However, the administration papers were not slow in lashing back at Jackson. The National journal a.s.serted: "General Jackson"s mother was a Common Prost.i.tute, brought to this country by British soldiers! She afterwards married a Mulatto Man, by whom she had several children, of which number General Jackson is one!" Jackson burst into tears when he read this statement, but he was still more upset by attacks on the validity of his marriage to Rachel. He swore he would challenge to a duel, and kill, anyone he could identify being behind the rumors. He meant Clay of course. (On his deathbed, Jackson said the two things he most regretted in his life were that "I did not hang Calhoun and shoot Clay.") In fact, on a quite separate issue, Clay and Randolph did fight a duel on the Potomac banks, just where the National Airport now stands: neither was hurt but Clay"s bullet went through Randolph"s coat (he bought the Senator a new one). When Jackson got information that a private detective, an Englishman called Day, was nosing around Natchez and Nashville looking at marriage registers, he wrote to Sam Houston that, when he got information about Clay"s "secret movements," he would proceed "to his political and perhaps his actual destruction." Clay was certainly warned by friends that gunmen were after him. Jackson went so far as to have ten prominent men in the Nashville area draw up a statement, which filled ten columns in the Telegraph, testifying that his marriage to Rachel was valid. That did not stop the administration producing a pamphlet which asked: "Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband be placed in the highest offices in the land?" The Telegraph replied by claiming that Mr. and Mrs Adams had lived in sin before them marriage and that the President was an alcoholic and a sabbath-breaker.
The Presidential campaign of 1828 was also famous for the first appearance of the "leak" and the campaign poster. Adams complained: "I write few private letters ... I can never be sure of writing a line which will not some day be published by friend or foe." Anti-slavery New England was regaled by a pamphlet ent.i.tled General Jackson"s Negro Speculations, and his Traffic in Human Flesh, Examined and Established by Positive Proof. Even more spectacular was the notorious "Coffin Handbill," printed for circulation and display, under the headline "Some Account of Some of the b.l.o.o.d.y Deeds of General Jackson," listing eighteen murders, victims of duels or executions he had carried out, with accompanying coffins. Harriet Martineau related that in England, where these accusations circulated and were generally believed, a schoolboy, asked in cla.s.s who killed Abel, replied, "General JACKSON, Ma"am." Campaign badges and fancy party waistcoats had made their first appearance in 1824, but it was in i8z8 that the real razzmatazz began. Jackson"s unofficial campaign manager was Amos Kendall (1789-1869), editor of the Argus of Western America, who in 1827 had switched from Clay to Jackson. Jackson had long been known to his troops as Old Hickory, as that was "the hardest wood in creation." Kendall seized on this to set up a nationwide network of "Hickory Clubs." Hickory trees were planted in pro-Jackson districts in towns and cities and Hickory poles were erected in villages; Hickory canes and sticks were sold to supporters and flourished at meetings. There were Hickory parades, barbecues, and street-rallies. Kendall had the first campaign song, "The Hunters of Kentucky," written and set to music. It told of the great victory of 1815 and of "Packenham [sic] and his Braggs"-how he and his men would rape the girls of New Orleans, the "beautiful girls of every hue" from "snowy white to sooty"-and of how Old Hickory had frustrated his dastardly plans and killed him.
Jackson proved an ideal candidate, who knew exactly when to hold his tongue and when to give vent to a (usually simulated) rage. And he had the ideal second-in-command in Martin Van Buren, head of the Albany Regency, which ran New York State, a small, energetic, dandified figure, with his reddish-blond hair, snuff-colored coat, white trousers, lace-tipped orange cravat, broad-brimmed beaver-fur hat, yellow gloves, and morocco shoes. If Van Buren dressed like the young Disraeli, he had something Disraeli never possessed-a real, up-to-date political machine. Van Buren grew up in the New York of Aaron Burr and De Witt Clinton. New York politics were already very complex and rococo-outsiders confessed inability to understand them-but they were the very air the little man breathed. Burr had turned the old Jeffersonian patriotic club, the Society of Saint Tammany, where members came to drink, smoke, and sing in an old shed, into the nucleus of a Big City political organization. Clinton had invented the "spoils system," whereby an incoming governor turned out all office holders and rewarded his supporters with their jobs. New York was already politics on a huge scale-a man would hesitate between running for governor and running for president. Van Buren"s genius lay in uniting Tammany with the spoils system, then using both to upstage first Burr, then Clinton, and rule the roost himself.
Van Buren was the first political bureaucrat. He came from the pure Dutch backwater of Kinderhook in Albany County, where the Rip Van Winkle stories originated, but there was nothing sleepy about him. His motto was: "Get the details right." His Tammany men were called Bucktails by their enemies, because of their rustic origins, but he taught them to be proud of their name and to wear the symbol in their hats, just as the Democrats later flaunted their donkey. Branching out from Tammany, he constructed an entire statewide system. His party newspapers in Albany, and in New York City, proclaimed the party line and supplied printed handbills, posters, and ballots for statewide distribution. The line was then repeated in the country newspapers, of which Van Buren controlled fifty in 1827. The line was set by the party elite of lawyers and placemen. Even by the 1820s, America, and especially New York, was a lawyers" paradise. Frequent sessions in New York"s complex court circuit system kept the lawyers moving. Van Buren used them as a communications artery to towns and villages even in remote parts of the state. Officeholders appointed by the governor"s council were the basis for party pressure groups everywhere. Van Buren"s own views sprang from the nature of his organization. The party ident.i.ty must be clear. Loyalty to majority decisions taken in party councils must be absolute. All measures had to be fully discussed and agreed, and personal interests subordinated to party ones. Loyalty was rewarded and disloyalty punished without mercy.
When Van Buren"s Bucktails took over the state in 1821, he conducted a ma.s.sacre of major officeholders at the council"s very first meeting and thereafter combed through 6,000 lesser jobs removing Clintonians, federalists, and unreliable Bucktails. Clinton, who had invented the spoils system, let out a howl of rage. This kind of punishment-and-rewards system was the very opposite of what the Founding Fathers had envisaged; but it was the future of American politics. And Van Buren, like many American master-politicians since, was quite capable of combining party ruthlessness with high-mindedness. He was a political schizophrenic, admitting he abused power occasionally and vowing never to do it again (he did of course). He supported Clinton"s great project of the Erie Ca.n.a.l, because he thought it was in the interests of New York and America, despite the fact that the Ca.n.a.l, triumphantly completed on November 2, 1825, helped Clinton to regain the governorship-and ma.s.sacre the Bucktails in turn. American political history has since thrown up repeated exemplars of what might be called the Van Buren Syndrome-men who could combine true zeal for the public interest with fanatical devotion to the party principle.
