JOHN C. CALHOUNHENRY CLAYDANIEL WEBSTER
unprecedented sway over a party was due, in large measure, to his remarkably fascinating personality, his audacity and dash, his amazing powers of ingratiation, and his superb eloquence which acted upon the spirit of the party workers like the sound of a bugle to a battle charger. No American orator, perhaps, has ever approached his effect upon a partisan audience. Fluent, and at times capable of passages of inspired eloquence, a consummate master of the implements of sarcasm and ridicule, his was the oratory that moves men to action. He could lash his followers to fury or move them to tears. His speeches often lacked literary finish, and, at times, in their colloquialisms descended beneath the dignity of the man’s position, but even these occasional descents to buffoonery contributed to his popularity. He often spoke the language of the people—Webster and Calhoun, never. The contribution of new ideas to a discussion was not his forte. But he could gather up the material at hand, and weave it into a speech of fervent declamation which created the momentary impression that he was breaking virgin soil. His oratory was in his personality and his delivery. His voice was an exquisite musical instrument, with a clarion note that carried his words to the outskirts of the greatest throng. When he spoke, his expressive countenance glowed with his genius, his eyes flashed or caressed, his commanding figure seemed to grow, and in his combined dignity and grace he looked the part of the splendid commander of men, and the inspiring crusader of a cause. No man of his time, among all the great orators of that golden age, could so hold an audience literally spell-bound, Prentiss alone approaching him.
In personal intercourse, no politician ever possessed more of the seductive graces. There his magnetism was compelling. When he cared to put forth all his powers of attraction, no one could withstand his charm. Webster was godlike and compelled admiration; Clay was human and commanded love. Calhoun once said of him: “I don’t like Clay. He isa bad man, an impostor, a creature of wicked schemes. I won’t speak to him, but, by God, I love him!” His effect on both men and women has been ascribed to the fact that, masculine and virile though he was, he possessed feminine qualities that led to a sentimental feeling toward him. Men would follow him, knowing him to be wrong; stake their political fortunes on him, though they knew it would mean their own undoing; and women wept over his defeats and idolized him as a god.
As a political leader he was an opportunist. He often changed his tack to meet the passing breeze, but with the exception of his Bank reversal nothing could force him to admit it. As we proceed with the story of the party battles of the Jackson Administrations, we shall be impressed at times with his capability for trickery, demagogy, misrepresentation, deliberate misinterpretation, and dogmatic arrogance with his own friends and supporters. He brooked no equals. He accepted no rebuke and few suggestions, and led his party with a high-handedness that would have wrecked a lesser man.
His personal habits were not the best, and yet they were not of a nature that greatly shocked his generation. Adams thought him “only half educated” and was disgusted by the looseness of his public and his private morals.[380]But Adams was not in harmony with his times. Clay was an inveterate gambler—but so were a large portion of the public men in the Washington of the Thirties. And while a heavy drinker, he does not appear to have often been noticeably under the influence, as was Webster. But these vices never interfered with his work or diverted him for a moment from the pursuit of his ambition.
It was a militant figure that strode down the Avenue to the Capitol to lead the fight, with the stride of an Indian, his well-shaped feet encased in shoes instead of the bootsgenerally worn at the time, and fastidiously attired as was his wont—a Henry Clay, in shining armor, his sword shimmering.
Fivedays after Congress convened, the Baltimore Convention nominated Clay for the high office he long had sought. It had been inevitable from the hour he rode out of Washington after the inauguration on his way to Baltimore. During his retirement, his letters of 1829 and 1830 furnish proof of his candidacy, albeit he carefully conveyed the impression that he was a little indifferent to the nomination, and more than doubtful of the result of the election.[381]In a letter to a political follower he early predicted that if Jackson could unite New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania upon his candidacy, opposition would be futile.[382]Two months later, Webster assured him of the support of Massachusetts, but feared that a first nomination from that State would “only raise the cry of coalition revived.”[383]And three days after his nomination at Baltimore, Clay had written of his skepticism of success, with the encouraging comment: “Something, however, may turn up (and that must be our encouraging hope) to give a brighter aspect to our affairs.”[384]Thus, when he entered the Senate we may be sure that it was with the fixed determination that something should “turn up.” It was his belief, as we have seen, that Jackson’s election depended upon his ability to carry Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York. At the time he entertained no hope of diverting Virginia from Jackson, but he hoped to carry Pennsylvania or New York, or both. Upon the former he pinned his faith—and there the tariff was strong, and the National Bank had its headquarters there, with its ramifications into everysection of the country. His platform had been carefully thought out and thoroughly discussed in the correspondence of 1829 and 1830. It embraced internal improvements, a protective tariff, and the rechartering of the Bank. Thus, when Congress met, the Opposition candidate and his platform were before the people, and the congressional battles of the session were but heavy skirmishes preliminary to the battle for the Presidency.
As he looked over the personnel of Congress, Clay must have rejoiced over his advantage. There, by his side, sat Webster, with all the prestige of his great name and in all the splendor of his genius. Presiding still over the deliberations of the Senate was the stern-visaged political philosopher and sage who had definitely broken with Jackson-Calhoun. It could not have taken him long to discover, in the young Hercules with the harshly carven features, the brilliant possibilities of John M. Clayton. And there, harboring a secret grudge, and suffering acutely from the wounds inflicted on his mentor in the chair, sat the eloquent Hayne, meditating revenge. In Thomas Ewing of Ohio, a robust partisan and able debater, he found a fighter after his own heart. And while they were of the State Rights persuasion, and hostile to the tariff and internal improvements, he could scarcely have failed to catch in the eyes of the erudite Tazewell and Tyler of Virginia something of a promise that was to be fulfilled.
And against him, he saw John Forsyth and Benton, men of character and power, supported by Felix Grundy and Hugh White, “Ike” Hill and Mahlon Dickerson of New Jersey.
His was manifestly the advantage in the Senate.
But in the House his advantage was much greater, for among the members of the Opposition was the most brilliant array of great orators ever assembled in a single Congress. John Quincy Adams had reëntered public life as a Representative from Quincy—as full of fire and pepper as ever in hisyouth; Edward Everett, the most scholarly and polished orator of his generation; Rufus Choate, the greatest forensic orator the Republic has produced; Richard Henry Wilde, who combined the qualities of a graceful poet, a vigorous debater and eloquent orator, and a sound scholar; Tom Corwin, the wit and the slashing master of polemics; and greater perhaps than all, as a congressional orator, the fiery and indomitable George McDuffie of South Carolina.
