an ever harder time justifying that some people could vote and others not. And as the population expanded and moved west, away from the citadels of eastern privilege, and as other countries—France, Mexico, and most of Spanish America—took up the revolutionary cry and echoed it back to America, the logic of broader suffrage became overwhelming. Women and most blacks still stood beyond the pale, but by the mid-1820s nearly all white men in America could vote.
And the person they voted for most enthusiastically was Andrew Jackson. The 1824 race to succeed Monroe matched Jackson against Quincy Adams, among others, and was the most competitive in a generation. For the first time a westerner challenged the tidewater East; for the first time the West felt a compelling interest in the outcome. As far away as Texas, even expatriate Stephen Austin followed the campaign. “Our candidates for President are J. Q. Adams, W. H. Crawford, H. Clay and General Jackson,” Austin learned in a letter from John Sibley at Natchitoches. Sibley added, “Clay or Jackson will feel more interested for Mexico and of course will be our choice.”
Jackson proved to be the choice of the West, and of more American voters than any of the other three. But the four-way voting split precluded any candidate’s getting a majority of electors, and the decision devolved to the House of Representatives. The last time this had happened—in 1800—the bitterness hadn’t dissipated before Alexander Hamilton lay dead on the Hudson bank, the victim of Aaron Burr’s bullet. Jackson intimated that his dueling days were over, but one could never be too sure about the volcanic old soldier. Henry Clay, however, hated Jackson more than he feared him, perhaps because “Harry of the West”—of Kentucky, to be precise—resented his eclipse at Jackson’s hands, and he threw his support to Adams. A short while later, in what gave every appearance of being the back end of a bargain, Adams named Clay secretary of state. In those days the secretary of state was the heir presumptive to the presidency: in every election from 1800 to 1824 the winning candidate had apprenticed as secretary of state. Consequently Clay and the country had reason to believe he had traded his short ticket in the 1824 drawing for a winning ticket later on.
The Jacksonians grew apoplectic as the dimensions of what they called the “corrupt bargain” became evident. Jackson himself had expected no better. “So you see the Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver,” he muttered grimly. “His end will be the same. Was there ever witnessed such bare faced corruption?”
The campaign of 1828 began at once, energized by the Jacksonian anger and amplified by the continued democratization of American politics. Until the 1820s voters typically did not choose presidential electors; state legislatures did. By 1828, however, that practice had largely vanished (only two states still let their legislatures choose electors), with the result that presidential contests became popular referendums. And in a popular referendum, Jackson was unbeatable. He polled 140,000 more votes than Adams (of 1.2 million cast), and swept into the presidency, the first candidate clearly the choice of the American people.
Jackson’s inauguration was a brawl. The army of westerners who came to see the swearing-in of Old Hickory (the name he acquired in the campaign against the Creeks, and the first popular honorific applied to a president) surged up Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House, where they swarmed through the doors and windows, soiled the carpets, tore the drapes, broke the furniture, and smashed the china in the drunken glory of the victory they considered their own as much as Jackson’s. “I never saw such a mixture,” declared an astonished Joseph Story, an associate justice of the Supreme Court. “The reign of King Mob seemed triumphant.” Senator James Hamilton accounted the affair “a regular Saturnalia . . . The mob broke in, in thousands—spirits black, yellow, and grey, poured in in one uninterrupted stream of mud and filth, among the throngs many fit subjects for the penitentiary.” One of the city’s most proper hostesses rendered similar judgment: “What a scene did we witness! The Majesty of the People had disappeared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, negroes, women, children, scrambling, fighting, romping. What a pity, what a pity.”
The riot finally ended, and the people went home to sleep off their victory. The mud on the carpets and furniture was allowed to dry and cake before being brushed away. The drapes were mended and the china replaced. But the spirit of demos that sacked the White House was abroad in the land. It swamped the vestiges of elitism in American politics; after Jackson, even candidates favored by birth and circumstance represented themselves as sons of the soil, born in log cabins and reared in the school of rough experience.
More tellingly, the new ethos of popular power fueled and justified the landed expansion that marked the age of Jackson. As the symbol of democracy, the proud old general embodied the principle that the will of the people is as close to the will of God as humans can hope to get. And when the will of the American people drove them to assuage their hunger for land by reaching across the Sabine River to Texas, the spirit of Jackson—the spirit of democracy—drove them on.
Sam Houston observed Jackson’s rise with intense interest, and, seeing in the general most of what he wanted to be, the fatherless young man supported Jackson whenever he could. Houston’s wounds from Horseshoe Bend healed slowly; the army, embarrassed by its initial neglect, ordered Houston to Washington for further treatment. This first visit to the nation’s capital opened the westerner’s eyes to the grand prospects of a country that could dream of carving a great city from the wilderness; it also opened his eyes to the continuing vulnerability of a country whose Capitol and White House could be destroyed with impunity by British forces. Houston was still in the East when the news of Jackson’s victory at New Orleans arrived; even more than most of those with whom he heard the news, Houston thrilled to Jackson’s feat of arms, and admired his hero more than ever.
