What Hath God Wrought (48 page)

Sometimes opposition to Catholic evangelism betrayed the very democratic ideals that it professed to protect. The most dramatic responses to the expansion of Catholicism took violent form. On the night of August 11, 1834, a well-organized mob burned down the Ursuline Convent outside Charlestown, Massachusetts (the site is now in Somerville). The Order of St. Ursula, founded in Italy, came to the United States from French Canada. Specialists in women’s education, the Ursuline nuns had been running a boarding school on Mount Benedict for girls aged six to eighteen. The mother superior and about half the sisters were converts from Protestantism. The students’ parents, mainly well-to-do Boston Unitarians, sought a good education for their girls and didn’t worry about exposing them to Catholicism. To the farmers and workers of Charlestown, however, it looked like young Protestants being corrupted by an un-American ideology. In January 1832, a nineteen-year-old local farmer’s daughter and convert to Catholicism left the convent, where she had spent several months as a “special student,” denounced the nuns’ practices, and then renounced her conversion. Rebecca Reed’s story, eventually published as
Six Months in a Convent
(1835), told of severe penances imposed on a sick novice by the mother superior and of nuns prostrating themselves before superiors, kissing their feet and licking the floor—monastic practices that shocked non-Catholic Americans. Then, in July 1832, a second woman left the convent: Sister St. John, assistant to the mother superior. Although she soon relented and returned, her action revived charges that the convent held people against their will. On August 11, Lyman Beecher spoke in Charlestown on the need for Protestant educational institutions in the West to counteract the influence of Catholic ones. By that time, however, conspirators had already plotted the destruction of the convent on Mount Benedict.

Men of Charlestown had recently celebrated the Boston Tea Party of 1775, and many of them concluded that it was time for another patriotic mob to take the law into their own hands. Fears of the incompatibility of Roman Catholicism with liberty, rooted in Anglo-American tradition since the days of Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada, lived on in the 1830s—despite, ironically, the British Parliament enacting Catholic Emancipation in 1829. In their own eyes, the conspirators acted as Americans rather than Protestants, protecting their country and its mission against alien subversive influence. As their most prominent apologist declared, the Patriots of 1775 “thought not that within sight of Bunker Hill, where the blood of heroes flowed, a Convent would be established, and their granddaughters become its inmates.”
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The bravado of the mother superior, who bravely declared that “twenty thousand Irishmen” would defend her community, did not deter the plotters. The burning of the convent had been thoroughly planned, and the volunteer fire companies summoned to the scene made no effort either to interfere with the perpetrators or to put out the flames. The ten nuns and forty students all escaped unharmed. A second night of rioting wrecked the nuns’ garden. One vandal, bent on sacrilege, found the consecrated communion wafers and put them in his pocket; uninterested in mere theft, he threw away the silver ciborium that contained them. Twenty-four hours later he committed suicide. The authorities had not defended the convent by force, but upon the insistence of the Boston mercantile community they did promptly investigate and indict twelve men. Local juries acquitted all but one defendant, whom the governor soon pardoned (at the request of prominent Catholics as a gesture of conciliation). A bill to pay state compensation to the religious order failed to pass the legislature. But the Ursulines eventually recovered their ciborium, which remains a precious possession.
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VIII

In the wee hours of Monday, August 22, 1831, a trusted family slave climbed through the window of his master’s house and unbarred the door for six companions armed with axes. The intruders proceeded to kill Joseph and Sally Travis, her twelve-year-old son, and an apprentice boy, also twelve, hacking them to death in their beds. After leaving the house, they remembered a baby in a cradle and came back to kill him too. So began the greatest slave rebellion in United States history.

The man who opened the door, and the leader of the uprising, was a mystic religious visionary named Nat Turner. By day a field hand, at night and on weekends Turner prophesied, baptized, and healed. Turner learned to read from his parents and had absorbed the Bible’s imagery and power. None of his owners tried to discourage his religious activities. As an exhorter revered by blacks and respected among whites, Turner moved about Southampton County in southeastern Virginia, a region of modest landholdings, diversified agriculture, and masters who worked in the fields alongside their bondsmen. The 1830 census of the county showed whites to be a minority and free blacks a significant element. The population of 16,074 was 41 percent white, 48 percent enslaved, and 11 percent free colored.
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Nat Turner listened to “the Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days” and interpreted signs of divinity in the world around him. Like Isaiah, he heard the Spirit tell him to “proclaim liberty to the captives” and “the day of vengeance of our God” (Isaiah 61:1–2). Turner decided that “the great day of judgment was at hand,” when he would become God’s instrument. The Spirit instructed him to “fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first shall be last and the last shall be first.”
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An eclipse of the sun in February 1831 signaled him to usher in the millennium with its great role reversal. The date first set for the new revolution was the Fourth of July, but when Turner fell ill, it had been postponed until August 21 (the fortieth anniversary of the Haitian Revolution). Starting from the Travis household, Turner and his band moved from one farm to another, killing all the whites they found on their march toward Jerusalem, as the Southampton county seat was portentously named.
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(Meanwhile, in western Missouri, Joseph Smith was planning another new Jerusalem, dedicating the site for a Mormon temple there.)

