Andrew Jackson (80 page)
As Clay’s censure resolutions moved toward passage in the Senate, Jackson accounted them simply more of what he had long expected of Clay. “The storm in Congress is still raging, Clay reckless and as full of fury as a drunken man in a brothel,” he told Andrew. But the furor would have no effect. “This mammoth of power and corruption must die. . . . The
monster must perish
.” When the Senate approved the censure, Jackson blamed Biddle’s greedy reach. “Nicholas Biddle now rules the Senate, as a showman does his puppets.”
Yet the worst was already over. The liquidity crisis eased as the federal deposits flowed into the state banks, and from the state banks into the economy. Biddle might own Clay and the Senate, but the people were retaking the economy. “The clamour of pressure in the money market is vanishing,” Jackson observed in March 1834. “All things will end well here.”
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nd so it seemed for several months. The bank war broke Biddle’s power. The Democrats trounced the Whigs in the congressional elections of 1834, successfully blaming Biddle and the bank for the financial panic that followed the removal of the deposits. Whig leaders thereupon abandoned Biddle as quickly as they could. Thurlow Weed, the voice of New York Whiggism, told Biddle and the bank good riddance. “After staggering along from year to year with a doomed bank upon our shoulders,” Weed declared, “both the bank and our party are finally overwhelmed. The burden, however, is now removed.”
The beginning of the new year brought further glad tidings. When the federal accounts were tallied on January 1, 1835, the United States government was no longer in debt. Jackson had been paying down the debt since his first day in office, in the Jeffersonian belief that the debt was a Federalist plot to fatten bankers and subvert the republic. After six years, his administrative reforms and spending vetoes paid off in this proud accomplishment, which gave the lie to charges that a democracy could never control its fiscal appetites.
But if the fiscal problem had been solved, the monetary problem remained. In fact it got worse, primarily as a result of Jackson’s war against the Bank of the United States. Freed from the restraints Biddle’s bank had imposed, the state banks issued notes by the basketful. These fueled a rampant speculation in every kind of commodity. Jackson couldn’t do much about the speculation overall, except worry that it jeopardized the stability of the economy and threatened the welfare of millions of ordinary people. But he could curb the speculation in land, which had particularly painful effects on folks trying to get started in farming. In July 1836 he approved the “specie circular,” which required that purchasers of federal lands pay gold or silver for their acreage.
Jackson’s move burst the land bubble at once, and as the air blew out it chilled the broader economy. Not till 1837, after Jackson had left office, would the full effects be felt, but the lesson was clear, or should have been: that in matters monetary, there were no easy answers, and perhaps never would be.
P
olitics in the age of Jackson wasn’t for the faint of heart and especially not for the weak of mind. The rhetoric was extravagant, sometimes violently so, and those persons who couldn’t mind the difference between metaphor and reality could become a danger to themselves and others. In January 1835 Jackson attended a memorial service at the Capitol for a departed congressman. He was exiting the building when a man quietly emerged from the crowd of onlookers and from a distance of less than ten feet leveled a pistol at the president’s heart and fired. The percussion cap exploded but failed to ignite the powder in the barrel. “The explosion of the cap was so loud that many persons thought the pistol had fired,” Thomas Benton remembered. “I heard it at the foot of the steps, far from the place, and a great crowd between.” The sound startled all present and froze them in their steps. The assailant took advantage of the collective pause to raise a second pistol, aim, and squeeze the trigger. Again the cap fired, but again it failed to ignite the powder.
Jackson by this time realized he was under mortal attack, and he charged the man with his cane. Yet others moved more quickly, and a knot of angry cabinet secretaries, military officers, and bystanders collapsed upon the man. He was roughly carried away to police custody.
Interrogation revealed that his name was Richard Lawrence and that he had been born in England. He was a painter of houses by trade, but the panic of the previous year had thrown him out of work. No American president had ever been assassinated, and the attempt alone suggested to police that Lawrence was insane. They summoned doctors to assist with the examination. The doctors inquired as to the assailant’s health. “He replied that it had been uniformly good, and that he had never labored under any mental derangement,” the doctors reported. “Nor did he admit the existence of any of those symptoms of physical derangement which usually attend mental alienation.” The doctors inquired into motive. “He replied that he had been told that the president had caused his loss of occupation, and the consequent want of money. . . . He believed that to put him out of the way was the only remedy for this evil.” The doctors asked who told him this. He couldn’t identify anyone in particular, but he did say he had often attended the debates in Congress.
