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Andrew Jackson

CHAPTER FOUR

Reconciling with Britain Abroad, and with Slavery at Home, 1809–1836

1. JAMES MADISON AS PRESIDENT

Madison was the last principal founder of the nation still in harness. His presidency was heavily preoccupied with the perpetual crisis caused by the refusal of the British and French to take the United States and its sovereignty seriously. The novelty had worn off America, and Napoleon was a far more epochal and immense historic figure—other than in the most conventionally idealistic terms—than the American founders, and the struggle with him was entirely engrossing to Europe and terminally enervating to much of it, ultimately including France. Madison drifted through his first year, after the cancellation of Jefferson’s embargo, which act included authorizing the president to resume trade with any country that signaled the end of violations of America’s neutrality.

While in this mode, Madison was embarrassingly fleeced, first by the British and then by the French, as if in a stately early nineteenth century court quadrille. The British minister in Washington, David Erskine, told Madison’s secretary of state, Robert Smith, that the British orders in council that had so offended America would be withdrawn on June 10, 1809. Madison responded with a proclamation on April 19 lifting the ban on trade with Great Britain. The British foreign secretary, George Canning, disavowed Erskine and pulled him as minister on May 30, and Madison reimposed the trade embargo on Britain on August 9, 1809. The next legislative tackling of the trade question was by the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Nathaniel Macon, in early 1810. His bill stated that if either Britain or France relaxed its offensive measures, the president could prohibit trade with the other. (Only Britain and France were now players in this American game, which the subjects of their attempted reprisals barely seemed to notice.) Napoleon’s foreign minister, the Duke de Cadore,¹ informed the American minister in Paris, John Armstrong, that France was ending its trade blockade. Madison, undismayed by the fiasco with Britain, announced on November 2, 1810, that the embargo against France had ended, and that commerce with Britain would end completely if it did not follow the French lead. In retaliation, Britain completely shut down New York as a port and redoubled the impressments of American sailors, before it came to light that Napoleon had not ended the anti-American trade exclusion at all. By then, such matters had been overtaken by more important and drastic events, as France had invaded Russia and America had gone back to war against Britain.

Madison did seize west Florida, which was the territory along the Gulf coast from the Mississippi to Mobile, Alabama, on October 27, 1810, as it had been Jefferson’s and his contention that American sovereignty over this territory could be legally inferred from the Louisiana Purchase. But Madison continued, almost four years after the imposition of the self-defeating embargo, to shuffle and reshuffle ineffectual remedies to the systematic British and French violations of American sovereignty. If he had followed Washington’s old dictum that peace should be pursued by preparing for war, and assembled an army capable of occupying Canada, Britain would have made concessions. Britain could not transfer the forces that would have been necessary to prevent an American occupation of Canada after it had committed its main army to the war in Spain in 1808. But Madison compounded Jefferson’s error and never armed himself with a plausible stick with which to threaten the British, who continued to treat the United States like a banana republic, a practice in which Napoleon emulated or surpassed them with simple chicanery, as he had no navy (having been relieved of it by Viscount Nelson and other British admirals) with which fully to replicate Britain’s outrages against America.

As the foreign policy problems worsened and the American foreign trade economy stagnated, apart from the formidable efforts of smugglers, the charter of the Bank of the United States came up for renewal. The tenacious Swiss banker and ethnologist Albert Gallatin, settling determinedly into his third full term as Treasury secretary, fought hard to renew the charter, with Madison’s support. The administration lost in the House, and a tie in the Senate was broken by the vote of Vice President Clinton, against the government, an almost unheard-of rebuff to the president. It was another unfortunate blunder, because the Bank was, as Hamilton had designed it, and as Gallatin had seen, a fine financing vehicle—something that, despite Jefferson and Madison’s aversion to debt and large government, would prove very necessary when, the following year, the United States found itself trying to fund a war against a Great Power. (Gallatin was a great authority on American Indian tribes, and here too his expertise could have been invaluable, as relations with the indigenous peoples were chronically and dishonestly mismanaged for generations.)

Finally, by 1811, American opinion was moving toward war with Britain despite all the Jefferson-Madison pusillanimity about porous and self-punitive economic embargoes. The formidable Shawnee chief, Tecumseh, and his brother, The Prophet, were being encouraged by the British to build up an Indian buffer zone on the northwest frontier, and there was frequent skirmishing with settlers in the summer of 1811. The governor of the Indiana Territory, General William Henry Harrison, was induced to move against Tecumseh, who had attempted to organize all the main tribes, bands, and nations, as they variously called themselves, including in the Southwest, into a great defensive confederation. The Indians attacked the approaching Harrison at dawn on November 7 at Tippecanoe, and a fierce struggle see-sawed all day until the Americans forced retreat on the Indians, and burned their village down. This entered into American legend, in the absence of real war against sophisticated enemies, as a great victory, and after 30 years for the legend to be magnified by the American promotional machine, Harrison would join a succession of 11 men from Washington to Eisenhower who would ride military renown into the presidency.

By 1811, the British promotion of the Indians would inflame opinion in the West and North as efficiently as the maritime abrasions had aroused the seaboard states, especially New England and New York. Coming forward in the Congress now were young and aggressive men from the West and the South, who were widely known, following the description of John Randolph of Roanoke, as “war hawks.” Among the most prominent were Henry Clay of Kentucky, Speaker of the House in 1811; John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who followed Macon as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; and Richard M. Johnson (who in 1813 would claim to have killed Tecumseh). They advocated an armed and aggressive response to the British.

2. THE WAR OF 1812

On November 5, 1811, Madison, clearly preparing to take the plunge that would have been easier and timelier years before after suitable preparations, blasted the antics of the British on the high seas (“hostile inflexibility in trampling on rights which no independent nation can relinquish”). He was no kinder to the French, who had hoodwinked him for a year into believing the continental blockade in the Berlin Decree of 1806 had been lifted, and finally called for additional commitments to national defense. On April 1, 1812, he asked the Congress for an immediate and general embargo for 60 days, and was empowered three days later to call up 100,000 militiamen from around the country for six months.

The war that was to follow was farcical in its beginning and in its end, and often in between. The Napoleonic blockade, enforced by the mighty French Grand Army, did cause serious hardship in Britain, and the prime minister, Spencer Percival, was contemplating easing the heavy-handed treatment of America when he became the only British prime minister to be assassinated, by a deranged man of incoherent political views, on May 11, 1812. He was replaced by Lord Liverpool, but the delay held up until June 23 the British suspension of the orders in council that blockaded America. On June 18, at Madison’s request, Congress declared war on Great Britain.

Madison delivered his request for a declaration of war on June 1; seventeen days to extract the declaration, with New England, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware voting against, illustrated how not to go to war. The country was sharply divided from the start, far more than it had been on the issue of independence from Britain, or than the South would be about seceding or the North over subduing secession nearly 50 years later. Not until the latter stages of the Vietnam War would America be so divided while exchanging fire with an enemy. Madison identified impressments of American sailors, violation of U.S. neutrality and territorial waters, the blockade of U.S. ports, and the related refusal to retract the enabling orders in council (as if the provocations would have been less galling if they weren’t declared official policy, but only judicial decisions) as the reasons for war. Indians were not mentioned.

Because of three full terms of mismanagement of America’s war-making powers and strategic position opposite Great Britain, the United States did not enter the war with such advantages as it should have enjoyed. Britain had its main army in Spain and was in no position to send heavy units to America. Its navy was fully engaged enforcing the blockade on France and its allied and conquered territories. The United States had 30 times as many people as Canada, and the U.S. Navy, though only 16 ships, had advantages of proximity and resupply, and was manned entirely by carefully selected and trained men. Against that, its army was not trained at all, public opinion was fragmented badly from the start, and there was no capacity to raise money efficiently since the lapse of the Bank of the United States. Madison was responsible, building on Jefferson’s woeful traditions in these matters, for all of these problems.

The British only cuffed the Americans about because they ruled the oceans and knew that the United States had no military capability to inconvenience them in Canada or the West Indies. Countries, like people, do what they think they can get away with, with impunity. Madison was ultimately correct to go to war, but it would not have been necessary if he had not been swindled so artistically by Napoleon. The war—late, poorly prepared both in war-making terms and in preparation of public opinion—was still the right thing to do if it were successful. If the United States had emerged from it in possession of Canada, none of the impotent saber-rattling and vapid posturing of the various embargoes would have counted for anything.

Madison, a profoundly pacifistic man, despite his eminent position as a revolutionary, did finally conclude that there was no option but war, and started with every opportunity to make the war a great success and another immense accretion to the territory of the United States. And he started it in high fettle, visiting each government department, rendering pep talks wearing a “little round hat and huge cockade.”²

The original American military plan was a harking back to the unfulfilled dreams of the previous wars about the ease of taking Canada (which had only been done by Britain in 1759, by penetrating the vast St. Lawrence like an endoscopy and seizing Quebec). There were to be the now traditional three parallel approaches: General Henry Dearborn would scoot up Lake Champlain and take Montreal; General Stephen Van Rensselaer would cross into Canada at the Niagara River and take what was to become Toronto; and a westerly force under General William Hull would attack across the St. Clair River at what is now Detroit and clean up whatever was left. The Americans were poorly trained militia, and the previous Washington and Adams Administrations’ commitment to a permanent general staff and the development of detailed provisional war plans had been abandoned. Thus, all that was imagined were predictable approaches toward Montreal and at the western ends of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.

Hull’s drive across the Detroit River into Canada was the first off, but it proceeded only a few miles and then he withdrew after a month, as he was rightly fearful of being cut off by Tecumseh, who had thrown his lot in with the British and Canadians following their capture of the American post on Michilimackinac Island. Hull abruptly surrendered Detroit to General Isaac Brock without any exchange of fire, and the Indians seized Fort Dearborn (Chicago) on August 15 and massacred the garrison. His entire force of 2,000 were instant POWs. Hull was court-martialed for cowardice and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted because of his Revolutionary War service, and he was dishonorably discharged.

As if for the convenience of the defenders, the Americans deferred the attack at Niagara until the complete rout and capture of the Detroit forces, and Brock awaited Rensselaer on the Niagara River starting in late August. (Rensselaer had no military experience, but he was a Federalist and was appointed by New York governor Daniel Tompkins in a move to placate political opposition.) After two months, the Americans attacked at Queenston Heights and won the engagement, killing Brock. As the struggle reached its climax, the New York reservists declined to assist the rest of the American force, because their obligation to do so did not extend beyond the borders of the state. The British repulsed the invaders, and Van Rensselaer retired and was replaced by General Alexander Smyth. Smyth dithered for over a month before attempting another invasion of Canada, which was easily repulsed on November 28, and he was sacked. Dearborn set out from Plattsburg for Montreal on November 19, hoping to coordinate with Smyth. His New York reservists also refused to cross the border into Quebec, and Dearborn returned diffidently to Plattsburg. After this sequence of fiascoes, Madison fired the war secretary, William Eustis, and replaced him with John Armstrong, who proved abrasive and unsuitable.

