The party battles of the Jackson period

by Claude G. Bowers

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.