Andrew Jackson (9 page)

The Philadelphia charter was elegant in places, workmanlike in others, downright clunky in yet others. Like all works of committee it embodied compromise. One obvious compromise regarded representation in the new Congress. States with few inhabitants had wanted to maintain the Confederation principle of one vote per state. Heavily peopled states desired representation by population. The result was a hybrid legislature, with the Senate embodying the small-state position and the House of Representatives the big-state view. Another compromise determined the selection of the president: not by the Congress or by the states directly but by an electoral college created anew every quadrennium. Who would the president represent, then? It was a fair question. Some in the convention sought to ban slavery, deeming it antithetical to the basic principles of liberty and self-government. Yet the slave-thick southern states stood together, defending their peculiar institution as necessary to their economic development. The most the antislavery delegates could win was a delayed (and only implicit) ban on the overseas slave trade, by common consent the worst aspect of the slave system.

But the truly fateful compromise, the one that made the others—especially the slavery finesse—potentially lethal was the waffling on where sovereignty in the new government lay. Were the states supreme, or the national government? Many of the delegates were lawyers, and their lawyerly skill was never more evident than in their ability to cloud this central issue. Readers weren’t nine words into the preamble before they were scratching their heads. “We the people of the United States of America”—how was this to be construed? An emphasis on “people” suggested national primacy. A stress on “States” pointed to the states, as did the facts that the delegates to the convention voted by states and that the proposed constitution was referred to the states for ratification, with equal weight given to every one.

The waffle didn’t fool opponents of the new constitution, who spied a centralist plot in the Philadelphia proceedings. Many of the old revolutionaries turned away, complaining that the proposed government would deprive them of liberties hard won by war. To replace the grasping authority of Britain, they declared, with that of a central American government would be ironic, tragic, and stupid.

But the supporters of the constitution were clever. They contended that the new government would be strictly limited to the powers expressly granted it. Where the charter was silent, they said, the states would take precedence. Even as they winked to assure themselves and their friends that the new government would be a signal improvement over the Confederation, they cooed to skeptics that nothing much, really, had changed.

The compromises contained in the constitution—especially on slavery and sovereignty—would vex America for decades. Andrew Jackson as president would find himself tripping over the loose ends the drafters left lying across the American frame of government. But in the autumn of 1787 another aspect of the constitutional debate drew almost as much attention. For decades political theorists had contended that republics could sustain themselves only in compact geographical areas. Pointing to the city-states of Greece and to preimperial Rome, they argued that compactness created a sense of common purpose and allowed citizens and rulers to know one another well, and that these advantages diminished dangerously over distance. What republic had ever survived being extended over a large geographical area? None the drafters of the constitution could cite. As this reasoning pertained to the American situation, it supported the antifederalists, who contended that New Hampshire could never know Georgia, nor the hamlets on the frontier the cities of the seaboard. Single states stretched the republican principle already; a centralized government would snap it. More prosaically, the long distances in America made centralized government unworkable. If the citizens of Massachusetts or South Carolina had to travel to Philadelphia (or New York or wherever the national capital turned out to be) every time they needed to conduct their government business, they would have no time for more productive activities. One reason America broke away from Britain was that getting decisions out of London took so long.

The federalists countered this complaint in various ways, but none more ingenious than that devised by James Madison. In the tenth article of the collection that became known as the
Federalist Papers
, Madison turned the received reasoning about the size of republics on its head. Extensive republics, he asserted, were actually
more
stable than small ones. In a small republic, one or two factions could easily conspire against the general interest, engineer a majority, and subvert the liberties of the rest. In a large republic, the factions would be more dispersed, rendering conspiracy and subversion more difficult and rare. “Extend the sphere,” Madison said, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or, if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength and to act in unison with each other.” What others considered a weakness of large republics—the dispersion of their people and the diversity of their interests—Madison touted as a strength.

