Andrew Jackson (70 page)
The question of legitimate sovereignty extended to relations with the Indian tribes. No president before Jackson (and none after) had such intimate experience of Indian relations. For this reason the members of Congress listened carefully as Jackson explained the philosophy that would guide his approach to the Indians. A controversy had arisen of late between the states of Georgia and Alabama, on one hand, and certain Cherokees and Creeks, on the other. The Indians asserted tribal autonomy and therefore exemption from state laws, which exemption the states refused to grant. The Indians appealed to the president for protection. Jackson denied the appeal, citing the constitutional prohibition against creating new states within existing states. Autonomy for the Indians, he said, was tantamount to creating such new states. Many of those supporting the Indians lived in the northern states. “Would the people of Maine permit the Penobscot tribe to erect an independent government within their State?” he asked. “Would the people of New York permit each remnant of the Six Nations within her borders to declare itself an independent republic under the protection of the United States? Could the Indians establish a separate republic on each of their reservations in Ohio?”
Jackson believed there would be no peace for the Indians east of the Mississippi. This was a harsh prediction, but history allowed no other.
Our ancestors found them the uncontrolled possessors of these vast regions. By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for a while their once terrible names. Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware is fast overtaking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek. That this fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limits of the States does not admit of a doubt.
Humanity and national honor demand that every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity. It is too late to inquire whether it was just in the United States to include them and their territory within the bounds of new States. . . . That step can not be retraced. A State can not be dismembered by Congress or restricted in the exercise of her constitutional power. But the people of those States, and of every State, actuated by feelings of justice and a regard for our national honor, submit to you the interesting question whether something can not be done, consistently with the rights of the States, to preserve this much-injured race.
What Jackson proposed was the legal transfer of land west of the Mississippi to the eastern tribes and the physical transfer of those tribes to the western land. This policy would circumvent the constitutional problem of states within states, as the transferred land would lie within no state but within federal territory. There the Indians could exist as autonomous tribes, “subject to no other control from the United States than such as may be necessary to preserve peace on the frontier and between the several tribes.” Jackson stressed that the emigration across the Mississippi must be voluntary. “It would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land.” But the Indians must know the alternative. “If they remain within the limits of the States, they must be subject to their laws.”
It was a long message, and Jackson was almost done. But he had to say a word about an issue that would arise soon. “The charter of the Bank of the United States expires in 1836, and its stockholders will most probably apply for a renewal of their privileges.” Jackson warned that he didn’t like the bank as it currently existed. “Both the constitutionality and the expediency of the law creating this bank are well questioned by a large portion of our fellow citizens, and it must be admitted by all that it has failed in the great end of establishing a uniform and sound currency.” Jackson didn’t rule out a substitute agency “which would avoid all constitutional difficulties and at the same time secure all the advantages to the Government and country that were expected to result from the present bank.” But he offered no details.
Having provided Congress, and through Congress the American people, an outline of the work that would fill his tenure as president, Jackson commended Congress “to the guidance of Almighty God, with a full reliance on His merciful providence for the maintenance of our free institutions.”
T
he message appealed to the American people, who hadn’t expected such depth from their hero. But Congress proved a tougher audience—or, rather, the anti-Jacksonian minority in Congress did. And the Democratic majority proved less coherent in the halls of the legislature than it had been on the hustings. It was one thing to shout for Old Hickory and reform, and quite another to agree on the nature of reform.
Trouble initially arose with Jackson’s nominations to federal office. The Senate rejected Isaac Hill, the New Hampshireman who had been made part of the Kitchen Cabinet and offered a job at the Treasury. Certain senators claimed offense at Hill’s criticism of President and Mrs. Adams. Others, including some favorably disposed toward Jackson, protested the use of public pay to reward friendly editors. Like Thomas Ritchie, they thought this practice undermined freedom of the press. Finally, and perhaps most to the point, advocates of the Bank of the United States, alarmed at Hill’s editorial opposition to the bank and wishing to serve Jackson notice that they wouldn’t yield without a fight, wanted to make an example of his nomination. The sum of the complaints was sufficient to block the appointment. Yet Hill—and Jackson—had the last laugh when, a short while later, the legislature of New Hampshire named Hill that state’s new senator, and the man who might only have editorialized against the bank could now vote against it. Hill’s allies reveled in his foes’ discomfiture. “Were we in the place of Isaac Hill,” said a friendly fourth-estater, “we would reject the presidency of the United States, if attainable, to enjoy the supreme triumph, the pure, the unalloyed, the legitimate victory of stalking into that very Senate and taking our seat—of looking our enemies in the very eye—of saying to the men who violated their oaths by attempting to disfranchise citizens, ‘Give me room—stand back—do you know me? I am that Isaac Hill, of New Hampshire, who, in this very spot, you slandered, vilified, and stripped of his rights. The people, your
masters
, have sent me here to take my seat in this very chamber, as your equal and your peer.’”
The Hill case required months to play out, but the lesson wasn’t lost on the anti-Jacksonians. Daniel Webster, who had predicted New Hampshire’s reaction to the Hill rejection, recognized that though the Constitution specified a separation of powers, democracy could override it. “Were it not for the fear of the outdoor popularity of General Jackson,” the Massachusetts senator wrote, “the Senate would have negatived more than half his nominations.”
