And on the day that Jackson was enjoying, or trembling at, the popularity of his triumph, where was Adams? The day before the inauguration he had removed to the home of Commodore Porter on the outskirts of the city; and at the time the surging multitude was all but drowning the roar of the cannon with its cries for Jackson, the dethroned President, finding the day “warm and springlike,” had ordered his horse, and, accompanied by a single companion, had ridden into the city “through F Street to the Rockville turnpike,” and over that until he reached a road leading to the Porters’—reminded of the passing of his power by the neglect of the people.[146]
Henry Clay shut himself in his house and did not leave it during the day—tormented by bitter regrets.
Almostimmediately Jackson began to get the reaction on his Cabinet and his policies. The disaffections in the house of his friends, which were to cause him so much embarrassment during the first two years of his Administration, began to appear before the shouts of the crowd on the White House lawn had died away. We have it on the authority of thecapital gossips of the day that when McLean, the Postmaster-General, who had betrayed Adams, heard of his new chief’s plans for wholesale dismissals of postmasters, he warned Jackson that in his proceedings against those officials who had participated in politics he would be forced to include in the proscription the supporters of Jackson as well as those who had been faithful to Adams; that Jackson, for a moment nonplussed, sat puffing at his pipe, then arose, and, after walking up and down the room several times, stopped abruptly before his obstreperous minister, with the question: “Mr. McLean, will you accept a seat on the bench of the Supreme Court?”—and that McLean instantly accepted.[147]This is vouched for by Nathan Sargent, who says that on the evening of the interview Lewis Cass told him, at a reception at the home of General Porter, that McLean, with whom he was intimate, had just described the interview to him.[148]The civic virtue of Mr. McLean has been explained on the theory that he entertained presidential aspirations and did not care to incur the displeasure of the many postmasters who were friendly to his ambition. However that may be, he secured a position of which he was not unworthy, and Jackson probably saved himself some trouble by meeting a sudden crisis in a truly Jacksonian way.
It is reasonable to assume that during the brief moments he walked the floor puffing his pipe, he determined upon McLean’s successor. One week before his inauguration, he had given James A. Hamilton a list of applicants for office with the request for an opinion and report, and among these was the application of William T. Barry of Kentucky for a place on the Supreme Bench. The applications had been returned to him with the recommendation that the Kentuckian be appointed. He was known to Jackson as an “organization man.” It was probably the matter of a moment, for one of the President’s quick decision, to make the exchange—McLean for the Bench, Barry for the Cabinet.[149]His efforts to soothe the injured feelings of Senator Tazewell, whose heart had been set on the portfolio of State, were not so successful. After the disappointed statesman had refused the War Department, some of the Jackson tacticians conceived the idea of offering him the mission to London, and for a few days the Virginian seemed tempted. But one week after the inauguration, he wrote the President that domestic reasons precluded an acceptance. Keenly disappointed and concerned, Jackson, after a consultation with one of his advisers,[150]wrote a personal note to Tazewell requesting him to call at the White House. It is not incomprehensible that in his angry mood the proud Southerner should have resented the earnest importunity of the direct Jackson, and he left the President with the statement to McLean that he had not liked the General’s manner in looking him through and through and telling him he must go. He had looked upon it as a military order, and considered the matter at rest. This opened the way, however, for the recognition of Van Buren’s friend, Louis McLane, whose ruffled feelings were smoothed by the appointment to the English Court. But within a week two of Jackson’s party friends and supporters, McLean and Tazewell, had been alienated and were ripe for the seduction of the Opposition.
Meanwhile, as soon as Clay could recover from the shock of defeat, he began the organization and solidification of a bitter and stubborn opposition to the Administration. As early as the first of January it was evident that “the aim of the defeated party is to get a majority in the Senate and thereby to control the President.”[151]During the first few weeksof the new Administration the iron sank deep into the souls of the dispossessed office-holders and their friends. It was manifest that there was something more than a new master in the White House—that a régime had passed, a dynasty had fallen. Previous Presidents had entered office with the good wishes of most of their political opponents, but it was clear from the beginning that the dispossessed had steeled themselves against conciliation, were planning to find fault on general principles, and to exert themselves to the utmost to wreck the Administration. The Cabinet was greeted with derision and the Whig drawing-rooms made merry over the “millennium of the minnows.” All the members of the new official family were ridiculed with the exception of Van Buren and even he, while conceded to be a “profound politician,” was “not supposed to be an able statesman.”[152]The vitriolic and vindictive Adams, nursing his wrath to keep it warm, poured forth on the pages of his diary vituperative denunciations of the Cabinet, together with the gossip of the malicious. Ten days of the new régime, and he had rendered the verdict that “the only principles yet discernible in the conduct of the President” were “to feed the cormorant appetite for place, and to reward the prostitution of canvassing defamers.”[153]
While Adams indulged in these unfriendly reflections merely to feed his personal vanity, and to record his superiority, Clay, equally bitter, was not content to shut his reflection up between the covers of a book. To him defeat had been especially bitter. He hated Jackson with vindictive malice because the latter really credited the “bargain” story, and had sanctioned its circulation. His overpowering passion was to reach the Presidency. He had entered the official household of Adams as the head of the Cabinet when the “Secretarial Succession” seemed definitely established, and had looked forward to succeeding his chief at the end ofhis second Administration. The fact that there had been no second Administration had been due, in part, to the prevalent opinion that Clay had entered into a bargain for power, and he faced retirement from public life feeling that his great opportunity had failed him and that his reputation had been stained. He was the type of man whose bitterness must find relief in action. From the moment he recovered from the shock of the election, he dedicated himself to the pursuit of Jackson.
