American Experiment (59 page)

A motley group was gathered behind the Old Hero—its acknowledged leader, Martin Van Buren. Small, amiable, plumpish, cautious, calculating, urbane, the New Yorker seemed almost the antithesis of the Hero, but both had made their way without much education, knew what it was to be on the outs with dominant factions in their states, and shared prejudices about bankers, entrenched federal officials, and Easterners unaware of the need to settle the western lands. Van Buren had shown himself a master political broker and coalition builder, as a leader of the “Albany Regency” and United States senator.

Jackson’s old-time advisers had been mainly Westerners: Major John H. Eaton, a Florida land speculator and Tennessee politico; William B. Lewis, also of Tennessee, who had helped him as political lieutenant and fixer; Judge John Overton, an old confidant and loyalist. The most colorful by far was Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Expelled from the University of North Carolina for thieving from his roommates, he had moved to Tennessee, gained admission to the bar, won a seat in the state senate, served as Jackson’s aide-de-camp, then moved to Missouri and within five years won election as United States senator. He and Jackson, who earlier had brawled ferociously in Tennessee, were now reconciled. A handsome, solidly built man, of considerable intellectual power, Benton had a vanity so grand and serene that friends came to accept it, like a national monument.

These men and their allies across the nation slowly worked out a simple but formidable double strategy to elect Old Hickory President. They
would broaden out Jackson’s personal coalition and entrench it solidly in the democratic and agrarian ranks of the old Republican party. Crucial to the first strategy was winning support from southern leaders disaffected by Adams, and the key man in this region was Vice-President Calhoun, who had broken with the President and plumped for Jackson. Although Calhoun had been elected Vice-President in 1824, he had been disturbed by the flouting of the popular will in Adams’ selection by the House—and even more disturbed that two Adams terms, followed by two terms for the heir apparent, Henry Clay, would close off the presidency for sixteen years. Calhoun was already in his mid-forties. Within two years of Adams’ (and his own) inauguration, having moved solidly into Jackson’s camp, the dour South Carolinian was sending the Hermitage optimistic reports about 1828 prospects.

“Every indication is in our favor, or rather I should say in favor of the country’s cause,” he wrote Jackson in January 1827. “The whole South is safe, with a large majority of the middle states, and even in New England strong symptoms of discontent and division now appear, which must daily increase.” He looked forward to the triumph of “the great principles of popular rights, which have been trampled down by the coalition.” Within another year the general’s lieutenants had extended their counter-coalition throughout the twenty-four states. The heart of this strategy was what Van Buren called an alliance between the “planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North.”

An even more crucial task was to build a firm foundation of popular support beneath the broadening cadre of Jackson’s leaders. Van Buren & Co. decided on the bold strategy of the “substantial reorganization of the Old Republican party”—in plainer words, to build a
Jackson
party within the disheveled ranks of the cumbrous party of Monroe, Adams, and Clay. The key to this effort was unprecedented political organization. In Nashville, Jackson himself established and supervised a central committee composed of stalwarts like Lewis and Overton. In Washington, an informal caucus of members of Congress safeguarded Jackson’s interests on Capitol Hill. Throughout the states, Hickory Clubs organized parades and barbecues and rallies, printed up handbills, pamphlets, and leaflets, and canvassed the voters in their homes. The Jackson men, ostentatiously taking their case “to the people,” established an extraordinary number of new dailies and weeklies to combat the established newspapers that spoke for Adams and Clay. All this required money, but the Jacksonians seemed to have plenty of it. Edward Pessen estimated that the election of Jackson cost about one million dollars—a formidable sum in 1828.

The contest was largely devoid of issues, and it was meant to be. Jackson
did not rally the masses by appeals to ideals of justice and equality; he stayed home and stayed quiet, except for occasional pieties and ambiguities. In vain did Adams supporters try to raise questions like the tariff and internal improvements. “The
Hurra Boys
” were all for Jackson, one Administration man sneered, but he had to admit that they constituted a “powerful host.” The “National Republicans”—as the anti-Jacksonians came to be called—seemed unable to compete with a Hickory Leaf in every hat and hickory-pole raisings in every town square. Increasingly, the Jacksonians themselves were becoming known as “Democratic-Republicans,” or simply “Democrats.”