In the first year of the conflict, the United States did do better on the ocean and on the Great Lakes, and in single-vessel combat more than held its own with the Royal Navy, which had swept the waters around Europe of adversaries. Monroe had been asked by Madison at the end of the year to test the waters with peace overtures to the British. Once again, Madison had completely misjudged the prospects. The United States had had such a ludicrous start to the war that the British had no incentive at all to negotiate. As part of the same ambivalence about the war, the United States had maintained a chargé in London even after the outbreak of war, and the chargé advised the British foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh (Marquis of Londonderry), that peace could be had if the British would abandon impressment of American sailors, and blockades of American ports, and pay for damage to American ships and forts. Castlereagh declined to negotiate on that basis, and a British overture from Admiral Warren, who commanded their forces in Halifax, directly to Monroe was rejected by Monroe unless the British promised to abandon impressment. This was not acceptable and the desultory war continued into 1813.

3. THE 1812 ELECTION

The presidential election of 1812 saw the origin of what became a wartime tradition of the nomination of a peace candidate by the party out of office. George Clinton’s capable nephew, De Witt Clinton, mayor of New York City and champion of the Erie Canal, which he later built, as governor, was nominated by the New York state antiwar Republicans, with former Empire loyalist Jared Ingersoll for vice president, and the Federalists, fading and fragmented, endorsed both candidates. With the antiwar Democratic-Republicans having defected, President Madison was unanimously renominated by the Democratic-Republican congressional caucus. George Clinton had died, and Elbridge Gerry was nominated for vice president with Madison.

Of the principal founders of the country, Franklin had been too old to participate in the government, and Washington, Hamilton, and Adams were men of affairs, practical officers, and people of commercial and administrative talent. None of them was particularly talented politically, other than, in the broadest sense, Washington. Jefferson the great polemicist and political theorist and Madison the great constitutional expert did not possess great practical skills of administration or the instinct of the national interest other than in an idealized sense of natural expansion into unpopulated areas. They thought it was sufficient to raise the lamp to the world and have a balanced Constitution and economical government and all else would follow, and they suspected Adams and Hamilton of being commercially dominated warmongers, with fragile attachment to any notion of individual or popular rights (quite unfairly in the case of Adams).

There were limitations to the Adams-Hamilton view of a dominating state and powerful standing armed forces, counting nothing on the goodwill of nations or the halcyon powers of America’s founding principles and institutions. But the first group, prominently including Franklin, had an unerring instinct for the national interest, for the self-interestedness of other countries, for the limitations of sonorous assertions of inalienable rights as substitutes for armed force and the will to use it. Their strategic grasp never faltered, where Jefferson and Madison allowed the United States to lapse back into neo-colonial irrelevance, having neither the strength to threaten British possession of Canada, nor the strategic weight and diplomatic finesse to hold any sort of balance between France and Britain in wars that involved all the European powers for decades.

But Jefferson and Madison were immensely skillful politically. Their unpretentious method of government, tendency to devolve government to the states, and emphasis on broadening the suffrage and generalizing availability and quality of education while reducing taxes all hugely endeared them to the country. Hamilton and Adams, who between them won only one serious election, Adams as president, and that only because of Washington’s endorsement and by a narrow margin, had no such appeal or success. This was the problem of the Federalists, who began as supporters of the Constitution but once the Constitution was adopted and implemented never developed as a party and merely became a group of interests, and not such widespread interests at that—essentially the commercial and financial elites of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. The Democratic-Republicans essentially controlled the whole political spectrum, and most of the political competition in the country was between its factions. In these circumstances, inept though Madison’s delayed, hesitant, backing into war had been, unwise though it was to go to war as head of a divided country, if he ran the war intelligently, he had yet a great chance to pick the fine plum of Canada, not a huge population but a huge rich area.

The interesting precedent in the 1812 election was the emergence of an antiwar party. In future wars, whenever they were waged or at least discussed for long enough, support and opposition to the war tended to be the demarcation in the presidential election: Clay leading antiwar opposition to Polk over Mexico in 1844; McClelland against Lincoln in the Civil War in 1864; Eisenhower promising to end the Korean War, though on favorable terms, in 1952; McGovern opposing the Vietnam War against Nixon in 1972; and both John Kerry and Barack Obama somewhat, though perhaps ambiguously, against the Iraq War in 2004 and 2008. America’s participation in World War I would be between elections, and Woodrow Wilson ran as the man who “kept us out of war” and then asked for a declaration of war six weeks after he was reinaugurated. Franklin D. Roosevelt promised peace through strength and all aid short of war for the democracies in 1940, and his opponent, Wendell Willkie, though he supported his program, accused FDR of leading the nation into war. The only direct attack on the United States in history, by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, was so brazen, premeditated, and unannounced that there was practically unanimous support for participation in World War II when it came.

De Witt Clinton gave it a good try, but Madison prevailed, 128 electoral votes to 89, with Gerry winning 131 to 86 over Ingersoll. The Federalists, in what would be their last vigorous performance, made substantial congressional gains, as all the New England and Middle Atlantic states down to Virginia, except Vermont and Pennsylvania, went for the opposition.

4. THE WAR: THE CAMPAIGNS OF 1813

Despite the success of individual American sea captains in single-ship duels with the British, and despite the fact that the Royal Navy was blockading practically all of Europe from Bahia in Spain to the Baltic, and from Gibraltar to Naples, it was still able to dispatch the forces necessary to blockade the entire American Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and to keep the blockade almost airtight throughout the war, though it left New England and New York untroubled for a time, in order to encourage the domestic political opposition. But the blockade was extended to the northern tip of the American coast in 1814. Throughout this time, the British caused havoc along the whole coast, with shore raiding parties and amphibious hit-and-run missions. American privateers and commerce raiders did a great deal of damage around the British Isles and in southern sea lanes as time went on, forcing the British to convoy ships to and from the Americas, but the British blockade of the United States, while it spurred the development of domestic manufacturing, did raise prices and depress farm incomes.

The Americans made significant progress in 1813, though they paid dearly for the absence of a military commander of the quality of Washington, Greene, Marion, and Morgan, until late in the war. A group of Kentuckians, including Speaker Henry Clay, engaged William Henry Harrison, victor of Tippecanoe, to take charge of their militia and try to recapture Detroit. Madison then named Harrison a major general of the U.S. Army (he had been a major general of militia), and confirmed his orders. He had 10,000 men. The Americans were defeated at Frenchtown in January and suffered about 1,000 casualties, but they defeated the British and Tecumseh at Fort Meigs in May and at Fort Stephenson in August. Harrison was enabled to carry out his orders to retake Detroit only after the decisive victory of Captain Oliver Hazard Perry in the Battle of Lake Erie on September 10, 1813. (Perry had the advantage of experienced, salt-water navy veterans, against relatively inexperienced lake sailors.) Perry sent Harrison the famous message “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” In June, the dying Captain James Lawrence, on board the Chesapeake, in a duel with the British Shannon, had given the more famous order “Don’t give up the ship,” which became the motto of the United States Navy. (Perry’s flagship on Lake Erie was named Lawrence after him.) Harrison pushed into Canada at the western end of Lake Erie. It was in this campaign in September of 1813 that Tecumseh was killed by Colonel Richard Johnson at Moravian Town, with the result that the Indians wholly deserted the British and Canadians, removing great anxiety from the American northwest frontier communities. (Johnson would run successfully for vice president of the U.S. in 1836 on the memorable slogan “Rumpsey, Dumpsey, Who Killed Tecumseh?”)

The American attack on Ontario at the Niagara point of entry, under General Henry Dearborn and Colonel Winfield Scott, was a good deal more professionally executed than the slapstick farce of the previous year. The Americans took York (Toronto), and against Dearborn’s orders key buildings in the city were burned down, including the house of assembly and the governor’s house. (The explorer General Zebulon Montgomery Pike was killed in the actions around Toronto, aged 52.) Dearborn was replaced by the egregious General James Wilkinson, Aaron Burr’s former collaborator and allegedly a member of the Conway conspiracy against George Washington, who had fluffed up his own role in the victory of Saratoga while serving as General Gates’s messenger to the Continental Congress conveying news of the victory and the surrender of Burgoyne. Typically, Madison had just finished trying to court-martial Wilkinson (who had also been fired as clothier general of the army for taking kickbacks on the material for uniforms), and Wilkinson had only been released on Christmas Day, 1811. He was one of American history’s ultimate (more or less likeable) scoundrels.

Wilkinson was to attack along the St. Lawrence to Montreal, while General Wade Hampton followed the well-trodden path north along Lake Champlain, and the two armies were to converge and take Montreal, which was defended by 15,000 British soldiers, well dug in around the city. Hampton approached to the Chateauguay River, suffered a minor defeat in a skirmish, and withdrew his 4,000 men back into New York state. Wilkinson suffered a defeat of one section of his 10,000-man force and then ducked into winter quarters too, very prudently, in mid-October. It wasn’t quite as absurd an attack toward Montreal as the previous year’s, but was only a marginal improvement, and the Americans never threatened or came within 50 miles of Canada’s largest city. The nature of the war escalated when the Americans burned a village near Niagara Falls. The British and Canadians seized Fort Niagara in December, wounding or capturing about 500 of the American defenders, and then the Indians laid waste some of the upper New York countryside around Niagara, and occupied and burned down Buffalo in the last couple of days of 1813. It was a little war but a nasty one.

The lack of enthusiasm for the war in the U.S. administration was never a secret, in 1813 as in 1812. America’s able minister to Russia, President Adams’s son John Quincy Adams, had encouraged the offer of mediation from the czar, Alexander I, who had ignored the Napoleonic blockade to facilitate American commerce with Denmark and with Russia itself. Once Napoleon had attacked Russia, in June 1812, Russia and Britain were firm allies, and the Russian emperor had some influence with Britain, especially after the Russian armies and the Russian winter had ground down Napoleon’s Grand Army, which had intimidated all Europe for over eight years. Napoleon’s defeat in Russia, and then, in October 1813, the first real battlefield defeat he sustained in his career, at Leipzig, at the hands of the combined Russian, Prussian, Austrian, and Swedish armies, as the British were finally driving the French out of Spain after more than six years of combat, signaled a decisive shift in the war in Europe.

