Andrew Jackson (69 page)

D
isappointments came in multiples that year. Andrew Hutchings was the son of a friend and business partner who had died, leaving to Jackson the boy’s care. Hutchings should have been old enough by now to start taking responsibility for himself, but he stubbornly refused. He wouldn’t go to school or learn a trade. “His conduct has filled me with sincere regret,” Jackson told John Coffee, who managed the boy’s inheritance at Nashville. “I know not what to do with him.” Jackson thought of bringing Hutchings to Washington, to the college at Georgetown the Jesuits had founded. “Perhaps under my own eye I might be able to control him and convince him of the impropriety of his ways.” Yet he wondered if Hutchings would come if summoned. At times he was tempted to wash his hands of the boy. But he couldn’t get himself to do it. “I cannot think of letting him be lost. . . . When I reflect on the charge given me by his father on his dying bed, and the great anxiety he had about him, I am truly distressed.”

Andrew Jackson Jr. was better behaved than Hutchings, but he too required direction. The young man was twenty now and was managing the Hermitage in his father’s absence. Jackson was upset to learn from a Nashville neighbor of the death of one of the Hermitage slaves, a man named Jim. “I pray you, my son,” Jackson wrote Andrew, “to examine minutely into this matter, and if the death was produced by the cruelty of Mr. Steel”—the overseer—“have him forthwith discharged.” Andrew was new to the business of running a plantation, and Jackson urged him to seek the advice of family friends. But by whatever means, he must learn to manage slaves and especially overseers. “My negroes shall be treated humanely. When I employed Mr. Steel, I charged him upon this subject, and had expressed in our agreement that he was to treat them with great humanity, feed and clothe them well, and work them in moderation. If he has deviated from this rule, he must be discharged.” Jim’s was the latest in a disturbing string of deaths. “Since I left home I have lost three of my family. Old Ned I expected to die, but I am fearful the death of Jack, and Jim, has been produced by exposure and bad treatment. Your Uncle John Donelson writes that
Steel has ruled with a rod of iron
. This is so inconsistent to what I expected that I cannot bear the inhumanity that he has exercised towards my poor negroes. . . . Unless he changes his conduct, dismiss him.”

Other advice to Andrew was more personal. Jackson’s neighbors reported that Andrew was courting a young woman. From eagerness or ignorance, he had initiated the suit without gaining permission from the girl’s father. Jackson wrote to the father to apologize for Andrew’s mistake and to testify to his son’s good faith. “He has been reared in the paths of virtue and morality by his pious and amiable mother, and I believe has walked steadily in them.” To Andrew himself he offered the advice of a loving father. “My son, having your happiness at heart more than my own . . . you can judge of the anxiety I have that you should marry a lady that will make you happy. . . . You are very young, but having placed your affections upon Miss Flora, I have no desire to control your affections or interfere with your choice. Early attachments are the most durable. . . . I have only to remark that no good can flow from a long courtship. Therefore I would recommend to you to be frank with her, say to her at once the object of your visit, and receive her answer at once.”

Yet the young man must protect himself—and his heart. If Flora said yes, they should marry at once, and the two could come to the White House to live. If she said no, or if she vacillated, he should break off the suit. And in that case he should be in no hurry to form other attachments. “You have many years yet for the improvement of your mind, and to make a selection of a companion.” Jackson was thinking of Andrew, but he admitted he was thinking of himself as well. “Remember, my son, that you are now the only solace of my mind and prospect of my happiness here below, and were you to make an unhappy choice, it would bring me to my grave in sorrow.”

A
fter a year consumed with the housekeeping of his administration—and the airing of more dirty linen than almost anyone outside Washington cared to see—Jackson turned his attention to the issues that faced the nation. Presidents’ annual messages were great events in those days, at a time before national politics became a year-round endeavor. First messages by new presidents were even more anticipated, as potentially setting the agenda for an entire administration. In the case of Jackson, who hadn’t actively campaigned for office and had said next to nothing on many important issues, the anticipation was doubled again. He didn’t disappoint, although he did provoke. The message he delivered to Congress on December 8, 1829, was a landmark document, the manifesto of democracy as defined by the man who embodied popular government in America. Since Alexander Hamilton had drafted speeches and papers for George Washington, presidents’ messages to Congress had always been collaborative affairs (and always would be). Jackson wrote out a sketch of what he intended to say and circulated it to his advisers; Martin Van Buren added thoughts and language, as did others. But the final draft was fully Jackson’s, summarizing his considered views on the appropriate role of the federal government in the life of the nation, and in particular in the lives of the ordinary people.

He began with foreign affairs. Those members of Congress who knew Jackson’s history—and they all knew
something
of it—must have been surprised at the mildness of his tone toward Britain, his lifelong bête noire. “With Great Britain, alike distinguished in peace and war, we may look forward to years of peaceful, honorable, and elevated competition. Everything in the condition and history of the two nations is calculated to inspire sentiments of mutual respect and to carry conviction to the minds of both that it is their policy to preserve the most cordial relations.” Was this the voice of
Jackson
, the hammer of Albion, the slayer of two British generals and a host of redcoat soldiers? In fact, this part of the message owed much to Van Buren, who as secretary of state would have to conduct diplomacy with Britain. But it also revealed that Jackson understood the difference between being a general and being president. Two issues pended between the United States and Britain: the rectification of the border between Maine and Canada, and the opening of the British West Indies to American trade. On each point Jackson recognized that a velvet glove and soothing words might accomplish more than a flung gauntlet and an aggressive challenge.

