Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab

by Steve Inskeep

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  RAN AWAY from the subscriber, residing in Lauderdale county, Ala on Sunday night, the 31st of October last, a negro man named

  ISAAC.

  The owner described the escaped slave as “26 or 27 years old,” perhaps “5 feet 8 or 10 inches high,” with a “down look,” a tendency to call himself a doctor, and a small piece missing from his nose, “occasioned by a bite.” Isaac was also “fond of spirits,” according to the owner who was uncertain of Isaac’s age or height.

  Isaac’s fate was related to that of Indians, and directly tied to the exploits of Andrew Jackson. Isaac had been living in Kentucky, a slave state, when he was sold down to Alabama in 1818. That was the same year that Lauderdale County, his new home, was founded along the north bank of Muscle Shoals. He was apparently one of the first slaves imported after Andrew Jackson’s conquests and treaties opened the region and sparked the 1818 land bubble. The seat of Lauderdale County was Florence, the new city founded at tremendous profit by Jackson’s friends. The area’s new plantation owners would be stuck on the land for quite some time; the land market crashed along with cotton prices in 1819. The plantation owners relied on the labor of men like Isaac to slowly redeem their investments.

  There was nothing unusual about the ad for the escaped slave. Other issues of the Argus reported on a question debated in the Kentucky legislature: If a slave was executed for committing a crime, should the owner be compensated for the loss of his property? A proposal for a tax to finance such compensation was defeated, 33–30; it wasn’t clear if lawmakers objected to the principle or just disliked the tax. In a slave-based economy, such questions must inevitably arise in democratic debate.

  Did no one notice the contradictions? Of course they did. Some Americans had agitated against slavery even before 1790, when Benjamin Franklin signed a petition calling on Congress to remove this “Inconsistency” from the “Character of the American People.” Northern states gradually did free their small slave populations in the republic’s early years. Slavery was more entrenched in the South, though some questioned it. One of the men General Lafayette encountered during his American journey was Edward Coles, a Virginian who had inherited slaves and decided that the institution was morally wrong. Coles relocated with his slaves to Illinois, granted them liberty, provided them land, and won election in 1822 as an antislavery governor. Lafayette also encountered people involved in grander schemes. Since 1816, leading citizens had been financing the American Colonization Society, which proposed that slaves should be gradually freed over time and given passage to Africa, from which they or their ancestors had come. A founding officer of the society was Speaker of the House Henry Clay.

  Supporters of colonization had a variety of motives. Some worried about the nation’s soul. Others were slave owners—including Clay, who traveled with a manservant and used dozens of other enslaved people to work his farm outside Lexington. Clay concluded early in life that slavery was “a great evil,” but he kept slaves he acquired through inheritance and marriage. He said that until slavery was outlawed he had a right to practice it. His views made him the perfect politician for Kentucky, which had pro-and antislavery sections, and also the perfect man to support the Colonization Society. It promised to address the evil in a way that did not explicitly threaten the existing order. Gradual colonization was considered far safer than simply abolishing slavery, which would deny slaveowners’ property rights and create a far larger class of free black people than many whites wanted. Clay said the society occupied the thoughtful middle ground between “rash” abolitionists and those who found slavery a “blessing.”

  Arguments for colonization began to resemble arguments for removing Indians across the Mississippi. African Americans, like Indians, were alleged to be incompatible with the new republican society. Even if they could assume the responsibilities of citizenship, it was said, white prejudice would prevent them from doing so in peace. Better for all, the argument went, if they were transported to some separate place.

  Fifteen

  Clay Is Politically Damd

  At dinners and parades honoring Lafayette, few Americans talked with his traveling party about the presidential election of 1824. It would have been unseemly to bring up divisive issues. Lafayette’s secretary began to think that the hero’s tour had “paralyzed all the electoral ardour.” He should have known better. Americans were intently focused on the contest, as were Europeans. The secretary, Auguste Levasseur, who later published a memoir of the tour, wrote that European analysts were predicting disaster for the young republic. In previous elections the United States had “been able to restrict its choice to a few individuals, rendered dear to their country by their revolutionary services,” but now the nation must “open the door to the ambitious and designing.”