In judging of the sincerity of his unrelenting opposition during the next eight years, it is well to bear in mind that before Jackson had perfected a policy, or proclaimed a principle, Mr. Clay attended a banquet given in his honor within a stone’s throw of the White House, at which he assailed the President with an intemperance of denunciation never exceeded in later years. This was evidently personal. One week after the inauguration he said to Mrs. Bayard Smith: “There is not in Cairo or in Constantinople a greater moral despotism than is at this moment exercised over public opinion here. Why, a man dare not avow what he thinks or feels, or shake hands with a personal friend, if he happens to differ from the powers that be.”[154]On the very day this remarkable statement was recorded by the chronicler of the Whig drawing-rooms, Adams wrote in his diary: “Mr. Clay told me some time since that he had received invitations at several places on his way to Lexington to public dinners, and should attend them, and that he intended freely to express his opinions.”[155]A little later Adams notes that while riding he passed Mr. Clay in a carriage driving toward Baltimore on his way to Kentucky—pale, stern, and sour. On that journey, and without having at that time any particular actions of the new Administration on which to base an attack, he spoke wherever the opportunity was afforded, and always with a vehement denunciation of President Jackson.
The inauguration was over; the people from afar, having seen “their” President and visited “their” White House, had returned to their homes; and Henry Clay, the most consummate of politicians, one of the most eloquent of men, was already meditating upon the organized assault that was to be made upon the new régime. Now let us acquaint ourselves with the advisers with whom the President had surrounded himself officially.
Bycommon consent the Whig aristocracy conceded that Martin Van Buren was the strong man of the Cabinet because of an uncanny cleverness as a politician, while denying him the qualities of statesmanship or intellectual leadership. Even as a politician tradition would have him of the superficial, manipulating, intriguing sort. History had generally accepted this tradition until Mr. Shepard’s masterful biography[156]focused attention upon his career, and the publication of his fascinating “Autobiography” disclosed his intellectuality. He stood out among the politicians of his time, to whom history has been kinder, because of his refusal to indulge in the popular personal attacks or to stoop to disreputable intrigues. A man of even temper, blessed with a sense of humor, he found it not only possible but profitable and pleasurable to maintain social relations with political opponents, and all that the embittered Adams could see in this was that “he thought it might one day be to his interest to seek friendship.” In senatorial debates he had discussed principles and policies calmly, instead of indulging in flamboyant discourses flaming with personalities—and this was accepted in his day as evidence that he held his principles lightly. Adams wrote that “his principles are always subordinate to his ambition.”[157]
This “superficial politician” was the greatest lawyerelected to the Presidency before the Civil War, and, with the possible exception of the second Harrison, the greatest lawyer-President we have had. Living in a community overwhelmingly Federalistic, this “trimmer without principles” became a bitter opponent of Federalism. With all the rich and powerful of the locality allied with Federalism, this “courtier” entered the other camp. When Burr was a candidate for Governor, with the support of Van Buren’s preceptor in the law, this young man, who “was under the influence of his evil genius,” ardently supported the Clinton-Livingston candidate, who was elected. When he entered politics, he found the spoils system thoroughly established in New York, and political proscription practiced by both parties, but that was not to prevent his enemies from charging him with its initiation. He did not quarrel with the system. He used, but never abused it. And in the days of his limitation to State politics, he displayed qualities of statesmanship, patriotism, and courage. New York Federalism did not dismiss him as a mere schemer and intriguer when he led his party in the State Senate. He met the Federalist attack upon the War of 1812 upon the floor of the Senate, and not in party caucus. When Federalism fought every needful measure, he became as much the spokesman of the war party in Albany as Clay, Calhoun, and Grundy in Washington. In reaching an estimate of Van Buren, it is important to bear in mind that this alleged man of indecision, without initiative or constructive capacity, was the author of “the most energetic war measure” adopted in the country.[158]As a member of the Constitutional Convention of New York, dealing with the extension of suffrage, when Chancellor Kent, giving free rein to his aristocratic tendencies, was opposing the extension, and mere demagogues were advocating the immediate letting down of the bars to all, it is significant, both of his Americanism and
MARTIN VAN BURENTHOMAS HART BENTON
his wisdom, that Van Buren scorned both the rôle of reactionary and demagogue, and proposed the plan for the gradual extension of suffrage in a speech couched in the language of seasoned statesmanship. Thus, at the time he entered National life, there was nothing in his career to justify the conventional estimate of his public character.
With the inauguration of Adams, soon after he had entered the United States Senate, Van Buren became the recognized leader of the Opposition, and he set himself the task of organizing and militantizing a party to fight the Federalistic trend of the President. There were various elements on which he could draw. With his genius for organization and direction, he made it his work to seek a common ground upon which all could stand together in harmony. He fought the principles and policies of the Administration in dignified fashion, without recourse to scurrility; but he capitalized every mistake and gave it fullest publicity through the circulation of carefully prepared speeches, after the fashion of the present day. Careful to discriminate, even in his attacks, between personal and political wrongdoing, he treated Adams with the utmost courtesy. With a party formed, he drilled it as carefully as was ever done by the Albany Regency. He instilled into it the party spirit. He mobilized an army. With this he fought the Administration on the floor.
But he was one of the first, if not the first, to take the people outside the halls of Congress into consideration. To create a party without as well as within the Congress, he arranged for the circulation of carefully prepared senatorial speeches for the moulding of public opinion in the highways and the byways. Thus he was probably responsible for the delivery of the first congressional speeches intended solely for campaign use.