The doctors pressed him on why he wanted Jackson dead. “He answered, because he was a tyrant.” The doctors asked who told him that. “He answered, it was a common talk with the people, and that he had read it in all the papers.” He was asked whether he thought he personally would benefit from the president’s death. “He answered, he could not rise unless the president fell, and that he expected thereby to recover his liberty, and that the mechanics would all be benefited; that the mechanics would have plenty of work; and that money would be more plenty.” He was asked why money would be more plenty. “He replied, it would be more easily obtained from the bank.” What bank? “The Bank of the United States.”
To this point in the interrogation, Lawrence’s comments made him seem simply an extreme Whig. But when he asserted that he was in regular correspondence with the governments of Europe and that he was the rightful heir to the throne of England, the doctors decided he was indeed insane. As a result he was never tried for the attempted assassination. Some observers hoped the incident would cause the participants in the political debates to reconsider their rhetoric, to ask whether allegations of despotism might drive others to similar acts of deluded tyrannicide. But if any of the debaters did reconsider, the effect wasn’t noticeable.
Indeed, a contrary conclusion was drawn by some of Jackson’s partisans, though apparently not by Jackson himself. Restraint was unnecessary, they said, because God protected democrats. In the course of the investigation the police tested the pistols Lawrence had aimed at the president. Each time now, the weapons fired perfectly. “The circumstance made a deep impression upon the public feeling,” Thomas Benton explained, “and irresistibly carried many minds to the belief in a superintending Providence, manifested in the extraordinary case of two pistols in succession—so well loaded, so coolly handled, and which afterwards fired with such readiness, force, and precision—missing fire, each in its turn, when levelled from eight feet at the President’s heart.”
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mid the battle over the bank, Jackson received some welcome news of a personal sort. Sam Houston had made a remarkable comeback from the depths of his drunken self-pity. He still drank, but not more than many in America in those sodden days when liquor was safer than water and most meals began and ended with a crook of the elbow and a nod to the vine or the cornstalk. He looked almost as good as he had before he threw his career away over a broken heart: tall, with broad shoulders and a leonine head framed in flowing black hair and bushy side-whiskers. Business of an undisclosed sort brought him east to New York and then Washington. In the capital he happened to tangle with a congressman who, remembering Houston’s support for Jackson, lashed the younger man as a way of hitting the older. The congressman, William Stanberry, spoke on the floor of the House and on that account thought himself immune from retaliation. Houston recalled enough from his own service in the House to interpret its rules of order otherwise and, when he caught Stanberry on Pennsylvania Avenue, caned him vigorously. Stanberry thereupon filed charges in the House against him.
Jackson didn’t like Stanberry, who opposed him on the bank, and thought he deserved the thrashing. The president was particularly touched that Houston had employed a hickory cane to apply the strokes. He brought Houston to the White House and offered encouragement. “It’s not you they are after, Sam,” he said. “Those thieves, those infernal bank thieves, they wish to injure your old commander.” Jackson gave Houston money for a new suit for the trial and told him, “When you make your defense, tell those infernal bank thieves, who talk about privileges, that when an American citizen is insulted by one of them, he also has some privileges.”
Houston defended himself floridly in the trial. He couldn’t deny he had beaten Stanberry, but he pleaded extenuating circumstances. The congressman had insulted him beyond endurance, he said, and then had refused to meet him in an honorable duel. What was a gentleman to do? He closed his defense with a flight of oratory that impressed even gallery denizens used to Daniel Webster. “So long as that flag shall bear aloft its glittering stars,” he declaimed, pointing at the flag behind the Speaker’s chair, “so long, I trust, shall the rights of American citizens be preserved safe and unimpaired, and transmitted as a sacred legacy from one generation to another, till discord shall wreck the spheres, the grand march of time shall cease, and not one fragment of all creation be left to chafe on the bosom of eternity’s waves.”
