Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  The southern plantation owners and the eastern industrialists had every reason to be suspicious of Jackson and to dislike him because he was determined to take their special privileges away from them. That’s the reason they were suspicious of him. The rich and powerful people in the country had control of the money interests up to that point, and Jackson’s objective was to take that control away from them and see that the people who had little businesses, little farms, were properly taken care of. He wanted to help the people who needed help.

  The country was ready for that sort of change, and Jackson was straightforward and honest and clearly for the people who had no real representation at the head of the federal government. The Declaration of Independence uses almost the exact words that Lincoln used in his Gettysburg Address, that all men are created equal, but it wasn’t practiced, fundamentally, in many of the policies of the various governments: city, county, state, and national. But Jackson made a really sincere effort to give the common people the place in the government where they belong. He was no demagogue. His policies were a development of the Democratic Party and of Jackson’s ability to understand what the country needed at that time. He wanted sincerely to look after the little fellow who had no pull, and that’s what a president is supposed to do. Jackson was a practical man, working for the welfare of the whole country, and I think he succeeded in his purpose, to a great extent, if not entirely. There’s the theory that Jackson showed no prior signs of being the kind of man he was as president, but I don’t agree with that at all. He was always for the common people. He always made it clear, when he was a judge and a member of the House of Representatives and a senator, that he represented the man with a hole in his pocket just as much as he represented the big shots; and when he became president of the United States, he followed through on the policy he had always followed.

  To tell the truth, Jackson didn’t look much like a man ready to take charge when he finally got in, in 1828. He was sixty-one years old, but he looked a lot older, and he was suffering now from tuberculosis, sick in body from that disease and sick in heart from the sudden death of his wife. But I guess another reason I admire him so much is that he was a take-over man who always knew what he had to do and went to work right away at the job of doing it. Some people, even some of the people who supported him when he was running for president, felt he looked so bad when he was sworn in that he wouldn’t last more than a year or two, but he surprised the worriers by working like a demon for eight full years in office and getting all sorts of good things accomplished.

  As I’ve said, he didn’t get any help at all from Calhoun. The principal difference between the two men was that Jackson thought in terms of the welfare of the whole country, whereas Calhoun was much more concerned with the rights of the individual states, and particularly the southern states. Calhoun was for nullification, a belief that the Constitution could be interpreted as saying that states had rights that overrode federal rights, so that, for example, if a state like Calhoun’s South Carolina didn’t like a bill such as that protective tariff bill, which they certainly didn’t like, they could insist that that bill be nullified, meaning canceled out as though it didn’t exist. Jackson felt that the federal government spoke for all states and all parts of the country, and that, if the Congress passed a bill, the law created by that bill had to be obeyed by everybody, and that included all states which might not like that law.

  Calhoun felt that the South was being neglected or ignored by the federal government because southern states were largely agricultural, and northern states were largely industrial, and he thought the government was favoring the North in its lawmaking because federal lawmakers believed that northern manufacturing and industry were more important to the financial health of the country than farming and agriculture. Jackson maintained that the government was dealing fairly and equally with all areas and elements of the country. Calhoun became more and more an apologist for slavery, and early hints that the South might consider separating itself from the United States, if a lot of states weren’t admitted to the union as slave states, showed up in some of his actions and statements.

  Later on, he helped get Texas admitted to the Union as a slave state and fought to keep California out because it was coming in as a free state. His theory in trying to prevent territories coming in as free states was that the federal government didn’t really own those territories but just held them as a sort of trustee; the territories, he said, were owned jointly by all the states, so individual states could quite legitimately object to their property being allowed in as states if they wanted to do so. A nonsensical theory at best. And after he died, two books of his political philosophy were published, and they openly advocated secession “if necessary.”

  Jackson, of course, like Lincoln a few decades later, felt that secession should never be necessary or permitted under any circumstances whatever and that the Union should be preserved at all costs. When he made his famous statement to that effect at that dinner, which incidentally was a dinner celebrating the eighty-seventh anniversary of the birth of Jackson’s idol, Thomas Jefferson, he stared at Calhoun with that cold hawk-stare of his as he said it.

  Jackson didn’t get a whole lot of help from his cabinet during his first term in office, either, and the reason had very little to do with politics or government policy; it was mostly the result of another marital scandal that must have reminded Jackson constantly of his own problems regarding Mrs. Jackson. His campaign manager when he was running for the presidency was Senator John Eaton of Tennessee, who had been married to Jackson’s ward, Myra Lewis, and Jackson made Eaton his secretary of war following the election. (The Jacksons had no children of their own, which is why Myra Lewis, a distant relative, became Jackson’s ward. The Jacksons also adopted a nephew of Mrs. Jackson’s and named him Andrew Jackson, Jr.) But Eaton was now a widower, and sometime before the election, he had an affair with a young woman named Margaret O’Neale Timberlake, who was the daughter of the couple who owned the boardinghouse in Washington in which Eaton lived, and who worked as a barmaid in the tavern attached to the boardinghouse. (Most senators in those days didn’t have the funds to live in the equivalent of those beautiful Georgetown houses in which a lot of senators live today.) Jackson knew Peggy Timberlake because he had lived in that same boardinghouse when he was a senator himself, and he liked her, but the trouble was that she was married; her husband was John Timberlake, a purser in the Navy. And the scandal grew worse when Timberlake died at sea, possibly a suicide, because he’d learned of his wife’s affair with Eaton.