The end of the war meant that Houston must look for other work, as the army was certain to shrink with the peace. He applied to be a federal agent to the Cherokees; not surprisingly, considering his intimate knowledge of the tribe, he won the job. Almost immediately, however, the post put him in a quandary. An 1816 treaty between the federal government and a rump group of Cherokees afforded the Monroe administration a pretext for removing all the Cherokees beyond the Mississippi River. Houston recognized that the removal was unfair, and he weighed whether he could honorably carry out its provisions against Oolooteka and other Cherokees he had come to know and love. Yet he reasoned—with himself, and with Oolooteka—that the treaty would be enforced in any event, and better for the Cherokees that it be enforced by one of the few w
ho cared for them and might soften the terms somewhat, than by those who would simply treat it as an excuse for further exploitation.
Many of the Cherokees opposed relocation, even against the arguments of their brother Raven that they had no choice. They insisted on traveling to Washington to make their case to the government. Houston accompanied them, dressed, out of respect, in the blanket and breechclout he had worn while living as one of them. Secretary of War John Calhoun greeted the delegation at the War Department and expressed his appreciation that they had traveled so far; then he sent them to meet President Monroe. But he held Houston back and delivered a verbal thrashing. Houston—somewhat to his surprise—had managed to hold on to his commission in the U.S. Army; the war secretary demanded to know what possessed an American officer to appear at the capital in the costume of a savage.
Houston bridled at this aspersion on his judgment and integrity. He held his tongue but conceived a dislike for Calhoun that lasted their whole lives. When Calhoun added to the insult by repeating spurious allegations circulated by persons who wanted Houston’s job that he had been involved in slave smuggling, Houston angrily resigned his officer’s commission and, a short time later, his Indian agency.
Now he really did need work, and as he returned to Tennessee he pondered his options. He had corresponded with Jackson since the war, and he knew that the general had begun adult life as a lawyer. Better educated and more widely read than Jackson (which wasn’t saying much), Houston decided to become a lawyer, too. He sped through an eighteen-month course of study in six months, and commenced practice in Lebanon, a day’s ride east of Nashville. To mark his new start, he acquired a new set of clothes: a frock coat of purplish hue, assorted waistcoats and cravats, fitted breeches, gleaming boots, and a tall beaver hat.
When his work took him to Nashville—as he ensured that it did—he stopped at the Hermitage to pay his respects to Jackson. The general had no natural children, and he began to look upon the younger man as a son. Jackson employed his influence to help Houston gain an appointment as adjutant general of the Tennessee militia. He subsequently endorsed Houston, again successfully, for chief prosecutor of the Nashville district. Jackson’s imprimatur carried even greater weight in a contest by Houston for commander of the Tennessee militia—Jackson’s old post—and Houston soon felt the decided pleasure of hearing himself addressed, like his mentor, as “General.”
The least Houston could do was return Jackson’s support, which he did with gusto. “The canker worms have been (already too long) gnawing at the very core and vitals of our government, and corruption stalks abroad, without obstruction or reprehension,” he wrote Jackson in August 1822, by way of encouraging the elder general to run for president. “You are now before the eyes of the nation. You have nothing to fear, but everything to expect. The hopes of men in Washington will be frost bitten by the bare mention of your name! . . . You have been your country’s Great Sentinel, at a time when her watchmen had been caught slumbering on post, her capital had been reduced to ashes. You have been her faithful guardian, her well-tried servant! . . . Will not the nation look to you again?”
Jackson didn’t need Houston’s encouragement to run for the presidency, but he appreciated his protégé’s enthusiasm. And, perhaps guessing that the contest would be close, and might even go to the House of Representatives, he encouraged Houston to make a race for Congress. Houston did and won.
Houston could have been forgiven for feeling proud on returning to Washington. The boy who had fled home to live with the Indians was now a general, a congressman, and the surrogate son of the likely next president of the United States. His imposing height, his bold swinging strides, and his brash good looks marked him as a man with prospects.
Houston observed rather than spoke during much of his first term in Congress, but in January 1824 he couldn’t resist taking the floor in support of a cause fraught with meaning for his own future and that of every people desiring to govern themselves. Greek nationalists had risen up against the Ottoman yoke; Houston argued that the United States must recognize Greek independence and thereby help the fighters of Hellas become free. “The Greeks are struggling for their liberty,” he explained. “Let us, then, as far as we can, consistently with our relations with foreign nations, hail them as brethren and cheer them in their struggle.” Critics claimed that the Greek struggle was no business of America’s. Houston derided such diffidence. The Greek struggle was the struggle of free people everywhere, he held, and American recognition of Greek independence would enhance freedom everywhere. “It would be an advantage to show them that they are not an isolated people. . . . It will be encouraging them to stand like freemen, and to fall, if they must fall, like men.”
