Andrew Jackson (63 page)

A
nd so began the longest, bitterest, ugliest campaign in American political history. Adams wasn’t even inaugurated before Jackson’s hometown paper, the
Nashville Gazette
, declared him a candidate for president in 1828. The paper hadn’t consulted Jackson but relied on the general’s assertion that a man called by the people to democratic office couldn’t refuse. Jackson himself fueled the enthusiasm by taking vigorous and sarcastic exception to Clay’s charge that he was a dangerous “military chieftain.” “It is for an ingenuity stronger than mine to conceive what idea was intended to be conveyed by that term,” Jackson said.

It is very true that early in life, even in the days of boyhood, I contributed my mite to shake off the yoke of tyranny, and to build up the fabrick of free government; and when lately our country was involved in war, having the commission of Major General of militia in Tennessee, I made an appeal to the patriotism of the western citizens, when 3000 of them went with me to the field, to support her Eagles. If this can constitute me a “military chieftain,” I am one.

Aided by the patriotism of the western people, and an indulgent providence, it was my good fortune to protect our frontier border from savages, and successfully to defend an important and vulnerable point of our Union. Our lives were risked, privations endured, sacrifices made, if Mr. Clay pleases, martial law declared, not with any view of personal aggrandisement, but for the preservation of all and everything that was valuable, the honor, safety, and glory of our country. Does this constitute a “military chieftain”? And are all our brave men in war, who go forth to defend their rights, and the rights of their country, to be termed “military chieftains,” and therefore denounced?

Jackson couldn’t resist noting that Clay had never risked life, limb, or treasure for his country. And now he seemed to be saying that those who had done so should be disqualified from political office. Such demagogues were the ones to be feared, not honest soldiers.

I became a soldier for the good of my country. Difficulties met me at every step. I thank God it was my good fortune to surmount them. The war over and peace restored, I sought to retire again to my farm and to private life, where but for the call made by my country to the Senate I should have contentedly remained. . . . If this makes me so, I am a “military chieftain.”

J
ackson returned to his farm, although not exactly to private life. He was one of the most famous men in America, and certainly the most popular, and his supporters were determined to make him president. John Eaton and some allies purchased a recently Crawfordist newspaper in Washington and transformed it into an organ of Jacksonism. Jacksonians in other cities followed suit, aiming to get out the good word on Jackson and the bad word on Adams and Clay. Eaton was joined in Congress by Sam Houston, who had emulated his surrogate father by becoming major general of the Tennessee militia and then fighting a duel (but only badly wounding his foe). In Washington, Houston and Eaton became Jackson’s ardent advocates. They wrote letters to editors, and editorials, and kept Jackson apprised of the mood of Congress. “I have not in my life seen a cause rising so fast as
that of the people is
,” Houston told Jackson, “nor one sinking faster than the cause of a
wicked and corrupt coalition!
. . . You lose no friends, but gain daily. It will be so until the great day of deliverance to our country arrives.”

Jackson could have taken the temperature of Congress himself had he not resigned his Senate seat. He dreaded the thought of another season of windy rhetoric and barren posturing, but at first he couldn’t figure out how to avoid it. His stated philosophy of neither seeking nor shunning office seemed to rule out resignation. But deliverance came in the form of an apparent conflict of interest. Congressional Jacksonians angered by the outcome of the 1824 election proposed a constitutional amendment forbidding the appointment of members of Congress to posts in the executive branch during the term of their election and for two years thereafter. If adopted, the amendment would have prevented appointments like that of Clay by Adams. The amendment went nowhere, but it gave Jackson an—apparently unintended—excuse to leave the Senate. For him to vote on a measure so clearly inspired by his defeat in the House would be improper, he told the Tennessee legislature. Therefore “I must entreat to be excused from any further service in the Senate.”

I
f Jackson was relieved upon ending his senatorial career, Rachel was ecstatic. She had been disappointed for her husband at the result of the election but pleased for herself. The thought of life in the White House made her shudder. Washington’s excitements were nothing next to what she called “the variety of dear little interests” of home. The journey west from Washington had been slow, but she didn’t begrudge the delay, as each mile carried her closer to her heart’s content. “Our time was delightfully occupied on the road,” she wrote a friend. “From Baltimore to our farm we were honored by the most friendly and hospitable attentions.”