The leader of the uprising prepared himself for his destiny by prayer and fasting. Once the rebellion began, he showed no relish for leading a death squad. Turner killed only one person with his own hands, when she would otherwise have escaped and raised the alarm. After that experience he brought up the rear of his party, arriving at each farm after the killing was finished. At some households, slaves joined Turner’s cause, and eventually about sixty participated, along with several free blacks. But not all bondsmen jumped at the chance to participate in a bloody and hopeless enterprise; one, Aaron Harris, tried to talk Turner into abandoning his mission. Some helped their owners hide. Over the two days that the rebellion lasted, some fifty-seven whites were killed, forty-six of them women and children. According to African American tradition, Turner admonished his followers, “Remember that ours is not a war for robbery, nor to satisfy our passions; it is a
struggle for freedom.
” None of the victims was raped or tortured, though their bodies were usually decapitated. Outside of Turner’s presence, a few of his men looted and got drunk on captured brandy.
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The uprising was put down by a combination of vigilantes, state militia, and federal troops from the U.S. Navy base at Norfolk. In the final shootout at Simon Blunt’s plantation, six white civilians with sixty loyal slaves repulsed twenty attacking rebels. Fear and rage turned the white vigilantes into armed mobs, wreaking vengeance on luckless black people, whether Turner’s followers or not. “Some of these scenes are hardly inferior in barbarity to the atrocities of the insurgents,” confessed a Virginia journalist witness.
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The vigilantes too beheaded those they killed, displaying the severed heads on poles. No one knows how many African Americans lost their lives as a consequence of Nat Turner’s Uprising. Twenty, including three free Negroes, were tried and legally executed; ten others, convicted and transported for sale. Fifteen defendants were judicially cleared. Perhaps a score were killed fighting in the uprising itself, and about a hundred massacred afterwards. Over twenty additional blacks were executed elsewhere in Virginia and North Carolina during the wave of hysteria that followed.
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Nat Turner himself eluded capture for six weeks, until October 30. The authorities took care to prevent his being lynched. He was tried on November 5 in Jerusalem and hanged six days later. In accordance with Virginia law, Turner was represented by counsel, and the commonwealth paid $375 to the estate of his late owner as compensation for executing him. His body, like that of most condemned criminals, was used for anatomical dissection. While in custody, Turner talked with a white man named Thomas Gray, who published his account of the interview as
The Confessions of Nat Turner
. Turner explained to Gray his moral and religious premises and eschatological vision. Marveling at the prisoner’s “calm, deliberate composure,” Gray asked him, “Do you not find yourself mistaken now?” But defeat and impending death did not shake Nat Turner’s faith. “Was not Christ crucified?” he responded.
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Turner’s Uprising provoked a huge debate among white Virginians over what lessons they should draw from it. Some warned of more rebellions and argued that the best way to forestall bloody racial strife would be a program of compensated emancipation coupled with colonization. Most of the support for this policy of gradual reform came from the western part of the commonwealth, where slaveholding was not of central importance. In opposition ranged the large plantation owners of the tidewater, to whom slavery seemed essential for their economy and way of life. Legislative apportionment favored the proslavery eastern part of the state, but even so, the two sides were about evenly balanced. Governor John Floyd, himself a westerner, occupied a pivotal position. A Calhoun Democrat, like his Carolina mentor he had long backed public funding for internal improvements. Floyd saw gradual emancipation as promoting Virginia’s economic development, and he planned to endorse it when the state legislature met. His surprising failure to do so is probably explained by a visit he received from Calhoun not long before the session began. No record of their conversation exists, but very likely the vice president persuaded Floyd that emancipation would play into the hands of Yankee politicians and agitators. A new Calhoun, devoted to slavery and state rights, had replaced the old one, and turned Governor Floyd around as well.
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Without the governor’s support, the emancipation-colonization program stalled in Virginia’s House of Delegates. Thirty-nine-year-old Thomas Jefferson Randolph, grandson of the late president, gave it cautious endorsement. So did the editors of the state’s two leading newspapers, Thomas Ritchie of the
Richmond Enquirer
and John Hampden Pleasants of the
Richmond Constitutional Whig
. Both sides in the debate agreed that Virginia should be a white person’s country and that a substantial free colored population constituted a security risk. (Much was made of the fact that some free Negroes had joined Turner.) Conservatives conceded that the state would be better off with fewer slaves and a more industrial-commercial economy, but argued that the domestic slave trade would suffice to drain off surplus black laborers from Virginia to the trans-Appalachian Southwest, without legislative intervention. After prolonged debate, on January 25, 1832, the House voted 67 to 60 that “further action for the removal of slaves should await a more definite development of public opinion.” By this fateful procrastination, Virginian statesmanship abdicated responsibility for dealing with the state’s number one problem. When the Civil War came thirty years later, Virginians would still be divided; the great slavery debate of 1831 foreshadowed the bifurcation of the Old Dominion into Virginia and West Virginia.
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In the short term, reaction prevailed over reform. Instead of emancipation, Virginia’s lawmakers sought security through increased repression: tighter pass rules for slave travelers and more patrols to enforce them, further restraints on the free colored population, and, specifically to inhibit the emergence of more Nat Turners, restrictions on slave literacy and religious gatherings. A slave society could not afford to allow those in bondage to pursue a millennial vision in which the last would be first.

