American Experiment (63 page)

The election outcome demonstrated anew that political leaders, like military ones, must unite their armies. Van Buren won 170 electoral votes, a clear majority over the combined total of Harrison with 73, White with 26, Webster with only 14. Political analysts noted the electoral strength of Harrison, the weakness of the celebrated senator from Massachusetts. Van Buren carried the popular vote by 763,000 to 736,000 over his combined opponents—a narrow margin, but well distributed. Democrats and Whigs each picked up some strength in the opposition’s areas, helping produce a “converting election,” as Gerald Pomper called it, that reflected a shifting voter coalition and heralded the shape of presidential contests to come.
For the moment, at least, sectional politics seemed to be declining, national party politics rising.

On Inaugural Day, Jackson and Van Buren rode together to the Capitol in a gleaming carriage behind four splendid grays. People were struck by the contrast between the two men as they alighted at the entrance to the Capitol, the one gaunt, careworn, ailing, the other half a foot shorter, plump, bouncy, but looking all his fifty-four years with his once reddish hair receding and his sideburns turning gray. The crowd seemed little stirred by the new President’s inaugural words, which stressed the need for forbearance and harmony, but it still appeared mesmerized by Jackson; when he moved slowly down the steps to his carriage bystanders broke into thunderous applause and cheers. Watching from a side window, Thomas Hart Benton was transfixed. Most such pageants were unreal and fleeting, empty and soulless, but “this was reality,” as Arthur Schlesinger wrote of Benton’s feeling, “the living relations between a man and his people, distilled for a pause in the rhythm of events, rising for a moment of wild and soaring enthusiasm, then dying away into the chambers of memory.”

Could Van Buren as leader
engage
his followers as Jackson had done? Buffed and burnished in his long years of state and national politicking, a believer in the political system in which he had risen steadily as Columbia County surrogate, state senator, New York state attorney general, United States senator, and, briefly, governor, a canny operator in the New York Regency, he had come to look on government as a vast network of pulls and pressures that needed only constant oiling for the clanking machinery and balm for the harried operatives. Thus he was above all a transactional leader—harmonizer, conciliator, consolidator, a man who, unlike Jackson, believed in dampening fires rather than kindling them. He saw the Democratic party as a means of unifying disparate groups and bringing them into accord behind a national program. Since Van Buren did not want or expect much action from the national government, he would not put much pressure on the political system. Clearly this kind of leadership would not engage the hearts and souls of Democrats. But could it cope with change and crisis?

The answer came with brutal impact within weeks of Van Buren’s Inaugural. He had hardly had time to collect a Cabinet around him—he kept most of Jackson’s men—when a financial disaster struck the nation. For some time danger signals had been warning that the boom conditions of the mid-1830s—the expansion of banks and bank loans, the mounting debts of planters and merchants alike, the dizzying rise of prices, especially
for farmland—would tumble into financial chaos. Even as Van Buren took office, jobless New Yorkers were protesting against high rents and fuel and even sacking the city’s flour warehouses. In May the jerry-built state banking system favored by Jackson collapsed under the pressure for specie. Banks closed their doors; bustling ports along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts fell idle; men lost their jobs and crops rotted in the fields. The country seemed stunned; the conquest of the land by a foreign power, the British minister wrote home, could hardly have produced a wider sense of “humiliation and grief.”

Here was a dramatic test of leadership for the new President, but already there were signs that Van Buren would fail it. During his last year in office Jackson had issued a “Specie Circular” providing that payment to the government for public lands would be mainly limited to gold and silver. The circular was a clear expression of Jackson’s and “Old Bullion” Benton’s hard-money policy. As pressure on the state deposit banks rose during late 1836, Whigs helped push a rescinding of the circular through the Senate and House, but Jackson pocket-vetoed the measure. Now Van Buren was President, and pressure mounted on him to repeal the circular. Wavering between the pro and con arguments, Van Buren seemed haunted by Old Hickory, who from the Hermitage made known his opposition to repeal. The new President gave in to the old.

