The Book of Bastards (7 page)

March 4, 1829: a sixty-two-year-old veteran prepared for a day history would never forget. His career had been flush with success and honor. He served in several wars, including the American Revolution; was appointed the first governor of Florida; was elected first congressman from Tennessee; spent two-terms as a United States senator; and commanded the victorious American troops at the historic Battle of New Orleans. That late winter morning, he strode down Pennsylvania Avenue hatless, clad in a black suit and string tie to honor his recently deceased wife. President-Elect Andrew Jackson had a date with destiny; it was his inauguration day.

Jackson and many of his supporters viewed that day as long overdue. After he won the election of 1828 in a landslide vote and handily defeating incumbent John Quincy Adams and a field of other challengers, Jackson had pledged that he would reform the federal government. He insisted that the common people would be represented, not just the monied interests and the same old political elites who acted as if political power and influence were theirs by birthright.

Jackson considered himself a man of the people, and the people seemed to love him for it. So in the weeks before Jackson's inauguration, the national capital had experienced a steady influx of visitors from all walks of life and every possible rung on the social ladder. All of them determined to bear witness to one of their own taking hold of the reins of on the West Portico of the Capitol Building. By the time that Jackson took his long walk down Pennsylvania Avenue on that fateful March day, an immense, loud, colorful crowd had gathered to await him.

Although he was required to attend the inauguration because of his place on the high court, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story left as quickly as he could in order to get away from the crowd. Jackson's predecessor John Quincy Adams followed the example of his own father twenty-eight years earlier and stayed away altogether. The District's fifteen federal marshals stretched a ship's cable across the Capitol's East Portico in an attempt to keep the crowd back.

Jackson took the oath of office and then addressed the throng. He spoke for only ten minutes, renewing his campaign promise to weed out political corruption in the national government. Then he returned to the White House. A long procession of his admirers followed, blocking Pennsylvania Avenue with the sheer weight of their numbers.

Breaking completely with previous precedent, Jackson had insisted that his new residence be open to the public on this day. Thousands of his fellow Americans took him up on the invitation.

Washington socialite and novelist Margaret Bayard Smith later wrote of the celebration:

By the end of the day the entire first floor of the White House was a complete wreck. Jackson himself quietly left by a set of back stairs and spent the night in the rooming house he'd rented upon entering the city the previous week. Those revelers left behind were only coaxed out of the White House by the quick thinking of its staff: they removed the punch bowls (filled with more liquor than “punch”) from the building and set them up out on the South Lawn.

Along with Jackson and everything and everyone he represented, Democracy (after a fashion) had arrived in the national capital on March 4, 1829. And on that day, as has often proven many times since, Democracy showed itself to be something of a bastard.

Former national and frontier politician, judge, militia general, Indian fighter, and hero of the Battle of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson began serving his country as a teenager during the American Revolution. Orphaned, marked by smallpox, and scarred across the face by the slash of a British officer's sword after Jackson — a prisoner at the time — refused to polish that officer's boots Jackson's service left him diamond hard.

So tough that his troops had nicknamed him “Old Hickory,” Jackson was intelligent, ruthless, stubborn, determined, and — when he chose to be — charming. Many of the common folk in the country found him and his appealing “rags to riches” life story irresistible. Thousands of them voted for him for president in 1824, when he got more votes than any other candidate but still lost the presidency. Jackson won the election of 1828 and served as president for eight stormy years from 1829–1837.

During that presidency Jackson proved himself to be quite a bastard. Among other things, he took it on himself to destroy the banking system (with help from Martin Van Buren). He also dispossessed most of the remaining Indian tribes east of the Mississippi. And through sheer force of will he shut down a crisis that threatened to break the country apart in civil war.

For his part, Jackson claimed that removing the Cherokees was “humane,” moving them “out of the way” of encroaching white settlement. Some favor.

It was during the last of these crises (known as the “Nullification Crisis”) that Jackson's outright bastardry might have been the single most likely thing holding the nation together. The affair pitted Jackson against several Southern states, including South Carolina, and Vice President John C. Calhoun, in a battle over federal tariffs. The president did not allow sectional sympathy to sway him during this crisis. He sent federal troops into the state in response to news that South Carolina's governor had raised a militia of 25,000.

At the height of the tension, Jackson had a visitor who informed him that he was going to South Carolina for a visit, and asked whether the president had any message to pass along to his friends there. The president responded with characteristic bluntness:

An able politician with a strong personality, John C. Calhoun wore many hats during his nearly fifty years of public service. He was a member of the House of Representatives; a longtime senator from South Carolina; a secretary of war for James Monroe; secretary of state for John Tyler; and vice president of the United States during the administrations of both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Calhoun was also such a zealous advocate of states' rights that his beliefs led him to commit treason against the very government he had sworn to protect.

The Tariff of 1828 was a nationally divisive issue. President Jackson and his Northern allies supported the law. It protected fledgling Northern industries that were being driven out of business by a market flooded by cheaper British goods. The Southern states, however, called it the “Tariff of Abominations.” The South had an agricultural economy, and its major trading partner was not the rapidly industrializing Northern states. Southern cotton most often sold to British, not American, buyers. Calhoun felt he couldn't turn his back on his fellow Southerners just to save face with the president. His vocal opposition put him in a politically awkward position.