Most of 1827 the a.s.siduous Van Buren spent building up the new Jacksonian Democratic Party, traveling along rotten roads in jolting carriages to win support from difficult men like Benton of Missouri, a great power in the West, the splendid but bibulous orator Randolph, who was often "exhilarated with toast.w.a.ter," down to Georgia to conciliate old, sick Crawford, up through the Carolinas and Virginia and back to Washington. Thus, for the first time, the Democratic "Solid South" was brought into existence. In February 1828 Clinton died of a heart-attack, clearing the way for Van Buren to become governor of New York State. He spent seven weeks in July and August, electioneering in the sticky heat of grim new villages upstate, taking basic provisions with him in his carriages, for none were to be had en route, complaining of insects, humidity, and sudden storms which turned the tracks into marshes. He brought with him cartloads of posters, Jackson badges (another innovation), Bucktails to wear in hats, and Hickory sticks. He was the first American politician to a.s.semble a team of writers, not just to compose speeches but to draft articles for scores of local newspapers. Artists and writers who supported the Jackson campaign included James Fenimore Cooper, the sculptor Horatio Greenough, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the historian George Bancroft, William Cullen Bryant, then the leading American poet, and another well-known poet William Leggett. Apart from Ralph Waldo Emerson, most of America"s writers and intellectuals seem to have backed Jackson-the first time they ganged up together to endorse a candidate. As Harriet Martineau put it, Jackson had the support of the underprivileged, the humanitarians, the careerists, and "the men of genius. Adams confided bitterly in his diary: "Van Buren is now the great electioneering manager for General Jackson [and] has improved as much in the art of electioneering upon Burr, as the state of New York has grown in relative strength and importance in the Union." Adams was safe in New England but he could see-already-that the South plus New York made a formidable combination.
This was the first popular election. In twenty-two of the twenty-four states (Delaware and Rhode Island still had their legislatures choose college electors), the voters themselves picked the president. Except in Virginia they were equivalent to the adult male white population. A total of 1,155,340 voted, and Adams did well to get 508,064 of them, carrying New England, New Jersey, and Delaware, and a majority of the college in Maryland. Even in New York he got sixteen out of thirty-six college votes because Van Buren, despite all his efforts, carried the state by a plurality of only 5,000. That gave Adams eighty-three electoral votes in all. But Jackson got all the rest and a popular vote of 647,276. So Jackson went to Washington with a clear popular mandate, ending the old indirect, oligarchical system for ever.
The manner of the takeover was as significant as the result. In those days voting for president started in September and ended in November, but the new inc.u.mbent did not take office till March. Washington was then a slow, idle, Southern city. Designed by Pierre L"Enfant and laid out by the surveyor Andrew Ellicott (1764-1820), it was in a state of constant constructional turmoil but contrived to be sleepy at the same time. Its chief boast was its 91,665 feet of brick pavement, though it also had, at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 13th Street, the Rotondo, with its "Transparent Panoramic View of West Point and Adjacent Scenery." Banquets for the legislators, which were frequent, began at 5.30 P.M. and progressed relentlessly through soup, fish, turkey, beef, mutton, ham, pheasant, ice cream, jelly, and fruit, taken with sherry, a great many table wines, madeira, and champagne. There was, besides, much drinking of sherry cobblers and gin c.o.c.ktails, slings made with various spirits, juleps, snakeroot bitters, timber doodly, and eggnogs. Most politicians lived in boarding houses, most of them decorous, a few louche. But there were already hostesses who set the tone which was oligarchical, elitist, and essentially Virginian Ascendancy.
To Jackson, then, it was a hostile city and he arrived there President-elect, on February 11, 1829, a sad and bitter man. Early in December his wife Rachel had gone to Nashville to buy clothes for he new position. There, she picked up a pamphlet defending her from charges of adultery and bigamy. Hitherto the General had concealed from her the true nature of the smear campaign waged against her honor, and the shock of discovery was too much. She took to her bed and died on December 22. To his dying day Jackson believed his political enemies had murdered her and he swore a dreadful revenge. He put up at Gadsby"s Boarding House. He was not alone. From every one o the twenty-four states his followers congregated on the capital, 10,000-strong army of the poor, the outlandish, the needy, above all the hopeful. Washingtonians were appalled as these people a.s.sembled, many in dirty leather clothes, the "inundations of the northern barbarians into Rome." They drank the city dry of whiskey within days, the crammed the hotels, which tripled their prices to $20 a week, they slept five in a bed, then on the floors, spilling over into Georgetown any Alexandria, finally into the fields. Daniel Webster wrote: "I never saw such a crowd here before. Persons have come 500 miles to see General Jackson and they really seem to think the country has been rescued from some general disaster." But most wanted jobs. Clay joked sardonically about the moment "when the lank, lean, famished forms, from fen and forest and the four quarters of the Union, gathered together in the halls of patronage; or stealing by evening"s twilight into the apartments of the president"s mansion, cried out with ghastly faces and in sepulchral tones, "give us bread, give us Treasury pap, give us our reward!"
The inaugural itself was a demotic saturnalia, reminiscent of scene from the early days of the French Revolution but enacted against a const.i.tutional background of the strictest legality. It was sunny and warm, the winter"s mud, 2 feet deep in places, beginning to dry. By 10 A.M. vast crowd, held back by a ship"s cable, had a.s.sembled under the East Portico of the unfinished Capitol. At eleven, Jackson emerged from Gadsby"s and, escorted by soldiers, walked to the Capitol in a shambling procession of New Orleans veterans and politicians, flanked by "hacks, gigs, sulkies and woodcarts and a Dutch waggon full of females." At noon, by which time 30,000 people surrounded the Capitol, the band played "The President"s March," there was a twentyfour-gun salute, and Jackson, according to one critical observer, Mrs Margaret Bayard Smith, bowed low to the People in all its majesty." The President, with two pairs of spectacles, one on top of his head and other before his eyes, read from a paper words n.o.body could hear. Then he bowed to the people again and mounted a white horse to ride to his new mansion, "Such a cortege as followed him," gasped Mrs Smith, "countrymen, farmers, gentlemen mounted and dismounted, boys, women and children, black and white, carriages, waggons and carts all pursuing him."