The Americans could reasonably expect that the British would soon be in a position to send large numbers of battle-hardened troops and commanders to fight in America. The defeats on Lake Erie and at Detroit were in sharp contrast to the Duke of Wellington’s victories in Spain. Castlereagh declined the intervention of the czar, but in November 1813 he sent a diplomatic message to Monroe offering direct negotiations. Madison and Monroe agreed and, contrary to normal practice, in which such negotiations are conducted secretly, Madison sought and achieved confirmation of a high-powered peace delegation to go to Ghent, in what is now Belgium, to negotiate. The American negotiating team would be the minister to Russia, Adams; the emissary who had been nominated to negotiate under the czar’s aegis, James A. Bayard; Speaker of the House and war-hawk leader Henry Clay; the chargé in London, Jonathan Russell, and the Treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin. Madison could scarcely have emphasized his desire for peace more clearly. The American group considerably outranked their British analogues, Lord Gambier, Henry Goulburn, and William Adams. At the conference, the Americans were a motley group, as Clay would sometimes return from a night of gambling and carousing to encounter the purposeful Adams having just concluded his morning prayers, but Gallatin shepherded them along and they were quite congenial.³

5. MILITARY AND DIPLOMATIC DEVELOPMENTS IN 1814

To Madison’s considerable credit, he finally recognized the complete failure of his and Jefferson’s hare-brained, counter-arithmetical commercial restriction policy—that it was riddled with smuggling and corruption, that is had done much more damage to the United States than to those against whom it had supposedly been applied, and that it had not motivated Britain to be less unreasonable. On March 31, 1814, he recommended to the Congress the abandonment and repeal of the entire program. Whatever may be said of the errors that led to these policies and their lengthy unsuccessful implementation, the president renounced them with a lack of official vanity and humbug that set an admirable precedent rarely followed in the subsequent history of his great office. Provision was made to protect new manufacturing industries with special tariffs for two years after peace should occur, but the repeal of the Embargo and Non-Importation Acts was approved easily by both houses of the Congress.

The late Tecumseh had managed to stir up the Creek Indians in Alabama, who seized Fort Mims, about 35 miles north of Mobile, and massacred more than half of the nearly 600 people in the fort, including a good many women and children. The major general of the Tennessee militia, Andrew Jackson, organized 2,000 volunteers (hence the identifying slogan of the state), and went on the warpath against the Creeks. There were a number of skirmishes won by both sides, but in March 1814, Jackson, now at the head of 3,000 men, overwhelmed the Creek stronghold at Horseshoe Bend, Alabama, killed approximately a thousand Indian braves, and carried off more than 500 Indian women and children as prisoners. In a treaty in August, the Creeks signed over two-thirds of their land to the United States. This came two weeks after the Generals Harrison and Lewis Cass signed the Treaty of Greenville with the Delaware, Miami, Seneca, Shawnee, and Wyandot Indians, in the coalition assembled by Tecumseh, in consequence of which those tribes again flipped sides and declared peace with the Americans and war on the British. These were not large forces involved (there had been more than 500,000 soldiers engaged on the two sides in the Battle of Leipzig), but the antics of the Indians were extremely disturbing to the settlers, and they tended to ignore Euro-American niceties about women and children. These generals wrote a new chapter in the American political lionization of generals, even when their fame arose in small engagements. Jackson, Harrison, and Cass would, between them, be major party nominees to the presidency six times between 1824 and 1848, and win three times, and the only one of them who did not become president, Lewis Cass, became secretary of state instead. Senior military officers would receive electoral votes for president or vice president in 27 of America’s first 30 quadrennial elections, 1788–1904. Eleven of America’s first 25 presidents would be distinguished military officers, and the first 30 elections would produce 15 terms with soldier-presidents and three with military vice presidents.

Castlereagh was about to become the co-star, along with Austria’s Metternich and the imperishable Talleyrand and the Holy See’s cunning delegate, Ercole Cardinal Consalvi, of the immense Congress of Vienna, which would reorder much of the world, Napoleon having gone into exile at Elba, off the Italian coast, in April. (Talleyrand sold the argument that Napoleon, whom he had served as foreign minister for eight years, was an impostor who had inflicted himself on France in Cromwellian manner, and that France, with Britain, Austria, Russia, and Prussia, was a fully fledged member of the Holy Alliance that had defeated Napoleon, a considerable feat of diplomatic advocacy.) Capable statesman as he was, Castlereagh pursued a negotiated peace and escalation of the War of 1812 at the same time. As his delegation sat down with the Americans at Ghent, the British sent 14,000 veterans of the Duke of Wellington’s Peninsular Army to Canada in the summer of 1814, and the Royal Navy ignored Madison’s olive branch in repealing the embargo and reinforced its blockading fleets against America. The British high command produced a much more imaginative plan to win the war than the humdrum American efforts to charge into Canada yet again by the Lake Champlain, Niagara, and Detroit approaches. They were also vastly more competent than those responsible for the British conduct of the American Revolutionary War. Twenty years of fighting Napoleon had sharpened their staff work and greatly fortified their officer talent.

A three-pronged attack was envisioned, in the footsteps of Montcalm and Burgoyne on the inevitable Lake Champlain and another go at the Niagara crossing; and amphibious attacks on Chesapeake Bay, just southeast of Washington, and at New Orleans. The U.S. regular army was only 34,000 men at the start of October 1814. There were as many as 100,000 militiamen and reservists, but they were scattered through all the states in various conditions of preparedness, command competence, experience, and equipment. The better reservist leaders, such as Jackson and Harrison, were very capable, and Jackson, who had survived hand-to-hand combat with Indians (including a hatchet-wound to the cranium), had been a drummer in the Revolutionary War, and had personally killed a number of men in military and civilian capacities, was a fierce personality who was about to stride to the forefront of national affairs and remain there for 30 years. The charlatan Wilkinson survived another court-martial but finally left the army for even greener financial pastures, trying in Burrite fashion to buy part of Mexico. Winfield Scott and Jackson were the rising figures in the army now.

The Americans launched a preemptive strike at Niagara, which yielded a fine American victory at Chippewa in July, led by General Winfield Scott, who took only about half the 500 casualties of the British. Scott would prove to be probably the greatest American general between Washington and Greene and the Civil War, and was now embarked on a career of 50 years as a military hero. (He, too, would be an unsuccessful presidential candidate, in 1852.) Three weeks later, there was a further action involving about 6,000 men evenly divided, at Lundy’s Lane, near Niagara Falls. It was a stalemate, though the Americans withdrew, and both sides took about 850 casualties. The British failed to take Fort Erie, but the Americans vacated it anyway a few months later—another indecisive engagement almost within earshot of the thundering falls. The British attack down Lake Champlain was repulsed in a naval battle in September, although the Americans were outnumbered. The British commander, Sir George Prevost, who mishandled 11,000 well-trained soldiers, was sacked, but that would prove the last time in history these singularly unsuccessful routes of invasion in both directions, Niagara and Lake Champlain, would be exploited (other than by armies of amiable tourists moving in both directions at once).

The Chesapeake Bay landings would be more successful, and were really an elaboration on previous coastal raids all along the American littoral, and on Pitt’s “descents” on France in the Seven Years’ War. This British movement of their land forces in pin-pricks on the perimeter of their enemies, facilitated by their usual naval superiority, would continue through the World Wars, including Gallipoli and Zeebrugge in World War I (unsuccessful), and the Greek and Crete operations and Dieppe (Canadian forces) in World War II (also unsuccessful). The 4,000 men of the British attacking force departed directly from France for their American targets in June 1814, with a brief stop at Bermuda, and were landed on August 19, an ambitious undertaking in amphibious warfare for the time. The objective was to burn Washington to avenge the burning of Toronto (York) the previous year. The American commander, the inept General William Winder, failed with a ragtag of 7,000 reservists and sailors to stop 3,000 of Wellington’s veterans at Bladensburg, nine miles from Washington, with Madison and the cabinet looking on and the Americans scattered as the British marched, unopposed, into Washington on August 24. The president and his cabinet colleagues fled (on foot in Madison’s case, because of problems with his horse) in different directions and the government temporarily disintegrated.

The British burned the Capitol, and all the other government buildings except the patent office, including the White House, which Mrs. Madison had fled with a portrait of George Washington under her arm, after coolly organizing the removal of as much as possible; she was refused shelter by the irate wife of a farmer who had just been conscripted, an astounding, even endearing display of official disorder. The white paint slapped onto the executive mansion’s seared outer walls gave the building its subsequent name. Apart from a couple of residences, a newspaper office, and the naval dock (which the Americans blew up themselves), the British forces showed correct discipline and avoided indiscriminate destruction or looting. The British left by sea on the 25th, unharried, and Madison and his colleagues returned on August 27, to a less-exuberant welcome from the citizenry. Madison again fired the secretary of war, John Armstrong, and now took the extreme step of replacing him with Monroe, who took over the War Department while retaining the State Department, a unique event in American history to this day. Monroe was now a virtual co-president, supervising the defense of the country and the negotiation of peace. The British had scored a great propaganda victory of little straight military significance, but their attempt to take Baltimore three weeks later failed. The Americans prepared thoroughly and repulsed the British from what was then one of America’s largest cities. The unsuccessful British bombardment of Fort McHenry inspired Francis Scott Key to write the American national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

6. THE END OF THE WAR

The peace conference at Ghent continued through the autumn. The British opened by demanding a rewriting in their favor of the Canadian border through the northern New England states and Michigan and Minnesota, and the establishment of an Indian buffer state in the Northwest. The Americans demanded reparations and an end of impressments and the blockade. They rejected any changes of territorial boundaries from the start of the war, and claimed none. They had been faithful throughout to their demands, and it must be said that despite Madison’s bumbling, and the frightful indignity of having their capital razed to the ground, they had shown considerable pluck, and fought their corner quite well after the initial debacle of their 1812 invasion of Canada. Madison, though he provoked acute nostalgia for the steady and formidable Washington as a war leader, showed remarkable honesty, partly naïve and partly the result of creeping resignation and the disillusioning cynicism of experience. When news of the burning of Washington reached the Congress of Vienna, the British stiffened their demands. When news of the American victory on Lake Champlain arrived, it was sobering.

The Duke of Wellington, the world’s most illustrious military commander with Napoleon in involuntary retirement, was offered the command in Canada. He was not eager for it, as the United States now had over eight million people, and there was no possibility of subduing the whole country, or permanently gouging large parts out of it. The British had been at war for 21 of the previous 22 years, and had supported an immense navy constantly in action throughout that time, and armies of 75,000 to 90,000, most of the units steadily in action for the last six years in a very costly and severe war in Spain. (The duke had been Sir Arthur Wellesley when he departed for Spain in 1808, and when he returned he had the unprecedented pleasure of having his patents read in the House of Lords as baron, viscount, earl, marquis, and duke, recognizing his successive victories in that very long war in Spain and Portugal.)

