¹ Bassett,The Life of Andrew Jackson,Vol. I, p. 123.
By his appointment Jackson became the eventual successor of General Wilkinson, with headquarters at New Orleans. His first move, however, was to pay a visit to Mobile; and on his way thither, in August, 1814, he paused in the Creek country to garner the fruits of his late victory. A council of the surviving chiefs was assembled and a treaty was presented, with a demand that it be signed forthwith. The terms took the Indians aback, but argument was useless. The whites were granted full rights to maintain military postsand roads and to navigate the rivers in the Creek lands; the Creeks had to promise to stop trading with British and Spanish posts; and they were made to cede to the United States all the lands which their people had claimed west and southeast of the Coosa River—more than half of their ancient territories. Thus was the glory of the Creek nation brought to an end.
Meanwhile the war with Great Britain was entering a new and threatening phase. No notable successes had been achieved on land, and repeated attempts to reduce Canada had signally failed. On the Great Lakes and the high seas the navy had won glory, but only a handful of privateers was left to keep up the fight. The collapse of Napoleon’s power had brought a lull in Europe, and the British were free to concentrate their energies as never before on the conflict in America. The effects were promptly seen in the campaign which led to the capture of Washington and the burning of the Federal Capitol in August, 1814. They were equally manifest in a well-laid plan for a great assault on the country’s southern borders and on the great Mississippi Valley beyond.
The last-mentioned project meant that, after two years of immunity, the Southwest had becomea main theater of the war. There was plenty of warning of what was coming, for the British squadron intended for the attack began assembling in the West Indies before the close of summer. No one knew, however, where or when the blow would fall. To Jackson the first necessity seemed to be to make sure of the defenses of Mobile. For a time, at all events, he believed that the attack would be made there, rather than at New Orleans; and an attempt of a British naval force in September to destroy Fort Bowyer, at the entrance to Mobile Bay, confirmed his opinion.
But the chief attraction of Mobile for the General was its proximity to Florida. In July he had written to Washington asking permission to occupy Pensacola. Months passed without a reply. Temptation to action grew; and when, in October, three thousand Tennessee troops arrived under one of the subordinate officers in the recent Creek War, longer hesitation seemed a sign of weakness. Jackson therefore led his forces against the Spanish stronghold, now in British hands, and quickly forced its surrender. His men blew up one of the two forts, and the British blew up the other. Within a week the work was done and the General, well pleased with his exploit, was back at Mobile.There he found awaiting him, in reply to his July letter, an order from the new Secretary of War, James Monroe, forbidding him to touch Pensacola. No great harm was done, for the invaded territory was no longer neutral soil, and the task of soothing the ruffled feelings of the Spanish court did not prove difficult.
As the autumn wore on, signs multiplied that the first British objective in the South was to be New Orleans, and no efforts were spared by the authorities at Washington to arouse the Southwest to its danger and to stimulate an outpouring of troops sufficient to repel any force that might be landed at the mouth of the Mississippi. On the 21st of November, Jackson set out for the menaced city. Five days later a fleet of fifty vessels, carrying ten thousand veteran British troops under command of Generals Pakenham and Gibbs, started from Jamaica for what was expected to be an easy conquest. On the 10th of December the hostile armada cast anchor off the Louisiana coast. Two weeks later some two thousand redcoats emerged from Lake Borgne, within six or seven miles of New Orleans, when the approach to the city on that side was as yet unguarded by a gun or a man or an entrenchment.
That the “impossible” was now accomplished was due mainly to Jackson, although credit must not be withheld from a dozen energetic subordinate officers nor from the thousands of patriots who made up the rank and file of the hastily gathered forces of defense. Men from Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee—all contributed to one of the most remarkable military achievements in our history; although when the fight was over it was found that hundreds were still as unarmed as when they arrived upon the scene.
A preliminary clash, in a dense fog, on the second evening before Christmas served to inspire each army with a wholesome respect for the other. The British decided to postpone further action until their entire force could be brought up, and this gave Jackson just the time he needed to assemble his own scattered divisions, select lines of defense, and throw up breastworks. By the end of the first week of January both sides were ready for the test.
The British army was a splendid body of seven thousand trained soldiers, seamen, and marines.