What then to do? With both his Cabinet and his party divided over possible measures, Van Buren decided to convene a special session of Congress. He cast about for a solution to the continuing panic, now flattening down into a depression. To ask for a rechartering of the national bank was unthinkable for a Jacksonian Democrat; to propose a tidying up of the state bank deposit system, which now lay almost in ruins, was equally unthinkable. But he hit upon a scheme advanced by William M. Gouge, a young Philadelphia editor and economist, who in his popular
History of Paper Money and Banking
had proposed that public funds should be kept in public custody and not deposited in private banks. This idea—the divorce of the government “from all connection with Banks”—Van Buren made the centerpiece of a spate of reforms that he presented to Congress.

For a time, prospects in Congress for the Independent Treasury, as it was called, seemed auspicious. Van Buren made the proposed divorce of Treasury and bank a party issue, and the Democrats seemed firmly in control of both chambers. In the Senate, Silas Wright, the plain-spoken Regency leader and longtime cohort of Van Buren, presided over the Finance Committee. In the House, another young New Yorker and ally of the President’s, Churchill C. Cambreleng, chaired the Committee on Ways and Means, and loyalist James Polk was Speaker. On the face of it,
moreover, the Independent Treasury bill seemed the answer to a Democrat’s prayers. It carried on the hard-money tradition of the party; it blunted the charge that the Democrats were unduly influenced by state banks; it refreshed the Democrats’ claim that they spoke for the great number of people. Thus Cambreleng argued that the bill would keep the government “in the hands of the planting, farming, and laboring classes and save it from becoming a mere gambling machine to fill the country as in England with ‘palaces, poorhouses, and prisons.’ ”

Led by their forensic gladiators, Clay and Webster, the Whigs put up a furious resistance to Democratic dogma. Not only did they offer specific arguments that the Independent Treasury bill would draw specie out of circulation, unduly restrict loans and credits, and of course provide the Democrats with more patronage jobs. They maintained that government had positive obligations to help the people—to establish and maintain a sound currency, to secure and stabilize the nation’s financial system, and certainly not, in Webster’s words, to confine the constitutional obligation of government to the “mere regulation of the coins” and the care of its own revenues. He felt that “this could not be America when I see schemes of public policy proposed…leaving the people to shift for themselves. …”

In the end, though, it was Democrats rather than Whigs who doomed the divorce of state and bank. All along Van Buren had been forced to fight a rearguard action against a group of Democratic Conservatives who were clinging stubbornly to old Jacksonian hard-money positions. Led by Senator William Cabell Rives, a patrician Jeffersonian from Virginia, and Nathaniel P. Talmadge of New York, the conservatives denounced the Independent Treasury as really a new national bank in disguise, a Biddle-type institution that would threaten the rights of the states. The divorce bill passed the Senate by a comfortable vote, but failed in the House as Democratic conservatives voted with the Whig opposition. In two years an Independent Treasury bill would pass both houses and receive Van Buren’s signature, but by then it would be too late for the President and his party.

Somehow Van Buren had failed to find a transcending issue in the economic crisis, one that would raise Congress and the people above the lesser questions dividing them in order to grapple with the kind of central question—or visible enemy—that Jackson had so brilliantly dramatized. Van Buren had found himself harmonizing myriad factions that could not easily be brought together, mediating among ideologies that did not want conciliation. Democrats were split sectionally, doctrinally, ideologically; even the small band of conservatives were divided. Some of the financial
issues, hideously complex, were easy prey to facile simplification and demagoguery. And looming ominously over all the debate was the old, unresolved, and bitter issue of states’ rights, and behind that, the question of slavery.

A Calhoun Democrat from South Carolina, Francis Pickens, stoked the suppressed fire when he was allowed to give the first speech in the House on Van Buren’s Treasury scheme. Expected to reiterate Calhoun’s defense of the divorce bill in the Senate, the thirty-two-year-old congressman almost ignored the Treasury bill and, as “if drawn by some ineluctable force,” in James Curtis’ words, went on to a tirade against the North and a passionate defense of slavery. The whole banking system in the North, he declared, “is a political substitute for the standing armies of Europe.…We are not compelled to resort to those artificial institutions of society by which non-slave-holding regions seek to delude and deceive their victims. No, Sir, we avow to the world that we own our black population, and we will maintain that ownership, if needs be, to the last extremity!” Few in the House that day could have doubted the resolution of this young owner of several hundred slaves.