The more Rachel pondered the matter, the more she concluded that she now enjoyed the best of all worlds. She had the honor of being married to the man the American people most wanted to lead them, yet she didn’t bear the burden of being a president’s wife. “To me,” she told her friend, “the
Presidential charms
by the side of a
happy retirement from public life
are as the tale of the candle and the substantial fire, the first of which it is said is soon blown out by the wind but the latter is only increased by it.”

R
achel’s joy at returning home doubtless distracted her from the improvements in the route she and her husband traveled to get there. The slowness of their journey owed far more to the popular demands on her husband than to the condition of the road itself, which had changed dramatically during the three decades since Jackson had first ridden east. Private funds had built a pike from Baltimore to Cumberland, Maryland; from there the federal government picked up construction of what was called the National Road. By 1818 the road had reached the Ohio River at Wheeling, in the panhandle of western Virginia. Travel on the road was as convenient and pleasant as land travel could be in those days. Its crushed-stone surface shed rain, banishing the mud that had bogged wagons in rainy weather and most of the dust that had choked travelers in dry. Arched stone bridges eliminated dependence on ferrymen and susceptibility to the flooding of low-water crossings. Taverns lined the route, averaging more than one per mile in stretches. These establishments varied in quality, from stagecoach inns offering meals and beds to the well-heeled travelers aboard the scheduled coaches to wagon stands providing minimal services for those transporting themselves.

At Wheeling travelers to Nashville could board steamboats, which carried them down the Ohio and up the Cumberland. Steamboat passage was more expensive than travel by stage, but it was far more comfortable. First-class travelers—like the Jacksons—had private rooms, and they could stroll about the decks during the day. The earliest steamboats had a disturbing habit of blowing up, but by the mid-1820s explosions were infrequent enough to occasion surprise when they did occur. More common, though less spectacular, were groundings on sandbars, collisions with other craft, and minor fires from smokestack sparks.

Yet the really exciting development in water travel in the 1820s relied not on steam power but on mules. In 1825, after eight years of construction, the Erie Canal was completed. Governor De Witt Clinton, the driving force behind the construction, signaled the importance of the event by pouring two kegs of Lake Erie water into the harbor at New York City. The water link between the Atlantic and the Lakes transformed the economies of both the Northeast and the Northwest—in fact, made them part of a single economy for the first time. Transport costs from Ohio to New York fell by as much as 90 percent; now farm products from the interior, carried east on the mule-drawn canal barges, could compete with those grown on the seaboard.

The effect on both regions was revolutionary. Agriculture in Ohio and Indiana boomed, while agriculture in New England languished. New York City, lately a laggard behind Philadelphia, became America’s foremost commercial center. Eastern producers of textiles and other manufactured goods shifted from handicraft methods to factories as displaced eastern farmers scrambled for work and as the canal opened new markets for manufactures in the interior. Standards of living rose on the fall in transport costs and the emergence of regional specialization. Easterners ate better; westerners went better clothed and shod. The change was as obvious as the shirts on people’s backs; within a decade “homespun” almost vanished, replaced by factory-woven cloth even on the distant frontier.

Other effects of the revolution in transport were less visible but no less profound. As farmers and manufacturers shipped their goods over longer distances, they increasingly depended on a stable, predictable money supply, one that spanned not merely cities or states but the nation as a whole. The panic of 1819 had demonstrated what happened when money vanished; the next panic would spread more rapidly along the improved avenues of commerce. In Jackson’s early days as a merchant, David Allison’s failure to honor a note had left Jackson and a few others in the lurch; in the age of expanding markets, a critical bankruptcy in one part of the country could bring down hundreds of businesses all across America. The nation had never been so prosperous, but never had its economy been so sensitive to disruption.