There were regiments which had helped Wellington to win Talavera, Salamanca, and Victoria, and within afew short months some of these same regiments were to stand in that thin red line which Ney and Napoleon’s guard could never break. Their general, Pakenham, Wellington’s brother-in-law, was a distinguished pupil of his illustrious kinsman. Could frontiersmen who had never fought together before, who had never seen the face of a civilized foe, withstand the conquerors of Napoleon? But two branches of the same stubborn race were represented on that little watery plain. The soldiers trained to serve the strongest will in the Old World were face to face with the rough and ready yeomanry embattled for defense by the one man of the new world whose soul had most iron in it. It was Salamanca against Tohopeka, discipline against individual alertness, the Briton of the little Isle against the Briton of the wastes and wilds. But there was one great difference. Wellington, “the Iron Duke,” was not there; “Old Hickory” was everywhere along the American lines. ¹
There were regiments which had helped Wellington to win Talavera, Salamanca, and Victoria, and within afew short months some of these same regiments were to stand in that thin red line which Ney and Napoleon’s guard could never break. Their general, Pakenham, Wellington’s brother-in-law, was a distinguished pupil of his illustrious kinsman. Could frontiersmen who had never fought together before, who had never seen the face of a civilized foe, withstand the conquerors of Napoleon? But two branches of the same stubborn race were represented on that little watery plain. The soldiers trained to serve the strongest will in the Old World were face to face with the rough and ready yeomanry embattled for defense by the one man of the new world whose soul had most iron in it. It was Salamanca against Tohopeka, discipline against individual alertness, the Briton of the little Isle against the Briton of the wastes and wilds. But there was one great difference. Wellington, “the Iron Duke,” was not there; “Old Hickory” was everywhere along the American lines. ¹
¹ Brown,Andrew Jackson,pp. 75-76.
Behind their battery-studded parapets the Americans waited for the British to make an assault. This the invaders did, five thousand strong, on January 8, 1815. The fighting was hard, but the main attack failed at every point. Three British major generals, including Pakenham, were killed early in the action, and the total British loss exceeded two thousand. The American loss wasbut seventy-one. The shattered foe fell back, lay inactive for ten days, and then quietly withdrew as they had come. Though Jackson was not noted for piety, he always believed that his success on this occasion was the work of Providence. “Heaven, to be sure,” he wrote to Monroe, “has interposed most wonderfully in our behalf, and I am filled with gratitude when I look back to what we have escaped.”
By curious irony, the victory had no bearing upon the formal results of the war. A treaty of peace had been signed at Ghent two weeks before, and the news of the pacification and of the exploit at New Orleans reached the distracted President at almost the same time. But who shall say that the battle was not one of the most momentous in American history? It compensated for a score of humiliations suffered by the country in the preceding years. It revived the people’s drooping pride and put new energy into the nation’s dealings with its rivals, contributing more than any other single event to make this war indeed a “second war of independence.” “Now,” declared Henry Clay when the news reached him in Paris, “I can go to England without mortification.” Finally, the battle brought AndrewJackson into his own as the idol and incarnation of the West, and set the western democracy decisively forward as a force to be reckoned with in national affairs.
Thevictory at New Orleans made Jackson not only the most popular man in the United States but a figure of international interest. “Napoleon, returning from Elba to eke out the Hundred Days and add the name Waterloo to history, paused now and then a moment to study Jackson at New Orleans. The Duke of Wellington, chosen by assembled Europe to meet the crisis, could find time even at Brussels to call for ‘all available information on the abortive expedition against Louisiana.’” ¹
¹ Buell,History of Andrew Jackson,Vol II, pp. 94-95.
While his countrymen were sounding his praises, the General, however, fell into a controversy with the authorities and people of New Orleans which lent a drab aspect to the closing scene of an otherwise brilliant drama. One of his first acts upon arriving in the defenseless city had been to declaremartial law; and under the decree the daily life of the inhabitants had been rigorously circumscribed, citizens had been pressed into military service, men under suspicion had been locked up, and large quantities of cotton and other supplies had been seized for the soldiers’ use. When Pakenham’s army was defeated, people expected an immediate return to normal conditions. Jackson, however, proposed to take no chances. Neither the sailing of the British fleet nor the receipt of the news of peace from Admiral Cochrane influenced him to relax his vigilance, and only after official instructions came from Washington in the middle of March was the ban lifted.
Meanwhile a violent quarrel had broken out between the commander and the civil authorities, who naturally wished to resume their accustomed functions. Finding that the Creoles were systematically evading service by registering as French citizens, Jackson abruptly ordered all such people from the city; and he was responsible for numerous other arbitrary acts. Protests were lodged, and some people threatened judicial proceedings. But they might have saved their breath. Jackson was not the man to argue matters of the kind. A leading Creole who published an especially pointedprotest was clapped into prison, and when the Federal district judge, Hall, issued a writ ofhabeas corpusin his behalf, Jackson had him also shut up.
As soon as he was liberated, the irate judge summoned Jackson into court to show why he should not be held in contempt. Beyond a blanket vindication of his acts, the General would not plead. “I will not answer interrogatories,” he declared. “I may have erred, but my motives cannot be misinterpreted.” The judge thereupon imposed a fine of one thousand dollars, the only question being, he declared, “whether the Law should bend to the General or the General to the Law.” Jackson accepted the sentence with equanimity, and to a group of admirers who drew him in a carriage from the court room to one of the leading coffeehouses, he expressed lofty sentiments on the obligation of citizens of every rank to obey the laws and uphold the courts. Twenty-nine years afterwards Congress voted reimbursement to the full amount of the fine with interest.