Wellington was more interested in jointly leading the British in the Vienna discussions that rewrote the map of much of Europe than in embarking for a nebulous mission in Canada. He had commanded armies in India as well as Spain, and preferred not to do it again. This was all for the best, as Napoleon famously returned from Elba in March 1815 and conducted one more campaign, narrowly lost at Waterloo, where Wellington won one of the most important and closely contested battles in the history of the world. His absence could have been decisive, as the Prussian Blucher and whomever the British would have named in Wellington’s stead could not have defeated Napoleon, generally reckoned the greatest military commander in history. (Waterloo was, after Leipzig, his only defeat in scores of battles, many of them won against heavy odds and by tactical tours de force of genius.)

The duke advised his government that after the American victory on Lake Champlain, the British were not entitled by the results on the ground to demand territorial concessions. On November 26, 1814, the British abandoned their demand for territorial concessions and an Indian buffer zone in the Northwest. As the world would now be at peace, impressments and blockades seemed, and were, a stale-dated issue. The British were not going to pay reparations and indemnities and the Americans didn’t seriously expect them to, as the chief victor in Europe and now the most powerful nation in the world. The Americans made some uncontroversial fishing concessions, but that was all.

The long British struggle with France going back 500 years to Joan of Arc, and accentuated after the Reformation and the rise of national governments, and especially by Louis XIV and then the almost departed emperor, had finally been resolved in favor of Britain. The island nation was tired and strained by costs and casualties and the first stresses of the industrial age, and it didn’t want an endless war in America, but it was not going to do more than end the war and leave things as they had been. And if the Americans tried to chase the British out of Canada now, they would find Wellington and his army tramping down the shores of Lake Champlain and across the Niagara River, and they would not remind anyone of General Burgoyne or Governor Prevost. The Treaty of Ghent was signed on December 24 and peace soon broke out.

True to its frequently absurd nature, and symmetrically with the fact that America declared war as the casus belli of the British blockade was being removed, the greatest battle of the war occurred two weeks after the peace was concluded, and so did not influence the results at all, but was important for other reasons. General Andrew Jackson had been named commander of the military district from New Orleans to Mobile, by Monroe, and characteristically ignored Monroe’s orders not to disturb Spanish Florida, and seized Pensacola. When he learned of British forces approaching, he retired to Baton Rouge to be ready to repulse British landings wherever they appeared on the Gulf coast. The British landed 7,500 men under General Sir Edward Pakenham (the Duke of Wellington’s brother-in-law) 40 miles east of New Orleans, starting on December 13.

Jackson bustled down to New Orleans starting on December 15 and was able to attack the British on December 23. He furiously constructed defensive positions around New Orleans, and Pakenham attacked Jackson’s 4,500 men with 5,300 of his regulars on January 8, 1815. Jackson placed Tennessee and Kentucky marksmen with long rifles in forward trenches, and advantageously placed his artillery to smash the British line as well. The advance of the British, walking upright in tight formation, presented a splendid target. There was a second British advance after the first was driven back. It was a madly unimaginative attack plan by Pakenham, who was killed as his army was badly defeated and took over 2,000 casualties, compared with only eight American dead and 13 wounded. Jackson became America’s greatest hero, its greatest warrior since Washington, and its most successful political leader since Jefferson, and eventually, with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, one of the four most important American presidents in the first 140 years of its history.

News of the Battle of New Orleans reached the still fire-ravaged capital of the United States before the news of the Treaty of Ghent, and greatly salved American sensibilities after the scorching there and the inelegant flight of the government. The treaty arrived on February 11, was ratified unanimously by the Senate (meeting in temporary quarters) on February 15, and proclaimed by Madison on February 17. It had been a silly little war in many ways; it should have been fought earlier and more wisely by the Americans, yet they suffered only 1,877 dead and 4,000 wounded. The economic cost had been heavy and the strain on national unity had been considerable. It was an opportunity lost and Madison went far too long with the foolishness of Jefferson’s notions of economic war. Yet the United States had accomplished something in fighting successfully to keep its head up against the greatest powers in the world, and particularly the overwhelming master of the world’s seas. The Royal Navy was deployed across all the world’s oceans, “wherever wood could float” as Napoleon grudgingly said (with as large, in numbers of ships, and as far-flung a fleet as the United States would deploy at the end of World War I, when Admiral Nimitz’s mighty Pacific Fleet took 400,000 men to sea when it sailed). The war’s farcical aspect had been diluted by Madison’s lack of pomposity and endearing preparedness to acknowledge error.

The Americans, though without so skillful a propagandist as Jefferson to tart up a rather squalid little war, apart from the successes of Perry and Jackson, still managed to present it as a milestone on the road to full national maturity. Gallatin, no Jefferson or Paine or Hamilton, but a formidable talent in a less-crowded field, declared: “The war has renewed and reinstated the national feelings and characters which the Revolution had given. The people . . . are more American; they feel and act more as a nation.”⁴ In the end, the last of the nation’s founders to retire had finally, and reluctantly, done the honorable thing to defend the nation’s honor and sovereignty, and, in his way, had done so successfully. Washington and Adams and Hamilton would have taken over Canada and ended up buying peace with a cash settlement. But it was just that, an opportunity lost, not a defeat, and considering the power of the opponent, it lightly enhanced America’s status in the world. Ancient and mighty France had to endure the British army in Paris for a prolonged period. They didn’t burn anything but they stayed as long as they pleased, and the Duke of Wellington “bought” the British embassy on the Faubourg St. Honore. Today it remains there, next to the United States embassy, and both are only a cricket ball or baseball’s throw from the residence of the president of the (Fifth) Republic.

Madison, true to his nature and having learned his lesson, recommended retention of an army of 20,000, and most of the navy that had been built up, but the Congress reverted to its former condition, cut the army to 10,000, sold gunboats, and returned the Great Lakes to an unarmed state. Madison did have the pleasure of sending Captain Stephen Decatur to give the Dey of Algiers, and his analogues in Tunis and Tripoli, another good thrashing at sea with a 10-ship squadron, extracting concessions and return of hostages and tribute and reparations from the Barbary leaders and ending this problem (and legitimizing after all the wording of the Marine Corps anthem). A complete restoration of normal and favorable trade terms with Britain was agreed in a commercial convention in July 1816.

In one of the last major initiatives of his administration, Madison again sounded a little like his Federalist predecessors in supporting the rechartering of a Bank of the United States. This was recommended by the Treasury secretary, Alexander J. Dallas, as necessary to patch back together the chaotic state of the country’s finances after the war with Britain. A very weak measure setting up a bank that would be severely circumscribed was passed by the Congress but vetoed by Madison. Then the men who would lead the Congress for the next 35 years, despite intermittent dalliances in the administration (all three would be secretaries of state)—John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster—joined forces and put through a serious bill. Calhoun would speak for the South, Clay for the West and Midwest, and Webster for New England. Calhoun was a Democrat, as the Democratic-Republicans were about to be called officially, and the other two would emerge as Whigs, when the Federalists metamorphosed into that party, and their relations with each other were never especially warm. But they played an immense role, greater than any of the presidents between Jackson and Lincoln, except Polk, in the long denouement of the related problems of slavery and states’ rights. The new bank would have $35 million of authorized capital, one-fifth posted by the federal government, which would name five of the 25 directors. The bank would receive federal government deposits and not pay interest on them, and in other respects resembled Hamilton’s original bank. It would be a normative and stabilizing influence, controlling the money supply and maintaining reasonable consistency of credit in the country, through, eventually, 25 branches. The bank was one of Madison’s principal presidential achievements.

In his very last material act as president, Madison vetoed a bill for federal construction of roads and canals that Calhoun, congressional leader of the South, had put forward, to be financed from the dividends of the Bank of the U.S. This was a remarkable acceptance by Calhoun of Hamilton’s constitutional justification of implied powers, and showed also how far Calhoun would move, from advocating a generous interpretation of the federal government’s powers to enact a measure for national unity and closer union, to where he would end his career, 35 years ahead. Madison remained true to his own concepts of the Constitution, imposing his veto with the unique authority of the principal draftsman.

The president honored the Washington and Jefferson tradition and declined to seek a third term. He would leave office a respected president, moderately popular for his unpretentious nature, thought slightly unserious after the British descent upon Washington, and remembered by the knowledgeable for his irreplaceable contributions to the Constitution.

7. JAMES MONROE AS PRESIDENT

Having held almost every other post, including senator, governor, minister to France and to Britain, and secretary of state and of war, James Monroe was almost a case of the office seeking the man. There was a challenge from the former minister to France, war secretary and current Treasury secretary William H. Crawford of Georgia, as a younger man (44, compared with Monroe’s 58) and not a Virginian, unlike Monroe and three of the four presidents to date. The House caucus of the Democratic-Republicans chose the nominee and Monroe won this test 65 to 54. Vice President Gerry had died in office, and Monroe and his colleagues appeased New York with the selection for that position of that state’s governor, Daniel D. (an improvised initial that did not stand for anything) Tompkins. Rufus King, respected political veteran and former vice presidential candidate, was nominated by the Federalists, who were no longer a coherent party, and did not offer a vice presidential candidate.

The result was a foregone conclusion; Monroe won 183 electoral votes to 34 for King, who took only Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware. The Federalists vanished from the scene, in, as a Boston newspaper would describe it as Monroe toured New England, “an era of good feeling.” Monroe, too, had come a long way having opposed the Constitution as too centralist, he now seemed more a follower of the first Virginian president than of the next two. In his inaugural address, he called for armed forces adequate to protect the nation’s interests and a policy that would favor manufacturing. He had a strong administration, with Tompkins, John Quincy Adams as secretary of state, Crawford at the Treasury, John C. Calhoun at the War Department, and Richard Rush as attorney general. More talented than any cabinet since Washington’s first administration, it more resembled such British coalitions as Pelham and Newcastle’s “broad-bottom” government of 1744–1754, or Grenville and Fox’s “government of all the talents” of 1806.

The long process of building a close Anglo-American relationship took its first step with what was called the Rush-Bagot Agreement of 1817, though it had been entirely agreed between Monroe and Castlereagh. It substantially disarmed the Great Lakes (which the Congress had unilaterally done anyway). It was also implicit that the same principle would govern the land frontier between the United States and Canada. This agreement would be supplemented by the Convention of 1818, signed for the United States again by Richard Rush, then minister in London, and by Albert Gallatin, now the minister in Paris. This convention extended the border along the 49th parallel from Lake of the Woods (northern Minnesota) to the Rocky Mountains, and agreed to negotiate the border through the Rockies to the Pacific in 10 years, in which time citizens of both signatory countries could move freely in the Far Pacific territory. The United States also obtained modest fishing concessions in Newfoundland waters.