  Jackson urged Eaton to cool down the scandal by marrying Peggy Timberlake quickly, especially since he was so much in love with her, and the Eatons were married two months before Jackson entered the White House. But the wives of most of the cabinet members stuck up their noses and wouldn’t invite the Eatons into their homes, partly because the affair had been such widespread public knowledge before the marriage and partly because of Peggy Eaton’s low social position as a former barmaid, and Jackson did another of those foolish, hotheaded things he sometimes did: He ordered his cabinet members to order their wives to socialize with Peggy Eaton and asked for the resignation of all cabinet people whose wives wouldn’t cooperate. The cabinet members refused to talk to their wives or to resign; they told Jackson calmly that they had no control over the social activities of their wives. And the leader of the cold-shoulder movement against Mrs. Eaton - as you might have guessed, it was the wife of that enemy in Jackson’s own camp, John C. Calhoun - redoubled her efforts to keep people away from Eaton’s wife.

  It got to the point where Jackson and his cabinet practically weren’t talking to each other, and the situation worsened when cabinet members wouldn’t back Jackson in his move against the Bank of the United States, which I’ll discuss in just a minute. But the result of all this trouble was something that presidents have used to great advantage ever since that time: the employment of advisors outside government staff. Jackson jus
t stopped calling cabinet meetings for a while, which was a bad thing, but it made him turn more and more to people he knew would be loyal and honest to him - a group of men who became known as his kitchen cabinet. Jackson was loyal to his friends, just as all of us have been during our administrations, and I hope all presidents will be that way. And Jackson knew that he needed people who were loyal to him in turn, in order for him to have a program that he could carry through.

  Fortunately, the people with whom he began to have policy meetings were some of the best minds in the country, including Francis Preston Blair, the editor of the Washington Globe, who later started another paper, the Congressional Globe, which became the Congressional Record, and whose residence, Blair House, I lived in when the White House was being fixed up; another newspaperman Jackson knew and trusted. Duff Green, former editor of the St. Louis Enquirer (though eventually Green sided with Calhoun on nullification and became more and more involved with southern rather than with national issues); Jackson’s adopted son, Andrew, Jr., who also served as his secretary, and, of course, John Eaton. Another member of Jackson’s real cabinet who became part of his kitchen cabinet was Martin Van Buren, former senator and former governor of New York and then Jackson’s secretary of state, who had no hesitation about accepting the Eatons socially, possibly because he was a widower and had no wife to snub them. He subsequently, of course, followed Jackson into the presidency.

  But the problem of the Eatons remained a thorn in Jackson’s side, and in 1831, Eaton resigned as secretary of war, after which he challenged three members of the cabinet to duels, which they all refused. Eaton eventually became governor of Florida and minister to Spain. Then Van Buren resigned, a self-sacrificing move since he felt he’d also become too controversial because of his support of the Eatons and because he’d joined Jackson in showing his distaste for Calhoun. Jackson then appointed Van Buren minister to England, but Congress split evenly on approving the appointment, and this gave Calhoun the deciding vote, which he cast, spitefully, against Van Buren, despite the fact that Van Buren had been an excellent secretary of state and would almost certainly have been an equally excellent minister to England. As you can see, Calhoun, who was known in his day as the Gentleman from South Carolina, was no gentleman in a lot of ways.

  Three other cabinet members also left in 1831, resigning on their own or finally succumbing to Jackson’s repeated suggestions that they leave: Samuel D. Ingram of Pennsylvania, the secretary of the treasury, John M. Berrien of Georgia, the attorney general, and John Branch of North Carolina, the secretary of the navy. That left only one member of the original Cabinet, William T. Barry of Kentucky, the postmaster-general; the job of postmaster general was a brand-new addition to the cabinet, and Barry stayed on until 1835. And then, early in 1832, as Jackson and Calhoun grew more and more at odds on the nullification question and on other things, and when Jackson made it clear that Van Buren and not Calhoun was going to be his running mate for his second term and his choice to follow him as president, Calhoun left the administration himself, the only vice president in our history to resign.30 That brought in an almost completely new cabinet of men who were much more loyal to Jackson and worked with him to get his programs through. And later in 1832, Jackson ran for his second term, with Van Buren as his running mate, opposed by Henry Clay on the National Republican ticket, with a fellow named John Sergeant of Pennsylvania, the lawyer for the Bank of the United States, looking for the vice presidency, and Jackson won again without difficulty. He got 687,502 popular votes to Clay’s 530,189 votes, 55 percent to 42 percent with the other 3 percent going to minor candidates, and 219 electoral votes to Clay’s forty-nine, the other nineteen electoral votes also going to minor candidates. Clay took only Connecticut, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, with South Carolina’s eleven votes going to a fellow named John Floyd and Vermont’s seven going to a fellow named William Wirt. Van Buren had to run on his own, of course, in those days when the presidential and vice-presidential jobs weren’t sewn together, and also did well, getting 189 electoral votes to Sergeant’s eighty-nine, and forty-eight other votes going to others.

