“Thus, sir, this horrible conspiracy against the Constitution melted down to a mere question of dollars and cents.” And when this agreement was reached by the Senate, the House was dead—the hour of midnight having passed. He did not himself believe that a Congress died at midnight, but others did, and they were conscientious. And the Senate, knowing of that situation, had the insolence to adopt its resolution of reminder and send it to the House. “But to complete the true character of that message we must inquire at what time it was sent. It was sent at two o’clock in the morning; it was sent at a time when it was known, both in the House and the Senate, that no quorum was to be found. When that message was delivered, I must confess, if ever a feeling of shame and indignation had filled my bosom, it was at that moment. I felt it was an insult to the immediate representatives of the people; and if it had been sent at a moment when the House existed, with the power to resent unprovoked insult, I verily believe, that, imitating the example of our Congress in a somewhat similar case during the Revolutionary War, I should have moved that a message be sent by two members of the House to cast the Senate message on their floor, and tell them it was not the custom of the House to receive insolent messages.”[864]

Thus did Adams the Whig stand forth as the special champion of the President and the Democratic House, and tear the Webster sophistry to tatters; thus did he serve notice that, outside the more selfish politicians of the Whig Opposition, the Nation applauded the spirit of Jackson and was prepared to follow him against any foreign foe. The speech was the sensation of the day, and Adams was never forgiven. Henry A. Wise, the brilliant Virginia Whig, followed in a remarkable medley of gossipy charges against his colleagues, but his effort was so novel in its irregularities that it destroyed itself—and the fight over the loss of the Fortifications Bill is told in the speeches of Webster and Adams. The Whigs pursued the latter with their resentment to the polls in the autumn of that year, and he was able to record, after the election, that he was “reëlected to the next Congress without formal opposition, but almost without Whig votes.” And looking back at the end of the year, and recording his impressions, he referred to his reply to Webster with evident relish. “It demolished the speech of Webster,” he wrote, “drove him from the field, and whipped him and his party into the rank and file of the Nation in the quarrel with the French King.”[865] It did something more; it disclosed the fact that the Whig leaders, in their hate of Jackson, approached perilously near disloyalty to their country. If Jackson won his fight, it was after battling against, not only the Government of France, but against the party Opposition at home. And fighting this double battle, he won.

IX

Adams spoke on January 21, 1836, while Congress was considering the recommendations of the Special Message. Alphonse Pageot, and his wife and son, Andrew Jackson, were in New York awaiting passage back to France; and two days after the French Chargé left New York, Charles Bankhead, the British Chargé d’Affaires at Washington, acting on instructions from his Government, offered the mediation of England in the settlement of the Franco-American dispute, in a letter to Forsyth. Jackson and his Secretary of State took six days to deliberate on the proposal before giving a formal answer. The note, signed, and no doubt prepared by Forsyth, is a strong and polished review of the controversy, a reiteration of Livingston’s contention that no nation has the right to attempt an interference with the “consultation” of the departments of the American Government, and an explicit reservation that the American Government would not make the explanation or apology prescribed by the Government of France. There is no single sign of weakening, absolutely nothing new in the way of a concession, and only a repetition of the Livingston notes to the Duc de Broglie.

Twelve days later, Bankhead informed Forsyth of the success of the mediation. “The French Government,” he wrote, “has stated ... that the frank and honorable manner in which the President has, in his recent Message, expressed himself in regard to the points of difference between the Governments of France and the United States, has removed those difficulties, upon the score of national honor, which have hitherto stood in the way of the prompt execution by France of the treaty.”[866] This was a complete reversal. The President had “expressed himself on the points of difference” through Livingston, in conversation, and through notes to both de Rigny and de Broglie, and he had expressed himself to them precisely as in “his recent Message.” And it was after he had thus expressed himself that France had insisted that an explanation or apology prescribed by her should be made as a condition to the execution of the treaty. Jackson added nothing; France accepted what she had scornfully refused before, and the triumph of Jackson was complete. On May 10th Jackson was able to inform Congress that France had paid the four installments due. Thus, after the failures of the Administrations of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Adams to get a settlement with France, Jackson had negotiated a treaty within two years of his first inauguration, and had enforced the observance of the treaty almost a year before the expiration of his last term.

