What Hath God Wrought (54 page)

All the major political controversies of Andrew Jackson’s two terms in the White House involved issues of authority. Jackson exercised presidential authority in new ways, removing competent officeholders and vetoing more bills than all his predecessors put together. (The contrast with his immediate predecessor was particularly striking, since Adams had vetoed no bills at all.) Jackson engaged in contests of authority with Congress and barely avoided one with the Supreme Court. The Eaton Affair showed that even social intercourse could be a matter for the assertion of presidential authority. Ultimate authority, that is, sovereignty, became the subject of explicit and bitter debate during Jackson’s administrations. Rival claims of sovereignty for the states and the nation found expression in legal theory, rhetorical eloquence, and finally in political crisis. The president believed in the sovereignty of the American people and in himself as the embodiment of that sovereignty. The conflict between Jackson and the Second Bank of the United States escalated into a “war” waged in defense of both national and popular sovereignty. By the end of his presidency, Jackson had defended federal supremacy in the crisis with South Carolina even while encouraging neighboring Georgia to assert state sovereignty. In the last analysis, it was his personal authority, rather than that of the federal government or even the presidential office, which Jackson zealously maintained.

II

Jacksonians justified Indian Removal as a prerequisite to the westward extension of white settlement. But from the standpoint of Jackson’s western supporters, cheap land seemed just as important as the expulsion of the Native population. Western settlers and land speculators wanted to buy cheap from the government and sell dear to later arrivals. Missouri’s Thomas Hart Benton, spokesman for the frontier, proposed the price of unsold public lands drop automatically over time until they found a buyer. After four years on the market, their price would reach a mere twenty-five cents an acre. “The public lands belong to the People, and not to the federal government,” he thundered.
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Benton termed his policy “graduation.” To achieve more rapid settlement of the West, his plan would severely curtail the potential value of the lands to the government. It meant abandoning hope of using revenue from the public lands for internal improvements or education and leaving the government without much leverage on the economy. It had therefore been opposed by the Adams administration. Anticipating a more sympathetic response from Jackson, Benton had supported him for president, in spite of the fact that they had once been such bitter personal enemies that Old Hickory still carried a bullet in his body from a shootout with Benton and his brother Jesse in 1813.

In reality, there was plenty of land for all, so much that the price stayed low. Land Office auctions in the 1820s seldom raised much more than the $1.25 minimum even for the best new acres. The Native Americans were dispossessed faster than their lands could be sold. Georgia didn’t even try to sell the Cherokee lands it seized; the state raffled them off in a lottery. In New England and the Chesapeake, people complained of depressed property values and abandoned farms because of the abundance of land in the West. Not surprisingly, some argued that Americans would be better off pushing industrialization and developing their infrastructure, instead of trying to expand the agricultural sector with more and more land. As Adams’s Treasury secretary, Richard Rush, had put it, “The creation of capital is retarded rather than accelerated by the diffusion of a thin population over a great surface of soil.” The growth of cities and towns would eventually provide commercial farmers with a better market. In the meantime, the government’s policy of keeping land prices low meant that farms were uneconomically large and too many people worked in the agricultural sector.
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When Jackson’s first Congress met in December 1829, land sales as well as Indian policy demanded the attention of the members. Senator Samuel Foot of Connecticut, speaking for the East, proposed a temporary moratorium on new lands being offered for sale until more of the existing stock of available land had found buyers. Benton responded on January 18, 1830, with a speech accusing Foot and New Englanders in general of trying “to check the growth and to injure the prosperity of the West.” Easterners wanted to keep “the vast and magnificent valley of the Mississippi for the haunts of beasts and savages.” Benton suspected a plot by northeastern industrialists, who “want poor people to do the work for small wages,” to prevent the masses from having the option of cheap land. He cried out for the South to come to the aid of the West.
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The rising star of South Carolina politics, Senator Robert Y. Hayne, responded to the call. A protégé of John C. Calhoun, Hayne, like his mentor, had shifted from nationalism to particularism. In the past Hayne had never supported cheap land, but now he endorsed it in a state-rights version: The federal government should cede the public lands to the states where they were located. Western states would surely sell them cheaply, in a race with each other to entice settlers. Jackson was turning the Indian tribes’ lands over to the states; why not do the same with the rest of the public lands? The speeches of Benton and Hayne seemed to point the way toward a political alliance of South and West under Jacksonian auspices, directed against New England.

Then Daniel Webster spoke up. “Sir, I rise to defend the East.” Earlier a congressman from New Hampshire, Webster was now senator from Massachusetts. “Black Dan” (so called for his dark complexion) had changed more than his constituency, for he was undergoing a political transformation the mirror image of Calhoun’s. Formerly a free-trader who had invoked New England state rights in opposition to the War of 1812, Webster emerged as a leading defender of nationalism and a protective tariff when industrialization and cotton textile manufacturing in particular changed the economy of New England. Like Calhoun, Webster nursed presidential ambitions that would be forever frustrated. Unlike the South Carolinian, however, Webster had broad interests outside politics. He was the nation’s most famous trial lawyer, a man of letters and bon vivant. Though his private integrity was not above suspicion, his public persona impressed observers. The senator had a feeling for the theatrical; on public occasions he still dressed in the fashion of an eighteenth-century gentleman, with knee breeches and waistcoat.
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To his cult following, Webster represented the values of civilization, learning, and law that they found wanting in Andrew Jackson.