Suddenly, to the dismay of the gentry watching from the balconies of their houses, it became obvious that the vast crowd in its entirety was going to enter the White House. It was like the sansculottes taking over the Tuilleries. A Supreme Court justice said those pouring into the building ranged from "the highest and most polished" to "the most vulgar and gross in the nation-the reign of King Mob seemed triumphant." Soon the ground floor of the White House was crammed. Society ladies fainted, others grabbed anything within reach. A correspondent wrote to Van Buren in New York: "It would have done Mr Wilberforce"s heart good to see a stout black wench eating a jelly with a gold spoon in the president"s house." Clothes were torn; barrels of orange punch were knocked over; men with muddy boots jumped on "damask satin-covered chairs" worth $150 each to see better; and china and gla.s.sware "worth several thousand dollars" were smashed. To get the mob out of the house, the White House servants took huge stocks of liquor onto the lawn and the hoi polloi followed, "black, yellow and grey [with dirt] many of them fit subjects for a penitentiary." Jackson, sick of it all, climbed out by a rear window and went back to Gadsby"s to eat a steak, already a prime symbol of American prosperity. He declined, being in mourning, to join 1,200 citizens at the ball in Signor Carusi"s a.s.sembly Rooms, a more sedate affair, ticket only. The scenes at the White House were the subject of much pious moralizing at Washington"s many places of worship that Sunday, the pastor at the posh Unitarian Church preaching indignantly from Luke 19:41-"Jesus beheld the city and wept over it."
Then came the rewards. One of Van Buren"s sidekicks, Senator William L. Marcy, responding to the weeping and gnashing of teeth as the Old Guard were fired, told the Senate that such "removals" were part of the political process, adding, "To the victors belong the spoils of the enemy." The phrase stuck and Jackson will always be credited with bringing the spoils system into federal government. Mrs Smith wrote bitterly of the expulsions: "so many families broken up-and those of the first distinction-drawing rooms now dark, empty, dismantled." Adams protested: "The [new] appointments are exclusively of violent partisans and every editor of a scurrilous and slanderous newspaper is provided for." It is true that Jackson was the first president to give journalists senior jobs-Amos Kendall for example got a Treasury auditorship. But Jackson partisans pointed out that, of 10,093 government appointees, only 919 were removed in the first eighteen months and over the whole eight years of the Jackson presidency only 10 percent were replaced. Moreover, many of those sacked deserved to be; eighty-seven had jail records. The Treasury in particular was full of useless people and rogues. One insider reported: "a considerable number of the officers are old men and drunkards. Harrison, the First Auditor, I have not yet seen sober." One fled and was caught, convicted, and sentenced. Nine others were found to have embezzled. Within eighteen months Kendall and other nosy appointees discovered $500,000 had been stolen, quite apart from other thefts at the army and navy offices and Indian contracts. The Registrar of the Treasury, who had stolen $10,000 but had been there since the Revolution, begged Jackson to let him stay. Jackson: "Sir, I would turn out my own father under the same circ.u.mstances." But he relented in one case when a sacked postmaster from Albany accosted him at a White House reception and said he had nothing else to live on. He began to take off his coat to show the President his wounds. Jackson: "Put your coat on at once, Sir!" But the next day he changed his mind and took the man"s name off the sackings list: "Do you know that he carries a pound of British lead in his body?" Jackson"s appointments turned out to be no more and no less corrupt than the men they replaced and historians are divided on the overall significance of bringing the spoils system to Washington.
Two of Jackson"s appointments turned out disasters. The first was the selection of Samuel Swartwout as collector of customs in New York, which involved handling more cash than any other on earth, $15 million in 1829. His claim to office was that he had backed Jackson in New York even before Van Buren. But he was a crooked old crony of Burr, who gambled on horses, stocks, and fast women. In due course he fled to Europe, taking with him $1,222,705.09, the biggest official theft in US history, worse than all the peculations of the Adams administration put together.
An even more serious mistake was Jackson"s sentimental decision to make his old comrade and crony Major John Eaton the War Secretary. The canny Van Buren, who knew Swartwout of old but had been unable to prevent his appointment, was even more uneasy about Eaton, whom he regarded as indiscreet, negligent, and the last man to keep a Cabinet secret. He was even more suspicious of Eaton"s wife, a pretty, pert young woman of twenty-nine called Peggy, a known adulteress who had lived in sin with Eaton before Jackson ordered him to marry her. But the President, adoring spirited ladies who stood up to him in conversation, would not hear a word said against her.
This imprudent appointment set in motion a chain of bizarre events which were to change permanently the way in which America is governed. The well-informed Amos Kendall dismissed rumors that Peggy was a wh.o.r.e; she was, he said, merely egotistical, selfish, pushy, and "too forward in her manners." But the other Cabinet wives, older and plainer, hated her from the start and insisted she had slept with "at least" twenty men, quite apart from Eaton, before her second marriage to him. If old Rachel had lived, she might have kept the Cabinet matrons in line (or, more likely, quashed the appointment in the first place). But her place had been taken by the twenty-year-old Emily Donelson, wife of Jackson"s adopted son. Emily had been accustomed to managing a huge Southern plantation and was not in the least daunted by running the White House with its eighteen servants. But she would not stay in the same room with Peggy, who, she said, "was held in too much abhorrence ever to be noticed." Mrs Calhoun, wife of the Vice-President and a grand Southern lady, would not even come to Washington in case she was asked to "meet" Mrs Eaton. Adams, for whom the Peggy Eaton row was the first nice thing to happen since he lost the presidency, recorded gleefully in his diary that Samuel D. Ingham, the Treasury Secretary, John M. Berrien, the Attorney General, John Branch, the Navy Secretary, and Colonel Nathan Towson, the Paymaster-General, had all "given large evening parties to which Mrs Eaton is not invited ... the Administration party is slipped into a blue and green faction upon this point of morals ... Calhoun heads the moral party, Van Buren that of the frail sisterhood." The fact is, Van Buren was a bachelor, with no wife to raise objections, and he, and the British amba.s.sador, another bachelor, gave the only dinner parties to which Peggy was invited.
The battle of the dinner-parties, what Van Buren called the "Eaton Malaria," was waged furiously throughout the spring and summer of 1829. It became more important than any other issue, political or otherwise. Jackson"s first big reception was a catastrophe, as the Cabinet wives cut Peggy dead in front of a delightedly goggling Washington gratin. At one point the President laid down an ultimatum to three Cabinet members: they must ask Mrs Eaton to their wives" dinner-parties or risk being sacked. He thought Clay had organized it all but patient work by Van Buren showed that the wives, and Emily, had had no contact with Clay. Jackson then referred darkly to a "conspirasy" organized by "villians" and "females with clergymen at their head." The clergymen were the Rev. Ezra Stile Ely of Philadelphia and the Rev. J. M. Campbell, pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Washington, which Jackson often attended. Both believed the gossip, and Jackson had both of them to the White House to argue them out of their suspicions. He exchanged some striking letters with Ely on the subject and engaged in amateur detective-work, rummaging up "facts" to prove Peggy"s innocence and having investigators consult hotel registers and interview witnesses. At 7 P.M. on September 10, 1829, he summoned what must have been the oddest Cabinet meeting in American history to consider what he termed Eaton"s "alleged criminal intercourse" with Peggy before their marriage. Both Ely and Campbell were bidden to attend. The meeting began with a furious altercation between Campbell and the President on whether Peggy had had a miscarriage and whether the Eatons had been seen in bed in New York or merely sitting on it. The Cabinet sat in speechless embarra.s.sment as the clergyman droned on, often interrupted by Jackson"s exclamations: "By the G.o.d eternal!" and "She is as chaste as a virgin!" Campbell finally rushed out of the room in a rage, saying he would prove his accusations in a law court, and the Cabinet meeting broke up in confusion.