  The most important thing Jackson accomplished in office, I believe, was his opposition to Calhoun’s advocacy of nullification - not just because of that one interpretation of the Constitution, but because Jackson made it really clear for the first time that “United States of America” wasn’t just a name, but a country of people who were truly united and weren’t going to allow themselves to be torn apart permanently for any reason whatever. And many years later, when South Carolina and other states seceded at the time of the Civil War, they still understood the presidential position that the United States was a going concern and would not be allowed to be broken up by a minority.

  Calhoun didn’t leave things alone, of course. Even when Jackson made that toast at that dinner, Calhoun responded with a counter-toast that didn’t go down too well with Jackson and other people there: “The Union - next to our liberty, the most dear!” And after Calhoun walked out of the vice presidency, he went back to South Carolina and got the legislature there to pass a law that said flatly that they had the right of nullification and would obey only the federal laws they wanted to obey and nullify the laws they didn’t want to obey, and one thing they weren’t going to obey right off the bat was a tariff law Jackson had gotten passed in 1832, even though it was a milder tariff law than the one that had been passed in 1828. And if the United States didn’t like it - why, they were prepared to secede from the United States.

  Jackson didn’t take long to make it clear that he didn’t like it and wasn’t going to let it happen. Right after he was reelected, he issued a Proclamation on Nullification in which he stated that any attempt at secession would be considered treason, and he ordered thousands of former soldiers back into active duty and got Congress to allow him to send these troops into South Carolina if necessary. South Carolina soon postponed and then dropped their secession plans, and on March 15, 1833, which happened to be Jackson’s sixty-sixth birthday, they also canceled their nullification law.

  The other important thing that Jackson achieved was his battle to dissolve the Bank of the United States, which was run by a Philadelphia financier named Nicholas Biddle, and even though it was a private enterprise, acted as financial agent for the country and controlled most of the country’s money. The bank had been started back in 1791 by Alexander Hamilton, who felt that a central bank was necessary to keep the country on a sound economic basis, but went out of business in 1811, and started up again in 1816. Jackson, however, hated the idea of a central bank in general and the Bank of the United States in particular; he pointed out that the bank was strictly for big-time industrialists, quick to make big loans to big companies but hostile and even contemptuous when asked for loans by farmers and small businessmen. He also felt that the idea of a private company that controlled so much of the country’s money gave that company too much power over the country and its lawmakers. He also disliked the fact that the Bank of the United States pretty much controlled the other banks around the country; small banks had to borrow money from the big bank, and the Bank of the United States could then punish them at will or even put them out of business by suddenly calling in notes on loans.

  Just after his reelection, therefore, Jackson went to work to take the financial control of the country away from the Bank of the United States. The Bank’s charter ran until 1836, but Clay decided to make the matter a campaign issue and talked Biddle into making an application for early rechartering of the Bank during the pre-election period, assuring Biddle that he’d support the application if he was elected, and convincing Biddle that it wouldn’t matter even if Jackson won because Biddle’s pals in the Senate would get the new charter through. Clay also pointed out to Biddle that so many people owed money to the Bank of the United States and to other banks under that bank’s thumb - hell, he reminded Biddle, he even owed money to the Bank of the United States himself
, or maybe Biddle reminded him of that in telling Clay that he’d better be nice to the big, powerful bank if he became president - that legislators and other people wouldn’t dare to oppose the new charter because they might then be called upon to repay their loans immediately if the Bank of the United States was going out of business.

  And after Jackson won, the Senate did pass a bill okaying the new charter, but they forgot how tough Jackson could be when he felt it was necessary. He immediately vetoed the bill, pointing out that the Constitution never gave the government the right to charter a central bank in the first place, and saying in his plain-spoken way that when laws “make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society, the farmers, mechanics, and laborers, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government.” The Senate couldn’t muster up enough votes to override his veto, and Jackson followed up by withdrawing $11 million of government money from the Bank of the United States and spreading the money out in various state banks.

  He ran into plenty of opposition here, too. Louis McLane, who became secretary of the treasury after Ingram left in 1831, refused Jackson’s order to transfer the money, so Jackson transferred him to the post of secretary of state; Jackson then put William J. Duane in the job, but he also refused to transfer the money, and Jackson fired him; Jackson then moved his attorney general, Roger Taney, to the job of secretary of the treasury because he knew that Taney was as much opposed to the Bank of the United States as he was. But Clay was still a power in the Senate even though he’d lost the presidential election, and he managed to get the Senate to say no to the appointment, the first time in American history that a cabinet appointment had ever been rejected. Jackson finally took his secretary of the navy, Levi Woodbury, and made him secretary of the treasury, and Woodbury moved the money.