Slander and abuse pushed aside issues. Adams was called a monarchist, squanderer of the taxpayers’ dollars on silken fripperies, Sabbath breaker, pimp. Partisans of the President in turn labeled Jackson as blasphemer, bastard, butcher, adulterer. As usual, the invective had a tiny morsel of truth.
John Quincy Adams
a
pimp?
Well, it seemed that in St. Petersburg, corrupted as he was by his long service in sinful foreign capitals, he had “prostituted a beautiful American girl to the carnal desires of Czar Alexander I.” A fiction, of course, but a rumor to be handled only by attributing even baser acts to Jackson. The
Old Hero
an
adulterer
? Well, Jackson had indeed married Rachel Robards before she was divorced, and he may have done so knowingly, but the Jackson men had to put out sworn statements as to his innocence.

In a contest of invective and personality, no Adams could win out. Jackson beat him in the popular vote, 647,292 to 507,730. The general won the electoral college 178 to 83; Adams carried only New England and parts of the central Atlantic region. Jackson brought off a clean sweep of the rural hinterland west of New Jersey and south of the Potomac. Swept out of office by this gale of southern and “western” ballots, the National Republicans saw the results as presaging ominous changes, as their political fathers had twenty-eight years before. “Well,” said an Adams backer, “a great revolution has taken place…” Another wrote: “It was the howl of raving Democracy.”

It was, at least, the howl of the outsiders. With the approach of Inauguration Day 1829, plain people by the hundreds descended upon Washington, crowding the lodging places and thronging the streets. They massed in front of the Capitol to hear their hero pledge reform to all and the ending of the national debt. Then they followed the new President down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, pushed into the mansion, and fought their way toward the punch and the ice cream. As the visitors trampled on the chairs and carpets of the house just vacated by an Adams of Boston, as they smashed china and glasses, it seemed as though a new day had
dawned in Washington. Truly the outsiders were now inside the citadel of power.

A political tempest had blown in from the west. Now the nation awaited Jackson with anticipation and apprehension. Nobody knew what he would do when he arrived in Washington, Webster wrote to friends in Boston. “My opinion is, that when he comes he will bring a breeze with him. Which way it will blow, I cannot tell.…My
fear
is stronger than my
hope.
” Old John Randolph of Roanoke, as passionate and apocalyptic as ever, cried that the country was ruined past redemption. “Where now could we find leaders of a revolution?”

Thousands of job seekers throughout the country had
their
idea of a good revolution: rotate the ins out of federal office, and rotate the outs in. Some stayed home in hopes of taking over as postmasters or customs collectors, but hundreds flocked to Washington, settled down in hotels and boardinghouses, and haunted the White House and the departments. “Spoilsmen” put heavy political pressure on the Administration. “I take it for granted that all who do not support the present administration you will not consider your friends, and of course will lose your confidence,” a New York politico wrote to Van Buren. “The old maxim of ‘those not for us are against us,’ you have so often recognized that its authority cannot be denied.” Arriving late in Washington to join the Administration, Van Buren was besieged by applicants who followed behind him into his room. Reclining ill on a sofa, he patiently heard them out.

A wave of fear passed through Washington officialdom. “The great body of officials,” James Parton wrote, “awaited their fate in silent horror, glad when the office hours expired at having escaped another day.…No man deemed it safe and prudent to trust his neighbor, and the interior of the department presented a fearful scene of guarded silence, secret intrigue, espionage, and tale-bearing.” From Braintree, Adams heard that a clerk in the War Office had “cut his throat from ear to ear, from the mere terror of being dismissed,” and that another clerk had “gone raving distracted.”

Two Kentucky job seekers ran into each other in Washington. “I am ashamed of myself,” one said, “for I feel as if every man I meet knew what I came for.” The other replied: “Don’t distress yourself, for every man you meet is on the same business.” Despite the furor, the number of actual removals was not large—less than 10 percent after the first eighteen months of the new administration. Probably a somewhat larger number of non-college men of lower socioeconomic station got hired. Some of the clerks and agents had been Jackson men; others had been neutral. Many
other changes resulted simply from death or retirement. But a few removals were enough to put Washington in shock.