Whether Madison’s argument convinced anyone was hard to tell. At times he himself didn’t appear to believe it. But it definitely didn’t persuade the residents of the backcountry villages and farms, who cherished their independence and didn’t look kindly on ceding any of it to a distant government they neither knew nor trusted. Frontier antifederalists in the Carolinas damned the constitution as the death of liberty and held a funeral. “The people had a coffin painted black, which, borne in funeral procession, was solemnly buried, as an emblem of the dissolution and interment of public liberty,” an eyewitness recorded. “They feel that they are the very men who, as mere militia, half-armed and half-clothed, have fought and defeated the British regulars in sundry encounters. They think that after having disputed and gained the laurel under the banners of liberty, now, that they are likely to be robbed both of the honour and the fruits of it.”

But not for decades would the voice of the West mean much in American politics. Despite the complaints of the frontiersmen, the constitution was ratified, and the country embarked on its great experiment in federalism.

T
he alienation of the West from the East would give Andrew Jackson his opportunity in national politics; for now it contributed to one of the great—failed—experiments in American history. At the time John Donelson had reached the Big Salt Lick, the valley of the Cumberland was part of North Carolina. Yet during the next half decade, the government of North Carolina decided that its western region was too much trouble to govern, and it ceded the district to the United States. The Confederation Congress, amid its own troubles, was slow to respond, with the result that the territory that would become Tennessee hung in legal limbo, lacking a government of any kind.

Nearly all the inhabitants had emigrated from states that had recently written constitutions to replace their colonial charters, and to these emigrants it came naturally to write another constitution, for a state of their own. They named their state Franklin, after the Founding Father with the greatest interest in the West. For decades before the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin had argued that the West held the key to America’s future. At the end of the Revolutionary War he directed the negotiations that ensured that the United States owned the territory all the way to the Mississippi River. Though Franklin had never been anywhere near the Mississippi—being a city boy his entire life—he instinctively appreciated the importance of the great river for the future of the West. When Spain demanded control of the Mississippi as a condition for assisting the United States against Britain, he rejected the idea out of hand. “A neighbor might as well ask me to sell my street door,” he said.

The founders of the state of Franklin agreed with the famous doctor on the importance of the West and the Mississippi, and in August 1784 they sent delegates to Jonesboro, on the Nolichucky River, to discuss their grievances against North Carolina and the United States. The delegates voted unanimously to establish a state government. Four months later a constitutional convention drafted a charter for Franklin.

But then the republican spirit ran into the capitalist spirit. Among the Franklinites were a substantial number of speculators, who sought a state government primarily to secure titles to land. When the speculators began fighting among themselves, Franklin’s progress toward statehood stalled. It didn’t help matters that the Franklinites received no encouragement from Congress, which would ultimately have to ratify their handiwork. For a few years Franklin operated a land office and conducted diplomacy with Indian tribes, but neither its land titles nor its Indian treaties carried weight with anyone besides those directly involved. When Congress, following adoption of the federal Constitution, created the Southwest Territory in 1790, the state of Franklin vanished into the mists of the Smoky Mountains.

Y
et the sentiments that gave rise to Franklin weren’t so easily dispelled. Since the voyage of the Donelson party, the inhabitants of the western region had wondered whether geography didn’t dictate that their future lay with whatever country controlled the Mississippi. And when John Jay, in defiance of Benjamin Franklin’s dictum about front doors, proposed a treaty with Spain that would have ceded control of the Mississippi to the Spanish, the westerners were outraged. Some tried to block the treaty; others discussed joining the enemy. The latter group commenced clandestine talks with Spanish officials, offering to lead a secession movement that would take the West out of the Union and into the Spanish empire.

