Andrew Jackson (55 page)

Perhaps Jackson’s intestinal problems were particularly severe when he received Scott’s answer and responded. Had Jackson been a heavy drinker, Scott must have thought him drunk. For whatever reason, Jackson wrote Scott a letter as intemperate and abusive as anything he ever composed. Scott, Jackson said, had approached the issue “with the designs of an assassin lurking under a fair exterior. . . . Is conduct like this congenial with that high sense of dignity which should be seated in a soldier’s bosom? Is it due from a brother officer to assail in the dark the reputation of another and stab him at a moment when he cannot expect it? . . . I shall not stoop, sir, to a justification of my order before you, or to notice the weakness and absurdity of your tinsel rhetoric. . . . To the intermeddling pimps and spies of the War Department, who are in the garb of gentlemen, I hold myself responsible for any grievance they may labor under on my account, with which you have my permission to number yourself.”

The outbreak of the Seminole War spared Americans the absurd and unseemly prospect of a duel between two of its ranking officers. Monroe calmed Jackson, who threatened to resign over the affair, by appealing to his sense of duty. “It is my earnest desire that you remain in the service of your country,” the president said. “Our affairs are not settled. . . . The Spanish government has injured us and shews no disposition to repair the injury. . . . Should we be involved in another war, I have no doubt that it will decide the fate of our free government.”

Monroe’s contemporaries (and historians after them) often found the Virginian unimpressive. Yet he was shrewd enough to discover Jackson’s vulnerability: the incapacity of the soldier-patriot to resist a call to the service of his country. Besides, even Jackson recognized that there was more glory in thrashing Spaniards than in quarreling with Winfield Scott. But the rift between the two men persisted, and Scott joined the growing ranks of Jackson’s enemies.

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here are serious difficulties in this business, on which ever side we view it,” Monroe declared in July 1818. The business the president referred to was the diplomatic furor that followed Jackson’s latest Florida venture. The British were protesting the execution of Arbuthnot and Ambrister, the Spanish Jackson’s entire Florida campaign. To emphasize his point that Spanish power in Florida was a dangerous sham, Jackson had recaptured Pensacola on his way back from the Suwanee River. “This is justifiable on the immutable principles of self-defence,” he wrote the Spanish governor, José Masot, as he approached the town. “The Government of the United States is bound to protect her citizens, but weak would be her efforts and ineffectual the best advised measures if the Floridas are to be free to every enemy.” As it happened, the governor had fled to the Barrancas, the fort that commanded the bay below the town. Receiving no answer, Jackson sent a sterner note to the acting commander at Pensacola. “I am informed that you have orders to fire on my troops entering the city. . . . I wish you to understand distinctly that if such orders are carried into effect, I will put to death every man found in arms.” The commander, a mere lieutenant colonel, chose not to test Jackson’s sincerity, and Jackson took the town.

Proceeding to the Barrancas, he conveyed the same message to Masot in slightly more tactful fashion. “Resistance would be a wanton sacrifice of blood. . . . You cannot expect to defend yourself successfully, and the first shot from your fort must draw down upon you the vengeance of an irritated soldiery.” The governor, who had more at stake than the lieutenant colonel, insisted on contesting the American takeover, but mostly for form’s sake. The battle was brief and casualties were light.

Had Jackson taken the town and marched away, as he did in 1814, the difficulties he created for Monroe would have been modest. But Jackson’s earlier experience convinced him that Spain couldn’t be trusted with Florida, and so he garrisoned Pensacola with American troops who, from all appearances, would remain there permanently. The Spanish were predictably outraged. Their minister at Washington, Luis de Onís, filed a protest with the State Department as soon as he heard the news. President Monroe, he insisted, must return Pensacola to Spanish control at once and punish General Jackson.

Less predictably, certain Americans agreed with the Spanish minister. Though the American people, by and large, loved Jackson, many American politicians distrusted him deeply. Some honestly worried that he had the makings of a military dictator. Others feared for the Constitution if the executive branch—whether in the person of a general or of the president—could wage war without asking Congress. Still others saw in Jackson an impediment to their own political ambitions.

This last group was well represented in Monroe’s own administration. The demise of the Federalists—who put up only token resistance to Monroe’s election in 1816 and wouldn’t nominate anyone in 1820—didn’t end national politics in America. It simply shifted politics to within the Republican party, where those men who wished to succeed Monroe were already maneuvering for advantage. William Crawford scarcely bothered to hide his ambitions, which made for tense cabinet meetings with John Quincy Adams, who
did
try to hide his ambitions but didn’t succeed. John Calhoun had hopes, besides an unrecognized capacity for intrigue.

“Mr. Calhoun is extremely dissatisfied with General Jackson’s proceedings in Florida,” Adams remarked after a series of meetings in which Jackson and Florida provided the consistent theme. “Thinks Jackson’s object was to produce a war for the sake of commanding an expedition against Mexico, and that we shall certainly have a Spanish war.” The South Carolinian’s sniping persisted. “Calhoun says he has heard that the court-martial at first acquitted the two Englishmen, but that Jackson sent the case back to them. . . . He says, also, that last winter there was a company formed in Tennessee, who sent Jackson’s nephew to Pensacola and purchased Florida lands, and that Jackson himself is reported to be interested in the speculation.”

Less from love of Jackson than from enmity toward Crawford and Calhoun, Adams became Jackson’s strongest, and then only, defender in the cabinet. “The opinion is unanimously against Jackson excepting mine,” Adams wrote. Calhoun continued to attack Jackson for exceeding orders. Crawford joined in, predicting dire consequences from the general’s rash action. If the president didn’t restore Pensacola to Spain and reprimand Jackson, Crawford said, war would result, the economy would crash, and the administration would be punished by the American electorate.

