Andrew Jackson (54 page)

T
he capture of St. Marks, while satisfying, didn’t end the war. Too many hostiles had escaped east. “Tomorrow I shall march for the Suwanee River,” Jackson wrote Calhoun on the second day in control of St. Marks. His objective was the stronghold of Bowlegs, a Seminole chief who harbored warriors, fugitive slaves, and sundry others with neither respect for nor fear of Americans or their laws. Between St. Marks and Bowlegs’s village lay a hundred miles of waterlogged forest and plain.

McIntosh and his Creeks were the first to encounter resistance, in the form of a large group of enemy Creeks. “They were in a bad swamp, and fought us there for about an hour,” McIntosh reported. “They ran and we followed them three miles. They fought us in all about three hours. We killed thirty-seven of them, and took ninety-eight women and children and six men prisoners, and about seven hundred head of cattle.” McIntosh’s company lost only three men killed and five wounded.

On the seventh day from St. Marks, Jackson’s column neared the Suwanee, where he hoped to capture or kill Bowlegs and end the conflict. He pressed his men forward, only to find the route blocked by a lake still several miles short of Bowlegs’s town. “Here I should have halted for the night had not six mounted Indians (supposed to be spies) who were discovered, effected their escape,” he explained to Calhoun. Knowing the riders would report the approach of the invaders, Jackson ordered his men back on the march. The combined force of Americans and friendly Creeks struck Bowlegs’s town at sunset. They killed a handful of Indians and blacks and took a few prisoners, including a British national named Robert Ambrister. But the main body of the enemy crossed the river and vanished even farther east.

The next day Jackson sent Gaines after the escapees with two days’ provisions. Gaines didn’t catch them, but he did seize more of their supplies, and he concluded that though they were free they would soon be very hungry. Jackson burned Bowlegs’s village and prepared to call the war a success. “I believe I may say that the destruction of this place, with the possession of St. Marks, . . . will end the Indian War for the present,” he told Calhoun.

J
ackson turned out to be right. Although Seminole resistance to American power would revive and, during Jackson’s presidency, erupt again, for the time being the insurgents were destitute and demoralized. The soggy earth of Florida was harder to scorch than that of the Red Sticks’ Mississippi homeland, but Jackson went far toward making it uninhabitable for enemies of the United States.

As Jackson headed back west and north he tied up some loose ends of the conflict. He convened a special court at St. Marks to determine the fate of the captured Britons, Ambrister and Arbuthnot. Gaines headed the court, and other officers drawn from the regular army and the militia filled out the tribunal. The prisoners were charged with various crimes of which the common theme was incitement to war against the United States and giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies. Though the court lacked any authority besides an order from Jackson, it observed certain legal forms. Witnesses were sworn and heard. The accused were permitted to defend themselves and their actions. The proceeding lasted three days, at the end of which the court delivered its verdict and its sentence recommendation to Jackson. Both men were found guilty. Arbuthnot was sentenced to death by hanging. Ambrister was initially sentenced to death by firing squad, but the court reconsidered and changed the sentence to fifty lashes and twelve months at hard labor.

Jackson could approve the sentences, modify them, or set them aside. He asked himself, in the case of Ambrister, whether a prison sentence was practical where no prisons existed and whether a whipping accorded with the gravity of waging war against the United States. Early the day after he received the court’s findings, he left St. Marks for Mississippi and home. From the road outside the town he sent back a message conveying his decision.

The Commanding General orders that Brevet Major A. C. W. Fanning, of the corps of artillery, will have, between the hours of eight and nine o’clock,
A
.
M
., A. Arbuthnot suspended by the neck, with a rope, until he is
dead
, and Robert C. Ambrister to be shot to
death
, agreeably to the sentence of the court.

D
uring the half decade after the War of 1812, the money problem so long a source of vexation to westerners became a crisis of national proportions. Gold fled the country for foreign bourses, driven out by cheap banknotes. Silver was almost as scarce. The federal government had issued Treasury notes to fund the war, but because these weren’t convertible into specie and because the government couldn’t resist printing more of them, they depreciated rapidly. Sound banks suffered for the sins of the flimsy, leaving sellers reluctant to accept notes from any issuer. Merchants fell back on barter. Potential lenders were demoralized by the ruinous rates of inflation.

So dire was the financial anarchy that the Republicans were driven to a measure the founders of the party had long considered Federalist anathema. In 1816 the Republican Congress resurrected the Bank of the United States. The original bank had been the brainchild of Alexander Hamilton, who hoped to marry wealth to power by granting the bank—a privately owned institution dominated by some of the richest men in the country—control over the financial business of the federal government. Republicans condemned Hamilton’s bank as unconstitutional and as prima facie evidence of the Federalist plot to sacrifice liberty to profit. They lacked the votes in 1791 to prevent its charter but swore they would have if they could have. And when the bank’s charter expired in 1811, with the Republicans firmly in control of Congress, the bank’s opponents gleefully watched it die. The Federalists could do nothing to save it. But those Federalists who survived the War of 1812 had the satisfaction of seeing the worm turn and James Madison, one of the harshest critics of the first Bank of the United States, compelled by the financial crisis of the postwar period to call for its resurrection. In April 1816 the Republican Congress approved a bill chartering a second Bank of the United States for twenty years, and Madison signed it into law.

