Andrew Jackson (67 page)

Jackson’s informal council served him as a sounding board for policy, but it also provided emotional sustenance, especially now that Rachel was gone. The group took shape after William Lewis, having helped install Jackson in the White House, prepared to return to Tennessee to his farm. “Why, Major,” Jackson said, “you are not going to leave me here
alone
, after doing more than any other man to bring me here?” Lewis reconsidered and, when Jackson found him a minor post at the Treasury, stayed on. Kendall and Hill likewise received positions with the Treasury, while Green landed government printing contracts.

The cabinet appointments evoked little enthusiasm among outside observers but not much criticism either. John Eaton was charged with being merely a Tennessee favorite of the president—which prompted Jackson to embrace him all the tighter. “Great exertions have been made by Clay’s friends to raise a clamour about my taking Major Eaton into my cabinet, and some of my friends from Tennessee, weak enough to be duped by the artifice, were made instruments,” he told John Coffee. “The object was to intimidate me from the selection, and thereby destroy Major Eaton. I had to assume sufficient energy to meet the crisis. I did meet it, and Major Eaton will become one of the most popular men in the departments, be a great comfort to me, and will manage the department of war well.”

Critics concentrated their fire against the “kitchen cabinet,” as they derisively called Jackson’s informal circle. William Lewis was assailed as the president’s personal propagandist, while Amos Kendall, Duff Green, and Isaac Hill were branded hack writers remarkable only for their singular prejudice for all things Jacksonian. Even some of Jackson’s friends acknowledged that appearances weren’t good. “We lament to see so many of the editorial corps favored with the patronage of the Administration,” Thomas Ritchie wrote to Martin Van Buren. Ritchie edited the Richmond
Enquirer
and had backed Jackson strongly, although not so strongly as Kendall, Green, and Hill. “A single case would not have excited so much observation, but it really looks as if there were a systematic effort to reward editorial partizans, which will have the effect of bringing the vaunted liberty of the press into contempt.” Ritchie didn’t question the ability of Kendall and the others, and he positively admired their courage. All the same, their personal standing with Jackson made him uneasy. “Invade the freedom of the press and the freedom of election, by showering patronage too much on editors of newspapers . . . and the rights of the people themselves are exposed to imminent danger.”

Ritchie, who knew he was writing for the president’s eyes as much as for Van Buren’s, thought Jackson’s choice of advisers reflected on the broader issue of reform. “What is reform?” he asked Van Buren. “Is it to turn out of office all those who voted against him, or who decently preferred Mr. Adams? Or is it not rather those who are incapable of discharging their duties: the drunken, the ignorant, the embezzler? . . . It is surely not to put out a good and experienced officer because he was a decent friend of J. Q. Adams,
in order
to put in a heated partizan of the election of General Jackson.”

Ritchie had a point, and Jackson knew it. But the president responded defensively, as he often did to criticism, however well intended. “You may assure Mr. Ritchie . . . that the President has not, nor will he ever, make an appointment but with a view to the public good,” he told Van Buren. “He never has, nor will he, appoint a personal friend to office unless by such appointment the public will be faithfully served.” Having got that out of his system and on the record, Jackson continued in a more philosophical vein. “I cannot suppose Mr. Ritchie would have me proscribe my friends merely because they are so. If my personal friends are qualified and patriotic, why should I not be permitted to bestow a
few
offices on them?” Presidents Washington and Jefferson had rewarded friends, to the benefit of the public, as Ritchie certainly knew. “Before he condemns the tree, he ought to wait and see its fruit. The people expect reform. They shall not be disappointed. But it must be
judiciously
done, and upon
principle
.”

T
he principle Jackson decided on was that rotation in office, rather than permanent tenure, should be the norm in a democracy. As this was a departure from previous practice, and liable to misinterpretation, he took care to explain the reasoning behind it. “There are, perhaps, few men who can for any great length of time enjoy office and power without being more or less under the influence of feelings unfavorable to the faithful discharge of their public duties,” he said. “They are apt to acquire a habit of looking with indifference upon the public interests and of tolerating conduct from which an unpracticed man would revolt. Office is considered as a species of property.” Such thinking was wrong, and it was what Jackson intended to root out. “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. Offices were not established to give support to particular men at the public expense. No individual wrong is, therefore, done by removal, since neither appointment to nor continuance in office is a matter of right.”

This was why rotation
should
be practiced. That it
could
be practiced without damage to the common welfare followed from the nature of the work. “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.” Far from damaging performance, rotation would actually improve it. “I can not but believe that more is lost by the long continuance of men in office than is generally to be gained by their experience.”

Yet applying the principle of rotation wasn’t painless. The replacement of federal officials worked real hardship in some cases. “My husband, sir, never was your enemy,” the wife of one ousted official wrote Jackson. Her man had simply voted his conscience, and for this he had lost his job. “You were apprised of our poverty; you knew the dependence of eight little children for food and raiment upon my husband’s salary. You knew that, advanced in years as he was, without the means to prosecute any regular business, and without friends able to assist him, the world would be to him a barren heath, an inhospitable wild.”

