A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (43 page)

Possessing so much, Clay lacked much as well. His ideology hung together as a garment of fine, but incompatible, cloths. Having done as much as anyone to keep the nation from a civil war, Henry Clay in modern terminology was a moderate, afraid to offend either side too deeply. Like Webster and Jackson, he stood for union, but what was that? Did “Union” mean “compact”? Did it mean “confederation”? Did it mean “all men are created equal”? Clay supposedly opposed slavery in principle and wanted it banned—yet like the Sage of Monticello, he and his wife never freed their own slaves.

Ever the conciliator, Clay sought a middle ground on the peculiar institution, searching for some process to make the unavoidable disappear without conflict. He thought slavery was not a competitive economic structure in the long run, and thus all that was needed was a national market to ensure slavery’s demise—all the while turning profits off slavery. Such inconsistencies led him to construct a political platform along with other nationalists like Adams, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster that envisioned binding the nation together in a web of commerce, whereupon slavery would disappear peacefully.

Clay’s American system (not to be confused with Eli Whitney’s manufacturing process of the same name) involved three fundamental objectives: (1) tie the country together with a system of internal improvements, including roads, harbor clearances, river improvements, and later, railroads all built with federal help; (2) support the Bank of the United States, which had branches throughout the nation and provided a uniform money; and (3) maintain a system of protective tariffs for southern sugar, northeastern textiles, and iron. What was conspicuous by its absence was abolition of slavery. Without appreciating the political similarities of the American system, Clay had advanced a program that conceptually mirrored Van Buren’s plans for political dominance. The American system offered, in gussied-up terms, payoffs to constituent groups, who in return would ignore the subject standing in front of them all.

Thus, between Adams and Clay, the former had the will but not the skill to do anything about slavery, whereas the latter had the skill but not the will. That opened the door for yet another candidate, William Crawford of Georgia. Originally, Van Buren had his eye on Crawford as the natural leader of his fledgling Democratic Party. Unlike Adams and Clay, however, Crawford stood for slavery, veiled in the principles of 1798, as he called them, and strict construction of the Constitution. Lacking any positive message, Crawford naturally appealed to a minority, building a base only in Virginia and Georgia, but he appealed to Van Buren because of his willingness to submit government control to party discipline. Van Buren therefore swung the caucus behind the Georgian. Instead of providing a boost to Crawford, the endorsement of him sparked a revolt on the grounds that Van Buren was engaging in king making. Van Buren should have seen this democratic tide coming, as he had accounted for it in almost everything else he did, but he learned his lesson after the election. Crawford’s candidacy also suffered mightily in 1823 when the giant man was hit by a stroke and left nearly paralyzed, and although he won some electoral votes in the election of 1824, he no longer was an attractive candidate for national office.

None of the three major candidates—Adams, Clay, or Crawford—in fact, could claim to be “of the people.” All were viewed as elites, which left room for one final entry into the presidential sweepstakes, Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. Beginning with the Tennessee legislature, then followed by Pennsylvania, Jackson was endorsed at a mass meeting. Sensing his opportunity, Jackson ensured southern support by encouraging John C. Calhoun to run for vice president. Jackson appeared to have the election secure, having mastered the techniques Van Buren espoused, such as avoiding commitment on key issues, and above all avoiding the slavery issue.

When the ballots came in to the electoral college, no one had a majority, so the decision fell to the House of Representatives. There, only the three receiving the highest electoral count could be considered, and that eliminated Clay, who had won only 37 electoral votes. The contest now came down to Jackson with 99, Adams with 84, and Crawford with 41. Clay, the Speaker of the House, found himself in the position of kingmaker because his 37 electoral votes could tip the balance. And Clay detested Jackson: “I cannot believe that killing 2,500 Englishmen at New Orleans qualifies for the…duties of the First Magistracy,” he opined.
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Clay should have known better. Washington before him had ridden similar credentials to the presidency. Nevertheless, between Crawford’s physical condition and Clay’s view of the “hero of New Orleans,” he reluctantly threw his support to Adams. He had genuine agreements with Adams on the American system as well, whereas Crawford and Jackson opposed it. Whatever his thinking, Clay’s decision represented a hideously short-sighted action.

