[ Preface to the Anniversary Edition]
[Preface]
[Contents]
[Illustrations]
[Index]
[ Books, Papers, and Manuscripts Cited and Consulted]
[Footnotes]

THE PARTY BATTLES
OF THE
JACKSON PERIOD

BY
CLAUDE G. BOWERS
Anniversary Edition

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY CLAUDE G. BOWERS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE
THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

PREFACE TO THE ANNIVERSARY EDITION

This is the hundredth anniversary of the memorable campaign which marked the rising of the people and the election of Andrew Jackson to the Presidency, and it has been thought appropriate to issue an Anniversary edition of “Party Battles of the Jackson Period” uniform with “Jefferson and Hamilton.”

It has not been thought necessary to change the text of the first edition materially. The passing of the century has brought a fairer appraisement of Jackson’s character and career, but he remains, and ever must, a subject of controversy, because he was a crusader for certain fundamentals of government on which men divide honestly. His civic integrity, his flaming patriotism, and his robust Americanism are beyond all controversy, and men of all political persuasions do homage to his memory.

With a world-wide movement against democracy to-day, and with striking manifestations of its existence here, it is well for Americans to ponder the lessons of the struggle for its preservation by Jackson and the masses whom he led with such superb courage and consummate ability. There is little being urged against it now that was not heard during the period of his leadership. It had never been in more deadly danger than when he met its enemies in bitter battle. And now, after a hundred years, there are indications that the battle he fought successfully must be fought again, if the elemental ideas he stood for are to survive in governmental practice.

In some of the reviews of the first edition it was suggested that I had been “hard on John Quincy Adams.” A careful reading convinces me that the conclusion is not justified. Such was not my intention or desire. Though often petty in small things, he was always heroic in big things, and these determine the character of a public man. In the chapters on the French quarrel I have sought to show him at his best, sinking his partisanship in his Americanism, and subordinating his personal prejudices to his patriotism.

Claude G. Bowers

March 16, 1928

PREFACE

It is the purpose of the author to deal, more minutely than is possible in a general history or biography, with the brilliant, dramatic, and epochal party battles and the fascinating personalities of the eight years of Andrew Jackson’s Administrations. From the foundation of the Republic to the last two years of the Wilson Administration, the Nation has never known such party acrimony; nor has there been a period when the contending party organizations have been led by such extraordinary politicians and orators. It was, in a large sense, the beginning of party government as we have come to understand it. It was not until the Jacksonian epoch that we became a democracy in fact. The selection of Presidents then passed from the caucus of the politicians in the capital to the plain people of the factories, fields, and marts. The enfranchisement of thousands of the poor, previously excluded from the franchise, and the advent of the practical organization politicians, wrought the change. Our government, as never before, became one of parties, with well-defined, antagonistic principles and policies. Party discipline and continuous propaganda became recognized essentials to party success.

This period witnessed the origin of modern party methods. The spoils system, instead of being a mere manifestation of some viciousness in Jackson, grew out of the assumed necessity for rewarding party service. The recognition of party government brought the national convention. The new power of the masses necessitated compact and drilled party organizations down to the precincts of the most remote sections, and even the card-index system known to-day was part of the plan of the incomparable politicians of the Kitchen Cabinet. The transfer of authority from the small coterie of politicians to the people in the corn rows imposed upon the leaders the obligation to furnish the rank and file of their followers with political ammunition for the skirmishes at the country stores as well as for the heavy engagements at the polls, and out of this sprang the intense development of the party press, the delivery of congressional speeches for “home consumption,” the party platform, and the keynote speech.

The triumph of the Jacksonians over the Clays, the Websters, and the Calhouns was due, in large measure, to their development of the first great practical politicians—that much-depreciated company sneeringly referred to as the Kitchen Cabinet, to whom all politicians since have paid the tribute of imitation.

With the appearance of Democracy in action came some evils that have persisted through the succeeding years—the penalties of the rule of the people. Demagogy then reared its head and licked its tongue. Class consciousness and hatreds were awakened. And, on the part of the great corporations, intimidation, coercion, and the corrupt use of money to control elections were contributed. These evils are a heritage of the bitter party battles of the Jacksonian period—battles as brilliant as they were bitter.

The purpose of this volume is to describe these mad party struggles, and to picture, as they really were, the great historical figures, “warts and all.” If Henry Clay is here shown as an unscrupulous, selfish, scheming politician, rather than as the mythical figure who “would rather be right than President”; if John C. Calhoun is here described as petty in his personal hates and spites and in his resentment over the failure of personal ambitions; if Daniel Webster, the most admirable of the three during these eight vivid years, is set forth, not only as the great Nationalist who replied to Hayne and sustained Jackson’s Nullification Proclamation, but as the defender of the Bank from which, at the beginning of the fight, he bluntly solicited a “refreshment” of his retainer, it is not through any desire to befoul their fame, but to set down the truth as irrefutably disclosed in the records, and to depict them as they were—intensely human in their moral limitations.

The necessities of history happily call for the featuring of some figures, potent in their generation, attractive in their genius, and necessarily passed over by historians covering much longer periods. No close-up picture of the time can be painted that ignores Edward Livingston, patriot and philosopher; Roger B. Taney, the militant party leader; John Forsyth, the “greatest debater of his time”; John M. Clayton, the real master of both Calhoun and Clay in the Compromise of 1833; George McDuffie, the tempestuous Danton of the Opposition; Hugh Lawson White, the “Cato of the Senate” and the Nemesis of Jacksonian Democracy; William Cabell Preston and Horace Binney, the polished orators, now almost forgotten; Major Lewis, the master of political details; Frank Blair, the slashing journalistic champion of the Administration; and Amos Kendall, the genius of the Kitchen Cabinet.

An analysis of motives and methods has led to some unconventional conclusions. Not only do Clay, Webster, and Calhoun dwindle in moral grandeur, but others, traditionally considered small, loom large. Thus the John Tyler of these eight years stands out in intellectual honesty, courage, and consistency far beyond others to whom history has been more generous.

No apology need be offered for featuring the personalities of the time. They throw light on motives and explain events. The episode of Mrs. Eaton changed the current of political history. The gossip concerning Mrs. White indicates the putridity of political factionalism. The scurrilous biography of Van Buren written by Davie Crockett on the suggestion of Senator White is illuminative of the popular prejudices of the times; and the solemn investigation of the charge that Senator Poindexter had instigated the attempt upon the life of the President at the Capitol discloses the morbidity of the partisan madness. Through the gossip of the drawing-rooms, the jottings of the diaries, the editorial comments of the contemporary press, the social and political intrigues of women, the attempt is made to re-create something of the atmosphere by which the remarkable statesmen and politicians of the Jackson Administrations were affected.

Generations have been taught to respect or reverence the memories of the extraordinary men of the Thirties who rode on the whirlwind to direct the storms; and, their human weaknesses forgotten, their sinister, selfish purposes ignored, their moral or intellectual limitations overlooked, they seem, in the perspective of the years, stern, austere, always sincere, and singularly free from the vices of politicians, as we have come to know them in the leaders of a later day. And yet it would be difficult to find creatures more thoroughly human than these who are usually presented to us as steel engravings, hung high on the wall in a dim light. They move across the page of history scarcely touching or suffering the contamination of the ground. They seem to play their parts upon a stage impressive and imposing, suspended between earth and heaven. That they lived in houses, danced, gambled and drank, flattered and flirted, gossiped and lied, in a Washington of unpaved streets and sticky black mud, made their way to night conferences through dark, treacherous thoroughfares, and played their brilliant parts in a bedraggled, village-like capital, is not apt to occur to one. Thus, in tracing the political drama of this portentous period, an attempt is made to facilitate the realization that they were flesh and blood, and mere men to their contemporaries, not always heroic or even admirable, through the visualization of the daily life they lived in a capital peculiarly crude and filled with grotesque incongruities.

No period in American political history is so susceptible to dramatization. There is grim tragedy in the baffled ambitions of Calhoun and Clay; romance in the rise of Kendall and the fall of Mrs. Eaton; rich comedy, when viewed behind the scenes, in the lugubrious procession of “distress petitioners” trained to tears by the art of Clay and the money of Biddle; and rollicking farce in the early morning flight of a dismissed Cabinet minister, to escape the apprehended chastisement of an erstwhile colleague whose wife’s good name had been assailed.

The drama of party politics, with its motives of love, hate, and vaulting ambition—such is the unidealized story of the epochal period when the iron will of the physically feeble Jackson dominated the life of the Nation, and colored the politics of the Republic for a century.

The Drama—its motives—its actors—such the theme of this history.

Claude G. Bowers

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE PARTY BATTLES
OF THE
JACKSON PERIOD

CHAPTER I
THE WASHINGTON OF THE THIRTIES

The tourist traveling from Philadelphia to Washington in the Thirties anticipated few pleasures and no comforts from the trip that had to be made by coach from Baltimore, over roads intolerably wretched under the best conditions, and all but impassable and not without dangers in inclement weather. The journey from Philadelphia to Baltimore was usually made by boat through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, and the entire trip, in winter one of exposure, required the greater part of two days.[1] The fare from Baltimore to Washington was four dollars. Sometimes the ruts in the winter roads would overturn the coach, throwing the passengers into the mire, and occasionally resulting in sprains and broken bones.[2] Later in Jackson’s time, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was built, with a branch into Washington, and when the first cars, drawn by horses, reached the country-town capital, the enthusiastic statesmen felt that the problem of transportation had been solved. Urging Butler to accept the attorney-generalship, and stressing the fact that acceptance would not preclude his appearance in personal cases in New York and Albany, Van Buren made much of the fact that “to the former place you will next season be able to go in fifteen hours, and to the latter in a day and a night.”[3] Blair, of the “Globe,” boasted after the election of 1832 that “in eight days and nights after the closing of the polls in Ohio, the result was known in the city of Washington from all the organized counties except three.” This, he declared, “is an instance of rapid communication from the West unparalleled in this country.”[4]

The foreigner, expecting a national capital more or less pretentious and compact, was invariably shocked on entering the environs over miserable mud roads, to find only an occasional drab hut or cottage at wide intervals. Usually, until the Capitol attracted his attention, he was wholly unconscious of his arrival at his destination. One of these, who has left a record of his visit, relates that he was “looking from the window of his coach in a sort of brown study, at fields covered with snow,” when a fellow passenger startled him with the inquiry as to how he liked Washington.

“I will tell you when I see it,” he replied.

“Why, you have been in Washington the last quarter of an hour,” was the rejoinder.[5]

Another famous visitor “was taken by surprise” on finding herself within the shadow of the hall of the lawmakers, “so sordid are the enclosures and houses on its very verge.”[6]

But as the coach wound round the Capitol, and swung with a merry clatter into Pennsylvania Avenue, the houses at more frequent intervals and connected shops disclosed the town. With a characteristic “clatter and clamp,”[7] with a gay cracking of whips, the coach would splash and rumble up to one of the leading hotels, and the cramped and weary tourist would joyously take leave of the conveyance and seek lodgment within.

If well advised, he would instruct the coachman to drop him at Gadsby’s, then the most popular and comfortable hostelry in town, on the Avenue, a short distance from the Capitol.[8] There he would find, not only a clean bed, but excellent service and a lordly hospitality from the host. Gadsby, for his generation, was a genius at his trade. He moved his small army of negro servants with military precision. “Who that ever knew the hospitalities of this gentlemanly and most liberal Boniface,” wrote one who enjoyed them, “can ever forget his urbane manner, his careful attention to his guests, his well-ordered house, his fine old wines, and the princely manner in which he could send his bottle of choice Madeira to some old friend or favored guest at the table?”[9] It was not always, however, that accommodations could be found at Gadsby’s, and then the tourist would seek the Indian Queen at the sign of the luridly painted picture of Pocahontas, where he would be met at the curb by Jesse Brown, the landlord.[10] Here, for a dollar and a quarter a day, he could not only find a pleasant room, but a table loaded with decanters of brandy, rum, gin, at short intervals from the head to the foot. If the host of the Indian Queen lacked the lordly elegance of Gadsby, he made up for it in the homely virtues of hospitality. Wearing a large white apron, he met his guests at the door of the dining-room, and then hastened to the head of the table where he personally carved and helped to serve the principal dish.[11] If this, too, was crowded, the tourist would try Fuller’s near the White House,[12] where a room would be found for him either in the hotel proper, or in one of the two or three houses adjoining, which had been converted into an annex.[13]

Having rested from his journey and removed the stains of travel, if he were a person of some importance, and especially a foreigner, he would be speedily deluged with the cards of callers anxious to make his sojourn pleasant. Day by day the hotel registers were eagerly scanned for the names of visiting celebrities, for the Washington of the Thirties loved its lions and lionesses. No possible person was ever neglected, and real personages were fêted, wined, and dined. But not until he set forth to return the calls would he appreciate the Portuguese Minister’s description of the capital as “a city of magnificent distances.” Inquiring at the hotel how to reach the residences of his callers, he would be not a little puzzled at the nonchalant reply that the coachmen “knew where all the prominent people live.” Engaging a coach, he would set forth gayly, in the confident expectation of leaving his card at from thirty to forty houses in the course of the day. A short drive would take him to the end of the macadamized pavement of the Avenue, and thereafter for hours, pitching and plunging, over the ruts and the mud-holes, through miry lanes, and across vacant lots, shaken in body, and sore in spirit, he would find by evening that he had reached six or seven of the forty houses, and was charged by the coachman at a rate “which would keep a chariot and two posters for twice the time in London.”[14] In the course of a week he would find that he had spent as much as thirty dollars for coach hire—by odds, the most expensive feature of his Washington sojourn. An English visitor, startled at the cost of travel, contracted with a coachman for services from five o’clock to daylight for twenty dollars, but after having attended five parties on the first evening, the morose driver repudiated his contract, and it was necessary to add five dollars to retain his services.[15] “I should imagine [Washington] to be the very paradise of hackney coachmen,” wrote one disgusted visitor. “If these men do not get rich it must be owing to some culpable extravagance, for their vehicles are in continual demand from the hour of dinner[16] till five in the morning, and long distances and heavy charges are all in their favor.”[17]

As the visitor drove about the town he found nothing in the physical aspects of the country-town capital to indicate that L’Enfant ever had a vision or produced a plan for a city beautiful. Because real estate dealers had quarreled over the location of public buildings, the selection of the hill for the Capitol had led to the location of the White House a mile or more to the west, and for three decades the problem of building a compact city between the two had failed. The streets were all unpaved when Jackson was first inaugurated, and only Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the President’s Mansion had been rescued from the mire when he left office. Hub-deep in mud in inclement weather, these country roads sent forth great clouds of dust on dry and sunny days. With the exception of the Avenue, not a single street approached compactness, the houses on all other streets being occasionally grouped, but generally widely separated, and in some instances so much so as to suggest country houses with their shade trees and vegetable gardens.[18] “It looks as if it had rained naked buildings upon an open plain, and every man had made a street in reference to his own door,” wrote Nathaniel P. Willis, who knew his Washington.[19] Another writer of the day who was impressed with “the houses scattered in straggling groups, three in one quarter, and half a dozen in another,” was moved to compassion for “some disconsolate dwelling, the first or last born of a square or crescent, yet in nebulous suffering like an ancient maiden in the mournful solitude of single blessedness.”[20] Still another contemporary word painter tells us that even on the Avenue “the buildings were standing with wide spaces between, like the teeth of some superannuated crone.”[21]

At the foot of the Capitol, itself beautiful even then, were desolate waste lands being reserved for some ultimate Botanical Gardens, and a few miserable shack-like boarding-houses.[22] “Everybody knows that Washington has a capitol,” wrote a satirical English observer, “but the misfortune is that the capitol wants a city. There it stands, reminding you of a general without an army, only surrounded and followed by a parcel of ragged little dirty boys; for such is the appearance of the dirty, straggling, ill-built houses which lie at the foot of it.”[23] Where the Smithsonian Institution has long stood were innumerable quagmires reeking with miasma.[24] About the President’s Mansion, a few pretentious houses, several still handsome homes after almost a century, had been built, and in this section, and in Georgetown, lived the people of fashion and the diplomats. “The Co’t end,” it was called. At the four corners of the Mansion of the Presidents stood the plain brick buildings occupied by the State, Treasury, War, and Navy Departments. On Capitol Hill a few good houses had been erected, especially on North A and New Jersey Avenue, South. Other than these, and those west of the White House, there was little but pastures and enclosed fields in the eastern, southeastern, and northeastern sections of the town.[25] East of Fourteenth Street, on the north side, but few houses had been built beyond F Street, and the “country home” of William H. Crawford, at the northeast corner of Fourteenth Street and Massachusetts Avenue, was still considered as remote from town as on that winter day after his defeat for the Presidency when no callers were expected because of the heavy snow.[26]

Looking down upon the little town from the skylight of the Capitol, Harriet Martineau could plainly discern the “seven theoretical avenues,” but with the exception of Pennsylvania, all were “bare and forlorn,” and the city which has become one of the most beautiful and impressive in the world could then present to the naked eye only “a few mean houses dotted about, the sheds of the navy yard on one bank of the Potomac, and three or four villas on the other.”[27] With the streets full of ruts, the sidewalks dotted with pools of muddy water, or in places overgrown with grass, with cows pasturing on many of the streets now lined with elegant homes, and challenging the right of way with Marshall or Clay or Jackson, it is not surprising that foreigners, even as late as the Thirties, were moved to imitate the sarcasm of Tom Moore. The difficulties of locomotion kept the pedestrian’s eyes upon the ground, and the inconveniences, in making calls, of crossing ditches and stiles, and walking alternately upon grass and pavement, and striking across fields to reach a street, were more noticeable than the noble trees that lined the avenues.[28] Wretched enough in the daytime, the poorly lighted streets at night were utterly impossible. “As for lights,” wrote a contemporary, “if the pedestrian did not provide and carry his own, he was in danger of discovering every mud-hole and sounding its depths.”[29] More nearly possible to the fastidious were the narrower streets of Georgetown, with its more imposing and interesting houses, and more select society, where many of the statesmen lived, and not a few of the Government clerks, who rode horseback to the departments in the morning.

Even in the Thirties there were many beautiful drives and walks in the vicinity of Washington, and a few houses that were impressive to even the most critical English visitor. Visible for many miles, and easily seen from the town, loomed the pillared white mansion of Arlington, then the home of George Washington Custis, to which many of the aristocrats of the capital frequently found their way. There, during the Jacksonian period, Robert E. Lee, standing in the room, whence, across the river, he could see the Capitol building, was united in marriage to the daughter of the house.[30] Within the city the most imposing mansions were those of John Tayloe, at Eighteenth Street and New York Avenue, designed by Thornton, and even then rich in political and social memories,[31] and the handsome residence of John Van Ness, the work of Latrobe, built at a cost of sixty thousand dollars to make a fit setting for the charm and beauty of Marcia Burns, at the foot of Seventeenth Street, on the banks of the Potomac. From the doorstep the master and his guests could watch the ships from across the sea mooring to the docks of Alexandria, and the merchantmen, bound for the port of Georgetown, laden with the riches of the West Indies.

The tourist in the Washington of the Thirties did not have the opportunity for sight-seeing that means so much to the capital visitor of to-day. Aside from the Capitol and the White House, there were no public buildings of architectural distinction. The churches had “nothing about them to attract attention,” and while St. John’s on Lafayette Square was then summoning to worship, it did not at that time have the virtue of quaintness or the mellowness of historical memories. A visit to the Patent Office was customarily made, and most tourists found something to interest them in the museum of the State Department, with its portraits of the Indian chiefs who had visited Washington.[32] Occasionally the venturesome would ascend to the skylight of the Capitol to survey the straggling and dreary town from the height.[33] But always there was the dignified and stately white building of the lawmakers and of the Supreme Court, and thither tourists and citizens, men and women, daily found their way for the entertainment that never failed. Surrounded by its terraces, its well-kept lawns, its profusion of shrubbery, the visitor reached the entrance over its “beautifully gravelled walks,”[34] and entered the rotunda with its four Trumbull paintings of Revolutionary scenes, to be more impressed with the vacant spaces for four more, and the explanation that “Congress cannot decide on what artist to confer the honor.”[35] He would not fail to be delighted with the classic little Senate Chamber, redolent of the genius of Latrobe, and with the ease with which he might ignore the tiny gallery to find a hearty welcome on the floor. If a foreigner, he would be surprised to find a constant stream of fashionable ladies entering the chamber, crowding the Senators, accepting their seats, and attracting attention with their “waving plumes glittering with all the colors of the rainbow, and causing no little bustle.”[36] There he would see Van Buren or Calhoun in the chair, and on the floor he would want to have Webster, Clay, Benton, Forsyth, Preston, and Ewing pointed out. And perhaps, like Miss Martineau, he would leave with the impression that he had “seen no assembly of chosen men and no company of the high born, invested with the antique dignities of an antique realm, half so imposing to the imagination as this collection of stout-souled, full-grown, original men brought together on the ground of their supposed sufficiency, to work out the will of their diverse constituencies.”[37]

Having seen the Senate, he would seek the House of Representatives. Inquiring his way to the Strangers’ Gallery from the rotunda, he would be directed to a narrow stairs, and, on ascending, would find himself in a large room of many columns, the work of the architect of the Senate, looking down upon the seats of members arranged in concentric rows. Thence he would look down upon the bald head of the venerable Adams, the anæmic figure of Polk, the handsome form of Binney, and the ludicrous conglomeration of garbs representing the diverse tastes of the tailors of New York and the wilderness. If acquainted with one of the members, the visitor might be invited to the corridor behind the Speaker’s desk, fitted with seats and sofas drawn about the fireplace at either end, where members and their guests were wont to lounge and smoke.[38] Having satisfied himself with the chambers of the lawmakers, the visitor would want to see the tribunal of interpretation, said by some to have more power in determining the law of the land than the members of Congress, and to observe the famous Marshall on the Supreme Bench. Descending to the basement of the Capitol, immediately under the Senate, he would be shown into a small plain room with low ceiling, and “a certain cellar-like aspect which is not pleasant,”[39] and would probably be a little shocked at the figure of Justice, “a wooden figure with the eyes unfilleted, and grasping the scales like a groceress.”[40] On cushioned sofas, on either side of the room, he might, if a favorite orator were making an argument, see gayly dressed ladies—for, like the Senate Chamber, the court was one of the fashionable resorts of the Thirties. But there, he would find dignity and quiet and decorum, in striking contrast with most of the American courts of that generation.[41] If fortunate, he might listen to the reading of a decision by Marshall, and observe Butler, the Attorney-General, “his fingers playing among his papers, his thick black eyes and thin, tremulous lips for once fixed, his small face pale with thought,” contrasting with the more composed countenances of Clay and Webster.[42]

In the days of Jackson, comparatively few families had a permanent residence in Washington, and to an English visitor the town had the appearance of a watering-place.[43] Many Senators and Representatives considered it so impossible that they left their families at home.[44] Attorney-General Butler at first refused to consider a position in the Cabinet because “Mrs. Butler did not like the idea of bringing her daughters up here.”[45] When the wives and daughters did accompany the statesmen to the capital, it was the custom, with such as could afford to maintain an establishment, to take a house. These usually purchased, albeit many of the more desirable residences that could be leased were not for sale. An establishment could be maintained at a surprisingly low cost. Houses “suitable for the purposes of genteel people” could be had for from $50 to $300 a year, and even the large mansions, many of them standing and still occupied by fashionable families after almost a century, could be had for from $500 to $800 a year.[46] The servant problem did not exist, for domestics could be employed in abundance for $4 a month.[47] The Southerners, bringing their slaves with them, or buying them in the slave market at Alexandria, were able to entertain with a lavish display which set the pace socially, and made the Southern dominance easy. Foreigners were impressed, after hearing a senatorial orator rhapsodize in the Senate over the blessings of American liberty, to see him driven from the Capitol after his oration by one of his family slaves.[48] Others, not wishing to be burdened with a house, lived in the hotels, where other people’s slaves waited upon them. In these, too, the cost of living was low, the leading hostelries taking guests at $1.75 a day, $10 a week, or $35 a month. Transients sat down to tables fairly groaning with food, and with decanters of brandy and whiskey at their elbows, free at these prices. The guest, in his room, could order real Madeira for $3 a bottle, sherry, brandy, and gin for $1.50, and Jamaica rum for $1. The statesman, leaving his hotel quarters for the Senate or the House, could, if he wished, pause at the bar of the hostelry for a toddy of unadulterated liquor and lump sugar for twelve and a half cents.[49] But the greater part of the public men lived in boarding-houses, and the “Intelligencer,” the “Globe,” and the “Telegraph” filled columns, at the beginning of congressional sessions, with the enticing advertisements of the landladies. Some few of these houses, such as Dawson’s, associated with celebrities, live in history, but the majority were small, shabby, and uncomfortable. In these, however, romances sometimes blossomed, and the barmaid of one presided for a time over the establishment of a Cabinet member, and the landlady of another over the household of a Senator who aspired to the Presidency.[50]

Out of this life in hotels and boarding-houses, during the Jacksonian period, came the custom of statesmen forming themselves and families into “messes,” each “mess” having a table to itself and contracting with the landlady or landlord for a caterer. In this way the lawgivers were socially grouped according to their intellectual and financial standing, and some of these “messes” were famous in their day. Friendships were formed that survived all the vicissitudes of time and political change. One of these, known as the “Woodbury mess,” consisted of such a notable coterie of brilliancy and genius as Calhoun, John Randolph, Tazewell, Burges, and Verplanck. About the table many celebrated measures were conceived and the strategy of many a fight was planned.[51] According to the law of the “mess” a member might invite a guest only with the consent of all the others, and it was understood that a failure to get unanimous consent should not be resented. Occasionally the guests were permitted to contribute something to the usual outlay. Daniel Webster was glad enough to pay his way on such occasions. The venerable Adams, who had a comfortable home on F Street[52] and was not considered a notably social animal, delighted to join his most interesting colleagues at the boarding-house or hotel table. “I dined with John C. Calhoun at Dawson’s,” he recorded. “Mr. Preston, the other Senator from South Carolina, and his wife were there, and Mangum, Southard, Sprague of Maine. Company sat late at table and the conversation was chiefly upon politics. The company was, at this time, adversaries of the present Administration—most of them were adversaries to the last.”[53] Three days later: “Dined with Benj. Gorham and Edward Everett. Calhoun, Preston, Clay, and others were there.”[54] The next evening: “Dined with Colonel Robert B. Campbell of S.C. at his lodgings at Gadsby’s”; thirty people, including Calhoun and Preston, in attendance.[55]

It was inevitable that in a little city of twenty thousand, consisting in part of the cleverest men and women in the Republic, and devoted wholly to politics and society, celebrated sojourners should be fêted and lionized. Foreigners visiting America in the Thirties, and recording their impressions, have all paid tribute to the hospitality and brilliance of the capital, as compared with other and larger cities. The most famous of the visitors was Harriet Martineau, who arrived in the summer of 1834, in her thirty-second year, and in the full flush of her literary fame. Introduced to the President and the Senate leaders by the British Minister, it was the rumor at the time that six hundred people called upon her the day after her arrival.[56] “The drollest part of the whole,” wrote a lady of fashion, “is that these crowds, at least in Washington, go to see the lion and nothing else. I have not met with an individual, except Mrs. Seaton and her mother,[57] who have read any of her works, or know for what she is celebrated. Our most fashionable exclusive,[58] Mrs. Tayloe, said she intended to call, and asked what were the novels she had written, and if they were pretty. The gentlemen laugh at a woman’s writing on political economy. Not one of them has the least idea of her work.”[59] But the fluency of the lioness captivated the men. Among her constant visitors were Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Preston, and Justice Story. When she entered the Senate Chamber or the Supreme Court room, the leading men of the Nation left their seats to pay her homage. Calhoun’s “mess” gave her a dinner. Clay insisted that at Lexington she should occupy his house at Ashland, and that she should be the guest of his daughter in New Orleans. Calhoun assured her triumph in Charleston through letters to his friends. “No stranger except Lafayette ever received such universal and marked testimonies of regard,” wrote a sympathetic observer of her reception.[60] When Thomas Hamilton, the English writer, author of “Men and Manners in America,” reached Washington, a member of Congress escorted him, uninvited, to a ball on the evening of his arrival, with the assurance that the “intrusion would be welcome.” After passing “through a formidable array of introductions to distinguished persons, and after four hours of almost unbroken conversation, much of which could not be carried on without considerable expenditure of thought,” the weary tourist, at three o’clock in the morning, rejoiced to find himself “stretched in a comfortable bed at Gadsby’s.”[61] The experiences of Hamilton and Miss Martineau were not exceptional.

