Jackson would be a candidate before the House; so would Adams. Clay and Crawford were battling for the third and final slot. After Jackson arrived in Washington, he watched intently to see if his despised rival would get it.
If Louisiana has not voted for Mr Clay he is not in the house.
Clay needed Louisiana’s electoral votes. It soon became clear that he didn’t win them. Jackson could feel victory getting closer.
I should never have aspired to the responsibility—but, let the lords will be done.
Now, however, the Speaker of the House took on a new role. As the House prepared to break the three-way deadlock, Clay could swing the election to one of the candidates who remained.
With or without Jackson’s consent, his supporters reached out to Clay. One was Sam Houston, the soldier who had climbed at General Jackson’s orders over the Creek barricade at Horseshoe Bend, and who was now a Tennessee congressman. Houston met a friend of Clay’s, and said Clay could end up as Jackson’s secretary of state. Congressman James Buchanan of Pennsylvania took a similar message directly to Clay. But Clay was leaning in another direction. Encountering John Quincy Adams at a dinner in honor of General Lafayette, Clay asked to have “some confidential conversation upon public affairs.”
• • •
Clay told a Kentucky friend the House vote was a “choice of evils.” This was not the warmest endorsement of Adams, but Clay probably believed that Adams would support the American System. It’s also likely that Clay’s ambition pushed him toward Adams, since Jackson was his rival for the affection of the West. But Clay’s political calculus was complex, since he would pay a price in Kentucky for opposing a western man. Clay’s own explanations for his decision are worth considering.
In the election of Mr Adams we shall not by the example inflict any wound upon the character of our institutions; but I should much fear hereafter, if not during the present generation, that the election of the General would give to the Military Spirit a Stimulus and a confidence that might lead to the most pernicious results.
Clay said this so often that he likely believed it was true. He’d been hearing confirmation of his judgment for years. “Too much of a Soldier to be a civilian,” said Return J. Meigs Jr., a former Ohio governor and U.S. postmaster general (whose father, the longtime Cherokee Indian agent, worked with Jackson in Tennessee for many years). “There is more of the Dictator—than of the Consul in his Character.” A consul was a peacetime leader in ancient Rome, and the metaphor resonated in a country that dwelled on Greco-Roman precedents for its republican experiment. It was not by chance that Americans gave an ancient Roman name to the Senate, or put the Bank of the United States in a building that resembled an ancient Greek temple. Latin was taught in many schools, including those set up for Indians. Even Clay, with his limited education, was introduced to Greek and Roman writers while serving as an apprentice to a Virginia jurist. Meigs, in his letter to Clay from Marietta, Ohio, threw in two lines in Latin from the Roman poet Horace, and assumed his friend in Kentucky would be able to decipher them. Clay’s 1819 speech summarized Jackson’s Florida campaign with Caesar’s famous phrase “Veni, vidi, vici.” Suddenly Jackson was Caesar and Clay was Cicero, the Roman senator who tried to stand in his way.
While Clay’s apprehensions were understandable, he could have viewed Jackson differently. It was true that as a general, Jackson found new and creative ways to exercise power—just as Clay found new and creative ways to exercise power as Speaker of the House. Each was a disruptive figure who unnerved conventional thinkers. Clay’s brooding on history blinded him to the reality of his rejection of Andrew Jackson: The candidate Clay considered least suited for the presidency was the one who most resembled Clay.
Clay visited Adams for a long talk, and took the opportunity to complain. Representatives of all the candidates had been appealing for his support in a manner he considered “gross.” Obviously, Henry Clay was not going to make a “gross” bargain to support Adams. Adams’s diary noted that without requesting “any personal considerations for himself,” Clay told Adams “he had no hesitation in saying that his preference would be for me.” The Speaker visited Adams again on January 27, “and sat with me a couple of hours, discussing all the prospects and probabilities of the presidential election. He spoke to me with the utmost freedom,” even discussing what to do about friends of Adams who seemed to be wavering in their support. With his self-confidence and ease, Clay had already assumed the position of adviser of the man he expected to make president. That was the way to gain a post in Adams’s cabinet without asking for it.