In person he was slight, erect, and scarcely of middle height. His intellectuality was indicated by his high, broad forehead, and his bright, quick eye. His smile, which washabitual, was genial and seemed sincere. His features, generally, were pleasing. His manner was always courtly, and he made a study of deportment. No professional diplomat of the Old World, living in the atmosphere of courts, could have been more polished. Contemporaries have described him as “extraordinarily bright and attractive, but without anything supercilious.”[159]In social life he was a favorite. Few men of his period were better fitted for the drawing-room. An entertaining talker, he could converse intelligently upon a multitude of subjects and could pass from a political conference with the Kitchen Cabinet to a social call on Adams, or a chat with Clay, without effort or embarrassment. Fond of feminine society, he could be as charming to a débutante as to a grande dame, and we find him delighting the brilliant Mrs. Livingston with his intellectual charm, while captivating her daughter, Cora, with his juvenile levity. Fastidious to a degree, he could enjoy the unconventional moments of Jackson in his shirt-sleeves and with his pipe, and make the pleasure mutual. This premier of an Administration that contemporaries of the Opposition loved to describe as plebeian and vulgar “was perhaps as polished and captivating a person as the social circles of the Republic have ever known.”[160]As we shall see, nothing ruffled him. He never forgot his dignity nor lost his temper. He was all suavity. He was all art.
He lives in history as a politician and President and is never thought of as an orator. He belonged rather to the type of parliamentary speaker which followed the scintillating period when Pitt declaimed in stately sentences and Fox thundered with emotional eloquence—the conversational type which is still prevalent at Westminster. He made no pretense to an artful literary style, but his speeches were in good taste. We have the tradition that he not only preparedhis speeches with infinite care, which is probable, but that he rehearsed them before a mirror, which is debatable. It is said that on his retirement from the Senate, and at the sale of his household goods at auction, “it was noticed that the carpet before the large looking-glass was worn threadbare,” and that “it was there that he rehearsed his speeches.”[161]That he was something of an artist and an actor we shall see in the course of the recital of the events of the Jackson Administration.
Secretary of the Treasury Ingham was a Pennsylvania paper manufacturer who possessed little learning and stood in no awe of genius. His career had been that of a petty but persistent plodder who knew the ways of cunning. His mind was prosily practical, and he thought solely in terms of money. His fourteen years in Congress had been barren of achievement, but his business training had given him a certain advantage over more brilliant men in the work of the committees. He was the forerunner of the machine politician of a later day, skillful in intrigue, unscrupulous in methods, and resourceful in the work of organization. His general character is not easily deduced from the conflicting opinions of his contemporaries. One of these, unfriendly to the Jackson régime, wrote that he “is a good man of unimpeachable and unbending integrity”;[162]while Adams, after relating an incident tending to an opposite conclusion, tells us that “there is a portrait of Ingham in Caracci’s picture of the Lord’s Supper”—which is the nearest approach to a description of his appearance that can be found. There is a general agreement, however, as to the inferiority of his talents, and in our political history he is scarcely the shadow of a silhouette.
Quite a different character was Secretary of War Eaton, a gentleman of education, polish, amiability, capacity, and wealth. The possession of a fortune deprived him of an incentive to the full exertion of his talents, and he frankly preferred leisure to labor, discouraged the approach of clients, and liked nothing better than a quiet corner of his library at his country home near Nashville. There was nothing in his appearance, his manner, or conversation remotely to suggest the frontiersman, and, on the contrary, observers were impressed by his dignity and poise, his courtliness and courtesy. Even in the bitter days when society was in league against his wife, we find one of her harshest critics writing that “every one that knows esteems, and many love him for his benevolence and amiability.”[163]He possessed many advantages for a political career. Having the time and money to devote to politics, he early developed a genius for organization, and an uncanny capacity for intrigue. The campaign of 1828 found him entrusted with much of the important work—the delicate missions. Wherever Jackson lacked or needed an organization, or one in existence required stiffening, there went Eaton, doing his work furtively, and on the surface nothing but its achievement indicated that it had been undertaken.[164]It was his fine Italian hand which wrought such havoc with Clay’s forces in Kentucky. When that State began to waver as to Clay, Jackson determined to force the fighting in a territory at first thought hopelessly lost to the Democracy. Even Benton found his way to the “dark and bloody ground,” but tradition has it that it was the suave and furtive Eaton, who appeared in different parts of Kentucky, making no speeches, and half concealing himself in a mantle of mystery, who divorced from Clay so many of his supporters. There is a sinister aspect to the general description of his activities; and his enemies, and Jackson’s, always insisted that he had parceled out jobs with a lavish hand. A man of culture, a soldier of acknowledged gallantry, a lawyer of ability, he was destined to an unhappy notoriety, but he deserved a better fate.
The patrician of the Administration was Secretary of the Navy Branch, who, like Eaton, had inherited an ample fortune, and had divided his time between politics, the practice of the law, and the management of a large plantation. At the time he entered the Cabinet, he had distinguished himself in the politics of North Carolina, had served three terms as Governor, and was a member of the United States Senate—scarcely the record of an obscure man. As chief executive of his State, his record had been far from that of a colorless time-serving politician without constructive qualities or vision. If his messages were couched in the lofty, pompous phrases of the period, they were not without substance. He was a pioneer in the field of popular education, the leader of a crusade against capital punishment for many crimes, an advocate of the substitution of imprisonment for the death penalty, and he urged the establishment of a penitentiary based on the idea of reformation. A man of great wealth, and an aristocrat by temperament, he led a fight against imprisonment for debt.[165]His, too, is the distinction of having in that early day proposed the strict regulation of the medical profession as a protection of the public against impostors. A planter, and the owner of many slaves, he insisted, while Governor, on the protection of the legal rights of the blacks; and the petition of the entire population of Raleigh, the importunities of a hundred and twenty young women, the plea of State officials, were not sufficient to persuade him to save from the gallows a young white man who had murdered a slave.[166]In the Senate, while not distinguished as an orator, he was considered a strong debater and was respected as a man of courage and deep convictions.