Nor were American literary celebrities left in doubt as to the cordiality of their welcome in the best social circles of the capital. The winter of 1833 found Washington Irving in Washington, where he was not unfamiliar with the leading houses, living “in the neighborhood of the McLanes” and making “use of a quiet corner and a little interval of leisure to exercise a long neglected pen.”[62] Despite the flood of invitations, he found time to report to Van Buren the attitude of McLane, and the hostilities, in select circles, to Kendall. “Washington Irving is here now,” wrote John Tyler to his daughter. “He stands at the head of our literati. His productions are numerous and well spoken of in Europe.”[63] Nor did society in those days lack their chronicler, for the first society letters from Washington were those of Nathaniel P. Willis written for the “New York Mirror.” At that time he was “a foppish, slender young man, with a profusion of curly light hair, and was always dressed in the height of fashion.”[64] The doors of the most exclusive homes were thrown open to this elegant youth, who, having traveled in Europe, affected a contempt for the masses. He became the faithful Pepys of the period, describing society people and events with liveliness and fancy, and imparting a strange interest to the most insignificant occurrences through the art of the telling. It was during this period, too, that the political letters of Washington correspondents were introduced into American journalism. Matthew L. Davis, famous as the “Genevese Traveller” of the London “Times,” and as the capital correspondent of the “New York Courier and Enquirer,” was for years the confidant and companion of Senators, Justices, and Presidents. And James Gordon Bennett, young and clever, appeared upon the scene to give a new and spicy touch to reporting with his Walpolean letters of wit, sarcasm, and personalities, for the New York paper of James Watson Webb. Along with the democratization of politics in the Thirties went a popularization of the methods of the press.

The amusements of the Washington of this time were, for the most part, crude. The theater featured players scarcely celebrated in their own day, and most of the plays presented have happily been long since forgotten. Even these were interspersed with songs and farce acts. In 1820 the Washington Theater had been built, and hither, at long intervals, came celebrated artists, but they came “like angels, few and far between.” From his rustic retreat in Maryland the elder Booth, half mad, all genius, occasionally emerged to curdle the blood of the statesmen and their families with his intense interpretations of the Shakesperian tragedies. From a Booth night Jackson was seldom absent. But of all the artists who played in the capital none created such a furor as Fanny Kemble. The elder statesmen were captivated by her art and charm. John Marshall and Justice Story were regular attendants, and the Chief Justice was lustily cheered as he entered the box. When she played Mrs. Haller in “The Stranger,” and the audience was moved to tears, “the Chief Justice shed them in common with the younger eyes.”[65] Inspiring audiences—those of the Thirties, with Marshall, Jackson, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun in the boxes or the pit. Great, not only in genius, but in their fresh capacity to enjoy, and when one of the most learned Justices of the Supreme Court could be moved to poesy in paying tribute to an actress’s art.[66]

But even with a Kemble playing, the haughty little country capital refused to abandon its parties, and we have the record of a New Yorker finding “Fanny Kemble in the Washington Theater like a canary bird in a mouse trap,” leaving the theater in the midst of a performance to attend “a delightful party at Mrs. Tayloe’s,” where he “met many distinguished people and all the Washington belles.”[67] In those days the theater-goer purchased his tickets between ten and one o’clock, and the doors were thrown open at six, with the curtain rising promptly at seven. For the usual performances the boxes were seventy-five cents, the pit twenty-five. When the rain converted the streets into ribbons of sticky black mud, or the bitter cold made an invitation to the people from the “magnificent distances” unprofitable, the papers would announce a postponement, with an explanation.[68] The pleasure-seekers were not restricted, however, to the players of the Washington Theater, and occasionally a show would appear advertising “the Great Anaconda of Java,” and the “Boa Constrictor of Ceylon,” both “so docile that the most timid lady or child may view them with safety and pleasure.”[69] Such were the amusements offered for the entertainment of Jackson, Webster, Marshall, Calhoun, and Clay.

But for the men there were other forms of amusement, popular in their day. The racing on the National Course near the city made it difficult to maintain a quorum in Congress, and the statesmen mounted their horses to ride to the track to cheer their favorites and to bet their money. Even the President entered his horses and lost heavily on his wagers. There Jackson and a goodly portion of the Cabinet, and a formidable sprinkling of the leaders of the Opposition from Clay to Letcher, might be seen backing their judgment as to horseflesh with their purses. And when it was not horse-racing, it was cockfighting, with the President entering his own birds from the Hermitage, and riding with his friends to Bladensburg to witness the humiliation of his entries. It was a day of gambling, when statesmen, whose names children are now taught to reverence, played for heavy stakes for days and nights at a time, with Clay and Poindexter losing fortunes, and an occasional victim of the lure blowing out his brains. While most of the celebrities played in private houses, they could, if they preferred, find the notorious gambling-houses along the Avenue. Along with racing, cockfighting, and gambling went heavy drinking. “Since I have been here,” wrote Horace Binney, after two years in Congress, “one man, an habitual drunkard, blew out his brains; two have died notorious drunkards, and one of them shamefully immoral. The honors are given to all, with equal eulogy and ceremonial.”[70] The statesman of the Thirties who did not drink heavily was a rarity. Just as whiskey, brandy, gin, and wine were served in great decanters on the tables at hotels, “at the boarding-houses every guest had his bottle or interest in a bottle.”[71] On the way to the Capitol, the statesman could quench his thirst at numerous bars—and often did. And in the basement of the Capitol building whiskey could be had. Never in American history have so many promising careers been wrecked by drunkenness as during the third decade. Frequently national celebrities would appear upon the floor of the House or Senate in a state of intoxication, and on at least one occasion the greater part of the house was hilariously drunk.[72] Thus, despite the miry streets, the drabness and rusticity, the Washington of the Jacksonian period was easily the gayest, the most brilliant and dissipated community in the country. A penetrating observer found, in its recklessness and extravagance, a striking similarity to the spirit of the eighteenth century in England, as portrayed in Thackeray’s “Humorists,” with “laxity of morals and the coolest disregard possible.”[73] Its superior social charm was due to the fact that it was “the only place in the Union where people consider it necessary to be agreeable—where pleasing, as in the Old World, becomes a sort of business, and the enjoyments of social intercourse enter into the habitual calculations of every one.”[74] A goodly portion of the women of good society, and other sojourners, were apt to contemplate a Washington season as “a sort of annual lark,” which offered the most promising solution of the problem of a weary winter in the country. Willis explained the attractions of the country capital on the ground that “the great deficiency in all our cities, the company of highly cultivated and superior men, is here supplied.”[75] Even the supercilious and scolding Captain Marryat of England found it “an agreeable city, full of pleasant, clever people, who come here to amuse and be amused,” and he observed “much more usage du monde and Continental ease than in any other parts of the States.”[76]

After spending several crowded weeks in the social and political heart of the town, Harriet Martineau concluded that, while life there would be “dreary” to women who loved domesticity, “persons who love dissipation, who love to watch the game of politics, and those who make a study of strong minds under strong excitement, like a season in Washington.”[77] Ludicrous as it was in its incongruities, the little city bravely assumed the pose of a real capital, plumed itself on the superiority of its society, and made much of the fashions. At the crowded receptions the wondering visitor might very easily be jostled against Webster or Sam Houston, dandies like Willis or frontiersmen in boots and soiled linen, flirtatious belles and matrons, beauties and beasts. But there were many leaders of fashion who imitated the frivolities of European capitals, ordered their dresses from Paris or London, and regularly summoned coiffeurs to their homes to dress their hair for balls and receptions.[78] When Congress was in session fashionable women from every section flocked to the seat of government bringing their daughters for a Washington season. One of the resident society leaders, commenting on their coming, dolefully complained that they were “coming in such ton and expensive fashions, that the poor citizens cannot pretend to vie with them and absolutely shrink into insignificance.”[79] The shops made much of their Paris finery. Mrs. Coursault announced “to the ladies of the metropolis that she has just returned from Paris with a most splendid assortment of millinery and goods, to be seen at the store of Mrs. Lamplier on the Avenue.”[80] Mr. Palmieri advertised that he had “just received from Paris an elegant assortment of caps and pelerines direct from Mademoiselle Minette’s, the first Milliner of Paris, and a beautiful assortment of satin shoes.”[81] Another announced “French dresses for balls,” and still another, “the arrival from Paris of an elegant assortment of French jewelry.”

The daily life of the fashionable ladies of the time began with breakfast at nine, when they amused themselves by comparing the conflicting descriptions of scenes they had witnessed the day before in the “Intelligencer” and the “Globe.” By eleven they were apt to be on their way to the Capitol to enliven the solemnity of the Senate Chamber or the Supreme Court, unless a neglected call, an appointment with an artist, or an excursion interfered. Dinner was served from four to six, and soon afterwards milady retired to her boudoir to dress for some ball, rout, levee, or masquerade. Long drives through the mud—late hours with the breaking dawn greeting her return—and the weary lady would relax and warm awhile at the drawing-room fire before retiring for the night.[82] Contrary to the popular belief, there was much social brilliance during the Jackson Administrations. Nor is the prevailing impression that all the elegance, cleverness, and charm was confined to the drawing-rooms of the Whig aristocracy borne out by the facts. In truth, among the women of the Jacksonian circle there were two or three who were easily superior to the best the Whigs could offer, in intellect, culture, and beauty. Such was the bigotry of the times that there was a tendency for society to segregate into camps, but it was impossible to draw the party line on a number of the fascinating and brilliant women who presided over the households of Jacksonian Senators and Cabinet Ministers. While the Whigs generally remained severely aloof from the house of the President, they were unable to resist the invitations of the President’s friends.

Among all the women of the period none approached Mrs. Edward Livingston in brilliance, charm, and elegance, nor did any of the ladies of the Whig circle, not even Mrs. Tayloe, who wondered if Miss Martineau’s novels were “pretty,” approach her in the lavishness and taste of her dinners and parties. “Mrs. Livingston takes the lead in the fashionable world,” wrote Mrs. Smith, who found it hard to concede the virtues of the Jacksonians.[83] “I know that Mr. Livingston gives elegant dinners and his wines are the best in the city,” recorded a press correspondent of the time.[84] “We dined by invitation with Mr. Secretary Livingston,” wrote Justice Story, an enemy of the Jacksonians. “The dinner was superb and unequalled by anything I have seen in Washington except at some of the foreign ministers’, and was served exclusively in the French style.”[85] This captivating woman, of French descent, had known a childhood of romance in a marble palace by the sea in St. Domingo, had miraculously escaped the servile insurrection, and reached New Orleans to become the wife of Livingston. Wonderfully vivacious, eloquent in conversation, intelligently interested in politics, steeped in the literature of the ages, witty and spirited, her home in Lafayette Square more nearly resembled a salon than anything the capital has ever known. Even the most bigoted Whigs of the day were glad to lay aside their partisanship at her threshold, and leaders, still flushed with a verbal duel in the Senate, smiled amicably upon each other in her drawing-room. Here one might meet John Marshall, Joseph Story, and Bushrod Washington of the Supreme Court, Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Wirt, or Randolph. About her, too, she gathered a coterie of cultured women, and Mrs. John Quincy Adams and Mrs. Andrew Stevenson came and went in the house on the Square with as little ceremony as members of the household. The charm of the house was enhanced by the exquisite Cora, the daughter, who reigned as the belle and toast of the town until her marriage, captivating, among others, the impressionable young Josiah Quincy, who thought her “undoubtedly the greatest belle in the U.S.,” and, if not “transcendently handsome,” possessed of a “fine figure, a pretty face.” Finding it “the height of the ton to be her admirer,” the young Bostonian followed the fashion with all his heart.[86]

Intimately identified with Mrs. Livingston was Mrs. Stevenson, to whom the years had been kind since the days when, as Sally Coles, she was a protégée of Dolly Madison.[87] At this time she was the wife of the Jacksonian Speaker of the House, soon to become the hostess of the American Legation in London, and to witness, in that rôle, the coronation of Victoria. Strikingly handsome, tall and commanding, she resembled her friend in an ineffable graciousness of manner and an extraordinary conversational ability. Among the most famous hostesses of the Jacksonian circle were Mrs. Louis McLane, “a gay, frank, communicative woman” whose “self-complacence is united with so much good humor in others that it is not offensive,” who gave popular weekly dinners and parties;[88] Mrs. Levi Woodbury, beautiful of form and feature, who resembled Dolly Madison in her suavity, ease of manner, and infinite tact, and presided over her many dinners and dances with dignity and grace, and made a practice of featuring the most dashing belles of Baltimore, Alexandria, and Georgetown;[89] and Mrs. John Forsyth, more conventional and retiring than the others, but yielding to none in culture and elegance, and having a certain advantage in her “group of graces.”[90] Among the hostesses of the Opposition, Mrs. Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, a woman of grace and beauty, but lacking in the intellectual sparkle of Mrs. Livingston, maintained the most elegant establishment.

But these were only the most brilliant leaders, for the Jacksonian period was one of hectic social activity, with foreign ministers and Cabinet members entertaining constantly and lavishly, and the official underlings desperately bent on a ruinous and riotous imitation. It was a day of much pretense and pose, of ceremonious intercourse, and it was not easy to determine from the swallow-tails and the buff waistcoats whether the wearer were a Senator or a clerk.[91] It was a conversational period, and seldom has the American capital contained at one time so many excellent talkers. Nor was the talk mere chat and gossip. Even the women, especially from the South, were clever conversationalists, able keenly to discuss the politics of the day and the measures of the hour.[92] Even the busiest and greatest party leaders had the time and inclination for calls on bright women when they could enjoy the Johnsonian luxury of having their talk out. We have a picture of Clay “sitting upright on the sofa, with a snuff box ever in his hand,” discoursing “for many hours in his even, soft, deliberative tone”; of Webster, “leaning back at his ease, telling stories, cracking jokes, shaking the sofa with burst after burst of laughter, or smoothly discoursing to the perfect felicity of the logical part of one’s constitution”; of Calhoun, the “cast iron man,” who “looked as if he had never been born,” no longer capable of mental relaxation, meeting men and haranguing them by the fireside as in the Senate; of Justice Story, talking gushingly for hours, “his face all the while, notwithstanding his gray hair, showing all the nobility and ingenuousness of a child’s.”[93] The talk about the firesides and at the receptions, that were given over entirely to conversation, was by no means confined to art, eloquence, and poetry, for the Mother Grundys of gossip were numerous among the women seeking to amuse and be amused. There were personalities as well as personages in the years that Jackson directed a triumphant party and Clay led a brilliant and militant opposition.[94] The little town of twenty thousand was not so large that the ladies could not know, from observation or deduction, when Adams dined with Calhoun, when Webster called on Mrs. Livingston, and what Mrs. Tayloe served her guests at her last reception.

“Did you have candied oranges at Mrs. Woodbury’s?” asked a lady who had dined with Mrs. Cass, of a friend who had dined with the wife of the Secretary of the Navy.

“No.”

“Then they had candied oranges at the Attorney-General’s,” was the deduction.

“How do you know?”

“Oh, as we were on the way, I saw a dish carried; and as we had none at Cass’s, I knew they were either for the Woodburys or the Attorney-General’s.”[95]

It was the golden age of gallantry as well as gossip, some flirtatious, some courtly. If the admirer of John Forsyth’s daughter proposed in a Valentine Day verse[96] throbbing with adolescent passion, the more staid and sober-minded Francis Scott Key wrote, in a fine hand, religious hymns for the pleasure of her mother.[97]

The evening parties were the most popular form of entertainment, and the hostesses of the Cabinet circle set the pace. The invitations were sent out nine days in advance. Because of the exigencies of politics, and the exactions of an awakened “Democracy,” these could be neither small nor exclusive in character, and from seven to nine hundred invitations were usually extended. Between nine and ten o’clock all the apartments would be thrown open. The muddy streets in front would be congested with carriages. The host and hostess, standing in the drawing-room, would receive their guests, and then the more serious would withdraw to quiet corners for conversation, the gay and frivolous would swing into the dance, and the devotees of chance would seek and find a remote corner for cards. Servants would gingerly thread their way through the throng with light refreshments until eleven o’clock when an elaborate supper would be served. By three o’clock the company would begin to retire, and usually, at daybreak, the lights would be extinguished.[98]

It was a day of social novelties. Ice-cream as a refreshment first made its appearance in the country capital at the home of the widow of Alexander Hamilton. Introduced at the White House immediately afterwards by Jackson, it took society by storm,[99] and Kinchy, the confectioner on the Avenue, who had a monopoly on ice-cream and ices, became as indispensable socially as the chef and the fiddler.[100] Of the dances, the most popular was the waltz, introduced two years before Jackson’s inauguration, and, considered at first of questionable modesty, it soon won its way, and the matrons found it as alluring as the débutantes. Even then there were censorious people to see in the dreamy glide an example of the moral degeneracy of the age.[101] To accentuate their pessimism, the crowds were invariably so dense that the dancers could scarcely move, reminding an amused Kentuckian “of a Kentucky fight when the crowd draws the circle so close that the combatants have no room to use their limbs.” But despite the crowded quarters, the twenty-four fiddlers in a row bravely sought “by dint of loud music to put the amateurs in motion,” until they jumped “up and down in a hole, and nobody sees more of them than their heads.”[102] Queer, conglomerate crowds packed the balls and receptions of men in public life, forced to accept official society as they found it, and if members of Congress appeared at the dance in their morning habiliments and in unpolished boots, in worsted stockings and in garments fashioned by a backwoods tailor, they were not conspicuous.[103] All, or most, entered with zest into the social activities of the time. On the night of a big ball “the rolling of carriages sounded like continual peals of thunder, or roaring of the wind.” In the dark, dismal streets, the lamps on the vehicles alone were visible, and these, moving rapidly in the blackness, “appeared like brilliant meteors in the air.”[104] Sometimes, in the case of the more pretentious entertainers, like the foreign ministers, the streets in front of the houses were light as day from the line of flaming torches along the pavement. Fox, the British Minister, a relative of the great orator; Baron von Roenne, the Prussian, a brilliant jurist and publicist; and Baron Bodisco, the Russian, made great displays of equipages and appointments, and were noted for their wines and exotic entertainments. At the legations of Fox and Bodisco, great sums passed over the card table, the most famous statesmen of the time among the players, and the British Minister so seldom saw the sun that on the occasion of a funeral, while seated beside the wife of the Spanish Minister, he turned a puzzled look upon her with the comment, “How strange we all look by daylight!” Both ministers contributed not a little to the gayety of gossip, Bodisco, by his squat ugliness and courtliness, and Fox, by his whimsical refusal at dinners to go to the table until the dishes had cooled.[105] During the period the most celebrated functions were given at Carusi’s Assembly rooms which could accommodate great numbers. Leaders of fashion and the socially ambitious of Baltimore and Alexandria, wishing to make an impression in introducing a débutante or to repay social obligations, found these rooms suited to their purpose. It was in these rooms that Washington society had its first presentation of the “Barber of Seville,” and “John of Paris” in the winter of 1833.[106] The same year a Washington birthday party was given there, both rooms thrown open, “decorated and illuminated and with a band in each,” and diplomats admitted without an entrance fee.[107] Hither all the ladies of the capital, unfamiliar with the dances, or wishing to learn new ones, found their way to learn from the popular Louis, only the inclemency of the weather and the impossible mire of the streets interfering with his profits.[108] Thus the fashionables of the Thirties managed to create the illusion of living in the great world, chattering in the Senate, bustling into the Supreme Court chamber, dining, dancing, flirting, gossiping, attending the theater to see a Booth or a Kemble, going to the circus to see the animals fed at eight o’clock, “in the presence of the audience,”[109] or riding to the National Course near town to witness the races, or attending an exhibit of the paintings of John G. Chapman on the Avenue.[110] Only on Sundays did the capital become quiet and sedate, for, after a pious morning pilgrimage to church, the ladies carrying a hymn or a prayer book and leaning on the arms of their escorts, they retired to the seclusion of their homes and the streets were deserted or given over to the promenades of the colored folks.[111]

In this Washington, where men were feverishly fighting for place and prestige, and women were engaged in a hectic struggle for social leadership, Death lurked always, for a less healthful spot could not easily have been found. Built originally in a swamp reeking with malaria, surrounded with morasses, and with not a few of these in the heart of the town, with sanitation poor and water wretched, the residents were constantly menaced by disease. With the gradual disappearance of the forests immediately surrounding it, the conditions became worse. The death-rate was as high as one in fifty-three, with August claiming the heaviest toll from fevers.[112] Between the fevers of the summers and the influenza of the winters, the residents had to be constantly on guard. Whiskey and quinine were taken with the regularity of bread and meat, and tourists were wont to sit late at their quarters “sipping gently a medicine which the doctors of the capital thought destructive of the influenza germs which were lying in wait for the unwary.”[113] Fevers, pneumonia, influenza, and the cholera made the swampy capital of the Thirties as profitable to the doctors as to the coachmen.

Such, in brief, was the scene of the most dramatic and significant political battles that were staged in America between the foundation of the Republic and the Administration of Woodrow Wilson. Such was the day-by-day life of the men, now steel engravings, who played the leading rôles. And by bearing in mind the sordidness and pettiness of the environment, and of the men and women with whom they daily and nightly gossiped and dined and danced, it may be less of a shock to discover, in the unfolding of the story of these eight crowded years, that even the greatest were men of moral weaknesses and limitations.