And against this combination the best the Administration could do was to put forth the commonplace plodder James K. Polk, assisted by Churchill C. Cambreleng of New York.
If Jackson had the advantage of position, Clay had all the prestige of genius on his side. Thus the two parties faced each other for the battle.
A lessprovocative Message than that with which Jackson opened the Congress could hardly have been penned. It was conciliatory and in good taste. But Clay’s voice was for war. It was his determination that something should “turn up,” if he had to turn it up, for the purposes of the election, and he had instilled his spirit into his followers. Instantly the gage of battle was thrown down in the consideration of the nomination of Van Buren as Minister to England. A pettier piece of party politics is scarcely found in the history of the Senate. Among all the Opposition Senators, there were probably none who doubted his capacity or questioned his integrity. With the Calhoun faction it was personal spite; with Clay, Webster, and Clayton it was partisan spleen. Six months before, Van Buren had ridden out of Washington with Jackson by his side, and had sailed for England. In London he was at once received into the most brilliant society. He became an intimate of the Duke of Wellington, and Talleyrand, Ambassador from France, cultivated him, while Rogers, the poet, entertained him frequently at his famousbreakfasts. He had been charged with an important mission—nothing less than the negotiation of an agreement that would prevent the recurrence of the causes of estrangement between the two peoples growing out of the occurrences incidental to England’s participation in European wars.[385]Welcomed to the most exclusive drawing-rooms, cultivated by the most powerful of English statesmen, with the prestige in London of having adjusted, while in the State Department, the long-standing differences relative to the West Indian trade, he was in position to achieve triumphs for his country when his nomination was sent to the Senate.
And there, Clay, Webster, and Calhoun eagerly awaited its coming. They had been busily engaged for weeks in preparing the attack. Each drew all his particular friends into the conspiracy, many of them entering reluctantly rather than incur their displeasure. The charges against Van Buren were transparently political. The Calhoun faction were prepared to contend that he had engineered the quarrel of the President and the Vice-President and had disrupted the Cabinet. Clay’s special point was to be that he had introduced the policy of proscription, destined to destroy American institutions, and he was to join with Webster in viciously assailing him for his instructions to our Minister to England in the negotiations on the West Indian trade.
The latter reason for refusing to confirm the nomination of Van Buren was the only one that rose to the dignity of a pretense. For some time the United States had been negotiating with London for the opening of trade in American vessels between this country and the British possessions, but without success. During the preceding Administration, while Clay was Secretary of State, extravagant claims were advanced by the American Government, and, by angering England, had only served to make a settlement more remote. When Van Buren became Secretary of State, and McLanewas sent to London, he was charged with the duty of reopening negotiations, and was given certain instructions for his guidance. Among these was the abandonment of the untenable claims of Clay, and the concession of the British point of view upon them. This was denounced as a weakness and a surrender, and as an intentional reflection upon the previous Administration for party purposes. As a matter of record, the instructions furnished McLane by Van Buren were predicated upon the report submitted to Clay, after the failure of the preceding negotiations, by Albert Gallatin, the Minister to England under Adams.[386]It consequently follows that when Clay, thoroughly familiar with his own Minister’s report to him, and with the fact that Van Buren had merely followed it in his preparation of the instructions, vehemently denounced the latter for deliberately and maliciously reflecting upon the previous Administration, he was tricking the Senate and the country. He, at least, knew better. And the mere fact that McLane was further instructed to stress the fact that the preceding Administration had been repudiated by the people at the polls, and the new régime should not be held accountable for the mistakes of the old, while in doubtful taste, was scarcely an offense so heinous as to justify the proposed humiliation of Van Buren.[387]The other charges had less substance. It has never been convincingly shown that Van Buren had any part in engineering the quarrel between Jackson and Calhoun, and years after retiring from the Presidency, Jackson solemnly exonerated him from any complicity.[388]Equally unproved, and unprovable, was the claim that he had precipitated the Cabinet crisis, and the charge that he had introduced the policy of proscription might well have emanated from some one other than Clay.
The clear intent of the conspiracy was to destroy Van Buren and his prospects for the Presidency.
When the nomination reached the Senate, nothing was done for five weeks. Meanwhile the leaders of the conspiracy were carefully preparing their speeches for publication and wide distribution. On the submission of the report, the venom behind the remarkable procrastination was revealed in a resolution, entrusted to one of the lesser lights,[389]to recommit the nomination with instructions to investigate the disruption of the Cabinet and whether Van Buren had “participated in any practices disreputable to the national character.” This, offered as a weak contribution to the attempt to blacken Van Buren’s reputation, having served its purpose, was withdrawn without action. Then the orators began. One after another, with a cheap simulation of sorrowful regret over the necessity of injuring an amiable man, poured forth his protest against the nomination. Clay, of course, made a slashing onslaught. Webster confined himself to attacking the victim because of his instructions to McLane. Clayton and Ewing, Hayne and seven others recited their elaborately prepared partisan harangues under the approving eye of Calhoun in the chair.
The principal reply, and only four were made, was that of Senator John Forsyth, the accomplished floor leader of the Administration, and one of the most eloquent and resourceful of men. He vigorously protested against a partisan crucifixion, and sarcastically commended the fine public spirit of Senators who could voluntarily bring such distress upon themselves to serve the public good. This fling went home to many. Hayne, in later years, admitted that he had spoken and voted against his judgment at the behest of party,[390]and John Tyler, who was incapable of a pose, voted for the confirmation, “not that I liked the man overmuch,” but because he could find no principle to justify his rejection, anddid not care to join “the notoriously factious opposition ... who oppose everything favored by the Administration.”[391]Indeed, the cooler and wiser heads among the enemies of the Administration considered the attack a serious political blunder. Adams, on learning of the plan, warned that “to reject the nomination would bring him [Van Buren] back with increased power to do mischief here.”[392]And Thurlow Weed, of the “Albany Journal,” uncannily wise and prophetic, sounded a solemn warning through his editorial columns that such persecution of Van Buren “would change the complexion of his prospects from despair to hope.” The plan persisted in, and “he would return home as a persecuted man, and throw himself upon the sympathy of the party, be nominated for Vice-President, and huzzahed into office at the heels of General Jackson.”[393]
This was the view of Kendall and Blair, and of Benton, who refused to participate in the Senate debate. The latter felt that, though “rejection was a bitter medicine, there was health at the bottom of the draught.” He alone among the senatorial friends of the rejected Minister appears to have had the prescience to appreciate the ultimate advantage. To one Senator, rejoicing over the rejection, he turned with triumphant mien: “You have broken a Minister and made a Vice-President.” But the enemies of the Administration and of the victim were jubilant. “It will kill him, sir, kill him dead; he will never kick, sir, never kick,” exclaimed Calhoun in the presence of “Old Bullion.”[394]And there was an immediate reaction. Instead of killing, it made Van Buren. He instantly became a party martyr, and idol.