The Monroe administration refused to aid the Greeks, which simply intensified Houston’s desire to make Jackson president. Following the 1824 deadlock in the electoral college, Houston had every hope that the House of Representatives would choose Jackson. “My own confident opinion is that Jackson will succeed and be our next President!” he wrote in January 1825. When the forces of Clay swung to the side of Adams and gave the latter the victory, Houston shared the outrage of all Jacksonians. “The individual who was manifestly the choice of the majority of the people was not elevated to that distinguished situation for which his qualifications so preeminently fitted him, and to which the important services he had rendered to his country so richly entitled him,” Houston told his Tennessee constit-uents. “This is a subject of serious consideration for the citizens of the United States, and it will be for them to say, on some subsequent occasion, whether their voices shall be heard and their rights respected, or whether they will tamely yield those inestimable rights to the unhallowed dictation of politicians, who may choose to barter them for their own individual aggrandizement.”
The occasion of which Houston spoke, of course, was the 1828 election, toward which he began working at once. He apparently authored an unsigned biography of Jackson, a campaign tract of no historical or literary value but of some political influence; Jackson called Houston and a couple of other writers his “literary bureau” for their value in filling newspapers with Jacksonian fact and opinion. Houston promoted Jackson in the halls of Congress at every opportunity. “I am charged, for the purpose of producing political effect, I presume, with being the organ of General Jackson upon this floor,” he told the House. “I am also charged with being his personal and political friend. I will inform the gentleman that General Jackson’s public acts are his best organ, and his sentiments a sure passport to the affections and confidence of his countrymen.” He sent hickory canes to potential Jackson supporters and the latest political intelligence to Jackson himself. “Your friends here are confident, and your enemies are decreasing in number!” he wrote in January 1827. A short while later he added, “I have not in my life seen a cause rise so fast as that of the people . . . nor one sinking faster than the cause of a wicked and corrupt coalition!”
Jackson’s enemies became Houston’s enemies. One Jackson-hater challenged Houston to a duel; that the challenger was a known sharpshooter diminished Houston’s devotion to Jackson not in the slightest. “My firm and undeviating attachment to General Jackson has caused me all the enemies I have, and I glory in the firmness of my attachment,” he wrote. “I will die proud in the assurance that I deserve, and possess, his perfect confidence.” In fact this duel fizzled, but another didn’t. The second challenger, William White, was a weak shot, yet Houston—who, as the challenged, had choice of weapons—selected pistols at fifteen feet, to give White a fair chance. Jackson, the experienced duelist, offered Houston the advice to bite a bullet; this would steady his hand in case he got hit while shooting. As things happened, Houston didn’t need the ballast and, while escaping injury himself, hit White in the abdomen.
“General, you have killed me,” White said.
“I am very sorry,” Houston answered. “But you know it was forced upon me.”
“I know, and f
orgive you,” White rejoined.
To Houston’s relief and probably (although not certainly, such being the curious code of the duel) White’s, White didn’t die. Dueling had fallen into legal limbo in Tennessee by this time—unlawful yet still popular—and so Houston, although indicted, was never arrested. On the contrary, he was feted among the many who still considered pistols an appropriate form of argument. Houston was becomingly modest about the affray. “Thank God my adversary was injured no worse,” he said.
In 1827, as the Jackson juggernaut rolled toward the White House, Houston entered the race for Tennessee governor. William Carroll, Jackson’s lieutenant at New Orleans, was stepping down after three terms, as the Tennessee constitution required; he endorsed Houston as a placeholder, one who would keep the office warm until he could run again, in two years. Houston accepted the favor without embracing the condition, and made a canvass of Tennessee that revealed him to be nearly as charismatic as Old Hickory himself. “Houston stood six feet six inches in his socks,” recounted one observer (noting the emotional impact of the man rather than his strict stature), “was of fine contour, a remarkably well proportioned man, and of a commanding and elegant bearing; had a large, long head and face, and his fine features were lit up by large eagle-looking eyes; possessed of a wonderful recollection of persons and names, a fine address and courtly manners and a magnetism approaching that of General Andrew Jackson.” Houston’s wardrobe was as striking as before, yet with a different theme. He retained the beaver hat but instead of the purple coat wore a Cherokee hunting shirt, bound by a beaded red sash with an armorlike buckle. The dazzled electorate gave him a comfortable victory.