CHAPTER II
THE RISING OF THE MASSES

I

With the election of 1828 a new era dawned in American politics. Up to this time the election of Presidents and the determination of policies had been a matter of manipulation among the congressional politicians. The possessors of property and the aristocrats of intellect had been the only classes with whom the politicians had concerned themselves. The Virginia Dynasty and the Secretarial Succession died on the day that the rising of the masses raised to the Presidency a man who had never served in the Cabinet, distinguished himself in the Congress, or appealed to the “aristocracy of intellect and culture.” To the politicians, office-holders, and society leaders in Washington, the election of Andrew Jackson was something more than a shock—it was an affront. In the campaign he had been opposed by two thirds of the newspapers, four fifths of the preachers, practically all the manufacturers, and seven eighths of the banking capital. Respectability sternly set itself against the presumptuous ambitions of what it conceived to be a rough, illiterate representative of the “mob.”

Four years before, the stage had been set for a bitter battle. The election of Adams, through the support of Clay, followed by the appointment of the latter to the first place in the Cabinet, had carried the suspicion of a bargain, and this suspicion had crystallized into a firm conviction with a large portion of the people. Throughout the Adams Administration, its enemies—and they were legion—harped constantly upon the “bargain,” angering the crabbed Adams, and stinging Clay to furious denunciation, and this but served to intensify the bitterness of their foes.

The result was the most scurrilous campaign of vilification the country had known. A new school of politicians, forerunners of the astute and none too scrupulous managers of later days, sprang up to direct the fight for the grim old warrior of the Hermitage, and the fact that Clay took personal charge of the campaign for Adams was turned with telling force against his chief. Early in the campaign we find the satirical and caustic Isaac Hill, of the “New Hampshire Patriot,” of whom we shall hear much, writing that “Clay is managing Adams’s campaign, not like a statesman of the Cabinet, but like a shyster, pettifogging in a bastard suit before a country squire.” And lest the motive for Clay’s interest escape his readers, we find Hill writing again: “This is Mr. Clay’s fight. The country has him on trial for bribery, and having no defense, he accuses the prosecutor.”

This reference to the accusation of the prosecutor was inspired by the outrageous calumny that was heaped upon the head of Jackson. He was pictured as a usurper, an adulterer, a gambler, a cockfighter, a brawler, a drunkard, and a murderer. The good name of Mrs. Jackson, one of the purest of women, was wantonly maligned; and in the drawing-rooms of the intellectually elect she was not spared by the ladies who were shocked at the “vulgarity” of her husband. The Adams organs stooped to the attack, and while the “National Intelligencer,” under the editorship of Joseph Gales, refused thus to pollute its columns, the “National Journal,” under the editorial management of Peter Force, and specially favored by the Adams Administration, specialized on the slander of an excellent woman. A little later an attempt was made to justify the infamy of this proceeding by charging that Mrs. Adams had been assailed, but the extent of the assault was the charge that she was an English woman with little sympathy for American institutions.

While history has accepted Adams’s indignant denial of the charge that he had personally sanctioned the attack on Mrs. Jackson, the National Central Committee, in charge of his campaign, was busily engaged in the dissemination of the putrid literature. This has been thoroughly established by the testimony of Thurlow Weed, editor of the “Albany Journal,” who refused to degrade himself by its circulation. When, early in August, before the election in November, he received “two large drygoods boxes” of the pamphlets, with a letter from the National Committee advising him that they contained “valuable campaign documents,” with the request that he attend to their circulation “throughout the western counties of the State,” he promptly “secured the boxes with additional nails and placed them under lock and key.” And when the National Committee learned that they were not being distributed, and sent a representative to protest against his inactivity, he frankly informed the emissary that “not a copy had been seen or would be seen by an elector until the polls had closed.” For this he was denounced in New York and Boston as “a traitor to the Administration,” but the sagacious politician of Albany stoutly maintained that he “would not permit a lady whose life had been blameless to be dragged forth into the arena of politics.”[114]

The charge of murder lodged against Jackson, by editor, hack-writer, and cartoonist, had reference to his execution of Arbuthnot, two Indian chiefs, and seven of his soldiers, and to his duel with Dickinson. Pictures of the coffins of the soldiers were printed on circulars and distributed from farmhouse to farmhouse in New England.[115] This gave Hill an opportunity to tickle Jackson with a rejoinder which was copied from the “New Hampshire Patriot” into all the Jackson papers of the country: “Pshaw! Why don’t you tell the whole truth? On the 8th of January, 1815, he murdered in the coldest kind of cold blood 1500 British soldiers for merely trying to get into New Orleans in search of Booty and Beauty.”

But all the scurrility of the campaign cannot be justly charged to the enemies of Jackson. His friends were almost as offensive. Adams had bribed Clay. He had bought the Presidency. While abroad he had pandered to the sensuality of the Russian Court. He was stingy, undemocratic, an enemy of American institutions, bent on the destruction of the people’s liberties. He was an aristocrat, and had squandered the people’s money in lavishly furnishing the East Room of the White House after the fashion of the homes of kings. He had even purchased a billiard table for the home of the President!

And so it went on for weeks and months—the ordinary slanders of a present-day municipal campaign. A foreigner traveling through the country during the summer and autumn of 1828 would have thought the election of Adams certain. In the marts, the counting-rooms, and the drawing-rooms, he would have found but one opinion; but the astute Adams sensed the coming disaster and recorded his misgivings in his diary. The temperamental Clay was depressed one day, to be exultant the next. But the new school of political leadership, managing the fight for Jackson, and devoting itself assiduously to the newly enfranchised “mob” in the highways and the byways, had no notion of defeat. The “hurrah for Jackson” which shocked the sedate, unaccustomed to such noisy acclaim of a presidential aspirant, and disgusted the “best people,” was music to the ears of these modern politicians, who had carefully calculated upon the strength of the “mob.” Their confidence was not misplaced. The result was an upheaval. Adams, Clay, Federalism, the Virginia Dynasty, the Secretarial Succession, were brushed aside by the rush of the cheering masses bearing their hero to the White House. History has decided that in this campaign “the people first assumed control of the governmental machinery which had been held in trust for them since 1789”; and that “the party and Administration which then came into power was the first in our history which represented the people without restriction, and with all the faults of the people.”[116]

II

The Administration circle in Washington was deeply depressed by the result, and society looked forward to the reign of the barbarians with mingled feelings of mirth and abhorrence. Although not unprepared for the defeat, the bitter Adams, meditating on his political blunders, recorded that “some think I have suffered for not turning my enemies out of office, particularly the Postmaster-General.”[117] That John McLean, the official referred to, had been disloyal to his chief was common knowledge. The first reaction to defeat from the followers of the Adams Administration was toward laughter, levity, extravagant manifestation of cynical gayety, with an all too noticeable thawing of the frigidity of White House ceremonies. The dying régime put on its best bib and tucker in a hectic and hysterical demonstration of social hilarity. But this first reaction was short-lived. Very soon thereafter callers at Clay’s home were “shocked at the alteration of his looks,” and found him “much thinner, very pale, his eyes sunk in his head and his countenance sad and melancholy.”[118] Mr. Rush (Secretary of the Treasury) was soon “alarmingly ill”—the “first symptoms of disease was altogether in the head.” Mr. Southard (Secretary of the Navy) was confined to his room for three weeks. William Wirt (Attorney-General) suffered two attacks of vertigo, “followed by a loss of the sense of motion.” General Porter (Secretary of War) “was almost blind from inflammation of the eyes and went to his office with two blisters, one behind each ear.” Even the cold-blooded Adams, who appeared “in fine spirits,” was soon “so feeble as to be obliged to relinquish his long walks and to substitute rides on horseback.”[119] A social intimate of the leaders swept from power by the rising of the masses mournfully recorded that they would retire to private life “with blasted hopes, injured health, impaired or ruined fortunes, imbittered tempers, and probably a total inability to enjoy the remnant of their lives.”[120]

On none did the blow fall with such crushing force as on the proud-spirited Clay. As the repudiated régime was approaching the end, the presiding genius of one of the favorite Administration drawing-rooms met him at a reception.

“What ails your heart?” he asked.

“Can it be otherwise than sad when I think what a good friend I am about to lose?”

For a moment he held her hand without speaking, his eyes “filled with tears.”

“We must not think of this or talk of such things now,” he said. And with that he relinquished her hand, “drew out his handkerchief, turned away his head and wiped his eyes, then pushed into the crowd and talked and smiled as if his heart were light and easy.”[121]

On February 25th this lady made another poignant note: “Mr. Clay’s furniture is to be sold this week.”

Thus the old régime died hard, and in bitterness.

III

But “The King is dead—long live the King”—was the mood of the strange crowds in the streets of the capital—unusual creatures from the out-of-the-way places to whom the city was not accustomed. Never before had the inaugural ceremonies attracted the people of the farms and the villages, from every nook and corner. Long before the 4th of March the city swarmed with all sorts and conditions, the rustic, the rural politician, the adventurer, along with politicians of influence and repute. They overflowed the city, filled all the hotels and rooming-houses, spread out to Georgetown, descended on Alexandria.[122] Webster, writing to his brother toward the close of February, said: “I have never seen such a crowd before. Persons have come five hundred miles to see General Jackson, and they really seem to think that the country has been rescued from some dreadful danger.”[123] What they really thought was that they had come into their own. They hastened to “their capital,” to witness the inauguration of “their President,” and, in many instances, in the hope of entering into their reward.

Out of the maze of incomprehensible contradictions, we may gather that Jackson disappointed many of the faithful, who had planned a spectacular entrance to the capital, by entering quietly and unannounced in the early morning. Elaborate preparations had been made, a pompous reception committee of the socially elect and politically pure had been organized, headed by John P. Van Ness, the dean of society and husband of the exquisite Marcia Burns, and plans had been perfected for leading a great throng into the country to meet and escort him to the accompaniment of gun fire into the city. Reaching the capital four hours before he was expected,[124] he went directly to Gadsby’s where he took lodging.[125]

But the committee was not to be wholly deprived of its prerogatives. The moment the news reached it and the crowds, the celebration began. “I hear cannon firing, drums beating, and hurrahing. I really cannot write, so adieu for the present,” wrote Mrs. Smith. The mob surged down the Avenue to the hostelry famous for its whiskey, brandy, game, and the imposing ceremony of the host, packed the streets and fought for the privilege of entering and shaking the hand of the man of the hour. From the moment of his arrival until he took the oath of office he was accessible to the most humble and obscure. Importuned and petitioned by ambitious politicians, the old man courteously heard them all, to the last man, and, according to all contemporaries, kept his own counsel as to prospective appointments. Even as late as March 2d, the observant Webster wrote his brother that the President-to-be was close-mouthed, and predicted that there would be few removals.[126] The crafty Isaac Hill, of the “New Hampshire Patriot,” had arrived early upon the scene, and we are indebted to him for a side-light on Jackson’s methods and mood, and the scenes about the hotel. Almost daily this persistent aspirant for place wormed his way into the presence of the source of all patronage. Jackson was cordial, remembered, quoted, laughed about witticisms in Hill’s paper during the campaign, but said “little about the future except in a general way.” There was cruel hilarity in that crowded room at Gadsby’s over the maneuvers of the office-holders to retain their places. A “funny story” was told of Wirt writing to Monroe “soliciting his influence with the General to keep him on the pay roll.”[127] An old translator of twenty years’ experience in the State Department had, in conversation, expressed a curiosity to know where a Democrat could be found to translate diplomatic French, and this was jokingly related to Jackson. “Oh, just tell him,” said the General, “that if necessary I can bring Planche’s whole Creole Battalion up here. Those French fellows, you know, who helped to defend New Orleans against the Red Coats that had just made all the translators here take to the woods for their lives.” This flare of spirit gratified and encouraged the spoilsmen. “Good, wasn’t it?” Hill wrote to his assistant in Concord. “Besides his courage and truth, Old Hickory has a fund of humor in his make-up, but most of his sallies, like the above, are likely to be a little bit cruel.”

About the time that Hill was writing to his assistant editor, he was meeting daily, at the home of Obadiah B. Brown, a preacher-politician, where Amos Kendall, a Kentucky editor, then obscure, but destined to become the master mind of the Administration, was holding forth, and organizing a number of fellow journalists who had been useful in the campaign, to compel recognition. There, in the home of the jovial preacher, Kendall and Hill were making common cause with the smiling Major M. M. Noah of New York, Nathaniel Green of Massachusetts, and the quiet but sagacious Gideon Welles of Connecticut. More political history was being made in the humble abode of Brown than in the crowded, smoke-laden room at Gadsby’s.[128] The Kentucky editor does not seem to have encountered the same reticence in Jackson that Hill had found. After his first call at Gadsby’s, we find him writing his wife: “He expressed his regards for me and his disposition to serve me, in strong terms.” And a few days later, after his second call, he writes: “The other day I had a long conversation with General Jackson. At the close of it, after saying many flattering things of my capacity, character, etc., he observed, ‘I told one of my friends that you were fit for the head of a department, and I shall put you as near the head as possible.’”[129]

It is significant of the change of the times that, while the practical politicians of the new school were encouraged and jubilant, the seasoned veterans of political battle-fields were discouraged and not a little disgruntled. Amusing tales of the discomfiture of these were gayly carried to the politicians of the Opposition in the salon of Mrs. Smith, who recorded, toward the close of February, that “every one thinks there is great confusion and difficulty, mortification and disappointment at the Wigwam, as they call the General’s lodgings. Mr. Woodbury[130] looks glum, as well as several other disappointed expectants.”[131]

The battle royal occurred in the selection of the Cabinet. The one principle on which Jackson was determined was the exclusion from his Cabinet table of any aspirant for the succession. He had been profoundly impressed by the demoralizing effect of the intrigues of the presidential candidates in the Cabinet of Monroe.[132] This, however, did not deter the two powerful men of the party, Calhoun and Van Buren, from exerting themselves to pack the Cabinet with men favorable to their respective aspirations for the chief magistracy. Of the latter’s plans the President-elect knew nothing. He had probably decided to ask the clever New York politician to accept the portfolio of State before leaving the Hermitage. He had been intimate with Van Buren in the Senate; had been impressed with his tact, diplomacy, and ability, and especially with his genius in the creation, consolidation, and drilling of a party, and in formulating its policies. He was not unmindful of the part the “Red Fox”[133] had played in his nomination and election. In view of all the conditions the selection of Van Buren was logical and inevitable.[134] It was just as inevitable that Calhoun, the Vice-President, should be hostile to the choice. Primarily, we may be sure, the South Carolinian recognized in the suave and subtle New Yorker a dangerous rival for the succession. Whether he was even that early interested in strengthening the South at the expense of the North is not so certain. However that may be, he appeared in the throng of wire-pulling politicians at Gadsby’s, earnestly urging that Senator Tazewell of Virginia should be placed at the head of the Cabinet. This able statesman but a little time before had maintained close political relations with Van Buren,[135] but he was an extreme State-Rights advocate, entirely satisfactory to Calhoun. During the half-concealed struggle over the Cabinet, Van Buren, who had been elected Governor of New York and was staying in Albany, was well served in Washington by James A. Hamilton, whose mission was to keep in intimate touch with events and inform the New Yorker of all developments. Thus it happened that Hamilton was with Jackson when, at ten o’clock one morning, Calhoun called for a conference with the President-elect. “I know what it is about,” said Jackson to Van Buren’s agent. “He cannot succeed. I wish you to remain until he leaves.” It was during this conference, the last he ever had with the President on patronage matters, that Calhoun made his final stand for Tazewell, or against Van Buren. With great solemnity he urged the appointment of the Virginian, largely because of “his great knowledge and wisdom,” but partly on the ground that it would assure the support of Virginia for the Administration. It is doubtful whether, up to this time, Calhoun had appreciated the political sagacity of the man with whom he dealt. Jackson listened to his importunity with courteous attention, but did not commit himself. One suggestion he made, however, which must have warned the great Carolinian that his motives were divined. When Calhoun stressed the importance of cultivating Virginia, Jackson blandly inquired whether it would not be useful to have the support of New York. Calhoun’s reply disclosed his animus against the “Little Magician.” The appointment of Clinton, had he lived, might have guaranteed the support of the Empire State, but the selection of no other citizen of that State would. He left, no doubt with the feeling that he had failed in his mission, and never again approached Jackson on the subject of appointments. And the moment he left, a detailed story of the conference was given to Hamilton, who promptly sent it to his chief in Albany.[136]

When Jackson reached the capital he had made no decision as to the Treasury, and there he was to be buffeted about by many cross-currents. Van Buren, who was socially and politically intimate with Louis McLane of Delaware, was anxious that he should be named for the post, and the gentleman himself was on the ground ready to respond to the summons that failed to come. The political tacticians at Gadsby’s reached the decision early that the place should be awarded to Pennsylvania, and Samuel D. Ingham, who had rushed to Washington as a representative of one of the factions, with an application for a subordinate position in the Treasury, became an active candidate for the more important honor. This was displeasing to Jackson, who favored Henry Baldwin, but in this preference he was unable to secure any important support among his advisers.[137] Strangely enough, powerful influences almost immediately rushed to the support of the man who would have been delighted with a comparatively obscure position. The Pennsylvania congressional delegation, on which he had served for years, unanimously endorsed him. Stranger still, Calhoun, with whom Jackson at this juncture had no desire to break, became an ardent supporter of his candidacy. He had served in the House of Representatives many years before with the mediocre Pennsylvanian, and had found in him one of his most faithful idolaters. That his influence, and the desire to recognize him in the making of the Cabinet, was the determining factor, was the consensus of opinion at the time.

But here again appeared cross-currents difficult to understand. South Carolina, usually so subservient to the wishes of her great statesman, but now cool toward him, was uncompromisingly hostile to his favorite for the Treasury. The other leading members of the South Carolina delegation, known to be opposed to Ingham and to prefer McLane to him, had hesitated from motives of delicacy to make their views known to Jackson; and Van Buren’s favorite for the position authorized Hamilton, Van Buren’s emissary, to notify the General of their willingness to call if their opinion was wanted.[138] On February 17th, the Carolinians, including Senator Hayne, McDuffie, Hamilton, Archer, and Drayton, filed into the throne room at Gadsby’s, and Hamilton, who acted as spokesman, began by tactfully commending the selection of Van Buren, and then turned to the Treasury. Before he could announce his candidate, Jackson interrupted with the announcement that Ingham had been chosen. Nothing daunted, Hamilton suggested as a better choice the brilliant Langdon Cheves of South Carolina. “Impossible,” snapped the grim old man. Then why not McLane? That, too, was instantly dismissed, and the Carolinians left Gadsby’s in a rage. “I assure you I am cool—damn cool—never half so cool in my life,” Hamilton exclaimed immediately afterwards.[139]

For the War Department there was no such competition, and after an unsuccessful attempt had been made to conciliate Tazewell with the post, Jackson, who was anxious to have among his advisers one of his old friends and managers, satisfied himself with the selection of Senator John H. Eaton of Tennessee.

The processes of reasoning leading to the appointment of Senator John Branch of North Carolina as Secretary of the Navy have been lost to history and there is no clue. We know that Van Buren and his friends strongly urged the selection of Woodbury of New Hampshire; and McLane expressed the contemporary state of mind in a letter to his friend: “By what interest that miserable old woman, Branch, was ever dreamed of, no one can tell.” This much we know—that Branch himself did not have the most remote idea of entering the Cabinet when the invitation reached him from Gadsby’s, and he withheld his acceptance until he could consult with a number of his friends.[140] Two reasons have been advanced as probable. The one, popular at the time, was that Jackson’s advisers thought that something should be done to promote the social prestige of the Administration; and the other, generally accepted by historians, that the appointment was made as another concession to Calhoun. While the Carolinian made no request for his inclusion in the Cabinet, Branch was one of his most loyal followers.

There is no real justification for astonishment over the decision of the conferees at the Wigwam to ask Senator John McPherson Berrien of Georgia to accept the position of Attorney-General. Not only was he a brilliant member of the Senate, noted as an orator, but his professional reputation in his section was almost as great as that of Webster in New England. His votes in the Senate on the party measures of the Adams Administration had been pleasing to Jackson, and, whether he was named as another gesture of good-will toward Calhoun, as generally assumed, or not, his appointment could not have been displeasing to the Vice-President.

While the Postmaster-General had not hitherto been a member of the Cabinet, the Jackson board of strategy, wishing to manifest its appreciation of John McLean, who had held the post under Adams while exerting himself on behalf of Jackson, determined to raise the position to the Cabinet and retain him.[141]

Thus the Cabinet was completed, and after a fashion indicative of no desire on the part of Jackson to quarrel with his Vice-President. Van Buren, who did not enter into the President’s calculations as to the succession, had been given the most desirable post, but his friends, McLane and Woodbury, had been set aside for Ingham and Branch, both devoted to the political fortunes of Calhoun. The latter was represented by half the Cabinet, Ingham, Branch, and Berrien, and no stretch of the imagination could make the other two members, Eaton and McLean, other than absolutely independent of the wily politician of Kinderhook. The processes through which all this was speedily changed enter into one of the most fascinating dramas of political intrigue in the history of the Republic.

IV

While the President-elect was holding his conferences, with the mysterious Major Lewis going in and out at Gadsby’s and playing with the destinies of men, and the streets were seething with an incongruous crowd shouting their “Hurrah for Jackson,” Jackson was remaining coldly aloof from the occupant of the White House. He had carried to Washington a bitter resentment against Adams and his personal lieutenants, because of the dastardly attacks upon the woman then buried at the Hermitage. He made no call of courtesy, and Adams was stung to the quick. Especially painful to the old Puritan was the thought that he had been considered capable of a vulgar assault upon the good name of a woman. After much struggling with his pride, he made the first advance by sending a messenger to Jackson to inform him that the White House would be ready for his occupancy on the 4th of March. “He brought me the answer,” Adams records, “that the General cordially thanked him, and hoped that I would put myself to no inconvenience to quit the house, but to remain in it as long as I pleased, even for a month.”[142] A few days later, Adams sent his messenger to say that his packing might require two or three days beyond the 3d, and Jackson replied that he did not wish to put him to the slightest inconvenience, “but that Mr. Calhoun had suggested that there might be danger of the excessive crowds breaking down the rooms at Gadsby’s, and the General had concluded, if it would be perfectly convenient to us, to receive his company at the President’s house after the inauguration on Wednesday next.” Whereupon Adams “concluded at all events to leave the house on Tuesday.”[143] Thus the closing days of his Administration must have been bitter, indeed, to the proud old Puritan of the White House. Deliberately ignored by his successor, tortured by the thought of the treachery of McLean and others, the co-workers of his régime, depressed, embittered, or in hiding, he appears to have been utterly forgotten by the society of the capital as well as by the general public. Justice Story observing his isolation was moved to write in bitterness to a friend that he had never “felt so forcibly the emptiness of public honors and public favor.” Certainly no generous sympathy was felt for him by his triumphant foes. When, on the last Sunday before the inauguration, the pastor of the President’s church unhappily selected for his text, “What will ye do on the solemn day?” one of Jackson’s courtiers, who had attended the services, hurried back to Gadsby’s, and the company assembled there went into gales of laughter, and agreed that it would be, for some, a “solemn day.”

That day was heralded by the thunder of cannon—a day of warmth and sunshine. All roads led to the Capitol, and from an early hour the thoroughfares were thronged with the eager, enthusiastic, motley crowd, rejoicing audibly in the event. Down the Avenue the good-natured mob fought its way, the splendid Barronet and the stately coaches splashed by the wagons and the carts, women and children in exquisite finery crowded by women and children in home-spun and rags, statesmen jostled by uncouth frontiersmen, the laborer brushing inconsiderately, and perhaps a little arrogantly, against the banker—for it was the People’s Day. When, at eleven o’clock, the aristocratic Mrs. Smith set forth with her company, she found the Avenue one living mass, flowing sluggishly eastward, with every terrace and portico and balcony packed, and with all the windows of the Capitol crowded, some to observe the approach on the west, and others to witness the ceremony on the east. When the mob caught sight of Jackson and his party walking from Gadsby’s in democratic fashion, it pressed in upon him, impeding his approach, but seeming in nowise to challenge his displeasure, for he alone of his party walked with bared head. The spectators on the south terrace thrilled to the scene—an American king going to his coronation, acclaimed and accompanied by the plain people. The ceremonies over, he fought his way to his waiting horse—and down the Avenue he rode, followed by the most picturesque cortège that ever trailed a conqueror—gentlemen of society and backwoodsmen, scholars and the illiterate, white and black, the old hobbling on crutches and canes and children clinging to their mothers’ gowns, walking and riding in carriages and wagons and carts—following to the People’s House.