On the evening of the day the news of his rejection reached London, Van Buren appeared at a party at Talleyrand’s, smiling, suave, undisturbed, as though he had scored a triumph. It was probably on that day that he heard from Benton, urging that he hold himself free for the Vice-Presidency.
The speeches of Clay, Webster, Hayne, and Clayton were published, the veil of secrecy having been lifted from the executive session for this party purpose, and the effect was wholly different from that expected. It had been the part of Kendall and Blair to see to that. While the Senators were talking, they had been busy with their pens, and when the action was taken the Democratic press furiously denounced the rejection, the rank and file of the party roseen masseto proclaim the victim a martyr, mass meetings were called in New York, Philadelphia, and Albany to arraign the Senate, and the Democratic members of the New York Legislature sent the President a letter of condolence. The Legislature of New Jersey declared that after its favorite son, Senator Dickerson, its choice for Vice-President would be the martyr. And Isaac Hill took the stump in New Hampshire to denounce Webster as disloyal to friendship and as a sniveling hypocrite.[395]
But the success of the conspiracy acted upon Clay like the taste of blood on a tiger, and with an insinuative reference to Livingston’s indebtedness to the Government, which he knew had been discharged to the penny, he would have applied the political proscription of the Whigs to the philosopher in the State Department but for the indignant protest of Dallas. Thus the character of the fight to be waged against the Administration was clearly revealed within a month after Clay’s return to public life.
Thefirst month, too, witnessed an assault on the most vulnerable point of the Administration lines, and an open invitation to Calhoun and the Nullifiers to join their politicalfortunes with the party of Clay. Both the attack and the invitation came from John M. Clayton, who was almost to rival Clay in the leadership of the Whigs, and to surpass him in some of the qualities of leadership. When he entered the Senate practically unknown, he was the youngest member of that body, but there was enough in his physical appearance and bearing to set him out in any group as one destined to command. Over six feet in height, his figure well filled out; of clear complexion, with large gray eyes of intellectual power, and an enormous, superbly shaped head, he looked both the physical and mental giant. It only required the personal contact to attract men to him as steel shavings are attracted to the magnet. His manner was easy and graceful, his disposition kindly and benevolent, his wit keen, his conversational powers far beyond the average. With a remarkable memory and an unusual gift for analysis, he entered the Senate well equipped in a thorough knowledge of literature and history. He had great talents and just fell short of genius. As an orator, he was logical, forceful, at times dramatic and eloquent. Hating the Jacksonians, he surveyed the field for an opportunity to attack, and he found it in the Post-Office Department.
One of Jackson’s most unfortunate appointments had been that of Barry as Postmaster-General. A genial and likable politician, a loyal friend, an ardent champion of the President, and, personally, a man of undoubted integrity, he was pitifully lacking in business ability, in a capacity for organization, and was all too credulous of his subordinates. Within two years after Jackson’s inauguration, the politicians knew that his department offered a rich field for investigation. Knowing this, Clayton introduced his celebrated resolution inquiring into its abuses. That the Administration circles were not at all satisfied that nothing could be uncovered is evident in the excitement the resolution caused, and every effort was made by Administration Senators to block it.In his initial speech in support of his resolution, Clayton sounded the keynote of the Whig campaign against the prescriptive policies of Jackson, but more significant still was his appeal, the first openly made, to Calhoun, to join with the followers of Clay in a concerted assault upon the Administration.
While the young Senator from Delaware was speaking, Calhoun sat in the chair of the presiding officer. Turning in his direction, Clayton made the first bold bid for his support of the party Opposition.
“But it will be seen,” he said, “whether there be not one man in this nation to breast its [Administration’s] terrors whenever the President hurls his thunders. There are hawks abroad, sir. Rumor alleges that that plundering falcon has recently swooped upon a full-fledged eagle that never yet flinched from a contest, and, as might be naturally expected, all await the result with intense interest. It is given out that the intended victim of proscription now is one distinguished far above all in office for the vigor and splendor of his intellect.... But if that integrity and fairness which have heretofore characterized him through life do not desert him in this hour of greatest peril, we may yet live to see one, who has been marked out as a victim, escape unscathed even by that power which has thus far prostrated alike the barriers of public law and the sanctity of private reputation.”
The appeal was entirely unnecessary, if not intended merely as a public tribute to a newly acquired ally, for Calhoun and his friends were already hostile to the Administration. It is historically interesting only in that it shows the cleverness of the National Republicans, soon to adopt the name of Whigs, in undertaking to coalesce with all elements of the Opposition, no matter how divergent, or even inconsistent, the causes leading to the disaffection.
Thus, within a few weeks after the assumption of the leadership by Clay, we find Jackson’s favorite humiliatedby the rejection of his nomination; another wantonly insulted by the questioning of his personal integrity; a movement launched to blacken the Administration through an investigation of its most vulnerable department; and a plan conceived for the consummation of an unholy alliance of incongruous elements.
MeanwhileClay, devoted to the protective tariff policy, anxious to save it from crucifixion by consent, and with a political eye on the political effect of his championship in Pennsylvania, without which he thought Jackson’s reëlection impossible, had been busy formulating a new tariff which was to create more party clashes.
Within a month after Congress met, he called a meeting of the friends of the protective tariff to determine plans for party action. The then existing “tariff of abominations”[396]was doomed by public opinion. Two months before he wrote a friend acknowledging a revision inevitable, and announcing plans for one not compromising to the protective principle.[397]The conference called by Clay met at the home of Edward Everett, Representative from Boston, with the presidential nominee himself presiding. He summoned his friends, not to consult, but to take orders. He disclosed his plan—a repeal of all duties on tea, coffee, spices, indigo, and similar articles, and thereby reduce the revenue as much as seven millions that year without interfering with the prevailing duties that had been imposed for protective purposes. Jackson intended to destroy the protective system through the accumulation of revenue. It was the duty of its friends to save it through the reductions proposed.
