American Experiment (60 page)

Personal and social squabbles in Jackson’s first year were harbingers of the storm to come. A few weeks before the Inaugural, Secretary of War John Eaton had married Margaret (Peggy) O’Neale Timberlake, the vivacious daughter of a Washington tavernkeeper and the widow of a navy purser who had recently committed suicide. Rumors were put out—by Jackson’s political enemies, it was said—that Timberlake had cut his throat on discovering Peggy’s involvement with the wealthy young Eaton. Jackson had approved the marriage as a way of stilling the rumors, but the enamored pair waited only four months after the purser’s death. Tongues waggled faster than ever as Washington watched to see if the wife of John Eaton would be received in society. Floride Calhoun, consort of the
Vice-President, proceeded to shun Peggy Eaton, and the cabinet wives followed suit. It was the kind of situation—as Jackson’s enemies should have known—guaranteed to tap his unbounded concern for young women treated cavalierly, as he believed his wife Rachel had been. For Jackson’s adored—and in his view maligned—wife had died only a few weeks before he was inaugurated.

“I did not come here,” he asserted, “to make a Cabinet for the Ladies of this place, but for the Nation.” Van Buren, himself a widower, moved into the breach by acting the gallant toward Peggy, while the President blamed first Clay, and then Calhoun, for the embarrassment.

The great battles of Jackson’s presidency began with the congressional session that got under way in December 829. From then on, the President took on the barons of the Senate—Clay, Hayne, and the others—his own Vice-President, his own Cabinet, the opposition party, the banking elite, the Supreme Court, secessionists. At the end, Clay himself would cry out that Jackson had “swept over the Government, during the last eight years, like a tropical tornado.” But if Jackson’s presidency was filled with conflict, it was in large part because he embodied it, and so did the men he confronted. It was a blast out of the west that precipitated the sectional storm that would dominate the rest of Jackson’s first term.

The chamber of the United States Senate, noon, Tuesday, January 26, 1830.
An air of high expectancy hangs over the packed hall, as Washington personages push their way in from the blustery cold outside and crowd into the aisles and vestibules. A score or more fashionably dressed women, their round bonnets trimmed with drooping plumes, look down from the front row of the balcony. They are watching Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a full, almost portly figure in his old-fashioned long-tailed coat with bright gilt buttons, buff waistcoat, and large white cravat. Webster is looking toward the Vice-President of the United States, John Calhoun, in the presiding chair, erect and stern. All the Washington notables seem to be here, except for the distant man in the White House—famous senators like Hayne of South Carolina, Benton of Missouri, Woodbury of New Hampshire, celebrities of the past like John Quincy Adams and Harrison Gray Otis still haunting Washington, and so many visitors from the House that little business can be done there.

The occasion is Webster’s reply to Hayne of South Carolina. A week earlier, Webster had dropped into the Senate, after finishing his legal business in the Supreme Court just a few steps away, in time to hear the
South Carolina senator call for an alliance of the West and the South against the “selfish and unprincipled” East. Over the next few days, while Benton, Hayne, Webster, and other senators argued over the usual questions of national politics—public lands, internal improvements, the tariff—Webster became aware that a far more ominous set of issues was dominating the debate: those of nullification, secession, the very nature of the American Constitution. Even so, the famous orator, affluent and successful, recently remarried after the death of his first wife, might have shunned the battle except that Hayne, unusually impassioned, sarcastic, and aggressive for a young man ordinarily so moderate and courteous, had dealt him some punishing blows.

Now Webster would answer Hayne’s climactic speech. Hayne’s supporters were so elated by their champion’s performance that Webster’s own backers became apprehensive. But not Webster. When his friend Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story called on him to offer help, he replied, “Give yourself no uneasiness, Judge Story! I will grind him as fine as a pinch of snuff.” And the next morning, asked on entering the Senate whether he was “well charged”—a reference to the four fingers of powder needed to charge a muzzle-loading gun—the orator replied jauntily, “
Seven
fingers!”

The long-gathering conflict now culminating in this debate was explosive enough. It had its main source in dramatic social and economic changes in the South—especially in South Carolina—which had set that section in a radically different direction from the North. A decade or two before, South Carolinians had exhibited much the same constellation of interests and attitudes as most other states in the Union. Highly nationalistic, they gloried in the fame and achievements of John Calhoun and the other southern war hawks of 1812. As consumers of products from abroad, they hated tariffs, but many South Carolinians grew or made their own products that needed protection, and they also accepted tariffs as strengthening American manufactories in the event of war.

As for slavery, most members of the South Carolinian delegation in Congress favored the compromise of 1820. To be sure, old Charles Pinckney—the same Charles Pinckney who had brought his young bride to Philadelphia in 1787 and helped write the Constitution there—warned that if Congress was ever accorded the right even to consider the subject of slavery, “there is no knowing to what length it may be carried,” but most of the state’s political leaders shared the moderate attitudes of nationalists like Calhoun and William Lowndes.

Then—almost overnight, it seemed later—the mood of South Carolina had altered sharply. For rice and cotton growers, the 1820s were a time of rapid economic change, price and demand instability, credit squeezes,
and depression, all tending toward a rising sense of social and economic insecurity, which in turn fostered a powerful parochialism and sectionalism. The Tariff of 1828 excited the worst southern fears; it was to them literally a tariff of abominations, to be despised and shunned. In a decade of peace they could no longer accept the tariff as a defense measure. Federal policy on internal improvements and other questions also continued to antagonize South Carolinians. But behind all the old issues always loomed the specter of northern interference with slavery. An alleged slave conspiracy, led by Denmark Vesey of Charleston, along with rumors of other planned slave revolts, aroused dread over threats from inside; the stepped-up efforts of the American Colonization Society in the North aroused fears over threats from outside.