After touching on relations with several other foreign countries, Jackson turned to his domestic agenda. The first item was a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college. In Jackson’s time the Constitution had yet to acquire the patina of semidivine revelation subsequent generations would accord it. “Our system of government was by its framers deemed an experiment, and they therefore consistently provided a mode of remedying its defects,” he said. Those in his audience who, like him, had
known
some of the framers, nodded in agreement as to principle if not detail. The primary defect was obvious to anyone who had observed the election of 1824. “To the people belongs the right of electing their Chief Magistrate; it was never designed that their choice should in any case be defeated.” Jackson was on tenuous historical ground here. The point of the electoral college had been to temper and interpret the will of the people, if not actually to defeat it. But in the age of democracy, his political argument was increasingly persuasive. “Experience proves that in proportion as agents to execute the will of the people are multiplied, there is danger of their wishes being frustrated.” Conversely, the danger would be diminished by reducing the number of agents, starting with the electors, who should be eliminated. Jackson proposed to leave alone the relative weight of the states in choosing presidents (he didn’t say precisely how), but the power of election must rest more directly upon the people. As an adjunct to such an amendment, he recommended limiting presidents to a single term, of perhaps six years.

Of matters legislative rather than constitutional, the tariff was the most controversial. The biennial temptation to fiddle with the rate schedules had proved irresistible in 1828, when Congress raised rates to new heights. No genuine principles, besides political self-interest, informed the 1828 tariff, which reflected instead the ability of various manufacturers, shippers, and growers to shield themselves from foreign competition and pass the burden of supporting the federal government to others. But one result was clear: southerners detested the tariff, as it taxed much of what they consumed while protecting next to nothing of what they produced. Southern planters were already hurting after a British financial panic caused the price of cotton to plunge, and the 1828 tariff—shortly labeled the “tariff of abominations” by southerners—added domestic insult to foreign injury.

Jackson, as a southerner and a cotton producer, sympathized with the abomination school of thought on the tariff. But as president he had to acknowledge political realities. He broached the tariff topic cautiously, identifying the dominant economic interests of the country as agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing, and declaring, “To regulate its conduct so as to promote equally the prosperity of these three cardinal interests is one of the most difficult tasks of Government.” His sympathies surfaced when he declared that the three interests, though all important, weren’t equal. “The agricultural interest of our country is so essentially connected with every other, and so superior in importance to them, that it is scarcely necessary to invite to it your particular attention. It is principally as manufactures and commerce tend to increase the value of agricultural productions and to extend their application to the wants and comforts of society that they deserve the fostering care of Government.” This pleased the anti-tariff party, as did some subsequent comments supporting the principle of free trade. But Jackson didn’t propose tearing down the tariff entirely. “The general rule to be applied in graduating the duties upon articles of foreign growth or manufacture is that which will place our own in fair competition with those of other countries.” Implicitly acknowledging a complaint of the southerners, he added, regarding the tariff, “Local feelings and prejudices should be merged in the patriotic determination to promote the great interests as a whole. . . . Discarding all calculations of political ascendancy, the North, the South, the East, and the West should unite in diminishing any burthen of which either may justly complain.”

Though the protectionists might protest, Jackson linked the tariff to the broader question of government revenues. (The protectionists wanted a tariff for protection, not for revenue.) The president reported that the federal debt—mostly from the War of 1812—stood at $49 million. Government revenues currently exceeded expenditures by several million dollars per year, creating the prospect, “in a very short time,” of paying off the debt. The American people would then face an important decision. Jackson didn’t think the tariff could be responsibly reduced so far as to eliminate the surplus entirely, nor did he think surpluses should be allowed to pile up in the federal treasury. Advocates of internal improvements wanted the federal government to spend the excess on roads and other public works. Jackson acknowledged the value of such projects, but he feared that federal control of spending would encourage corruption in the way the projects were approved and funded. Congressmen would be tempted to approve one another’s favorite projects regardless of the general good, while contractors would be tempted to bribe the lawmakers to land sweet deals. And the president had doubts regarding the constitutionality of many such projects. “To avoid these evils, it appears to me that the most safe, just, and federal disposition which could be made of the surplus revenue would be its apportionment among the several States according to their ratio of representation.” What a much later generation would call revenue sharing appealed to Jackson as a means of reconciling the national interest in roads and waterways serving the country as a whole with the greatest degree of state autonomy in determining which projects would receive funding.

Jackson was a Unionist first and last, as those who challenged him would discover. But the umbrella of his Unionism sheltered a healthy respect for the wisdom of the states in treating issues important to ordinary lives. “The great mass of legislation relating to our internal affairs was intended to be left where the Federal convention found it—in the State governments. Nothing is clearer, in my view, than that we are chiefly indebted for the success of the Constitution under which we are now acting to the watchful and auxiliary operation of the State authorities. This is not the reflection of a day, but belongs to the most deeply rooted convictions of my mind. I can not, therefore, too strongly or too earnestly, for my own sense of its importance, warn you against all encroachments upon the legitimate sphere of State sovereignty.”