For three weeks after the arrival of the treaty of peace Jackson lingered at New Orleans, haggling by day with the contractors and merchants whose cotton, blankets, and bacon were yet to be paid for, and enjoying in the evening the festivitiesplanned in his honor by grateful citizens. His pleasure in the gala affairs of the time was doubled by the presence of his wife, who one day arrived quite unexpectedly in the company of some Tennessee friends. Mrs. Jackson was a typical frontier planter’s wife—kind-hearted, sincere, benevolent, thrifty, pious, but unlettered and wholly innocent of polished manners. In all her forty-eight years she had never seen a city more pretentious than Nashville. She was, moreover, stout and florid, and it may be supposed that in her rustic garb she was a somewhat conspicuous figure among the fashionable ladies of New Orleans society.
But the wife of Jackson’s accomplished friend and future Secretary of State, Edward Livingston, fitted her out with fashionable clothes and tactfully instructed her in the niceties of etiquette, and ere long she was able to demean herself, if not without a betrayal of her unfamiliarity with the environment, at all events to the complete satisfaction of the General. The latter’s devotion to his wife was a matter of much comment. “Debonair as he had been in his association with the Creole belles, he never missed an opportunity to demonstrate that he considered the short, stout, beaming matron at his side the perfection of her sex and farand away the most charming woman in the world.” ¹ “Aunt Rachel,” as she was known throughout western Tennessee, lived to see the hero of New Orleans elected President, but not to share with him the honors of the position. “I have sometimes thought,” said Thomas Hart Benton, “that General Jackson might have been a more equable tenant of the White House than he was had she been spared to share it with him. At all events, she was the only human being on earth who ever possessed the power to swerve his mighty will or soothe his fierce temper.”
¹ Buell,History of Andrew Jackson,Vol II, p. 97.
Shortly before their departure the Jacksons were guests of honor at a grand ball at the Academy. The upper floor was arranged for dancing and the lower for supper, and the entire building was aglow with flowers, colored lamps, and transparencies. As the evening wore on and the dances of polite society had their due turn, the General finally avowed that he and his bonny wife would show the proud city folk whatrealdancing was. A somewhat cynical observer—a certain Nolte, whom Jackson had just forced to his own terms in a settlement for war supplies—records his impression as follows: “After supper we were treated toa most deliciouspas de deuxby the conqueror and his spouse. To see these two figures, the General, a long haggard man, with limbs like a skeleton, and Madame la Générale, a short fat dumpling, bobbing opposite each other like half-drunken Indians, to the wild melody ofPossum up de Gum Tree, and endeavoring to make a spring into the air, was very remarkable, and far more edifying a spectacle than any European ballet could possibly have furnished.” But Jackson was only less proud of his accomplishments as a dancer than as a fighter, and it was the part of discretion for a man of Nolte’s critical turn to keep a straight face on this occasion.
In early April the General and his wife started homeward, the latter bearing as a parting gift from the women of New Orleans the somewhat gaudy set of topaz jewelry which she wears in her most familiar portrait. The trip was a continuous ovation, and at Nashville a series of festivities wound up with a banquet attended by the most distinguished soldiers and citizens of Tennessee and presided over by the Governor of the State. Other cities gave dinners, and legislatures voted swords and addresses. A period of rest at the Hermitage was interrupted in the autumn of 1815 by a horseback trip to Washington which involved asuccession of dinners and receptions. But after a few months the much fêted soldier was back at Nashville, ready, as he said, to “resume the cultivation of that friendly intercourse with my friends and neighbors which has heretofore constituted so great a portion of my happiness.”
After Jackson had talked over his actions at New Orleans with both the President and the Secretary of War, he had received, as he says, “a chart blank,” approving his “whole proceedings”; so he had nothing further to worry about on that score. The national army had been reorganized on a peace footing, in two divisions, each under command of a major general. The northern division fell to Jacob Brown of New York, the hero of Lundy’s Lane; the southern fell to Jackson, with headquarters at Nashville.
Jackson was the last man to suppose that warfare in the southern half of the United States was a thing of the past. He knew that the late contest had left the southern Indians restless and that the existing treaties were likely to be repudiated at any moment. Florida was still in the hands of the Spaniards, and he had never a doubt that some day this territory would have to be conquered and annexed. Moreover Jackson believed for someyears after 1815, according to General Eaton, that Great Britain would again make war on the United States, using Florida as a base. At all events, it can have caused the General no surprise—or regret—to be called again into active service on the Florida border before the close of 1817.
The hold of the Spaniards upon Florida had been so far weakened by the War of 1812 that after the restoration of peace they occupied only three important points—Pensacola, St. Marks, and St. Augustine. The rest of the territory became a No Man’s Land, an ideal resort for desperate adventurers of every race and description. There was a considerable Indian population, consisting mainly of Seminoles, a tribe belonging to the Creek Confederacy, together with other Creeks who had fled across the border to escape the vengeance of Jackson at Tohopeka. All were bitterly hostile to the United States. There were Spanish freebooters, Irish roustabouts, Scotch free lances, and runaway slaves—a nondescript lot, and all ready for any undertaking that promised excitement, revenge, or booty. Furthermore there were some British soldiers who had remained on their own responsibility after the troops were withdrawn. The leading spirit among these wasColonel Edward Nicholls, who had already made himself obnoxious to the United States by his conduct at Pensacola.
