The party battles of the Jackson period

by Claude G. Bowers

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]