Jackson had won the popular vote by a large margin over Adams, had beaten Adams and Clay put together, and had the most electoral votes. No evidence has ever surfaced that Clay and Adams had made a corrupt bargain, but none was needed in the minds of the Jacksonians, who viewed Clay’s support of Adams as acquired purely through bribery. Nor was anyone surprised when Adams named Clay secretary of state in the new administration. Jackson exploded, “The Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver, but his end will be the same.”
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It mattered little that Clay, in fact, had impeccable credentials for the position. Rather, the Great Compromiser muddied the waters by offering numerous, often conflicting, explanations for his conduct. Meanwhile, Calhoun, who saw his own chances at the presidency vanish in an Adams-Clay coalition, threw in completely with the Jacksonians; and overnight, Adams created an instant opposition built on the single objective of destroying his administration.
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Adams’s Stillborn Administration

At every turn, Adams found himself one step behind Jackson and the Van Buren machine. Lacking an affinity for the masses—even though he spent countless hours receiving ordinary citizens daily, dutifully recording their meetings in his diary—Adams seemed incapable of cultivating any public goodwill. In his first message to Congress, Adams laid out an astounding array of plans, including exploration of the far West, the funding of a naval academy and a national astronomical observatory, and the institution of a uniform set of metric weights and measures. Then, in one of the most famous faux pas of any elected official, Adams lectured Congress that the members were not to be “palsied by the will of our constituents.”
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Bad luck and poor timing characterized the hapless Adams administration, which soon sought to pass a new tariff bill to raise revenue for the government, a purpose that seldom excited voters. When the Tariff of 1824 finally navigated its way through Congress, it featured higher duties on cotton, iron, salt, coffee, molasses, sugar, and virtually all foreign manufactured goods. Legislators enthusiastically voted for duties on some products to obtain higher prices for those made by their own constituents, hardly noticing that if all prices went up, what came into one hand went out of the other. Calhoun saw an opportunity to twist the legislation even further, giving the Jacksonians a political victory. A bill was introduced with outrageously high duties on raw materials, which the Machiavellian Calhoun felt certain would result in the northeastern states voting it down along with the agricultural states. As legislation sometimes does, the bill advanced, bit by bit, largely out of the public eye. What finally emerged threatened to blow apart the Union.

The stunned Calhoun saw Van Buren’s northerners support it on the grounds that it protected his woolen manufacturing voters, whereas Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, one of those Calhoun thought would be painted into a corner, backed the tariff on the principle that he supported all protective tariffs, even one that high. Thus, to Calhoun’s amazement and the dismay of southern and western interests, the bill actually passed in May 1828, leaving Calhoun to attack his own bill! He penned (anonymously) the “South Carolina Exposition and Protest,” and quickly the tariff was dubbed the Tariff of Abominations.

As the next election approached, on the one side stood Jackson, who, despite his military record seemed a coarse man of little character. At the other extreme stood the equally unattractive Adams, who thought that
only
character counted. Jackson and his followers believed in “rotation in office,” whereby virtually any individual could be plugged into any government job. The Whigs, on the other hand, emphasized character and social standing.
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To Adams, and other later Whigs, simply stacking men of reputation in offices amounted to good government. Common experience at the end of Adams’s term suggested that some men of character lacked sense, and some men of sense seemed to lack character. Therefore, sometime after Jefferson, the fine balance that demanded both effectiveness
and
honor among elected officials had taken a holiday.

The Rise of the Common Man

Hailed by many historians as the first true democratic election in American history, the contest of 1828 was nearly a foregone conclusion owing to the charges of the “corrupt bargain” and the inept political traits of the incumbent Adams. The four years of the Adams administration actually benefited Van Buren’s political machine, giving him the necessary time to line up the papers, place the proper loyalists in position, and obtain funding. By 1828, all the pieces were in place. Adams’s supporters could only point to Jackson’s “convicted adulteress” of a wife (the legal status of her earlier divorce had been successfully challenged) and his hanging of the British spies in Florida, going so far as to print up handbills with two caskets on them, known fittingly as the coffin handbills. Modern Americans disgusted by supposedly negative campaigning have little appreciation for the intense vitriol of early American politics, which makes twenty-first-century squabbles tame by comparison.