At the close of the war Nicholls and his men built a fort on the Apalachicola, fifteen miles from the Gulf, and began again to collect and organize fugitive slaves, Indians, and adventurers of every sort, whom they employed on raids into the territory of the United States and in attacks upon its inhabitants. The Creeks were falsely informed that in the Treaty of Ghent the United States had promised to give up all lands taken from them during the late war, and they were thus incited to rise in vindication of their alleged rights. What Nicholls was aiming at came out when, in company with several chieftains, he returned to England to ask for an alliance between the “mother country” and his buccaneer state. He met no encouragement, however, and in reply to an American protest the British Government repudiated his arts. His rôle was nevertheless promptly taken up by a misguided Scotch trader, Alexander Arbuthnot, and the reign of lawlessness continued.
After all, it was Spain’s business to keep order on the frontier; and the United States waited a year and a half for the Madrid Government to giveevidence of intent to do so. But, as nothing but vain promises were forthcoming, some American troops engaged in building a fort on the Apalachicola, just north of the boundary line, marched down the river in July, 1816, bombarded Nicholls’s Negro Fort, blew up its magazine, and practically exterminated the Negro and Indian garrison. A menace to the slave property of southern Georgia was thus removed, but the bigger problem remained. The Seminoles were restive; the refugee Creeks kept up their forays across the border; and the rich lands acquired by the Treaty of Fort Jackson were fast filling with white settlers who clamored for protection. Though the Monroe Administration had opened negotiations for the cession of the whole Florida country to the United States, progress was slow and the outcome doubtful.
Matters came to a head in the closing weeks of 1817. General Gaines, who was in command on the Florida border, had tried repeatedly to get an interview with the principal “Red Stick” chieftain, but all of his overtures had been repulsed. Finally he sent a detachment of soldiers to conduct the dignitary and his warriors from their village at Fowltown, on the American side of the line, to a designated parley ground. In no mood for negotiation,the chief ordered his followers to fire on the visitors; whereupon the latter seized and destroyed the village.
The fight at Fowltown may be regarded as the beginning of the Seminole War. General Gaines was directed to begin operations against the Indians and to pursue them if necessary into East Florida; but before he could carry out his orders, Jackson was put in personal command of the forces acting against the Indians and was instructed to concentrate all of the troops in his department at Fort Scott and to obtain from the Governors of Georgia and Tennessee such other assistance as he should need.
Jackson received his orders at the Hermitage. Governor Blount was absent from Nashville, but the eager commander went ahead raising troops on his own responsibility. Nothing was so certain to whet his appetite for action as the prospect of a war in Florida. Not only did his instructions authorize him to pursue the enemy, under certain conditions, into Spanish territory, but from the first he himself conceived of the enterprise as decidedly more than a punitive expedition. The United States wanted Florida and was at the moment trying to induce Spain to give it up.Here was the chance to take it regardless of Spain. “Let it be signified to me through any channel (say Mr. J. Rhea),” wrote the Major General to the President, “that the possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States, and in sixty days it will be accomplished.”
This “Rhea letter” became the innocent source of one of the most famous controversies in American history. Jackson supposed that the communication had been promptly delivered to Monroe, and that his plan for the conquest of Florida had the full, if secret, approval of the Administration. Instructions from the Secretary of War, Calhoun, seemed susceptible of no other interpretation; besides, the conqueror subsequently maintained that he received through Rhea the assurance that he coveted. Monroe, however, later denied flatly that he had given any orders of the kind. Indeed he said that through a peculiar combination of circumstances he had not even read Jackson’s letter until long after the Florida campaign was ended. Each man, no doubt, thought he was telling the truth, and historians will probably always differ upon the merits of the case. The one thing that is perfectly certain is that Jackson, when he carried his troops into Florida in 1818, believed that theGovernment expected him to prepare the territory for permanent American occupation.
In early March, Jackson was at Fort Scott, on the Georgia frontier, with about two thousand men. Though he expected other forces, Jackson found that scarcity of rations made it inadvisable to wait for them, and he therefore marched his army on as rapidly as possible down the soggy bank of the Apalachicola, past the ruins of Negro Fort, into Florida, where he found in readiness the provisions which had been sent forward by way of Mobile. Turning eastward, Jackson bore down upon the Spanish settlement of St. Marks, where it was rumored that the hostile natives had assembled in considerable numbers. A small fleet of gunboats from Mobile and New Orleans was ordered to move along the coast and intercept any fugitives, “white, red, or black.” Upwards of two thousand friendly Indians joined the land expedition, and the invasion became from a military standpoint a sheer farce. The Seminoles were utterly unprepared for war, and their villages were taken possession of, one by one, without opposition. At St. Marks the Indians fled precipitately, and the little Spanish garrison, after a glimpse of the investing force, asked only that receipts begiven for the movable property confiscated. The Seminole War was over almost before it was begun.
