Andrew Jackson (58 page)

P
ensacola is a perfect plain,” Rachel Jackson wrote from the Florida capital to a friend back home in Nashville. “The land nearly as white as flour, yet productive of fine peach trees, oranges in abundance, grapes, figs, pomegranates, etc., etc. Fine flowers growing spontaneously. . . . The town is immediately on the bay. The most beautiful water prospect I ever saw; and from ten o’clock in the morning until ten at night we have the finest sea breeze. There is something in it so exhilarating, so pure, so wholesome, it enlivens the whole system.”

Rachel had come south with her husband for the transfer of authority in Florida from Spain to the United States. Monroe—who had been reelected in 1820 in the only uncontested presidential race in American history—needed someone of stature to supervise the transfer, and Jackson was a natural, for one obvious reason and one not so obvious. The obvious reason was that the conqueror of Florida should accept the surrender. Jackson’s many supporters expected as much. Monroe had gone to great lengths to keep the general happy, and this was an inexpensive way to continue doing so.

The less obvious reason was that Jackson had to be retired from the army. Congress had mandated the army’s shrinking. Some of the shrinkers were avowed anti-Jacksonians who calculated that a smaller army would have no place, or perhaps merely no appeal, for Jackson. Others were simply acting in the American tradition of disbanding the army between wars, lest it eat out the people’s means. Whatever the motives of the legislators, the new army would have room for one major general only, and Jacob Brown enjoyed seniority over Jackson. Monroe didn’t relish having to force Jackson out, but he had no choice.

Florida enabled both men to save face. The territory required a governor, and Jackson knew it well. If his administrative temperament left something to be desired—the general’s handling of martial law in New Orleans still roiled memories in the Crescent City—Monroe comforted himself that Jackson probably wouldn’t remain in Florida long. Careful soundings indicated that Jackson was willing to treat the Florida assignment as a victory tour. He would haul down the Spanish flag, raise the American flag, and go quietly into private life.

Jackson and Rachel traveled from Nashville to New Orleans in the latest style, aboard a river steamboat. From New Orleans they sailed to Pensacola, arriving at their destination in the early summer of 1821. The Spanish obviously hadn’t been keeping the place up. “All the houses look in ruins, old as time,” Rachel wrote her friend. “Many squares of the town appear grown over with the thickest shrubs, weeping willows, and the Pride of China. All look neglected.” The people were a remarkable assortment. “The inhabitants all speak Spanish and French. Some speak four or five languages. Such a mixed multitude you, nor any of us, ever had an idea of. There are fewer white people far than any other, mixed with all nations under the canopy of heaven.”

At Pensacola, Rachel and the locals witnessed the last days of Spanish rule in Florida. “Three weeks the transports were bringing the troops from St. Marks in order that they should all sail to Cuba at the same time,” she recounted. Jackson remained outside the city during this period, communicating with the Spanish governor, José Maria Callava, by note. Rachel and some of the American officers tried to talk him into town, but he refused to enter till the transfer became official. “He said that when he came in, it should be under his own standard, and that would be the third time he had planted that flag on that wall.” So he waited, with his small entourage. “At length, last Tuesday was the day. At seven o’clock, at the precise moment, they hove in view under the American flag and a full band of music. The whole town was in motion. . . . They marched by to the government house, where the two Generals met in the manner prescribed. Then his Catholic majesty’s flag was lowered, and the American hoisted high in air, not less than one hundred feet.”

It was with great satisfaction that Jackson accepted the surrender from Colonel Callava. “Yesterday I received possession of this place with the whole of West Florida and its dependencies,” he wrote John Coffee. “I will have the pleasure to be enabled to lay the foundation of permanent happiness to the people and lasting prosperity to the city.” And then, for himself, sweet freedom from public life. “I am contented that this will terminate my political career, and that I will have the pleasure to see you at your house in all the month of October next, fully satisfied with the Hermitage to spend the rest of my days.”

Y
et Jackson’s hair-trigger sense of propriety kept him from leaving Florida quietly. Even after the formal transfer of authority, closing the Spanish accounts required considerable back-and-forth between Jackson and Callava, neither of whom was suited to the task. Jackson distrusted the Spanish and despised bureaucratic detail; Callava scorned Americans and resented their disregard for international law. It didn’t help that Jackson spoke no Spanish and Callava no English. They depended on others to translate and interpret, and this dependence injected a note of uncertainty into their communications. From uncertainty to suspicion was a short step.

The origins of the explosion between the two were innocuous, almost ludicrously so. A woman resident of Pensacola filed a lawsuit involving an inheritance of land near the town. To make her case she required access to papers in the possession of Callava’s subordinate, Domingo Sousa. She applied to Henry Brackenridge, whom Jackson had just appointed alcalde, or mayor. The request seemed reasonable to Brackenridge, and he carried it to Jackson, who agreed. Jackson sent Brackenridge and two helpers to Sousa to fetch the papers. Sousa declined to surrender them, saying he worked for Callava and couldn’t turn anything over without an order from the colonel.

Brackenridge and the others returned to Jackson’s office. Jackson’s anger began to rise as he heard their story. The Spanish, he judged, were playing their games once more. Spanish authority—including Callava’s over Sousa—had terminated with the transfer of authority. The only one who gave orders in Florida now was American governor Jackson. He ordered Sousa arrested and the papers seized. Jackson’s men attempted to carry out the order, but by the time they got back to Sousa’s, he had given the papers to Callava’s steward, Antoine Fullarat. Upon his arrest and interrogation, Sousa told Jackson what he had done. Jackson became convinced that he was being played for a fool.