There the unwieldy mob, in carnival mood, hundreds only accustomed to the rough life of the frontier, stormed the mansion, fighting, scrambling, elbowing, scratching. Waiters appearing with refreshments were rushed by the uncouth guests, resulting in the crash of glass and china. Men in heavy boots, covered with the mud of the unpaved streets, sprang upon the chairs and sofas to get a better view of the hero of the hour.[144] Women fainted, some were seen with bloody noses, and Jackson was saved from being crushed only by the action of some gentlemen in making a barrier of their bodies. After this the old soldier beat a hasty retreat through the back way to the south, and sought relief at Gadsby’s.[145] “I never saw such a mixture,” wrote Justice Story. “The reign of King Mob seemed triumphant.” And Mrs. Smith writing of her experience said: “The noisy and disorderly rabble ... brought to my mind descriptions I have read of the mobs in the Tuileries and at Versailles.”

And on the day that Jackson was enjoying, or trembling at, the popularity of his triumph, where was Adams? The day before the inauguration he had removed to the home of Commodore Porter on the outskirts of the city; and at the time the surging multitude was all but drowning the roar of the cannon with its cries for Jackson, the dethroned President, finding the day “warm and springlike,” had ordered his horse, and, accompanied by a single companion, had ridden into the city “through F Street to the Rockville turnpike,” and over that until he reached a road leading to the Porters’—reminded of the passing of his power by the neglect of the people.[146]

Henry Clay shut himself in his house and did not leave it during the day—tormented by bitter regrets.

V

Almost immediately Jackson began to get the reaction on his Cabinet and his policies. The disaffections in the house of his friends, which were to cause him so much embarrassment during the first two years of his Administration, began to appear before the shouts of the crowd on the White House lawn had died away. We have it on the authority of the capital gossips of the day that when McLean, the Postmaster-General, who had betrayed Adams, heard of his new chief’s plans for wholesale dismissals of postmasters, he warned Jackson that in his proceedings against those officials who had participated in politics he would be forced to include in the proscription the supporters of Jackson as well as those who had been faithful to Adams; that Jackson, for a moment nonplussed, sat puffing at his pipe, then arose, and, after walking up and down the room several times, stopped abruptly before his obstreperous minister, with the question: “Mr. McLean, will you accept a seat on the bench of the Supreme Court?”—and that McLean instantly accepted.[147] This is vouched for by Nathan Sargent, who says that on the evening of the interview Lewis Cass told him, at a reception at the home of General Porter, that McLean, with whom he was intimate, had just described the interview to him.[148] The civic virtue of Mr. McLean has been explained on the theory that he entertained presidential aspirations and did not care to incur the displeasure of the many postmasters who were friendly to his ambition. However that may be, he secured a position of which he was not unworthy, and Jackson probably saved himself some trouble by meeting a sudden crisis in a truly Jacksonian way.

It is reasonable to assume that during the brief moments he walked the floor puffing his pipe, he determined upon McLean’s successor. One week before his inauguration, he had given James A. Hamilton a list of applicants for office with the request for an opinion and report, and among these was the application of William T. Barry of Kentucky for a place on the Supreme Bench. The applications had been returned to him with the recommendation that the Kentuckian be appointed. He was known to Jackson as an “organization man.” It was probably the matter of a moment, for one of the President’s quick decision, to make the exchange—McLean for the Bench, Barry for the Cabinet.[149] His efforts to soothe the injured feelings of Senator Tazewell, whose heart had been set on the portfolio of State, were not so successful. After the disappointed statesman had refused the War Department, some of the Jackson tacticians conceived the idea of offering him the mission to London, and for a few days the Virginian seemed tempted. But one week after the inauguration, he wrote the President that domestic reasons precluded an acceptance. Keenly disappointed and concerned, Jackson, after a consultation with one of his advisers,[150] wrote a personal note to Tazewell requesting him to call at the White House. It is not incomprehensible that in his angry mood the proud Southerner should have resented the earnest importunity of the direct Jackson, and he left the President with the statement to McLean that he had not liked the General’s manner in looking him through and through and telling him he must go. He had looked upon it as a military order, and considered the matter at rest. This opened the way, however, for the recognition of Van Buren’s friend, Louis McLane, whose ruffled feelings were smoothed by the appointment to the English Court. But within a week two of Jackson’s party friends and supporters, McLean and Tazewell, had been alienated and were ripe for the seduction of the Opposition.

Meanwhile, as soon as Clay could recover from the shock of defeat, he began the organization and solidification of a bitter and stubborn opposition to the Administration. As early as the first of January it was evident that “the aim of the defeated party is to get a majority in the Senate and thereby to control the President.”[151] During the first few weeks of the new Administration the iron sank deep into the souls of the dispossessed office-holders and their friends. It was manifest that there was something more than a new master in the White House—that a régime had passed, a dynasty had fallen. Previous Presidents had entered office with the good wishes of most of their political opponents, but it was clear from the beginning that the dispossessed had steeled themselves against conciliation, were planning to find fault on general principles, and to exert themselves to the utmost to wreck the Administration. The Cabinet was greeted with derision and the Whig drawing-rooms made merry over the “millennium of the minnows.” All the members of the new official family were ridiculed with the exception of Van Buren and even he, while conceded to be a “profound politician,” was “not supposed to be an able statesman.”[152] The vitriolic and vindictive Adams, nursing his wrath to keep it warm, poured forth on the pages of his diary vituperative denunciations of the Cabinet, together with the gossip of the malicious. Ten days of the new régime, and he had rendered the verdict that “the only principles yet discernible in the conduct of the President” were “to feed the cormorant appetite for place, and to reward the prostitution of canvassing defamers.”[153]

While Adams indulged in these unfriendly reflections merely to feed his personal vanity, and to record his superiority, Clay, equally bitter, was not content to shut his reflection up between the covers of a book. To him defeat had been especially bitter. He hated Jackson with vindictive malice because the latter really credited the “bargain” story, and had sanctioned its circulation. His overpowering passion was to reach the Presidency. He had entered the official household of Adams as the head of the Cabinet when the “Secretarial Succession” seemed definitely established, and had looked forward to succeeding his chief at the end of his second Administration. The fact that there had been no second Administration had been due, in part, to the prevalent opinion that Clay had entered into a bargain for power, and he faced retirement from public life feeling that his great opportunity had failed him and that his reputation had been stained. He was the type of man whose bitterness must find relief in action. From the moment he recovered from the shock of the election, he dedicated himself to the pursuit of Jackson.

In judging of the sincerity of his unrelenting opposition during the next eight years, it is well to bear in mind that before Jackson had perfected a policy, or proclaimed a principle, Mr. Clay attended a banquet given in his honor within a stone’s throw of the White House, at which he assailed the President with an intemperance of denunciation never exceeded in later years. This was evidently personal. One week after the inauguration he said to Mrs. Bayard Smith: “There is not in Cairo or in Constantinople a greater moral despotism than is at this moment exercised over public opinion here. Why, a man dare not avow what he thinks or feels, or shake hands with a personal friend, if he happens to differ from the powers that be.”[154] On the very day this remarkable statement was recorded by the chronicler of the Whig drawing-rooms, Adams wrote in his diary: “Mr. Clay told me some time since that he had received invitations at several places on his way to Lexington to public dinners, and should attend them, and that he intended freely to express his opinions.”[155] A little later Adams notes that while riding he passed Mr. Clay in a carriage driving toward Baltimore on his way to Kentucky—pale, stern, and sour. On that journey, and without having at that time any particular actions of the new Administration on which to base an attack, he spoke wherever the opportunity was afforded, and always with a vehement denunciation of President Jackson.

The inauguration was over; the people from afar, having seen “their” President and visited “their” White House, had returned to their homes; and Henry Clay, the most consummate of politicians, one of the most eloquent of men, was already meditating upon the organized assault that was to be made upon the new régime. Now let us acquaint ourselves with the advisers with whom the President had surrounded himself officially.

VI

By common consent the Whig aristocracy conceded that Martin Van Buren was the strong man of the Cabinet because of an uncanny cleverness as a politician, while denying him the qualities of statesmanship or intellectual leadership. Even as a politician tradition would have him of the superficial, manipulating, intriguing sort. History had generally accepted this tradition until Mr. Shepard’s masterful biography[156] focused attention upon his career, and the publication of his fascinating “Autobiography” disclosed his intellectuality. He stood out among the politicians of his time, to whom history has been kinder, because of his refusal to indulge in the popular personal attacks or to stoop to disreputable intrigues. A man of even temper, blessed with a sense of humor, he found it not only possible but profitable and pleasurable to maintain social relations with political opponents, and all that the embittered Adams could see in this was that “he thought it might one day be to his interest to seek friendship.” In senatorial debates he had discussed principles and policies calmly, instead of indulging in flamboyant discourses flaming with personalities—and this was accepted in his day as evidence that he held his principles lightly. Adams wrote that “his principles are always subordinate to his ambition.”[157]

This “superficial politician” was the greatest lawyer elected to the Presidency before the Civil War, and, with the possible exception of the second Harrison, the greatest lawyer-President we have had. Living in a community overwhelmingly Federalistic, this “trimmer without principles” became a bitter opponent of Federalism. With all the rich and powerful of the locality allied with Federalism, this “courtier” entered the other camp. When Burr was a candidate for Governor, with the support of Van Buren’s preceptor in the law, this young man, who “was under the influence of his evil genius,” ardently supported the Clinton-Livingston candidate, who was elected. When he entered politics, he found the spoils system thoroughly established in New York, and political proscription practiced by both parties, but that was not to prevent his enemies from charging him with its initiation. He did not quarrel with the system. He used, but never abused it. And in the days of his limitation to State politics, he displayed qualities of statesmanship, patriotism, and courage. New York Federalism did not dismiss him as a mere schemer and intriguer when he led his party in the State Senate. He met the Federalist attack upon the War of 1812 upon the floor of the Senate, and not in party caucus. When Federalism fought every needful measure, he became as much the spokesman of the war party in Albany as Clay, Calhoun, and Grundy in Washington. In reaching an estimate of Van Buren, it is important to bear in mind that this alleged man of indecision, without initiative or constructive capacity, was the author of “the most energetic war measure” adopted in the country.[158] As a member of the Constitutional Convention of New York, dealing with the extension of suffrage, when Chancellor Kent, giving free rein to his aristocratic tendencies, was opposing the extension, and mere demagogues were advocating the immediate letting down of the bars to all, it is significant, both of his Americanism and

his wisdom, that Van Buren scorned both the rôle of reactionary and demagogue, and proposed the plan for the gradual extension of suffrage in a speech couched in the language of seasoned statesmanship. Thus, at the time he entered National life, there was nothing in his career to justify the conventional estimate of his public character.

With the inauguration of Adams, soon after he had entered the United States Senate, Van Buren became the recognized leader of the Opposition, and he set himself the task of organizing and militantizing a party to fight the Federalistic trend of the President. There were various elements on which he could draw. With his genius for organization and direction, he made it his work to seek a common ground upon which all could stand together in harmony. He fought the principles and policies of the Administration in dignified fashion, without recourse to scurrility; but he capitalized every mistake and gave it fullest publicity through the circulation of carefully prepared speeches, after the fashion of the present day. Careful to discriminate, even in his attacks, between personal and political wrongdoing, he treated Adams with the utmost courtesy. With a party formed, he drilled it as carefully as was ever done by the Albany Regency. He instilled into it the party spirit. He mobilized an army. With this he fought the Administration on the floor.

But he was one of the first, if not the first, to take the people outside the halls of Congress into consideration. To create a party without as well as within the Congress, he arranged for the circulation of carefully prepared senatorial speeches for the moulding of public opinion in the highways and the byways. Thus he was probably responsible for the delivery of the first congressional speeches intended solely for campaign use.

In person he was slight, erect, and scarcely of middle height. His intellectuality was indicated by his high, broad forehead, and his bright, quick eye. His smile, which was habitual, was genial and seemed sincere. His features, generally, were pleasing. His manner was always courtly, and he made a study of deportment. No professional diplomat of the Old World, living in the atmosphere of courts, could have been more polished. Contemporaries have described him as “extraordinarily bright and attractive, but without anything supercilious.”[159] In social life he was a favorite. Few men of his period were better fitted for the drawing-room. An entertaining talker, he could converse intelligently upon a multitude of subjects and could pass from a political conference with the Kitchen Cabinet to a social call on Adams, or a chat with Clay, without effort or embarrassment. Fond of feminine society, he could be as charming to a débutante as to a grande dame, and we find him delighting the brilliant Mrs. Livingston with his intellectual charm, while captivating her daughter, Cora, with his juvenile levity. Fastidious to a degree, he could enjoy the unconventional moments of Jackson in his shirt-sleeves and with his pipe, and make the pleasure mutual. This premier of an Administration that contemporaries of the Opposition loved to describe as plebeian and vulgar “was perhaps as polished and captivating a person as the social circles of the Republic have ever known.”[160] As we shall see, nothing ruffled him. He never forgot his dignity nor lost his temper. He was all suavity. He was all art.

He lives in history as a politician and President and is never thought of as an orator. He belonged rather to the type of parliamentary speaker which followed the scintillating period when Pitt declaimed in stately sentences and Fox thundered with emotional eloquence—the conversational type which is still prevalent at Westminster. He made no pretense to an artful literary style, but his speeches were in good taste. We have the tradition that he not only prepared his speeches with infinite care, which is probable, but that he rehearsed them before a mirror, which is debatable. It is said that on his retirement from the Senate, and at the sale of his household goods at auction, “it was noticed that the carpet before the large looking-glass was worn threadbare,” and that “it was there that he rehearsed his speeches.”[161] That he was something of an artist and an actor we shall see in the course of the recital of the events of the Jackson Administration.

Secretary of the Treasury Ingham was a Pennsylvania paper manufacturer who possessed little learning and stood in no awe of genius. His career had been that of a petty but persistent plodder who knew the ways of cunning. His mind was prosily practical, and he thought solely in terms of money. His fourteen years in Congress had been barren of achievement, but his business training had given him a certain advantage over more brilliant men in the work of the committees. He was the forerunner of the machine politician of a later day, skillful in intrigue, unscrupulous in methods, and resourceful in the work of organization. His general character is not easily deduced from the conflicting opinions of his contemporaries. One of these, unfriendly to the Jackson régime, wrote that he “is a good man of unimpeachable and unbending integrity”;[162] while Adams, after relating an incident tending to an opposite conclusion, tells us that “there is a portrait of Ingham in Caracci’s picture of the Lord’s Supper”—which is the nearest approach to a description of his appearance that can be found. There is a general agreement, however, as to the inferiority of his talents, and in our political history he is scarcely the shadow of a silhouette.

Quite a different character was Secretary of War Eaton, a gentleman of education, polish, amiability, capacity, and wealth. The possession of a fortune deprived him of an incentive to the full exertion of his talents, and he frankly preferred leisure to labor, discouraged the approach of clients, and liked nothing better than a quiet corner of his library at his country home near Nashville. There was nothing in his appearance, his manner, or conversation remotely to suggest the frontiersman, and, on the contrary, observers were impressed by his dignity and poise, his courtliness and courtesy. Even in the bitter days when society was in league against his wife, we find one of her harshest critics writing that “every one that knows esteems, and many love him for his benevolence and amiability.”[163] He possessed many advantages for a political career. Having the time and money to devote to politics, he early developed a genius for organization, and an uncanny capacity for intrigue. The campaign of 1828 found him entrusted with much of the important work—the delicate missions. Wherever Jackson lacked or needed an organization, or one in existence required stiffening, there went Eaton, doing his work furtively, and on the surface nothing but its achievement indicated that it had been undertaken.[164] It was his fine Italian hand which wrought such havoc with Clay’s forces in Kentucky. When that State began to waver as to Clay, Jackson determined to force the fighting in a territory at first thought hopelessly lost to the Democracy. Even Benton found his way to the “dark and bloody ground,” but tradition has it that it was the suave and furtive Eaton, who appeared in different parts of Kentucky, making no speeches, and half concealing himself in a mantle of mystery, who divorced from Clay so many of his supporters. There is a sinister aspect to the general description of his activities; and his enemies, and Jackson’s, always insisted that he had parceled out jobs with a lavish hand. A man of culture, a soldier of acknowledged gallantry, a lawyer of ability, he was destined to an unhappy notoriety, but he deserved a better fate.

The patrician of the Administration was Secretary of the Navy Branch, who, like Eaton, had inherited an ample fortune, and had divided his time between politics, the practice of the law, and the management of a large plantation. At the time he entered the Cabinet, he had distinguished himself in the politics of North Carolina, had served three terms as Governor, and was a member of the United States Senate—scarcely the record of an obscure man. As chief executive of his State, his record had been far from that of a colorless time-serving politician without constructive qualities or vision. If his messages were couched in the lofty, pompous phrases of the period, they were not without substance. He was a pioneer in the field of popular education, the leader of a crusade against capital punishment for many crimes, an advocate of the substitution of imprisonment for the death penalty, and he urged the establishment of a penitentiary based on the idea of reformation. A man of great wealth, and an aristocrat by temperament, he led a fight against imprisonment for debt.[165] His, too, is the distinction of having in that early day proposed the strict regulation of the medical profession as a protection of the public against impostors. A planter, and the owner of many slaves, he insisted, while Governor, on the protection of the legal rights of the blacks; and the petition of the entire population of Raleigh, the importunities of a hundred and twenty young women, the plea of State officials, were not sufficient to persuade him to save from the gallows a young white man who had murdered a slave.[166] In the Senate, while not distinguished as an orator, he was considered a strong debater and was respected as a man of courage and deep convictions.

The portrait of Branch, which hangs in the Navy Department in Washington, suggests, in the slender profile and luminous eyes, the poet, rather than the politician. He is described by one who saw him often in his Washington days as “tall, well-proportioned, graceful in gestures, and affable and kindly in manner.”[167] He had the graciousness of the Southern aristocrat of the old school, and was devoted to the social standards and customs of his section. Strongly attached to his home and family, having the poet’s love of the artistic, he surrounded himself with beauty, and his home at Enfield was a comfortable and stately mansion surrounded by a smooth lawn, in the midst of gardens, orchards, and shade trees. His political career and the course of the Jackson Administration were to be greatly influenced by his devotion to his wife and daughters, and to his social ideals.

In John McPherson Berrien, the Attorney-General, we have a character with whom history has played strange pranks. When he entered the Cabinet, he was conceded to be one of the most polished orators of his time and one of the famous lawyers of the South. His Washington début in the Supreme Court, in a case involving the seizure of an African slave ship, had been a spectacular triumph.[168] All contemporaries agree as to his extraordinary gifts of eloquence. Perley Poore describes him as “a polished and effective orator.”[169] Another contemporary found him “a model for chaste, free, beautiful elocution.”[170] Still another has it that “he spoke the court language of the Augustan age.”[171] Even the blasé John Marshall, who listened to Webster and Choate, was so impressed that he dubbed him “the honey-tongued Georgian youth.”[172] He had been in the Senate three years when a speech upon the tariff impelled the press of the period to describe him as “the American Cicero”—a designation that clung to him through life. The greatest speech made by any of the leaders of the Opposition on the Panama Mission was the constitutional argument of Berrien.[173] As a man he was cold and reserved, an aristocrat in manner, as in feeling. He made a virtue of not cultivating the multitude, scorned all compromise with his convictions, firmly believed in himself, and was not at all impressed with opposition. Utterly without tact or diplomacy, caustic and sarcastic, he incurred bitter enmities, but his admirers, who liked to compare him with Cicero, took pride in this weakness.[174] As a political leader, he was dictatorial and demanded obedience without question. The slightest hesitation on the part of his tried and truest friends was usually followed by coldness on his part. Selfish to a degree, he was always keen for his personal advancement.[175] Few more brilliant men have ever been Attorney-General of the United States.

If Postmaster-General Barry was unknown to Washington, it was a matter of indifference to him. In politics he was an exotic. Entering Congress as a young man, he could have remained indefinitely, but congressional life did not allure him. For twenty years he had been an influential State politician, serving in the legislature until sent to the United States Senate to fill an unexpired term. It is an interesting commentary on his preference for State office that he resigned from the Senate, where he might have remained, to become Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court. Living in Lexington as a neighbor of Henry Clay, he had been for many years one of the great leader’s most ardent supporters, and it is significant of the character of the man that, while he supported Clay against Jackson in 1824, the “bargain” story transformed him into a bitter foe.

In view of their relations to the Jackson Administration years later, the estimate of Barry reached by Amos Kendall in 1814, and recorded in his “Autobiography,” is interesting, and serves to account for the feeling, scarcely concealed, with which the journalist-politician afterwards undertook the unraveling of the difficulties into which Barry had plunged the Post-Office Department. It was when Kendall was on his way to Kentucky that he first met the Lexington politician and went down the Ohio River with him and Mrs. Barry with “servants, horses, and carriages,” in a boat thirty feet long, with three apartments. At the end of the journey Kendall wrote: “He appears to be a very good man but not a great man. For our passage he charged nothing, and in every way treated me like a gentleman. His lady seems to be a woman of good disposition, but uneducated.” In contradiction to this estimate, we have another in which he is described as possessing extraordinary abilities, active business habits, an exact knowledge of men and things, and as being “a great orator.”[176] And this same authority describes Mrs. Barry as “frank, lady-like, free from affectations, possessing a fine person and agreeable manners.” Parton tells us that he was “agreeable and amiable, but not a business man”—which is the final verdict of history. In person he was above the medium height, but slender and thin in face. He was modest in demeanor, and energetic—even though he did not always properly direct his energy—and fond of society. He became Postmaster-General because, according to the Jackson standard, he had richly earned the reward.

Such was the Jackson Cabinet which accompanied him into office. There have been greater Cabinets, but many inferior to it, and few with men possessing greater ability than Van Buren or Berrien, or more social distinction than Branch. There was not a single member who did not possess at least good ability, and Jackson had, or thought he had, what he said he proposed to have, a Cabinet without a presidential aspirant. It is strange that the one man who developed into a candidate almost immediately was the one to whom he became most ardently attached.

We shall now note the first troubles of the official family.

CHAPTER III
THE RED TERROR AND THE WHITE

I

Thirteen days after the inauguration, the Senate, having confirmed the Cabinet, adjourned, and the Administration could look forward to almost nine months of non-interference from the Congress. The pre-inaugural prediction that the President would adopt a policy of proscription of his political foes was almost immediately justified by events. The “spoils system,” as an important cog in the machinery of political parties, thus frankly recognized, dates from this time. Through all the intervening years the civil service reformers have indulged in the most bitter denunciation of Jackson on the untenable theory that but for him public offices would never have been used as the spoils of party. Some of the most conscientious of historians have created the impression that the adoption of a prescriptive policy was due to something inherently wrong in the President. As a matter of fact, Jackson was the victim of conditions and circumstances, and the new political weapon grew out of the exigencies of a new political era.

For many years political parties had been chaotic, vapory, and indefinite; and if the politics of the young Republic had not been drifting toward personal government, it had been partaking of the nature of government by cliques and classes. The first Message of John Quincy Adams had made the definite division of the people into political parties inevitable—these parties standing for well-defined, antagonistic policies. Van Buren had early caught the drift and had cleverly organized a party standing for principles and policies, rather than for personalities. John M. Clayton, soon to become one of the outstanding figures of the Opposition to the Jackson Administration, who had seldom voted even in presidential elections because of his indifference to the mere ambitions of individuals, understood that in 1828 something more was involved, and threw himself into the contest in support of Adams. And Clay was even then looking forward to the organization of a party pledged to internal improvements and a protective tariff.

The Jackson Administration marks the beginning of political parties as we have known them for almost a century.

It was in this compaign, too, that the masses awakened to the fact that they had interests involved, and possessed power. Previous to this the aristocracy, the business and financial interests, and the intellectuals, alone, determined the governmental personnel. Men went into training for the Presidency, and, as in a lodge, passed, as a matter of course, from the Cabinet to the Vice-Presidency, and thence to the chief magistracy. An office-holding class, feeling itself secure in a life tenure, had grown up.

As we have seen, the election of Jackson was due to the rising of the masses. Thousands who had never before participated in politics played influential parts in the campaign. The victory, they considered theirs. Thus they had flocked to Washington as never before to an inauguration, rejoicing in the induction of “their” President into office, and all too many pressing claims to recognition and entertaining hopes of entering upon their reward. Before the inauguration, the grim old warrior, awaiting the opportunity, at Gadsby’s, to take the oath of office, had been fairly mobbed by ardent partisans of his cause, demanding the expulsion of the enemy and the appointment of his supporters to office. The Jackson press had been particularly insistent upon this point. Duff Green, of the “National Telegraph,” had early announced that he naturally assumed that the office-holders who had actively campaigned for Adams would make way for the victors. This same feeling had spread into every community in the country. Isaac Hill, writing in the “New Hampshire Patriot” immediately after the election, had sounded the onslaught for the Democracy of New England.[177] And soon after reaching Washington, and sensing the atmosphere at Gadsby’s, the New England editor had written joyously to a friend: “You may say to all our anxious Adamsites that The Barnacles will be scraped clean off the Ship of State. Most of them have grown so large and stick so tight that the scraping process will doubtless be fatal to them.”