Jackson and his vice president, John Calhoun, coasted into office, winning 178 electoral votes to Adams’s 83, in the process claiming all the country except the Northeast, Delaware, and Maryland. Old Hickory, as he was now called, racked up almost 150,000 more popular votes than Adams. Jackson quickly proved more of an autocrat than either of the Adamses, but on the surface his embrace of rotation in office and the flagrant use of the spoils system to bring in multitudes of people previously out of power seemed democratic in the extreme. More than 10,000 celebrants and job seekers descended on Washington like locusts, completely emptying the saloons of all liquor in a matter of days. Washington had no place to put them, even when gouging them to the tune of twenty dollars per week for hotel rooms. Webster, appalled at the rabble, said, “They really seem to think the country has been rescued from some general disaster,” while Clay succinctly identified their true objective: “Give us bread, give us Treasury pap, give us our reward.”
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The real shock still awaited Washingtonians. After an inaugural speech that no one could hear, Jackson bowed deeply to the crowd before mounting his white horse to ride to the presidential mansion, followed by the enormous horde that entered the White House with him! Even those sympathetic to Jackson reacted with scorn to “King Mob,” and with good reason: The throng jumped on chairs with muddy boots, tore curtains and clothes, smashed china, and in general raised hell. To lure them out, White House valets dragged liquor stocks onto the front lawn, then slammed the doors shut. But Jackson had already left his adoring fans, having escaped out a back window to have a steak dinner at a fancy eatery.

The entire shabby event betrayed Jackson’s inability to control his supporters, on the one hand, and his lack of class and inherent hypocrisy on the other. He had no intention of hanging out with his people, but rather foisted them off on helpless government employees. Jackson ran the country in the same spirit. Having hoisted high the banner of equality, in which any man was as good as another, and dispersed patronage as none before, Old Hickory relied on an entirely different group—elite, select, and skilled—to actually govern the United States. His kitchen cabinet consisted of newspaper editor Francis Preston Blair, scion of a wealthy and influential family; Amos Kendall, his speechwriter as well as editor; the ubiquitous Van Buren; and attorney Roger B. Taney. These individuals had official positions as well. Kendall received a Treasury auditorship, and Taney would be rewarded with a Supreme Court nomination.

Perhaps, if the Peggy Eaton affair had not occurred, Jackson might have governed in a more traditional manner, but the imbroglio of scandal never seemed far from him. Out of loyalty, he selected as secretary of war an old friend, John Eaton, who had recently married a pretty twenty-nine-year-old widow named Peggy. She came with a reputation. In the parlance of the day, other cabinet wives called Peggy a whore, and claimed she had “slept with ‘at least’ twenty men, quite apart from Eaton.”
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Her first husband, an alcoholic sailor, committed suicide after learning of her extramarital shenanigans with Eaton. To the matrons of Washington, most of whom were older and much less attractive, Peggy Eaton posed the worst kind of threat, challenging their propriety, their mores, and their sexuality. They shunned her: Mrs. Calhoun refused even to travel to Washington so as to avoid having to meet Peggy. Adams gleefully noted that the Eaton affair divided the administration into moral factions headed by Calhoun and Van Buren, a widower, who hosted the only parties to which the Eatons were invited—a group Adams called the “party of the frail sisterhood.”

Jackson saw much of his departed Rachel in Peggy Eaton (Rachel had died in 1828), and the president demanded that the cabinet members bring their wives in line and invite Peggy to dinner parties, or face dismissal. But Jackson could not even escape “Eaton malaria” at church, where the local Presbyterian minister, J. M. Campbell, obliquely lectured the president on morality. A worse critic from the pulpit, the Reverend Ezra Stile Ely of Philadelphia, was, along with Campbell, summoned to an unusual cabinet meeting in September 1829, where Jackson grilled them on their information about Peggy. Jackson likely regretted the move when Ely brought up new vicious charges against the Eatons, and he uttered “By the God eternal” at pointed intervals. “She is chaste as a virgin,” Jackson exclaimed.