Jackson began his administration with characteristic vigor. It was he who first put into practice the principle, "To the victors belong the spoils." There was about him no academic courtesy, and he proceeded at once to displace many Federal officeholders and to replace them with his own adherents. The Senate tried for a time to stem the tide, but was forced to give it up. There was no withstanding that fierce and dominant personality. Jackson was more nearly a dictator than any President had ever been before him, or than any will ever be again. His great popularity seemed rather to increase than to diminish, and in 1832, he received no less than 219 electoral votes.
JACKSON
Let us do him justice. Prejudiced and ignorant and wrong-headed as he was, he was a pure patriot, laboring for his country's good. Nothing proves this more strongly than his attitude on the nullification question, in other words, the right of a state to refuse to obey a law of the United States, and to withdraw from the Union, should it so desire. This is not the place to go into the constitutional argument on this question. It is, of course, all but certain that the original thirteen states had no idea, when they ratified the Constitution, that they were entering an alliance from which they would forever be powerless to withdraw; and the right of withdrawal had been asserted in New England more than once. South Carolina was the hot-bed of nullification sentiment, arising partly from the growing anti-slavery feeling at the North, and partly because of the enactment of a tariff law which was felt to be unjust, and on October 25, 1832, the South Carolina legislature passed an ordinance asserting that, since the state had entered the Union of its free will, it could withdraw from it at any time and resume the sovereign and independent position which it had held at the close of the Revolution, and that it would do so should there be any attempt to enforce the tariff laws within the state.
Jackson's attitude on this question was already well known. At a banquet celebrating Jefferson's birthday, two years before, at which Calhoun and others had given toasts and made addresses in favor of nullification, Jackson had startled his audience by rising, glass in hand, and giving the toast, "Our Federal Union—it must be preserved!" That toast had fallen like a bombshell among the ranks of the nullifiers, and had electrified the whole Nation. Since then, he had become a stronger nationalist than ever; besides, he was always ready for a fight, and whenever he saw a head had the true Irishman's impulse to hit it. So he responded to the South Carolina nullification ordinance by sending two men-of-war to Charleston harbor and collecting a force of United States troops along the Carolina border. "I consider the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one state, incompatible with the existence of the Union," he wrote; and when a South Carolina congressman, about to go home, asked the President if he had any commands for his friends in that state, Jackson retorted:
"Yes, I have; please give my compliments to my friends in your state, and say to them that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hands on, engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach."
Whether or not this message was delivered history does not say, but the whole Nation arose in wrath behind its President, state after state denounced nullification and disunion, and the South Carolina ordinance was finally repealed. So the storm passed for the moment. It left Jackson more of a popular hero than ever; it was as though he had won another battle of New Orleans. One cannot but wonder what would have happened had he been acting as President, instead of Buchanan, in those trying years after 1856.
He retired from the presidency broken in health and fortune, for however well he took care of the interests of his friends, he was always careless about his own. The last eight years of his life were spent at his Tennessee estate, The Hermitage. The end came in 1845, but his name has remained as a kind of watchword among the common people—a synonym for rugged honesty, and bluff sincerity. His career is, all in all, by far the most remarkable of any man who ever held the high office of President—with one possible exception, that of Abraham Lincoln.