Chapter XXII
READING THE Louisville Gazette which came weekly to Gentryville, working out as chore-boy, field-hand and ferryman, walking a fifty-mile circuit around the home cabin, flatboating down the Ohio and Mississippi, the young man Abraham Lincoln took in many things with his eyes that saw and his ears that heard and remembered. A Virginia planter named Edward Coles had quit Virginia and come down the Ohio River with his slaves, ending his journey in Illinois, where he had deeded a farm to each of his slaves with papers of freedom. The Erie Canal in New York, a big ditch for big boats to run on, was finished; it cost seven and a half million dollars but it connected the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean and it meant that the north ends of Indiana and Illinois, besides other prairie stretches, were going to fill up faster with settlers. The first railroad in the United States, a stub line three miles long, was running iron-wheeled wagons on iron rails at Quincy, Massachusetts. A settlement called Indianapolis had been cleared away. Glass and nails were arriving in southern Indiana now; there used to be none at all ten years back. The famous Frenchman, General LaFayette, came up the Mississippi from New Orleans and visited Kaskaskia, where a reception was held in a mansion with the windows kept open for the benefit of people outside who wanted to have a look in. Sam Patch, who slid down Niagara Falls once, and lived, had slid down the Genesee Falls at Rochester, New York, and was killed.
It was interesting that Henry Clay, the famous congressman and orator from Kentucky, was nicknamed “The Mill Boy of the Slashes,” and came from a family of poor farmers and used to ride to mill with a sack of corn. It was interesting to hear a story that Henry Clay’s wife was asked by a Boston woman in Washington, “Doesn’t it distress you to have Mr. Clay gambling with cards?” and that she answered, “Oh, dear, no! He most always wins.”
Fragments of talk and newspaper items came about Daniel Webster, and his Bunker Hill speech at the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill monument, or John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and a decision in law, but they were far off. There was a sharp-tongued senator from Virginia, John Randolph of Roanoke, who was bitter against John Calhoun, vice president of the United States; and John Randolph one day pointed his finger at Calhoun and said: “Mr. Speaker! I mean Mr. President of the Senate and would-be President of the United States, which God in His infinite mercy avert.” And Randolph during a hot speech would call to a doorkeeper, “Tims, more porter,” taking every ten or fifteen minutes a foaming tumbler of malt liquor, drinking two or three quarts during a long speech.
And neither Calhoun nor anybody else interfered with John Randolph when, on the floor of the Senate, he called John Quincy Adams, the President of the United States, “a traitor,” or Daniel Webster “a vile slanderer,” or Edward Livingston “the most contemptible and degraded of beings, whom no man ought to touch, unless with a pair of tongs.” In some stories about famous men there seemed to be a touch of the comic; John Randolph on the Senate floor called Henry Clay a “blackleg”; they fought a duel with pistols; Clay shot Randolph twice in the pantaloons; Randolph shot off his pistol once “accidentally” and once in the air; both sides came through alive and satisfied.
Southern and western congressmen kept dueling pistols in their Washington outfits; some had special pistols inlaid with gold. A Philadelphia gunsmith named Derringer was winning popularity with a short pistol to be carried in the hip pocket and used in street fights. At the “exclusive” assembly balls in Washington, the women’s skirts came down to slightly above the ankles; their silk stockings were embroidered with figures called “clocks” and their thin slippers had silk rosettes and tiny silver buckles. The fashionable men of “exclusive” society affairs wore frock coats of blue, green, or claret cloth, with gilt buttons; shirts were of ruffled linen; they had baggy “Cossack” pantaloons tucked into “Hessian” boots with gold top tassels.
Everybody in the capital knew that the justices of the Supreme Court took snuff from their snuffboxes while hearing causes argued; that Henry Clay was moderate about drinking whisky, while Daniel Webster went too far; that Andrew Jackson smoked a corn-cob pipe, and his enemies were free to say Mrs. Jackson too enjoyed her daily pipe. Protests were made to the Government against the transportation of the mails on Sunday; in Philadelphia church people stretched chains fastened with padlocks across the streets to stop the passage of mail-coaches.
The stories drifted west about white men in New York City who held political processions in which they marched dressed like Indians; they had organized the Tammany Society back in 1789; the members died but Tammany lived on. The big excitement of New York politics had been the struggle of De Witt Clinton, the governor, to put through the digging of the Erie Canal, against Tammany opposition.
Oh, a ditch he would dig from the lakes to the sea.
The Eighth of the world’s matchless Wonders to be.
Good land! How absurd! But why should you grin?
It will do to bury its mad author in.
So Tammany sang at the start. But De Witt Clinton stuck with the tenacity of his forefathers who had fought against the Indians and against the British king. When he won out, the rhymes ran:
Witt Clinton is dead, St. Tammany said,
And all the papooses with laughter were weeping;
But Clinton arose and confounded his foes—
The cunning old fox had only been sleeping.