The fierce and Anglophobic Andrew Jackson was placed in charge of American forces on the Georgia-Florida border, across which many runaway slaves and hostile Indians had fled. There were some incidents and Jackson’s standing orders were to clear the area between the U.S. border and the Spanish forts. Jackson wrote to President Monroe that if he were advised, through “channels . . . that possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States . . . in sixty days it will be accomplished.” He received no reply, which for as bellicose an American expansionist as Jackson was all the encouragement he needed to invade East Florida in April 1818.

He captured Pensacola in May and captured two English traders whom he accused of fomenting slave and Indian and even Spanish action against the United States (Alexander Arbuthnot and Robert Ambrister). Jackson hanged the first and shot the second. British and official American opinion condemned Jackson; Clay proposed censure in the House, and the war and Treasury secretaries, Calhoun and Crawford, agreed. The secretary of state, the very able John Quincy Adams, was negotiating with the Spanish for control of Florida. Jackson’s antics considerably strengthened his bargaining position and he entirely approved Jackson’s action. Public opinion rose up in support of the general, and neither Monroe nor the Congress took any action against him. Thus reinforced, Adams negotiated the cession to the U.S. of all Florida, and the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase. Adams, son of the former president, had studied in France and the Netherlands, was a former senator, had served in diplomatic capacities as a teenager, and had served all the previous presidents, as minister in the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain. He had been the senior diplomat in the Ghent peace delegation and would prove one of the most capable secretaries of state in American history.

8. THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE

At the end of 1819, there were 22 states in the Union, 11 free and 11 slave, with Maine and Missouri having applied for admission. The slave states, apart from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas, were Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The free states, apart from those in the original 13, were Vermont, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The northern states were growing more quickly than the southern states, as that was where most immigrants arrived, and Europeans, the source of most immigration, did not want to move to a semi-tropical climate, and were unfamiliar with dealing with people of African origin. Most Americans were in free states, and despite the three-fifths rule, the congressional delegations of the free states were substantially larger than those of the South. When amendments were proposed prohibiting slavery in the Missouri Territory, which was a large part of the Louisiana Purchase, there was very spirited reaction from southerners, and a series of heated debates and close votes, as the strains on a country half free and half slave, with a constitutional arrangement for favoring slave states in congressional delegations and presidential and vice presidential electoral votes, began, as was widely foreseen, to tear at national unity. After acrimonious and confused debate for nearly four months, a compromise proposed by Senator Jesse Thomas of Illinois was adopted. Maine and Missouri were admitted as states, Maine as a free state and Missouri without restriction on slavery, and the balance of the Louisiana Territory west of Missouri and north of the line 36°30 (the continuation of the Arkansas-Missouri border) would not be a slave-holding area.

This settled the issue down for a time, but it was perennial, and would become more intractable. The North now realized that slavery would not die on its own, though most considered it unchristian and an affront to the founding values of the country. The South realized that it would always be questioned and that it would always be on the moral defensive. “From [the Missouri Compromise] on few Americans had any illusions left about the awful reality of slavery in America.”⁵ Jefferson famously now called it “A fire bell in the night . . . the knell of the Union.” He feared that all that he and “the generation of 1776” had accomplished to secure “self-government and happiness to their country” could be squandered “by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons.”⁶ Yet he dismissed the Missouri question as “not a moral question, but one merely of power.”

Monroe had so defused partisanship, the caucus of his party in the House of Representatives that was to choose the Democratic-Republican nominees for president and vice president could not assemble a quorum on the preannounced date. The Federalist Party was inactive, so no one was officially put forward by any party. President Monroe and Vice President Tompkins allowed their names to stand and there was no formal opposition. Monroe won 231 electoral votes to three abstentions and one vote cast for Adams (the secretary of state) by an elector who thought no one but Washington should have the honor of being elected unanimously. Tompkins collected 218 votes, with the others scattered, although he simultaneously ran as governor of New York, making it clear that if elected, he would serve in that office, leaving the secretary of state to succeed to the presidency should Monroe not complete his term. In the event, Tompkins lost the governor’s race narrowly to De Witt Clinton, who went on to build the Erie Canal, connecting New York City to the Great Lakes, one of the world’s most noteworthy feats of engineering at the time. It was 363 miles long, 40 feet wide and 4 feet deep, and had 83 locks to take vessels up 675 feet. It would have been only half as long if it had utilized Lake Ontario, but war with Britain was still thought quite possible, and Lake Ontario was more peopled on the northern side (Toronto) and was directly accessible from the St. Lawrence, so the Erie Canal runs parallel to the lake, about 10 miles south of it, from Lake Oneida to Lake Erie at Buffalo.

9. THE MONROE DOCTRINE

Starting in 1810, all of the Latin American countries began to agitate for independence from Spain and Portugal. Open revolts flickered and raged all over the Americas south of the United States. The colonial powers were evicted more effortlessly in some places than others, but they had nothing like the resources to try to maintain themselves that the British had had at their disposal 40 years before. The so-called Holy Alliance (France, Russia, Austria, Prussia; Britain withdrew from this ultra-conservative arrangement), a strange and almost mystical reactionary league to freeze Europe and much of the world as they were when the Congress of Vienna concluded, determined at Verona in November 1822 that members would all assist a restoration of absolute monarchy in Spain. France invaded Spain to this end, less than a decade after Wellington and the Spanish guerrillas had forced Napoleon’s army out of Spain. Canning, who had replaced the (suicidally) deceased Castlereagh as foreign minister, suspected the French of aspiring to a Latin American empire, and when he did not receive adequate French assurances to disabuse himself of this concern, he proposed to Rush, the American minister in London, that Great Britain and the United States make a joint pact to keep other European powers out of Latin America. Monroe had already recognized the nascent Latin American republics and exchanged embassies with them (in May 1822). Rush told Canning that he did not have the authority to commit the U.S., but that he suspected the concept could have traction if Britain would join the United States in recognizing the new Latin American republics.

Monroe and, when he consulted them, Jefferson and Madison were enthusiastic about close cooperation with Great Britain, quite a turn for the old revolutionaries. Once America became active in the world, its leaders quickly found that the only foreign power it had much in common with was Britain—the language, the comparative liberality, and the stable political institutions. Adams demurred from his elders and predecessors (all four had been secretary of state and Adams, too, would be president.) Secretary of State Adams was not so convinced that the British were really renouncing colonial ambitions in Latin America; he had been jousting with the British over Cuba, and feared a nefarious attempt to establish a quid pro quo. He considered that the British alone would prevent other Europeans from asserting themselves in Latin America, as no one now disputed the absolute supremacy of the Royal Navy, virtually everywhere in the world. Adams was also concerned about the czar’s assertion of rights in the Northwest, where the British had a minimal naval presence and little concern what the Russians did. In the light of these factors, Adams proposed distinctive American warnings to Russia and France, and the United States did not respond to Canning. Adams persuaded Monroe and the rest of the cabinet to issue a policy statement purporting to govern foreign activities in the Americas.

In his annual message to the Congress on December 2, 1823, the president enunciated what became known as the Monroe Doctrine, which was composed by Adams and himself. They made four points: The Americas would not be subject to further colonization by Europeans; there was a distinct political society in the Americas very different to that of Europe; the United States would consider any attempt to extend European influence in the Americas to be dangerous to the national security of the U.S., but existing European colonies and dependencies in the Americas were grandfathered as legitimate; and the United States renounced any interest in influencing events in Europe. There were some doubtful aspects of this formulation. The United States had much more in common with Britain than with the emerging, unstable dictatorships of Latin America, and the Royal Navy assured the integrity of the Americas at least for the first 40 years after Monroe promulgated his doctrine. The United States had no ability whatever to prevent British encroachments in South America, had they wished to make any. And the renunciation of an American role in Europe was not much of an act of restraint, as it had no capacity whatever to play any such role. On April 17, 1824, the U.S. signed with Russia a treaty in which Russia confined itself to activities in the Pacific Northwest of North America above longitude 54°40, and desisted from attempts to rule the Bering Sea exclusively for Russian fishing and whaling.

In general, international reaction to Monroe’s speech was complete indifference, even in Latin America, but it would become an extremely important dispensation for the Americas after 1865, when the power of the United States was very great and unchallengeable in its own hemisphere. In the meantime, this was a brilliant diplomatic stroke by Monroe and Adams, as they managed to align their country’s interest exactly with Britain’s and appear to have more power than they did, while building a solid relationship with their former nemesis. Britain was now entering the greatest century of its influence in the world in its history, and the association of America with it was entirely on the basis of America’s own national interest.

Monroe would follow his fellow Virginians and retire after two terms, having blended Jeffersonism with Hamiltonism, and having recovered some of Franklin’s talent for diplomatic finesse, which seemed to give America a greater weight in the world than it really possessed. And the ill-conceived embargoes had been successful shields for the launch of manufacturing. That was not what was expected to happen by the squires of Monticello and Montpelier (Jefferson’s and Madison’s homes), but it was the beginning of an industrial capacity Hamilton had foreseen and that in the centuries to come would stupefy the world. After five presidencies and 50 years after the American Revolution began, the new republic was fairly launched.

Taken as a whole, in just one lifetime, from the start of the Seven Years’ War to 1824, the Americans had had an astounding rise, from a colony with two million people to one of the world’s six or seven most important countries, with over 11 million people. The problem of being half slave-holding and half free was the only shadow over America’s prospects, but it was a dark and lengthening shadow. Jefferson, the unimpoverishable optimist, in his final years, yet had “twinges of fear of an impending disaster whose sources he never fully understood. He and his colleagues had created” (and nurtured) “a Union devoted to liberty that contained an inner flaw that nearly proved to be its undoing.” Madison, who died 10 years after Jefferson and Adams, in 1836, left the posthumous word that “There was a serpent creeping with his deadly wiles” in the American “paradise.”⁷ So there was, and the great strategic challenge now was to keep the Union together until the forces of federalism in the North and West would be adequately motivated and powerful to suppress the slave states, if either moral revulsion at slavery or a preemptive insurrection made that necessary to preserve the Union.