If we may accept Adams as a faithful reporter, Clay’s manner was “exceedingly peremptory and dogmatical.” Various questions, indicative of doubt, were asked. Everett, mindful of the ominous protest of the South, thought the plan might be interpreted as “setting the South at defiance.” Adams, who had a mind of his own, reported that the Committee on Manufactures in the House, of which he was chairman, was “already committed upon the principle that the reduction of the duties should be prospective, and not to commence until after the extinguishment of the public debt”; and he suggested that the Clay plan would be, not only “a defiance of the South, but of the President and the Administration.” The spirit of Clay is well disclosed in his none too gracious reply that “to preserve, maintain, and strengthen the American System, he would defy the South, the President, and the Devil; that if the Committee on Manufactures had committed themselves ... they had given a very foolish and improvident pledge; and that there was no necessity for the payment of the debt by the 4th of March, 1833.”
This led to some debate between the former President and his premier, with Adams insisting that Jackson’s desire to extinguish the debt should be “indulged and not opposed,” and that the President’s idea “would take greatly with the people.” This view piqued and mortified Clay, who had found all the party leaders in the conference becomingly obsequious with the exception of Adams. That Adams was equally disgusted we may gather from his description of Clay’s manner as “super-presidential,” and from the following entry in his journal: “Clay’s motives are obvious. He sees, that next November, at the choice of presidential electors, the great and irresistible electioneering cry will be the extinguishment of the public debt. By instant repeal of the duties he wants to withdraw seven or eight millions from the Treasury and make it impossible to extinguish it by the 3rd of March, 1833. It is an electioneering movement, and this was the secret of these movements, aswell as of the desperate efforts to take the whole business of the reduction of the tariff into his own hands.”[398]The Democratic opinion that Clay was partly actuated by a petty partisan desire to deprive the Administration of the credit for wiping out the national debt, corroborated as it is by Adams, is plausible enough. At the same time, it was manifestly Clay’s purpose to rally the protected industries to his standard in the presidential campaign.
Meanwhile the lobbyists of the protected interests, flocking to the capital, crowded the rotunda every morning, mixing with the statesmen. Here, at the time, was the Republic in miniature—lobbyists, statesmen, correspondents, and plebeians mingling in a common arena, with the visiting tourists ranged about to view the celebrities in their moments of conversational unbending.[399]Clay made the presentation of his plan the opportunity for his first political speech of his campaign. The Senate was crowded to hear him. It was not enough that he should acknowledge the approach of the extinguishment of the public debt, and base his argument for the reduction of duties upon that fact. The possibility of the passing of the debt during the Administration of Jackson was clearly annoying, and he attempted, laboriously, and at considerable length, to deprive it of any credit. The plan of the Administration to reduce no duties on unprotected articles previous to March, 1833, and to make a gradual and prospective reduction on protected articles, he denounced as a scheme to “destroy the protecting system by a slow but certain poison.” There was nothing remarkable in his first speech except its affectation of modesty, and his reference to old age and declining power.
But he was soon to find the incentive for his greatest speech upon the tariff. Hayne attacked the protective system with all the vigor and venom of a Nullificationist in the making; and Clay replied in the brilliant fighting protectionist speech which ranks as one of the masterful efforts of his life, and was to be used as a textbook for the advocates of the system for fifty years. Read even to-day, after the lapse of almost a century, it has a familiar sound, and transmits its pulsations from the printed page as though the reader felt the heartbeat of the orator.
Among the Southerners in the Senate, this speech created the greatest excitement and the gravest forebodings, with John Tyler assailing both the principle of protection and the method of framing bills under the principle. But the most significant note struck by Tyler was the warning that the continuance of the protective policy would inevitably lead to the disruption of the Union. The speeches of both Clay and Tyler were sent broadcast over the country. That of the former delighted protectionists and impressed all. Harrison Gray Otis wrote enthusiastically from Boston, but both James Madison and James Barbour gently questioned the taste of the partisan attack on Albert Gallatin as a “foreigner.”[400]Highly complimentary letters were received by Tyler from John Marshall and James Madison, both of whom favored the reduction of the tariff.[401]
And throughout it all, Clay found himself unable to maneuver Jackson or his friends into a position of opposition to the system. Amos Kendall and Blair had their hopes tied to another issue. They had no thought of sacrificing the electoral vote of the Keystone State. The leaders of the Senate opposition to the tariff were Hayne and Tyler, neither of whom was longer considered as in the confidence of the President. Clay’s speech, widely distributed in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York, proved him a champion of the system, but nothing occurred in the Senate to prove Jackson an enemy. This was the situation when the real battle was transferred to the House of Representatives.
Throughsome trickery or blunder, that portion of the Presidential Message relating to “relieving the people from unnecessary taxation after the extinguishment of the public debt,” was referred to the Committee on Ways and Means a majority of whose members were hostile to the protective system; and to the Committee on Manufactures was referred that part concerning “manufactures and the modification of the tariff”—a dual reference of the same subject to rival committees. At the head of the Committee on Manufactures was John Quincy Adams—certainly not a spokesman of the Administration; and the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means was George McDuffie of South Carolina, a protégé of Calhoun, and now an implacable foe of Jackson.