The portrait of Branch, which hangs in the Navy Department in Washington, suggests, in the slender profile andluminous eyes, the poet, rather than the politician. He is described by one who saw him often in his Washington days as “tall, well-proportioned, graceful in gestures, and affable and kindly in manner.”[167]He had the graciousness of the Southern aristocrat of the old school, and was devoted to the social standards and customs of his section. Strongly attached to his home and family, having the poet’s love of the artistic, he surrounded himself with beauty, and his home at Enfield was a comfortable and stately mansion surrounded by a smooth lawn, in the midst of gardens, orchards, and shade trees. His political career and the course of the Jackson Administration were to be greatly influenced by his devotion to his wife and daughters, and to his social ideals.
In John McPherson Berrien, the Attorney-General, we have a character with whom history has played strange pranks. When he entered the Cabinet, he was conceded to be one of the most polished orators of his time and one of the famous lawyers of the South. His Washington début in the Supreme Court, in a case involving the seizure of an African slave ship, had been a spectacular triumph.[168]All contemporaries agree as to his extraordinary gifts of eloquence. Perley Poore describes him as “a polished and effective orator.”[169]Another contemporary found him “a model for chaste, free, beautiful elocution.”[170]Still another has it that “he spoke the court language of the Augustan age.”[171]Even the blasé John Marshall, who listened to Webster and Choate, was so impressed that he dubbed him “the honey-tongued Georgian youth.”[172]He had been in the Senate three years when a speech upon the tariff impelled the press of the period to describe him as “the American Cicero”—a designation that clung to himthrough life. The greatest speech made by any of the leaders of the Opposition on the Panama Mission was the constitutional argument of Berrien.[173]As a man he was cold and reserved, an aristocrat in manner, as in feeling. He made a virtue of not cultivating the multitude, scorned all compromise with his convictions, firmly believed in himself, and was not at all impressed with opposition. Utterly without tact or diplomacy, caustic and sarcastic, he incurred bitter enmities, but his admirers, who liked to compare him with Cicero, took pride in this weakness.[174]As a political leader, he was dictatorial and demanded obedience without question. The slightest hesitation on the part of his tried and truest friends was usually followed by coldness on his part. Selfish to a degree, he was always keen for his personal advancement.[175]Few more brilliant men have ever been Attorney-General of the United States.
If Postmaster-General Barry was unknown to Washington, it was a matter of indifference to him. In politics he was an exotic. Entering Congress as a young man, he could have remained indefinitely, but congressional life did not allure him. For twenty years he had been an influential State politician, serving in the legislature until sent to the United States Senate to fill an unexpired term. It is an interesting commentary on his preference for State office that he resigned from the Senate, where he might have remained, to become Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court. Living in Lexington as a neighbor of Henry Clay, he had been for many years one of the great leader’s most ardent supporters, and it is significant of the character of the man that, while he supported Clay against Jackson in 1824, the “bargain” story transformed him into a bitter foe.
In view of their relations to the Jackson Administrationyears later, the estimate of Barry reached by Amos Kendall in 1814, and recorded in his “Autobiography,” is interesting, and serves to account for the feeling, scarcely concealed, with which the journalist-politician afterwards undertook the unraveling of the difficulties into which Barry had plunged the Post-Office Department. It was when Kendall was on his way to Kentucky that he first met the Lexington politician and went down the Ohio River with him and Mrs. Barry with “servants, horses, and carriages,” in a boat thirty feet long, with three apartments. At the end of the journey Kendall wrote: “He appears to be a very good man but not a great man. For our passage he charged nothing, and in every way treated me like a gentleman. His lady seems to be a woman of good disposition, but uneducated.” In contradiction to this estimate, we have another in which he is described as possessing extraordinary abilities, active business habits, an exact knowledge of men and things, and as being “a great orator.”[176]And this same authority describes Mrs. Barry as “frank, lady-like, free from affectations, possessing a fine person and agreeable manners.” Parton tells us that he was “agreeable and amiable, but not a business man”—which is the final verdict of history. In person he was above the medium height, but slender and thin in face. He was modest in demeanor, and energetic—even though he did not always properly direct his energy—and fond of society. He became Postmaster-General because, according to the Jackson standard, he had richly earned the reward.
Such was the Jackson Cabinet which accompanied him into office. There have been greater Cabinets, but many inferior to it, and few with men possessing greater ability than Van Buren or Berrien, or more social distinction than Branch. There was not a single member who did not possess at least good ability, and Jackson had, or thought he had, what he said he proposed to have, a Cabinet without a presidential aspirant. It is strange that the one man who developed into a candidate almost immediately was the one to whom he became most ardently attached.
We shall now note the first troubles of the official family.
Thirteendays after the inauguration, the Senate, having confirmed the Cabinet, adjourned, and the Administration could look forward to almost nine months of non-interference from the Congress. The pre-inaugural prediction that the President would adopt a policy of proscription of his political foes was almost immediately justified by events. The “spoils system,” as an important cog in the machinery of political parties, thus frankly recognized, dates from this time. Through all the intervening years the civil service reformers have indulged in the most bitter denunciation of Jackson on the untenable theory that but for him public offices would never have been used as the spoils of party. Some of the most conscientious of historians have created the impression that the adoption of a prescriptive policy was due to something inherently wrong in the President. As a matter of fact, Jackson was the victim of conditions and circumstances, and the new political weapon grew out of the exigencies of a new political era.
For many years political parties had been chaotic, vapory, and indefinite; and if the politics of the young Republic had not been drifting toward personal government, it had been partaking of the nature of government by cliques and classes. The first Message of John Quincy Adams had made the definite division of the people into political parties inevitable—these parties standing for well-defined, antagonistic policies. Van Buren had early caught the drift and had cleverly organized a party standing for principles and policies, rather than for personalities. John M. Clayton, soon to become oneof the outstanding figures of the Opposition to the Jackson Administration, who had seldom voted even in presidential elections because of his indifference to the mere ambitions of individuals, understood that in 1828 something more was involved, and threw himself into the contest in support of Adams. And Clay was even then looking forward to the organization of a party pledged to internal improvements and a protective tariff.