War of 1812. Courtesy of the U.S. Army Center of Military History

10. THE 1824 ELECTION AND PRESIDENT JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

As the Virginia Dynasty ended, there was jockeying for the succession in Monroe’s talented cabinet. John Quincy Adams, William Crawford, and John C. Calhoun were all presumed to be running for president, as was the populist general Andrew Jackson. The country was practically a one-party state, and the states objected to the practice of the Democratic-Republican caucus of the House of Representatives choosing the party’s nominee and, effectively, the president. The Tennessee legislature selected General Jackson as a candidate in 1822, which was a year after Calhoun had thrown his hat in the ring, and so fierce was the rivalry that Crawford, who had great influence in the Senate, blocked the promotion of officers favored by Calhoun as war secretary, sometimes even when they were supported by the president himself. The Massachusetts and Kentucky legislatures nominated their favorite sons, Adams and the Speaker of the House, Henry Clay, all in 1822. Monroe launched the concept of the “lame duck” president, well before it was called that.

A stroke effectively eliminated Crawford, who had been selected by the House caucus in the traditional manner, in 1823, and Calhoun withdrew to run for vice president with both Jackson and Adams. Jackson ran in favor of popular election of the president, but against federally paid internal improvements, which were held to be intrusive by the federal government, and if permitted, likely to be followed by federal meddling in the status of slavery. Most of the candidates favored tariff protection for American manufacturing. The ballot yielded 99 electoral votes for Jackson, 84 for Adams, 41 for Crawford, and 37 for Clay. As there was no majority, the election went to the House of Representatives, which would consider only the top three candidates. Clay urged support for Adams and, as Speaker, exercised considerable influence, starting with causing the Kentucky congressmen to ignore the instruction of the state legislature to vote for Jackson, and vote for Adams instead. Adams won 13 states to seven for Jackson and four for Crawford. Clay accepted Adams’s offer of secretary of state, leading to the allegation of a “corrupt bargain” by the two to throw the House election to Adams. There was never any evidence of this, but it was much bandied about, including by the erratic and volcanic John Randolph, who also described Adams and Clay as “the Puritan and the blackleg.” This led to a duel, in which neither aggrieved party (Clay and Randolph) was injured. Calhoun was easily elected vice president.

After this election, the Adams and Clay groups became National Republicans, while the Jacksonians became the successors to Jefferson and Madison as Democratic-Republicans. Adams declined to politicize the civil service and dismissed only 12 federal government employees in his term, and those for objective cause. It was an admirable stance, but nothing was going to stop the charge of Jackson, swearing vengeance for the corrupt bargain and claiming to be the spear of the people as they seized control of government from the elites. In his address to the Congress in December 1825, Adams proposed an extensive program of roads and canals, a national university and observatory, and further exploration of the interior. It was an ambitious program, but one bound to offend the states’ rights advocates, which included all the South and much of the Southwest, essentially because of fear of attacks on slavery. This was the key to discussion of federal aid to public works, and was indicative of self-defeating government minimalism. It was held that if the federal government had the power to build public works all over the country, there would then be nothing to stop it from tampering with slavery. The South was already retreating into a slave mentality. Calhoun, as president of the Senate, elevated many opponents of the administration, as he was now the South’s leading political figure and used his position to advance his own status and not to support the administration (having probably received more votes for his office from followers of Jackson than of Adams).

The whole first half of 1826 was taken up with debate over U.S. attendance at the Panama Conference. This was a pan–Latin American meeting organized by the liberator of much of South America, Simón Bolívar, who was seeking a tight alliance between all the states against Spain or any outside interloper. He sought a continental assembly and the right to require military support and solidarity from all constituent states. Colombia and Mexico insisted that the United States be invited, and Adams agreed to be represented. This created awkwardnesses; where Adams and Clay believed that American preeminence in the hemisphere required American representation, Calhoun and Senator Martin Van Buren, a devious New York wheelhorse who would hold almost every elective office and champion different sides of many issues, opposed U.S. attendance, ostensibly because the Senate had not been consulted before Adams accepted the invitation, and because attendance would violate American opposition to intrusion in the affairs of other countries. The real reason for the concern of the South was that there would be black national leaders present and they did not wish to exalt the dignity of “negroes” ethnically indistinguishable from slaves.

The Congress supported the administration, after vigorous debate, but the representatives Adams sent did not arrive, one because of death en route. That there should have been a heated six-month debate on such a trivial issue illustrated the extreme sensitivity of the slavery issue. Southern leaders overreacted, reacted preemptively, and generally betrayed a nearly paranoid fear of criticism of slavery. Calhoun was the leader of this strain of opinion, and Van Buren went along with it only to cement his relations with Jackson, whom he saw more clearly than some as the coming man.

Thomas Jefferson, aged 83, and John Adams, aged 91, died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Adams’s last words were alleged to have been that “Jefferson survives.” They had mended their quarrels of decades before and enjoyed an extensive and often eloquent correspondence. Adams had the pleasure, as the only president to this point to have been denied reelection, of seeing his son installed as president, at time of writing a feat replicated only by the Bushes. The senior Adams and Jefferson had seen a tremendous advance of the country they had done so much to establish, including a steady advance of popular government, a discarding of property and tax-paying qualifications for voting, and the movement in all states except Delaware and South Carolina of the selection of presidential electors from the state legislators directly to the voters.

The North-South divisions were aggravated by the tariff debates of the late twenties. Northern and central manufacturing states wanted higher tariffs for textiles and steel and iron goods, to protect their ever-growing domestic market, while the South wanted those goods to be cheaper, and did not want to provoke tariff retaliation by the wide range of foreign countries to which the South exported agricultural products and cotton. The South was fiercely attached to the principle of absolute equality with the North, which it was losing demographically, though it was maintained in the Senate. As the North grew more quickly, and tariffs prospered its own industries while handicapping those of the South, and the North aspersed slavery and the ownership by people of other human beings, southerners came to question in increasing numbers the value and utility of the Union to them.

As early as 1813, an in camera Federalist convention had met and proposed a series of constitutional amendments that included elimination of the three-fifths rule regarding the counting of slaves in calculating congressional representation and the composition of the Electoral College; the admission of new states and declaration of embargoes or of war only with two-thirds majorities of both houses of Congress; and the prohibition of a second presidential term and of successive presidents from the same state. The report of this convention arrived in Washington as the Treaty of Ghent arrived, and the issues died, especially after the vibrant 1824 presidential contest between a Deep South candidate, a New Englander, and two frontiersmen. But it indicated the stresses the Virginia Dynasty and the War of 1812 had caused. The grievances and sensibilities of the South would not be so easily appeased. Three of the four 1824 presidential candidates were slaveholders, three-quarters of the people were not, 15 percent of the people were black, and 15 percent of those were free. It was bound to become very complicated, very quickly.

Severe strains between the regions arose again over tariffs. The Jacksonians in control of the Congress determined to embarrass the president by proposing outrageously high tariffs (“The Tariff of Abominations”) on a wide range of products, to ensure that all sections voted against it, and Jackson’s supporters would take credit for its defeat in the South and West, which saw tariffs as a sop to the eastern and northern states, which would blame Adams for the defeat. This was the cynical design of the unholy alliance between Calhoun and Van Buren, and it backfired, because New England voted for the tariffs as supportive of the principle of protection, and the measure passed. Calhoun then baptized himself in political chicanery by total immersion, by leading South Carolina (six weeks after his reelection as vice president in 1828) to adopt a series of legislative resolutions protesting the constitutionality of the tariff Calhoun had himself co-sponsored on the assumption that it would be defeated. He also wrote, though he did not sign, a treatise that embraced the separatist concept of nullification—the ability of a state simply to declare that a federal law did not apply within that state. This was not compatible with any serious notion of the United States (though Jefferson had flirted with it after the Alien and Sedition Acts under the senior Adams). This constitutional heresy would prove almost inextinguishable, and was still being bandied about by southern segregationists in the 1960s. It was a public rumination on separatism: the acceptance of the benefits of the Union while eschewing anything thought to be burdensome. It was an outrage from the just-reelected vice president of the United States of America, Monroe’s war secretary, and the co-author of a tariff whose adoption he now purported to find unconstitutional. The rot at the core of the American Union was already a life-threatening tumor.

11. THE RISE OF JACKSON

Jackson had retired as a senator in 1825, following the Tennessee legislature’s nomination of him for president (presidential aspirants threw their hats into the ring much earlier in these times), and he accepted Calhoun as his running mate. Now, and henceforth, this party was called the Democrats, leaving “Republican” for adoption by a new force 30 years hence. President Adams was renominated by what was called the National Republican convention, meeting in Harrisburg. He took as his running mate, Richard Rush, former minister to Great Britain and attorney general and current secretary of war.

Jackson was now, in 1828, an unstoppable political force: as the demographic center of the country moved across the Appalachians, he was the hero of the frontiersmen and of the Old South, and of all who admired the spirit of expansion, the Revolutionary drummer boy turned national military hero. (He had won probably the greatest land battle in the country’s history, the Battle of New Orleans, albeit after the end of the war in which it was supposedly fought. As Yorktown was largely won by the French, and as they were never at war again, it was certainly the greatest victory ever won by the Americans over the British.) Jackson was the selfless combat hero, the rugged man of the West, the guardian of the slave-holding South, and he was a slick political operator. He won the 1828 presidential election with 647,000 votes and 178 electoral votes to Adams’s 509,000 votes and 83 electoral votes. New York state went for Jackson by 5,000 out of 276,000 because of the exertions of Martin Van Buren and William L. Marcy, who between them would be amply rewarded in the coming decades with a cornucopia of great offices. They were the leaders of the Albany Regency, the ruling political machinery in New York from the retirement of Tompkins and DeWitt Clinton to the rise of William Henry Seward and Thurlow Weed in the late 1930s.

John Quincy Adams is rivaled only by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Woodrow Wilson as the greatest intellect ever to hold the presidency of the United States. He was one of the nation’s very greatest secretaries of state and had an imaginative program as president, but was the representative of a region of declining importance and was saddled with the appearance and tone of a New England Brahmin and an overt opponent of slavery, as the fireball of Jacksonian democracy swept most of the country. Completely unaffected by the prestige of the presidency and of his family, he was elected to the House of Representatives, the only ex-president in the country’s history except for Andrew Johnson to serve again in elective office after leaving the White House, and became one of the leaders of the abolitionist movement. He was a man of the utmost intelligence and integrity, but not an overly effective president and not a particularly astute national politician. He was profoundly esteemed in his last 17 years in Congress, right to his death in 1848 at the age of 79.

General Jackson was a startling change from the six Virginia and Massachusetts gentlemen who had preceded him to the nation’s highest office. In his inaugural address, Jackson was quite restrained, promising economy in government and respect for the jurisdictions of states, a “just and liberal policy” toward the Indians, and what appeared to be a reform of the civil service. He was silent or enigmatic about tariffs, internal improvements, and the status of the Bank of the United States. He threw the White House open to the populace, which included a tremendous rout of rumbustious and reveling frontiersmen, and a rather bacchanalian occasion ensued, with windows being used as doors and considerable alcoholic consumption, though no vandalism or violence. It was a symbolic notice of a distinct change in tone from the former occupants.