Jackson couldn’t ignore the protests, but he recognized that, however heartfelt, they were usually one-sided. A woman correspondent berated him for firing a man named Hawkins, the husband of a friend. “You can have no idea of the integrity, honesty and good principles of the man you have prostrated, and literally taken the bread out of the mouths of a helpless wife and two small children,” she said. Jackson inquired after Hawkins and discovered that he habitually got drunk on the job. Yet he answered the woman tactfully. “It is a painful duty to be the instrument of lessening the resources of a family so amiable as that of Mr. Hawkins, but when the public good calls for it, it must be performed,” he wrote. “As a private individual, it would give me the greatest happiness to alleviate their distresses, but as a public officer, I cannot devote to this object the interests of the country.”

Jackson knew, and didn’t mind, that the fear of being fired would affect many more persons than those actually dismissed. A little fear would have a sobering effect on the tipsy, a vivifying effect on the lazy, a straightening effect on the wayward.

But the fear got out of hand. After four administrations of indulgence, the merest hint of accountability pushed some to paranoia. “The gloom of suspicion pervaded the face of society,” one officeholder asserted. “No man deemed it safe and prudent to trust his neighbor. . . . A casual remark, dropped in the street, would within an hour be repeated at headquarters; and many a man received unceremonious dismission who could not, for his life, conceive or conjecture wherein he had offended.” Another critic contended that whatever good the replacements had done was overshadowed by the harm. “I question whether the ferreting out treasury rats, and the correction of abuses, are sufficient to compensate for the reign of terror which appears to have commenced. It would be well enough if it were confined to evil-doers, but it spreads abroad like a contagion: spies, informers, denunciations—the fecula of despotism.”

Jackson had never let criticism turn him from the course his conscience dictated, and he didn’t let criticism turn him now. He hefted his shovel to “cleanse the Augean stables,” as he put it to Coffee. But an inevitable side effect almost caused him to wish he’d left the matter alone. Once word got out that the new administration considered most federal appointments subject to review, Jackson was besieged by applicants for the places made vacant. Battalions of hopefuls wrote reciting their qualifications. Regiments appeared in person. “I have been crowded with thousands of applicants for office,” Jackson lamented to Coffee, “and if I had a tit for every applicant to suck the Treasury pap, all would go away well satisfied; but as there are not offices for more than one out of five hundred who applies, many must go away dissatisfied.”

How clean Jackson got the Augean stables is hard to say. His enemies had reason to exaggerate the carnage among the officeholders and to emphasize the virtue of those let go, while his friends had incentive to understate the number of political replacements and cast most removals as dismissals for cause. The best estimate is that between one-tenth and one-fifth of federal officeholders were replaced during Jackson’s tenure other than by ordinary attrition. For obvious reasons, this figure was higher than under Jackson’s immediate predecessors, but it appears to be comparable with the turnover after Jefferson defeated John Adams.

Yet Jackson’s opponents had the last word, even if they stole it from a friend of the president. Governor William Marcy of New York applied the Jacksonian rule to his own state, without apology. “It may be, sir, that the politicians of New York are not so fastidious as some gentlemen are as to disclosing the principles on which they act. They boldly preach what they practice. When they are contending for victory, they avow their intention of enjoying the fruits of it. If they are defeated, they expect to retire from office. . . . They see nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belongs the spoils.”

Jackson insisted on calling his approach “rotation in office.” But “spoils system” was what stuck.

I
n the nineteenth century a new president had a long time to adjust to his surroundings before having to deal with Congress in a meaningful way. Each legislative session consisted of two terms: one beginning in December and running till the following summer, the other commencing in December again and lasting only till the end of winter. Jackson, like other presidents, was inaugurated at the tail end of the short session, which meant that he had till the following December—more than a year after he learned that he would be the next president—to prepare to do business with the legislators.

The long interval reflected the leisurely pace of life in those earlier days (compared, of course, with what would come), but it also manifested the limited expectations Americans had of government. The footprint of government in the daily life of the country was far smaller than it would be later. Regulations, taxes, and services that subsequent generations would take for granted simply didn’t exist. And the
federal
government’s portion of that smaller footprint was especially petite. The great majority of laws that touched the lives of citizens were written by their state legislatures. Politicians in Washington flattered themselves as being at the top of the food chain of government, and in certain respects they were. The great issues of war and peace were reserved to the federal government, as were relations among the states. But the smaller fish in the states collectively consumed far more of the attention—and resources—of the people than the whales in Washington.

With little substantive to consider during its first several months, a new administration could easily be distracted by matters of little substance. In Jackson’s case the distraction came from a direction he could never have expected. Just weeks before the inauguration, John Eaton married Margaret O’Neal Timberlake. Eaton had known Peg O’Neal for a decade, having stayed in the Washington house of her father, along with numerous other paying guests, including at times Jackson. Peg was just a girl during those early years, but she blossomed into a beauty noticed and desired by the boarders and many besides. She appreciated the attention, as did her father, who observed its positive effect on the guest traffic and did little to curtail her naturally flirtatious ways. In time she paired off with John Timberlake, a young naval officer, and the two were wed. But Timberlake’s duties took him from Washington for many months at a time, leaving Peg at her father’s house with the other guests, who found her more attractive than ever. And she was just as friendly as ever, which inevitably set tongues wagging with respect to her faithfulness to her far-off spouse.