There had been the four years John Quincy Adams was President. He had been elected in a three-cornered fight that ended on election day with Andrew Jackson having the most votes cast for him but not a majority. This had put the contest into Congress, where Henry Clay had thrown his forces to Adams; and Adams’s first move was to appoint Clay Secretary of State. The Jackson men said it was a crooked deal. Jackson had handed in his resignation as Senator from Tennessee and started work on his political fences for 1828, while his New York Tammany friend, Martin Van Buren, was booming him up North. All the four years Adams was President, the moves in Congress were aimed at bagging the Presidency in 1828. Investigating committees worked overtime; each side dug for the other’s scandals: Adams’s past personal record; Jackson’s handling of six deserters at Mobile in 1815, when 1,500 soldiers were drawn up at parade rest to watch thirty-six riflemen fire at six blindfolded men, each man kneeling on his own coffin; Adams’s bills for wall paper and paint in renovating the White House; Jackson’s alleged marriage to his wife before she was properly divorced.
In the background of all the bitter personal feelings, the slander and the slack talk of politics, a deep, significant drift and shift was going on. Part of it was the feeling of the West and Southwest, the raw and new country, against the East and New England, the settled and established country. Added to this was a feeling that Jackson stood for the rough, plain people who work, as against the people who don’t. That was the issue, as the Jackson crowd presented it, so that even Abe Lincoln in Spencer County, Indiana, was caught in the drive of its enthusiasm, and wrote:
Let auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind;
May Jackson be our President,
And Adams left behind.
Jackson rode to election on a tumultuous landslide of ballots. His wife, Rachel, said, “Well, for Mr. Jackson’s sake, I am glad, but for my own part I never wished it.” And the home women of Nashville secretly got ready dresses of satin and silk for her to wear in Washington as the first lady of the land; then death took her suddenly; her husband for hours refused to believe she had breathed her last; he had killed one man and silenced others who had spoken against her. One woman wrote, “General Jackson was never quite the same man afterward; her death subdued his spirit and corrected his speech.”
Then the new President-elect sailed down the Cumberland River to the Ohio, stopped at Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, and went on to Washington for an inauguration before a crowd of ten thousand people, whose wild cheering of their hero showed they believed something new and different had arrived in th
e government of the American republic. Daniel Webster, writing a letter to a friend, hit off the event by saying: “I never saw such a crowd. People have come five hundred miles to see General Jackson, and they really seem to think the country is rescued from some dreadful danger.” The buckskin shirts of Kentucky settlers and the moccasins of Indian fighters from Tennessee were seen in the crowd, and along with politicians, preachers, merchants, gamblers, and lookers-on, swarmed in to the White House reception, took their turns at barrels of whisky, broke punch-bowls of glass and chinaware, emptied pails of punch, stood on the satin-covered chairs and had their look at “Andy Jackson, Our President,” who was shoved into a corner where a line of friends formed a barrier to protect the sixty-two-year-old man from his young buck henchmen.
Thus began an eight-year period in which Andrew Jackson was President of the United States. He came to the White House with the mud of all America’s great rivers and swamps on his boots, with records of victories in battles against savage Indian tribes and trained Continental European generals who had fought Napoleon, with shattered ribs and the bullets of Tennessee duelists and gun-fighters of the Southwest in his body; he knew little grammar and many scars, few classics and many fast horses.
Jackson came taking the place of John Quincy Adams, who was asking large funds for a national university and a colossal astronomical observatory, “a lighthouse of the skies,” a lovable, decent man who knew all the capes, peninsulas, and inlets of New England, who had been across the Atlantic and stood by the Thames and the Seine rivers, and had never laid eyes on the Mississippi nor the Wabash River. Harvard went under as against the Smoky Mountains and Horseshoe Bend. Jackson came in with 178 electoral votes as against 83 for Adams, after national circulation by his enemies of a thick pamphlet entitled, “Reminiscences; or an Extract from the Catalogue of General Jackson’s Youthful Indiscretions, between the Age of Twenty-Three and Sixty,” reciting fourteen fights, duels, brawls, shooting and cutting affairs, in which it was alleged he had killed, slashed, and clawed various American citizens. It was told of him that he asked a friend the day after the inaugural what the people were saying of his first message. “They say it is first-rate, but nobody believes you wrote it,” was the answer. To which Jackson rejoined, “Well, don’t I deserve just as much credit for picking out the man who could write it?”
One nickname for him was “Old Hickory”; he had lived on acorns and slept in the rain; now he sat in a second-story room of the White House smoking a cob pipe, running the United States Government as he had run his armies, his political campaigns, his Tennessee plantation, his stable of racing horses, with a warm heart, a cool head, a sharp tongue, recklessly, cunningly; he was simple as an ax-handle, shrewd as an Indian ambush, mingling in his breast the paradoxes of the good and evil proverbs of the people.
