Andrew Jackson (25 page)

Other documents from the period strongly suggest that Jackson
did
have an interest in the slaves. An entry in his account book for the Bank of Nashville reads: “A. Jackson amount of proportion of cash for negroes bought of Richard Epperson: $929.” Jackson’s ownership is also indicated by promissory notes from Jackson to Apperson and by an affidavit submitted by Jackson to an arbitrator sorting out the tangled affairs of the failed partnership.

Almost certainly Jackson was part owner of the slaves in question. Even more certain is that by the 1820s a personal history of slave trading had become a political liability for a national candidate. Jackson’s supporters, with or without his knowledge, likely planted the dubious disclaimer. If Jackson was aware of the cover-up, he probably excused it on grounds that it treated a minor matter from long ago. No one ever asserted that slave trading was a major part of his business or denied that it declined for him with passing years. Perhaps the trouble the Apperson slaves caused him made him swear off the practice forever. The one thing that can be said with complete confidence is that times and attitudes were changing. Slaveholding wasn’t a disqualification for national office, but slave trading might be. And Jackson knew it.

A
t the end of 1808 Rachel and Andrew Jackson became parents. By then they had been married nearly fifteen years (by the state of Tennessee’s reckoning; more by their own). No offspring had blessed their union, for reasons unclear. Almost certainly they wanted children. In those days before state-sponsored pensions nearly every parent did, if only for assistance in old age. Jackson’s bout with smallpox during the Revolutionary War may have rendered him sterile. Or the infertility may have originated with Rachel, who had lived with Lewis Robards long enough to have borne children had she been able. (Robards went on to father several children by a second wife.)

Rachel probably felt the lack of children more severely than Jackson did. Especially in those days, when fewer outlets existed for the creative energies of women, the average wife placed great store in having children. One imagines Rachel wondering, as the years passed, whether she would ever have a child to hold, to put to bed at night, to nurse when sick, to admire growing up. She doubtless shared her sorrows and frustrations with Jackson, although perhaps not all of them, for fear of seeming weak.

In December 1808, Elizabeth Donelson, the wife of Rachel’s brother Severn, bore twin boys. Someone suggested that Rachel and Jackson rear one of the boys as their own. Twins always place an extra strain on families of newborns. Perhaps Elizabeth didn’t feel strong enough to care for two babies. Perhaps two new mouths to feed were one more than Severn thought he could handle. Rachel may have asked, or Elizabeth may have offered, but somehow the women decided that Rachel would take one of the babies for her own. The men were consulted, of course, but almost certainly the initiative came from the women.

Jackson later contended that he and Rachel formally adopted Andrew Jackson Jr. a few weeks after his birth. Corroborating evidence is scanty. In that era Tennessee had no regular procedure for adoptions, relying rather on extended families to take care of their children without state intervention. Jackson said he petitioned the legislature for a special bill. But no bill, or even any petition, appears in the state records.

Jackson may have misremembered things. More likely he misrepresented them—from the best of intentions. Given the cloud surrounding the start of his and Rachel’s marriage, he didn’t want Andrew Jr. living under a similar shadow. It was Tennessee’s fault, not the boy’s, that the state made adoption difficult.

Whether formally adopted or not, Andrew Jr. received all the love any child could ask for. By the standards of the time, he was a child of his parents’ old age. Jackson and Rachel were forty-one, and many of their contemporaries were grandparents. Doubtless partly for this reason they spoiled Andrew, as grandparents—or merely late parents—often do. He wanted for nothing money could buy, servants deliver, or parental attention bestow. Though named for his father, he couldn’t have spent a childhood more different from Jackson’s straitened youth, and this was just as Jackson wanted it.

A visitor to the Hermitage caught its master in a domestic pose. “I arrived at his house one wet chilly evening, in February, and came upon him in the twilight, sitting alone before the fire, a lamb and a child between his knees. He started a little, called a servant to remove the two innocents to another room, and explained to me how it was. The child had cried because the lamb was out in the cold, and begged him to bring it in.” The visitor knew Jackson as a man of ferocious reputation. Seeing him with young Andrew and the lamb made him think the reputation wrong, or at least incomplete. “The ferocious man does not do that.”

A
ndrew’s arrival helped distract his father from business troubles. Besides the chronic shortage of money, entrepreneurs in the West faced the intractable problem of distance. The principal market for Nashville’s produce was Natchez, five hundred miles away, leaving Nashville’s merchants at the mercy of agents on long and tenuous tethers. Horace Green was only one of several unreliable characters whom Jackson was compelled to work with and who cost him thousands of dollars over the years. Distance created other difficulties. A dispute arose between Jackson and an ironmonger at Abingdon. “I cannot make out a statement . . . ,” Jackson explained, “for want of the original contract, it being locked up and Mr. John Hutchings now at Natchez having the key.” Perhaps Jackson was simply putting off his creditor. Jackson owed money but lacked cash. He offered a horse—“a good draft horse and gentle in gear, and not a bad riding horse,” he said—as payment for the debt. He added, “Send me a pair of boots of the manufactory of Abingdon . . . and close the accounts.” Whether Jackson got the boots is unclear, but whatever he got didn’t repay him for his headaches. “I always have the blue devils about me when old accounts are mentioned.”

At times he thought of starting anew. Several friends had heard promising things about Madison County, to the west of Nashville. They were moving there and wanted Jackson to join them. They said he might be appointed judge of the county. Jackson was tempted. His business interests in Nashville weren’t thriving and his enemies were, and the combination kept his blue devils alive. “I find it impossible to divest myself of those habits of gloomy and peevish reflection that the wanton and flagatious conduct and unmerited reflections of base calumny heaped upon me has given rise to,” he told a friend and possible sponsor for the judgeship. He said he was willing “to try the experiment how far new scenes might relieve me from this unpleasant tone of thought.” But an acceptable offer never came through, leaving him stuck where he was.

Still he dreamed of other places and new opportunities. His nephew Donelson Caffery traveled south to Spanish Florida and reported handsome prospects. “There is no business in this country like farming. An industrious man with a few negroes may soon make a fortune.” The land was Spanish merely in name. “The Spanish authority here is suspended by a feeble thread. There is only a mere shadow of a government. The commandant of this place may be bribed to any thing. He will grant a decree for the recovery of money, and by the debtor’s slipping a few dollars in his hand will suspend that decree during his pleasure.” A few weeks later Caffery wrote again, declaring Florida ripe for the plucking. “The people in this country appear to be on the eve of shaking off the Spanish authority. A few popular men with spirit and sense enough to conduct an enterprise of the kind could at any moment revolutionize the province.” Another informant, a son of Jackson’s close friend (and second) Thomas Overton, was equally encouraging. “If you have never visited this country, I think, sir, it would be well worth your while, as it is much the finest I have ever seen. This, sir, is the place for making fortunes. I have persuaded my father much to remove here, but he pays no attention to my entreaties. I think were you to see this country, you would move the whole neighborhood.”

T
he allure of Florida—what soldier or American patriot wouldn’t want to conquer such a country?—and the trials of business at home made Jackson wish more than ever that the war against Britain would begin. Spain was Britain’s ally, and a war against the latter might easily involve the former. But everything pointed the opposite way. In the letter offering himself for judge of Madison County, Jackson explained that his interest in the job reflected his discouragement with respect to the big issue confronting the West and America generally. “I am well aware that no act of insult, degradation or contumely offered to our government will arouse them from their present lethargy and temporising conduct until my name sake”—the British minister in Washington happened to be named Jackson—“sets fire to some of our seaport towns. . . . Then perhaps the spirit of ’76 may again arise.”

Jackson’s frustration over the war issue caused him to break with Jefferson regarding the president’s successor. Jefferson had been grooming James Madison, and such was his control over the Republicans that the party’s congressional caucus fell obediently into line in support of the secretary of state, despite the uproar over the
Chesapeake
shelling and the embargo. Jackson refused to follow the administration’s line. Instead he joined an insurgent wing of the party in putting forward James Monroe, who as minister to Britain had argued forcefully against impressment. Jackson stumped around Tennessee for Monroe, with modest effect. And even that effect often wore off as soon as he left. “The only two converts you made while here have retrograded,” an acquaintance in Carthage told Jackson. “They say that they only supported Monroe out of politeness to you. . . . I can assure you, sir, without you or some other friend of Monroe’s return to this quarter, he will have but few friends.”

Monroe’s candidacy stalled long before the general election, in which Madison easily defeated Federalist Charles Pinckney. Yet Madison’s victory, despite dealing a blow to Jackson and the insurgents, in fact left the discontented in a stronger position than previously. Jefferson was a giant of the revolutionary era, Madison a mere mortal. Jefferson could resist the complaints of his pro-war critics, Madison maybe not.

Jefferson did Madison the lame-duck favor of allowing repeal of the disastrous embargo, but he covered his retreat with a face-saving measure called the Nonintercourse Act, which maintained the embargo against Britain and France yet opened American trade to other countries. The law invited evasion, for once American vessels left port, ostensibly for Brazil or Russia or some other nonbanned country, they might head for whatever destination they chose. And it tied American policy in knots. French commanders captured American ships near Britain, claiming that they must actually be British since American ships weren’t allowed to trade with the British. (In fact British merchant vessels were known to fly the American flag to disguise their nationality.) Forced to acknowledge the failure of the nonintercourse policy, Madison substituted an even more convoluted piece of legislation called Macon’s Bill Number Two. This opened American trade with Britain and France but empowered the president to reimpose the embargo against either country should the other act decently toward the United States.

Madison’s problem was the same one every president since George Washington had faced. Britain and France were each more powerful than the United States, and each considered its war with the other more important than good relations with America. If strangling France required trampling on America’s rights, Britain would trample away. If repelling Britain necessitated treating American vessels as British, France would do so. America’s European troubles might not end when the European war ended, but they certainly wouldn’t end before that.

E
specially in the early days of the American republic, the president didn’t make foreign policy by himself. Congress was the equal of the executive on most aspects of the subject, and it insisted on its prerogatives. Madison understood the situation, which contributed to his hesitance regarding war.

Jackson understood the situation, too, and he initially blamed Congress for the government’s failure to act against Britain. “The present Congress will not act with energy,” he declared several months into the Madison presidency. “Some of our old Republican friends have either lost their usual good judgment or their political principle. From all which I conclude that as a military man I shall have no amusement or business.”

The elections of 1810, however, brightened the outlook by infusing Congress with new blood. Henry Clay would become Jackson’s archrival, but when he first entered the political arena they had much in common. Clay was self-educated, ambitious, and a westerner who saw the legal profession as a springboard to public life. His successful defense of Aaron Burr in the celebrated treason trial won him a national reputation and inspired his Kentucky compatriots to send him to Washington as their congressman. Seniority in those days meant less than ability, and Clay’s ability was so obvious that his fellow congressmen made him their speaker within weeks of his arrival. The subject on which Clay spoke most loudly and consistently was the need for war against Britain, to vindicate the nation’s honor, safeguard its frontiers, and secure its future.