The Jackson Administration marks the beginning of political parties as we have known them for almost a century.
It was in this compaign, too, that the masses awakened to the fact that they had interests involved, and possessed power. Previous to this the aristocracy, the business and financial interests, and the intellectuals, alone, determined the governmental personnel. Men went into training for the Presidency, and, as in a lodge, passed, as a matter of course, from the Cabinet to the Vice-Presidency, and thence to the chief magistracy. An office-holding class, feeling itself secure in a life tenure, had grown up.
As we have seen, the election of Jackson was due to the rising of the masses. Thousands who had never before participated in politics played influential parts in the campaign. The victory, they considered theirs. Thus they had flocked to Washington as never before to an inauguration, rejoicing in the induction of “their” President into office, and all too many pressing claims to recognition and entertaining hopes of entering upon their reward. Before the inauguration, the grim old warrior, awaiting the opportunity, at Gadsby’s, to take the oath of office, had been fairly mobbed by ardent partisans of his cause, demanding the expulsion of the enemy and the appointment of his supporters to office. The Jackson press had been particularly insistent upon this point. Duff Green, of the “National Telegraph,” had early announced that he naturally assumed that the office-holders who had actively campaigned for Adams would make wayfor the victors. This same feeling had spread into every community in the country. Isaac Hill, writing in the “New Hampshire Patriot” immediately after the election, had sounded the onslaught for the Democracy of New England.[177]And soon after reaching Washington, and sensing the atmosphere at Gadsby’s, the New England editor had written joyously to a friend: “You may say to all our anxious Adamsites thatThe Barnacles will be scraped clean off the Ship of State. Most of them have grown so large and stick so tight that the scraping process will doubtless be fatal to them.”
Before Jackson’s entry into the White House, the scenes in and about Gadsby’s were scarcely less than scandalous. A great perspiring mob swarmed in the streets in front, crowded the tap-room, jostled its way in the halls, and, notwithstanding the efforts of Major Lewis, it demanded and secured admission to the President’s private apartment. All admitted themselves responsible for Jackson’s election. Amos Kendall, encountering a pompous stranger on the Avenue, was invited to look upon the man who had “delivered Pennsylvania.”[178]James A. Hamilton, who was close to Jackson in the early days of the Administration, was importuned by an Indianian, who had taken the electoral vote of the State to the Capitol, to intercede on his behalf for the Register’s office at Crawfordsville, or the Marshalship. This typical office-seeker had “calculated to remain a few weeks ... hoping that some of these violent Adams men may receive their walking papers.” He carried letters of recommendation from all the Democratic members of theState Legislature “for any office I can ask.” But, in view of the brisk competition, would not Hamilton kindly recall that he had received letters from the Hoosier bearing on the campaign, and personally testify to the important part he had played?[179]Others depended upon the length of their petitions, and two applicants from Pennsylvania, for the same office, had signers so numerous that the number had to be estimated by the length of the sheets.[180]
Meanwhile there is no question but that Jackson was eager to serve his friends, if not to punish his enemies. From the moment of his election, he had entertained no illusions as to the character of the opposition his Administration would encounter. It was an open secret that his enemies, long before the inauguration, had begun to organize for the discrediting of his Administration. He was familiar with the bitterness of Clay. And, with the determination to make his Administration a success, from his point of view, he turned his attention to preparations for the fight. His military training told him that it was fatal to enter a campaign with traitors in the camp. The disloyalty from which Adams had suffered had not been lost upon him.[181]And he had fixed convictions as to political organization. “To give effect to any principles,” he said, “you must avail yourself of the physical force of an organized body of men. This is true alike in war, politics, or religion. You cannot organize men in effective bodies without giving them a reason for it. And when the organization is once made, you cannot keep it together unless you hold constantly before its members why they are organized.”[182]Thus party politics, in the modern sense, began with Jackson, and the spoils system grew out of the exigencies of party politics. Vicious though it may be, it is significant of its appeal to the rank and file of party workers, uponwhom party success depends, that politicians of all parties, including Lincoln, have adopted it without shame.
It does not appear that Jackson was greatly influenced in his course by his advisers, of either his constitutional or Kitchen Cabinet. Van Buren, who has been wrongfully accused of so many things, and among others, of having been the dominating influence as to the spoils system, heard of the plan for sweeping changes with grave misgivings. “If the General makes one removal at this time,” he said in a letter to Hamilton written from Albany, “he must go on. So far as depends on me, my course would be to restore by a single order every one who has been turned out by Mr. Clay for political reasons, unless circumstances of a personal character have since arisen to make the appointment in any case improper. To ascertain that will take a little time. There I would pause.” This, from the head of his official family.
And the most intimate of his advisers, of the Kitchen Cabinet, Major Lewis, is reported to have written to the President: “In relation to the principle of rotation in office, I embrace this occasion to enter my solemn protest against it; not on account of my office, but because I hold it to be fraught with the greatest mischief to the country. If ever it should be carried outin extenso, the days of this Republic will, in my opinion, be numbered; for whenever the impression shall become general that the Government is only valuable on account of its offices, the great and paramount interests of the country will be lost sight of, and the Government itself ultimately destroyed.” With the possible exception of Eaton, who was a practical politician in the modern sense, and Van Buren, to the extent just indicated, none of the members of the Cabinet were spoilsmen at heart; and Amos Kendall, the genius of the Kitchen Cabinet, would unquestionably have preferred to be spared the pain of turning men out of office. To be sure, the jovial but vindictive Duff Green, who spent much time at the elbow of Jackson in theearly months of the Administration, was insistent upon the punishment of enemies, but the responsibility for the adoption of the policy rests upon the President himself.