The episode testifies more to Jackson"s irrational loyalty than to his common sense. As might have been foreseen, he never contrived to force Mrs Eaton on Washington society. She was a worthless woman anyway. Her black page, Francis Hillery, later described her as "the most compleat Peace of deception that ever G.o.d made, and as a mistres it would be cruelty to put a dum brute under her Command." Her ultimate fate was pitiful. When Eaton died in 1856, leaving her a wealthy widow, she married an Italian dancing-master, Antonio Buchignani, who defrauded her of all her property and ran off with her pretty granddaughter. But she changed the way America is governed.
One of the most fascinating aspects of history is the way power shift from formal to informal inst.i.tutions. The Cabinet system, which itself began in Britain as an informal replacement of the old Privy Council, was adopted by George Washington in the 1790s and was still functioning under John Quincy Adams. Jackson, however, was the first president to be elected by a decisive popular mandate and, in a sense, this gave him the moral right to exercise the truly awesome powers which the US Const.i.tution confers to its chief executive. From the outset, an informal group of cronies began to confer with him in the entrails of the White House. They included Kendall, his old aide Major Lewis, his adopted son Donelson, Isaac Hill, the former editor of the New Hampshire Patriot, and two members of the official Cabinet, Eaton and Van Buren. Jackson"s enemies called it the "Kitchen Cabinet" and declared it unconst.i.tutional.
Jackson began to lean more and more on this group as he became slowly convinced that opposition to Peggy was not just moral but political, orchestrated by Calhoun and his wife Floride, who had finally come to Washington to make trouble. Van Buren encouraged this conspiracy theory. Not for nothing was he known as the "Little Magician." Behind his spells was the deep, often hidden, but steadily growing antagonism between North and South. Van Buren stood for the commercial supremacy of the industrial North, Calhoun for the extreme version of states" rights. It was not difficult for the Secretary of State to persuade his President that the notion of sovereignty being peddled by Calhoun was a mortal threat to the Union itself, and that the VicePresident, using Mrs Eaton as a pretext, was behind a much wider "conspiracy" to subvert Jackson"s Cabinet. Jackson slowly came to accept this notion and in April 1831 he acted, following a plan of Van Buren"s. To avoid suspicion, Van Buren resigned. Then almost all the other Cabinet ministers were sacked and replaced, leaving Calhoun isolated to serve the rest of his term. Van Buren"s reward was to be made heir apparent, getting first the vice-presidency (during Jackson"s second term), then the reversion of the presidency itself.
Meanwhile the Kitchen Cabinet governed the country. It had no agenda. Its membership varied. Outsiders thought its most important figure was Kendall. He certainly wrote Jackson"s speeches. The General would lie on his bed, smoking his fearsome pipe and "uttering thoughts." Kendall would put them into presidential prose. Congressman Henry A. Wise termed Kendall "the President"s thinking machine, and his writing machine-aye, and his lying machine." Harriet Martineau, reporting Washington gossip, said "it is all done in the dark...work of goblin extent and with goblin speed, which makes men look about with a suspicious wonder, and the invisible Amos Kendall has the credit for it all." Very likely Kendall had much less power than was ascribed to him. But he symbolized what was happening to government. The old Cabinet had been designed to represent interests from all over the Union and its members were a cross-section of the ruling cla.s.s, insofar as America had one-they were gentlemen. The Kitchen Cabinet, by contrast, brought into the exercise of power hitherto excluded cla.s.ses such as journalists. Kendall despised Washington society, which he accused of trying to ape London and Paris. He thought "late dinner" was "a ridiculous English custom," drinking champagne instead of whiskey "uppety," low-cut evening dresses "disgusting."
The idea of men like Kendall helping to rule America was appalling to men like Adams. But there it was. Jackson had successfully wooed the ma.s.ses, and they now had their snouts in the trough. Jackson not only set up a new political dynasty which was to last, with one or two exceptions, up to the Civil War. He also changed the power-structure permanently. The Kitchen Cabinet, which proliferated in time into the present enormous White House bureaucracy and its a.s.sociated agencies, was the product of the new accretion of presidential power made possible by the personal contract drawn up every four years between the president and the ma.s.s electorate. That a man like Kendall came to symbolize these new arrangements was appropriate, for if Jackson was the first man to sign the new contract with democracy, the press was instrumental in drawing it up.
Ordinary people did not care much whether they were ruled by a formal Cabinet or a kitchen one, as long as that rule was light. And, under Jackson, it was. He let the economy expand and boom. As a result, the revenue from indirect taxation and land sales shot up, the meager bills of the federal government were paid without difficulty, and the national debt was reduced. In 1835 and 1836, it was totally eliminated, something which has never happened before in a modern state-or since. There is no doubt that electors liked this frugal, minimalist, popular style of government, with no frills and no pretensions to world greatness. In 1831 Jackson was reelected by a landslide, the first in American presidential history. The luckless Clay was his main opponent. It is a curious fact that, although Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe had all been Masons, Clay was the only one whose Masonry was held against him (perhaps because he never went to church), especially in New York. So in 1832 Clay had to face an anti-Mason candidate, Thurlow Weed, who got a popular vote of 101,051, which would have gone mainly to Clay. Clay campaigned frantically, and oscillated between Kentucky and Washington, much of the time with his wife and grandson, four servants, two carriages, six horses, a jacka.s.s, and a big shepherd dog-all to no avail. He got 437,462 to Jackson"s 688,242 votes, and in the electoral college the margin was even greater-a mere 49 to Jackson"s 219.
This was the beginning of the Jacksonian Democratic dominance. Jackson virtually appointed his successor, Van Buren, and though Van Buren failed to get reelected in 1840 because of a severe economic crisis, that was the only blip in the long series of Democratic victories. The Democrats returned with James K. Polk or "Little Hickory" as he was known, in 1844, with Zachary Taylor in 1848 (who, dying in office, was succeeded by Millard Fillmore), and then by two solid Jacksonians, Franklin Pierce, 1852, and James Buchanan, 1856. In effect, Jackson, or his ideas, ruled America from 1828 to the Civil War.