Once the United States enacted the tariff, the British responded with heavy taxes on goods from the United States, including on Southern cotton. This in turn hurt Southern exports as much as Jefferson's embargo had hurt New England's shipping industry twenty years before.

Calhoun could not silently bear what he considered an injustice to his native region. He penned
The South Carolina Exposition and Protest
as a condemnation of the tariff. Since he was still Jackson's vice president, Calhoun published his treatise anonymously. In the essay, Calhoun supported nullification. He used legal theory to suggest that a state ought to be able to “nullify” (or cancel out) a federal law within the boundaries of the state itself. The plan would have allowed the South to continue selling cotton to British mills without paying heavy taxes. And it would have allowed any state to throw out any federal law with which its citizens disagreed.

By actively advocating the circumvention of the U.S. Constitution, Calhoun committed treason. And like the organizers of the Hartford Convention before him, Calhoun paid a price for his perfidy. His actions in this case cost him any possibility of ever succeeding Andrew Jackson as president.

Calhoun was doubly unfortunate in his timing. By the time Jackson got word that Calhoun had secretly written the
Exposition
, he had also discovered that Calhoun had worked against him earlier in their careers. Calhoun had lobbied for Jackson to be court-martialed for dereliction of duty back in 1818, when Calhoun was Monroe's secretary of war, and Jackson and his militia were chasing British agents and Seminoles into Spanish-held Florida.

When Jackson asked him about this, Calhoun equivocated and made excuses. It didn't help that Calhoun had been scheming to fill the cabinet with his own political allies during the whole “Eaton Affair.” This perfect storm of poorly timed and two-faced political choices resulted in a permanent break between the two men. Martin Van Buren of New York replaced Calhoun as vice president and Jackson's political heir; Calhoun went home to South Carolina to sulk.

Although he eventually partially rehabilitated his reputation, and returned to Washington as by turns secretary of state and U.S. Senator from his beloved South Carolina, Calhoun never again got close to the White House.

And the country was the better for it.

When Andrew Jackson set about choosing the members of his cabinet, he included a few personal friends, among them his secretary of war, John H. Eaton. The two men had served together in the Senate, and Jackson, with no children of his own, took a fatherly interest in the much younger Eaton.

Rumor had it that Eaton was carrying on a years-long affair with Margaret “Peggy” O'Neill Timberlake. He was a handsome widower; she was the beautiful daughter of an Irish immigrant pub owner. But she was married. Her husband, a purser in the U.S. Navy, had money troubles and was often away on long voyages. Eaton had befriended the couple before Timberlake's circumstances forced his return to sea and was often seen in Peggy's company afterward, hence the rumors of an affair.

Peggy suffered a miscarriage in 1828, during the second straight year of one of her husband's cruises. Obviously, Timberlake was not the father, and tongues began to wag. When her husband died at sea soon afterward of pulmonary disease (rumors said suicide) at age fifty-one, there was an outright buzz over the whole affair.

Peggy cut the mourning period short and married Eaton less than a year later. The two wed so quickly in part as a result of the encouragement of President Jackson, who knew and liked them both. Shortly before his inauguration, Jackson bluntly advised Eaton: “If you love Margaret Timberlake go and marry her at once and shut their [the gossips'] mouths.”

If anything, their nuptials had the opposite effect. “She will not be admitted to society!” declared novelist Margaret Bayard Smith. Smith had much company in this among Washington society's
doyennes
, including Floride Calhoun, the stiffnecked, blue-blooded wife of Vice President John C. Calhoun.

Calhoun hoped to use the resulting scandal to his own advantage. With a strong record in the government, Calhoun needed to pave the way for his own presidential run in 1832. He had already succeeded in filling the president's cabinet posts with men who followed his lead. The only problem: the humorless vice president had a rival in the cabinet, someone with vastly better people skills than his own. Secretary of State Van Buren's desire to succeed Jackson was no secret, even if the sly New Yorker never admitted it.

Calhoun hoped to drive a wedge between Jackson and Van Buren and used his prudish wife to do it. Floride snubbed Peggy and convinced the other cabinet wives to do the same. The Calhouns intended to force the Eatons out of Washington. And if Eaton resigned, a Calhoun man could take his place: Van Buren would be all the more isolated.

The plan backfired. While Floride got the wives of all of the other cabinet officials to follow her lead, Van Buren — a widower — had cheerfully embraced the couple. The Calhouns also failed to consider their scheme's impact on the president. Jackson was convinced that campaign slanders had killed his beloved wife Rachel, and seeing Peggy's treatment at the hands of Washington's “polite society” enraged him.

Eaton resigned from the cabinet in 1831, but the Calhouns won a hollow victory. Jackson had formed such a close bond with Van Buren that he was willing to state openly that Van Buren — “frank open, candid, and manly … Republican in his principles” — was his preferred successor.

Eaton's political career, once so promising, never recovered from the “Eaton Affair.” He governed the Florida Territory and served as Van Buren's ambassador to Spain, dying in 1856.

After Eaton died, Peggy married an Italian musician forty years her junior. Karma eventually caught up with old Mrs. Eaton: her third husband ran off with her seventeen-year-old granddaughter and her fortune. Once a bastard's wife, always a bastard's wife.