And the result was that the spring and summer months of 1829 were filled with the clamor of importunate pleas, not unmixed with threats and curses, from the office-seekers. In many instances the wives and daughters of the applicants fluttered down upon Washington to reënforce the husband and the father.[183]One of the General’s most ardent supporters left the capital two days after the inauguration bitterly denouncing him for his failure to appoint the irate one to a position not then vacant.[184]Cabinet officers were harassed, bombarded, followed from their offices to their homes and back again, until several of them confessed that life had become a burden, and they were forced to close their doors to applicants until a late hour in the afternoon to find time for the transaction of public business.[185]Such aspirants as were not upon the ground in person were either represented by friends who were, or they peppered the members of the Cabinet with letters. One peculiarly offensive candidate for the collectorship of customs in New York wrote to an equally disreputable friend: “No damn rascal who made use of an office or its profits for the purpose of keeping Mr. Adams in and General Jackson out of power is entitled to the least leniency save that of hanging. Whether or not I shall get anything in the general scramble for plunder remains to be seen, but I rather guess I shall. I know Mr. Ingham slightly, and would recommend that you push like the devil if you expect anything from that quarter.”[186]And in the letter from Ingham to the seeker of “plunder” we have abundant evidence that the advice was accepted: “These [his duties] cannot be postponed; and I do assure you that I am compelled daily to file away long lists of recommendations, etc., without reading them, although I work eighteen hours out of the twenty-four with all diligence. The appointments can be postponed; other matters cannot; and it was one of the prominent errors of the late Administration that they suffered many important public interests to be neglected, while they were cruising about to secure or buy up partisans. This we must not do.”[187]The same man, having written an insolent letter to Van Buren, was sharply rebuked by him. “Here I am,” wrote the Secretary of State, “engaged in the most intricate and important affairs, which are new to me, and upon the successful conduct of which my reputation as well as the interests of the country depend, and which keep me occupied from early in the morning until late at night. And can you think it kind or just to harass me under such circumstances with letters which no man of common sensibility can read without pain?... I must be plain with you.... The terms upon which you have seen fit to place our intercourse are inadmissible.”[188]
Nor was this clamor for office confined to the more important positions—it reached down to the most menial places, to those of the gardener, the janitor, and messenger. Worse still—men in position to serve were even appealed to for place by members of their immediate families. Thus we find Amos Kendall writing to his wife: “I had thought before of trying to get some place for your father, but I cannot do anything until I am myself appointed. I hope in a year or two, and perhaps sooner, to find some situation that will enable him to live near us, and comfortably.”[189]
Meanwhile the clerks in Washington lived in a state of terror. Men who had long worked in harmony, and on terms of intimacy, were afraid to talk to one another. Every onesuddenly assumed the aspect of a spy and an informer. “All the subordinate officers of the Government, and even the clerks are full of tremblings and anxiety,” wrote one woman to a correspondent. “To add to this general gloom, we have horrible weather, snowstorm after snowstorm, the river frozen up and the poor suffering.”[190]The majority of the subordinates and clerks, many the ne’er-do-wells of distinguished families, assuming that they were assured of a life position, had lived up to, and beyond, their meager incomes, and suddenly found themselves unfit for other employment and confronted with dismissal.[191]And slowly, but surely, the dismissals came, leaving many in desperate straits, without sufficient funds to reach their homes, and unfit to earn a livelihood if they did. Some were driven to desperation. One dismissed employee of the Custom House in Boston went “in a transport of grief” to Ingham with a plea to be informed of the cause of his dismissal, only to be told that offices were not hereditary.[192]One clerk in the War Department cut his throat from ear to ear; another in the State Department went stark mad. But all appeals for sympathy were met by the proscriptionists with the stern reminder: “The exclusive party who were never known to tolerate any political opponent raise and reiterate the cry of persecution and proscription at every removal that takes place. They have provoked retaliation by the most profligate and abandoned course of electioneering; the most unheard-of calumny and abuse was heaped upon the candidate of the people; he was called by every epithet that could designate crime, and the amiable partner of his bosom was dragged before the people as worse than a convicted felon. What sympathy do men of such a party deserve when complaining that the places which they have abused are given to others?”[193]
A dark picture—and yet only darker than similar pictures in years to follow because, in 1829, the policy was new and caught the office-holders unprepared. So gloomy has the picture been painted that the student of the times is prepared to learn of a general massacre of the placemen. There was no such massacre—no such massacre as followed the election of Lincoln. One is prepared to hear that all the enemies of Jackson were driven from office, but, as a matter of fact, the majority of the Federal office-holders during his régime were unmolested. This could not be said of Roosevelt’s Administration, nor of Cleveland’s. The exact number of removals during the first year of Jackson’s Administration cannot be determined with precision. Schouler,[194]while making no attempt definitely to fix the number, says that “some have placed the number as high as two thousand.” In view of the evidence of contemporaries available, it does seem that a fairly accurate idea should be obtained. It is interesting to observe in this connection that while Jackson’s enemies were dealing in sweeping generalities, his defenders were furnishing figures.