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mid the struggle over Jackson’s nominations, another controversy developed, one that overshadowed the nominations and threatened to overwhelm the country as a whole. The South still simmered with discontent over the 1828 tariff, which grew more abominable in southern minds the more they pondered it. Whether the damage to South Carolina was greater than the damage to the other southern states, or whether South Carolinians were simply quicker to take offense, was hard to say. But one thing was certain: Jackson’s birth state possessed the region’s sharpest legal mind, which happened to be joined to an acute sense of propriety regarding the prerogatives of the states vis à vis the central government. Both the mind and the sense—the arguments and the emotion—belonged to John Calhoun, Jackson’s vice president, who had drafted a formal protest against the tariff, one based on first principles of constitutional philosophy and calling into question the meaning of American republicanism.
For a vice president to protest a federal law wasn’t unheard of; Jefferson had done just that in 1798. But such protest was a delicate business. Vice presidents lack both power and standing in matters of legislation: the executive power to veto an obnoxious bill and the political standing to challenge its authors. Moreover, if a vice president’s actions contradict those of the president, he risks career suicide. For this reason Jefferson hadn’t acknowledged his authorship in 1798, and even in 1829 it wasn’t widely known.
From similar causes, Calhoun disguised
his
authorship of what came to be called the “South Carolina Exposition.” Calhoun denied the authority of Congress to pass tariffs for protection. “It is true that the third section of the first article of the Constitution of the United States authorizes Congress to lay and collect an impost duty,” he said, “but it is granted as a tax power, for the sole purpose of revenue; a power in its nature essentially different from that of imposing protective or prohibitory duties. The two are incompatible.” Calhoun’s exposition went on to delineate the unequal effect of the tariff on South and North. “We cultivate certain staples for the supply of the general market of the world; and they manufacture almost exclusively for the home market. Their object in the tariff is to keep down foreign competition, in order to obtain a monopoly of the domestic market. The effect on us is to compel us to purchase at a higher price, both what we purchase from them and from others, without receiving a correspondent increase of price for what we sell.”
Yet the differential economics of the tariff was merely a symptom of a larger problem. Democracy was a fine thing, Calhoun asserted, but it wasn’t the last word in politics, or at any rate shouldn’t be. “No government based on the naked principle that the majority ought to govern, however true the maxim in its proper sense and under proper restrictions, ever preserved its liberty, even for a single generation. The history of all has been the same: injustice, violence and anarchy, succeeded by government of one or a few. . . . An unchecked majority is a despotism—and government is free, and will be permanent, in proportion to the number, complexity and efficiency of the checks by which its powers are controlled.”
The most important of these checks limited the central government to those powers specifically delegated by the Constitution. “All others are expressly reserved to the States and the people.” As no man could be a judge in his own case, so the central government could not judge the extent of its powers. But if not the central government, then who? “The right of judging in such cases is an essential attribute of the sovereignty of which the States cannot be divested without losing their sovereignty itself.” This state sovereignty, Calhoun concluded, “clearly implies a veto . . . on the action of the General Government.”
To this last assertion Calhoun’s long document ultimately reduced. The vice president claimed for South Carolina a veto on the actions of the federal government: a right to nullify federal laws as they pertained to the state. Whether the federal government would honor the claim was the question that hung over Washington in the months after Calhoun penned his exposition. “The next two or three years will be of the deepest interest to us and the whole Union,” he predicted.
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f the delicacy of Calhoun’s position prevented his open espousal of the nullification cause, Robert Hayne had no such compunctions. Hayne was another South Carolinian, a senator whose constituents expected nothing less than a vigorous defense of the rights of the states. He determined to give it to them. He stalked the tariff issue, intending to leap on it and do it in at first opportunity. But when the tariff failed to appear during the early weeks of the congressional session, he adopted another approach. Daniel Webster, in a discussion of revenues from the sale of federal lands (including those brought to market by Jackson’s treaties with the Creeks and Cherokees), asserted that reliance on federal revenues helped bind the nation together. Hayne responded indignantly. “Sir, let me tell that gentleman that the South repudiates the idea that a pecuniary dependence on the Federal Government is one of the legitimate means of holding the States together. A money interest in the Government is essentially a base interest, and just so far as it operates to bind the feelings of those who are subjected to it to the Government, just so far as it operates in creating sympathies and interests that would not otherwise exist, is it opposed to all the principles of free government, and at war with virtue and patriotism.” But since Webster had raised the issue of money, Hayne pointed out that the South sent far more money to Washington than it received in return.
He turned to the larger question of the nature of the Union. The South, or at least South Carolina, had been charged with innovation in asserting a right to nullify, he said. He rejected the charge, claiming a long lineage for himself, his state, and its doctrines. “The party to which I am proud of having belonged from the very commencement of my political life to the present day, were the democrats of ’98. Anarchists, anti-federalists, revolutionists, I think they were sometimes called. They assumed the name of democratic republicans in 1812, and have retained their name and their principles up to the present hour. True to their political faith, they have always, as a party, been in favor of limitations of power; they have insisted that all powers not delegated to the Federal Government are reserved, and have been constantly struggling, as they are now struggling, to preserve the rights of the States, and prevent them from being drawn into the vortex, and swallowed up by one great consolidated Government.” The South was said to esteem the Union insufficiently. Hayne replied that it was the North that did so, by pushing the South to the brink of destruction with the abominable tariff and then refusing to hear the South’s pleas. He shuddered at the future. “Good God, has it come to this? . . . Do gentlemen value so lightly the peace and harmony of the country? . . . Do gentlemen estimate the value of the Union at so low a price that they will not even make one effort to bind the States together with cords of affection? . . . If so, let me tell gentlemen the seeds of dissolution are already sown, and our children will reap the bitter fruit.”