The theory of some historians that Jackson, in his dealings with foreign nations, was lacking in finesse and success, is manifestly colored by blind prejudice. The prestige of the Nation abroad was never so high as after his stern insistence that a treaty with the United States could no more be disregarded than one with any of the European Powers. John Fiske touched the real significance of the result of the controversy when he wrote that “the days when foreign powers could safely insult us were evidently gone by.”[867] And the same historian discloses the necessity for the position assumed by Jackson. “In foreign affairs,” he writes, “Jackson’s Administration won great credit through its enforcement of the French spoliation claims. European nations which had claims for damages against France on account of spoliations committed by French cruisers during the Napoleonic wars, had no difficulty after the Peace of 1815 in obtaining payment; but the claims of the United States had been superciliously neglected.”[868] And so pronounced a partisan as John W. Foster, Secretary of State under the second Harrison, has recorded the deliberate judgment that “in its foreign relations his Administration maintained a dignified and creditable attitude.”[869]

The Whig leaders in the Senate and the press, the Clays and Websters and the Gales, had permitted their bitterness against Jackson to lead them to the verge of disloyalty to country, and the indignant protest of Adams was a true reflection of the popular opinion. The clever politicians of the Kitchen Cabinet were not slow to see the opportunity again to picture Jackson as the patriotic hero, for the second time leading his people in a fight against a foreign adversary.

CHAPTER XV
THE BATTLE OF THE SUCCESSION

I

From the adjournment of Congress in March, 1835, until it convened in December, the political leaders concerned themselves with presidential politics, and the struggle for position was desperate and unscrupulous. From the hour in the first year of his first Administration, when Jackson, fearful of an early death, wrote his celebrated letter to Judge Overton expressing a preference for Van Buren, the latter had been looked upon as the crown prince. From that hour the master political manipulators surrounding Jackson made no move not intended to advance the “magician” toward the goal of his ambition. In the summer of 1833 Major Lewis was disturbed over the prospective candidacy of Justice McLean,[870] but it failed to materialize, and, within a year after the Major’s trepidation, the White House circle realized that the most serious challenge to the plans for the succession would come from Hugh Lawson White of Tennessee, considered a renegade from the Jackson camp. The close attachment of the President and the Senator from his State had perceptibly cooled in less than a year after the inauguration. The latter was of a proud and sensitive temperament, and the growing intimacy of his old friend with the new school of practical politicians was enough to estrange him. Had he hoped in the beginning to become the legatee of Jackson, we should have a plausible explanation of his bitter resentment of the President’s failure to observe his one-term pledge. We only know that he drifted, first into the position of an independent supporter of the Administration, and later into one of frank hostility. His imagination began early to play pranks with his judgment. He began to seek evidence of slights. In all the new school of Jacksonian leaders he saw enemies. He carefully scrutinized the “Globe” for discriminations against him. That there was no conscious effort on the part of the paper to ignore him is shown in the action of Blair, on learning that the Senator was offended. In a cordial letter he assured the suspicious Senator that he felt “the most perfect consciousness” that he had “done nothing to offend—certainly not intentionally,” and begged him to “frankly state the offense that it may be righted.” The curt, ungracious reply of White was overlooked and an appeal made for a personal interview, but the response was so repellent that further attempts at a reconciliation were abandoned. There is some justification for the conclusion that White had early determined upon a quarrel with the view to placing himself at the head of the opposition wing of the Democratic Party. In 1833 the Opposition began to claim him as its own when he supported Calhoun’s bill on Executive patronage in a powerful speech, and joined Clay in opposing the Administration plan in the Nullification fight.