Dressed in deepest mourning black, Andrew Jackson presented a somber figure at his presidential inauguration on March 4, 1829. His beloved wife, Rachel, had suffered a heart attack on December 17 and died five days later at the age of sixty-one. She had been much upset when the propriety of her relationship with Andrew had been made an issue in the campaign. Her husband blamed her death on his political enemies, who had “maligned that blessed one who is now safe from suffering and sorrow, whom they tried to put to shame for my sake!”
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His resentment may well have been exacerbated by guilt, since Rachel had begged him to retire to private life. Unfashionably stout and self-conscious about her provincial manners, she had been dreading the role of White House first lady. Now she would not have to perform it. A depressed and bitter president-elect managed to avoid the celebration that had been planned to welcome him to Washington at the end of his three-week trip from Nashville. He refused to pay the customary courtesy call on the outgoing president, who reciprocated by not attending the inaugural. Public speaking had always been an ordeal for Jackson even in the best of times. Under the circumstances, the incoming president kept his inaugural address brief and almost entirely ambiguous. Few could hear his words, but thousands watched with pleasure when he bowed to the crowd in a sign of respect for popular sovereignty.
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The symbolic gesture expressed an irony at the very heart of Jackson’s presidency. Despite the bow, Jackson brought to his task a temperament suited to leadership rather than deference. Although he invoked a democratic ideology, the new president had profoundly authoritarian instincts. Tall, ramrod straight, with piercing eyes and an air of command, the hero of New Orleans was not a man to be crossed. He had come up the hard way, born in a remote area on the border between North and South Carolina to the log-cabin poverty of a migrant Scots-Irish family and tragically orphaned at an early age. Jackson had sought and made his fortune in frontier Tennessee, with an eye on the main chance and just enough book learning to practice law. A man’s man, he fought Indians, gambled, and dealt successfully in lands and cotton. Even by frontier standards, Jackson possessed a particularly touchy sense of honor. He participated in several duels and fights, killing a man during one in 1806. The chronic pain of the wound he sustained then, and other bullet wounds from a barroom brawl in 1813, did nothing to help his disposition. Quick to sense a criticism or slight, he never apologized, never forgave, and never shrank from violence. His towering rages became notorious.
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Slaves Jackson bought and sold in substantial numbers; in 1817, he disposed of forty at one time for $24,000 (an economy of scale for the purchaser, his friend Edward Livingston). Jackson is said to have wagered his slaves on horse races. However, he indignantly denied ever having been a professional slave trader.
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Old Hickory was capable of patriarchal generosity to dependents; he even adopted a Creek Indian boy whose parents Jackson’s soldiers had massacred. “He is a savage, but one that fortune has thrown in my hands,” Jackson explained to his wife. (Adoption of captives was common in frontier warfare. The boy, who never renounced his tribal heritage, died of tuberculosis at sixteen.)
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But if someone challenged Jackson’s authority or he felt his honor questioned, he became implacable. After one of his slaves dared run away, Jackson offered a fifty-dollar reward for his recapture, “and ten dollars extra for every hundred lashes a person will give to the amount of three hundred.”
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Three hundred lashes risked beating the man to death, but perhaps revenge outweighed financial interest.

