Andrew Jackson (87 page)

These past several years the badness of democratic government had manifested itself in the rise of the slave power of the South. Like many of his generation and most of his section, Adams had expected slavery to wither and die. But it hadn’t, instead planting new roots in the territory opened by Jackson in the Southwest. And the slave power grew bolder as it broadened its base. Supporters of slavery stifled Adams and others in Congress who sought to debate it, leading Adams to ponder this new twist of democratic irony: that the very advocates of rule by the people refused to let the people speak. Yet he refused to abandon what he called “the life-and-death struggle for the right of petition,” though his enemies ridiculed him in the House, slandered him on the stump, libeled him in the press, and threatened him through the mails. “My conscience presses me on,” he told himself. “Let me but die upon the breach.”

He was hardly surprised to encounter Jackson in that breach. The general had been retired these eight years, but his influence followed Adams everywhere. Jackson’s supporters resurrected the old issues, in the old terms. They demanded that Congress rescind Jackson’s fine from New Orleans, and they excoriated all who opposed them. “When Weller moved, yesterday, the committee on the Jackson fine to rise,” Adams grumbled, “it was for the purpose of having a full, fresh morning hour to disgorge his bilious venom against the Whigs and his sycophancy to Jackson.” After Adams objected to a Jacksonian subterfuge to silence him, the leader of the Jackson forces “exploded with a volley of insolent billingsgate upon me.”

And when the Texas question reemerged, at the instance of Jackson and his followers, Adams felt the battle personally joined. The Democrats tried to make it a party issue by blaming Adams for giving away Texas in the 1819 treaty with Spain. They conspicuously called for the
re
annexation of Texas, the reclaiming of what had been America’s and should never have been relinquished.

Adams answered that Jackson had supported the treaty at the time and that any statements to the contrary were “bold, dashing, and utterly baseless lies.” Adams reiterated his charge that the attempt to attach Texas to the United States was part of the ever more audacious conspiracy of the slaveholders against American freedom. The opponents of slavery must awake to the danger. “Your trial is approaching. The spirit of freedom and the spirit of slavery are drawing together for the deadly conflict of arms. The annexation of Texas to this union is the blast of the trumpet for a foreign, civil, servile, and Indian war. . . . Burnish your armor, prepare for the conflict. . . . Think of your forefathers! Think of your posterity!”

T
hose were precisely the audiences Jackson was thinking of when, against all prior expectation, including his own, he ruined the political career of Martin Van Buren. As the 1844 election approached, the Texas question became even more pressing and more divisive. Henry Clay surprised no one by announcing against annexation and by becoming the leading candidate for the Whig nomination partly by virtue of that fact. Jackson judged that Clay’s opposition gave Van Buren just the issue he needed to reclaim the presidency for the Democrats and democracy.

Van Buren himself wasn’t so sure. As a New Yorker he was far more sensitive than Jackson to the complaints of the northern antislavery forces and far less attuned to the issues of border security that had never let Jackson rest. Beyond that, his political style was everything Jackson’s wasn’t. He was a conciliator, not a polarizer; he sought common ground, rather than to scorch the earth beneath his opponents’ feet. To Van Buren it made perfect sense to issue a statement that artfully avoided committing himself on the Texas question.

If Jackson hadn’t long since included him within his circle of friendship, he would have damned Van Buren’s waffling for cowardice. As it was, he shook his head at his protégé’s folly. “If Mr. Van Buren had come out in favour of annexation, he would have been elected almost by acclamation,” Jackson told Blair. But Van Buren hadn’t, thereby risking what Jackson considered double damage to the country: first by letting Texas get away and second by giving Clay and the Whigs a chance to win. Jackson had spoken in public only rarely since leaving the White House, and then chiefly on innocuous matters of uncontested patriotism. But Van Buren’s failure to make the cause of Texas his and the party’s own compelled Jackson to break his silence. In a letter to the
Nashville Union
he contended that Texas was vital to the future of democracy. “If Texas be not speedily admitted into our confederacy, she must and will be inevitably driven into alliances and commercial regulations with the European powers, of a character highly injurious and probably hostile to this country. What would then be our condition? New Orleans and the whole valley of the Mississippi would be endangered.” Texas was now as vital as New Orleans had been thirty years earlier. “She is the key to our safety in the South and the West. She offers this key to us on fair and honorable terms. Let us take it and lock the door against future danger.”

Jackson’s letter proved devastating to Van Buren. The New Yorker’s rivals in the Democratic party took advantage of his difference with Jackson on Texas to create opportunities for themselves. Most successful was James K. Polk, a former congressman and Tennessee governor, an ardent Jacksonian, and an equally ardent annexationist. Polk added “dark horse” to the lexicon of American politics by bolting from the pack of candidates and seizing the nomination at the Democratic convention in Baltimore. And he made the annexation of Texas—and of Oregon as well—the central theme of his campaign.

Jackson got the news of the nomination from Andrew Donelson. “The dark sky of yesterday has been succeeded by the brightest day democracy has witnessed since your election,” Donelson told Jackson.

Jackson agreed, and looked forward to the general election with confidence. “The Texan question has destroyed Clay in the South and West,” he said. “
Texas must and will be ours
.”

So it proved. Clay carried the Northeast and a handful of states elsewhere, but Polk dominated the South and West and won the election handily.

Jackson was relieved and gratified. “Polk and Dallas are elected and the republic is safe,” he declared.

J
ackson and most other observers assumed that the annexation of Texas awaited the inauguration of Polk. But Tyler, with little else to claim for his presidency, decided to lay claim to Texas. The antislavery minority in the Senate still prevented annexation of Texas by treaty, so Polk sought the alternative of a joint resolution of the House and Senate.