In this battle of words, Webster chose his adversary carefully: It would be Hayne, not Benton. New England had always been the friend of the West, Webster insisted. The American System of internal improvements and protective tariffs served the mutual interests of West and Northeast. A New Englander had authored the famous Ordinance of 1787, opening up the Old Northwest to settlement and ensuring its prosperity by excluding slavery, he pointed out. In accordance with the policy then established, sale of the public lands, with some of the proceeds going to education, “spreads about benefits and blessings which all can see and all can feel.” It “opens channels of intercourse, augments population, enhances the value of property, and diffuses knowledge.”

But the “godlike Daniel” (a nickname his admirers used without irony) deliberately broadened the scope of his oration beyond land policy. In reaction to the Tariff of Abominations, South Carolina’s legislature had encouraged (without actually yet adopting) the theory that a state could nullify the enforcement of a federal law within its borders. The strident state-righter Thomas Cooper, president of South Carolina College, had even warned in 1827 that “we shall, before long, be compelled to calculate the value of our union,” in which “the South has always been the loser and the North always the gainer.” In reaction, Webster seized the opportunity to “deprecate and deplore” the conception of the Constitution as a mere compact among states that they were free to interpret or restrict. “I am a unionist, and in this sense a national republican,” he declared. The spokesman for New England had thrown down the gauntlet.
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Hayne rose to the challenge. The Yankee “has invaded the State of South Carolina, is making war upon her citizens, and endeavoring to overthrow her principles and institutions,” he proclaimed. Hayne defended slavery and deplored the “false philanthropy” that criticized both it and Indian Removal. He denounced the tariff and justified state nullification of federal laws.
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Vice President Calhoun, exercising his duty to preside over the Senate, could be seen passing notes down to prompt his younger friend’s wide-ranging response. But the Carolinians had played into their adversary’s hands. Webster longed for just such an opportunity to make an eloquent statement on behalf of the Union. His political goal was to identify New England with American nationalism so emphatically as to erase the memory of his section’s particularism in the previous generation. Ironically, Webster’s famous plea for the Union was every bit as sectional in motive as Hayne’s rationalization of state rights.
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Webster’s “Second Reply to Hayne” laid out a nationalist doctrine of constitutional origin and interpretation. The Constitution had not been created by the states, he declared, but by the people of the Union as a whole, who had distributed their sovereign powers among both state and federal agencies. The states thus possessed no logical right to determine the extent of federal sovereignty. Ultimately, however, the most salient feature of Webster’s address was not its argument but its evocation of patriotic feeling. In a society where elocution was practiced as an art form and oratory constituted a branch of literature, Webster displayed his mastery of the genre.

Benefiting from some last-minute revisions made after its actual delivery, newspaper reprints and pamphlet versions of Webster’s “Second Reply to Hayne” circulated more widely than any previous speech in history. The communications revolution magnified the power of the spoken word: At least one hundred thousand copies sold. In fact, this and the other famous political orations of the time were delivered more for the sake of their distribution in print than in the hope of persuading their actual auditors. Webster’s peroration would be recorded in schoolbooks and memorized by the young for one hundred years and more.
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At first, Democratic newspapers scorned the address, but once Jackson had taken a stand against nullification they found themselves seconding Webster’s veneration of the Union. Hayne himself in later years acknowledged Webster “the most consummate orator of either ancient or modern times.” The New Englander’s eloquence helped forge the broad consensus of northern opinion that by 1861 was ready to wage war for the integrity of the Union. Abraham Lincoln called Webster on Liberty and Union “the very best speech that was ever delivered” and drew upon it in composing his own First Inaugural.
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The rest was anticlimax. In May the Senate finally shelved the resolution by Senator Foot that had provoked the great debate. But neither did Benton’s plan prevail. At the close of the congressional session, the House of Representatives defeated a watered-down version of his graduation scheme. The president himself refrained from endorsing graduation, reflecting the influence of Van Buren’s wing of the party and freeing Jacksonian congressmen from the Mid-Atlantic states to vote their section’s interest against the bill. In a close roll call, graduation lost because Ohio cast 8 out of 12 votes against it. Representing the most populous and economically developed state west of the Appalachians, Ohio’s delegation no longer identified with the frontier.
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During the Webster-Hayne Debate, people generally assumed that President Jackson would sympathize with his fellow southern slaveholder in opposition to a Yankee Federalist. Probably he did up to a point, but once South Carolina challenged the fundamental nature of the Constitution, Jackson felt impelled to affirm the sovereignty of the federal government and show that, like Webster, he deplored the doctrine of state nullification. Unlike Indian Removal, the tariff issue did not seem to him of such overriding importance as to justify pitting state authority against that of the federal government.

On April 13, 1830, the Democratic Republican Party (now starting to call itself the Democratic Party) celebrated the birthday of its late founder, Thomas Jefferson. The president and all the rest of the party’s Washington officeholders attended a banquet with twenty-four formal toasts, typical of that hard-drinking and long-winded society. Robert Hayne gave the longest speech of all, celebrating Jefferson’s state-rights principles and concluding with a toast to “the
Union
of the States, and the
Sovereignty
of the States.” After the formal toasts came the “volunteer” toasts, and it was the president’s prerogative to offer one of these. In consultation with Van Buren beforehand, Jackson had resolved to rebuke the nullifiers by proposing a toast to “our federal Union.” In the heat of the moment, however, he rose and called out an even more forceful toast: “Our Union:
It must be preserved
.” He glared directly at the vice president. Calhoun, his voice strong but the hand holding his glass shaking with emotion, responded, “The Union. Next to our liberty, the most dear. May we always remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the states and by distributing equally the benefits and the burdens of the Union.” To observers, it was a duel through toasts, and it attracted nationwide comment.
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