In feverish haste McDuffie, representing the extreme free-trade school, began the preparation of his report and the formulation of his bill to get in before the more deliberate Adams. He proceeded independently of the forthcoming report and tentative Administration measure from Secretary McLane, such was his precipitation. Adams, more considerate, awaited the report, in the meanwhile making many morning calls upon the Secretary.[402]Strangely enough, the former President had favorably impressed many Southerners by his admission that existing rates were unfair to the South. His position, as on a more notable occasion later, was unique. Even Jackson was actively making overtures to him. The ever-convenient Colonel Johnson of Tecumseh fame, approaching the old Puritan with a suggestion of a reconciliation, tactfully hinted that he thought the President should make the first move. The cautious Adams, not at all averse, reminded the emissary that Jackson had broken, not he; to which Johnson replied that the General had been poisoned by “scoundrel office-seekers” when he first reached the capital. Would Adams dine at the White House, if invited? The wily old man parried with the reminder that such would only be the courtesy customarily accorded all members. But would Adams dine at the White House with a small and select company? He would not—and on similar grounds. At the end of his rope, the anxious Johnson asked Adams for a suggestion, only to receive the reply that it was a matter for Jackson to decide.[403]The next day Adams received a note from Johnson to the effect that Jackson had “expressed great satisfaction” over the conversation and sent his “personal regards and friendship,” together with the assurance that he was “anxious to have social and friendly intercourse restored.” Thinking it over, the suspicious Adams could not but meditate upon the attacks from Clay’s friends if he should cross the threshold of the White House—and there the matter appears to have rested finally.[404]
There has never been another character in American history quite like Adams. His real portrait, self-painted, peers at the world from between the covers of his monumental diary, in which he communed with himself unreservedly, and expressed his opinion of men and their motives with brutal frankness. He was a professional statesman of a high order. Entering upon diplomatic duties in his youth, he knew the cross-currents of world politics at an age when most Americans are laboriously projecting themselves into the politics of their immediate neighborhood. From his earliest years he had been in contact with great minds, and with men of power and broad vision. A thorough scholar, he was, at the same time, a man of the world. Conscious of his ability and his advantages, cold and reserved, and dignified to the point of frigidity, it is not difficult to understand his supercilious attitude toward men less favored, and yet placed in lofty station. Inspired by the highest ideals of public service, holding himself under such rigid discipline as to havemade himself immune to the small vices, placing duty above friendship, scarcely ever yielding his dignity to mirth, and on those rare occasions smiling sardonically, he stood upon an isolated peak—of humanity, and yet separated from it.[405]No one living the monastic life could have lived more by rule, or have scourged himself more faithfully to his tasks.
Of friendships, he knew little from experience. Naturally of a suspicious disposition, he suspected treachery where it was not. Holding to no ordinary standard of perfection, he could not forgive the imperfections of his fellows. Even the transcendent genius of Clay could not hide from him the great man’s lack of education. One searches the pages of his diary in eager quest of some complimentary references—there are scarcely any. That he bitterly realized his isolation is clearly disclosed. “I am a man of reserve,” he wrote, “cold, austere and forbidding manners. My political adversaries say a gloomy misanthrope; my personal enemies, an unsocial savage. With a knowledge of the actual defects of my character, I have not had the pliability to reform it.” That such a man, entertaining such an opinion of his own merits and the failings of his contemporaries, should have consented to serve in the lower House of Congress, after having served in the Presidency, can only mean that he loved his country and sought the opportunity for service. That it was not to punish his enemies, we shall find on more than one occasion when he took his stand with the Administration of the man who displaced him. Not least among the merits of Adams was his capacity to work in serious coöperation with McLane in the moulding of the tariff of 1832.
Quite a different type, and in some respects a greater genius, was George McDuffie. His career was a mingling of romance and tragedy. A child of poverty, the protégé of a Calhoun,[406]
he had while yet in college been regarded “as a young man of extraordinary talents,” albeit at that time “he had not that passionate and eloquent declamation which he was afterwards to display in Congress.”[407]After hearing his great speech on the tariff in 1827, Josiah Quincy, who heard him, described him as “the most sensational orator of the time.”[408]In the fight against the Panama Mission, Sargent thought him “decidedly the most violent and aggressive speaker arrayed against the Administration.”[409]His passionate and impulsive nature frequently led to personal encounters; and in reaching an understanding of his irritable and sour disposition, it is profitable to know that just before entering Congress he had been wounded in the spine in a duel, and never afterwards knew a day free from personal discomfort. This wound, which ultimately killed him, changed a good-tempered and jovial man into the irritable, morose, and nervous creature known to history.[410]The indifference of the protectionists to the interests of the South, and the intemperate attacks of the abolitionists upon the Southern people, acted upon the diseased genius as an irritant and drove him to extremes. Even so, he rejected Nullification as a remedy, and insisted that the sole recourse of the Southerners was revolution.[411]Intellectually honest, morally clean, physically ailing, he put such of himself as he cared for the world to see into his public acts. He withdrew into himself—taciturn, lonely. “A spare, grim looking man, who was an admirer of Milton, and who was never known to smile or jest,” as Perley Poore describes him.[412]His health gone, his life uncertain, an idolized wife taken from him within a year, his leader’s aspirations wrecked, his section threatened, it is not strange that he poured forth on Andrew Jackson such torrents of eloquent vituperation.
Standingnot on ceremony, McDuffie hastened to report a bill, accompanied by an elaborate report in the nature of an indictment of the protective system, which “ought to be abandoned with all convenient and practical despatch, upon every principle of justice, patriotism and sound policy.” The bill provided an immediate reduction of duties on all articles except iron, steel, salt, cotton-bagging, hemp and flax, and on everything made of cotton, wool, and iron, to a basis of twenty-five per cent ad valorem. On the excepted articles the reduction was to be gradual, tumbling to twenty-five per cent at once, to eighteen and three quarters per cent on June 30, 1833, and to twelve and a half per cent one year later.
With Adams still laboring on his bill, McDuffie called his up with a slashing speech. This prodigiously long philippic was historical in that it tended to force the issue of Nullification a little earlier than its sponsors had planned.
In the meanwhile the Administration measure, with McLane’s report, had been submitted, providing for the repeal of the existing tariff after March 3, 1833, and the reduction of the revenue to the financial requirements of the Government. This contemplated the reduction of the revenue to $12,000,000 a year, and the arrangement of the rates so as sufficiently to protect the great interests involved.
Using the Administration measure as a basis, Adams thereupon prepared his bill and report. In his statement the patriotic statesman, indifferent to the clamor of party, or class, or section, shines forth luminously. It may have been unnecessary to expose the protectionist’s fallacy that raising the duties lowers the price of the domestic product; equally unnecessary to warn the Southerners that a persistence intheir course would lead to appalling consequences, but he made these points. In presenting his bill, Adams frankly explained that it was based on the Administration measure, with some changes as to details.
With the Adams bill before it, the House made short shrift of the McDuffie measure. The protectionists were in despair. The Legislatures of Pennsylvania and Connecticut passed condemnatory resolutions, and mass meetings were held protesting against reductions. An unsuccessful attempt was made to substitute the Clay Senate plan. And yet Clay himself was fairly well satisfied, and on its passage in the House wrote that “with some alterations it will be a very good measure of protection.”[413]At the time he wrote, however, he was convinced that the alterations would be made in the Senate and accepted by the House, and upon the failure of these plans to materialize hangs another story of politics.