And what were these ideas? One was Union. No one was ever stronger for the Union than Jackson, not even Lincoln himself. Jackson might be a slave-owner, a small government man, a states" rights man and, in effect, a Southerner, or a Southwesterner, but first and foremost he was a Union man. He made this clear when portions of the South, especially South Carolina, threatened to leave the federal Union, or nullify its decisions, unless Washington"s economic policy was tailored to fit Southern interests. The South, being a huge exporter of cotton and tobacco, was strongly in favor of low tariffs. The North, building up its infant industry, wanted tariffs high. Congress had enacted its first protective high tariff in 1816, over Southern protests. In 1828 it put through an even higher one, the "Tariff of Abominations," which made US tariffs among the highest in the world and hit Britain, the South"s main trading-partner. South Carolina was particularly bitter. From being one of the richer states, it feared becoming one of the poorest. It lost 70,000 people in the 1820s and 150,000 in the 1830s. It blamed high tariffs for its distress. Jackson did his best to get tariffs down and "he 1832 Tariff Act was an improvement on the Abominations. But it lid not go far enough to satisfy the South Carolinans and their leader, Calhoun. In November 1832 the state held a const.i.tutional convention which overwhelmingly adopted an Ordinance of Nullification. This few const.i.tutional device, inspired by Calhoun, ruled the Tariff Acts of 1828 and 1832 to be unconst.i.tutional and unlawful and forbade all collection of duties in the state from February 1, 1833. Its legislature also provided that any citizen whose property was seized by the federal authorities could get a court order to recover twice its value.
To fight this battle in Washington, Calhoun quit the administration finally by resigning the vice-presidency and was promptly elected senator. In reply, Jackson (with all the authority of a newly reelected president) issued a Nullification Proclamation on December 10 which stated emphatically that "The power to annul a law of the United States, a.s.sumed by one state, [is] incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Const.i.tution, unauthorised by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed" (Jackson"s italics). The Const.i.tution, he added, "forms a government, not a league." It was "a single nation" and the states did not "possess any right to secede." They had already surrendered "essential parts of [their] sovereignty," which they could not retract. Their citizens were American citizens primarily, and owed a prime obedience to its Const.i.tution and laws. The people, he said, were sovereign, the Union perpetual. This, coming from a man who was born in South Carolina, and had been an anti-federalist all his life, was an amazing statement of anti-states" rights principle, and was to make it infinitely easier for Lincoln to fight for the Union in 1860.
Jackson went further. As chief executive, he had to enforce the laws pa.s.sed by Congress, and that included collection of the tariffs: "I have no discretionary powers on the subject; my duty is emphatically p.r.o.nounced in the Const.i.tution." He spoke to the people of South Carolina directly. They were being deceived by "wicked men"-he meant Calhoun-who a.s.sured them they would get away with it. He, as president, wanted to disillusion them before it was too late: "Disunion by force is treason" and would be put down with all the strength of the federal government. It would mean "civil strife" and the necessary conquest of South Carolina by federal forces. Indeed, he rather implied that any ringleaders would be tried for treason and hanged-and in private that is exactly what he threatened to do to his former Vice-President. He requested Congress to pa.s.s a Force Bill. He followed this up with a whole series of military measures-moving three divisions of artillery, calling for volunteers, mobilizing militias. He ordered the head of the army, General Winfield Scott, to Charleston Harbor, where Fort Moultrie and Castle Pinckney were reinforced, and a battleship and seven revenue cutters took up station in the harbor. He also organized, within the state, a pro-Union force which he hoped, if it came to war, would act and disarm the traitors. They responded to his proclamation: "Enough! What have we to fear? We are right and G.o.d and Old Hickory are with us."
The existence of an armed Unionist party within the state was one reason why the Nullifiers were forced to hesitate. Another was the failure of any other Southern state to join the South Carolina legislature in its measures to defy the tariff. But a third was Henry Clay, the "Great Compromiser." On February 12, 1833, just as South Carolina was planning, in effect, to secede, he brought forward an ingenious measure which progressively reduced the tariff to 20 percent by 1842. This was not as much as South Carolina wanted but it was enough to save its face. Jackson signed both the Force Act and the Compromise Tariff on March 1, 1833, and immediately afterwards South Carolina withdrew its Nullification Law. Needless to say, Clay got no thanks from either Jackson or Calhoun for getting them off their respective hooks. But the pending conflict between North and South was put off for another two decades and the power, strength, and rights of the Union publicly vindicated. The South was never quite the same again after this enforced climb-down by its most extreme state." The fact is, Jackson had a.s.serted, as president, that the Union could not be dissolved by the unilateral action of a state (or group of states), and the challenger had been forced to comply, implicitly at least.
If Jackson"s democratic America was implacable with Southern separatism, it was even more relentless in destroying the last remnants of Indian power and property east of the Mississippi. Of course Jackson was not alone. White opinion-and black for that matter: the blacks found the Indians harsher masters than anyone-were virtually united in wanting to integrate the Indians or kick them west, preferably far west. Jackson had destroyed Indian power in the Southeast even before he became president. And, under Monroe, Indian power south of the Great Lakes was likewise annihilated by General Lewis Ca.s.s (1782-1866), hero of the 1812 War and governor of Michigan Territory 1813-21. In August 1825 Ca.s.s called a conference of 1,000 leaders of all the Northwest tribes at Prairie du Chien and told them to settle their tribal boundaries. Once this was done, he made compulsory deals with each tribe separately. In 1826 he forced the Potawatomi to hand over an enormous tract in Indiana. The Miami handed over their lands in Indiana for $55,000 and an annuity of $25,000. Other separate tribal deals were similar. In the years 1826-30 the Indians were forced to surrender not only their old land but their new reservations, as the settlers poured in to take over. There was a substantial Indian uprising in 1829, but it was put down by overwhelming force, Washington for the first time using steam gunboats on the Great Lake! just as the British were using them to build up their empire all over the world. As a result of this "Gunboat Diplomacy," the Indians were pushed across the Mississippi, or left in small pockets, an 190,879,370 acres of their lands pa.s.sed into white hands at a cost of a little over $70 million in gifts and annuities."
Ca.s.s was a sophisticated man, who later held high posts in diplomacy and politics. He was one of the few Indian-fighters who actually set down his views on the subject-an essay ent.i.tled "The Policy and Practice of the United States and Great Britain in their Treatment of Indians," published in the North American Review, 1827. He said he could not understand why the Indians, after 200 years of contact with the white man, had not "improved." It was a "moral phenomenon-it had to be-since "a principle of progressive improvement seems almost inherent in human nature." But "the desire to ameliorate their condition" did not seem to exist in "the const.i.tution of our savages. Like the bear and deer and buffalo in his own forests, the Indian lives as his father lived, and dies as his father died. He never attempts to imitate the arts of his civilised neighbors. His life pa.s.ses away in a succession of listless indolence, and of vigorous exertion to provide for his animal wants or to gratify his baleful pa.s.sions ... he is perhaps destined to disappear with the forests."