Before Jackson’s entry into the White House, the scenes in and about Gadsby’s were scarcely less than scandalous. A great perspiring mob swarmed in the streets in front, crowded the tap-room, jostled its way in the halls, and, notwithstanding the efforts of Major Lewis, it demanded and secured admission to the President’s private apartment. All admitted themselves responsible for Jackson’s election. Amos Kendall, encountering a pompous stranger on the Avenue, was invited to look upon the man who had “delivered Pennsylvania.”[178] James A. Hamilton, who was close to Jackson in the early days of the Administration, was importuned by an Indianian, who had taken the electoral vote of the State to the Capitol, to intercede on his behalf for the Register’s office at Crawfordsville, or the Marshalship. This typical office-seeker had “calculated to remain a few weeks ... hoping that some of these violent Adams men may receive their walking papers.” He carried letters of recommendation from all the Democratic members of the State Legislature “for any office I can ask.” But, in view of the brisk competition, would not Hamilton kindly recall that he had received letters from the Hoosier bearing on the campaign, and personally testify to the important part he had played?[179] Others depended upon the length of their petitions, and two applicants from Pennsylvania, for the same office, had signers so numerous that the number had to be estimated by the length of the sheets.[180]

Meanwhile there is no question but that Jackson was eager to serve his friends, if not to punish his enemies. From the moment of his election, he had entertained no illusions as to the character of the opposition his Administration would encounter. It was an open secret that his enemies, long before the inauguration, had begun to organize for the discrediting of his Administration. He was familiar with the bitterness of Clay. And, with the determination to make his Administration a success, from his point of view, he turned his attention to preparations for the fight. His military training told him that it was fatal to enter a campaign with traitors in the camp. The disloyalty from which Adams had suffered had not been lost upon him.[181] And he had fixed convictions as to political organization. “To give effect to any principles,” he said, “you must avail yourself of the physical force of an organized body of men. This is true alike in war, politics, or religion. You cannot organize men in effective bodies without giving them a reason for it. And when the organization is once made, you cannot keep it together unless you hold constantly before its members why they are organized.”[182] Thus party politics, in the modern sense, began with Jackson, and the spoils system grew out of the exigencies of party politics. Vicious though it may be, it is significant of its appeal to the rank and file of party workers, upon whom party success depends, that politicians of all parties, including Lincoln, have adopted it without shame.

It does not appear that Jackson was greatly influenced in his course by his advisers, of either his constitutional or Kitchen Cabinet. Van Buren, who has been wrongfully accused of so many things, and among others, of having been the dominating influence as to the spoils system, heard of the plan for sweeping changes with grave misgivings. “If the General makes one removal at this time,” he said in a letter to Hamilton written from Albany, “he must go on. So far as depends on me, my course would be to restore by a single order every one who has been turned out by Mr. Clay for political reasons, unless circumstances of a personal character have since arisen to make the appointment in any case improper. To ascertain that will take a little time. There I would pause.” This, from the head of his official family.

And the most intimate of his advisers, of the Kitchen Cabinet, Major Lewis, is reported to have written to the President: “In relation to the principle of rotation in office, I embrace this occasion to enter my solemn protest against it; not on account of my office, but because I hold it to be fraught with the greatest mischief to the country. If ever it should be carried out in extenso, the days of this Republic will, in my opinion, be numbered; for whenever the impression shall become general that the Government is only valuable on account of its offices, the great and paramount interests of the country will be lost sight of, and the Government itself ultimately destroyed.” With the possible exception of Eaton, who was a practical politician in the modern sense, and Van Buren, to the extent just indicated, none of the members of the Cabinet were spoilsmen at heart; and Amos Kendall, the genius of the Kitchen Cabinet, would unquestionably have preferred to be spared the pain of turning men out of office. To be sure, the jovial but vindictive Duff Green, who spent much time at the elbow of Jackson in the early months of the Administration, was insistent upon the punishment of enemies, but the responsibility for the adoption of the policy rests upon the President himself.

And the result was that the spring and summer months of 1829 were filled with the clamor of importunate pleas, not unmixed with threats and curses, from the office-seekers. In many instances the wives and daughters of the applicants fluttered down upon Washington to reënforce the husband and the father.[183] One of the General’s most ardent supporters left the capital two days after the inauguration bitterly denouncing him for his failure to appoint the irate one to a position not then vacant.[184] Cabinet officers were harassed, bombarded, followed from their offices to their homes and back again, until several of them confessed that life had become a burden, and they were forced to close their doors to applicants until a late hour in the afternoon to find time for the transaction of public business.[185] Such aspirants as were not upon the ground in person were either represented by friends who were, or they peppered the members of the Cabinet with letters. One peculiarly offensive candidate for the collectorship of customs in New York wrote to an equally disreputable friend: “No damn rascal who made use of an office or its profits for the purpose of keeping Mr. Adams in and General Jackson out of power is entitled to the least leniency save that of hanging. Whether or not I shall get anything in the general scramble for plunder remains to be seen, but I rather guess I shall. I know Mr. Ingham slightly, and would recommend that you push like the devil if you expect anything from that quarter.”[186] And in the letter from Ingham to the seeker of “plunder” we have abundant evidence that the advice was accepted: “These [his duties] cannot be postponed; and I do assure you that I am compelled daily to file away long lists of recommendations, etc., without reading them, although I work eighteen hours out of the twenty-four with all diligence. The appointments can be postponed; other matters cannot; and it was one of the prominent errors of the late Administration that they suffered many important public interests to be neglected, while they were cruising about to secure or buy up partisans. This we must not do.”[187] The same man, having written an insolent letter to Van Buren, was sharply rebuked by him. “Here I am,” wrote the Secretary of State, “engaged in the most intricate and important affairs, which are new to me, and upon the successful conduct of which my reputation as well as the interests of the country depend, and which keep me occupied from early in the morning until late at night. And can you think it kind or just to harass me under such circumstances with letters which no man of common sensibility can read without pain?... I must be plain with you.... The terms upon which you have seen fit to place our intercourse are inadmissible.”[188]

Nor was this clamor for office confined to the more important positions—it reached down to the most menial places, to those of the gardener, the janitor, and messenger. Worse still—men in position to serve were even appealed to for place by members of their immediate families. Thus we find Amos Kendall writing to his wife: “I had thought before of trying to get some place for your father, but I cannot do anything until I am myself appointed. I hope in a year or two, and perhaps sooner, to find some situation that will enable him to live near us, and comfortably.”[189]

Meanwhile the clerks in Washington lived in a state of terror. Men who had long worked in harmony, and on terms of intimacy, were afraid to talk to one another. Every one suddenly assumed the aspect of a spy and an informer. “All the subordinate officers of the Government, and even the clerks are full of tremblings and anxiety,” wrote one woman to a correspondent. “To add to this general gloom, we have horrible weather, snowstorm after snowstorm, the river frozen up and the poor suffering.”[190] The majority of the subordinates and clerks, many the ne’er-do-wells of distinguished families, assuming that they were assured of a life position, had lived up to, and beyond, their meager incomes, and suddenly found themselves unfit for other employment and confronted with dismissal.[191] And slowly, but surely, the dismissals came, leaving many in desperate straits, without sufficient funds to reach their homes, and unfit to earn a livelihood if they did. Some were driven to desperation. One dismissed employee of the Custom House in Boston went “in a transport of grief” to Ingham with a plea to be informed of the cause of his dismissal, only to be told that offices were not hereditary.[192] One clerk in the War Department cut his throat from ear to ear; another in the State Department went stark mad. But all appeals for sympathy were met by the proscriptionists with the stern reminder: “The exclusive party who were never known to tolerate any political opponent raise and reiterate the cry of persecution and proscription at every removal that takes place. They have provoked retaliation by the most profligate and abandoned course of electioneering; the most unheard-of calumny and abuse was heaped upon the candidate of the people; he was called by every epithet that could designate crime, and the amiable partner of his bosom was dragged before the people as worse than a convicted felon. What sympathy do men of such a party deserve when complaining that the places which they have abused are given to others?”[193]

A dark picture—and yet only darker than similar pictures in years to follow because, in 1829, the policy was new and caught the office-holders unprepared. So gloomy has the picture been painted that the student of the times is prepared to learn of a general massacre of the placemen. There was no such massacre—no such massacre as followed the election of Lincoln. One is prepared to hear that all the enemies of Jackson were driven from office, but, as a matter of fact, the majority of the Federal office-holders during his régime were unmolested. This could not be said of Roosevelt’s Administration, nor of Cleveland’s. The exact number of removals during the first year of Jackson’s Administration cannot be determined with precision. Schouler,[194] while making no attempt definitely to fix the number, says that “some have placed the number as high as two thousand.” In view of the evidence of contemporaries available, it does seem that a fairly accurate idea should be obtained. It is interesting to observe in this connection that while Jackson’s enemies were dealing in sweeping generalities, his defenders were furnishing figures.

And among the defenders none is more reliable than Thomas H. Benton, whose veracity or personal honesty has never been impeached or questioned, and he tells us[195] that there were whole classes of office-holders that were not molested; that those whose functions were of a judicial nature were not disturbed, and that in the departments at Washington a majority remained opposed to Jackson through his two Administrations. More important still—he tells us that Jackson not only left a majority of his enemies in office, but that in some instances he actually reappointed personal and political enemies where they were “especially efficient officers.” And he lays stress upon the point that where men, who had bitterly fought Jackson in the election, were not reappointed, a hue and cry was raised that they had been denied a right. Corroborating this, we have the evidence of Amos Kendall,[196] who wrote, after the Administration had been in power a year and a half: “He [Jackson] is charged with having turned out of office all who were opposed to him, when a majority of the office-holders in Washington are known to be in favor of his rivals. In that city the removals have been but one seventh of those in office, and most of them for bad conduct and character. In the Post-Office Department, toward which have been directed the heaviest complaints, the removals have been only about one sixteenth; in the whole Government, one eleventh.” And to the evidence of both Benton and Kendall, either one of whom would have been incapable of deliberate falsehood, we may add the less reliable, because more prejudiced, evidence of Isaac Hill, given in a public speech at Concord in the late summer of 1829. “It is worthy of observation,” he said, “that at least two thirds of the offices of profit at the seat of the National Government, after the removals thus far made, are still held by persons who were opposed to the election of General Jackson.”[197] A more detailed study of the removals actually made show that, while there were 8600 post-offices in 1829, less than 800 postmasters were removed, and these, largely, in the more important centers, leaving 7800 undisturbed.

One of the most serious charges against Jackson in connection with these removals is that he practiced duplicity, reassuring a trembling office-holder one day only to remove him, without warning, on the next; and this story is based upon what the officer in charge of Indian affairs under Adams declares to have been his personal experience. According to his story, Eaton, his superior officer, suggested that he should see the President to meet some charges that had been made against him; that on visiting Jackson he had made a solemn denial, satisfied the President, and been presented by him to the members of his household; that on the next day a gentleman entered the Indian Office, and, after looking around, explained that the place had been offered him by the President that morning, but that he did not intend to accept; that the position was afterwards offered to others, and that the dismissal finally reached him in Philadelphia while there on official business. This places Jackson in a sinister light; but our commissioner adds, that one close to the Administration said: “Why, sir, everybody knows your qualifications for the place, but General Jackson has been long satisfied that you are not in harmony with his views in regard to the Indians.”[198] This raises the question whether a President chosen by the people is entitled to his own governmental policies or should be forced to accept such as may be handed to him by subordinates who received their appointments by preference, and not from the hands of the people. That this removal was the President’s own idea may be gathered from the fact that Eaton, Secretary of War, under whom Indian affairs came, was not in favor of the dismissal.

It is worth recording that Van Buren kept his department comparatively free from the spoils idea. But even the most intense partisan of Jackson will be hard pressed to find any proper reason for the spiteful recall of William Henry Harrison from Bogota, where he had just presented his credentials as United States Minister to Colombia. This recall was opposed very earnestly by Postmaster-General Barry, who frankly said to the President:

“If you had seen him as I did on the Thames, you would, I think, let him alone.”

“You may be right, Barry,” Jackson replied. “I reckon you are. But thank God I didn’t see him there.”[199]

Dark though the picture is from the viewpoint of the civil service reformer, there is another possible point of view. All the officials dismissed from places were not high-minded, conscientious public servants, for among them were numerous criminals. The dismissal of Tobias Watkins, an Adams appointee and a personal friend of the former President, to make place for Amos Kendall, was the occasion for a great outburst of indignation from the Opposition. Within a month the product of the spoils system had discovered frauds on the part of the “martyr” to the amount of more than $7000, and an arrest followed. He was convicted and served his time in prison. Nor was that of Watkins an isolated case. Thus the collector at Buffalo[200] had procured false receipts for money never paid and was given credit at the Treasury; the collector at Key West[201] had permitted an unlawful trade between Cuba and Florida; the collector at Bath, Maine,[202] was dismissed for personally using $56,315 of the public funds; the collector at Portsmouth[203] was shown to have engaged in smuggling; the collector at St. Marks[204] was shown to have been plundering live-oak from the public lands; the collector at Petersburg[205] had used $24,857 of the public money; the collector at Perth Amboy[206] had made false returns, appropriated to his own use $88,000 of the public money, and fled to Canada; the collector at Elizabeth City, North Carolina,[207] had converted $32,791 to his personal use and joined the other “martyr” to the spoils system on Canadian soil.[208] In brief, the introduction of the spoils system had resulted, in eighteen months, in the uncovering of peculations in the Treasury Department alone of more than $280,000 by men whose dismissal from office had called forth the unmeasured denunciation of Jackson’s enemies, and it is manifestly unfair to withhold these facts while placing emphasis upon the “dismissal of collector to make way for Jackson’s henchmen.”

Thus, throughout the spring and summer of 1829, the President and his Cabinet were bored, harassed, and tortured with importunities for place, denounced as ingrates because they left any of the enemies in office, and damned by the enemy for every dismissal that was made.

II

The spring and summer was the time of the Red Terror.

The White Terror of retaliation began with the meeting of the hostile Senate in December.

The enemies of Jackson sought the earliest possible opportunity to denounce the wholesale dismissals, and the brilliant orators of the Opposition in the House made intemperate attacks, while in the Senate Webster spoke against the policy of proscription, without, however, adopting the absurd position that the President did not possess the constitutional power.[209] The early part of the session was given over to denunciations of the removals, and to a frankly hostile scrutiny, on the part of the Senate, of all nominations requiring confirmation. It foreshadowed the bitter party battles of the next eight years by rejecting the nominations of some of Jackson’s most ardent supporters in the campaign, and by taking the ridiculous position that journalists should be excluded from appointive office. This proscription, or massacre of the editors, was aimed at men, comparatively new to public life, who were speedily to develop into the most brilliant and sagacious of the Jacksonian leaders. Long and acrimonious executive sessions became the rule of the Senate. In some instances, action upon nominations was postponed for months under provocative circumstances that were not lost upon the fighting figure at the other end of the Avenue. The charge was made that a number of the President’s nominees were “vicious characters.” It was in the early days of this session that a comparatively new Senator, elected upon the supposition that he would support the President and his policies, and destined to be the only member of the Senate to realize personally upon that body’s venomous hostility to the Administration, stepped forth to organize and direct the fight against the confirmation of nominees in whom the President was deeply interested. John Tyler led the first onslaught on the Administration.

It is important to pause to contemplate Tyler’s character and career, because he typifies those Democrats who were so soon to enter into coöperation with the Whigs in opposition, and because history has been unjust in underestimating both his capacity and courage. We shall find him pursuing Jackson throughout the greater part of his Presidency, and paying the penalty to the people with a manliness which found little emulation among men to whom history has been more gracious.

John Tyler was the scion of a family distinguished in law and in politics. His father was a fine Revolutionary figure, and one of the first lawyers in Virginia. He inherited his father’s ability, predilections, and prejudices. Within three months after his admission to the bar, he was employed in every important case in the county, and when, at the age of twenty-seven, he abandoned his practice to enter Congress, his income was $2000 a year, which was $1300 more than Webster’s at the same age.[210] On reaching Washington, he was cordially welcomed by the Madisons into the White House circle. He was fond of the society of the President’s house, disliked the French cooking, but found consolation in the excellent champagne of which he was very fond.[211] He found Clay, with whom he was to be associated in the fights against Jackson, in the Speaker’s chair, and fell under the spell of his fascination. It was then, too, that he formed his intense admiration for Calhoun.

His hostility to Jackson and Jacksonian methods was first manifested in his support of the resolutions censuring the General for his course in Florida. There is no doubt that at this time he had formed a deep-seated prejudice against the military hero. “We are engaged with Jackson and the President,” he wrote home at the time. “I do not hesitate to say that the constitutional powers of the House of Representatives have been violated in the capture and detention of Pensacola and the Barancas; that Jackson overstepped his orders; and that the President has improperly approved his proceedings, and that the whole are culpable.”[212] But there was a more powerful and less personal reason for his enmity to the Jackson Administration, which developed during this period. He had already become a sectionalist. Like Calhoun in later life, and Webster in 1820, he began to sense a struggle between the sections over the balance of power. Thus early he commenced to question the permanency of the Union. In the Missouri fight, in a strong speech against the restriction of slavery, he alone, among all participating on his side, advanced the proposition that the Congress possessed no constitutional power to pass a law prohibiting slavery in the Territories.[213] We find him writing[214] that “men talk of the dissolution of the Union with perfect nonchalance and indifference.” When, in his thirty-first year, he voluntarily retired to private life to retrieve his fortunes, he had made an impression so profound that it was predicted that he would rise to high station.[215]

When in 1827 he became a candidate for the Senate against the brilliant and vitriolic John Randolph of Roanoke, we find the elements working that were to ripen him for the break with the Jackson Administration, and for association with Clay’s party of incongruities and nondescripts. After the inauguration of Adams, he had written Clay commending his action in throwing his support to the Puritan, assuring him of his contempt for the “bargain” story, and unnecessarily adding a fling at Jackson: “I do not believe that the sober and reflecting people of Virginia would have been so far dazzled by military renown as to have conferred their suffrage upon a mere soldier—one acknowledged on every hand to be of little value as a civilian.”[216] When Randolph so viciously attacked Adams and Clay on the “bargain” story, Tyler became his most uncompromising foe. In some manner his letter to Clay found its way into the newspapers, resulting in much feeling, letter-writing, charges and counter-charges and journalizing, and the supporters of Tyler interpreted the use of the letter as an attempt to coerce him into support of Jackson in 1828. If such was the purpose, it failed. He was elected without having pledged himself, and at a complimentary dinner after his election, he referred to Jackson in a sneering fashion.

And now we begin to understand the underlying causes that took Tyler and other Southern Democrats out of the party and into the Whig ranks during the Jackson period. On reaching Washington in December, 1827, we find him writing to a correspondent: “My hopes are increased from the following fact ... that in the nature of things, General Jackson must surround himself by a Cabinet composed of men advocating, to a great extent, the doctrines so dear to us. Pass them in review before you—Clinton, Van Buren, Tazewell, Cheves, Macon, P. P. Barbour, men who, in the main, concur with us in sentiment. Furthermore, General Jackson will have to encounter a strong opposition. He will require an active support at our hands. Should he abuse Virginia by setting at nought her political sentiments, he will find her at the head of the opposition, and he will probably experience the fate of J. Q. A.”[217] The Cabinet, when announced, does not seem to have satisfied him, albeit Van Buren, of whose views on slavery extension he appears to have been misinformed, was a member. The presence of Berrien and Branch ought, perhaps, to have reassured him, but they were a minority, and they did not satisfy Calhoun, of whom they were devoted disciples.

Thus, from the very beginning of the Jackson régime, Tyler was suspicious, and ripe for the Opposition. In the spoils system he found a pretext for dissatisfaction, and he proceeded to develop this into a rather petty persecution. It would be a mistake to underrate the effect of his opposition. He was highly respected by his colleagues. His dignity, courtliness, urbanity, and ease gave him a certain social prestige. He was an interesting and likable companion, and his polished conversation had impelled an English novelist[218] to describe it as superior to that of any one he had met in America. His appearance was not against him. Tall and slender, of patrician mould, his Roman nose, firm mouth, broad and lofty brow, and honest blue eyes combined to give him a distinction that marked him in an assembly. He was not a mere professional politician of a type to be developed later in the Republic. His letters to his daughter[219] concerning her studies, on poetry, fiction, and history, denote a discriminating student and lover of literature. It was this occasional detachment from the political world which made it possible for him, during the famous debate on the Foot Resolution, to entertain himself in the Senate Chamber in the reading of Moore’s “Life of Byron.” We shall now observe him launch the White Terror against the Red.

III

Among the nominations, mostly for comparatively minor positions, sent to the Senate by Jackson were those of a “batch of editors.”[220] Strangely enough, this seems to have rather affronted the somewhat ponderous dignity of that body. So strongly did it then impress the Senate that it has made an ugly impression upon a number of historians. Even Schouler[221] is distressed to find so many mere “press writers” on the list. Whether the fact that they were mere editors was enough to make them “infamous characters,” we are left to conjecture. The secret of the strange antipathy to a class long conceded to be among the most influential of any nation is probably to be found in the fact that until this time the lawyers were conceded a monopoly in public station. There was a reason for Jackson’s change of policy, and it grew out of the organization of party and the democratization of government. Unlike his predecessors, he had not depended for support, nor did he expect to look exclusively for support to the professional politicians and the wealthy. As a candidate his appeal had been—for the first time in American history—to the people. As a President he proposed to look to the same quarter. With the people actually established as the ultimate power in the State, according to the theory of American institutions, he was not unmindful of the necessity of reaching the people with his case. He was the first President fully to appreciate the power of the press. He could see no reason why men capable of presenting and popularizing a policy or principle should be excluded from the privilege of helping put it in operation.

In the campaign of 1828 he had been opposed by the greater portion of the press, but he had found champions—men of capacity and talent, who had fought the good fight for him, and not without effect. The assumption that all these men were bribed by the promise of place would be a violent one indeed. And the “batch of editors” whose names he sent to the Senate were men who had long been attached to the cause that Jackson personified. Some had more recently allied themselves with the cause, but in every instance there was a sound reason for the change of front, and in these cases it does not appear that they had met the President in the campaign or had any expectations.

And these men, having received recess appointments, were at their posts or on their way. Those already at their posts had given ample proof of their capacity. One, against whom considerable bitterness was felt, had speedily uncovered the peculations of a highly respectable predecessor who was not a “press writer,” and that gentleman was languishing in the penitentiary. The Senate, apparently, did not consider this a service to the State worthy of reward. While there can be no doubt that the partisan enemies of Jackson were delighted at the opportunity personally to affront him, and while it is certain that Clay’s friends were anxious to punish one, and Adams’s friends to humiliate another, the actual conspiracy to defeat the confirmation of the editors originated with John Tyler, in close coöperation with Senator Tazewell of Virginia—who was still smarting under his defeat in the contest with Van Buren for the secretaryship of State.

The editors who thus fell under the haughty displeasure of the Senate were Major Henry Lee, James B. Gardner, Moses Dawson, Mordecai M. Noah, Amos Kendall, and Isaac Hill.

Charges of a personal nature were made against Lee, who had been appointed consul-general to Algiers. He was a half-brother of Robert E. Lee and a man of brilliant parts. During the campaign he had lived with Jackson at the Hermitage “writing for his election some of the finest campaign papers ever penned in this country.”[222] One who saw him there at the time has recorded his impressions. “He was not handsome, as his half-brother, Robert E. Lee, but rather ugly in face—a mouth without a line of the bow of Diana about it, and nose, not clean-cut and classic, but rather meaty, and, if we may use the word, ‘blood meaty’; but he was one of the most attractive men in conversation we ever listened to.”[223] He had served in the Virginia House of Delegates with Tyler, and had been a college mate. “Moreover,” writes Tyler, “I regarded him as a man of considerable intellectual attainments and of a high order of talent.”[224] But this did not operate in his favor. He had assisted in the writing of Jackson’s inaugural address, and is said to have been mostly responsible for its literary form. The fact that his morals were not considered impeccable was sufficient as a pretext, and the news of his rejection reached him in Paris, where he died. Tyler afterwards protested that he had found it painful to vote against his confirmation, and had expressed his opinion of Lee’s “innocence of certain more aggravated additions to the charge under which he labored.”

Isaac Hill, of the “New Hampshire Patriot,” was easily slaughtered on the ground that during the campaign he had “slandered Mrs. Adams.” In addition to the publication of his paper, the most vigorous and clever Jacksonian organ in New England, he conducted a publishing house, and his offense lay in having published a book in which Mrs. Adams was described as an “English woman” with little sympathy for American institutions. The hollowness of this excuse is evident in the fact that several Senators who had been shocked at this offense had regaled drawing-rooms with jokes of Mrs. Jackson’s pipe, and on Mrs. Eaton’s being a proper “lady in waiting” for the President’s wife since “birds of a feather flock together.”[225] The real reason for his rejection was that he had incurred the bitter enmity of the Opposition by his telling paragraphs during the campaign. Immediately after his rejection, two Senators hastened to the home of John Quincy Adams with the news, and the old man made the comment in his diary that night that Hill “was the editor of the ‘New Hampshire Patriot,’ one of the most slanderous newspapers against the late Administration, and particularly against me, in the country.”