H
enry Clay had hoped his appointment as secretary of state would be a personal blessing, the springboard to the presidency it had been for his four immediate predecessors. But the circumstances of his elevation and the unceasing attacks on his integrity by the partisans of Jackson made his tenure an unceasing agony.

John Randolph wasn’t a Jacksonian so much as an anti-Adamsite. The most infuriatingly brilliant and exasperatingly eccentric politician of his day, Randolph had entered Congress in time to help fellow Virginian Jefferson defeat New Yorker Burr in the second round of the election of 1800. But Jefferson’s devotion to Republican principles slipped below Randolph’s high standard, and during Jefferson’s second term Randolph excoriated the president with a vicious humor that evoked smiles among Jefferson’s enemies—but not laughs, lest Randolph turn his rapier on them. Randolph crossed swords with Henry Clay when Clay led the war hawks of 1812 and Randolph aligned himself with the Federalist opponents of the war. He lost his seat as a result but returned to the House in time to tangle with Clay, again unsuccessfully, over the Missouri Compromise. When Clay became secretary of state in 1825, Randolph assaulted him from the Senate, to which he was elevated by Jacksonians in the Virginia legislature who wished to send the Adams-Clay administration a message of their outrage. Randolph savaged Adams and especially Clay for one failing and another and closed his most venomous diatribe with a description of Adams and Clay as “the combination, unheard of till then, of the puritan with the blackleg.”

“The House was a perfect scene of confusion for half an hour, no one addressing the Chair, the Chairman crying out Order, Order, Order, hurley burley, helter skelter, Negro states and Yankees,” John Marable wrote Jackson, regarding the Randolph speech. Marable was a Tennessee congressman who, like many others, had slipped into the Senate to hear Randolph slash Clay. “Yes, says he—Mr. R.—with uplifted hands, I swear to my God and Country that I will war with this administration made up of the union of Puritans and Blacklegs.”

Adams didn’t mind being called a Puritan, but Clay couldn’t let “blackleg” pass. He challenged Randolph to a duel. By this time dueling had lost favor even with many of its former practitioners; Thomas Hart Benton accepted Randolph’s request to serve as second chiefly to talk Randolph out of going ahead. He succeeded too well; Randolph explained that he must answer Clay’s challenge but wouldn’t fire back. Yet just before the signal, Randolph’s pistol accidentally went off. This disrupted his concentration, so that on the signal he did fire. But he missed. Clay missed also, his bullet disappearing in the billows of the thin Randolph’s overcoat. Benton expected that the affair would end there. But Clay demanded a second round, and Randolph wouldn’t refuse. Clay missed again. Randolph now fired deliberately in the air. “I do not fire at you, Mr. Clay,” he said redundantly. Whether Clay was embarrassed more from twice missing Randolph or from not having his latest fire returned was hard to tell. Yet his relief outweighed his embarrassment, and he strode forward and offered his hand to his antagonist. Randolph wouldn’t let him off quite so easily. “You owe me a coat, Mr. Clay,” he said. Clay merely smiled and said, “I am glad the debt is no greater.”

But neither the coat nor the brush with death cured Randolph of his scorn for Clay. “Randolph loses no opportunity to abuse him,” John Eaton reported to Jackson a month later. “He gives it to him and Adams in great style whenever he takes the floor. Yesterday he made a speech of 4 or 5 hours.” Eaton added that Randolph’s windiness included high praise for Jackson. “He spoke of the abuse you had received from various sources heretofore, then said that you would live and last with posterity when your detractors should have sunk to forgetfulness, that like the great father of rivers, the Mississippi, your fame and splendid efforts for your country would roll its mighty volume on.”

J
ackson appreciated the support from Randolph, but he was more interested in the opinion of that other Virginian, Jefferson. As the fiftieth anniversary—the jubilee—of American independence approached in the summer of 1826, the eyes of the country turned to Monticello, where the author of the Declaration of Independence clung to life, but with weakening grip. They also turned to Quincy, Massachusetts, where John Adams was failing similarly. Jackson expected no good word from Adams, a founder of Federalism and the father of his chief rival, but he did hope for the benediction of Jefferson.