and of all who admired the spirit of expansion, the Revolutionary drummer boy turned national military hero. (He had won probably the greatest land battle in the country’s history, the Battle of New Orleans, albeit after the end of the war in which it was supposedly fought. As Yorktown was largely won by the French, and as they were never at war again, it was certainly the greatest victory ever won by the Americans over the British.) Jackson was the selfless combat hero, the rugged man of the West, the guardian of the slave-holding South, and he was a slick political operator. He won the 1828 presidential election with 647,000 votes and 178 electoral votes to Adams’s 509,000 votes and 83 electoral votes. New York state went for Jackson by 5,000 out of 276,000 because of the exertions of Martin Van Buren and William L. Marcy, who between them would be amply rewarded in the coming decades with a cornucopia of great offices. They were the leaders of the Albany Regency, the ruling political machinery in New York from the retirement of Tompkins and DeWitt Clinton to the rise of William Henry Seward and Thurlow Weed in the late 1930s.
John Quincy Adams is rivaled only by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Woodrow Wilson as the greatest intellect ever to hold the presidency of the United States. He was one of the nation’s very greatest secretaries of state and had an imaginative program as president, but was the representative of a region of declining importance and was saddled with the appearance and tone of a New England Brahmin and an overt opponent of slavery, as the fireball of Jacksonian democracy swept most of the country. Completely unaffected by the prestige of the presidency and of his family, he was elected to the House of Representatives, the only ex-president in the country’s history except for Andrew Johnson to serve again in elective office after leaving the White House, and became one of the leaders of the abolitionist movement. He was a man of the utmost intelligence and integrity, but not an overly effective president and not a particularly astute national politician. He was profoundly esteemed in his last 17 years in Congress, right to his death in 1848 at the age of 79.
General Jackson was a startling change from the six Virginia and Massachusetts gentlemen who had preceded him to the nation’s highest office. In his inaugural address, Jackson was quite restrained, promising economy in government and respect for the jurisdictions of states, a “just and liberal policy” toward the Indians, and what appeared to be a reform of the civil service. He was silent or enigmatic about tariffs, internal improvements, and the status of the Bank of the United States. He threw the White House open to the populace, which included a tremendous rout of rumbustious and reveling frontiersmen, and a rather bacchanalian occasion ensued, with windows being used as doors and considerable alcoholic consumption, though no vandalism or violence. It was a symbolic notice of a distinct change in tone from the former occupants.
Jackson did not hold regular cabinet meetings, and did not have a very distinguished cabinet, apart from Van Buren at State, but relied on a “kitchen cabinet” of less senior officials and friends. This would change in 1831. It shortly emerged that Jackson’s idea of reform of the civil service was to sack a large number of people not identified with his own political rise and movement and replace them with loyalists. This affected about 20 percent of all federal employees in the Jackson years, and was dubbed “the Spoils System” by New York Senator William Marcy (“To the winner go the spoils”), Van Buren’s side-kick in the Albany Regency.
Jackson allowed the Calhoun sponsorship of nullificationist ideas in South Carolina to go publicly uncontradicted through the first year of his administration, but it was known by the whole political community to be a ticking time bomb. A debate that began at the end of 1829 over the advisability of the federal government restricting and monitoring more closely the sale of public lands was soon represented by the formidable Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri as an attempt by northeastern interests to control and retard the growth of the West. This quickly escalated as Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina claimed that “the life of our system is the independence of our states” and imputed overbearing centralizing ambitions to the federal government. This smoked out the Senate’s most formidable orator of all, Daniel Webster, who attacked those southerners who “Habitually speak of the Union in terms of indifference, or even of disparagement.” The debate continued all through January 1830, as Hayne threw down the mask and espoused the sovereignty of the states and their right to unilateral nullification of federal laws. Webster replied that the states were sovereign only as far as the Constitution allowed that sovereignty is determined by the Constitution, that it resides with the government of the whole nation, and that state-federal disputes would be resolved by federal institutions and processes: federal courts, constitutional amendments, and free elections. Webster accused his opponents of sophistical arguments designed to weaken and undermine the national government in a dishonorable way. He concluded one of the most famous addresses ever rendered in the United States Senate: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” (January 27, 1830).
Hayne, who was understood to be speaking for his fellow South Carolinian and president of the Senate, Vice President Calhoun, replied to this with the familiar “compact” theory, that the states formed the federal government and had the legal capacity to judge when their rights were being infringed, and that the right of the states to reject federal laws was undiminished from before the Constitution was adopted. Webster had the better of the constitutional argument, as the adoption of and more than 40 years of adherence to the Constitution clearly conferred legitimacy on it, subject to interpretation, as the governmental law established by “We the people . . . for the United States of America.” Calhoun and his fellow alarmed slaveholders were not going to render inoperative a document so thoroughly debated and ratified and enforced with specious arguments about a compact and with the miraculous revenance, after decades of invisibility and silence, of a selective right of nullification. These arguments were a goad, and a warning to the North, and the first stab at developing a plausible argument to justify secession, by force of arms if necessary.
Subtle differences became the subject of intense scrutiny in the divination of the nuances of federal or state attachments. This became quite commonplace in matters of toasts at official occasions. One early example was the Jefferson Day dinner in Washington on April 13, 1830, where Jackson proposed a toast to “Our Union; it must be preserved.” And Calhoun responded: “The Union, next to our liberty most dear. May we always remember that it can only be preserved by distributing equally the benefits and burdens of the Union.”
12. THE UNION AND SLAVERY
Battle lines were being drawn, but Jackson was playing a subtle and discreet game. He was a large slaveholder, and for his defense of New Orleans and seizure of Florida, his heavy-handed policy toward the Indians, and his respect for states’ rights in public works matters, he had great popularity in the South. He was the incarnation of the frontiersman and had followed the settler’s path and extended the country westward. And yet, as a nationalist who had finessed the tariff issue and emerged as a fierce defender of the Union, he was not necessarily unpopular in the North. He devised a policy that would serve the Union well and vitally. Jackson would guarantee slavery in the South and Southwest and resist any impeachment of it, and promote its westward expansion; and he would enforce the primacy and inviolability of the Union.
In the South, he would be the man who would make the Union work for the South and would be that region’s unconquerable champion of the institution of slavery. In other regions, he was the guarantor of the Union; he would maintain the integrity of the United States at any cost. The North would tolerate slavery where it existed and in adjacent places to be settled, but not in the North, and the Union would survive. The South would accept the assurance of slavery where it existed and to the west of that, and would accept the Union. Jackson laid down this policy and enforced and bequeathed it. It was not a permanent arrangement, but it bought a vital 30 years, in which the Unionists became very much stronger than the slaveholders. This was a strategy of national self-preservation, geared to the inexorable economic and demographic rise and preeminence of the free states. It is not clear that Jackson thought beyond the co-preservation of the Union and of slavery, but tempered by the talents at compromise of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, his rejection of nullification and of abolitionism was used by a generation of American public life as a shield behind which the