Jackson did not hold regular cabinet meetings, and did not have a very distinguished cabinet, apart from Van Buren at State, but relied on a “kitchen cabinet” of less senior officials and friends. This would change in 1831. It shortly emerged that Jackson’s idea of reform of the civil service was to sack a large number of people not identified with his own political rise and movement and replace them with loyalists. This affected about 20 percent of all federal employees in the Jackson years, and was dubbed “the Spoils System” by New York Senator William Marcy (“To the winner go the spoils”), Van Buren’s side-kick in the Albany Regency.

Jackson allowed the Calhoun sponsorship of nullificationist ideas in South Carolina to go publicly uncontradicted through the first year of his administration, but it was known by the whole political community to be a ticking time bomb. A debate that began at the end of 1829 over the advisability of the federal government restricting and monitoring more closely the sale of public lands was soon represented by the formidable Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri as an attempt by northeastern interests to control and retard the growth of the West. This quickly escalated as Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina claimed that “the life of our system is the independence of our states” and imputed overbearing centralizing ambitions to the federal government. This smoked out the Senate’s most formidable orator of all, Daniel Webster, who attacked those southerners who “Habitually speak of the Union in terms of indifference, or even of disparagement.” The debate continued all through January 1830, as Hayne threw down the mask and espoused the sovereignty of the states and their right to unilateral nullification of federal laws. Webster replied that the states were sovereign only as far as the Constitution allowed that sovereignty is determined by the Constitution, that it resides with the government of the whole nation, and that state-federal disputes would be resolved by federal institutions and processes: federal courts, constitutional amendments, and free elections. Webster accused his opponents of sophistical arguments designed to weaken and undermine the national government in a dishonorable way. He concluded one of the most famous addresses ever rendered in the United States Senate: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” (January 27, 1830).

Hayne, who was understood to be speaking for his fellow South Carolinian and president of the Senate, Vice President Calhoun, replied to this with the familiar “compact” theory, that the states formed the federal government and had the legal capacity to judge when their rights were being infringed, and that the right of the states to reject federal laws was undiminished from before the Constitution was adopted. Webster had the better of the constitutional argument, as the adoption of and more than 40 years of adherence to the Constitution clearly conferred legitimacy on it, subject to interpretation, as the governmental law established by “We the people . . . for the United States of America.” Calhoun and his fellow alarmed slaveholders were not going to render inoperative a document so thoroughly debated and ratified and enforced with specious arguments about a compact and with the miraculous revenance, after decades of invisibility and silence, of a selective right of nullification. These arguments were a goad, and a warning to the North, and the first stab at developing a plausible argument to justify secession, by force of arms if necessary.

Subtle differences became the subject of intense scrutiny in the divination of the nuances of federal or state attachments. This became quite commonplace in matters of toasts at official occasions. One early example was the Jefferson Day dinner in Washington on April 13, 1830, where Jackson proposed a toast to “Our Union; it must be preserved.” And Calhoun responded: “The Union, next to our liberty most dear. May we always remember that it can only be preserved by distributing equally the benefits and burdens of the Union.”

12. THE UNION AND SLAVERY

Battle lines were being drawn, but Jackson was playing a subtle and discreet game. He was a large slaveholder, and for his defense of New Orleans and seizure of Florida, his heavy-handed policy toward the Indians, and his respect for states’ rights in public works matters, he had great popularity in the South. He was the incarnation of the frontiersman and had followed the settler’s path and extended the country westward. And yet, as a nationalist who had finessed the tariff issue and emerged as a fierce defender of the Union, he was not necessarily unpopular in the North. He devised a policy that would serve the Union well and vitally. Jackson would guarantee slavery in the South and Southwest and resist any impeachment of it, and promote its westward expansion; and he would enforce the primacy and inviolability of the Union.

In the South, he would be the man who would make the Union work for the South and would be that region’s unconquerable champion of the institution of slavery. In other regions, he was the guarantor of the Union; he would maintain the integrity of the United States at any cost. The North would tolerate slavery where it existed and in adjacent places to be settled, but not in the North, and the Union would survive. The South would accept the assurance of slavery where it existed and to the west of that, and would accept the Union. Jackson laid down this policy and enforced and bequeathed it. It was not a permanent arrangement, but it bought a vital 30 years, in which the Unionists became very much stronger than the slaveholders. This was a strategy of national self-preservation, geared to the inexorable economic and demographic rise and preeminence of the free states. It is not clear that Jackson thought beyond the co-preservation of the Union and of slavery, but tempered by the talents at compromise of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, his rejection of nullification and of abolitionism was used by a generation of American public life as a shield behind which the numerical, economic, and moral strength of the free states came vastly to exceed those of the slave states.

The subject of internal improvements (public works) was a vexatious aspect of the same debate. Jackson’s position that such interstate projects, or internationally significant versions such as the improvement of ports and harbors, were legitimate. But with the veto of the Maysville project, a highway entirely within the state of Kentucky, on May 27, 1830, Jackson sent a message to all sides: he was in favor of such projects where they really were matters involving more than one state, but not otherwise, and was for the division of available funds for redistribution to the states for selection of their own preferred objectives. This too, was a clever policy, as the North was concerned about federal aid to large projects, which Jackson supported; and the South was concerned with incursions from the federal government in local matters, which Jackson opposed.

The break between the president and the vice president would ramify into many fields. One of the sparks that set the long-accumulating tinder alight was the revelation to Jackson that Calhoun, as secretary of war in 1818, had favored censuring and punishing Jackson for his conduct in Florida. There was an acerbic exchange of correspondence between the two men, and all communication ended, with Jackson determined to be rid of Calhoun. The sly Van Buren (known as “The Red Fox of Kinderhook,” referring to his hair-color, cunning, and place of residence), who had ingratiated himself quite profoundly with Jackson by oiling his New York political machine for the president, though formerly an ally of Calhoun’s in presenting the Tariff of Abominations in an unsuccessful effort to embarrass President Adams, was now President Jackson’s chief henchman in the purge of Calhoun. The ancient Florida quarrel just exacerbated the crisis caused by Calhoun’s effort to reduce the Union to a periodic consultation with half of the states to see if they would accept the application of laws passed by what had been for 40 years the legislature of America.

A third ingredient in the boiling atmosphere was the attempted boycott of Secretary of War John Eaton’s wife, Peggy O’Neal, a former barmaid. Mrs. Calhoun and other cabinet secretaries’ wives refused contact with Mrs. Eaton, and when this absurd matter was raised at a cabinet meeting by Jackson, the only person who supported him was Van Buren, an egalitarian and a bachelor. To facilitate the house-cleaning, Van Buren and Eaton tendered their resignations, and Jackson sent Van Buren to London, eliminated the social problem with Eaton’s wife by naming Eaton governor of Florida, sacked the rest to purge any influence of Calhoun, partly merged the kitchen and real cabinets, and added some stronger members. Calhoun blocked the confirmation of Van Buren to the London post, casting the deciding vote himself, in a brazenly provoking desertion of the administration, and Van Buren soon returned. The distinguished jurist and barrister and mayor of New York and codifier of the laws of Louisiana, Edward Livingston, went to State; the former minister to London, Louis McLane, took the Treasury; General Lewis Cass took over the War Department; Senator Levi Woodbury became secretary of the navy Amos Kendall soon became postmaster general; and the most durable and powerful of all except Jackson himself, Roger B. Taney, became attorney general. This swept the Calhoun elements out, and Calhoun’s days as vice president were also numbered. Jackson strengthened his government and gave notice that he was not only fierce and belligerent, as had been well-known for 25 years, but also a skillful political infighter, such as had not been seen in the White House since the reign of the last general-in-residence. There was none of the philosophical stoicism of Jefferson or John Quincy Adams, the ambivalence of Madison or Monroe, or the rather self-defeating querulousness of John Adams. Jackson was a crafty, fanatical, and deadly opponent.

The firmness of Jackson’s policy was its own reward; exalted though Britain was in the world, even its most powerful statesmen did not wish to cross swords with Old Hickory, as Jackson’s followers called him. Lord Palmerston, who virtually invented gunboat diplomacy, and was not above threatening war on any state, and conducted several in a very long career that included 19 years in the junior but influential post of secretary at war, three years as home secretary, 16 years as foreign secretary, and nine years as prime minister, actively wished to avoid a tangle with Jackson, whom he knew would be like a porcupine and would make any test of strength not worth the trouble. Palmerston “always respected a powerful opponent and the references in his correspondence to General Jackson . . . show that here was a man not to be trifled with.”⁸

The administration negotiated a very satisfactory reopening of complete trading access through the West Indian ports, a long-running grievance resolved. Jackson also resolved claims for damage to American shipping against France, going back to 1815. In 1834, the French being in arrears, Jackson asked the Congress for reprisals against France, which then approved an installment under the reparation agreement, conditional on Jackson’s apology for slights against France. This was an inexplicable French reversion to the insolence of the Genêt and XYZ affairs. Jackson replied that “The honor of my country shall never be stained by an apology from me for the statement of truth and the performance of duty.” Jackson fired off ukases all day and sat on the terrace on temperate evenings, as he had for decades with his beloved but now deceased wife Rachel, both smoking large-bowled pipes and speaking softly of their happy but terribly eventful and tumultuous life together.

Jackson’s policy toward Indians was also rather repressive, and was based on removing all Indians to west of the Mississippi, chiefly to free up land for more slaves baling cotton in the South. To this end, over 250,000 Indians were transported west, and many thousands died of illnesses contracted on the voyage. Treaties with Indians were routinely violated, especially when gold was discovered on Cherokee land in Georgia, and the Supreme Court overruled the state’s expropriation of the gold-yielding property. Jackson allegedly said: “The chief justice [Marshall] has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” Armed resistance to forced movement by the Sac and Fox Indians led to the Black Hawk War in 1832, but the resistance was futile. Jackson’s enthusiasm for slavery and shabby treatment of the Indians are two great failings of his character and administration, though, again, they helped get the Union through a vital and vulnerable period.

The Nat Turner slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, August 13 to 23, 1831, killed 57 whites and over 100 blacks, and led to the execution of 20 slaves and the deterioration of slave-holding conditions throughout the South, restricting the movements of slaves, reducing their education levels, and making emancipation of individual slaves more difficult. There was great agitation in the South to prevent the dissemination of abolitionist propaganda through the mails. Jackson, ever faithful to his formula of safety for slavery in the South but no secession, proposed a bill banning such literature from the mails. Robert Hayne’s successor as governor of South Carolina, George McDuffie, in a splendid local flourish, demanded the death penalty for such offenders, “without benefit of clergy.”⁹ The following year, the New England Anti-Slavery League was founded by William Lloyd Garrison, and there were similar organizations elsewhere in the North, as the entrenchment of positions on the issue on each side deepened slowly and ominously.

