Andrew Jackson (13 page)

These almost certainly were not the sum of Jackson’s dealings in slaves, but their relatively modest number indicates that he was a slaveholder rather than a slave trader. The lands he acquired included farms that had to be plowed and sown and weeded and harvested. His slaves worked those properties. In 1796 he purchased—for seven hundred dollars—a square mile of land he called Hunter’s Hill. There, on the south bank of the Cumberland above Nashville, he built a home for Rachel and himself. (Ironically or otherwise, the original white claimant to the property was Lewis Robards.) Several of Jackson’s slaves lived and worked at Hunter’s Hill, in the fields and around the house.

By the mid-1790s, despite his failure as a merchant, Jackson had established the basis for his future material success. He was wealthy in land, which wasn’t worth much in anything else yet but someday would be. The formula for western wealth was simple (and was the same as it had been for generations and would be for generations more): get there early, acquire land cheap, wait for more settlers to arrive, and sell at a profit. It was how a man grew up with the country, and it was what Jackson intended to do.

I
n the summer of 1789, while Jackson was settling into Nashville, while George Washington and the federal Congress settled into New York, and while the state of Franklin settled into the sea of history and myth, a very unsettling series of events began unfolding in Europe. The people of Paris revolted against King Louis XVI with a force that surprised even them and astonished most onlookers. Americans initially embraced the French assertion of popular rights, as an extension of the cause they had set in motion more than a decade earlier. “The convulsions in France are attended with some disagreeable circumstances,” Benjamin Franklin observed, “but if by the struggle she obtains and secures for the nation its future liberty and a good constitution, a few years’ enjoyment of those blessings will amply repair all the damages their acquisition may have occasioned. God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say, ‘This is my country.’”

Such was easier for Franklin to say than for some of his compatriots, in that Franklin died before the French Revolution was a year old, before the disagreeable circumstances to which he referred turned really bloody. The revolution became a civil war as the aristocracy struggled desperately to preserve their privileges and then their lives, and ultimately an international war as Britain and France’s other neighbors tried to prevent the spread of the revolutionary infection. At this point Americans began to take sides—not officially, as President Washington responded to the outbreak of war in Europe by declaring American neutrality, but emotionally, as Americans reacted to the events in strikingly divergent ways. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and at this point Washington’s secretary of state, cheered for France. The “liberty of the whole earth,” Jefferson said, depended on the ability of republican France to fend off the attacks by its reactionary rivals. Appealing to the alliance with France by which the United States had won its independence, Jefferson argued that American honor and necessity required a tilt toward Paris. Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s secretary of the Treasury and closest confidant, took the opposite view. Whatever the initial merits of the French Revolution, Hamilton judged, they had been washed away in the blood of the Terror. Real liberty required restraining France and restoring order in Europe. Britain was trying to do just that and therefore deserved American support.

The argument over the French Revolution was about more than the affairs of Europe. It ran to the heart of the arguers’ views of government and the people. In holding for France, Jefferson and his followers—many of whom had opposed ratification of the Constitution—signaled their continuing confidence in the people as against government, their preference for the principles of 1776 over those of 1787. They believed the people were naturally good and required only opportunity and encouragement to manifest their goodness. Less government was better than more, and the state governments were better than the central government. By contrast, Hamilton and his followers distrusted human nature and relied on government to keep it in check. They had supported the Constitution of 1787, which they conceived as a corrective to the libertarian excesses of 1776. They continued to try to strengthen government against the people, and the federal government against the states.

The split between Jefferson’s crowd, who called themselves Republicans, and Hamilton’s, the Federalists, acquired economic and regional overtones. The Federalists were strong among the merchant and monied classes, especially in the Northeast. The Republicans looked to the landed folk, particularly the planters and farmers of the South and West. Each difference tended to reinforce the others, so that by the mid-1790s Republicans and Federalists glared at each other across a widening gulf of ideology, economics, and section.