But Jackson was not in Florida simply to quell the Seminoles. He was there to vindicate the honor and establish the sovereignty of the United States. Hence there was further work for him to do. The British instigators of lawlessness were to be apprehended; the surviving evidences of Spanish authority were to be obliterated. Both objects Jackson attained with characteristic speed and thoroughness. At St. Marks he made Arbuthnot a prisoner; at Suwanee he captured another meddler by the name of Ambrister; and after a court-martial he hanged one and shot the other in the presence of the chieftains whom these men had deceived into thinking that Great Britain stood ready to come to the red man’s relief. Two Indian chiefs who were considered ringleaders he likewise executed. Then, leaving St. Marks in the possession of two hundred troops, Jackson advanced upon Pensacola, the main seat of Spanish authority in the colony.
From the Governor, Don José Callava, now came a dignified note of protest; but the invader’s only reply was an announcement of his purpose to take possession of the town, on the ground that itspopulation had encouraged the Indians and given them supplies. On May 24, 1818, the American forces and their allies marched in, unopposed, and the commander coolly apprised Callava that he would “assume the government until the transaction can be amicably adjusted by the two governments.” “If, contrary to my hopes,” responded the Spanish dignitary, “Your Excellency should persist in your intention to occupy this fortress, which I am resolved to defend to the last extremity, I shall repel force by force; and he who resists aggression can never be considered an aggressor. God preserve Your Excellency many years.” To which Jackson replied that “resistance would be a wanton sacrifice of blood,” and that he could not but remark on the Governor’s inconsistency in presuming himself capable of repelling an army which had conquered Indian tribes admittedly too powerful for the Spaniards to control.
When the Americans approached the fort in which Callava had taken refuge, they were received with a volley which they answered, as Jackson tells us, with “a nine-pound piece and five eight-inch howitzers.” The Spaniards, whose only purpose was to make a decent show of defending the place, then ran up the white flag and were allowedto march out with the honors of war. The victor sent the Governor and soldiery off to Havana, installed a United States collector of customs, stationed a United States garrison in the fort, and on the following day set out on his way to Tennessee.
In a five months’ campaign Jackson had established peace on the border, had broken the power of the hostile Indians, and had substantially conquered Florida. Not a white man in his army had been killed in battle, and not even the most extravagant eulogist could aver that the war had been a great military triumph. None the less, the people—especially in the West and South—were intensely pleased. Life in the frontier regions would now be safer; and the acquisition of the coveted Florida country was brought appreciably nearer. The popular sentiment on the latter subject found characteristic expression in a toast at a banquet given at Nashville in honor of the returning conqueror: “Pensacola—Spanish perfidy and Indian barbarity rendered its capture necessary. May our Government never surrender it from the fear of war!”
It was easy enough for Jackson to “take” Florida and for the people to rejoice in the exploit. To defend or explain away the irregular featuresof the act was, however, quite a different matter; and that was the task which fell to the authorities at Washington. “The territory of a friendly power had been invaded, its officers deposed, its towns and fortresses taken possession of; two citizens of another friendly and powerful nation had been executed in scandalously summary fashion, upon suspicion rather than evidence.” The Spanish Minister, Onis, wrathfully protested to the Secretary of State and demanded that Jackson be punished; while from London Rush quoted Castlereagh as saying that English feeling was so wrought up that war could be produced by the raising of a finger.
Monroe and his Cabinet were therefore given many anxious days and sleepless nights. They wanted to buy Florida, not conquer it. They had entertained no thought of authorizing the things that Jackson had done. They recognized that the Tennesseean’s crude notions of international law could not be upheld in dealings with proud European States. Yet it was borne in upon them from every side that the nation approved what had been done; and the politically ambitious might well think twice before casting any slur upon the acts of the people’s hero. Moreover the irascibility ofthe conqueror himself was known and feared. Calhoun, the Secretary of War, who was specially annoyed because his instructions had not been followed, favored a public censure. On the other hand, John Quincy Adams, the Secretary of State, took the ground that everything that Jackson had done was “defensive and incident to his main duty to crush the Seminoles.” The Administration finally reached the decision to surrender the posts but otherwise to back up the General, in the hope of convincing Spain of the futility of trying longer to hold Florida. Monroe explained the necessities of the situation to Jackson as tactfully as he could, leaving him under the impression—which was corrected only in 1830—that Crawford, rather than Calhoun, was the member of the Cabinet who had held out against him.
But the controversy spread beyond the Cabinet circle. During the winter of 1818-19 Congress took it up, and a determined effort was made to carry a vote of censure. The debate in the House—with galleries crowded to suffocation, we are informed by theNational Intelligencer—lasted four weeks and was notable for bringing Clay for the first time publicly into opposition to the Tenneseean. The resolutions containing the censurewere voted down, however, by a majority of almost two to one. In the Senate a select committee, after a laborious investigation, brought in an unfavorable report, but no further action was taken.
When the discussion in Congress was at its height, Jackson himself appeared in Washington. Certain friends at the capital, fearing that his outbursts of temper would prejudice his case, urged him to remain at home, but others assured him that his presence was needed. To his neighbor, Major Lewis, Jackson confided: “A lot of d———d rascals, with Clay at their head—and maybe with Adams in the rear-guard—are setting up a conspiracy against me. I'm going there to see it out with them.”