Jackson’s religion was a stern Scots-Irish Presbyterianism. His wife turned increasingly pious in middle age, and although Andrew was never as devout as she became, he took some aspects of the faith seriously. During his short term as governor of Florida Territory, he imposed (at Rachel’s urging) strict Protestant sabbatarian regulations on the Catholic population.
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Once, when a young lawyer in Tennessee tried to argue in his presence against the existence of hell, Jackson roared, “I thank God that there is such a place of torment as hell.” Asked why, the general responded: “To put such d——d rascals as you are in!” The young man fled the room.
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Politically influential in Tennessee even before the Battles of Horseshoe Bend and New Orleans made him a national hero, Jackson had served in the state constitutional convention of 1796, in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate (briefly), and on the state supreme court. His career as frontier warrior and self-made plantation magnate exemplified aspirations that were widely shared by American men of his time. He was the first president with whom many ordinary Americans could identify and the first to have a nickname. That nickname, “Old Hickory,” invoked his stature as a tough leader of men in an age when only men could vote. Jackson’s success in life personified the wresting of the continent from alien enemies, both Native and European, white supremacy over other races, and equal opportunity for all white males, without preference for birth or education, to enjoy the spoils of conquest. A visitor to his plantation house, the Hermitage outside Nashville, would find the log cabins of his youth standing alongside the stately mansion with its Greek columns and imported French wallpaper. Like many another plantation owner, Jackson enjoyed an expensive lifestyle; he entertained lavishly both at the Hermitage and the White House.
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Although ironic, Jackson’s combination of authoritarianism with a democratic ideology, his identification of his own will with the voice of the people, worked well for him politically. He defined himself as defender of the people against special interests and advocated—unsuccessfully—a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college and choose the president by direct popular vote. The populist rhetoric of Jackson and his political associates combined ceaseless condemnation of elite corruption with the antigovernment political ideology they had taken over from Randolph, Taylor, and the Old Republicans. A large segment of the American electorate shared Jackson’s belief in the legitimacy of private violence and the assertion of male honor, his trust in natural rather than acquired abilities, and his impatience with limitations on one’s own will.
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But Jackson’s values and suspicion of government were far from commanding universal assent, and they were to prove exceptionally divisive in the years ahead. The “age of Jackson” was not a time of consensus. It is unfortunate that the adjective “Jacksonian” is often applied not only to Jackson’s followers but to all Americans of the period.