The Senate lost no time making amendments, and as it was now July, with all anxious to adjourn, no time was wasted on unnecessary speeches, and the amendments, which were numerous, were hurried through. In a few instances, not many, the protectionists lost, but on the whole theirs was the victory when the bill went back to the House. There a few of the Senate amendments were accepted, but the majority were rejected and the bill was thrown into conference.
And here enters one of the comedy-tragedies of politics. Calhoun was absent, Tazewell in the chair, when the measure was returned to the Senate. The motion for a conference carried. And then it was, in the naming of the Senate conferees, that Tazewell either made a blunder or turned a trick. Hayne, named as the minority member, was expected to act badly, but the protectionists pinned implicit faith in Wilkins of Pennsylvania and Dickerson of New Jersey, theformer a business man, manufacturer, banker from a protectionist State, the latter with a powerful protectionist constituency. Unhappily the friends of the Senate bill did not attach sufficient importance to the candidacy of both men for the Vice-Presidential nomination with Jackson—to the pull of personal ambition. Whatever their special motives in surrendering to the conferees of the House, they gave only a perfunctory support to the Senate amendments and capitulated.
The amazement and indignation of Clay and his followers were unbounded. Clay sharply cross-examined Wilkins and Dickerson upon the proceedings in the conference, and then had to content himself by joining Webster in a warm denunciation of the surrender. There was nothing to be done, however, but for the Senate to recede, and the bill was passed and promptly signed by Jackson.
Thus the tariff battle on which Clay relied to strengthen him in the pre-presidential contest was practically barren of party significance. By no sophistry or reasoning could the protectionist States of Pennsylvania and New York be turned against Jackson, who had promptly signed the bill that Adams had sponsored, and which had been supported by such Administration Democrats as Isaac Hill, Dickerson, Marcy, Wilkins, Grundy, White, and Benton.
The tariff issue was dead before the campaign was fairly begun.
IfClay had failed to embarrass the Administration on the tariff, the keen Jacksonian politicians were to be more successful in embarrassing Clay on the land question. This was a peculiarly delicate subject for Clay to touch in the midst of the campaign. In the Southern and Western States more than 1,090,000,000 acres remained the property of the National Government—a vast empire. The proceeds from thesale of these lands had been originally dedicated to the payment of the national debt; and now with the extinguishment of the debt in sight, all manner of schemes were advanced as to the future disposition of the lands and the proceeds. For a number of years Benton, with characteristic tenacity, had been urging his plan of graduated prices, with free grants to actual settlers, and he had won Jackson over to his theory with Edmund Burke’s proposition, advanced in his speech on the disposition of the crown lands in England, that the principal revenue to be had from uncultivated tracts “springs from the improvement of the population of the kingdom.” The sturdy Missourian looked with repugnance upon the idea of considering these uncultivated acres as sources of revenue, rather than as an opportunity for settlers, and he gradually converted the Democratic Party to his point of view.
To make matters all the more embarrassing to Clay, his party had been placed in the position of deliberately withholding this vast domain from the axe of the pioneer and the spade of the cultivator, in the interest of the manufacturers of the East. This had resulted from the unfortunate wording of an official report of Richard Rush, a colleague of Clay’s in the Cabinet of Adams, in which he had lamented the preference of the American people for agricultural over manufacturing pursuits. The report had been referred to Clay whose practiced political eye instantly saw the possibilities in the perversion or exaggeration of the meaning of these paragraphs, and he had fruitlessly urged their elimination. The Democrats were quick to grasp their opportunity. The protectionists, Clay and his friends, planned that the National Government should, by holding on to the lands, retard their settlement by maintaining prices prohibitive to the settler; they proposed to maintain a large labor market in the industrial labor centers of the East where competition would be keen enough to keep down wages. For the sake of the protected interests, they were ready to sacrifice the opportunities of the poor of the Eastern cities and make them the galley slaves of the factories; retard the development of the West, and immolate the national interest on the altar of greed. And there was just enough truth in these charges, rather luridly put forth, to make them exceedingly dangerous in a presidential year.
The issue had been accentuated by the suggestion of McLane, Secretary of the Treasury, that the public lands should be sold to the States in which they were located, and the proceeds apportioned among all the States in the Union. This, naturally enough, made an instant appeal to the States most intimately concerned, and six of the new Commonwealths hastened to petition Congress for the cession. This brought the subject before the Senate, and in the spring of 1832 two motions were submitted, one to inquire into the wisdom of reducing the price of the public lands, the other into the expediency of the McLane proposition.
And it was at this juncture that the Jacksonians turned the trick on Clay and forced him into the open as an aggressive enemy of the wishes of the new States. With a regular Senate Committee on Public Lands, composed of men intimately acquainted with the subject, the amazing motion was made and carried that the matter be referred to the Committee on Manufactures of which Clay was chairman. The friends of the candidate bitterly protested against the reference; and Clay himself “protested,” “entreated,” and “implored” that the reference be changed to the Committee on Public Lands. “I felt,” he said later, “that the design was to place in my hands a many-edged instrument which I could not touch without being wounded.”[414]
Unable to extricate himself from the embarrassment, Clay set to work, and in a short time submitted a report, accompanied by a bill, providing against the reduction of the price ofthe land, but for granting to Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Alabama, Missouri, and Mississippi twelve and a half per cent of the proceeds from the sale of lands within their borders, to be applied to the purposes of education and internal improvements. This, of course, was a frank attempt to prevent the resentment of the people of these States from asserting itself at the polls. The remainder of the proceeds was then to be apportioned to the remaining States, according to their population, to be used for the schools, internal improvements, and negro colonization. The act was to remain in force for five years, provided no war intervened, in which event all the proceeds were to be used in defraying the expenses of the conflict. In this way Clay attempted to maintain the existing economic conditions while satisfying the new States whose electoral votes he sought.
If the political intent of the reference to Clay’s committee had been in the least open to doubt, all such was removed by the action of the Senate in thereupon ordering the matter referred to the Committee on Public Lands. Again Clay vehemently protested. He had not wanted to report upon the subject. He had protested against the reference. But the reference having been made, and the report submitted, he protested anew against the reflection upon his committee implied by the new reference.