  The political moment was even more fractious than it seemed. For more than a generation, a single national political party had governed the United States. Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party had won election in 1800 and had held the presidency ever since. Their old rivals, the Federalists, had steadily faded into oblivion, to the point that in 1816 and 1820, President Monroe hardly faced meaningful opposition. But in 1824 the dominant party did not settle on a single candidate. There was no formal convention or primary system to choose a nominee, and an old informal system—leaving the nomination to the party’s members of Congress—fell apart. Each of the four contenders that fall was Democratic-Republican. The great ruling coalition was poised to split.

  Lafayette seemed to encounter presidential candidates everywhere. For a time he traveled with one, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. If Clay was driving to dominate the second generation of American leaders, Adams was the second generation, the son of the Revolutionary firebrand John Adams. He combined his father’s stubborn adherence to principle with a quiet demeanor. When Adams traveled with Lafayette on an overnight steamboat, the Frenchman’s party was stunned to see the secretary of state preparing to sleep with the common passengers on the floor of the dining room.

  Adams, at fifty-seven, had pinched eyebrows, a receding hairline, and whitening sideburns. He’d been a senator and a diplomat, part of the team that negotiated an honorable end to the War of 1812. Now he was well positioned to win the presidency. The previous two secretaries of state had each won the top job. Many presumed Secretary Adams would too. But Jackson’s candidacy was strong. When a visitor asked about plans for his administration, Adams got out of answering by saying that “I had never thought the probability of my election sufficient to warrant me in thinking about it at all.” This was the disinterested pose required of all candidates, but Adams surely had genuine moments of doubt.

  Unable to do anything but await the results, Adams passed a day in October accompanying General Lafayette on a tour of Philadelphia institutions, such as the “Pennsylvania Hospital for Sick and Insane Persons.” The highlight was a visit to the penitentiary, including a new building designed so that every prisoner would live in solitary confinement, and would therefore have time to think and reform. Here was one of the few recorded instances of his visit in which Lafayette could not restrain himself from commenting on current events. The old general informed his hosts that he had been in solitary confinement after the French Revolution, and the experience had not reformed him in any way. Solitary confinement was torture, known to drive men mad. In his diary, Adams recorded walking with Lafayette between “convicts drawn up in double line.” The brooding presidential candidate thought he saw signs of “vice and guilty lives” in the double row of faces—“desperation, malice, hatred, revenge, impudence, treachery, and scorn.” Soon afterward Adams departed with Lafayette for Washington.

  Lafayette checked into the Franklin House, also called Gadsby’s after the owner. Gadsby’s was a few blocks northwest of the White House, and Lafayette hadn’t been there long when he learned that Andrew Jackson had just checked into the same hotel. Resolving to pay a call, Lafayette discovered Jackson on
his way to call on him. They met at the stairs. They talked of old times. Jackson remembered spotting General Lafayette in Charleston early in the Revolution, when Jackson was only a boy. Lafayette managed to leave the impression, unlikely though it was, that he remembered seeing Jackson. Jackson’s wife, Rachel, sensed that “the emotion of revolutionary feeling was aroused in them both.” In the following days she took a close look at the French hero: “He wears a wig, and is a little inclined to corpulency. He is very healthy, eats hearty, goes to every party, and that is every night.”