Jackson’s enemies within the administration had help from without. Henry Clay had been happy for a time to bask in Jackson’s triumphs. “The Eighth of January shall be remembered, and the glory of that day shall stimulate future patriots!” the House Speaker told his colleagues. But he was quick to criticize when he sensed a negative reaction to Jackson’s Florida impetuousness. Clay condemned the executions of Arbuthnot and Ambrister as illegal and reprehensible, and he asserted that Jackson’s Florida campaign had usurped the exclusive authority of Congress to declare war. The general’s disregard for the Constitution endangered everything America stood for. “We are fighting a great moral battle for the benefit not only of our country but of all mankind. The eyes of the whole world are in fixed attention upon us.” The enemies of liberty had foretold the emergence of a military despot; for Jackson to escape censure would prove them right. And it would presage the end of the American republic. “Remember that Greece had her Alexander, Rome her Caesar, England her Cromwell, France her Bonaparte. . . . If we would escape the rock on which they split, we must avoid their errors.”

Leaning into the wind, Adams continued to defend Jackson. Adams may have seen Crawford and Clay as greater threats than Jackson to his succeeding Monroe. Or he may simply have believed what he said about Jackson’s being right. But whatever his motives, he argued on the general’s behalf with the determination Jackson later would come to dread. To the Spanish minister, Onís, the secretary of state justified Jackson’s intrusion as the necessary consequence of Spain’s failure to police Florida. To Albert Gallatin, his partner from the Ghent negotiations, Adams explained that Jackson had no alternative to executing Arbuthnot and Ambrister. He couldn’t hold the two men as prisoners without provoking Britain. Yet “to dismiss them with impunity would have been not only to let them loose to renew the same intrigues and machinations, but to leave their example a pernicious temptation to others to offend in like manner.” A sentence short of death would have had “little or no effect upon men to whom infamy was scarcely equivalent to any punishment at all.” Jackson was right: “The necessity of a signal example was urgent and indispensable.”

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ad Jackson been even a little repentant, he would have made Monroe’s task much easier. But he saw no reason to repent. “I have destroyed the Babylon of the South, the hot bed of the Indian war and depredations on our frontier, by taking St. Marks and Pensacola,” he wrote Rachel a few days after occupying the latter (and a few weeks after likening St. Marks to either Sodom or Gomorrah). He had delivered “the just vengeance of heaven, having visited and punished with death the exciters of the Indian war and horrid massacre of our innocent women and children.” To Monroe he defended his course as “absolutely necessary to put down the Indian war and give peace and security to our southern frontier.” His occupation of Florida sprang from the highest ideals. “In all things I have consulted public good and the safety and security of our southern frontier. I have established peace and safety, and hope the government will never yield it.”

Monroe could only shake his head at his impetuous general. The Spanish minister was demanding to know whether the president had ordered Jackson’s invasion of Florida; Monroe couldn’t decide how to respond. He couldn’t claim, in truth or politics, that he had. But to disavow and censure Jackson would make the administration look inept, besides angering the general and his many supporters. “Had General Jackson been ordered to trial,” Monroe told James Madison after the fact, “I have no doubt that the interior of the country would have been much agitated, if not convulsed.”

Monroe split the difference by ordering the return of the Florida forts to Spain but refusing to censure Jackson. That the president feared Jackson as much as he did the Spanish became clear from the effort Monroe made to mollify the general. “If the executive refused to evacuate the posts, especially Pensacola, it would amount to a declaration of war, to which it is incompetent,” Monroe told Jackson. “It would be accused with usurping the authority of Congress and giving a deep and fatal wound to the Constitution.” Publicly Monroe defended Jackson by blaming the Spanish for the anarchy they had allowed to develop in Florida. Jackson may have exceeded orders—Monroe made no secret of that—but he did little more than any conscientious field commander would have done under like circumstances. Florida had become “the theatre of every lawless adventure,” the president informed Congress. “With little population of its own, the Spanish authority almost extinct and the colonial governments in a state of revolution . . . it was in a great measure derelict.”

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pain got its forts back, but it couldn’t hold the land on which they stood. Jackson’s seizure of St. Marks and Pensacola forced the Spanish to acknowledge what had been implicit for some time: that with the American population of Georgia and Mississippi growing rapidly and the Spanish population of Florida growing not at all, Spain’s days in Florida were dwindling. John Quincy Adams made this point repeatedly in discussions with Luis de Onís regarding Florida and other boundary issues between the United States and the Spanish territory to the south and west. Adams’s strong support of Jackson signified not merely the secretary of state’s desire to frustrate his rivals for the presidency but his appreciation of how Jackson’s audacity strengthened his—Adams’s—bargaining position with Onís. What Spain couldn’t defend on the ground it couldn’t well claim at the negotiating table.

Yet Adams was diplomatic enough not to leave Onís bereft. While insisting, with Jackson’s aid, on having Florida, Adams gave up Texas. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the southwestern frontier of Louisiana remained vague. Thomas Jefferson claimed the Rio Grande, making Texas American. Spain said the border was the Sabine, making Texas Spanish. For ten years no one much bothered about Texas, as it was far from the settled regions of both Mexico and the United States and not on the way to anything important. But the war with Britain, and especially the attack on New Orleans, drew the American gaze southwestward, and after Adams assumed responsibility for the State Department, he set about reducing the uncertainty as to what was American and what wasn’t. Texas remained distant and largely unpopulated (even by Indians, who had been ravaged by smallpox and other diseases), and Adams felt little compunction about swapping the American claim to Texas for Florida and Spain’s claim to Oregon. Florida would pay off in the short term, rounding out the southeast. Oregon was a bet on the distant future, when the United States would require an outlet to the Pacific. Texas got lost in the middle.