Until vindicated by the House vote, he remained quietly in his hotel. After that he felt free to pay and receive calls, attend dinners, and accept the tokens of regard which were showered upon him. It was now that he paid his first visit to a number of the larger eastern cities. Philadelphia fêed him four days. In New York the freedom of the city was presented by the mayor on a delicately inscribed parchment enclosed in a gold box, and Tammany gave a great dinner at which the leading guest, to the dismay of the young Van Burenand other supporters of Crawford, toasted DeWitt Clinton, the leader of the opposing Republican faction. At Baltimore there was a dinner, and the city council asked the visitor to sit for a picture by Peale for the adornment of the council room. Here the General was handed a copy of the Senate committee’s report, abounding in strictures on his Seminole campaign. Hastening back to Washington, he filled the air with threats, and was narrowly prevented from personally assaulting a member of the investigating committee. When, however, it appeared that the report was to be allowed to repose for all time on the table, Jackson’s indignation cooled, and soon he was on his way back to Tennessee. With him went the news that Adams and Onis had signed a treaty of “amity, settlements, and limits,” whereby for a consideration of five million dollars the sovereignty of all Florida was transferred to the United States. This treaty, as Jackson viewed it, was the crowning vindication of the acts which had been called in question; and public sentiment agreed with him.
Dilatory tactics on the part of the Madrid Government delayed the actual transfer of the territory more than two years. After having twice refused, Jackson at length accepted the governorship ofFlorida, and in the early summer of 1821 he set out, by way of New Orleans, for his new post. Mrs. Jackson went with him, although she had no liking for either the territory or its people. On the morning of the 17th of July the formal transfer took place. A procession was formed, consisting of such American soldiers as were on the spot. A ship’s band briskly playedThe Star Spangled Bannerand the new Governor rode proudly at the fore as the procession moved along Main Street to the government house, where ex-Governor Callava with his staff was in waiting. The Spanish flag was hauled down, the American was run up, the keys were handed over, and the remaining members of the garrison were sent off to the vessels which on the morrow were to bear them on their way to Cuba. Only Callava and a few other officials and merchants stayed behind to close up matters of public and private business.
Jackson’s governorship was brief and stormy. In the first place, he had no taste for administrative routine, and he found no such opportunity as he had hoped for to confer favors upon his friends. “I am sure our stay here will not be long,” wrote Mrs. Jackson to a brother in early August. “This office does not suit my husband. …There never was a man more disappointed than he has been. He has not the power to appoint one of his friends.” In the second place, the new Governor’s status was wholly anomalous, since Congress had extended to the territory only the revenue and anti-slave-trade laws, leaving Jackson to exercise in other matters the rather vague powers of the captain general of Cuba and of the Spanish governors of the Floridas. And in the third place, before his first twenty-four hours were up, the new executive fell into a desperate quarrel with his predecessor, a man of sufficiently similar temperament to make the contest a source of sport for the gods.
Jackson was prepared to believe the worst of any Spaniard, and his relations with Callava grew steadily more strained until finally, with a view to obtaining possession of certain deeds and other legal papers, he had the irate dignitary shut up overnight in the calaboose. Then he fell upon the judge of the Western District of Florida for issuing a writ ofhabeas corpusin the Spaniard’s behalf; and all parties—Jackson, Callava, and the judge—swamped the wearied officials at Washington with “statements” and “exhibitions” setting forth in lurid phraseology their respective views upon the questions involved. Callava finallycarried his complaints to the capital in person and stirred the Spanish Minister to a fresh bombardment of the White House. Monroe’s Cabinet spent three days discussing the subject, without coming to a decision. Many were in honest doubt as to the principles of law involved; some were fearful of the political effects of any stand they might take; all were inexpressibly relieved when, late in the year, word came that “Don Andrew Jackson” had resigned the governorship and was proposing to retire to private life at the Hermitage.
Ona bracing November afternoon in 1821 Jackson rode up with his family to the Hermitage free for the first time in thirty-two years from all responsibility of civil and military office. He was now fifty-four years old and much broken by exposure and disease; the prospect of spending the remainder of his days among his hospitable neighbors on the banks of the Cumberland yielded deep satisfaction. The home-loving Mrs. Jackson, too, earnestly desired that he should not again be drawn into the swirl of public life. “I do hope,” she wrote plaintively to a niece soon after her return to the Hermitage, “they will leave Mr. Jackson alone. He is not a well man and never will be unless they allow him to rest. He has done his share for the country. How little time has he had to himself or for his own interests in the thirty years of our wedded life. In all that time he has not spent one-fourth of hisdays under his own roof. The rest of the time away, traveling, holding court, or at the capital of the country, or in camp, or fighting its battles, or treating with the Indians; mercy knows what not.”