• • •
Jackson was under increasing stress. He was flooded with callers at Gadsby’s hotel—fifty to a hundred a day, according to Rachel. He ended a letter to one of his political managers: “Since I have sat down to write this I have been interrupted twenty times & oblige now to close it hastily—A.J.” The bills Jackson received from the hotel suggested the mounting costs of entertaining. On January 11 he paid for eight bottles of port wine, a pint of whiskey, three more bottles of wine, and “2 Extra Dinners in Private Parlour.” On the fourteenth he was billed for claret, cigars, brandy, whiskey, champagne, three more dinners, and three bottles of “wager wine”—this, of course, beyond the meals and lodging for himself, Rachel, three servants, and four horses. He’d arrived in Washington with $2,300 but was running out of cash. He had to write to John Coffee in Alabama, asking him to send more. His health was more precarious than his finances. “We are all well,” Rachel wrote home on January 27, “except bad colds (Mr Jackson has not been very well sinc He left home) his mind has kept him Down he Longs for retirement at His own fire side I knew from the first how wrong it was, but my advise was nothing.” One night after meeting a congressman, Jackson slipped on his way up Gadsby’s stairs and painfully shifted one of the bullets in his body.
Despite his anxiety and pain, Jackson was writing letters to supporters that perfectly expressed his position. His ideas guided his supporters then, continued to guide them for years afterward, and would be emulated, in one form or another, down to the present day. He wrote to his old friend John Overton, a Tennessee judge:
Let me rise or fall upon the rule that the people have the right to choose the chief executive of the nation, and a majority of their voices have a right to govern, agreeable to the declared principles of the constitution—
Having been supported by the majority of the people, I can have no feelings on the occasion—If party or intrigue should prevail, and exclude me, I shall retire to my comfortable farm with great pleasure—there you know, was the height of my ambition.
It was a brilliant letter. If all its premises were accepted, there was no patriotic course for anyone to take except to salute Andrew Jackson on his way to the Executive Mansion. Jackson’s vision matched perfectly with his political requirements, although it did not match with the facts.
the rule that the people have the right to choose the chief executive of their nation, and a majority of their voices have a right to govern
That was not a rule. While the Founders had respected the principle of majority rule, they found the power of the majority, like all power, to be dangerous if unchecked. Check it they did, including by the creation of the Electoral College, designed to filter the will of the people through the eminent men who would be voted into it.
Having been supported by the majority of the people
He hadn’t been supported by a majority. Never mind that women and nearly all racial minorities did not vote, or that several states did not hold popular elections for president at all. In the four-way race, Jackson gained 42 percent of votes cast in the states that held a popular vote. Although Jackson led Adams’s 31 percent, neither had a majority. Of ten million Americans, about 359,000 voted, of whom about 151,217 marked ballots for Jackson.
If party or intrigue should prevail, and exclude me
Here Jackson did not see himself merely as a man fighting a three-way c
ontest in the House as required by the Constitution. It was a one-man contest. Jackson was the only person whose victory could possibly be just. Any reverse he might suffer was by definition illegitimate, a betrayal of America through elitist “intrigue.”
Jackson engaged in some intrigue of his own. Letter after letter resembled the one he sent to a Philadelphia merchant, a supporter in Pennsylvania.
With regard to the Presidency, My Dear Sir, you must excuse my inability to inform you—I know nothing of the movement of parties, or of the combinations, which are alledged to be in secret caucus. It is true rumors of the kind exist.
Having denied any knowledge of the news, he passed on the most salacious news that he had: rumors of “combinations” involving Henry Clay. His supporters pushed the rumors into the open. Late in January a pro-Jackson newspaper in Pennsylvania published a devastating interpretation of events. An anonymous congressman claimed that the presidency had gone up for sale. John Quincy Adams was buying support from Henry Clay, and Clay’s price was to become secretary of state, “should this unholy coalition prevail.”