Houston won the galleries but lost the case. The House voted him guilty and ordered the Speaker to reprimand him. Stanberry then filed a suit in criminal court against Houston, who lost again, incurring a five-hundred-dollar fine. Yet Houston won something five hundred dollars couldn’t have purchased: vindication in the eyes of Jackson and the Jacksonian public. “I was dying out, and had they taken me before a justice of the peace and fined me ten dollars, it would have killed me,” he recollected. “But they gave me a national tribunal for a theatre, and that set me up again.”
Jackson agreed. Houston’s impassioned defense of himself—and implicitly of Jackson—rehabilitated the prodigal son in the eyes of his surrogate father. Jackson blasted the House trial of Houston as “the greatest act of tyranny and usurpation ever attempted under our government,” and he predicted, “The people will inquire into this act of usurpation and make these little tyrants who have thus voted feel the power of the people.” The Constitution prevented the president from doing anything about the House’s chastisement of Houston, yet he was able to remit the fine imposed by the Washington district court.
Jackson would have been happy for Houston to return to Tennessee politics, but as in the case of the Bible’s prodigal son, the siblings of the wayward child were less delighted than the father at his sudden reappearance. Tennessee wouldn’t have Houston, who himself experienced mixed emotions about returning to the scene of his humiliation at love. So he set his eye farther west.
J
ackson had been thinking about Texas since Aaron Burr had plotted to free that province from Spanish control and add it to the American empire or his own. Burr’s disgrace and Jackson’s own efforts to distance himself from the fiasco made forgetfulness about Texas a virtue for a time. In any case, with his hands full in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida, he had little attention to spare for the region across the Sabine. Yet he wasn’t entirely oblivious. Like Jefferson, Jackson believed that the Louisiana Purchase had included Texas, and so with most southwesterners he objected when John Quincy Adams as secretary of state consigned Texas to Spanish control in 1819. But he couldn’t object too loudly, given that the same Spanish treaty delivered Florida to the United States and that Adams was Jackson’s staunchest defender against charges of high-handedness in the Seminole War. Mexican independence in 1821 complicated the Texas question for Jackson and other defenders of democracy. So long as Texas—and Mexico—had labored under Spanish rule, taking Texas could be cast as spreading liberty and self-rule. The Mexicans, after flirting with a domestic version of empire, in 1824 embraced republicanism, with a federal constitution modeled on that of the United States. Americans began emigrating to Texas at the invitation of the Mexican government and under the supervision of Stephen Austin and other
empresarios
. Republican respect and simple good-neighborliness suggested a patient approach to Texas, which Jackson initially adopted.
Yet he couldn’t help thinking that Texas ought to be American. The settled parts of Texas were much closer to Louisiana than to any comparably populated portion of Mexico, and by the time Jackson took office, the Americans in Texas outnumbered the native Mexicans. (Jackson knew that Austin and most of the early settlers were naturalized citizens of Mexico, but he—and many of the settlers themselves—considered them still Americans at heart.) Most to the point, Jackson’s attitude toward Texas mirrored his earlier attitude toward Florida. Mexican authority in Texas was nearly as nonexistent as Spanish authority in Florida had been. Everything in Jackson’s experience suggested that political power abhorred a vacuum, and what wasn’t filled by the United States, in the regions along America’s borders, would be filled by some other nation or people, potentially hostile to the United States. Spain’s 1829 attempt to reconquer Mexico had failed on account of the heroics of a brilliant young general named Santa Anna. But the Spanish might try again. Or the British might exploit Mexico’s weakness as they had exploited Spain’s weakness in Florida. Or the French, fast recovering from their post-Napoleonic malaise, might try to recapture some of the New World glory Bonaparte had bargained away. Indians, including some who had taken refuge in Texas from American pressure, would be tempted to raid back across the border into the United States. And American slaves, inspired by the knowledge that Mexico had abolished slavery, would try to escape to Texas as other slaves had escaped to Florida. Borders were always trouble, which was why Jackson continually tried to push them back.