Two weeks later Congress approved another measure similarly fraught with significance. The Constitution had always allowed Congress to regulate commerce, by means including the levying of tariffs on imports. Until the troubles that produced the war, tariffs were treated as tools for raising revenue, and in fact import duties were the primary source of revenue for the federal government. With revenue as the object, rates were kept low, lest customers turn away and collections fall. Things changed during the war. The trans-Atlantic dislocations caused by the conflict allowed domestic industries—iron, arms, tools, and others—to emerge. As they did so, they developed political constituencies: owners, employees, distributors, suppliers. The constituents found friends in Washington who sponsored tariff legislation based on the novel principle of protection rather than revenue. The point was to maximize not the government’s income but the incomes of the interested parties. The friends of industry, forming crucial alliances with cotton and woolen producers, persuaded Congress to pass the first explicitly protective tariff in American history.

A
ndrew Jackson contributed nothing toward the charter of the new bank or the passage of the protective tariff, though both the bank and the tariff would figure centrally in his career as president. By contrast, actions he had already taken made him the foremost author of a development that would transform American politics and the American economy no less than the bank and the tariff did.

Since the late sixteenth century, when hostile Indians had destroyed the first English colony planted in North America (at Roanoke Island on the Carolina coast), the indigenous peoples had been the principal barrier to the westward expansion of the American colonies and the states that became their successors. By crushing the Creeks and intimidating the other tribes of the Southwest, Jackson opened large swaths of land to settlement. Almost before the British sailed away from Louisiana after the Battle of New Orleans, the migration to the Southwest began, and during the next few decades what had been Indian-controlled wilderness when Jackson and his Tennessee volunteers first marched through became the center of a burgeoning American cotton industry. The deep black soil of the Gulf coastal plain grew long-staple cotton better than almost anywhere else on earth. With the help of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, which separated cotton seeds from fiber; Robert Fulton’s steamboat, which transported the cotton to market; and tens of thousands of black slaves, who planted, hoed, and harvested the cotton, the cotton farmers who followed in Jackson’s footsteps became wealthy and powerful. Slavery had been an institution with a doubtful future in the late eighteenth century, as the eastern lands on which the slaves worked grew tired and unproductive. Now slavery, or rather the slaveholders, ruled a cotton kingdom with a future limited only by the slaveholders’ ambitions.

S
ome people seek danger as a way of making themselves feel alive. They scale mountains or explore jungles when they feel existence becoming mundane, as they often do. Others seek confrontation, for similar reasons. Jackson wouldn’t have admitted to
seeking
confrontation. He would have said he simply stood on principle, which was where confrontation found
him
. But the number and gravity of his duels and shooting affrays, and the frequency of his ignoring and exceeding orders suggest that confrontation wasn’t some side effect of a boisterous personality but the raison d’être of Jackson’s spirit—at least that portion of his spirit he showed the world at large. The private Jackson—the gentle husband to Rachel, the doting father to Andrew Jr. and his foster brothers, the solicitous uncle to Rachel’s kin, the patron to the junior officers who served beneath him—was another character entirely. Within the circle he defined as family—and he defined it generously—he displayed all the tenderness he had been storing up since the early demise of his childhood family. But to the rest of the world—the world of hostile Indians just beyond the fringe of settlement, of partisan Tories burning and looting his home village, of imperious British officers demanding their boots blackened or invading American soil, of feckless Spanish commandants endangering the American South by their dereliction—he was always the embattled warrior.

More than a few of his battles he brought upon himself. In early 1817 the War Department reassigned one of his engineers without sending the reassignment order through Jackson’s Nashville headquarters. Jackson protested the lack of courtesy, and when Washington failed to assure him it wouldn’t happen again, he commanded the officers in his division to ignore any future directives from the War Department. They must listen only to him. “There is a chain of communication that binds the military compact, which, if broken, opens the door to disobedience and disrespect and gives loose to the turbulent spirits who are ever ready to excite mutiny.”

Mutiny was exactly what some of Jackson’s critics saw in the headstrong general’s order. Hadn’t Caesar and every other military dictator come to power by tying their men more closely to themselves than to the government all had pledged to serve?

Jackson heard the criticism, at first indirectly. In August 1817 an anonymous correspondent in New York warned him against enemies in the Northeast, including Winfield Scott, who headed the First and Third military departments, based in New York. “The War Office gentry and their adherents, pensioners, and expectants have all been busy,” the nameless writer asserted, “but no one (of sufficient mark for your notice) more than Major General Scott, who, I am credibly informed, goes so far as to call the order in question an act of mutiny. In this district he is the organ of Government insinuations and the supposed author of the paper enclosed”—an unsigned newspaper article critical of Jackson and his order. “Be on your guard.”

Jackson confronted Scott and demanded an explanation. “I have not permitted myself for a moment to believe that the conduct ascribed to you is correct,” he said, unpersuasively. “Candor, however, induces me to lay them”—the anonymous letter and the article—“before you that you may have it in your power to say how far they may be incorrectly stated.”

Scott didn’t appreciate being haled into Jackson’s court, especially on the testimony of someone who lacked the courage or decency to give his name. He denied being the author of the critical article, but he refused to disavow the sentiments ascribed to him. He pointed out the impossible position in which Jackson’s order placed his subordinates. Suppose the president ordered one of Jackson’s captains to take a certain action. “If the Captain obeys, you arrest him; but if in compliance with your prohibition he sets the commands of the President at naught, he would find himself in direct conflict with the highest military authority under the Constitution.” Scott hoped Jackson would reconsider his order. But in any event, he wanted nothing more to do with the affair.