At the head of the Committee on Public Lands was Senator King of Alabama, but Clay was right in ascribing the authorship of the report, soon to be submitted, to Thomas H. Benton.[415]This report vigorously assailed the reasoning and conclusions of Clay; attacked the disposition to look upon the public lands as useful primarily for revenue and secondarily for settlement, and reversed the order; and deprecated the suggestion of the use of the money to be distributedamong the States for the colonization of the negroes as calculated to “light up the fires of the extinguished conflagration which lately blazed on the Missouri question.” It favored the reduction of the price of land to one dollar per acre during the next five years; then to fifty cents, with fifteen per cent of the proceeds to be apportioned among the States. Whatever may have been the objections to the Democratic plan, it gave promise of an earlier redemption of the wilderness by the cultivation of man, and the more speedy enhancement of the land of the pioneers already in possession.
Keenly appreciative of the purpose of his enemies, Clay delivered a long and powerful speech, his second campaign speech in the Senate, plausibly defending his position, explaining Rush’s meaning, and attempting to divert the greed of the new States into a different channel. That he made a profound impression may be properly assumed from the fact that the bill passed the Senate, although it was checked by a hostile House.
Thus his friends flattered themselves that he had scored a triumph and outwitted his foes. The old school politicians still gauged public opinion by the roll-calls of the Congress. The new school, which came in with Jackson, were least of all concerned with the views of the politicians at the capital. They were interesting themselves with the plain voters, and were devising means for reaching these in the campaign to follow. They had sensed the feelings and the prejudices and suspicions of the pioneers of the new States. They were an agricultural people and easily inflamed by the suggestion that their interests were to be subordinated or sacrificed to the interests of the Eastern industrial centers. They wanted the speedy felling of the forests, the cultivation of the fields, the building of homes and schools and churches, and the Benton plan of reduced prices and preemption for actual settlers appealed to them as in harmony with their desires.
And thus, while the friends of Clay were rejoicing in whatthey conceived to be the unanswerable logic of the Clay report, the politicians of the Kitchen Cabinet, Kendall and Blair, were rejoicing in having, in documentary form, the proof that Clay and the protectionists were hostile to the wishes of the new States. Amos Kendall knew that “free trade and free lands” was a shibboleth that these pioneers could understand. And while Clay, Webster, and Clayton were rejoicing over the passage of the bill in the Senate, Kendall and Blair were joyously arranging to spread the story of that triumph to the voters of the new States. After all, they had succeeded in their purpose. They had a Clay and a Jackson report to hold side by side, and the event disclosed that the politicians of the Kitchen Cabinet were wiser than the politicians of the Senate house.
Duringthe early days of the Jackson régime, a remarkable and little remembered figure passed furtively in and out of the closet of the President, playing a quiet, but none the less effective, part in the moulding of policies. This was none other than James A. Hamilton, son of the creator of the National Bank. Then a trusted brave of the tribe of Tammany, the reflector of Van Buren, the supporter of Jackson, he had fought the Federalist machine of New York, been made acting Secretary of State by the President pending the arrival of Van Buren, and later been appointed District Attorney of New York. For several years on the eve of portentous events he glided into the capital. That the son of Alexander Hamilton should have had such intimate relations with the President who denounced what he thought to be the persecution of Aaron Burr, is one of the mysteries of history.
When the first Jackson Message was under consideration, Hamilton, in response to the requests of Van Buren, Lewis, and others, reached Washington to confer with Jackson. He hastened to Van Buren, who was no doubt prolific of suggestions; thence to the White House to be cordially received. The following morning he breakfasted with the President, who urged him to remain at the White House while revising the Message. In going over the draft, which he found the “work of different hands,” he was surprised to find that “the Bank of the United States was attacked at great length in a loose, newspaper slashing style.” He found much to do. It was four o’clock in the morning when Jackson, hearing someone tinkering with the fire in the grate, entered Hamilton’s room in his nightgown.
“My dear Colonel, why are you up so late?” he asked.
“I am at my work which I intend to finish before I sleep,” Hamilton replied.
At which the mulatto who slept on a rug in Jackson’s room was sent in to keep Hamilton’s fire going. At eight in the morning the latter appeared in the President’s room to report the completion of his task.
“What did you say about the Bank?” Jackson asked instantly.
“Very little.”
And the son of Alexander Hamilton read the brief paragraph challenging the constitutionality and the expediency of the Bank his father had created, and declaring that it had “failed in the great end of establishing a uniform and sound currency.”
“Do you think that is all I ought to say?” asked Jackson.
“I think you ought to say nothing about the Bank at present,” was the response.