The intent to retire was honest enough but not so easy to carry out. The conqueror of the Creeks and Seminoles belonged not merely to Tennessee but to the entire Southwest; the victor of New Orleans belonged to the Nation. Already there was talk—“talk everlastingly,” Mrs. Jackson tells us in the letter just quoted—of making the hero President. Jackson, furthermore, was not the type of man to sit idly by while great scenes were enacted on the political stage. When he returned from Florida, he faced the future with the weary vision of a sick man. Rest and reviving strength, however, put the old vim into his words and acts. In two years he was a second time taking a seat in the United States Senate, in three he was contesting for the presidency, and in seven he was moving into the White House.
The glimpses which one gets of the General’s surroundings and habits during his brief interval of repose create a pleasing impression. Following the winding turnpike westward from Nashville a distance of nine or ten miles and rumbling across theold wooden bridge over Stone River, a visitor would find himself at Hermitage Farm. The estate contained at that time somewhat more than a thousand acres, of which four hundred were under cultivation and the remainder luxuriant forest. Negro cabins stood here and there, and in one corner was a little brick church which the proprietor had built for the solace of his wife. In the center of a well-kept lawn, flanked with cedars and oaks, stood the family mansion, the Hermitage, whose construction had been begun at the close of the Seminole War in 1819. The building was of brick, two stories high, with a double wooden piazza in both front and rear. The rooms were small and simply furnished, the chief adornment being portraits of the General and his friends, though later was added the familiar painting of Mrs. Jackson. Lavasseur, who as private secretary of La Fayette visited the place in 1825, was greatly surprised to find a person of Jackson’s renown living in a structure which in France would hardly suffice for the porter’s lodge at the château of a man of similar standing. But western Tennessee afforded nothing finer, and Jackson considered himself palatially housed.
Life on the Hermitage estate had its full shareof the charm of the old South. After breakfasting at eight or nine, the proprietor spent the day riding over his broad acres, giving instructions to his workmen, keeping up his accounts, chatting with neighbors and passers-by, and devouring the newspapers with a zeal born of unremitting interest in public affairs. After the evening meal the family gathered on the cool piazza in summer, or around the blazing hearth of the great living room in winter, and spent the hours until the early bedtime in telling stories, discussing local and national happenings, or listening to the news of distant localities as retailed by the casual visitor. The hospitality of the Jackson home was proverbial. The General’s army friends came often to see him. Political leaders and advisers flocked to the place. Clergymen of all denominations were received with special warmth by Mrs. Jackson. Eastern men of distinction, when traveling to the West, came to pay their respects. No foreigner who penetrated as far as the Mississippi Valley would think of returning to his native land without calling upon the picturesque figure at the Hermitage.
Chief among visitors from abroad was La Fayette. The two men met in Washington in 1824 and formed an instant attachment for each other.The great French patriot was greeted at Nashville the following year with a public reception and banquet at which Jackson, as the first citizen of the State, did the honors. Afterwards he spent some days in the Jackson home, and one can imagine the avidity with which the two men discussed the American and French revolutions, Napoleon, and the late New Orleans campaign.
Jackson was first and last a democrat. He never lost touch with the commonest people. Nevertheless there was always something of the grand manner about him. On formal and ceremonial occasions he bore himself with becoming dignity and even grace; in dress he was, as a rule, punctilious. During his years at the Hermitage he was accustomed to ride about in a carriage drawn by four spirited iron-gray horses, attended by servants in blue livery with brass buttons, glazed hats, and silver bands. “A very big man, sir,” declared an old hotel waiter to the visiting biographer Parton long afterwards. “We had many big men, sir, in Nashville at that time, but General Jackson was the biggest man of them all. I knew the General, sir; but he always had so many people around him when he came to town that it was not often I could get a chance to say anything to him.”
The question as to who first proposed Jackson for the presidency will probably never be answered. The victory at New Orleans evidently brought the idea into many minds. As the campaign of 1816 was beginning, Aaron Burr wrote to his son-in-law that, if the country wanted a President of firmness and decision, “that man is Andrew Jackson.” Not apparently until 1821 was the suggestion put forward in such a way as to lead Jackson himself to take note of it. Even then he scoffed at it. To a friend who assured him that he was not “safe from the presidency” in 1824, he replied: “I really hope you don’t think that I am d——— fool enough to believe that. No sir; I may be pretty well satisfied with myself in some things, but am not vain enough for that.” On another occasion he declared: “No sir; I know what I am fit for. I can command a body of men in a rough way; but I am not fit to be President.”
It really mattered little what the General himself thought. His Tennessee friends had conceived the idea that he could be elected, and already they were at work to realize this vision. One of the most active was John H. Eaton, who had lately written the hero’s biography down to the return from New Orleans. Another of his friends wasGovernor Blount. John Rhea, Felix Grundy, and half a dozen more helped. But the man who really made Jackson President was his near neighbor and his inseparable companion of later years, William B. Lewis.