And among the defenders none is more reliable than Thomas H. Benton, whose veracity or personal honesty has never been impeached or questioned, and he tells us[195]that there were whole classes of office-holders that were not molested; that those whose functions were of a judicial nature were not disturbed, and that in the departments at Washington a majority remained opposed to Jackson through his two Administrations. More important still—he tells us that Jackson not only left a majority of his enemies in office, but that in some instances he actually reappointed personal and political enemies where they were “especially efficient officers.” And he lays stress upon the point that where men, who had bitterly fought Jackson in the election, were not reappointed, a hue and cry was raised that they had been denied a right. Corroborating this, we have the evidence of Amos Kendall,[196]who wrote, after the Administration had been in power a year and a half: “He [Jackson] is charged with having turned out of office all who were opposed to him, when a majority of the office-holders in Washington are known to be in favor of his rivals. In that city the removals have been but one seventh of those in office, and most of them for bad conduct and character. In the Post-Office Department, toward which have been directed the heaviest complaints, the removals have been only about one sixteenth; in the whole Government, one eleventh.” And to the evidence of both Benton and Kendall, either one of whom would have been incapable of deliberate falsehood, we may add the less reliable, because more prejudiced, evidence of Isaac Hill, given in a public speech at Concord in the late summer of 1829. “It is worthy of observation,” he said, “that at least two thirds of the offices of profit at the seat of the National Government, after the removals thus far made, are still held by persons who were opposed to the election of General Jackson.”[197]A more detailed study of the removals actually made show that, while there were 8600 post-offices in 1829, less than 800 postmasters were removed, and these, largely, in the more important centers, leaving 7800 undisturbed.
One of the most serious charges against Jackson in connection with these removals is that he practiced duplicity, reassuring a trembling office-holder one day only to remove him, without warning, on the next; and this story is based upon what the officer in charge of Indian affairs under Adams declares to have been his personal experience. According to his story, Eaton, his superior officer, suggested that he should see the President to meet some charges that had been made against him; that on visiting Jackson he had made a solemn denial, satisfied the President, and been presented by him to the members of his household; that on thenext day a gentleman entered the Indian Office, and, after looking around, explained that the place had been offered him by the President that morning, but that he did not intend to accept; that the position was afterwards offered to others, and that the dismissal finally reached him in Philadelphia while there on official business. This places Jackson in a sinister light; but our commissioner adds, that one close to the Administration said: “Why, sir, everybody knows your qualifications for the place, but General Jackson has been long satisfied that you are not in harmony with his views in regard to the Indians.”[198]This raises the question whether a President chosen by the people is entitled to his own governmental policies or should be forced to accept such as may be handed to him by subordinates who received their appointments by preference, and not from the hands of the people. That this removal was the President’s own idea may be gathered from the fact that Eaton, Secretary of War, under whom Indian affairs came, was not in favor of the dismissal.
It is worth recording that Van Buren kept his department comparatively free from the spoils idea. But even the most intense partisan of Jackson will be hard pressed to find any proper reason for the spiteful recall of William Henry Harrison from Bogota, where he had just presented his credentials as United States Minister to Colombia. This recall was opposed very earnestly by Postmaster-General Barry, who frankly said to the President:
“If you had seen him as I did on the Thames, you would, I think, let him alone.”
“You may be right, Barry,” Jackson replied. “I reckon you are. But thank God I didn’t see him there.”[199]
Dark though the picture is from the viewpoint of the civil service reformer, there is another possible point of view. Allthe officials dismissed from places were not high-minded, conscientious public servants, for among them were numerous criminals. The dismissal of Tobias Watkins, an Adams appointee and a personal friend of the former President, to make place for Amos Kendall, was the occasion for a great outburst of indignation from the Opposition. Within a month the product of the spoils system had discovered frauds on the part of the “martyr” to the amount of more than $7000, and an arrest followed. He was convicted and served his time in prison. Nor was that of Watkins an isolated case. Thus the collector at Buffalo[200]had procured false receipts for money never paid and was given credit at the Treasury; the collector at Key West[201]had permitted an unlawful trade between Cuba and Florida; the collector at Bath, Maine,[202]was dismissed for personally using $56,315 of the public funds; the collector at Portsmouth[203]was shown to have engaged in smuggling; the collector at St. Marks[204]was shown to have been plundering live-oak from the public lands; the collector at Petersburg[205]had used $24,857 of the public money; the collector at Perth Amboy[206]had made false returns, appropriated to his own use $88,000 of the public money, and fled to Canada; the collector at Elizabeth City, North Carolina,[207]had converted $32,791 to his personal use and joined the other “martyr” to the spoils system on Canadian soil.[208]In brief, the introduction of the spoils system had resulted, in eighteen months, in the uncovering of peculations in the Treasury Department alone of more than $280,000 by men whose dismissal from office had called forth the unmeasured denunciation of Jackson’s enemies, and it is manifestly unfair to withhold these facts while placing emphasis upon the “dismissal of collector to make way for Jackson’s henchmen.”
Thus, throughout the spring and summer of 1829, the President and his Cabinet were bored, harassed, and tortured with importunities for place, denounced as ingrates because they left any of the enemies in office, and damned by the enemy for every dismissal that was made.
Thespring and summer was the time of the Red Terror.
The White Terror of retaliation began with the meeting of the hostile Senate in December.
The enemies of Jackson sought the earliest possible opportunity to denounce the wholesale dismissals, and the brilliant orators of the Opposition in the House made intemperate attacks, while in the Senate Webster spoke against the policy of proscription, without, however, adopting the absurd position that the President did not possess the constitutional power.[209]The early part of the session was given over to denunciations of the removals, and to a frankly hostile scrutiny, on the part of the Senate, of all nominations requiring confirmation. It foreshadowed the bitter party battles of the next eight years by rejecting the nominations of some of Jackson’s most ardent supporters in the campaign, and by taking the ridiculous position that journalists should be excluded from appointive office. This proscription, or massacre of the editors, was aimed at men, comparatively new to public life, who were speedily to develop into the most brilliant and sagacious of the Jacksonian leaders. Long and acrimonious executive sessions became the rule of the Senate. In some instances, action upon nominations was postponed for months under provocative circumstances that were not lost upon the fighting figure at the other end of the Avenue. The charge was made that a number of the President’s nominees were “vicious characters.” It was in the early days of this session that a comparatively new Senator, elected uponthe supposition that he would support the President and his policies, and destined to be the only member of the Senate to realize personally upon that body’s venomous hostility to the Administration, stepped forth to organize and direct the fight against the confirmation of nominees in whom the President was deeply interested. John Tyler led the first onslaught on the Administration.