  Her husband was not healthy or hearty, and not attending many parties; Mrs. Jackson, deeply religious, regarded parties and the theater as temptations to resist. The Jacksons did go to functions hosted by President Monroe’s wife, Elizabeth, in the Executive Mansion. Ushered into the house where they hoped soon to live, they crossed the high-ceilinged main hall on their way to the drawing room. Later known as the Green Room, with its polished wood furnishings and portraits on the walls, it was among the smaller and more gracious of the ceremonial rooms; here the crowds might include Lafayette as well as other presidential candidates, for all four contenders were now sharing this small city and its even smaller political society. Clay and Adams might turn up anywhere. The fourth candidate, Treasury Secretary William Crawford, was nearly always at home, having suffered a stroke, but Crawford’s campaign manager was moving about—Senator Martin Van Buren of New York, a deft operator who had already proved his mastery in the union’s richest and most populous state. At events filled with such notables, Andrew Jackson was excellent, shaking off his health problems, trim and tall in fine clothes, courteous to ladies, the center of attention in any room. Then he went back to Gadsby’s and wrote sourly about the experience. Washington social events were “nothing but shew—nothing of pure principles of friendship in these crowds—hypocrisy and hollow heartedness predominates.”

  Custom required hypocrisy of Jackson, who had to pretend he had no interest in his own candidacy. He tried to follow the custom, insisting even in private letters that he was not following the news. The same letters showed he was following the news. As soon as he arrived in Washington that December, he had promised a friend back home that “when I have … become a little acquainted with the views of the political knowing ones here, I will give you the speculations on the presidential question.” He mentioned one of his rivals in particular—not Crawford, whose health doomed his prospects, nor Adams, but his fellow westerner Henry Clay.

  This made sense. When the undecided election was thrown to the House, Clay would be in a powerful position, the man who knew how to work the personalities and rules. Even if he couldn’t win, he would influence the outcome. But there was another reason for Jackson to watch Clay. Jackson hated him. Their mutual dislike dated back to a disagreement involving Jackson’s dealings with Indians. The disagreement had come half a dozen years earlier, but Jackson neither forgave nor forgot.

  • • •

  Clay was elegant of dress and informal in manner. He drank whiskey, gambled at cards, and once ended an alcohol-lubricated dinner by dancing down the length of a banquet table. A portrait made in his youth showed a lean and lanky man staring confidently at the painter, a half smile on his face. This permanent crook of the mouth showed up in painting after painting made over the half century of his career. Late in his life, photography made it possible to capture Clay’s countenance, and in these images the half smile looks more like a wry grimace, as if he cannot believe the human comedy he’s been witnessing all this time.

  Clay had an easier start in life than Jackson, growing up in a moderately prosperous Virginia family. Yet their similarities were considerable. Like Jackson, Clay never really knew his father, who died when Henry was four. (His mother remarried.) Also like Jackson, Clay had little formal education, served as an apprentice to lawyers before becoming a lawyer himself, moved west in his youth, and grew prosperous enough to buy an elegant farm. Margaret Bayard Smith, member of a prominent Washington family and a keen observer, said of Clay: “Whatever he is, is all his own, inherent power, bestowed by nature and not derivative from culture or fortune.” Jackson too.

  Elected to the Senate in 1806, Clay took his seat even though he was several months below the constitutionally mandated age of thirty. In 1811 he became a member of the House, and was elected Speaker on the first day of his first term. Ideas he supported defined federal policy for a generation—taxes on imports, federal roads, and a national bank, all of which he eventually labeled as elements of his American System, and all of which he saw enacted over opponents who said they were not authorized by the Constitution. He was forceful, eloquent, and too clever for his own good. In 1812 he led a congressional faction called the War Hawks, who pushed the United States toward conflict with Britain. He managed to avoid the destruction of his career as the war went wrong. He even redeemed himself as a member of the negotiating team that concluded an honorable peace, working alongside John Quincy Adams. But Clay’s advocacy of war, like many of his political choices, had an unanticipated consequence: in this case, the rise of Andrew Jackson.