“Oh, but, my friend, I am pledged against the Bank, but if you think that is enough, so let it be.”[416]
Some students of the period are prone to ascribe Jackson’s hostility to the Bank to a personal grievance of Isaac Hill. The flimsy assumption that the President’s Bank policy was born of the quarrel of the Concord editor with Biddle, because of the retention in the presidency of the Portsmouth branch of Jeremiah Mason, is unimpressive. Equally absurd to deny that the Mason incident played no part. According to some, Hill, in his attempt to force the removal of Mason, was wholly actuated by a desire to get political control of the institution; to others, to the inability of the editor-politician to get a loan. The truth is that the hostility to Mason was not confined to politicians, but was shared by many of themerchants of New Hampshire. This hostility was due to Mason’s austere action, on discovering that some bad loans had been made on speculative ventures, in exacting hard terms of the local merchants. The petition sent to Biddle by Hill contained the names of sixty members of the legislature, and most of the business men of Portsmouth, of both parties.[417]The president of the Portsmouth branch was a great lawyer, a statesman of reputation, an orator of power, and a partisan as bitter and intolerant as ever breathed the proscriptive air of New Hampshire. In the correspondence which followed between Secretary Ingham, who is said to have had a personal grievance,[418]and Nicholas Biddle, the president of the Bank, who has been variously described according to the bias of the writer, was unquestionably flippant and intolerant of suggestions from the Administration. While his position in the Mason incident can be justified, he was unnecessarily arrogant and tactless; but quickly realizing his mistake, he thereafter changed his tone, and throughout the summer and autumn of 1829 made every effort to conciliate the President. His letters of this period to the heads of the various branches insisting that the Bank be kept out of politics smack of sincerity.[419]But the harm had been done, and there is every reason to conclude that Amos Kendall was deeply concerned in the President’s decision to attack the Bank in his first Message. Certain it is that a letter from Kendall to Noah in November led the “New York Courier and Enquirer” to launch its editorial campaign against the institution. This letter, announcing the presidential decision to attack in his first Message, and presenting an argument in support of the position he was to assume, was sent by Noah to the newspaper,and “a portion of Amos Kendall’s letter, with a head and tail put to it ... was published as an editorial the next morning”; and this “was the first savage attack on the United States Bank” in the columns of that paper.[420]And almost immediately afterwards James Gordon Bennett, writing for the “Courier and Enquirer,” began a series of powerful articles in support of the policy of that journal.[421]
Indeed, if an explanation for Jackson’s position must be sought in the Kitchen Cabinet, it would be more profitable to seek it in the principles of Amos Kendall, who had written against the Bank long before he had met the President, and while still on friendly terms with Clay. Others of Jackson’s intimates were equally hostile. The views of Benton had been urged for years; and Hugh L. White, Senator from Tennessee, one of his confidential advisers in the early days of his Administration, had long distrusted the institution as tending to extravagant speculation, and as threatening the liberties of the people through its increasing influence in elections.[422]But Jackson himself needed no propagandists at his elbow. He had been prejudiced against the Bank for twenty years by Clay’s slashing speech against it when the first Bank applied for a recharter.[423]
In his Message of December, 1830, Jackson dismissed the Bank in a paragraph, clearly indicative of unfriendliness; and in December, 1831, he scarcely mentioned it at all, except to call attention to his previous statements. But from the moment the first Message was read, Biddle’s complacency was disturbed. His correspondence during the next two years shows him active and alert in attempts to conciliate his foe in the White House. Less than a week after one son of Alexander Hamilton had penned the first warning of war, Biddle was reading a letter from Alexander Hamilton, Jr., a brother, assuring him that the die was cast, the war inevitable, andwarning him against the presidential aspirations of Van Buren, to whose political fortunes his brother was then attached.[424]Biddle replied that the Bank views of the Message were Jackson’s, honestly held, and that for the time the Bank’s policy would be one of “abstinence and self-defense.”[425]“The expressions of the Message were the President’s own,” he wrote the head of the Washington branch immediately afterward, “ ... and inserted in opposition to the wishes, if not the advice of all his habitual counsellors. It is not, therefore, a cabinet measure, nor a party measure, but a personal measure.”[426]And had he not ample encouragement in the letters of Major Lewis, a household guest of Jackson’s, recommending the appointment of certain men to the directorship of the branch in Nashville?[427]Nevertheless, he was not at all positive that the recharter might not be made a party measure. Especially concerned with Van Buren’s attitude, he was being constantly warned against him, but his advices were contradictory. Within a month he was reassured by one correspondent[428]and alarmed by Clay, who wrote him from Ashland that, while in Richmond, Van Buren had entered into a conspiracy with politicians to destroy the Bank.[429]And to add to the mystic maze of contradictions, Major Lewis wrote, in a “confidential” note, that the report that Jackson would veto a bill rechartering the Bank “must be some mistake because the report was at variance with what I had heard him say upon the subject.”[430]Still another correspondent[431]informed him that Van Buren had told him that “he disapproved of that part of the message and was not hostile to the Bank.”
About this time Jackson journeyed to the Hermitage, andBiddle asked a leading citizen of Nashville to “feel him out.” The banker’s correspondent entertained the President at his home, and after a confidential chat felt justified in advising Biddle that he was “well convinced that he will not interfere with Congress on the subject of the renewing of the charter.”[432]By this time, however, Biddle had convinced himself that political expediency would determine the President’s attitude, and in a letter to one of Jackson’s personal friends he pointed out the disastrous political results to the Administration if the impression gained ground that it was “unfriendly to sound currency.” He even graciously indicated the line the next Message might take to save the Administration from that embarrassment.[433]But before that suggestion reached its destination, Clay solemnly wrote him that only a devoted friend of the Bank in the Presidency would make a recharter possible, and warned him against Van Buren. He was convinced that the Jacksonian politicians had determined to make the Bank question the issue in the next campaign. “I have seen many evidences of it,” he wrote. “The editors of certain papers have received their orders to that effect, and embrace every occasion to act in conformity with them.”[434]But when Congress met in December, and Jackson reiterated his views on the Bank, Biddle was earnestly urged from Washington to meet the issue at once by applying for a new charter. This advice was finally rejected. Congress, he wrote, was favorable, “and moreover the President would not reject the bill,” but many members favorable to the recharter would prefer not to vote that session. Then, too, time was working the removal of prejudices.[435]
At the beginning of the session, December, 1831, with the charter five years to run, we are confronted with the mystery of the injection of the issue at that time. We know, however, that the strain of uncertainty had been telling on Biddle’s temper. The vultures that play on the political necessities of corporations were beginning to swoop down upon him. Duff Green, of the “National Telegraph,” had applied for a $20,000 loan.[436]And mindful of the importance of propaganda, he had already decided to cultivate the press by paying it well for the publication of Bank literature.[437]But just before the opening of the congressional session, his negotiations with McLane and Livingston of the Cabinet, both friendly to the Bank, had again diverted him from his disposition to fight. In October the Secretary of the Treasury had sat in the marble-front building in Philadelphia and told him of confidential communications with the President. Anxious to keep the Bank question out of the campaign, Jackson had reluctantly consented, on the importunities of Livingston and McLane, to omit all references to the Bank in his Message. Biddle feared it would be a mistake. Would it not be better merely to remind Congress of his previous comments, and leave the decision “with the representatives of the people?” The fact that this course was followed is one of the ironies of history.[438]Hardly had this decision been reached when Clay wrote from Ashland urging an immediate application for a new charter. This was a sensational reversal of views. Not only had he previously advised Biddle differently, but in August, 1830, he had taken strong grounds against such application so long before the expiration of the existing charter. “I am not prepared,” he said then, “to say whether the charter ought, or ought not to be renewed on the expiration of its present term. The question is premature. I may not be alive to form any opinion on it. It belongs to posterity. It ought to be indefinitely postponed.”[439]Thisspeech was to be used with deadly effect by Blair in the “Globe” a little later.[440]Even then, before reaching Washington, Clay had determined to “turn up” the Bank charter as an issue.