13. JACKSON’S SECOND TERM: NULLIFICATION AND THE NATIONAL BANK

Jackson had been renominated to the presidency without opposition by what was now officially called the Democratic Party, and having purged Calhoun, he secured the nomination for vice president of his friend and protégé Martin Van Buren. The National Republicans held a convention in Baltimore and nominated Henry Clay for president and John Sergeant of Pennsylvania for vice president. There was also an Anti-Masonic Party. The main campaign issue was Jackson’s declared opposition to the renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States. Jackson and Van Buren won easily, as they were the party of effective Unionism, and Jackson represented the Bank of the U.S. as an elitist and exploitive enterprise operated by corrupt plutocrats friendly with Clay. Jackson had about 55 percent of the vote and 219 electoral votes to 49 for Clay.

Although Calhoun had helped generate the nullification controversy with his co-sponsorship of the Tariff of Abominations, this fed the nullification argument, and Jackson advocated a reduction of some tariffs sensitive to South Carolina in 1832, to reduce frictions. But the nullification party won the South Carolina elections in October 1832. Calhoun had stopped acting through surrogates and overtly championed nullification in a number of speeches and letters, dressing it up in relatively plausible constitutional argument. A South Carolina state convention was called for November 19. The convention was largely boycotted by South Carolina’s Unionists, and adopted a nullification ordinance, which declared the 1828 and 1832 tariffs nullified and forbade their collection in the state; required a state loyalty oath for all state employees except members of the legislature; forbade appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court of any matter arising from the ordinance; and stated that any use of force by the federal government against a state would be grounds for secession. The convention then voted to authorize and pay for a force of military resistance; this was taking matters to the verge of insurrection, and with the wrong president. Jackson ordered the war secretary to put the federal forts in Charleston Harbor on alert and put General Winfield Scott in command of all federal forces in South Carolina. About 8,000 South Carolina Unionists volunteered for the federal militia to suppress the nullifiers if necessary. For good measure, Jackson told a congressman that “If one drop of blood be shed there in defiance of the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man of them I can get my hands on to the first tree I can find.” When South Carolina senator Robert Hayne expressed skepticism to Senator Thomas Hart Benton that Jackson would follow through, Benton replied: “When Jackson begins to talk about hanging, they can begin to look for rope.”¹⁰ (Benton had been Jackson’s aide at New Orleans, with the rank of colonel, and then represented his interests in Washington. They quarreled and Benton shot and wounded Jackson in a frontier brawl, though they were later reconciled. Among Benton’s several famous sayings was: “I don’t quarrel, but I fight, sir; and when I fight, a funeral follows.” He and Jackson were birds of a feather, but he renounced slavery in later years, and thus was denied a sixth term as U.S. senator from Missouri.)

In his message to the Congress on December 4, 1832, Jackson recommended further downward revision of the tariff, and in his Proclamation to the People of South Carolina six days later (drafted by Livingston and a very substantial state paper), Jackson described nullification as a “practical absurdity” and reaffirmed the supremacy of a sovereign and indivisible federal government. No state could disobey federal law and none could leave the Union, and any attempt to do so “by armed force is treason.” Calhoun resigned as vice president a couple of months before the end of his term, on December 28, having already been reelected to the U.S. Senate replacing Hayne, who had just been elected governor of South Carolina. South Carolina called for a general convention of other states in solidarity, but was rebuffed. On January 16, 1833, Jackson sent Congress his Force Bill, authorizing the collection of tariff duties in South Carolina by the U.S. Army if necessary, though what was actually foreseen was offshore collection, which would have made armed clashes less likely.

Daniel Webster again led the Unionist forces in debate, against Calhoun, and it was a memorable single-warrior combat, though Webster had the better of the argument and was the ne plus ultra of American political orators of the time. Henry Clay, exercising again his great talent for conciliating the apparently irreconcilable, introduced a compromise tariff. Both Jackson’s Force Bill and Clay’s tariff passed and both were signed into law by Jackson on March 2, 1833, two days before he was reinaugurated. Six weeks before, South Carolina, supposedly in response to Clay’s approaching tariff bill, but certainly not without awareness of Jackson’s aroused threats, suspended its nullification ordinance, and rescinded it when the tariff was enacted, but also purported to nullify the Force Bill.

By this powerful show of force and purpose, coupled with conciliatory gestures to slave-holding, Jackson had shut down any thought of insurrection for perhaps a generation. Henceforth the cause of Union would rest chiefly on the ability of the free states to attract more immigration and spread westward more quickly than the more sluggish and agrarian slave states, so that insurrection would become unfeasible because of the greater strength of the Union states. This demonstrated Jackson’s strategic grasp, even if intuitively, of how to keep the Union together. The young republic had made its point in the world, but the world could also see that it was threatened by internal contradictions. Jackson loved the Union more than he approved slavery, and the United States owes him much for deferring the supreme test between the two unequal halves of the country until the Unionists, by the narrowest of margins and with the benefit of the most distinguished leadership in the country’s history, were strong enough to throttle the secessionists. Jackson may not have reacted for exactly this reason, but he saved the Union for a significant time at a decisive moment, and applied the only strategy that was going to preserve the country’s full potential for national greatness and benign world influence.

The 81-year-old (in 1832) James Madison, like Jefferson, had been disconcerted when their party was taken over by the comparative ruffian and warmonger Jackson, but they also had come to recognize the danger posed by the slavery issue. Jackson had politely referred to Madison as “a great civilian” but added that “the mind of a philosopher could not dwell on blood and carnage with any composure.”¹¹ Jackson had no such difficulties. He never lacked the steely resolve to deal severely with people and events. Once again, the American system seemed miraculously to have demonstrated that the office does seek the man, as it had turned up a leader who had terrible lapses of humanity, moderation, and scruple, but was providentially able to produce a policy of finely calibrated appeasement and intimidation of the slave-holding interest that would keep North and South together under the same constitutional roof for an indispensable further period of national maturation. By whatever combination of intuition, good fortune, and design, it was masterly strategy for the ultimate elimination of the Union’s great internal weakness (slavery).

Jackson’s next major step, the veto of the renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States, stirred another immense controversy. Clay urged the head of the Bank, Nicholas Biddle, to submit his application for recharter four years early, in 1832, to force Jackson’s hand and make an election issue of it. Biddle did so, and it was useful to Jackson, as the Bank was unpopular in the South and West, and seen as an elitist eastern organization that overly contracted credit in the faster-growing areas of the country. This also helped Jackson counter the nullifiers and appear generally as the champion of the little people. Biddle was judged too restrictive of credit through his ability to enforce ratios on smaller banks, and he was not accorded the credit the Bank generally deserved for avoiding inflation and keeping an orderly money supply. Shutting the Bank down was a mistake other than politically. Both houses of the Congress voted to renew, but they could not override Jackson’s veto. Jackson’s actions proved to be unsuccessful, but not as catastrophically mistimed as Madison’s inability to renew the charter in 1811.

Following the reelection of Jackson, Clay and Calhoun joined forces to get a House vote approving retention of government deposits in the Bank of the United States. Jackson felt he had won a clear mandate to get rid of the Bank, and Biddle thought his position justified his replying to Jackson’s war on him and his Bank by tightening credit, which he did. By the end of 1833, Biddle’s tactics had induced significant financial distress in the country, and Jackson had overcome a divided cabinet to remove federal government deposits from the Bank and place them in 23 state banks.

Jackson named Roger Taney, the attorney general, secretary of the Treasury to carry out the changes he sought, and as always with Jackson, there were insults and ruffled feathers all round. Clay got a censure vote against both Jackson and the Treasury through the Senate. Jackson’s transgression was that he refused to hand over to the Senate a paper he had read to his cabinet about the Bank recharter question. Jackson lodged a protest that he had been accused of an impeachable offense without being given an opportunity to defend himself. The Senate declined to confirm Taney at Treasury, but Jackson had him serve ad interim, and named him successfully, over strenuous opposition, as chief justice of the United States in 1835 when John Marshall died after 34 years in his office.¹² Taney was the first senior American official who was a Roman Catholic; he would serve 29 years as chief justice, with very mixed results. Benton eventually had the censure of Jackson expunged.

Inflation was abetted by the use of land-sale speculators’ notes as a form of transactional debt, and the huge increase in western land sales generated great increases in activity, and consequently in the de facto money supply, since these notes served as currency. Jackson ordered that only gold, silver, and in a few cases certain state-backed scrip would be accepted as payment in sales of federal lands. This turned inflation instantly into deflation, sharply reducing sales of federal lands and placing great strain on the state banks. Jackson’s unnuanced decrees in banking and monetary policy caused syncopated economic lurches that were often destructive to many, and reduced general levels of confidence in the rational administration of the country’s affairs.

Presidents (J.Q.) Adams and Jackson had both offered to buy Texas from Mexico, without success. American settlement in Texas began in earnest with Moses Austin and his son Stephen F. Austin, and was agreed by successive Mexican governments until 1830, when Mexico outlawed slavery in Texas and forbade further American settlement there. Stephen Austin went to Mexico to negotiate with the president, the charming and imperishable scoundrel General Antonio López de Santa Anna, who was nine times president of his country (though serving only seven years), and called himself “the Napoleon of the West” among other encomia. Santa Anna arrested Austin and imprisoned him for eight months. A group of Texans asserted their independence in 1835. Santa Anna set out to crush Texas militarily, and invested the San Antonio fortress, the Alamo, on February 23, 1836, with 3,000 men. The fortress was defended by only 188 men, including folkloric figures William Travis and Davy Crockett. After 10 days, Santa Anna overwhelmed the defenders and all the Americans were massacred, as were several hundred other Americans at different locations in Texas.

On April 21, Sam Houston led several hundred men stealthily across the San Jacinto River, near what is today the city of Houston, and defeated about 1,200 Mexicans at San Jacinto and captured Santa Anna, who was released to secure Mexican recognition of the independence of Texas. The Mexicans rejected this and Houston was elected president of the independent Republic of Texas. There were resolutions from both houses of the Congress for recognition of Texas, which Jackson, uncharacteristically, was hesitant to do. He wished to honor treaty obligations with Mexico and claimed not to wish a war with that country, though he would normally find such a prospect appetizing. He was more concerned with causing a split in the Democratic Party between pro- and anti-slavery forces, but on his last full day as president, March 3, 1837, Jackson did send a chargé to Texas in an act of quasi-recognition. This was another time bomb that Jackson would leave for his successors.