Mordecai M. Noah, editor of the “National Advocate” of New York City, appointed surveyor and inspector of the port of New York, appears to have tickled the risibles of the Senators of the Opposition, though his distinguished career entitles him to the respect of posterity. One important and memorable service to the Nation should have made him immune from the common hate. Sixteen years before he had been sent as consul to Tunis with a special mission to Algiers. We had been paying an annual tribute to Algiers for the privilege of navigating the Mediterranean, and Noah, the journalist, had denounced the practice and declared that the money could be better spent in the building of warships. He succeeded on his Algerian mission in ransoming American prisoners who were being held in slavery, but such was the bigotry of the time that, after his work was done, he was recalled on the flimsy pretense that his Jewish religion was impossible in Tunis. At the time he was honored by Jackson, he was not only distinguished by his public service, but because of his journalistic genius, and he had written his “Travels in England, France, Spain, and the Barbary States.” He deserves his place in Morais’s “Eminent Israelites of the 19th Century.” But he had rendered valuable service to Jackson in the campaign, and the bigoted members of the Senate rejected him with much hilarity.

The first setback the Opposition received came in the consideration of the nomination of Amos Kendall, of the “Kentucky Argus.” He had, at the time, served for months with marked ability as auditor of the Treasury, rooting out old and vicious practices, uncovering the crimes of his predecessor, but he had left the camp of Clay to do yeoman service for Jackson, and that was quite enough. Adams himself was deeply interested in his humiliation. In the midst of the campaign he had been consulted by Clay touching upon “testimony given by Amos Kendall before the Senate of Kentucky intended to support charges against Mr. Clay of corrupt bargaining with me”; and, on Clay’s representation, no doubt, describes the editor as “one of those authors to let, whose profligacy is the child of his poverty.” But the vote on Kendall was a tie, and Calhoun cast the deciding vote in his favor.

Tyler was delighted with his work. “On Monday we took the printers in hand,” he wrote. “Kendall was saved by the casting vote of the Vice President.... Hendricks [Indiana], who was supported by the last Administration, was induced to vote for him and in that way he was saved. Out of those presented to the Senate, but two squeezed through, and that with the whole power of the Government here thrown in the scale.”[226] Kendall tells an interesting story which shows that the friends of Calhoun were quietly at work to convince the rejected editors that their humiliation had been brought about through the secret influence of Van Buren. Even then the Little Magician, as Van Buren was called, was considered the greatest obstacle in the way of the South Carolinian’s progress toward the White House, and it was the evident purpose to send the editors, miserable “press writers” though they were, back to their papers to fight the aspirations of Van Buren. Before the vote was taken on Kendall, he was approached by Duff Green, of the “National Telegraph,” Calhoun’s organ, and assured that the Van Buren influence was responsible for the fight against him. This aroused the curiosity of the clever Kendall, who “had never heard of such influence,” and he instantly surmised the meaning of the message. Thus, when Green, predicting his rejection, suggested that the Kentuckian could return to the “Argus,” the latter replied that he would remain in Washington in that event.

The effect of these rejections on Jackson was like a slap in the face. It aroused all the lion in his nature. He had grown fond of the editors who had so vigorously fought his battles, and his heart was set on their reward. It was the Senate’s first challenge, and it was instantly accepted. It was clear that nothing could be done for Lee, where the vote was unanimous, but Jackson decided to renominate Noah, and we find Tyler writing to Tazewell: “The President this morning renominated Noah. This is a prelude to Hill’s renomination. Your presence, I apprehend, would be immaterial, as the result of any vote upon these subjects would not be varied. Monday is fixed for the consideration of Noah’s case.”[227] On the second attempt, Noah was confirmed, like Kendall, with the casting vote of Calhoun.

But the President had other plans for his favorite, Hill, over whose sharp retorts the General had so heartily chuckled during the campaign. Webb, the editor of the “Courier and Enquirer” of New York, denounced in his paper the Senate’s rejection of Hill. “Isaac Hill,” he wrote, “is a printer and was the editor of the ‘New Hampshire Patriot.’ He was always the friend of his country and its republican institutions, and when that country, during the late war, was about to be sold by traitors to the enemy; when the war was declared wicked and unjustifiable, and the Hartford Convention meditated the formation of a separate treaty with England, his voice was heard in the Granite State and in the mountains of Vermont, animating the people and arousing them to a just sense of their danger, and the blessings of freedom. He was a thorn in the side of the Tories, and though living in the hotbed of the Opposition, he pursued his course fearlessly, independently, and successfully.” Writing from Jefferson Barracks, General Henry Leavenworth entered his protest, a non-partisan one: “Isaac Hill with his ‘New Hampshire Patriot’ did more than any one man known to me to put down the ‘peace societies’ during the war,” he wrote, and he described enlistments under him following Hill’s patriotic exhortations.

It is more than probable that these protests were not uninspired, and that the fine Italian hand of Amos Kendall, who had already become the managerial genius of the Administration, was in them. Certain it is that the most effective move was that of Kendall in writing to the Democracy of New Hampshire that the President “has entire confidence in Mr. Hill and looks upon his rejection as a blow aimed at himself,” and putting it up to the legislature to “wipe away the stigma cast upon this just and true man, by the unjust and cruel vote of the Senate.” The New Hampshire Democrats understood, and a little later Isaac Hill walked down the aisle of the Senate that had humiliated and rejected him to take the oath as a Senator of the United States.

Thus the Senate’s fight against Jackson began at the earliest possible moment. Clay had begun his denunciations of the Administration before it was three weeks old; and the Senate sought an opportunity personally to affront the President before he had announced a policy or a programme.

CHAPTER IV
JACKSON BREAKS WITH CALHOUN

I

The definite break between Calhoun and Jackson was one of the most dramatic and far-reaching in its political effects of any similar quarrel in American history. It furnished Clay with new material for the building of his party. It decisively committed the party of Jackson to the defense of the Union. It eliminated Calhoun from the list of presidential possibilities, dropped the curtain on the South Carolinian that the Nation had known for two decades, and raised it on another with whom the world is well acquainted. It divided his life into two distinct parts. It made Martin Van Buren President.

The Calhoun who was to become one of Clay’s most vituperative and intemperate lieutenants in the fight against the Administration differs as radically from the ambitious politician who had intrigued for the election of Jackson as the Webster of the Great Debate differed from the Webster of the Rockingham Resolutions.

The greatest biographer of the Carolinian[228] fixes the time that he became the personification of the slavery cause as 1830—the date of the quarrel—and says that “up to that time he is, in spite of his uncommonly brilliant career, only an able politician of the higher and nobler order, having many peers and even a considerable number of superiors.” Of the three great figures, Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, he was admittedly the strongest intellectually, and the one most unmistakably touched with genius. Nature made him a statesman. Swept into Congress on the wave of patriotic enthusiasm following the attack on the Chesapeake, his audacity, independent thinking, militancy, and genius combined to place him in the very lead of the party of Young America that clamored for the War of 1812. He sounded the first clear official war note in his report on that part of Madison’s Message dealing with our relations with England; and after the delivery of his first war speech one of the leading editors of the day hailed “this young Carolinian as one of the master spirits who stamp their names upon the age in which they live.”[229] In his haughty assumption of equality with the oldest and most experienced members of the Congress, he suggests the younger Pitt. His war speeches were classics of argumentation, sober, and yet pulsating with patriotic passion. If any sectional thought crossed his mind then, it never touched his tongue. He was a superb Nationalist—one of the most splendid figures of his time. Summoned into Monroe’s Cabinet as Secretary of War, he disclosed a high order of executive as well as legislative ability. Finding the department in confusion, he brought order out of chaos, and established system. A former officer of the great Napoleon was impressed with the resemblance between Calhoun’s plan of army organization and that of the Corsican.[230] Even his friends were agreeably astonished at his aptitude for organzation and general executive duties. And this furthered his presidential plans, and a strong party in the Congress perfected plans to advance him to the White House on the expiration of Monroe’s term.

It is not now fashionable to think of him as a designing and ambitious politician, but one of his biographers has commented on his tendency to stoop “to cover with an approving and admiring smile a resentment which is lurking in the corner of his heart, and on the other side to break off all social intercourse with old and highly respected associates, merely because others whose services he wished to secure might not like these connections.”[231] And yet, despite his efforts, his candidacy appears to have made no impression upon the country. Among the publicists he was strong; but the people were not impressed. He was the original “young man’s candidate,” but this weakened him among the older and more important leaders. “His age, or rather his youth,” wrote one,[232] “at the present moment is a formidable objection to his elevation to the chair.” Nevertheless, placing his reliance on the younger element, he pushed on. Even in Massachusetts he was charged with having “newspapers set up” to support him.[233] Certain it is that Webster favored his election as long as it seemed possible of achievement, and when failure there seemed certain, the greatest of his future rivals earnestly urged his election to the Vice-Presidency.[234] To the latter position he was elected through a combination of the friends of Adams and Jackson.

And now we find the presidential fever consuming him. He becomes the practical, scheming, not overly scrupulous politician—a rôle he is not popularly supposed to have ever filled. From the very beginning he set to work to undermine the Administration of his chief. His apologists explain that when the “bargain” story was advanced, he was forced to choose between the two factions that had combined to elect him, and preferred to go with the Jackson forces.[235] Whatever his motive, he entered into no half-hearted opposition. This notable activity against Adams and in favor of Jackson has been ascribed to a presumptive premonition that the latter was certain to reach the Presidency, and, in view of Jackson’s assurance that he would be satisfied with one term, Calhoun calculated that the defeat of Adams would shorten his period of waiting by four years.[236] So ardently was he panting for the Presidency at this time that he summoned his friends to assist in the establishment of a paper, impatiently brushed aside the objections as to cost, and calling Duff Green to the editorship of the “National Telegraph,” created the most powerful party organ that had existed in this country up to that time.[237] Less than a year after Adams’s inauguration, Calhoun was actively organizing for his defeat. We find him inviting a Philadelphian to his chamber in the Capitol to urge him to coöperate with the Opposition party on the ground that “because of the manner in which it came into power it must be defeated at all hazards, regardless of its measures.”[238] This insistence on the defeat of the Administration, “regardless of its measures,” was the reasoning of an ambitious politician, none too scrupulous, in a pinch, in his methods. The rest is known—how Calhoun threw his influence to Jackson in 1828, and was reflected to the Vice-Presidency with the hero of the Hermitage. Close students of the period are now convinced that preliminary to this alliance an agreement had been made that Calhoun was to succeed to the Presidency after four years.

At this time he was in the full maturity of his wonderful power, and the future must have seemed secure. Quincy, who saw him about this time, found him “a striking looking man, with thick black hair brushed back defiantly,” and he comments on Calhoun’s policy of cultivating and fascinating all young men visiting the National capital.[239] The world is too familiar with the tragic features of the great Carolinian to require a description. The rugged carving, the low broad brow, the spare frame almost amounting to attenuation, the penetrating gaze of the “glorious pair of yellow-brown shining eyes,” the bushy brows and the sunken sockets—Calhoun looked unlike any other man in history.[240] He was a commanding figure at the time of the quarrel which was to change the entire course of his life, and to alter his political character.

II

We have seen that Calhoun was annoyed with Jackson over matters of patronage, but the development of the quarrel to the breaking point is to be traced in the story of a debate and two dinners.

While it has not been customary to attach any party significance to the Webster-Hayne debate, it was conducted along party lines and was a party battle. To such a seasoned observer of parliamentary fights as Thomas H. Benton, it was little more than a party skirmish.[241] Even Webster, at the time, evidently looked upon Hayne’s assault upon him as political in its character. Some time before he had sent Senator White of Florida to Calhoun to warn him that by permitting his friends to attack New England, he was playing into the hands of Van Buren, who would capture New England States that would otherwise go to the South Carolinian. And Calhoun, no less alive to the political significance of the promised fight, had, according to White’s story to Adams, been impressed. “He said Calhoun seemed to be considerably at a loss what to do,” wrote Adams at the time; “that he did not know what things were coming to; that he had no feeling of unfriendliness to me, and would by now have visited me but for fear of being misrepresented; that if I had consulted him four years ago, and not have appointed Clay Secretary of State, I should now have been President of the United States.”[242] This purported warning of Webster to Calhoun is given color by the former’s action during his great speech, in turning his fine black eyes upon the latter, in the chair, while quoting:

“A barren sceptre in their gripe
Thence to be wrenched by an unlineal hand,
No son of their’s succeeding”

—a prophecy said to have caused Calhoun to “change expression and show some agitation.”[243]

Whether the attack on Webster and New England was conceived for the purpose of serving a party or sectional end, the records show that the Administration leaders who participated in the debate, Grundy, White, and Livingston, followed the Webster-Hayne exchange with elaborate indictments of New England Federalism, and John Forsyth, the real floor leader of the Administration, while contributing little to the discussion, was notably busy upon the floor. That the party phase was uppermost in the minds of the politicians and the press immediately following the verbal duel of the giants may be deduced from the nature of the press comments. One paper, having a correspondent at the capital, summed up the result: “The opposition party generally contend that Mr. Webster overthrew Mr. Hayne; while, on the other hand, the result is triumphantly hailed by the friends of the Administration as a decisive victory over the eastern giant.”[244] And in keeping with the theory that the mass attack on New England Federalism was to capture that section for the Administration,[245] we find the speech of Hayne being extensively circulated over the New England States. There can be no doubt that Webster literally dragged in the really great issue of the Union, that Hayne was forced to accept that diversion, and by so doing gave to the debate its immortal character. Jackson was delighted with Hayne’s first speech, and interested in the second, but on a more mature consideration Webster’s glowing defense of the Union went home to the old patriot at the White House. It is because of the effect of the debate upon Jackson’s Administration, and not merely because it occurred during his Presidency, that we cannot dismiss it as remote from the party politics of the time.

It should be borne in mind that the Daniel Webster who emerged from the debate was not the same public character who had entered it. By that epochal utterance he obliterated the one vulnerable point in his career—for the Daniel Webster of 1829 was vulnerable. He entered politics in New Hampshire as a Federalist—“liberal Federalist,” to use the phrase of his biographer.[246] Notwithstanding this “liberality,” he was to become considerably smirched by party loyalty during the war with England. This war was the occasion for his first public utterance, when, on July 4, 1812, he bitterly denounced the war with true Federalistic fervor at Portsmouth. This speech, printed and circulated for propaganda purposes against the war, ran into two editions, and led to his selection as a delegate to the notorious Rockingham County mass meeting. Here it fell to him to prepare the address known to history as the “Rockingham Memorial” to which the advocates of the sinister doctrine of Nullification pointed approvingly up to the Civil War. The notoriety of this document resulted in his election to Congress, where his record was everything it should not have been.

His first move was to heckle the President by calling upon him for information as to the time and manner of the repeal of the French decrees—which was in line with his previous denunciation of France. The enemies of the War of 1812 were bitter against the French, just as the enemies of the World War, over a century later, were bitter against the English. And while his country was at war with a powerful foe, he voted against taxes necessary for the waging of it; fought the compulsory draft of men for the miserable little army on the ground that the States alone had the right to resort to conscription; and even threatened the dissolution of the Union with the suggestion that “it would be the solemn duty of the State Governments to protect their authority over their own State militia, and to interpose between their citizens and arbitrary power.” He stubbornly resisted the attempt to extend martial law to all citizens suspected of treason; actually declaimed against the bill to encourage enlistments; opposed the war policy of the war Administration and urged a defensive warfare. And, of course, he intemperately denounced the embargo.

This course made him by long odds the most conspicuous Federalist in the House, and while he opposed the Hartford Convention, he does not appear to have looked upon it as seditious or treasonable, and as late as 1820, in his Boston speech, utterly ignored by his biographers, he practically proclaimed the right of secession. In brief, throughout the second war against England he was found just on the safe side of the line of sedition. His position at the time was notorious, and Isaac Hill, in the “New Hampshire Patriot,” was openly accusing him of trying to dissolve the Union and to array the North against the South.

Thus, the Webster that Hayne assailed had skeletons in his closet. His reputation as an orator was greater than that of any living American. Behind him was his Plymouth Oration which had rivaled Washington Irving as a best seller;[247] his Dartmouth College plea, which had moved John Marshall to tears; his Bunker Hill Address, which had been read with avidity in England and translated into French; and his plea for Greek independence, which had been read all over the world. Such was the Daniel Webster who was challenged by Hayne—or the Democrats—or the Administration.

Robert Y. Hayne was a knight of Southern chivalry, who in youth, like the ancient Greeks and Romans, had studied oratory as an art, from his first boyhood triumph moving with dash and audacity to his destiny, and at thirty-two entered the Senate of the United States.[248] His reputation as an orator previous to the great debate promised that the contest would not be one-sided. His character as man and publicist commanded universal respect and even the affection of political friend and foe alike.[249] And he entered the contest with one distinct advantage over his adversary: there were skeletons in Webster’s closet; there were none in Hayne’s.

III

There is no doubt but that on the day Hayne opened his attack, he was in fine fettle. Never had the Senate Chamber presented a more inspiring scene. Before him, with folded arms, sat the most coveted prey in the covey of the Opposition. From the Vice-President’s chair, Calhoun, the god of his idolatry, encouraged him with the compliment of a happy expression. About him were grouped the prominent “Jackson Senators” ready to encourage him with their approving smiles.[250] There was a gallant and confident air in the orator as he “dashed into the debate like a Mameluke cavalry upon a charge.”[251] In a moment he was in the full swing of his eloquence, and, as he poured forth his sarcasm, and marshaled his facts against the Federalism of New England, and threw wide the door revealing the Webster skeletons in the closet, the realization was borne to all that they were listening to one of the most effective speeches ever heard in the Senate. The Democrats were jubilant—the enemy concerned—Webster was a mask, as unresponsive as the sphinx. The blows at Federalism—at New England—at Webster, fell like the hammer on an anvil. The speaker’s deadly parallel on Webster and his tariff record was a superb piece of clever oratory. His analysis of New England Federalism in the War of 1812 was a stinging indictment—it was a conviction and a sentence.

The Democrats and Jackson Senators were naturally delighted. This was a political speech that Hayne was making, and he was crucifying Federalism and parading the closet skeletons of its greatest living champion, and shaming the section that refused to be converted to the new faith. And when the orator fell into the trap cleverly prepared for him by Webster, and, ostentatiously encouraged by Calhoun with numerous notes of suggestions sent by the pages from the chair, entered upon his exposition of the theory of Nullification, it is improbable that the delighted Jackson Senators caught the full significance of the departure. Duff Green, in the “National Telegraph,” the Calhoun organ, then supporting the Administration, was in a frenzy of delight. Andrew Jackson, who had kept in close touch with the debate, sending Major Lewis daily to the Senate Chamber, and was immensely pleased with the political or party features of the speech, wrote the orator a cordial letter of congratulation.

The depression of the Federalists, the New Englanders, and the Opposition generally, was correspondingly great. A professional observer,[252] writing of the event in later years, tells us that “the immediate impression from the speech was most assuredly disheartening to the cause Mr. Webster upheld.” And Henry Cabot Lodge accepts the statement that “men of the North and of New England could be known in Washington in those days by their indignant and dejected looks and downcast eyes.”[253]

The day Webster began his reply was the coldest of the winter, a biting wind filling the streets with clouds of dust, and Margaret Bayard Smith, sitting before a blazing fire, and free from the interruption of callers because “almost every one is thronging to the Capitol to hear Mr. Webster reply to Colonel Hayne’s attack on him and his party,” wrote regretfully of the growing tendency of women to monopolize the seats both in the gallery and upon the floor.[254] The reader is too familiar with that splendid oration to justify, for our purposes, any analysis or extended reference to the substance. His replies to Hayne’s attacks on the war policy of the Federalists, and upon his own inconsistencies, while clever, were not, in truth, convincing answers, and it was upon these points that the Jackson Senators were centering their attention. Thus it is not remarkable that the full import of his speech was momentarily lost upon the heated partisans. Even Benton, refusing to believe that the Union was in danger, or in any way involved in the debate, did not care for Webster’s peroration, finding the sentiment nobly and oratorically expressed, “but too elaborately and too artistically composed for real grief in the presence of a great calamity—of which calamity I saw no sign.”[255] To Benton, the debate was a party combat and nothing more. Nor is there anything in the notes recorded by Adams to indicate that he was impressed with the Webster speech except as a defense of Federalism.[256] The party issue had, for the moment, obscured all else. If in Charleston, the home of Hayne, Webster became the idol of the old Federalists, and of the Democratic mechanics, Hayne won the affectionate admiration of the merchants of Boston, who had his speech printed on satin for presentation to him.[257] The Democratic members of the Legislature of Maine, thinking only of the denunciation of Federalism, ordered two thousand copies published and distributed as “a fearless unanswerable defense of the Democracy of New England”—showing that the Nullification feature was overlooked in the party contest involved. Some contemporaries thought the battle a draw.

And Jackson? Parton tells us that Major Lewis, who had been stationed in the Senate during the debate, on returning from the Capitol after hearing Webster, found Jackson up and eager for news. On being told that the New England orator had made a powerful speech and demolished “our friend Hayne,” the old man replied that he “expected it.”[258] A few days later the full import of Hayne’s speech must have dawned upon Jackson and his political intimates, and there is significance in the powerful speech delivered a little later in the debate by Edward Livingston, Senator from Louisiana, intimate friend of the President, who was destined to enter the Cabinet and to frame Jackson’s immortal challenge to Nullification. After the speeches of Webster and Hayne, that of Livingston stands out as the greatest made during the prolonged discussion. He attempted again to center the fire on Federalism, and in so doing brilliantly defended the Union against Nullification, and vigorously defended the Jacksonian policies against the attacks to which they had been subjected during the remarkable debate. If the personal views of Jackson and the Administration are to be sought in any of the senatorial speeches, they will be found, not in the speech of Hayne, but in that of Livingston, which, for that reason, is entitled to more consideration from historians than it has received. We shall now see that within two months Jackson was to find a way to say the last word in the Great Debate of 1830.

IV

For some reason the Nullifiers miscalculated the stern old patriot of the While House. Perhaps it was his opposition to the tariff; possibly his South Carolina nativity—whatever the cause, the extreme State Rights party claimed him as its own. It is scarcely probable that, previous to the Webster-Hayne debate, Jackson had ever given any serious consideration to the danger of disunion, and most probable that the views advanced by Hayne in the Nullification part of his speech first impressed him with the fact that a sinister doctrine, brilliantly advanced and powerfully supported, was preparing to challenge the authority of the Nation. But he had kept his own counsels. He may have discussed the danger with Livingston or Van Buren, but no public announcement of his position had escaped him up to the time of the Jefferson dinner in the April following the Great Debate. This dinner, if is now reasonable to conclude, had been arranged with a definite object in view—to create the impression that, in a contest, the President would be friendly to the doctrine of Calhoun and Hayne. The significance of the selection of Jefferson’s birthday as the occasion was not lost upon the President or his Secretary of State. It was the first formal observance of the great Virginian’s natal day, and among the leaders in the preparations were some “with whom the Virginia principles of ’98 had, until quite recently, been in very bad odor.”[259] It was clear to the Red Fox that the intent was “to use the Virginia model as a mask or stalking horse, rather than as an armor of defense.” The plan, as it developed, was to undertake, through various toasts and their responses, to associate this doctrine with Jeffersonian Democracy. Of the twenty-four toasts, practically every one bore upon this subject. The President, Vice-President Calhoun, the Cabinet were to be guests.

It was a subscription dinner, and outside the conspirators in charge the purchasers of tickets had no other thought than that it was intended solely as a tribute to the memory of the sage of Monticello.

Talking it over with Van Buren, Jackson soon convinced himself as to the motive of the conspirators. By prearrangement, Van Buren met Jackson at the White House, in the presence only of Major Donelson, the President’s secretary, to determine upon the attitude to be taken and the toasts to be proposed. While the Nullifiers were jubilating over the promised participation of the President, he was locked in with his Secretary of State deliberating on the wisdom of showing by his toast his familiarity with the purpose of the conspirators, and his determination to preserve the Union at all hazards. The conferees decided upon that aggressive course, and the toasts were framed accordingly.