James Wilkinson was the most active of the pro-Spanish conspirators. In 1787 he loaded two flatboats with farm produce and floated to New Orleans, where he sold his cargo for a hefty profit. This aspect of his journey drew the notice of all upstream, who had wondered how their goods would be received at the Spanish port. But commerce was Wilkinson’s cover for a deeper game. While in New Orleans he secretly renounced his American citizenship and swore fealty to the king of Spain, and he proposed a scheme for detaching the trans-Appalachian districts from the United States and attaching them to Spain’s dominions. America’s westerners, he said, were desperate for access to the Mississippi and New Orleans. They would seek the protection of whatever government could guarantee them this. “The leading characters of Kentucky . . . ,” he told Estevan Miró and Martín Navarro, respectively the Spanish governor and commandant at New Orleans, “urged and entreated my voyage hither in order to develop if possible the disposition of Spain towards their country and to discover, if practicable, whether she would be willing to open a negotiation for our admission to her protections as subjects.” Wilkinson dissembled here; the separation scheme was his idea. Nor did he want it shared, even with—or especially with—those leading characters of Kentucky until it was a fait accompli. “Gentlemen,” he concluded to Miró and Navarro, “I have committed secrets of an important nature, such was would, if they were divulged, destroy my fame and fortune forever. . . . If the plan should eventually be rejected by the Court, I must rely on the candor and high honor of a dignified minister to bury these communications in eternal oblivion.”

Miró and Navarro passed Wilkinson’s proposal to the viceroy of New Spain, who in turn forwarded it to the Spanish government. The council of state considered the plan with interest but decided not to press the matter “until the Kentuckians attain the independence from the United States to which they aspire.” Meanwhile, though, the separatists should be encouraged in commerce and other activities that fostered separation. And Wilkinson should be given a “hope of remuneration” to keep him interested.

These matters took many months, and by the time Wilkinson got the reply to his first proposal, the United States had a new constitution and a more assertive government. Though neither was popular west of the mountains, each possessed sufficient novelty to make many Kentuckians want to wait and see what became of them. This complicated Wilkinson’s plan. He judged it politic to push independence for the West rather than attachment to Spain. The latter might draw Spain into war with the United States or Britain or both, and in such a war Spain could never defend its new acquisition. Western independence, on the other hand, would be less provocative and almost equally to Spain’s purpose. “That section of the country,” Wilkinson said, in a second memorial to the Spanish government, “bound by its own interests, would still continue to serve as a barrier for Louisiana and Mexico as fully as if it were under the jurisdiction of Spain.” To facilitate the separation, Spain should make covert payments to influential individuals; Wilkinson helpfully supplied a list of recipients and appropriate amounts, ranging from five hundred to two thousand dollars. For himself he asked seven thousand dollars. He again stressed the need for discretion, lest discovery of his plan “expose me to great embarrassment.”

Miró and the Spanish could keep secrets. Not for decades would Wilkinson’s Spanish connection cause him the embarrassment he feared, and then because Andrew Jackson made a point of calling him on it. Meanwhile Wilkinson secretly collected a pension from the Spanish government and openly encouraged the settlers of the Cumberland to name their neighborhood the Mero District, in misspelled honor of the Spanish governor.

I
t was to the Mero District that Andrew Jackson relocated about the time the Spanish court answered Wilkinson’s first proposal. The open agitation for the state of Franklin and the veiled discussions with Spain caused North Carolina to reconsider its cession of its western lands, and after talks with some of the inhabitants of the interior it reasserted its jurisdiction and established institutions of governance. Foremost of these institutions was a court, with power to punish crime, compel payment of debts, and otherwise bring order to the frontier. The court required a judge, and the judge a solicitor, or prosecutor. Neither post was a plum. Each appealed chiefly to lawyers lacking profitable practice in the East. Jackson perhaps hoped for the judgeship, but it went to his Salisbury roommate John McNairy, who had better political connections. Yet McNairy tapped Jackson for the solicitor’s job. In the summer of 1788 the judge and the prosecutor prepared to travel to Nashville, the town that had grown up near the Big Salt Lick and that served as capital of the Mero District.