His decision to do so gave Adams an unexpected last chance to prevent what he considered a political, diplomatic, and moral disaster. No one could gag him now, with the Texas question fairly before the House. Adams could read the election returns as well as anyone, and he could see that expansion was in the blood of the American people. On this account he pointed to his own record as secretary of state to show that he had nothing against expansion per se. He endorsed the acquisition of Oregon, even if it bruised British feelings. But Texas, he said, was different. To take Texas would be to make slavery the essence of American expansion, not merely a side effect. It would trigger a war with Mexico, and it might well lead to a war between the American North and the American South.

But so long had Adams been railing against slavery that the House hardly heard him, and the country still less. The Jackson forces had won the election, and Jackson now won this last battle. The Texas resolution carried both houses.

Adams hadn’t been so discouraged since the day of Jackson’s inauguration, and for much the same reason. “The Union is sinking into a military monarchy,” he muttered. “The prospect is deathlike.”

F
or twenty years Jackson and Adams had bracketed American opinion regarding the most important political development of their era, the emergence of democracy. And at the end of that time they remained as divided over its meaning as they had been at the start. Adams believed that ordinary Americans weren’t fit to govern themselves, that left to their own ignorance they would choose military heroes and demagogues who told them what they wanted to hear while leading them where they had no business going. Their choice of Jackson for president was an early sign of the collapse of the republic, their seizure of Texas the most recent. More evidence doubtless would follow, culminating in a conflict that set one section against the other and utterly undid the handiwork of the Founders. Wherever George Washington’s deistic soul resided these days, it must be weeping for his country.

Jackson believed just the opposite. Democracy wasn’t a perversion of the republican promise but its perfection, or at least a large step toward perfection. The point of republicanism was to make government responsible to the people who lived under its laws. Whatever diminished responsibility was monarchy or aristocracy, and if the American Revolution had been about anything, it was about throwing off those twin incubi of despotism. Democracy made mistakes; Jackson didn’t deny that. But its mistakes were the honest and correctable mistakes of human misjudgment, not the interested, entrenched mistakes of selfish elites. Did the people know what was best for them? Not always. But they knew better than anyone else knew for them. God alone was perfect, and He ruled in heaven. Below, the people ruled, if imperfectly.

The question of Jackson’s day—as of every day since—was, who was right? Adams or Jackson? In 1845 it was difficult to tell. Adams saw slavery as the acid test of American politics, and he perceived the acid eating through the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and everything Americans held, or ought to hold, dear. He saw section replacing nation in the affections of the people, and civil war the near-certain result. The prospect was deathlike indeed.

Jackson saw the same events but interpreted them differently. Slavery wasn’t the issue; sectionalism was. Jackson defended slavery, in part because he couldn’t envision the political economy of the South without it, but mostly because he perceived the attacks on slavery as threats to the Union. The abolitionists might not intend to shatter the Union, but that would be the consequence of their actions. South Carolina had almost seceded over a tariff; how much more dangerous must it consider attempts to abolish the institution on which its whole way of life rested? Nor would South Carolina be alone on this issue. Its southern neighbors would feel compelled to rally to its side. And who, in any case, were the abolitionists to dictate morality to the rest of the country? They were but a noisy minority. The northern states had abandoned slavery peacefully when a majority of voters there decided slavery no longer served their interests. When a majority of voters in the southern states decided the same thing, slavery would end in the South. To force the issue was to assert that the people couldn’t be trusted with political power. Jackson could never accept that.

Jackson’s devotion to democracy was unsurprising in one born of the people and bred in the school of hard experience. He trusted the people because he was one of them, in a way none of his predecessors in the White House had been. His attachment to the Union was more difficult to explain. On most subjects his politics aligned with the traditional states’-rights preferences of the party of Jefferson. His principal complaint against the Federalists—aside from their arrogance—was that they stole power from the states, which he considered almost always more reliable in determining the will of the people than the central government at Washington. And throughout his presidency, on such bellwether issues as the Bank of the United States and internal improvements, he checked those in Congress who would have exceeded what he considered the proper bounds of federal authority. But he drew the line—a bright, sharp line, defended by arms if necessary—at anything that even hinted at secession. He would die with the Union, he said at the time of greatest strain with South Carolina. And he would take many with him.

Jackson wouldn’t have admitted it, and might not even have recognized it, but his devotion to the Union was at least as much emotional as it was political, at least as reflexive as considered. Sometime in his early life—perhaps when the blood from that British saber wound streaked his face, perhaps when his mother and brothers died and he found himself alone, perhaps when he crossed the mountains to the frontier West—he became peculiarly attached to the cause of his country. Lacking a family, he identified with the American people. Jackson’s enemies weren’t wrong to describe him as a military chieftain, but they misunderstood what this meant. His deepest loyalties were not to friends and relations, except for Rachel, or even to his Tennessee neighbors. The clan of Old Hickory, the tribe of Sharp Knife, was the American people. Whatever endangered them—the designs of the British, the weakness of the Spanish, the resistance of the Indians, the disloyalty of the Hartford Federalists, the machinations of the nullifiers, the corruption of the Whigs—elicited an immediate response, and sometimes an intemperate one. He could no more control his devotion to the Union than he could measure his attachment to Rachel. Had he been a different man—had he inherited a different temperament from his Ulster ancestors, had he experienced a warmer childhood, had he not been forced to struggle for everything he achieved—he might have turned out less belligerent, less likely to interpret question as affront and challenge as attack. But he was the man he was.