The glaring got ugly during Washington’s last years as president. Washington professed to be above partisan politics, but his administration drifted toward Hamilton’s conservative, pro-British Federalism, causing Jefferson to quit in disgust. This freed Washington to drift further toward the Federalists. In 1795 he sent John Jay, Hamilton’s coauthor (along with James Madison) on the
Federalist Papers
and currently chief justice of the Supreme Court, to London to negotiate a treaty of friendship and commerce with Britain. American merchants sought an end to British seizures of American ships—the result of Britain’s blockade of France—and greater access to British markets. They and their sailors additionally wanted the British to stop kidnapping—“impressing”—American seamen alleged to have deserted from the British navy. Finally, Washington hoped to persuade the British to complete their evacuation of the Ohio Valley. Jay succeeded in opening the British East Indies to American commerce, and he obtained a paper promise that the British would evacuate forts in the Northwest. But the other issue—in particular, the seizure of American ships and sailors—went unresolved.

Hamilton and the Federalists, and Washington, were willing to accept this half loaf, and the president laid Jay’s treaty before the Senate for ratification. But Jefferson and the Republicans condemned it as a sellout of everything the United States ought to stand for. They were especially incensed by the secrecy surrounding the negotiation of the treaty, as it smacked of the aristocracy they thought they had overthrown. Jay was hanged in effigy by angry Republicans, who also hurled rocks at the head of the real Hamilton. The treaty cleared the Senate but by the slimmest of margins. The Republicans tried to block the treaty in the House of Representatives, stalling an essential appropriations bill. Yet this failed, too, leaving the Republicans to gnash their teeth in frustration.

J
ackson encountered the partisan warfare on his visit to Philadelphia, again the nation’s capital. “What an alarming situation,” he wrote in October 1795 to Nathaniel Macon, a congressman from North Carolina. “Will it end in a civil war, or will our country be relieved from its present ignominy by the firmness of our representatives in Congress?” Jackson wasn’t a party man, but all his instincts were with the Republicans. He despised Britain as much as ever, and he distrusted those who favored the wealthy and wanted to transfer power from the states to the central government. He joined the Republicans in decrying the Jay treaty. He urged Macon to oppose the treaty and thereby “have the insulting, cringing, and ignominious child of aristocratic secrecy removed, erased, and obliterated from the archives of the grand republic of the United States.” Jackson followed certain Republicans in declaring the treaty unconstitutional. “I say unconstitutional because the Constitution says that the president by and with the advice and consent of the Senate is authorized to make treaties; but in the present treaty the advice of the Senate was not required by the president prior to the formation of the treaty, nor the outlines of said treaty made known to the Senate until after made.” Jackson cited Emmerich von Vattel, the distinguished scholar of the law of nations, to the effect that sovereigns are merely agents of the nations they represent and ought not to go beyond what they have reason to believe the people of their nations desire. “The president (from the remonstrance from all parts of the Union) had reason to presume that the nation of America would not have ratified the treaty, notwithstanding the 20 aristocratic nabobs of the Senate had consented to it.”

Jackson’s anger at the Jay treaty might have passed without issue but for a political coincidence. A 1795 census of the Southwest Territory revealed that the region contained 67,000 free persons (not including Indians) and 11,000 slaves. As the threshold for forming a state was sixty thousand (“counting the whole of the free persons . . . adding three-fifths of all other persons,” in the slavery-obfuscating language of the day), the territory’s political classes set to work writing a constitution and otherwise preparing for admission to the Union. A constitutional convention gathered at Knoxville in January 1796. Jackson joined James Robertson and three other delegates representing Davidson County.

Jackson’s decision to attend the convention marked a crucial turn in his career path, although it didn’t seem so at the time. Persons trained in the law were comparatively rare on the frontier, and Jackson would have seemed a shirker had he resisted selection to the Davidson delegation. Perhaps he sensed that a good showing at Knoxville would lead to greater things. More likely he went because his friends and colleagues urged him to, and he had nothing to keep him away.