“Thus armed,” wrote Van Buren years later, “we repaired to the dinner with feelings on the part of the Chief akin to those which would have animated his breast if the scene of this preliminary skirmish in defense of the Union had been the field of battle instead of the festive board.”[260] When Benton arrived that night, he found a full assemblage, with the guests scattered about in groups excitedly examining the list of toasts, and discussing their significance. The congressional delegation from Pennsylvania, on scenting the conspiracy, left the hall before the dinner began. Many others, not caring to associate themselves with such a movement, retired, thus depriving themselves of a triumph. But many remained, among them four members of the Cabinet, Van Buren, Eaton, Branch, and Barry. During the toasts, which were so numerous and lengthy that they required eleven columns in the “National Telegraph,” Jackson sat stern and impassive, betraying nothing of his intention. At length, the regular toasts given, the volunteer toasts were called for, and Jackson rose. As he did so, Van Buren, who was short in stature, stood on his chair to observe the effect better.[261] Straightening himself to his full height, and fixing Calhoun with his penetrating eye, he paused a moment, and then, following the hush, proposed the most dramatic and historical toast in American history:

“Our Federal Union: It must and shall be preserved.”[262]

There was no possible misunderstanding of the meaning. From the time of the delivery of the Webster speech the value of the Union had been discussed with a disconcerting freedom of expression. The rumor was afloat in the capital that Calhoun had sinister designs, and proposed to place himself at the head of a disloyal movement of the extreme State Rights men. The toasts of the evening had told their tale of the dinner conspiracy. And Jackson’s brief, meaningful sentence cut like a knife. It was something more than a toast—it was a presidential proclamation.

Without a word more, Jackson lifted his glass as a sign that the toast was to be drunk standing. Calhoun rose with the rest. “His glass trembled in his hand and a little of the amber fluid trickled down the side.”[263] There was no response. Jackson stood there, silent and impassive—clearly the master of the situation. All hilarity had gone. Jackson left his place, and, going to the far end of the room, engaged Benton in conversation, but not upon the subject of the dinner.

When all were seated, Calhoun, who had remained standing, slowly and hesitatingly proposed:

“The Union: next to our liberty, the most dear.”

Then, after a pause of half a minute, he proceeded in such a fashion as to leave doubt as to whether the concluding sentence was a part of the toast, or a brief speech:

“May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States, and by distributing equally the benefits and burdens of the Union.”

Within five minutes after Calhoun had resumed his seat, the company of more than a hundred had dwindled to thirty—men fled from the room as from the scene of a battle.

The story of that Jacksonian toast spread over the country, justifying, as Benton admits he then realized, the peroration of Webster’s speech, and proclaiming to the people the existence of a conspiracy against the Union, and the determination of Jackson to preserve it at all cost. That toast made history. It marked the definite beginning of the history-making quarrel of Jackson and Calhoun, and the beginning of the exodus from the Democratic or Jacksonian party of the Nullifiers and Disunionists, who were to be warmly welcomed by Clay into the party he was about to create to wage war on the Jackson Administration.

V

Another dinner was to complete the break of Calhoun and Jackson.

In the spring of 1830, President Jackson gave a dinner at the White House in honor of former President Monroe. During the evening, while the President and his predecessor were engaged in animated conversation concerning the days when the latter was in the White House and the former in the field in Florida, Tench Ringgold, marshal of the District, turned to Major Lewis with the observation that Calhoun had been an enemy of the President in relation to his Florida campaign. It was not, however, a revelation to Lewis at the time.

During Jackson’s first successful fight for the Presidency, the anniversary of the battle of New Orleans was celebrated, with Jackson as the guest of honor. James A. Hamilton had participated in the celebration as the representative of the Tammany Society of New York; and, joining the Jackson party at the Hermitage, had accompanied it to New Orleans. During the conversation en route, there was some discussion of the charges that had been made against Jackson in the presidential contest of four years before relative to his conduct in the Seminole War, and the assertion had been made that Crawford, a member of Monroe’s Cabinet, had urged his arrest. It was expected that a similar attack would be made in the campaign then beginning. Learning that Hamilton expected to return by way of Georgia, Major Lewis requested him to visit Crawford, then living in retirement there, and ascertain just what had occurred in the Cabinet meeting. The motive of Lewis was to arm himself, if possible, to repel the attack, and to effect a reconciliation between Jackson and the Georgian. Finding on his arrival in Georgia that to reach the home of Crawford he would be forced to go seventy miles out of his way, Hamilton requested John Forsyth to ascertain from Crawford “whether the propriety or necessity for arresting or trying General Jackson was ever presented as a question for the deliberation of Mr. Monroe’s Cabinet.”[264] Passing through Washington on his way home, Hamilton spent two days in the same house with Calhoun, and frankly made inquiry of him also. The latter answered with an emphatic negative. The impression Hamilton received from the conversation was that Calhoun had been favorable to Jackson and Crawford hostile. On reaching New York he wrote Major Lewis of his inability to see Crawford and of his conversation with Calhoun. The reply of the Major shows conclusively that, up to this time, there was not the slightest suspicion that Calhoun had been unfriendly to Jackson, and the sole impression made upon Lewis by Hamilton’s letter was that, since the subject of arresting or reprimanding Jackson had not been broached in the Cabinet, a grave injustice had been done the Georgian which ought to be righted. Soon afterwards, Hamilton heard from Forsyth to the effect that Crawford informed him that in a meeting of the Cabinet Calhoun had urged the propriety of arresting and trying Jackson.[265] Very soon after the receipt of Forsyth’s amazing letter, Hamilton received a note from Calhoun, suggesting the impropriety of disclosures as to Cabinet proceedings and asking that no use be made of his name. Realizing now the serious possibilities of a complete airing of the old controversy, Hamilton filed Forsyth’s letter away and mentioned it to no one. For eighteen months this letter was undisturbed. Then, in the autumn of 1829, when Major Lewis was his guest in his New York home, some evil spirit impelled Hamilton to show the letter to Jackson’s intimate who dwelt with him in the White House. Lewis made no disclosure until after the Monroe dinner. In the meanwhile, as we have seen, the relations between Jackson and Calhoun had become strained, and the Major convinced himself that, since the fight was inevitable, his idol should be furnished with all available ammunition. In telling him of Ringgold’s statement at the dinner, Lewis added that it was supported by the revelations of the Forsyth letter, and Jackson demanded the fatal note.

On learning of Jackson’s demand, Forsyth took the precaution first to send a copy of his letter to Hamilton to Crawford for verification in writing, or for such corrections as the facts might necessitate. The reply, with a minor correction, together with the Forsyth letter to Hamilton, were thereupon turned over to Jackson.

The effect on the President was to infuriate him. Setting his jaws, he wrote a sharp note to Calhoun demanding an explanation. This was the beginning of one of the most acrimonious controversies in American politics.

VI

With Crawford as the witness against Calhoun, it is essential to turn for a moment to the career of this remarkable and singularly unfortunate statesman. No student of the period, not poisoned by the prejudices and jealousies of Adams, who filled the pages of his diary with grotesque caricatures of his rivals, can escape the conclusion that William H. Crawford was one of the purest and ablest statesmen of his day. At the time he entered the Senate, in his thirty-fifth year, he was a splendid figure—handsome, virile, magnetic, independent in thought, and audacious in action. He was the great war leader in the Senate, as was Calhoun in the House. He had made the most profound impression on the business men of the Nation of any publicist since Hamilton by his fight for strict governmental economy, for the scrutinizing of all expenditures, and by his championship of the National Bank in a brilliant and exhaustive speech in reply to Clay. After two years as Minister to France, Madison called him into his Cabinet to unravel the hopeless tangle in the War Department. He served as adviser to Madison during the remainder of his Administration, continued as the official adviser of Monroe through the eight years of his Presidency, and was urged by Adams to continue in a similar capacity under him. He was soon transferred from the War Department to the Treasury, where he served for nine years to the complete satisfaction of the business men of the Republic.

Even as early as the close of the Madison Administration, a powerful element, opposed to the precedent which pointed to Monroe for the succession, centered on Crawford. Numerous newspapers strongly urged his election, offers of support poured in upon him, and had he at that time entered actively into the plans of his friends, there is every reason to believe he would have been chosen. When the Congress convened, the majority favored his candidacy. The caucus was postponed. The Administration put forth its utmost, exertions for Monroe. Crawford remained inactive. And when he definitely put his claims aside, a number of his friends refused to participate in the caucus, in which, notwithstanding his own lack of interest and the prestige of the Administration, Monroe was barely nominated by a vote of 65 to 54 for Crawford.

The Cabinet of Monroe was so constituted as to make it a house divided three ways against itself. Adams, Calhoun, and Crawford were all members, all were presidential candidates, and none had a clearer right to aspire to the succession than the one who had lacked only twelve votes of the nomination in 1816. The three-cornered fight began in earnest as early as 1821. With Adams, Crawford’s relations were far from friendly, as we may judge from the numerous vindictive comments in the former’s diary. Between Crawford and Jackson no love was lost, and we find the Georgian writing to a correspondent of Jackson’s “depravity and vindictiveness.”[266] But Calhoun was to prove the most unscrupulous and hostile of his foes.

It was not unknown to Crawford that Calhoun had earnestly sought the alienation of his supporters at the time of Monroe’s election. And, as the election of 1824 approached, Calhoun’s personal organ at the capital became intemperate in its attacks upon him. But the climax, involving Calhoun, was reached in the spring of 1824, when the “A. B.” papers appeared in Calhoun journals, followed by a formal charge in the House of Representatives, filed by Ninian Edwards of Illinois, alleging irregularities and misconduct in office against the Secretary of the Treasury. Here we have the issue direct between Calhoun, seldom accused of being an unscrupulous intriguer, and Crawford, against whom history has lodged the charge. The connection between Calhoun and the attack appears clear enough. Edwards was Calhoun’s friend. The paper that published the “A. B.” papers was Calhoun’s paper and was edited by a clerk in Calhoun’s office.

Immediately after making the charges, Edwards was appointed Minister to Mexico—on the recommendation of Adams, Secretary of State. During the two weeks previous to Edwards’s departure for his post, Calhoun made almost daily visits to his room in a lodging-house, spending from one to two hours with him on each occasion.[267] Nor does Adams, judger of men and motives, appear entirely free from complicity in view of his efforts to dissuade Monroe from summoning Edwards back to Washington to testify in the investigation ordered by the House on the demand of Crawford. The investigation disclosed that Edwards was a liar, and the committee, including Webster, Livingston, and Randolph, unanimously reported that “nothing has been proved to impeach the integrity of the Secretary of the Treasury or to bring into doubt the general correctness and ability of his administration of the public finances.”

There is ample justification for the conclusion that Calhoun was directly implicated in an unscrupulous attempt to blacken the reputation of a rival, and that Adams shared with him in the earnest desire that the investigation should be postponed until after the presidential election.

In the early stages of the contest everything indicated Crawford’s triumph. Then Tragedy intervened. As a result of the administering of lobelia by an unskilled physician, Crawford suffered a stroke. For a time he lost both sight and the power of speech. His nervous system was shattered. He lost the use of his lower limbs. But such is the pull of an overshadowing ambition that even in this plight he refused to withdraw from the race. The Opposition press was not above exaggerating his condition. And at such a time the caucus was held. The galleries were packed, but the attendance on the floor was slight. Out of the 261 members, only 68 were present, the friends of Calhoun, Adams, Clay, and Jackson having reached an agreement not to enter the caucus. Thus the contest was thrown into the House, where Clay went over to Adams and elected him.

There are few more poignant pictures associated with the failure of lofty political ambitions than that in the country home of the Georgian where he sat with his family about the blazing fire, awaiting the news from the Capitol.[268] His reputation had been dishonestly assailed, his health was broken, his fortune was gone, and, after having almost touched the Presidency, he calmly awaited the final word of failure. The daughters, who adored him, in their efforts to soften the expected blow, told him of their joyous dreams of a return to “Woodlawn,” the Georgia country home, where all could be much happier. When the expected messenger arrived and announced the election of Adams, the defeated statesman, without a change of tone or countenance, merely remarked that he thought it would be Jackson. The next day a letter from the new President urged him to continue in the Cabinet, Jackson called, “frank, courteous, and almost cordial,” and a little later Thomas Jefferson wrote his frank regrets.[269] And thus, having declined the Adams invitation, after a remarkable career in the service of his country, William H. Crawford, poorer than the day he entered public life, and physically a wreck, returned to “Woodlawn” in its magnificent oak forest, with its charming, winding driveways, with its peach and apple blossoms, and its gardens and its shrubbery. And here under an ancient oak he was to sit for many evenings with his children and his friends. That he sometimes thought over the lost hope, we may be sure; that he often associated it with Calhoun, there can be no doubt.

VII

The first act of Jackson’s, on being told of Calhoun’s hostility in the Monroe Cabinet, was to call for a copy of Crawford’s letter to Forsyth, and to enclose it in a letter to the Vice-President, expressing his surprise and asking for his version. The next development in the controversy came in the form of a long letter from Calhoun, practically admitting the charge, and elaborately condemning and damning Crawford for the betrayal of a Cabinet secret. This reply was delivered to Jackson on a Sunday on his way to church, and he wrote a brief and significant answer on his return to the White House on the same day. The closing words sealed the doom of Calhoun as far as the Presidency was concerned. “In your and Mr. Crawford’s dispute I have no interest whatever,” he wrote. “But it may become necessary for me hereafter, when I shall have more leisure and the documents at hand, to notice the historical facts and references in your communication—which will give a very different view to the subject. Understanding you now, no further communication with you on this subject is necessary.”

About this time he sent Calhoun’s letter to Van Buren, who refused to read it, explaining that he would be accused of fomenting the trouble and preferred to know nothing about it. When the messenger returned to Jackson with the comment of his Secretary of State, he replied, “I reckon Van is right. I dare say they will try to throw the blame on him.”[270]

And of course Van Buren was right. After many conferences on the subject with Calhoun, Adams recorded in his diary that “Calhoun is under the firm persuasion that the author of this combustion is Martin Van Buren, who has used the agency of James A. Hamilton in producing it, and that Hamilton, as well as Forsyth, had been a go-between to and from Nashville.”[271] The denial of Van Buren at the time was discounted by the anxiety of Hamilton, after talking with Forsyth in Georgia, to have Crawford’s statement in writing. Nothing, however, could have been more effective in eliminating Calhoun from the presidential race.

That he appreciated his predicament and fought desperately to extricate himself is shown in various ways. Wirt declared, at the time, that “he has blasted his prospects of future advancement,” and Adams described him as a “drowning man.” But the most conclusive evidence of Calhoun’s desperate efforts is to be found in the numerous notations in Adams’s journal. The first entry is to the effect that he had “received a letter from John C. Calhoun ... relating to his personal controversy with President Jackson and William H. Crawford. He questions me concerning the letter of Gen. Jackson to Mr. Monroe which Crawford alleges to have been produced at the Cabinet meetings on the Seminole War, and asks for copies, if I think proper to give them, of Crawford’s letter to me, which I received last summer, and of my answer.” It is characteristic that the only comment of Adams is an impartial damnation of the trio, Jackson, Calhoun, and Crawford, and especially of the Carolinian for his “icy-hearted dereliction of all the decencies of social intercourse with me, solely from terror of Jackson.” But the day following, we find Adams delving into his diary of 1818. “I thought it advisable,” he writes, “to have extracts from it made of all those parts relating to the Seminole War and the Cabinet meetings concerning it. As the copy must be made by an entirely confidential hand, my wife undertakes the task.”[272] A little later[273] we find a Mr. Crowninshield applying to him on behalf of Mr. Crawford for a written verification of the Cabinet incident. And four days after that we have Calhoun writing again “requesting statements of the conduct of Mr. Crawford in the deliberations of the Cabinet upon the Seminole War.”[274] The same day Wirt[275] informs Adams that he has received a similar note from the Georgian, and asks for a conference.

That night Adams went to Wirt’s lodgings on Capitol Hill and found him in bed and asleep. He was awakened, however, by a fellow lodger, and a four-hour conference followed, with Adams reading the former Attorney-General the letter from Crawford and the answer sent, and also from the Adams diary of May to August, 1818.

It seems that Adams was not prompt in complying with Calhoun’s request, and a third letter reached him pressing him for a statement of Crawford’s conduct and opinions expressed at the Cabinet consultation on the Seminole War, causing the former President to comment sourly in his diary that he would give no letter until he had seen all the correspondence, and knew precisely the points in dispute.[276] There appears to have been little disposition on the part of Calhoun to meet this requirement, for Adams notes that he had received from Calhoun “an extract” from Crawford’s letter to Forsyth, but not all the correspondence.[277] On the next day, the Carolinian, who was evidently devoting himself feverishly and exclusively to the hopeless attempt to save himself, sent “a further extract from the Crawford letter.”[278] The unpleasant old Puritan, thoroughly enjoying the torture of the fighting politicians, calmly awaited all the correspondence, and thus a week later we learn from the diary that “Mr. Martin took me aside and delivered to me a letter from Vice-President Calhoun with a bundle of papers, being the correspondence ...,” and that the messenger “said that Mr. Calhoun wished to have the papers returned to him to-morrow morning.”[279]

On the following day Wirt, having moved to Gadsby’s, was there informed by Adams that he had received the correspondence, but “that Mr. Calhoun had withheld two important papers; one, the letter from General Jackson to Mr. Monroe of Jan. 6, 1818, and the other, Crawford’s last letter to Calhoun, which, he sent me word, he had returned to Crawford.”[280] A few days later a Dr. Hunt called upon Adams, “more full of politics and personalities than of physic,” with the announcement that “Mr. Calhoun’s pamphlet is to be published to-morrow morning.”[281]

To Adams the issue was clear—a battle between Calhoun and Van Buren for the Presidency. The next day this pamphlet, bearing the elaborate title, “Correspondence between General Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun, President and Vice-President of the United States, on the Subject of the Course of the latter in the deliberations of the Cabinet of Mr. Monroe on the Occurrences in the Seminole War,” was published at midnight by Duff Green in the “National Telegraph.” “In my walk about the Capitol Square,” writes Adams, “I met E. Everett, R. G. Amory, E. Wyer, and Matthew L. Davis, all of whom, with the exception of Wyer, spoke of the pamphlet. I received a copy of it under cover from Mr. Calhoun himself.”[282]

Then the war opened in earnest. The “Telegraph” favorably commented upon the pamphlet, and the “Globe” unfavorably. Adams found that “the effect of Mr. Calhoun’s pamphlet is yet scarcely perceptible in Congress, still less upon public opinion,” and that, while the Administration was at war with itself, “the stream of popularity runs almost as strongly in its favor as ever.”[283] Not content with the pamphlet alone, the “National Telegraph” followed it with Crawford’s letter to Calhoun, and another of Forsyth’s, and Adams observed with interest that “in all this correspondence Van Buren is not seen; but James A. Hamilton, intimately connected with him, is a busy intermeddler throughout.”[284] This notation was in line with the gossip of the capital at the time of the controversy.

A little more than a week after the appearance of the pamphlet, Calhoun published his correspondence with Hamilton in the “Telegraph,” and Duff Green, in the same issue, editorially charged Van Buren with responsibility for the rumpus. And this was met on the following day by the latter in a letter to the paper positively denying any interest in the controversy, or any knowledge of Hamilton’s correspondence with Forsyth or Calhoun. Green responded by writing Van Buren down as a liar.[285] Thus the controversy raged, drawing politicians, one after another, into the fight. But in this fearsome medley of charges and counter-charges one fact stood out—that Calhoun had misrepresented his conduct in the Monroe Cabinet to Jackson, and, on being betrayed by Crawford, had incurred the deadly enmity of the President. As far as Jackson was concerned in the public controversy, the matter rested with Calhoun’s initial letter of admission that he had opposed Jackson’s course in the war. He prepared an elaborate statement of the facts for the purposes of history, turned it over to the editor of the “Globe,” who became his literary executor, and he, in turn, permitted Kendall to study it when he was planning a biography of the President.[286] But of all this the public knew nothing.

The inevitable storm had broken. Van Buren, suavely in the background, was clearly the beneficiary, Calhoun just as clearly the victim. After this the great Carolinian lost interest in the Presidency, all concern with party, and henceforth, with occasional attacks on Jackson, concentrated on sectionalism and slavery. His disaffection was to carry with it that of his more ardent supporters, and thus in scarcely more than a year Calhoun, Tyler, Tazewell, and the men who looked to them for guidance, passed from the Administration camp to join the Opposition. And the incident had one immediate effect—inseparable from it—the disruption of the Cabinet with the eradication of the last vestige of Calhoun influence from all the executive branches of the Government.

CHAPTER V
MRS. EATON DEMOLISHES THE CABINET

I

At the time the politicians were discussing the open rupture with Calhoun, two horsemen might have been seen riding slowly through Georgetown, and out on the Tenallytown road, engaged in earnest conversation. It was not a novelty, however, to the people of the ancient river town, for this had long been a favorite route of Jackson and Van Buren on their daily rides. On this occasion Jackson had been discussing the painful lack of harmony in his Cabinet and had expressed the hope that his troubles were about over.

“No, General,” said Van Buren, a little nervously, “there is but one thing that will give you peace.”

“What is that, sir?” snapped the grim one.

“My resignation.”

“Never, sir; even you know little of Andrew Jackson if you suppose him capable of consenting to such a humiliation of his friends by his enemies.”

To understand the conditions leading to such a suggestion from Van Buren, it is necessary to refer to the serious petticoat entanglement in which Jackson found himself within a few weeks after his inauguration, because of the presence of Senator Eaton in his Cabinet. It is an amusing fact that the first real democratic administration in American history should have been all but wrecked on a social issue. Aside from the agreeable work of “turning the rascals out,” little had occurred to disturb the serenity of the new Administration between the inauguration and the meeting of the Congress in the following December but this social war. The call to battle had been sounded even before Jackson had taken the oath of office; the battle raged with unprecedented fury for many months, finally wrecking the Cabinet and advancing Van Buren to within sight of the White House. It has not been uncommon for women to change the course of political and dynastic history in other countries, but to this day the case of the captivating Margaret O’Neal is unique in the United States.

The pretty daughter of a popular tavern-keeper, whose old-fashioned house was a favorite with statesmen and their wives, she had developed into womanhood under the eyes of men famous in the State. Here Jackson lived during his senatorial service, and grew fond of the vivacious child he often held on his knee. With the education a doting father lavished upon her, and with her intimate contact with men of ability and women of refinement, she found herself, on the threshold of life, the intellectual peer of the best of her sex. It is not unnatural that this clever and beautiful girl should have incurred the jealous displeasure of the less attractive spouses of the elder statesmen. Her rare beauty alone would have done that had she been as virtuous as Cæsar’s wife should have been. Perley Poore[287] describes her as of medium height, straight and delicate and of perfect proportions; with a skin of delicate white, tinged with red, and with an abundance of dark hair clustered above her broad, expressive forehead; with a nose of perfect Greek proportions, a finely curved mouth, a firm, round chin—the Aspasia of Washington. When, in addition to her physical and intellectual charms, it must be recorded that she occasionally played the rôle of barmaid, permitting such liberties as men in the early stages of their cups would take, it is easy to understand why the more sedate matrons of the little capital were prone to look upon her as beyond the pale. She had married a purser in the navy, and even her enemies at the time conceded that the match was a mésalliance because of her intellectual superiority. In time the husband sailed across the sea, leaving his comely young wife in the rather free-and-easy atmosphere of her father’s tavern. The moral conditions of the capital were not such as to spare the most virtuous, thus situated, from the tongue of gossip. A contemporary has said that the Washington of those days “resembled in recklessness and extravagance the spirit of the England of the Seventeenth Century, so graphically portrayed in Thackeray’s Humorists.’ ... Laxity of morals and the coolest disregard possible, characterized that period of our existence.”[288]

Living at the O’Neal tavern at the time was the wealthy Senator Eaton, who had manifested more than a passing interest in “Peggy,” as she was called, before her marriage. Gossip had it that he became more than ever attentive when the sailor went to sea. When, after a drunken debauch, which the gossips, without the slightest justification, ascribed to the worthless seaman’s knowledge of his wife’s friendship for the Senator, the husband shot himself, and Eaton was found in her company with increasing frequency, the case was complete as far as the drawing-rooms were concerned. All that evidence could not furnish, the imagination did, and pretty Peggy stood pilloried in the community.

It was at this juncture that Eaton asked the advice of Jackson as to a marriage. With characteristic impulsiveness the old warrior replied that if he loved her he should marry her and save her good name by the act. Thus, on January 1, 1829, the future Secretary of War was married to the tavern-keeper’s daughter, and instantly the drawing-rooms began to buzz. One of the patrician ladies of the time of the wedding poured forth the chatter of the social set. Here we find that Mrs. Eaton “had never been admitted into good society”; that while “very handsome” she was “not of an inspiring character” and had a “violent temper”; that notwithstanding this she was “irresistible” and “carries

whatever point she sets her mind on.” The enemies of Jackson were laughing in the drawing-rooms and diverting themselves “with the idea of what a suitable lady in waiting Mrs. Eaton will make for Mrs. Jackson,” and were repeating “the old adage, ‘Birds of a feather flock together.’”[289] In arriving at an understanding of Jackson’s vigorous defense of the lady of his Cabinet, it is well to bear in mind that the same scandal-mongers were rolling the name of Mrs. Jackson on their tongues. The same letter relates how one of Mrs. Smith’s gentlemen callers “laughed and joked about Mrs. Jackson and her pipe.”