  Clay’s opposition to Jackson became explicit in 1819, after Jackson conquered Florida. The House considered whether to punish Jackson, and Clay delivered an hours-long speech to a House chamber packed with spectators. It was a perfect exhibition of his style. However happy Americans were to be gaining Florida, Clay said, the general was slipping away from civilian control. “Wonderful energy!” he said of Jackson’s conquest. “Admirable promptitude. Alas! That it had not been an energy and a promptitude within the pale of the Constitution.” Margaret Bayard Smith heard the speech while seated on some steps outside the gallery. The House had fallen so silent that she “did not lose a word.” Clay needed every word. He was attacking the popular acts of a wildly popular man. Jackson was growing so famous he was mobbed in the streets. Even Clay felt obliged to say Jackson’s motives were “pure,” but the end did not justify Jackson’s means. The general exceeded orders, and failing to condemn him would be “a triumph of the principle of insubordination.” Interrupted by a Massachusetts lawmaker who defended Jackson, Clay replied, “The gentleman from Massachusetts is truly unfortunate. Fact or principle is always against him.”

  The Speaker went on to question the origins of the invasion of Florida. Why was Jackson chasing renegade Indians? Because Indians were rebelling. Why were they rebelling? Because Andrew Jackson imposed an unjust peace treaty after the Battle of Horseshoe Bend: illegitimate, infused with a “dictatorial spirit,” and “utterly irreconcilable” with American values. Once his speech was finished, Mrs. Smith recalled, Clay “came and sat a few minutes on the steps by me, throwing himself most gracefully into a recumbent posture.” This was part of the performance: his physical grace, his informality, his careful attention to an influential woman. Mrs. Smith’s husband was at various times a publisher, a banker, and a federal official, making the Smiths early members of Washington’s permanent governing establishment. Clay knew his business. He had, however, made a lasting enemy in General Jackson.

  Jackson’s defense was, in essence, that the Spanish deserved what they got. They had failed to prevent Indians in Florida from mounting raids across the border. Also, the invasion was popular. The people would sustain him. He was right: Clay himself ended his speech by acknowledging his cause was probably lost, and that the House would vote down every effort to censure Jackson. “Clay is politically damd,” Jackson afterward wrote to one of his political managers in Tennessee. “You will see him skinned here” in Washington, where Jackson had gone to coordinate his own defense, “and I hope you will roast him in the West… . If Mr. Casidy [a Nashville newspaper editor] can be got sober I wish him to scorch him.” The capital’s leading newspaper, the National Intelligencer, published a claim that the general had been overheard “in the public taverns and ballrooms of Washington” making threats “of personal vengeance, even to cutting off the ears of some of the members [of a Senate investi
gating committee] … and some members of the House of Representatives.”

  Yet as the election of 1824 approached, Jackson mastered his rage. He met Clay for dinner in Washington more than once. No ears were cut off. When the presidential election was thrown to the House, Jackson was intensely suspicious of Clay, yet evidence suggests he would have been willing to reach some accommodation. Jackson had no trouble, in later years, relying on former opponents as close advisers, including former allies of Clay. Jackson was capable of making an alliance with Clay. It was Clay who could not abide Jackson.

  • • •

  The presidential election of 1824 was the same as the elections of later generations in one vital respect. It was not decided by a popular vote. Under the Constitution, each state chose a small number of electors, by whatever means the state desired, and a vote by these electors selected the president. The popular and electoral votes need not turn out the same, as a later generation would learn during the disputed election of the year 2000. In 1824 there was not even a nationwide popular vote to win. Most states had only lately embraced the innovation of a popular vote for presidential electors, and several still left the choice to their state legislatures.

  In 1824, there were 261 electoral votes. Gaining a majority required 131. Results rolled in over a period of weeks, mostly during those twenty-eight brutal days when Mr. and Mrs. Jackson were bouncing eastward toward Washington. Jackson did well across the South and West, winning several states including Alabama and Mississippi, which he had done so much to bring into the union. His popularity also extended as far as the big northern state of Pennsylvania. In total he had 99 electoral votes, more than anyone else. Adams, dominant in New England, had 84. Clay and Crawford won scattered victories. No one had a majority. In such a case the Constitution said the top three contenders must be voted upon by the House: it became a brand-new election, in which the popular vote was even less relevant.