In fact the Indians varied enormously. The Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles, who bore the brunt of white aggression, had long been known as the "Five Civilized Tribes." John Quincy Adams, who was always hostile to Indians, had to admit that a delegation of Cherokees who came to see President Monroe in 1824 were "most civilised." "These men," he recorded, "were dressed entirely according to our manner. Two of them spoke English with good p.r.o.nunciation and one with grammatical accuracy. "147 During a Cabinet discussion of what Monroe called "the absolute necessity" that "the Indians should move West of the Mississippi," Calhoun, Secretary of War, argued that "the great difficulty" was not savagery but precisely "the progress of the Cherokees in civilisation." He said there were 15,000 in Georgia, increasing just as fast as the whites. They were "all cultivators, with a representative government, judicial courts, Lancaster schools and permanent property." Their "princ.i.p.al chiefs," he added, "write their own State Papers and reason as logically as most white diplomatists."
What Calhoun said was true. The Cherokees were advancing and adopting white forms of social and political organization. Their national council went back to 1792, their written legal code to 1808. In 1817 they formed a republic, with a senate of thirteen elected for two year terms, the rest of the council forming the lower house. In 1820 they divided their territory into eight congressional districts, each mapped and provided with police, courts, and powers to raise taxes, pay salaries, and collect debts. In 1826 a Cherokee spokesman gave a public lecture in Philadelphia, describing the system. The next year a national convention drew up a written const.i.tution, based on America"s, giving the vote to "all free male citizens" over eighteen, except "those of African descent." The first elections were held in summer 1828. A Supreme Court had been functioning five years. The first issue of the republic"s own paper, the Cherokee Phoenix, appeared February 28, 1828. Its capital, New Echota, was quite an elaborate place, with a fine Supreme Court building, a few two-story red-brick homes, including one owned by Joseph ("Rich Joe") Van, which is still to be found near what is now Chatsworth, Georgia, and neat rows of log cabins.
The trouble with this little utopia-as the whites saw it-was that it was built as a h.o.m.ogeneous Indian unit. It mattered not to the whites that this self-contained community virtually eliminated all the evils whites a.s.sociated with Indians. The Phoenix campaigned strongly against alcohol and there was a plan to enforce prohibition. The courts were severe on horse thieves. The authorities urged all Indians to work and provided the means. There were 2,000 spinning-wheels, 700 looms, thirty-one grist-mills, eight cotton gins, eighteen schools-using English and a new written version of Cherokee. The 15,000 Indians of this settled community owned 20,000 cattle and 1,500 slaves, like any other "civilized" Georgians. But its very existence, and still more its const.i.tution, violated both state and federal law, and in 1827 Georgia pet.i.tioned the federal government to "remove" the Indians forthwith. The discovery of gold brought in a rush of white prospectors and provided a further economic motive. The election of General Jackson at the end of 1828 sealed the community"s fate. In his inaugural address he insisted that the integrity of the state of Georgia, and the Const.i.tution of the United States, came before Indian interests, however meritorious. A man who was prepared to wage war against his own people, the South Carolinans, for the sake of const.i.tutional principles, was not going to let a "utopia of savages" form an anomaly within a vast and growing nation united in a single system of law and government. And of course, with hindsight, Jackson was absolutely right. A series of independent Indian republics in the midst of the United States would, by the end of the 20th century, have turned America into chaos, with representation at the United Nations, independent foreign policies, endless attempts to overthrow earlier Indian treaties and territorial demands on all their white neighbors.
Some whites supported the Cherokee Republic at the time. When Congress, in response to the Georgia pet.i.tion, decreed that, after January 1, 1830, all state laws applied to Indians, and five months later pa.s.sed a Removal Bill authorizing the President to drive any eastern Indians still organized tribally across the Mississippi, if necessary by force, a group of missionaries encouraged the Cherokee Republic to challenge the law in the Supreme Court. But in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, the Marshall Court ruled that the tribe did not const.i.tute a nation within the meaning of the US Const.i.tution and so could not bring suit. The missionaries then counselled resistance and on September 15, 1831 eleven of them were convicted of violating state law and sentenced to four years" hard labor. Nine had their convictions overturned by submitting and swearing an oath of allegiance to Georgia. Two appealed to the Supreme Court and had their convictions overturned. But Georgia, encouraged by President Jackson, defied the Court"s ruling. The end came over the next few years, brought about by a combination of force, hara.s.sment-stopping of annuities, cancellations of debts-and bribery. The Treaty of New Echota, signed in December 1835 by a greedy minority led by Chief Major Ridge, ceded the last lands in return for $5.6 million, the republic broke up, and the final Cherokee stragglers were herded across the Mississippi by US cavalry three years later.
If Georgia hated Indians with self-serving hypocritical genuflexions to the rule of law, the humbug of Arkansas was even more striking. It was the keenest of all the states to a.s.sert the superiority of white "civilized" values over the "savage" Cherokees, what its legislature denounced as a "restless, dissatisfied, insolent and malicious tribe, engaged in constant intrigues." Testimony from anyone with a quarter or more Indian blood was inadmissible in Arkansas courts. The state operated a system of apartheid with laws prohibiting dealings between whites and Indians. Yet ironically Arkansas was the most socially backward part of the United States. Its whites tended to be either solitaries-isolated hunters, trappers, and primitive farmers-or clannish, self-sufficient, and extremely violent. Its 14,000 inhabitants got a territorial government in 1819, but its courts and legislature were ruled by duels as much as by law or debate. In 1819 the brigadier general commanding the militia was killed in a duel and five years later the same happened to a superior court judge, his a.s.sa.s.sin being his colleague on the bench and the occasion a squalid game of cards. The Flanagan clan "respected no law, human or divine, but were slaves to their own selfish l.u.s.ts and brutal habits." The Wylie clan were illiterate, "wonderfully ignorant" and "as full of superst.i.tion as their feeble minds were capable of, believing in Witches, Hobgoblins, Ghosts, Evil Eyes ... They did not farm, had no fences round their shanty habitations and appeared to have lived a roving, rambling life ever since the Battle of Bunker Hill when they fled to this wilderness." Yet Arkansas was harder on the Indians than any other territory or state.
The sight of Indian families, expelled from Georgia and Arkansas, heading west with their meager possessions was not uncommon in the 1830s, a harsh symbol of the age of ma.s.s settlement. In winter 1831, in Memphis, Tennessee, Comte Alexis de Tocqueville, in America to study the penal system on behalf of the French government, watched a band of Choctaws being marshaled across the Mississippi. He wrote: "The Indians had their families with them, and they brought in their train the wounded and the sick, with children newly-born and old men on the point of death." He added: "Three or four thousand soldiers drive before them the wandering race of aborigines. These are followed by the [white] pioneers who pierce the woods, scare off the beasts of prey, explore the course of the inland streams and make ready the triumphal march of civilisation across the desert." Under President Jackson, he noted, all was done lawfully and const.i.tutionally. The Indians were deprived of their rights, enjoyed since time immemorial, "with singular felicity, tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood and without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world." It was, he concluded, impossible to exterminate a race with "more respect for the laws of humanity."