It is important to pause to contemplate Tyler’s character and career, because he typifies those Democrats who were so soon to enter into coöperation with the Whigs in opposition, and because history has been unjust in underestimating both his capacity and courage. We shall find him pursuing Jackson throughout the greater part of his Presidency, and paying the penalty to the people with a manliness which found little emulation among men to whom history has been more gracious.
John Tyler was the scion of a family distinguished in law and in politics. His father was a fine Revolutionary figure, and one of the first lawyers in Virginia. He inherited his father’s ability, predilections, and prejudices. Within three months after his admission to the bar, he was employed in every important case in the county, and when, at the age of twenty-seven, he abandoned his practice to enter Congress, his income was $2000 a year, which was $1300 more than Webster’s at the same age.[210]On reaching Washington, he was cordially welcomed by the Madisons into the White House circle. He was fond of the society of the President’s house, disliked the French cooking, but found consolation in the excellent champagne of which he was very fond.[211]He found Clay, with whom he was to be associated in the fights against Jackson, in the Speaker’s chair, and fell under the spell of his fascination. It was then, too, that he formed his intense admiration for Calhoun.
His hostility to Jackson and Jacksonian methods was first manifested in his support of the resolutions censuring the General for his course in Florida. There is no doubt that at this time he had formed a deep-seated prejudice against the military hero. “We are engaged with Jackson and the President,” he wrote home at the time. “I do not hesitate to say that the constitutional powers of the House of Representatives have been violated in the capture and detention of Pensacola and the Barancas; that Jackson overstepped his orders; and that the President has improperly approved his proceedings, and that the whole are culpable.”[212]But there was a more powerful and less personal reason for his enmity to the Jackson Administration, which developed during this period. He had already become a sectionalist. Like Calhoun in later life, and Webster in 1820, he began to sense a struggle between the sections over the balance of power. Thus early he commenced to question the permanency of the Union. In the Missouri fight, in a strong speech against the restriction of slavery, he alone, among all participating on his side, advanced the proposition that the Congress possessed no constitutional power to pass a law prohibiting slavery in the Territories.[213]We find him writing[214]that “men talk of the dissolution of the Union with perfect nonchalance and indifference.” When, in his thirty-first year, he voluntarily retired to private life to retrieve his fortunes, he had made an impression so profound that it was predicted that he would rise to high station.[215]
When in 1827 he became a candidate for the Senate against the brilliant and vitriolic John Randolph of Roanoke, we find the elements working that were to ripen him for the break with the Jackson Administration, and for association with Clay’s party of incongruities and nondescripts. Afterthe inauguration of Adams, he had written Clay commending his action in throwing his support to the Puritan, assuring him of his contempt for the “bargain” story, and unnecessarily adding a fling at Jackson: “I do not believe that the sober and reflecting people of Virginia would have been so far dazzled by military renown as to have conferred their suffrage upon a mere soldier—one acknowledged on every hand to be of little value as a civilian.”[216]When Randolph so viciously attacked Adams and Clay on the “bargain” story, Tyler became his most uncompromising foe. In some manner his letter to Clay found its way into the newspapers, resulting in much feeling, letter-writing, charges and counter-charges and journalizing, and the supporters of Tyler interpreted the use of the letter as an attempt to coerce him into support of Jackson in 1828. If such was the purpose, it failed. He was elected without having pledged himself, and at a complimentary dinner after his election, he referred to Jackson in a sneering fashion.
And now we begin to understand the underlying causes that took Tyler and other Southern Democrats out of the party and into the Whig ranks during the Jackson period. On reaching Washington in December, 1827, we find him writing to a correspondent: “My hopes are increased from the following fact ... that in the nature of things, General Jackson must surround himself by a Cabinet composed of men advocating, to a great extent, the doctrines so dear to us. Pass them in review before you—Clinton, Van Buren, Tazewell, Cheves, Macon, P. P. Barbour, men who, in the main, concur with us in sentiment. Furthermore, General Jackson will have to encounter a strong opposition. He will require an active support at our hands. Should he abuse Virginia by setting at nought her political sentiments, he will find her at the head of the opposition, and he will probably experience the fate of J. Q. A.”[217]The Cabinet, when announced, does not seem to have satisfied him, albeit Van Buren, of whose views on slavery extension he appears to have been misinformed, was a member. The presence of Berrien and Branch ought, perhaps, to have reassured him, but they were a minority, and they did not satisfy Calhoun, of whom they were devoted disciples.
Thus, from the very beginning of the Jackson régime, Tyler was suspicious, and ripe for the Opposition. In the spoils system he found a pretext for dissatisfaction, and he proceeded to develop this into a rather petty persecution. It would be a mistake to underrate the effect of his opposition. He was highly respected by his colleagues. His dignity, courtliness, urbanity, and ease gave him a certain social prestige. He was an interesting and likable companion, and his polished conversation had impelled an English novelist[218]to describe it as superior to that of any one he had met in America. His appearance was not against him. Tall and slender, of patrician mould, his Roman nose, firm mouth, broad and lofty brow, and honest blue eyes combined to give him a distinction that marked him in an assembly. He was not a mere professional politician of a type to be developed later in the Republic. His letters to his daughter[219]concerning her studies, on poetry, fiction, and history, denote a discriminating student and lover of literature. It was this occasional detachment from the political world which made it possible for him, during the famous debate on the Foot Resolution, to entertain himself in the Senate Chamber in the reading of Moore’s “Life of Byron.” We shall now observe him launch the White Terror against the Red.