There was this difference between Lewis and the other members of the Kitchen Cabinet—they all loved Jackson; but where the others thought of him as the personification of a party, Lewis could only think of him as the friend of the Hermitage. He had fought and wrought for his election, not to score a party victory, but to vindicate the man. Of Jackson’s comfort, happiness, and prestige he was supremely jealous, but there were times when he rebelled against the audacious proposals of others, more given to thinking of party, to stake the General’s reputation and success upon a party issue.
He has been called the “great father of wire-pullers,”[349] a closet man’s definition of a great manipulator of men. At the time the public began to speculate on the presidential possibilities of Jackson, the Major was his neighbor. He was not a penniless adventurer or soldier of fortune. There was nothing in politics for himself for which he cared a bauble. He was living comfortably on his large productive plantation, with slaves in the fields, and books in the library. Jackson had learned to love and trust him years before when he was chief quartermaster on the General’s staff in the campaign of 1812-15, and in the final settlement the Government was found to be indebted to him to the amount of three cents—which was never paid. When the Jackson movement became serious, the Major, knowing the General’s strength and weaknesses, took charge of all confidential matters. To just what extent he contributed to Jackson’s election no one ever knew—but all knew that he had played an important part. He conducted all the correspondence, and carefully scrutinized, and often revised, the General’s letters; and another of his functions was to serve as a sort of valet for all State occasions when Jackson should be carefully groomed.
He possessed the qualities that Jackson lacked. Where Jackson was impulsive, he was deliberative; where Jackson was prejudiced, he was tolerant; where Jackson was rash, he was prudent, if not timid; where Jackson was a man of action, he was a man of thought; and while Jackson had ideas, he furnished the vehicle to bear them in parade. During the many months preceding the election of 1828, this practical, polished politician was studying the political war map, and quietly planning successful battles in this State and that. He knew the politics of each State, the personalities and prejudices entering in, the dominating motives of all politicians, even to those never known outside their own little communities, and he knew how to play one force against the other without appearing in the game. Knowing as he did all the cross-currents of local politics, nothing ever arose that he could not deal with intelligently.
During the eight years in the White House, Lewis was a whole regiment of Swiss guards—always on duty and alert. “Keep William B. Lewis to ferret out and make known to you all the plots and intrigues hatching against your Administration, and you are safe,” was Jackson’s advice to Polk when the latter was entering the White House. We shall find him implicated in some of the most important events of his time, making history, and yet escaping the historian. His great advantage was his perfect understanding of Jackson’s character. He often became a buffer, protecting the President against unpleasant revelations. If he thought a disclosure necessary as a protection to the grim old warrior, he told his secret; if he thought it would merely arouse to useless wrath, he buried it; and sometimes, as in the case of the Crawford letter, he bided his time for months before revealing it. All the politicians of his day passed in review before him, Democrats and Whigs, Nullifiers and Nationalists, friends and enemies, and he silently catalogued them through a Bertillon system of his own. His advice to Jackson was that of a friend to a friend, seated about the blazing White House hearth, discussing politics and men in the midst of the tobacco smoke, as they might have done in the private life of the Hermitage.
He did not possess Kendall’s genius for programmes, nor Blair’s for propaganda, but he was invaluable in the field of personalities. He alone of the three sometimes doubted and drew back in fear. When Jackson vetoed the Maysville Bill, Van Buren found Lewis’s countenance “to the last degree despondent.”[350] He dreaded and doubted the effect of the veto of the measure rechartering the Bank, and later, the withdrawal of the deposits. Having been Federalistic himself, in other days, he had a fellow feeling for Louis McLane when that politician found himself in trouble. But doubting and trembling though he sometimes was, Van Buren has testified that “no considerations or temptations, through many of which he was obliged to pass, could weaken his fidelity to the General or his desire for the success of his Administration.”[351]
In the early stages of the Bank controversy, he alone of the members of the Kitchen Cabinet maintained friendly relations with Biddle.[352]
Concerning his status among the Jacksonian leaders, biographers and historians have radically disagreed. Even among the later writers this disagreement persists, and where one dismisses the theory that he was a politician, far-sighted and astute, as without sufficient evidence,[353] another concludes that “in a day of astute politicians, Major Lewis was one of the cleverest.”[354] The truth appears to be that while he was not a moulder of policies and creator of programmes, he was one of the most clever manipulators of men and masters of personal intrigue who ever served a President. In the Kitchen Cabinet he was the personal manager—the political secretary.
III
The most militant of the Kitchen Cabinet was Isaac Hill, whose name was anathema to the Federalists of New England. A poor boy educated in a printshop, slight and lame, hurling picturesque phrases and bitter reproaches at the powerful enemy, excoriating it with his satire and sarcasm, and slashing it with the keen blade of his wit, it is not surprising that the impression handed down by the Intellectuals of the Opposition is unfavorable. Where they have not dismissed him with a shrug, they have damned him as a dunce—and largely because he gave virility to a minority and made it militant, and, despite overwhelming odds, established in the hotbed of proscriptive Federalism a vigorous Democratic paper which was quoted from New Orleans to Detroit, and from Boston to St. Louis. If he lacked the depth and the constructive faculty of Kendall, and the literary finish of Blair, he possessed a genius as a phrase-monger which spread his fame and served his party, and in the heat of a campaign, one of his stinging paragraphs was as effective as one of Kendall’s leaders. There was no finesse in his fighting—he fought out in the open, in full range of his foe, and with any weapon on which he could lay his hands. If the intensity of his partisanship amounted to unfairness, it had been made so by the intolerance and bigotry of the Opposition of his section. Since no member of the Kitchen Cabinet more insistently demanded of Jackson the adoption of the spoils system, it is not unprofitable to inquire into the origin of his state of mind.