Just to make sure this report had the proper effect, the pro-Jackson editor mailed a copy to Henry Clay. Clay read it. There he was, accused of a corrupt design to become secretary of state. The top post in the cabinet. The post that in the republic’s short history had become the surest springboard to the presidency. The posting Clay would want, should he serve in the cabinet at all. Now it was Clay’s turn to explode in fury, publicly challenging the source of the story to a duel, and demanding an investigation in the House. On January 29, he wrote a long letter to a friend that reads as if its coauthor were bourbon. Insiders in Washington
have turned upon me and with the most amiable unanimity agree to vituperate me. I am a deserter from Democracy; A Giant at intrigue; have sold the West—sold myself—defeating Gen Jacksons election to leave open the Western pretensions that I may hereafter fill them myself—blasting all my fair prospects &c &c &c… . The Knaves cannot comprehend how a man can be honest. They cannot conceive that I should have solemnly interrogated my Conscience and asked it to tell me seriously what I ought to do?
“I perceive,” Clay went on, “that I am unconsciously writing a sort of defence, which you may possibly think imp[lies] guilt.”
The distraction did not keep Clay from the task to which he had set himself. He lined up the votes Adams needed, twisting arms so effectively that when the House met in its great echoing chamber, the lawmakers made John Quincy Adams the president-elect on the first ballot.
• • •
Jackson bore defeat well in public, walking into a crowded reception at the Executive Mansion and offering Adams his congratulations. Probably Lafayette was in the crowd; his secretary Levasseur was there, and found Jackson “open and sincere.” In private, everything was different. Within days, Jackson supporters met the president-elect to present an ultimatum: Clay must be denied the post of secretary of state, or a “determined opposition” would be organized against Adams from the very start of his administration. Adams, refusing to be intimidated, offered Clay the State Department. Clay hesitated, sensing the danger, but accepted: yet another of his fateful choices with unintended effects.
By then Jackson had long since issued his judgment in a letter from Gadsby’s hotel. The nation had never witnessed “such a bare faced corruption,” wrote the general who had bullied, intrigued, and bribed Indians into surrendering tens of millions of acres of real estate. None of that was important now. What mattered was that Henry Clay had betrayed him.
So you see the Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver—his end will be the same.
Sixteen
We Wish to Know Whether You Could Protect Us
At the time of Lafayette’s visit, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs administered native matters from offices in Georgetown, on the western edge of Washington. The bureau was run by Thomas McKenney, who was considered an expert on the tribes. McKenney’s offices included a special room that was once seen by the traveling English novelist Frances Trollope. “The walls,” she wrote, “are entirely covered with original portraits of all the chiefs who, from time to time, have come to negociate with their great father, as they call the President.” McKenney paid to have each visitor sit with the same painter. Some of the Indians wore expressions of “noble and warlike daring,” while others were shown with “a gentle and naïve simplicity.” At some point Major Ridge went up on the wall, as did John Ross, both of whom visited Washington in the early part of 1825.
There is no record that either man met Lafayette, though at least one visited Gadsby’s while Lafayette was staying there. Major Ridge arrived at the hotel on January 10, joining the stream of visitors to see Gadsby’s other famous guest, Andrew Jackson. “Our heads have become white,” Ridge observed when the two veterans of Horseshoe Bend met. Ridge was around fifty-three, Jackson fifty-seven. Possibly using his English-speaking son John Ridge as interpreter, the Cherokee leader delivered a short and respectful speech. “Our hearts have been with you always,” Ridge assured his former commander. Left unstated was Ridge’s reason for visiting Washington. He was acting as an adviser to the Creek Nation as it tried to avoid losing more land; this was the mission that earned Ridge and his son commissions totaling $25,000.