He could see in Jackson an approaching tyranny, Henry Clay had cried out during his Senate call for the censure of the President. “The land is filled with spies and informers; and detraction and denunciation are the orders of the day.…The premonitory symptoms of despotism are upon us; and if Congress do not apply an instantaneous and effective remedy, the fatal collapse will soon come on.…”

Every senator knew what Clay was talking about. Jackson had indeed swept into Washington like a tropical tornado. By the end of his two terms not only did Clay’s censure resolution lie expunged but Jackson had forced on Congress the key policies he wanted and vetoed those he did not; his twelve vetoes, indeed, would serve as the presidential record until the regime of the beleaguered Andrew Johnson. Jackson was no less a tornado to his Cabinet, breaking and remaking it almost at will, or to the bureaucracy, forcing officials out of office and putting his own men in. He got rid of one Vice-President and chose a new one, and even in the most delicate area of all, “states’ rights,” he recognized the claims of Georgia and denied those of South Carolina.

Andrew Jackson was one of the nation’s “strongest” Presidents, most historians agree, and probably one of the six or seven “greatest.” Some observers at the time viewed him as a dictator, some as the tool of Kendall or Van Buren or others, and historians have supported both arguments.
But it took someone of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s insight to write: “Surely he was a great man, and his native strength, as well as of intellect as of character, compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cunning the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool.” Most of the public at the time saw him either as Tyrant or as Hero; there was little middle ground. The Jacksonian model of the presidency would become for at least a century and a half the model for the “strong” President.

But for what purposes was the Jackson presidency used? With what results? In terms of what vision or values or fundamental goals? If historians agree about the Jacksonian model of the strong President, they sharply disagree over the central thrust of the Jacksonian leadership. Were the Jacksonians mainly a great coalition of poor farmers and eastern labor against entrenched capitalists? Or were they capitalists themselves, seeking only to share more of the booty of an expanding prosperity? Or were they mainly agrarians, dreaming the Jeffersonian dream of the small, independent, simple yeoman farmer who would constitute the base of a virtuous, limited, decentralized republic—a dream already being punctured by the cotton gin and the steam engine? Above all, was the climactic struggle between Jacksonians-Democrats and Federalists-National Republicans-Whigs a battle between equality and laissez-faire liberty, between People and Property?

The answers to these questions have been elusive because Jacksonian leaders operated at three levels of political discourse and action, and the middle level—the vital “linking” level—is still hazy and vacuous. At the upper level of rhetoric and declamation, the Jacksonian message came across with power and clarity. To denounce Biddle and the “monster bank,” the southern nullifiers, the Whiggish “aristocrats,” came easily to the “outsiders” and nationalists from the West. Through their rallies and conventions and newspapers, moreover, the Jacksonian leaders knew how to carry their message back to the voters in their communities and homes. Van Buren, indeed, believed in a deliberate strategy of bypassing old party leaders and directly mobilizing the “mass of the parties” in order to substitute out leaders for in.

At the bottom level, the level of day-to-day policy making and administration, the positions of the Jacksonian leaders were also clear. Absolute opposition to soft money, destruction of the national bank, guarded and opportunistic opposition to high tariffs, limited support of internal improvements, opposition to privileged corporate charters, fear of public debt, doubt about public enterprise, antagonism to monopoly—these positions were solidified in congressional debate, executive action, party
platform, and press. While the Jacksonians often compromised policy in the play of pressure-group and party faction, both their positive and negative policies left an indelible imprint on governance.

But few Jacksonian leaders had a comprehensive, consistent philosophy that could support a coherent program. Like their Jeffersonian forebears, they believed in liberty and equality, but it was not clear how these supreme values would be achieved—by strengthening government or minimizing it, by curbing business or favoring it, by protecting property or regulating it or destroying it. These general questions became specific options in the everyday consideration of practical policies—questions, for example, of how to deal with what kind of business or property, owned by whom, serving whose interests, with what actual economic or social effects—but explicit, substantive principles to guide these options were deficient. Jacksonianism was full of ambiguities. Thus a powerful belief in laissez-faire gripped the Jacksonian leadership, as it had the Jeffersonian. But these agrarian individualists feared business power as much as they did governmental. “Instead of setting man free,” Amos Kendall said, business power had “only increased the number of his masters.”