By the late 1820s the balance of South Carolina politics had changed. If the cleaving issue in the state, and in much of the South, had been nationalism versus sectionalism, that issue now was: what kind of sectionalism? to be carried how far? and how accomplished? Steadily shifting away from his old nationalism, Calhoun still had to deal more with fire eaters who wanted secession than with moderates who wished to attain South Carolina’s aims within the Union. News of the abominable tariff catalyzed powerful forces already building. Calhoun wrote a brilliant tract—the South Carolina Exposition—in which he flayed national tariff policy as unconstitutional and oppressive, “calculated to corrupt the public virtue and destroy the liberty of the country”; contended that no government based on the “naked principle” of majority rule could “preserve its liberty even for a single generation”; and claimed the right of “interposition” by state governments—that is, to declare null and void “unconstitutional” acts of the national government. If the federal government did not recognize the constitutional powers of the states, South Carolina would claim the right of nullification. South Carolinians had waited through Jackson’s first year, hopeful that he—a slave owner himself, after all—would redress their grievances, but in vain. Hayne’s hard line in the Senate, reflecting Calhoun’s arguments, showed that southern patience was running out.

So now, Webster waited to take the floor. The chamber hushed as the Vice-President recognized him. Standing majestically as he faced the chair, resting his left hand on his desk while swinging his right hand up and down, he spoke in a low but compelling tone. The orator held the floor for three hours, pausing only once or twice to consult some notes. He ridiculed Hayne’s fear of federal tyranny. “Consolidation!—that perpetual cry, both of terror and delusion—consolidation!” The federal government, he declared, was the instrument not of the will of the states but of “We the People”; the national interest was the controlling one; the effort
of a state to nullify a law of Congress was a revolutionary and illegal act. As Webster warmed to the attack, his granite face seemed to come alive; his eyes burned with fervor; his “mastiff-mouth” bit off his sentences with the finality of a spring trap. A connoisseur of all the arts of oratory, he moved from exposition to argumentation to irony to banter to scorn to eloquence to pathos. When he said, “I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts; she needs none,” but proceeded to do so, Bay State men clustered in the gallery were said to “shed tears like girls.” Webster had never felt an audience respond more eagerly and sympathetically. His peroration would soon be on New England schoolboys’ lips:

“When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance, rather, behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as, What is all this worth? Nor those other words of delusion and folly, Liberty first and Union afterwards; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart—Liberty
and
Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”

A few weeks later, Calhoun & Co. received another oratorical setback. The Webster-Hayne debate had been an interparty encounter, and politically the Massachusetts senator could be dismissed as a New Englander and an old Federalist. But what was the attitude of Andrew Jackson, a Southwesterner and a Democrat? Rather rashly, states’ rights Democrats organized a celebration of Jefferson’s birthday for April 13, 1830, in Washington to glorify their cause and symbolize the Democratic party alliance between East and West. Jackson and Van Buren attended, along with an array of other party leaders. The banquet in Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel was hardly over and chairs pulled back from the board when the Southerners launched into speeches and toasts that evoked the Jefferson of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Defying Jackson to his face, George Troup, a Georgia planter-politician and states’ rights extremist, toasted the government of the United States as more absolute than the rule of Tiberius, but as less wise than that of Augustus, and less just than that of Trajan.

All eyes turned to Jackson. Scowling at Calhoun as he signaled the crowd to rise, the old general toasted, “Our Federal Union—
it must be preserved.
” Van Buren, who had climbed up on a chair to witness the scene, saw the noisy company turn utterly silent, dumbfounded. Calhoun’s hand shook, spilling a little wine down the side of his glass. But he was ready with his answering toast: “The Union—next to our liberty the most dear.…”

A great Virginia reel of politics was under way, as politicians chose partners and changed them, in a dance of sections and interests, issues and ideologies. Not for half a century had the nation possessed such compelling sectional leaders—the spare, consecrated Calhoun, champion of the South; the droll, sparkling, restless Clay, still “Harry of the West”; New England’s hero, the imposing, magnetic Webster, “the great cannon loaded to the lips,” as Emerson pictured him; the consummate politician Van Buren, keen, dexterous, opportunistic, the supple representative of New York and the other swing states. But these men were more than leaders of sections. They were statesmen with a vision of the national purpose, and they were politicians who hungered for the presidency. Hence they had to protect their standing in their state and section, while gaining national recognition and building national coalitions. They were trapped in the rising sectional feeling of Americans. And they had to deal with the unpredictable, prickly, opinionated man in the White House.

The speeches of Webster and Hayne in the Senate, the toasts of Calhoun and Jackson at Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel, were the opening salvos of the 1832 presidential election campaign. Van Buren had attached his fortunes firmly to the President’s, and the political foxiness of the “Little Magician,” combined with the leonine presence and power of the President, made an invincible combination. Jackson struck first at Clay, his old western rival. The issue was the venerable one of internal improvements. In his December 1829 message to Congress, Jackson had questioned the constitutionality and the desirability of federal aid to roads and other projects. When Congress passed a bill authorizing government subscription of stock in a turnpike connecting Maysville and Lexington and lying wholly within Kentucky, the President vetoed it. Clay was outraged. Not only was he the author of the “American System” but only the year before he and his family had spent four days negotiating the steep curves and bottomless mud of the existing Maysville road. Still, the deliberate slap administered by Jackson helped confirm Clay as the National Republican candidate for President. Webster backed him too.

“On the whole, My Dear Sir,” Webster wrote Clay two days after the
veto, “I think a crisis is arriving, or rather
has arrived.
I think you cannot be kept back from the contest. The
people
will bring you out,
nolens volens. Let them do it.
…”