Jackson was the son of a north-of-Irelander who came to America with only a pair of hands. “No man will ever be quite able to comprehend Andrew Jackson who has not personally known a Scotch-Irishman.” His breed broke with their bare hands into the wilderness beyond the Allegheny Mountains, and more than any other one stock of blood is credited with putting the western and southwestern stretches of territory under the dominion of the central federal government at Washington. The mellowed and practiced philosopher, Thomas Jefferson, once wrote a letter with the passage, “When I was president of the Senate, he (Jackson) was a senator, and he could never speak on account of the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it repeatedly and as often choke with rage.” And yet, unless the Jackson breed of men, even their extreme type, “the half horse, half alligator men,” had pushed with their covered wagons, their axes and rifles, out into the territory of the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson would have had no basis nor data for his negotiations in that mammoth land deal. Though in the presence of the ruffled linen of the Senate Jackson did “choke with rage,” he faced Creek Indians, or seasoned troops from Napoleonic campaigns, or mutineers of his own army, with a cool and controlled behavior that was beyond the range of comprehension of models of etiquette in Washington.
With Jackson in the White House came a new politics, better and worse. The ax of dismissal fell on two thousand postmasters, department heads and clerks. An Administration daily newspaper, the Washington Globe, began publication; all office-holders earning more than one thousand dollars a year had to subscribe or lose their jobs. The editor was asked to soften an attack on an Administration enemy, and replied, “No, let it tear his heart out.” Wives of Cabinet members refused to mix socially with Peggy O’Neill; talk ran that she was “fast” and of too shady a past even though now married to the Secretary of War. As the scandal dragged on, Jackson wrote hundreds of letters in her defense, sometimes using the phrase that she was “chaste as snow”; the husbands of the offended Cabinet members’ wives resigned from the Cabinet; Jackson knocked the ashes from his cob pipe, appointed fresh and willing Cabinet members, and life went on as before.
When his postmaster-general, a tried and loyal friend, rebelled at making the wholesale dismissals required by the politicians, Jackson pushed him to a seat on the Supreme Court bench, and appointed a more willing post-office chief. One friend said he was an actor, that after storming at a caller, and closing the door, he would chuckle over his pipe and say, “He thought I was mad.” A mail-coach robber, condemned to be hanged, reminded the President that once at a horserace near Nashville he had told General Jackson to change his bets from a horse whose jockey had been “fixed” to lose the race; the death sentence was commuted to ten years in prison. “Ask nothing but what is right, submit to nothing wrong,” was his advice on policies with European countries. He was well thought of by millions who believed there was truth lurking behind his sentiment, “True virtue cannot exist where pomp and parade are the governing passions; it can only dwell with the people—the great laboring and producing classes that form the bone and sinew of our confederacy.” He was alluded to as “the Tennessee Barbarian” or “King Andrew the First” in certain circles, yet the doormats of the White House got acquainted with the shoes, boots, and moccasins of a wider range of humanity as he ran the Federal Government during those first years of the eight in which he was to be President.
Chapter XXIII
ALL THE WAY down the Mississippi to the Gulf and back, Abe Lincoln had heard about Andrew Jackson in that year of 1828 when Jackson swept that country with a big landslide. In the newspapers that came to the post office at Gentryville, in the talk around Jones’s store, in the fields harvesting, and at meetings, Andrew Jackson was the man talked about. With Andrew Jackson for President, the plainest kind of people could go into the White House and feel at home; with that kind of man, who smoked a cob pipe, talked horse sense, and rode reckless horses, and who had whipped the British at New Orleans, the Government would be more like what was meant in the Declaration of Independence and the Fourth of July speeches. Thus the talk ran.
Young Abe Lincoln heard it. The personality and the ways of Andrew Jackson filled his thoughts. He asked himself many questions and puzzled his head about the magic of this one strong, stormy man filling the history of that year, commanding a wild love from many people, and calling out curses and disgust from others, but those others were very few in Indiana. The riddles that attach to a towering and magnetic personality staged before a great public, with no very definite issues or policies in question, but with some important theory of government and art of life apparently involved behind the personality—these met young Abe’s eyes and ears.
It was the year he wrote in the front cover of “The Columbian Class Book” the inscription, “Abe Lincoln 1828.” The preface of the book said it contained “pieces calculated to interest the attention of the scholar and impress the mind with a knowledge of useful facts.” And he borrowed from Josiah Crawford “The Kentucky Preceptor,” the preface of that book saying, “Tales of love, or romantic fiction, or anything which might tend to instil false notions into the minds of children have not
gained admission.” There were essays on Magnanimity, Remorse of Conscience, Columbus, Demosthenes, On the Scriptures as a Rule of Life, the speech of Robert Emmet on why the English government should not hang an Irish patriot, stories of Indians, and the inaugural address of President Jefferson twenty-four years previous to that year. Jefferson spoke of “the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long-lost liberty” in the French Revolution. Let America remember that free speech, and respect for the opinions of others, are measures of safety, was the advice of Jefferson.
Then Abe Lincoln read the passage from the pen of Jefferson: “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear a republican government cannot be strong, that this government is not strong enough. . . . I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest government on earth.”
Young nineteen-year-old Abe Lincoln had plenty to think about in that year of 1828, what with his long trip to New Orleans and back, what with the strong, stormy Andrew Jackson sweeping into control of the Government at Washington, and the gentle, teasing, thoughtful words of Thomas Jefferson: “Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others?”
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