Jackson finished the Indians east of the Mississippi, and effectively laid down the ground rules which insured that they would not survive as substantial units west of it either. But he did not hate Indians: they were simply an anomaly. He did, however, hate banks, and especially the Second Bank of the United States. That was an anomaly too, and he was determined to remove it. It is often said that Jackson knew nothing about banks, and that is why he hated them. That is not true. He is, rather, an example of what Keynes meant when he said that the views of great men of the world, who believe themselves impervious to theory of any kind, are usually shaped by the opinions of "some defunct economist" which have imperceptibly got into their heads. Jackson once said he had disapproved of banks, and especially central banks, ever "since I read a book about the South Sea Bubble." He had already read Adam Smith, and misunderstood him, and Taylor, whom he understood only too well. In the late 1820s his views-and Taylor"s-were reinforced by an anti-banking ideologue called William M. Goude, who wrote widely about banking in the New York Evening Post and Jackson"s favorite paper, the Washington Globe. Goude"s book A Short History of Paper Money and Banking in the United States (1833), which summed up his theories, became one of the great bestsellers of the time. It was a book written against the "city-slickers", the "Big Men," the "money power," which contrasted the hard-working farmer, mechanic, and storekeeper with the chartered, privileged banker: "The practices of trade in the United States have debased the standards of commercial honesty ... People see wealth pa.s.sing continuously out of the hands of those whose labor produced it, or whose economy saved it, into the hands of those who neither work nor save." It was a plea for economic equality before the law, in effect for an end of chartering, and especially of federal chartering.
Jackson made ending the SBUS a major issue in the 1832 election and he felt that the landslide result gave him a clear mandate. It is important to grasp that Jackson spoke from his moral heart as well as his bank-hating head. The nation, he said, was "cursed" with a bank whose "corrupting influences" fastened "monopoly and aristocracy on the Const.i.tution" and made government "an engine of oppression to the people instead of an agent of their will." Only the elimination of the "Hydra" could "restore to our inst.i.tutions their primitive simplicity and purity." So Jackson"s love of conspiracy theory and his taste for a moral crusade went hand in hand.
There was also a personal element, as there always was in Jackson"s campaigns. He was certain-he "knew for a fact"-that Clay was paid large sums by the SBUS. So was Daniel Webster, the sophisticated if long-winded Ma.s.sachusetts orator who aroused all Jackson"s suspicions and whom he was also certain-"knew for a fact"-was crooked. Not least, Nicholas Biddle (1786-1844), president of the Bank since 1822, was just the kind of person Jackson feared and despised, a cultivated, high-minded (that is, humbugging), aristocratic intellectual. Jackson was always wary of "college men." Biddle had been to two (University of Pennsylvania and Princeton). He came from an ancient, posh Quaker family of Delaware, and married into another. He patronized the arts and not only collected but actually commissioned paintings of naked women of the kind Amos Kendall felt was an outrage, paying the gifted American artist John Vandelyn (1775-1852) to do him a lubricious Ariadne. He had edited a literary and artistic magazine called Port Folio, founded the Athenaeum Library in Philadelphia, and commissioned leading architects-at what Jackson believed to be vast expense-to design all the SBUS"s buildings in Greek Revival granite and marble. Biddle"s favorite architect, Thomas Ustick Walter (1804-87), who built the best of the banks, was also employed by Biddle to enlarge and cla.s.sify for him his house, Andalucia, on the Delaware, making it into one of the lushest and most beautiful homes in America and (to Jackson) a symbol flaunting the new money power.
Biddle was a first-cla.s.s central banker, as good at his job as Marshall was at being chief justice, and the two men had similar ideas about how America should be developed, by a highly efficient, highly compet.i.tive capitalist system with easy access to the largest possible sources of credit, that access to be maintained by strict fiscal and financial probity. Jackson did not care a d.a.m.n about that. Marshall had supported the SBUS in one of his most important decisions and Jackson did not "care a fig" for the reasons he advanced for his ruling. When Marshall finally died in 183 5-not before time in Jackson"s view-the President appointed as his successor his Attorney-General and crony Rogert Brooke Taney (1777-1864), who conducted his court for thirty years on principles diametrically opposed to Marshall"s." When the Senate and the House both reported favorably on the Bank and proposed to renew its charter even before it ran out, Jackson used his veto. The fact that the three greatest orators in the Senate, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster, all p.r.o.nounced at length and with ornate circ.u.mlocution on its merits only reinforced Jackson"s determination to destroy it. Brilliant orators they might be, he noted, but they were "always on the losing side."
Jackson was one of those self-confident, strong-willed people (one thinks of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in our own time) who are not in the least disturbed if the overwhelming majority of "expert opinion," the "right-thinking," and the intelligentsia are opposed to their own deep-felt, instinctive convictions. He simply pressed on, justifying his veto by producing a curious const.i.tutional theory of his own: "Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Const.i.tution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others ... The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both.""," The fury of the right-thinking was unbounded. Biddle himself described Jackson, in his stupidity and ignorance giving vent to "the fury of a chained panther biting the bars of his cage." His statement was "a manifesto of anarchy such as Marat or Robespierre might have issued to the mobs." The Jacksonian press hailed it as a "Second Declaration of Independence" and his organ, the Globe, said, "It is difficult to describe in adequate language the sublimity of the moral spectacle now presented to the American people in the person of Andrew Jackson."
With the election confirming and endorsing Jackson"s standpoint (as he saw it), he proceeded to the next step-withdrawing all federal funds from the SBUS and ending its connection with central government. Whether this act was strictly const.i.tutional was a matter of opinion, but Van Buren (now vice-president) warned him against it on prudential grounds. The SBUS was primarily a Philadelphia financial inst.i.tution, which performed a useful national role balancing the growing money power of New York. If Jackson pulled the government out of Philadelphia, wasn"t he in danger of falling into the hands of Wall Street? But Jackson brushed that aside too, and set Amos Kendall, of all people, busily to work finding alternative banks with which the administration could do business. Kendall fed him the rumor, which Jackson readily believed, that the SBUS"s vaults were, in fact, empty of bullion, and that it was not a safe bank to do business with anyway. The fact that Senators Clay and Calhoun put together a committee to inspect the vaults and reported them full did not convince the President, coming from such a source. (He thereby inaugurated an American tradition which continues to this day: every year, the Daughters of the American Revolution send a committee of ladies to visit the vaults of Fort Knox, to ensure that America"s gold is still in them.) Nor was Jackson impressed when two Treasury secretaries in turn flatly refused to carry out his orders to remove the deposits. He dismissed them both. Kendall, after a trawl through the financial community, came up with a list of banks willing to dare Biddle"s wrath and take the SBUS"s place. Jackson acted. And when, as a result, there were rumblings of trouble in the American economy-more p.r.o.nounced after its federal charter ran out in 1836 and it was obliged to "go private"-Jackson was adamant, rejecting Van Buren"s plea for "caution" with a gloriously characteristic reply: "Were all the worshipers of the golden Calf to memorialise me and Request a Restoration of the Deposits, I would cut my right hand from my body before I would do such an Act. The golden calf may be worshiped by others but, as for myself, I serve the Lord!"