The one unambiguous commitment in Jackson’s inaugural address was to what he called “
reform
”: the purging of federal offices.
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Duff Green, the editor of the Jacksonian
United States Telegraph
, had announced this goal during the campaign itself. Jackson would “
REWARD HIS FRIENDS AND PUNISH HIS ENEMIES
” through patronage, Green’s newspaper trumpeted. This was not just a prediction; it was a threat. Green was deliberately prodding officeholders (customs and land officers, U.S. attorneys and marshals, postmasters and others) to declare for Jackson, on the premise that if Adams won, it would not matter whom they had supported, but if Jackson won, they faced dismissal unless they had endorsed him.
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Adams had tried to put the federal patronage on a meritocratic basis. For his pains, the opposition press had vilified him as dealing in special privilege. Now, the pro-Jackson journalist Amos Kendall could not help observing that what the Old Hero’s supporters really wanted was “the privilege of availing themselves of the very abuses with which we charge our adversaries.”
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A horde of office-seekers attended Jackson’s inauguration. It was they who turned the inaugural reception into a near-riot, damaging White House furnishings until they were diverted outside onto the lawn. Later historians have cast this event in an aura of democratic exuberance; contemporary observers of every political stripe expressed embarrassment at it. “The throng that pressed on the president before he was fairly in office, soliciting rewards in a manner so destitute of decency, and of respect for his character and office,” observed a New England Jacksonian, was “a disgraceful reproach to the character of our countrymen.”
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The largest part of the federal government’s patronage lay in the Post Office. Since Postmaster General John McLean remained committed to nonpartisanship and meritocracy, Duff Green insisted that the president replace him. This proved a delicate matter, for both Green and McLean had close ties to Vice President Calhoun. As a solution, Jackson elevated a reluctant McLean to the U.S. Supreme Court and turned over the patronage-rich Post Office to William Barry. Barry allowed the quality of the postal service to deteriorate while a clique of Jacksonian journalists led by Amos Kendall divvied up the spoils in his department. This informal but powerful group of patronage dispensers evolved into what became known as Jackson’s “kitchen cabinet.” The central role of journalists testifies to the importance the administration attached to the communications revolution and public opinion. While political factions controlled key newspapers, in return newspapermen played key roles in politics and patronage.
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The kitchen cabinet had no institutional identity or even permanent membership; it was simply a term (originally derogatory) for a group of presidential favorites operating outside the formal cabinet. Martin Van Buren belonged to both cabinets for a time. No previous president had had such a group of advisors, and they were naturally the objects of suspicion. The kitchen cabinet has sometimes been described as the precursor of the modern presidential White House staff, or alternatively as the precursor of the national party organization, but both these models are anachronistic. The kitchen cabinet had no table of organization, and its members performed only such functions as the president directed. During his military career, Jackson had heard advice from his aides but did not convene councils of war; as president he did not want to be bound by the official cabinet, even after appointing an all-new one in 1831. An informal, flexible group of advisors with no power base other than his favor suited his executive style, allowing him to keep power in his own hands, and, as the historian Richard Latner has pointed out, “to dominate his surroundings.”
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With the partial exception of John Quincy Adams, every president beginning with Washington had made appointments to office from among his supporters. The early republic had no civil service system, and federal employees enjoyed no legal security of employment. Nevertheless the prevailing custom was to leave one’s predecessor’s appointees in office (except for the top tier of policymaking posts), replacing them gradually through attrition. Even Jefferson, eager as he was to replace Federalists with Republicans, had generally followed this practice. The novelty in the Jacksonian patronage policy lay not in appointments but in removals. According to one set of statistics, Jackson removed 919 federal officials during his first year; this represented about 10 percent of all government employees. The precise number removed is subject to confusion, but it was more than all his predecessors had done in the previous forty years. By the time Congress assembled in December 1829, Jackson had already removed thirteen district attorneys, nine marshals, twenty-three registers and receivers, and twenty-five customs collectors, replacing them all with recess appointments. The removal policy hit the Post Office hard. Within the first year, the new administration dismissed 423 postmasters, many with long and creditable records of service.
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At first these removals were routinely justified with accusations of malfeasance. In this way the Jackson leaders dressed up their patronage policy as “reform” of the corruption they alleged had prevailed under Monroe and Adams. In a few cases, those removed were indeed crooks: Tobias Watkins, army surgeon, literary magazine editor, and friend of John Quincy Adams, went to prison for four years for misappropriating three thousand dollars while a Treasury auditor. Others were superannuated and deserved to be retired. But in most cases, straightforward politics dictated the removals. Those in the Post Office were concentrated in the Northeast, where the Jacksonians needed help in building their political party. In fact, however, the mail service there was most efficient and least in need of a managerial shake-up.

After several months, it became obvious that the charges against incumbent officeholders were all too often fabricated. To preserve credibility the administration fell back upon its other rationale, the principle of “rotation in office” as good in itself. Jackson explained this policy in his Message to Congress of December 1829: “The duties of all public officers are, or at least admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance.” Having thus rejected any need to recruit a meritocracy in public service, he went on to examine the issue purely as the distribution of favors among the citizenry. “In a country where offices are created solely for the benefit of the people no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another.” Qualifications and experience were just excuses invoked to justify the perpetuation of privilege.
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The issues involved in allocating public office and employment have been repeatedly debated ever since, first with civil service reform and more recently in connection with affirmative action and term limits. The arguments were no less contested in Jackson’s time than now. But the spoils system, as it was soon named, had come to stay. Once the Jacksonian Democrats had established the new pattern of partisan removals, it remained whichever party won office, until gradually mitigated by civil service reform after the Civil War. Those whom the Jackson administration appointed to office did not differ in their economic class from previous appointees, though they were more often self-made men or born into provincial rather than cosmopolitan elites.
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Jackson showed no reluctance to appoint former Federalists to office once they had become his supporters; indeed, he appointed more of them than all his Republican predecessors put together. Nor, despite the rhetoric of “reform,” did Jackson’s appointees represent any improvement in probity; corruption that came to light in the Land Office, the Post Office, and Indian affairs under his administration dwarfed that under his predecessors. Samuel Swartwout, a crony whom the president personally selected for the lucrative post of collector of the port of New York, absconded in 1839 with his accounts over a million dollars in arrears. More rapid turnover in the bureaucracy led to officeholders who were less experienced and less motivated. Over the long term the spoils system diminished both the competence and the prestige of public service.
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