A few weeks later John Ross arrived in the capital to join Ridge in the latest Cherokee delegation. Georgia was making another demand for Cherokee territory. It was Thomas McKenney’s duty to pass on this demand to the Cherokees, even though he knew what the answer would be. He made his request in a desultory, one-sentence note.
Friends and Brothers: I am directed by the Secretary of War to enquire if you have authority to negotiate with the Government for a sale of your lands; and especially for that portion of them lying in the limits of Georgia.
The answer penned by Ross walked right up to the edge of sarcasm.
It would seem from the enquiry that the Secretary of War is impressed with the belief that our nation may be disposed to make a cession of our lands.
So that the secretary “may have full information,” Ross said the Cherokees’ refusal to sell was “unchangeable.” This caused a problem for the government, since Georgia’s desire for Cherokee as well as Creek land within the state was equally unchangeable.
The duty of resolving these irreconcilable demands fell on John Quincy Adams soon after his inauguration. Adams’s elevation must have been a hopeful sign to the Cherokees who’d so often visited his home. But if Adams appreciated the propaganda he’d been given about the Cherokee Nation, he was not enthusiastic about their prospects. In a cabinet meeting during his first year in office, President Adams heard Henry Clay remark that Indians were an “essentially inferior” race, “not an improvable breed,” and on their way to extinction. Some in the room were shocked, but Adams was not. He wrote afterward that “I fear there is too much foundation” for Clay’s opinions. Indians thus depended on a president who recognized their rights but regarded them as a lost cause. Adams’s resolve would promptly be tested—so soon, in fact, that when General Lafayette bid good-bye to the new president after the election and resumed his tour of all twenty-four states, he would reach the states of the emerging Deep South in time to witness a portion of the test.
• • •
The journal of Lafayette’s secretary, Levasseur, recorded memorable scenes as the party moved southward. Somewhere below Norfolk, Virginia, the group stopped at a “small, solitary inn,” where the owner served whiskey and bread. The owner’s wife brought in their son, a toddler who, repeating after his father, thanked Lafayette for their liberty. Approaching Charleston, South Carolina, Levasseur smelled the city before he saw it. “The coolness of the night had condensed the perfumes from the orange, peach, and almond trees, covered with flowers, and embalmed the air.” The city gave Lafayette “balls, displays of artificial fire-works, and entertainments” that lasted for days. While on a stea
mboat in the harbor, the great man was saluted with cannon fire from Fort Moultrie, which had guarded Charleston since the Revolution. Army engineers were finally planning a new fortress, to be built on a shoal in the harbor and to be called Fort Sumter.
Between the blasts of cannons and toasts to the Revolution, Lafayette’s secretary noticed a pervasive emotion: “fear.” South Carolina was a slave state, with a majority black population. The white minority had been terrified just three years before, in 1822, to learn that a free black man named Denmark Vesey was plotting a slave insurrection. Authorities hanged Vesey and dozens of alleged co-conspirators, and by the time of Lafayette’s visit, intensified security regulations gave South Carolina the feel of a police state. One measure decreed that when ships docked at Charleston, any free black sailors on board must be jailed so they could not carry messages to black people onshore. When a Supreme Court justice found the imprisonments unconstitutional, South Carolina openly defied the ruling, saying that stopping “insubordination” was “paramount” to “all laws” and “all constitutions.” Baffled by this early example of a state nullifying federal law, national officials did nothing.
In the 1820s progressive thinkers in the South were reluctant to fully endorse slavery. They defended it only as a necessary evil inherited from past generations. South Carolina’s great political thinker John C. Calhoun even suggested it was a passing phase, telling a northerner in 1823 that slavery was “scaffolding, scaffolding, Sir—it will come away when the building is finished.” But he neglected to specify who was going to take down the scaffolding, and Lafayette’s perceptive secretary noticed that no one was available. A vote against slavery would be a vote against the personal fortunes of many leading politicians.
Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab Page 15