The party battles of the Jackson period

by Claude G. Bowers

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.