Jackson defended the removals on the ground of principle, not party. Men long in office, he said, were apt to become indifferent to the public interest: “Office is considered as a species of property, and government rather as a means of promoting individual interests than as an instrument created solely for the service of the people.…The duties of all public officers are, or at least admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance.…In a country where offices are created solely for the benefit of the people no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another.” Pitching his case on the level of good republicanism did not endear the President to Washington bureaucrats—or win support from old Jeffersonians like Madison, who privately criticized rotation.

The new President’s inaugural address had given little concrete idea of his plans, aside from revamping of the civil service. He had straddled the issues of internal improvements, the tariff, the currency, all in a voice so low that it reminded veteran Washingtonians of Jefferson’s inaudible remarks twenty-eight years before. Jackson did promise a proper regard for states’ rights, economy in government, and a “just and liberal” policy toward Indians, but this was standard politicians’ fare. Nor did his cabinet-building offer many clues. The two principal appointees, Van Buren as Secretary of State and Samuel D. Ingham at Treasury, came from the swing states of New York and Pennsylvania. John Eaton, Jackson’s old Tennessee friend, was the new Secretary of War; other appointees came from North Carolina, Georgia, and Kentucky. Pro-South in substance, anti-Clay in sentiment, the Cabinet hardly looked like an instrument for governing. It met infrequently, usually on major occasions, but less to deliberate than to hear Jacksonian pronouncements worked up in the inner circle. Administrative policy questions were usually settled by the President and department heads in private conferences. The Cabinet rarely discussed major policy issues in the manner of a council of state.

It was the “kitchen cabinet” that both expressed and shaped the President’s program. This was not a cabinet, nor of course did it meet in the kitchen; it was, rather, a shifting group of advisers on whom Jackson called as he needed them. The most influential was Amos Kendall. Born on a poor Massachusetts farm in 1789, Kendall had attended Dartmouth, taught at Groton, and studied law; unrequited by both the girl and the profession he loved, at the age of twenty-five he moved to Kentucky, where he was befriended by Mrs. Henry Clay and made tutor to the Clays’ children. Later he turned to newspaper work and soon became editor of the
Argus of Western America
in Frankfort. For years a supporter of Clay and Adams, Kendall finally was caught between the Clay and Jackson factions. For reasons of both opportunism and principle he broke with Clay, moved to Washington, and was taken on as fourth auditor of the Treasury.

Another key adviser—and another former Kentuckian—was Francis Preston Blair. He looked like Kendall’s political clone, having broken with Clay, embraced Jacksonian oppositionism, and succeeded Kendall as editor of
the Argus.
He was brought to Washington to edit the new Democratic paper, the Washington
Globe
, whose columns he filled with “demonstrations of public opinion” drawn from remote country newspapers that allegedly he penned himself. Less close to Jackson was Isaac Hill, born of an impoverished New Hampshire family, a scourge of the New Hampshire squirearchy as editor of a small Concord weekly, until he moved to Washington.

It was an unlikely-looking lot: Kendall, nearsighted, asthmatic, prematurely white-haired, bundled up in a white greatcoat even on a blazing hot day; Hill, short, cadaverous, and lame; Blair, with an elfin body of hardly a hundred pounds. They had been outsiders to a society that prized good appearance in face, form, manners, and speech. But they were the perfect instruments to a President who needed men both committed and skeptical, both articulate and polemical, to help him with his speeches and papers, and often with his decisions. Many a morning the President would lie in bed, under a portrait of his lost Rachel, blurting out his ideas, chewing and spitting or puffing out great clouds of acrid smoke from his long pipe, while Kendall or others would take down the words, smooth them out, read them back over and over until their chief was satisfied. Several other aides helped too—Lewis and others from the old Tennessee days carried on for a time—and Van Buren had a most powerful triple role as the leading cabinet member, head of the foreign-policy-making establishment, and member of the inner group.