In a day of astute politicians Major Lewis was one of the cleverest. He knew Jackson more intimately than did any other man and could sway him readily to his purposes in all matters upon which the General’s mind was not absolutely made up. He had a wide acquaintance over the country; he was possessed of ample means and leisure; he was an adept at pulling judiciously laid and well-concealed political wires; he fully understood the ideas, aspirations, and feelings of the classes whose support was necessary to the success of his plans. In the present juncture he worked on two main lines: first, to arouse Jackson’s own State to a feverish enthusiasm for the candidacy of its “favorite son,” and, second, to start apparently spontaneous Jackson movements in various sections of the country, in such a manner that their cumulative effect would be to create an impression of a nation-wide and irresistible demand for the victor of New Orleans as a candidate.
Tennessee was easily stirred. That the Generalmerited the highest honor within the gift of the people required no argument among his fellow citizens. The first open steps were taken in January, 1822, when theGazetteand other Nashville papers sounded the clarion call. The response was overwhelming; and when Jackson himself, in reply to a letter from Grundy, diplomatically declared that he would “neither seek nor shun” the presidency, his candidacy was regarded as an established fact. On the 20th of July, the Legislature of the State placed him formally in nomination. Meanwhile Lewis had gone to North Carolina to work up sentiment there, and by the close of the year assurances of support were coming in satisfactorily. From being skeptical or at best indifferent, Jackson himself had come to share the enthusiasm of his assiduous friends.
The Jackson managers banked from the first upon two main assets: one was the exceptional popularity of their candidate, especially in the South and West; the other was a political situation so muddled that at the coming election it might be made to yield almost any result. For upwards of a generation the presidency and vice presidency had been at the disposal of a working alliance of Virginia and New York, buttressed by such supportas was needed from other controllable States. Virginia regularly got the presidency, New York (except at the time of the Clinton defection of 1812) the vice presidency. After the second election of Monroe, in 1820, however, there were multiplying signs that this affiliation of interests had reached the end of its tether. In the first place, the Virginia dynasty had run out; at all events Virginia had no candidate to offer and was preparing to turn its support to a Georgian of Virginian birth, William H. Crawford. In the second place, party lines had totally disappeared, and the unifying and stabilizing influences of party names and affiliations could not be counted on to keep down the number of independent candidacies. Already, indeed, by the end of 1822 there were a half-dozen avowed candidates, three of whom had seats at Monroe’s Cabinet table. Each was the representative of a section or of a distinct interest, rather than of a party, and no one was likely to feel under any compulsion to withdraw from the race at a preliminary stage.
New England offered John Quincy Adams. She did so with reluctance, for the old Federalist elements had never forgiven him for his desertion to the Republican camp in the days of the embargo,while the back country democracy had always looked upon him as an alien. But he was the section’s only available man—indeed, the only promising candidate from any Northern State. His frigid manner was against him. But he had had a long and honorable diplomatic career; he was winning new distinction as Secretary of State; and he could expect to profit both by the feeling that the North was entitled to the presidency and by the fact that he was the only candidate from a non-slave State.
Crawford, Secretary of the Treasury, was the heir apparent of the Virginia dynasty. Formerly this would have meant a clear road to the White House. Even now it was supposed to be a tremendous asset; and notwithstanding the Georgian’s personal unpopularity in most parts of the country, his advantages as the “regular candidate,” coupled with the long and careful campaign carried on in his behalf, were expected by many keen observers to pull him through.
A third candidate within the Cabinet circle was Calhoun, Secretary of War. Like Crawford, he could expect to reach the presidency only by winning the support of one or more of the greater Northern States. For a while he hadhopes of Pennsylvania. When it appeared that he had nothing to look for in this direction, he resigned himself to the conclusion that, since he was yet hardly forty years of age, his time had not yet come.
For the first time, the West now put forward candidates—two of them, Clay and Jackson. Clay was a Kentuckian, of Virginian birth and breeding, in whom were mingled the leading characteristics of both his native and his adopted section. He was “impetuous, wilful, high-spirited, daring, jealous, but, withal, a lovable man.” For a decade he had been the most conspicuous figure in the national House of Representatives. He had raised the speakership to a high level of importance and through its power had fashioned a set of issues, reflective of western and middle-state ideas, upon which the politics of the country turned for more than a quarter of a century. As befitted a “great conciliator,” he had admirers in every corner of the land. Whether his strength could be sufficiently massed to yield electoral results remained to be discovered.
But what of Jackson? If, as one writer has said, Clay was one of the favorites of the West, Jackson was the West itself. “While Clay was able tovoice, with statesmanlike ability, the demand for economic legislation to promote her interests, and while he exercised an extraordinary fascination by his personal magnetism and his eloquence, he never became the hero of the great masses of the West; he appealed rather to the more intelligent—to the men of business and of property.” ¹ Jackson, however, was the very personification of the contentious, self-confident, nationalistic democracy of the interior. He could make no claim to statesmanship. He had held no important legislative or administrative position in his State, and his brief career in Congress was entirely without distinction. He was a man of action, not a theorist, and his views on public questions were, even as late as 1820, not clear cut or widely known. In a general way he represented the school of Randolph and Monroe, rather than that of Jefferson and Madison. He was a moderate protectionist, because he believed that domestic manufactures would make the United States independent of European countries in time of war. On the Bank and internal improvements his mind was not made up, although he was inclined to regard both as unconstitutional.