As matters developed, he made his presence felt from the start. The records of the convention are incomplete, leaving Jackson’s precise role uncertain. But the memories of his colleagues there indicated that he took an active, if sometimes indirect, part in the convention’s work. “Jackson, though exerting a paramount influence in its deliberations, made few important motions himself,” Francis Blair asserted. “His method was to have someone who agreed with him—always some earlier settler than himself—make the desired motion. Then he would second it and speak at once powerfully in its support.” Blair wasn’t at the convention and apparently had this from someone who was. Yet he spoke from his own personal observation of Jackson when he described the style that long characterized Jackson’s speech.

He was not then or ever afterward what is commonly termed an orator. But he was a fluent, forceful and convincing speaker. When he addressed a body of men, whether jury, convention or political mass meeting, he talked to them. He did not orate. He had none of the arts of oratory, so-called. His voice, though strong and penetrating, was untrained. He had no idea of modulation, but let his inflections follow his feelings, naturally, as he went along. His gesticulation was even less trained and artful than his voice. About the only gestures he knew were the raising of both hands above his head to indicate reverence or veneration; the spreading of both arms wide out to indicate deprecation; and the fierce pointing of his long, gaunt forefinger straight forward, like a pistol, to indicate decision, dogmatism or defiance. And candor compels me to say that he used that forefinger more than any other limb or member in his gesticulation.

His vocabulary was copious and he never stood at a loss for a word to express his sense. When perfectly calm or not roused by anything that appealed to his feelings rather than to his judgment, he spoke slowly, carefully and in well-selected phrase. But when excited or angry he would pour forth a torrent of rugged sentences more remarkable for their intent to beat down opposition than for their strict attention to the rules of rhetoric or even syntax.

But in all situations and mental conditions his diction was clear and his purpose unmistakable. No one ever listened to a speech or a talk from Andrew Jackson who, when he was done, had the least doubt as to what he was driving at.

At the constitutional convention Jackson argued against an early proposal for a unicameral state legislature. Whether from an honest admiration of Congress or from a calculated judgment that flattery would help the state constitution receive the required federal approval, he contended that what suited the national government ought to suit a new state. The convention swung to his side and approved a dual legislature.

By at least one account, Jackson played a pivotal role in selecting the name of the new state. Several delegates from the region around Knoxville wanted to revive the name Franklin. Other delegates wished to honor Washington. Jackson thought too many states already had been named for individuals (Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia for English monarchs; New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware for the favorites of monarchs). Four years earlier Kentucky had graced itself with an Indian name, and Jackson thought Tennessee should follow the example, keeping the name of the river that had made the first settlements possible. Years later, a Jackson partisan (who wasn’t at Knoxville) said Jackson had praised the melodiousness of “Tennessee” as a word that had “as sweet a flavor on the tongue as hot corn-cakes and honey.” Perhaps he did note the euphony, but simile wasn’t Jackson’s natural mode. Whatever his precise argument, after he seconded James Robertson’s motion that the state be called Tennessee, the motion carried by a large majority.

The convention concluded its work in early February 1796 and sent the draft constitution east. Thomas Jefferson called it “the least imperfect and most republican of any of the American States’,” which was precisely why the same Federalists in Congress who supported the Jay treaty objected to it. The presidential election of 1796 was approaching, and unlike the uncontested coronations of George Washington, this one would be fought out. Tennessee leaned strongly Republican, which boded ill for the Federalist candidate, John Adams, and well for his Republican rival, Jefferson. The theory of self-government counted too heavily to keep a new state out of the Union indefinitely, but some Federalists hoped to keep it out till after the balloting for president. As things happened, the Republicans and republicanism got the better of the Federalists, and after some minor delay Tennessee was admitted. But in the bargain the Federalists limited Tennessee’s representation in the House of Representatives to a single congressman until after the census of 1800.