Biddle declared all along that, by forcing the SBUS out of its role as federal banker, Jackson would encourage a fever of speculation fueled by an expansion in the number of banks issuing paper and the quant.i.ty and quality of the paper they printed. That is exactly what happened, and the orgy was encouraged still further by Jackson"s decision to hand the federal government"s cash surplus, which acc.u.mulated when the national debt was paid off in 1835, back to the states. This amounted to $2.8 million, and though described as a loan was understood to be an outright gift, treated as such and spent. The surplus was the result of government land sales jumping from $1.88 million in 1830 to $20 million in 1836, and as the land boom continued the states a.s.sumed that federal handouts would continue and increased their borrowing on the strength of it. Banks of all shapes and sizes, many with outright crooks on their boards, poured oil on the smoldering embers of inflation by keeping their presses roaring. In the meantime, nature intervened, as it usually does when men construct houses of straw, or paper. Bad weather in 1835 created a crop failure in many parts of America, and the consequences began to make themselves felt in 1836 with an unfavorable balance of trade against the United States, a withdrawal of foreign credit, and the need to pay suspicious foreign creditors, who did not like American paper, in gold and silver.
Jackson, who was nearing the end of his term, increased the tension by issuing, on July 11, 1836, a Species Circular, which directed that future payments for public lands must be made in specie. This move was made in a simple-minded desire to get back to "sound" finance, but it had the predictable effect of making gold and silver even more sought after. Characteristically, it was cooked up in the Kitchen Cabinet and announced to the official Cabinet as a fait accompli. Most of its members objected, and so did Congress. The new Whig Party, recently formed in opposition to "King" Jackson, on the lines of the old English Whigs who had opposed Stuart tyranny. objected noisily to this further exercise of presidential prerogative, which Clay said was exactly what a dictator would do, calling the circular an "ill-advised, illegal and pernicious measure." It was "a bomb thrown without warning." Its effects at end-1836 coincided, almost exactly, with the failure of big financial houses in London, the world financial capital. This in turn hit cotton prices, America"s staple export. By the time Jackson finally retired in March 1837, handing over to his little heir apparent, Van Buren, America was in the early stages of its biggest financial crisis to date. By the end of May 1837 every bank in the country had suspended payment in specie. Far from getting back to "sound money," Jackson had merely paralyzed the system completely.
Before the panic became obvious Van Buren had squeezed through the presidency with a narrow victory made possible by the fact that the anti-Jackson Whigs fielded three candidates. Van Buren got 764,198 votes against a combined Whig total of 736,147. More important, he won fifteen states, making up 170 votes, while his nearest rival, William Henry Harrison (1773-1841), the victor of Tippecanoe (1811) and the Thames (1813 ), won only 73. So Van Buren was in the White House at last. His bitter Whig enemy in New York, Thurlow Weed (1797-1882), warned: "Depend upon it, his Election is to be "the Beginning of the End." " So, through no fault of the Little Magician-who had opposed Jackson"s financial policies throughout, so far as he had dared-it proved. He had worked long and hard for the presidency, being nice to everyone, concealing his intentions, "rowing to his object with m.u.f.fled oars" as John Randolph put it, convinced that the .... great state of New York, whose champions, Hamilton, Burr, De Witt Clinton, and Co., had all failed to get to the White House, was due for its turn at last.
But as president Van Buren never had a chance. The financial panic, which deepened into a real depression, ruined all. The money in circulation (banknotes mainly) contracted from $150 million in 1837 to barely over a third by the end of the decade. An enormous number of people, big and small, went insolvent, so many that Congress, in order not to clog the jails with them, pa.s.sed a special bankruptcy law under which 39,000 people were able to cancel debts of $441 million. The government itself lost $9 million which, on Kendall"s advice, it had deposited in Jackson"s "pet banks," which now went bust. Worse, the depression lingered for five years. As land sales slumped, the federal government went into sharp deficit, and the national debt began to acc.u.mulate again-something it has done ever since. Most of Van Buren"s energies went on an attempt to set up what he called an Independent Treasury-the nearest he could get to a central bank without actually repudiating Jackson"s policy. He finally got it through Congress just as he had to run before the voters again, and the Depression made it certain he would lose.
If there were any justice in politics, Clay should have been the beneficiary, since he had opposed the Jacksonians for two decades and his warnings against the Dictator"s absurd financial policies had been fully vindicated by events. But at the Harrisburg convention of the Whig Party-more a coalition of personal and local power-groups than a real party based on shared convictions-he was outmaneuvered and hornswoggled in the "smoke-filled rooms," the first time that phenomenon made its appearance in American history. Clay"s supporters arrived with a plurality of delegates but on the final vote he was beaten by Harrison 148-90, his manager telling him: "You have been deceived betrayed & beaten [by] a deliberate conspiracy against you." The election itself was unique in American history, conducted in a carnival atmosphere in which programs and policies were scarcely discussed at all, and all was slogans, gimmickry and razzmatazz. Considering the country was supposed to be, indeed to some extent was, in deep depression, the frivolity was remarkable. But then the mid-19th century was an astonishing age of optimism and America was a resilient nation. Harrison campaigned as a rugged frontiersman, with his running mate John Tyler (1790-1862), a dyed-in-the-wool Virginian and states" rights man who had been alienated by Jackson"s high-handed ways, being presented as an experienced and wily professional politician. So the Whig slogan was "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too." The Democrats retaliated by ignoring Tyler and branding General Harrison, who liked his noggin-or rather his joram-as "The Log Cabin and Hard Cyder" candidate. The Whigs turned this to advantage by holding "Log Cabin Rallies" at which hard cider was copiously served. They also created an electorally effective image of the dapper Van Buren as an effete New York dandy, drinking wine "from his coolers of silver." The actual popular vote was fairly close-1,275,000 to Harrison against 1,128,000 for Van Buren-but the college vote was a landslide, 234 to 6o. The Whigs thus demonstrated, as the Democrats ha