He sent Sousa under guard to Callava’s to retrieve the papers. En route the group discovered Callava having dinner with several Spanish officers, some Americans, and their wives. Sousa and his guards entered the dining room, where Sousa explained his predicament. Callava said he’d handle it, and dispatched an aide to Jackson, requesting a written application for the papers. Callava seems at this point to have been inclined to surrender the papers. He just needed the paperwork to show his own superiors.

Jackson’s day had been a long one, his bowels had been griping, and he was looking forward to bed. But Callava’s insistence on a written request banished thoughts of sleep even as they twisted his guts the more. Would there be no end to Spanish procrastination? Now he ordered Callava to turn over the papers. “It is further ordered,” he continued, “that if the said late Governor Don José Callava or his steward Fullarat, when the above described papers are demanded of them, should fail or refuse to deliver the same, that the said Don José Callava and his steward Fullarat be forthwith brought before me at my office, then and there to answer such interrogatories as may be put to them.”

Callava had digestive trouble of his own, which the confrontation with Jackson wasn’t improving. He left the dinner party early. He was at home when a company of American soldiers arrived to carry out Jackson’s order. Accounts of the confrontation that ensued differed, reflecting the prejudices, allegiances, and native languages of those involved. An American colonel described Callava as belligerent in words, albeit less so in deed. “Colonel Callava repeatedly asserted that he would not be taken out of his house alive, but he seemed to act without much difficulty when the guard was ordered to prime and load.” Callava considered the Americans abusive. “A party of troops, with the commissioners, assaulted the house, breaking the fence (notwithstanding the door was open), and the commissioners entered my apartment,” he testified. “They surrounded my bed with soldiers with drawn bayonets in their hands. They removed the mosquito net; they made me sit up, and demanded
the papers, or they would use the arms against my person
.”

Callava was taken to Jackson’s office. The American general’s temper had burned to the nub. The Spanish colonel’s wasn’t much longer. The two shouted at each other, Jackson in English, Callava in Spanish, with the interpreters vainly trying to keep up and pondering, on the fly, how literally to render the insults. A Spanish officer present described Jackson as beside himself. “The Governor, Don Andrew Jackson, with turbulent and violent actions, with disjointed reasonings, blows on the table, his mouth foaming, and possessed of the furies, told the Spanish commissary to deliver the papers.” Callava refused, according to Jackson out of “pompous arrogance and ignorance.” Jackson ordered Callava imprisoned. Callava, hearing the translation, called the order unjust and dishonorable. “Rising to his feet,” recalled the Spanish officer present, “he addressed himself to the secretary, whom the Governor kept on his right hand, and said, in a loud voice, that he protested solemnly, before the government of the United States, against the author of the violations of justice against his person and public character. The Governor, Don Andrew Jackson, answered to the protest that for his actions he was responsible to no other than to his government, and that it was of little importance to him whatever might be the result, and that he might even protest before God himself.”

Callava was still in detention the next day when Jackson’s men seized the papers from his house. The matter might have ended there had not an American judge, recently appointed to the territory, been found to serve Jackson a writ of habeas corpus regarding Callava. Jackson ignored the writ, telling the judge, Eligius Fromentin, that it deserved nothing but “indignation and contempt.”

The whole affair made Jackson more enemies. Callava sailed away, mooting Fromentin’s habeas writ, but the judge remained behind to spread lurid stories of Jackson’s uncontrollable ambition. “The first time the authority of General Jackson is contested,” Fromentin predicted, “I should not be surprised if, to all the pompous titles by him enumerated in his order to me, he should superadd that of grand inquisitor, and if, finding in my library many books formerly prohibited in Spain, and among others the Constitution of the United States, he should send me to the stake.”

Jackson brushed the carping aside. He had worked too long securing America’s southern border to let the scruples of a foolish judge diminish the satisfaction he felt on finally achieving his goal. He had fought Indians on the frontier, the British at New Orleans, and the Spanish in Florida, all to preserve the American way of life—in his part of the country, at least. At last his work was done. If personal enemies were the price of American liberty, he was happy to strike the bargain.

O
ur place looks like it had been deserted for a season, but we have a cheerful fire for our friends and a prospect of living at it for the balance of our lives,” Jackson wrote upon his and Rachel’s return to Nashville. Jackson was fifty-four, and Rachel the same age. His health was neither good nor improving, and he was already considerably older than his parents had been at the times of their deaths. He had little reason to expect many more years of life, and every reason to hope to spend those in the bosom of his home and family. His conscience had chronically nagged him regarding Rachel, who suffered, not always in silence, during his long departures. When his country called—when the Indians or British or Spanish threatened—he could justify placing duty to country above his duty to Rachel. But lesser chores—the administration of Florida, for example—he could leave to others. “I am truly wearied of public life,” he wrote Monroe in tendering his resignation from the governorship. “I want rest, and my private concerns imperiously demand my attention. . . . My duties have been laborious and my situation exposed me to heavy expense, which makes it more necessary that I should retire to resuscitate my declining fortune to enable it to support me in my declining years.”