The marriage might have remained merely one of the innumerable morsels with which ladies sometimes regale the drawing-rooms but for the announcement that Eaton had been invited into the Cabinet—and that spread the controversy to the politicians. Among these Senator John Branch had the courage or the insolence personally to press the point upon Jackson that, because of social complications, the appointment of Eaton would be “unpopular and unfortunate.”[290] Jackson heard his future Secretary of the Navy in stern silence, and appointed Eaton Secretary of War. The inauguration was scarcely over when the petticoat battle began. The most fashionable minister at the capital at the time, at whose church Mrs. Smith, the Branches, the Berriens, and the Inghams worshiped,[291] importuned, no doubt, by the society women of the city, and quite probably encouraged by the Cabinet ladies of his congregation, persuaded a Philadelphia minister to write the President of the alleged irregularities of Mrs. Eaton. Some of these ministerial charges are unfit for print. Jackson sent a stinging reply, and at the same time employed detectives to investigate the charges. The search of the sleuths was unavailing, and the situation became so embarrassing to the Philadelphia clergyman that he demanded that the Washington minister should reveal himself.

Thus, on the evening of September 1, 1829, a unique conference was held at the White House, when Jackson confronted the two clergymen, in the presence of witnesses, and forced them to admit that they had no evidence. One of the worst charges had been that a certain physician, conveniently dead, had said that Mrs. Eaton had undergone a premature accouchement when her husband had been more than a year at sea—the date fixed as 1821. When confronted by the fact that the first husband had not gone to sea until 1824, the clergyman lightly changed the date to conform. This disgusted and enraged Jackson. Because he cross-examined the gentlemen of the cloth regarding a matter affecting the reputation of a woman, some historians have been resentful of his severity.[292] The purpose was to convince the members of the Cabinet, who were present, that their ladies were working a grave injustice upon the wife of a colleague in refusing her social intercourse. But far from satisfying the women, the discomfiture of the minister and the utter collapse of the case only embittered them the more against her. The minister was placed in a painful position, dubbed by the irrepressible “Ike” Hill as “the chaplain of the conspiracy,” and described by Mrs. Smith[293] as having been “rendered incapable of attending to his ministerial duties to such a degree as to produce great dissatisfaction in his congregation.”

Meanwhile months had gone by and Mrs. Eaton was still snubbed. Mrs. Calhoun, a thorough aristocrat, had positively refused to call. Mrs. Ingham, whose own reputation was not unquestioned, took her cue from Mrs. Calhoun. Branch tells us that when, in May, his wife and daughters joined him in Washington, they found Mrs. Eaton “excluded from society,” and that he “did not deem it their duty to endeavor to control or counteract the decision of the ladies of Washington.”[294] Miss Berrien had accepted the verdict of the women, and her father was openly expressing his admiration for “the heroic virtues of John Branch for hazarding his place rather than permit his wife and daughters to associate with the wife of John H. Eaton.”[295] Parties were given and Mrs. Eaton was not invited; at public receptions she was snubbed.

This was all meat and drink to Adams, who recorded in his diary, after some scandal gossip with Mrs. Rush: “I told Mrs. Rush that this struggle was likely to terminate in a party division of Caps and Hats.” It is this suggestion as to party divisions which imposes upon the historian the necessity of dwelling upon this strange petticoat squabble. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that, when Martin Van Buren appeared at social functions with the pretty Peggy on his arm, he made himself President of the United States.

When the Red Fox arrived in Washington and noted the passionate determination of the iron man at the White House to force a social recognition of Mrs. Eaton, he could not have been unmindful of his advantage. He was a widower. No wife or daughters were with him to be compromised. His biographer[296] makes the point that he called upon the accused woman in response to common instincts of decency, and that his failure to have done so would have amounted to a striking public condemnation. But he did something more than merely call upon her—he became an active and aggressive partisan of her cause, and by so doing endeared himself to Jackson. Common decency did not demand that he feature her at his dinners and receptions, or enter into an agreement with two unmarried members of the diplomatic corps to do likewise.[297] It is impossible to account for this extraordinary partisanship on any other grounds than his desire to curry special favor with the President. His conduct and activities became the subject of jests and quips. “It is asserted that if Mr. Van Buren persists in visiting her [Mrs. Eaton], our ladies will not go to his house,” wrote one of the stubborn dames.[298] With the ladies of the Cabinet giving large parties, the wife of Eaton was omitted from the invitation lists, and Van Buren countered with dinners and dances at the British and Russian Legations at which Mrs. Eaton was treated with marked distinction. But even here “cotillion after cotillion dissolved into its original elements when she was placed at its head.”[299] At the Russian Legation, Madame Huygens, wife of the Dutch Minister, on finding that her seat was beside Mrs. Eaton at the table, haughtily took her husband’s arm and stalked impressively from the room. Because of this affront, Jackson was prone to make it an international incident by demanding the recall of the Minister, but Van Buren’s sense of humor intervened. In sheer delight Adams wrote: “Mr. Vaughan ... gave a ball last night which was opened by Mr. Bankhead, the Secretary of the British Legation, and Mrs. Eaton; and Mr. Van Buren has issued cards also for a ball which is to be given in honor of the same lady. I confine myself to the Russian and Turkish war.”[300] In the late summer of 1829 the effect of the struggle upon both Jackson and Van Buren was apparent. The President, disgusted, worn, and sick at heart, was confiding to his correspondents his partiality for the calm of the Hermitage. And Adams, riding about the environs, and encountering Van Buren, similarly taking the air, spitefully wrote: “His pale and haggard looks show it is already a reward of mortification. If it should prove, as there is every probability that it will, a reward of treachery, it will be but his desert.”[301]

When the winter came and the social season opened, the contest naturally intensified. Ingham, Branch, and Berrien gave large parties from which Mrs. Eaton was excluded, while “on the other hand the President made her doubly conspicuous by an over display of notice.”[302] At one of the President’s drawing-rooms she was surrounded by a crowd eager to please the host, but Mrs. Donelson, mistress of the White House, held aloof. This rebellion under his own roof caused the aged President the deepest pain. Adams records a melodramatic appeal by Van Buren to Mrs. Donelson, which was highly colored by the ardent Pepys, but such an appeal was made.[303] The effect of the fight was disastrous to the Administration. The members of the Cabinet were speedily involved by their wives, and for a time Eaton and Branch did not speak. It was at this juncture that Jackson determined to intervene, and “to bring them to speaking terms.”[304] His intermediary for the purpose, Colonel Richard M. Johnson,[305] was not a Talleyrand, and his lack of tact in his talks with Branch, Berrien, and Ingham made matters all the worse. When the relations of the Cabinet members became threatening, Jackson demanded that they meet and reach a basis for official intercourse at least. The meeting was held at the home of Berrien, attended by Branch, Eaton, and Barry. The negotiations were conducted with dignity and decorum, Branch satisfactorily explained invitations to the ministers who had accused Eaton’s wife, and the two shook hands as a token of reconciliation.[306] Meanwhile Congress was in session. All attempts to hold Cabinet meetings had long been abandoned. The lines were drawn tightly. The slights and indignities to Mrs. Eaton had become all but intolerable. And much was being heard of the alleged frailty and indiscretions of Mrs. Ingham—stories that seem to have been well known at the time, but to have been given renewed currency by Eaton.[307]

It was at this juncture that Van Buren, riding with Jackson, proposed the acceptance of his resignation. Meditating the step for some time he had been unable to muster the courage to broach the subject. For four days the President and his Secretary of State rode the Tenallytown road earnestly debating the propriety of the plan, and on the fourth day, just as they reached their turning-point at the Tenallytown Gate, Jackson gave a reluctant consent and suggested the British Mission. But the grim old warrior was loath to part with his one strong friend in the Cabinet, and early the next morning he summoned Van Buren to the White House, and in great agitation, and with significance, explained anew that it was his custom to release from association with him any man who felt that he ought to go. Thoroughly alarmed, Van Buren, with emotion, withdrew all he had said, and announced a willingness to retain his post until dismissed. Deeply touched, Jackson proposed another discussion on their afternoon ride. It was that afternoon that it was agreed to call others into the conference; and the next night Van Buren had as dinner guests Jackson, Barry, Eaton, and Major Lewis. Finally Eaton agreed to follow with his resignation. Would Peggy consent, asked the tactful Fox. Her husband thought she would. The next night the five met at dinner again, with Eaton reporting his wife’s acquiescence in the plans. But when, a few days later, Jackson and Van Buren, out for a stroll, stopped at the Eaton house, their reception from the mistress was so cold and formal that the Secretary commented upon it, and Jackson shrugged his shoulders in silence. But the die was cast. The plan was made. Van Buren and Eaton would resign, thus paving the way for the resignation of the Calhoun followers, and a reorganization of the Cabinet—with the Calhoun influence entirely eliminated.[308]

II

The decision made, the old President must have felt a sense of ineffable relief. His Cabinet had been a failure and he realized it. His dissatisfaction with a majority of its members was not due entirely to their hostility to Mrs. Eaton. The fight against the National Bank was in its incipiency and he looked upon Ingham as a tool of the Bank; the Nullification doctrine was being promulgated and he considered Berrien a Nullifier—and in both surmises he was right. He thought Branch pompous, incompetent, and subservient to petticoat rule. And we may be sure that whether or not the Cabinet was to be reorganized in the interest of Van Buren, the relations of all three toward the Carolinian entered into his decision to rid himself of them. There is evidence that he quite early determined to displace Berrien, but nothing of record to indicate the cause. In the man selected for his place, however, we have ample justification for the suspicion that the Red Fox had poisoned his mind against his Attorney-General. It was on the suggestion of Van Buren, very soon after the formation of the Cabinet in 1829, that the Attorney-Generalship was offered to Louis McLane, who, in disgust, had retired to Wilmington for the practice of his profession, with the inducement that he would later be transferred to the Supreme Bench on the death of the rapidly failing Justice Duval. Before breakfast one morning, after a hard ride over the wretched mud roads, Hamilton, the lieutenant of Van Buren, arrived at the McLane home with the proposal, which was accepted. Nothing, however, was done—another mystery that died with Jackson and his Secretary of State.[309]

But the coast was now clear. A strong workable Cabinet after Jackson’s own heart could be created. The manner in which he went about ridding himself of the undesirable members of the old Cabinet is graphically illustrated in the account left by Branch.[310] It is easy to visualize the scene in the President’s room, whither he has summoned Branch to inform him of the resignations of Van Buren and Eaton. There is a “solemn pause.” The Secretary, sensing the intent, smiles, and suggests that the grim one is not “acting in a character nature intended him for”; that he is not a diplomatist, and should speak frankly. Whereupon Jackson, “with great apparent kindness,” explains his purpose, points to a commission as Governor of Florida upon the table, and announces that it will be a pleasure to fill in the name of the visitor. Branch haughtily declares that he had “not supported him for the sake of office,” and soon retires. Returning to his office, Branch prepares and sends in his resignation courteously, but not omitting to mention that the action was taken in response to the President’s wish. Whereupon Jackson, splitting hairs, writes a protest against the statement that his correspondent’s resignation had been asked. “I did not,” he writes, “as to yourself, express a wish that you would retire.” But since the Cabinet had come in “harmoniously and as a unit,” and two were voluntarily retiring, it had become “indispensable” to reorganize completely the official household “to guard against misrepresentation.” More correspondence follows, ending with a gracious acceptance of the resignation, coupled with an expression of appreciation of the “integrity and zeal” with which the Secretary of the Navy had discharged his duties.[311]

Ingham made the President’s task easy with a brief note of resignation, and passed permanently from public life.[312] But Berrien was loath to go. In discussing the situation with friends, he made no secret of his desire to retain his post, but on learning that Jackson had no such notion, he withdrew in a friendly and dignified letter.[313]

The period between the announcement of Van Buren’s resignation and the appointment of the new Cabinet was rich in food for the gossips. What would become of the Red Fox? Would Mrs. Eaton have her triumph in the elevation of her husband to some other post of distinction? And what would be the factional complexion of the new Cabinet? John Tyler, sending his budget of gossip home, rather questioned the rumor that Van Buren would be groomed for Vice-President and thought he would prefer to go abroad. It had also reached Tyler that Hugh L. White might become Secretary of War, and that “Livingston is to rule the roost,” and he lamented that in the latter event “the Constitution may be construed to mean anything and everything.” He had likewise heard that McLane would be Secretary of the Treasury, “but how,” he asked, “can he ever be acceptable to the South with his notions on the tariff and internal improvement?”[314] Meanwhile there appears to have been a rather definite plan on the part of Jackson and Van Buren for the building of the new Cabinet.

III

Either the President or Van Buren could very plausibly have been responsible for the decision as to Livingston and the State portfolio, but the fact remains that the proffer of the post was made through the latter. The Louisiana statesman was spending his summer vacation at his country place on the Hudson when a mysterious letter reached him from the New York politician, summoning him instantly to Washington, and warning him, on leaving, to conceal his destination. Observing both the summons and the injunction, he proceeded at once to the capital, and with some misgivings accepted the post of Secretary of State.[315] That this was Van Buren’s appointment seems more than probable.

For the Treasury, Louis McLane, Minister to England, a subordinate, as such, to Van Buren, with whom he had worked in perfect accord politically, and whose wife was ambitious for Cabinet honors,[316] was summoned home from London. As Van Buren had, at this time, selected the London post for himself, this appointment was unquestionably his own.

The one embarrassing hitch came in the selection of a Secretary of War. It was the plan to have Senator Hugh L. White of Tennessee relinquish his seat for the War Office, thus opening the way for the election of Eaton to his old position in the Senate. But White was cold to the proposition. The mutual friends of the President and the Tennessee Senator importuned him to no effect. James K. Polk strongly urged him. Felix Grundy added his appeal. Another wrote him: “The old man says that all his plans will be defeated unless you agree to come.”[317] Jackson himself did not hesitate to go with White’s brother-in-law to Virginia to request Senator Tazewell, an intimate of White’s, to exert his influence—but to no avail. The reason for this refusal, furnished by a kinswoman, throws light on the general understanding as to the purpose of the Cabinet reorganization—he did not intend to “thereby aid in the elevation of Mr. Van Buren to the Presidency.”[318] Thus did Jackson’s earnest wish to serve his friends, the Eatons, fail at a critical juncture. After the place was also refused by Representative Drayton of South Carolina, an enemy of Nullification, Jackson turned to his old co-worker in the War of 1812, and Lewis Cass, then Governor of Michigan, entered the new Cabinet. This was probably Jackson’s personal appointment, albeit years before, while acting as judge advocate in the court-martial of General Hull, Van Buren had learned to his discomfiture that Cass was no ordinary man.[319] More successful in caring for his friend Isaac Hill than for the Eatons, a proffer of the Navy portfolio to Senator Levi Woodbury of New Hampshire created a senatorial vacancy that fell to the fighting journalist. Incidentally the relations between Van Buren and Woodbury were close.

In finding a successor for Berrien the President was handicapped by the general opinion of his friends, including Van Buren, that his retention would serve a good purpose. During the period of uncertainty numerous names were canvassed, the favorite of the politicians being James Buchanan.[320] The first suggestion of Roger Taney was made to Jackson by a Washington physician who had ventured to say that he knew “a man who will suit for Attorney-General.” The disinterestedness and high character of this truly great and much-maligned man shines forth in his conduct during this period of negotiations. He not only did not press his claims, but urged the retention of Berrien, and, under his instructions, his brother-in-law (Key) did likewise. Thus we find Key calling upon Livingston, Barry, and Woodbury, urging the keeping of Berrien on the ground that “it would have a good effect upon the affairs of the party, both as to its bearing on the Indian and the Eaton questions.”[321] All three agreed, but confessed a delicacy about broaching the subject unless consulted. In the midst of these negotiations, Key was summoned to the White House and informed of the intention to invite Taney into the Cabinet. Again Key urged the wisdom of retaining Berrien; the President firmly rejected the idea, and thus, on his personal judgment, Jackson secured the services of one of the strongest figures to be associated with him in his most bitter battle.

Livingston, McLane, Cass, Woodbury, and Taney—this at any rate was not the “millennial of the minnows.” But the new Cabinet was not to be received with universal acclaim. The Calhoun followers grumbled that it was a Van Buren Cabinet; and Tyler, thinking in terms of State Rights, complained bitterly that State-Rights men had been left “entirely out in the cold.”[322]

Nor did the Eaton trouble dissipate instantly on the passing of the first Cabinet. The retired members stoutly insisted on every occasion that they had been forced out because of their refusal to coerce their wives to associate with naughty Peggy. After his return to his North Carolina home, Branch, in a voluminous letter, charged all the responsibility for the disruption of the Cabinet to the social issue. Berrien, albeit not only willing but anxious to remain, on his return to Georgia eulogized Jackson at a complimentary dinner in his honor, but added that when he attempted to prescribe rules for the association of the families of his Ministers he scorned the dictation.[323] And Duff Green was so active and persistent in ascribing the upheaval to the Eaton affair that Key was convinced “that that matter had not occasioned the change in the Cabinet.”[324] The gossips of the drawing-rooms, distressed at being deprived of a choice morsel, set their teeth into it with a grim determination to hold on. Mrs. Bayard Smith, as though personally affronted, wrote to a friend: “The papers do not exaggerate, nay do not retail one half his [Jackson’s]

imbecilities. He is completely under the domination of Mrs. Eaton, one of the most ambitious, violent, malignant, yet silly women you ever heard of.” And a few days later she returns to the attack: “Mrs. Eaton cannot be forced or persuaded to leave Washington.... She ... believes that next winter the present Cabinet Ministers will open their doors to her. Mrs. McLane has already committed herself on that point. Previous to her going to England, while on a visit here, in direct violation of her most violent asseverations previously made, she visited this lady, and instantly became a great favorite with the President.”[325]

However, if Mrs. Eaton lingered, others departed with undignified celerity. As soon as the robes of office fell from his shoulders, Eaton began a search for Ingham to administer a personal chastisement. The latter, who had been peculiarly offensive, and whose own wife was a victim of the gossips, would not fight a duel. He did not care to fight at all. Thus began an amusing chase. Eaton lay in wait for him in the streets, while the dignified ex-Minister of Finance carefully picked his way home through the muddy alleys and back yards into the back door of his house. At length the chase became uncomfortable. A stage-coach was chartered. The Inghams’ baggage was packed. Two hours before daybreak, the coach driver might have been seen lashing his horses through the mud and water of the capital, bearing on their way to Philadelphia the erstwhile Cabinet Minister and his family.

The first Cabinet, which almost immediately put on a drawing-room comedy, went out with a rip-roaring farce, with seconds bearing ominous messages, and with Cabinet officers lying in wait in the shadows, creeping through alleys, brandishing pistols, and in the darkest hours before the dawn lumbering in stage-coaches out of the capital city to escape a shot.

The thoroughly frightened Ingham openly charged that Eaton intended to murder him, and the letters of the former secretaries concerning the “murder conspiracy” added mightily to the amusement of the enemies of the Administration and to the chagrin and disgust of its friends. “Before you receive this,” wrote a Washingtonian to Senator John Forsyth, “you will have seen the disgraceful publications of Eaton and Ingham, which, of course, are the sole topics of conversation here. The rumor was that the President was engaged the day before yesterday in investigating the matter, and I know that he had a magistrate with him taking depositions.”[326] The hilarity of Jackson’s enemies was vividly expressed in a cartoon, entitled “The Rats Leaving a Falling House,” published in Philadelphia, and, with childish delight, Adams records in his diary that “two thousand copies of this print have been sold in Philadelphia this day,” and that the ten thousand copies struck of “will be disposed of within a fortnight.”[327]

Van Buren was sent to the English Court. Eaton was made Governor of Florida and later Minister to Spain, where Mrs. Eaton, in the most dignified Court in Europe, became a brilliant success. Ingham passed from public life. Branch affiliated with the Whigs in 1832 and in 1836, and was made Governor of Florida by Tyler. Berrien became one of the orators and leaders of the Whigs, and one of the founders of the Know-Nothing Party. Thus, after two years of disorganization and domestic turmoil, the Jackson Administration, with a powerful Cabinet, and, for the first time, a definite policy, began to strike its stride. At least two of the new Ministers were to play leading and spectacular parts in the great party battles that were to follow.

It must have been with a sense of ineffable relief that Jackson, seated at the head of the Cabinet table, surveyed the new men with whom he had surrounded himself—a feeling in which the public shared. But as his glance moved about the table it no doubt lingered with greatest confidence and satisfaction upon the three whose very appearance bespoke character, intellectuality, and power. At his right hand the tall figure, with the student’s stoop, the meditative manner, the benevolent expression, which had stood beside him in the stirring days of New Orleans—the scholarly Livingston. Nearby he recognized in the imposing figure with the robust, well-knit frame, the huge head, the bushy brows, the penetrating, fighting blue eyes of Cass, a man of the solidity and strength that he admired and trusted. The one strange figure about the table, destined to prove more nearly a man after his own heart than any other who was to serve him in the Cabinet, was Taney—thin and delicate like Jackson himself, with the student’s stoop of Livingston, but without his calm. Between these three and the others, there was a decided descent, although they were men of ability and reputation.

IV

Edward Livingston was one of the strongest characters of his time, a Nationalist as intense as Webster, who was to pen a document as virile and militant as Webster’s speech for the Union—one of the most brilliant, talented, and polished publicists the Republic has known. This premier of the greatest of democrats, was a thorough aristocrat, tracing his lineage back to the English peerage. Compared with him, the Opposition leaders and even their ladies of the drawing-rooms lamenting the social crudities of the Jacksonians were of mongrel breed. And yet this highest type of aristocrat was, by preference, one of the most ardent of democrats. When, in his thirtieth year, he entered the National House of Representatives from his native city of New York, he had behind him every advantage and before him every opportunity. Distinguishing himself by brilliancy in debate, vigor in attack, when he left Congress his militant leadership of the Jeffersonian party had convinced Hamilton that he had to be destroyed.[328] Jefferson made him district attorney; the people elected him to the mayoralty of New York, and the attempt to serve in both capacities wrought his financial ruin. While personally directing the fight against the yellow fever plague, he was himself stricken, and he recovered only to find that his assistant in the district attorney’s office had squandered $100,000 of the public money on wine and women. Without a moment’s hesitation he conveyed all his property to a trustee for sale, beggared himself completely, and resigned both his offices. The public protested against his abandonment of the mayoralty, and for two months the Governor refused to accept his resignation, but he knew that the path of duty led to the replenishment of his purse. Thus, at thirty-nine, leaving behind him the prestige of his family connections and his own career, he turned toward Louisiana, then the Promised Land, and set forth for New Orleans. There he immediately took high rank in his profession, established a lucrative practice, and soon acquired valuable real estate abutting the river which promised a fortune. The story of how he was deprived of this through the incomprehensible spite of President Jefferson constitutes one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of American litigation.[329] But Livingston was sustained by infinite patience, a happy philosophy, and natural buoyancy of temperament, and he soon found other matters to enlist his interest. When Jackson reached New Orleans to defend the town, it was Livingston who aroused the militant spirit of the people with his martial eloquence, and served as the soldier’s aid, translator, and adviser. It was in these days amidst the barking of the English guns that Jackson discovered

in Livingston the man he could trust as a patriot and fighter in two of the bitterest battles of his Presidency.[330] It was soon after this that Livingston began the greatest undertaking of his life—one so far-reaching in its effect on humanity as to carry his name to the thinkers, philosophers, and philanthropists of every land. The “Livingston Code” alone entitles him to a place high on the scroll of humanitarians who have served mankind. Victor Hugo declared that he would be “numbered among the men of this age who have deserved most and best of mankind.” Jeremy Bentham was tremendously impressed. Dr. H. S. Maine, author of the “Ancient Laws,” pronounced him “the first legal genius of modern times.” Villemain, of the Paris Sorbonne, described his work as “a work without example from the hand of any one man.” From the Emperor of Russia and the King of Sweden came autograph letters, from the King of the Netherlands a gold medal and a eulogy, and statesmen and philosophers of Europe vied with kings and emperors in paying homage. The Government of Guatemala, not content with translating his “Code on Reform and Prison Discipline,” and adopting it without the change of a word, bestowed upon a new city and district the name of Livingston. Jefferson wrote: “It will certainly array your name with the sages of antiquity”; Kent and Story, Madison and Marshall joined in the common praise, and he was elected a member of the Institute of France. Such was the prestige he took to Washington, when, in his fifty-ninth year, he again entered the House as a Representative from New Orleans.

He was now an old man, but of unusual vigor, and able to wear out younger men with his long pedestrian jaunts. He loved society and mingled with it freely, unable to escape it if he would because of the social and intellectual brilliance of his wife and the charm and beauty of his daughter. His fame was seemingly secure. His reputation was world-wide. His conversational gifts were of an uncommon order. His friends and social intimates were confined to no party, and embraced the best of both. After a brief period in the House he had entered the Senate where he stood among the foremost. Such was the man Jackson called to the head of his Cabinet—one whose character and career suffer nothing by comparison with those of his most distinguished predecessors, Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay.