So what
was
Dallas—with the endorsement, Jackson accurately assumed, of the president—saying? Apparently that Jackson was right to have done what he did but that Judge Hall was, too. Jackson couldn’t tell what the administration’s game was, but he could guess that the president and his men wanted to have things both ways.
Jackson received this letter in early September. He penned a cursory rebuttal, deciding to save the rest for a personal meeting with Dallas and the president in Washington. “I expect to set out thither in a few weeks and hope, after my arrival there, to be able to give such explanation of my conduct as may be satisfactory,” he told Dallas.
J
ackson’s journey east was another triumphal progress. The citizens of eastern Tennessee turned out to hail the greatest man the state had ever produced. In the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia he was likened to that commonwealth’s first citizen, General Washington. A dinner at Lynchburg in Jackson’s honor included among the guests the aging Thomas Jefferson, who perhaps marveled that war brought out the best in certain people, including this one who had always seemed so rash during Jefferson’s presidency. The master of Monticello toasted the hero of New Orleans: “Honor and gratitude to those who have filled the measure of their country’s honor.” Jackson replied: “James Monroe, late secretary of war,” which was interpreted as at once personally gracious, Monroe being a Virginia protégé of Jefferson’s, and politically significant, in that Monroe was the leading contender for the succession to Madison.
Jackson and his party reached Washington on the evening of November 16, “having traveled all day in a cold rain,” as John Reid explained to his wife. Reid went on to describe the peculiar protocol of the capital, at least as it applied to Jackson.
Yesterday we visited the President and his lady, the secretary of state and his lady, the secretary of the treasury and his lady, and the secretary of war and his lady. . . . Now from your country education, you may suppose we visited, respectively, these husbands and wives in the same apartment. By no means. First we enter the
Lord’s
apartment, making a bow as we enter, and another, as you may guess, as we leave the room. The Lord follows us to the door and makes another low bow (all in the awkwardest style) just about the time our backs are turning upon him. We, of course, turn about two quarters round, which occasions in turn a very awkward position both of the body and mouth, while we are making our second bow and taking our second adieu. Then we enter a passage which leads directly to the door that opens upon the street, with hearts brim full of joy at our deliverance. All of a sudden this pleasing sensation is chilled by a great big footman who comes hurrying after us, enquiring, “Will you not see the lady? She expects and desires your presence in her parlour.” So we turn immediately back and are conducted up stairs to the lady’s parlour, where we either find her gently reclining on a couch, or the apartment empty, until she makes her appearance, full-rigged from the dressing room. A few very civil things are said by her and the General, and then we retire again with our double bows. This is the routine of “high life.”
Now this, undoubtedly, is the kindest, the most polite, and the best natured circle in the world. I’ll give you a proof. While we were at the President’s he turned to me and observed with the most smiling countenance, “I hope Mrs. Reid is with you in the city. I have a great desire to see her.” I replied, “She is left on the way, but would undoubtedly have come had she known how warm a side you had for her.” This was said (although said good humouredly) in such a way that methought he immediately became two inches lower—his hair became curly, and red both of his nostrils and eyelids appeared. The truth is, he was perplexed by the appearance of General Jackson, who, whenever the conversation flagged, was looking with a melancholy air out at the window, on the ruins of our public buildings.
To his surprise at the social customs of the capital, Reid appended his shock at the cost of living there. “Have our horses attended to and fattened; my expenses can’t be less than forty dollars a week! Most monstrous!! What must the General’s be? Our stay can’t be long.”
It really wasn’t long, compared with the month in transit either way. Jackson enjoyed—or, increasingly, endured—more dinners. He visited Mount Vernon. “Judge Washington was not at home,” Reid wrote of the nephew of the general. “But from Mr. Custis and the rest of the family we received the utmost hospitality and kindness.” Jackson consulted with the new secretary of war, William Crawford, about a plan to divide the nation into two military divisions, one for the North and the other for the South, and confirmed to the administration that he would accept command of the southern division. In doing so he put the minds of Madison and Monroe at ease that he wouldn’t upset the succession so carefully arranged. They, in turn, made clear that they sided with him against anyone tempted to reopen his dispute with Judge Hall and the federal courts.
By late December he was ready to leave. “I had the pleasure of seeing all the great men at the city, was friendly greeted by all, and was obliged to flee the proffered hospitality of the surrounding cities to restore my health and preserve life,” he wrote from the safety of Lynchburg on the last day of the year. “I therefore am retracing my steps to avoid the various pressing invitations.” Snow had fallen and was complicating travel west. “Tomorrow we move on for Nashville, where we will arrive as early as our horses and the season will permit. Our horses are thin and the depth of snow is very fatiguing to them.”
T
he war was over and Jackson was the nation’s hero, but the struggle continued. For Jackson the struggle always continued. Since his father died—which was to say, since before he was born—Jackson’s life had been a struggle. He knew nothing else, and never would. In private life he found, or made, enemies; in public life as well. As he matured in office, from judge to militia general to major general of the army, his enemies increasingly became the enemies of his country. The British were an abiding foe, from the Revolution to the recent war and beyond. His anglophobia grew reflexive. On learning a few months after New Orleans that Napoleon had broken his exile and again challenged the British in Europe, Jackson applauded the Corsican. “The
wonderful revolution
in France fills every body and
nation
with astonishment, and the tricoloured cockade being found in the bottom of each soldier’s knapsack tells to all Europe that Napoleon reigns in the affections of the soldiers.” Bad news for Britain was good news for America. “What will be the effect of this sudden revolution on the relations with America? Will it not give us an advantageous commercial treaty with Great Britain?”
When the wonderful revolution ran out at Waterloo and Napoleon was cast into final exile on St. Helena, Jackson had to look elsewhere to discomfit England. Spain was a likely target. Despotic, Catholic, proximate (in Florida), and in obvious trouble (from the continuing revolts around the Americas), the Spanish provided an outlet for the aggressiveness that never let Jackson rest. Not that he lacked cause to complain against them. As before his departure from Mobile to New Orleans, the Spanish failed to keep Florida clear of enemies of America’s peace. British warships and British troops no longer prowled the harbors and shore of the region, although British traders and agents did. But various Indians who refused to reconcile to American authority in the South made Florida their base for actions inimical to the peace of mind and hearth of Americans in Mississippi Territory.
The Seminoles were the worst offenders in this regard. In the early nineteenth century the Seminoles weren’t a tribe in the traditional sense but rather a recent agglomeration of refugees from the American South, including a substantial portion of Africans and their descendants, some held as slaves by the Indians, some held by other Africans, and some simply runaways from the plantations in Georgia and Mississippi. In both a technical and a practical sense they were outlaws, living by geography outside the law of the United States and by Spain’s weakness outside the law of Spanish Florida. For this reason a man like Jackson, charged with defending the southern borders of the United States, could easily conceive them a threat. Their mere existence provided a magnet for further runaways from the plantations and farms of whites and friendly Indians. Their camps and villages afforded a haven for those Creeks and other Indians who still resisted American control of Mississippi. Worst of all, in Jackson’s view, they tempted the British to continue meddling in American affairs. Behind the Seminoles, behind the Spanish, Jackson saw the specter of Britain in Florida. So long as Florida remained beyond American control, it was a potential base for British adventurism. The law of life—the law of constant struggle—kept it from being otherwise.
Had the Seminoles been model neighbors, Jackson would have distrusted them; that they weren’t models made his animus easier to justify. And it won him allies in the government at Washington. Before long Jackson would despise William Crawford, but for now, on the subject of Florida and the Seminoles, the Tennessee general and the Georgia politician found themselves in agreement. During the war some escaped slaves and unfriendly Indians had constructed a makeshift fort on the Apalachicola River in Florida, where they defied the authority of both Spain and the United States. By the spring of 1816 they numbered perhaps three hundred and were, in Crawford’s description to Jackson, “well armed, clothed, and disciplined.” More fugitives arrived regularly. “This is a state of things which cannot fail to produce much injury to the neighbouring settlements and excite irritations which may ultimately endanger the peace of the nation.” Crawford directed Jackson to warn the Spanish governor or commandant at Pensacola to clean out the “Negro Fort” or let the United States do so itself.
Jackson was happy to oblige. Before approaching the Spanish authorities in Florida, he directed General Edmund Gaines, to whom he had delivered command of the garrison at New Orleans upon leaving that city, to prepare for a Florida campaign. By now the killing of two Americans near Fort Claiborne in southern Mississippi provided an additional complaint against the denizens of the Negro Fort. “The growing hostile dispositions of the Indians must be checked by prompt and energetic movements,” Jackson told Gaines. “Half peace, half war is a state of things which must not exist. The murderers of Johnston and McGlaskey must be had and punished. No retreat must provide an asylum for them.” Referring specifically to the Negro Fort and its occupants, Jackson said, “If the conduct of these people is such as to encourage the Indian war, if the fort harbours the Negroes of our citizens or friendly Indians living within our territory, or holds out inducements to the slaves of our citizens to desert from their owners’ service, this fort must be destroyed.” Jackson realized that destruction of the fort would violate Spanish territory. But he had violated Spanish territory before, and he was prepared to do so again. “This fort has been established by some villains for the purpose of murder, rapine and plunder. . . . It ought to be blown up regardless of the ground it stands on.”
Jackson proceeded to pressure the Spanish governor at Pensacola in much the same way he had pressured the governor’s predecessor in 1814. “The conduct of this banditti,” Jackson informed Mauricio de Zuñiga, “is such as will not be tolerated by our government, and if not put down by Spanish authority will compel us in self-defence to destroy them.”
Zuñiga had no desire to tangle with Jackson, or any particular reason to. The Negro Fort was utterly beyond the control of his undermanned garrison, and he decried the activities of its inhabitants, who also preyed on the Spanish settlements in Florida, hardly less than Jackson did. The governor was so far from resisting Jackson’s demand to see the fort reduced as to offer the American general his support in the endeavor. Jackson’s courier paraphrased Zuñiga: “If the object was sufficiently important to require the presence of General Jackson, he would be proud to be commanded by you.”
J
ackson had nothing personal against Zuñiga, who seemed an honorable enough character. But he couldn’t help interpreting the governor’s cooperativeness as further sign of Spain’s pitiful weakness on the southern coast. Jackson might have moved at once against the Negro Fort had another issue not distracted him, one that changed his views of William Crawford. As the federal government had done for years, it sought to preserve Indian lands against illegal white encroachment. A desire to see justice done to the Indians, however belatedly, motivated the administration, but so also a concern for its own credibility. In addition, the Treasury in Washington was empty. Friction between whites and Indians might produce another war, which the federal revenues simply couldn’t sustain. In all of this, the position of the government at Washington in the late 1810s was analogous to that of the British government in the 1760s, when, after another costly war (against France), London tried to keep the Americans from settling west of the mountains. And the reaction of westerners in the 1810s was similar to that of the Americans fifty years earlier: cries of tyranny and vows of resistance.
Jackson found himself in the middle of things when Crawford ordered him to remove illegal settlers in southern Tennessee and northern Mississippi. Jackson was directed to post a proclamation—very much like the British Proclamation of 1763—giving squatters a brief period of grace to remove themselves. But once the grace period ended, Jackson must take action. “You will, upon the application of the marshal of any state or territory, cause to be removed by military force all persons who shall be found upon the public lands within your command, and destroy their habitations and improvements.” The order applied specifically to Indian lands. “Intrusion upon the lands of the friendly Indian tribes is not only a violation of the laws but in direct opposition to the policy of the government toward its savage neighbors. Upon application of any Indian agent stating that intrusions of this nature have been committed and are continued, the President requires that they shall be equally removed, and their houses and improvements destroyed by military force.”