“James,” said a father to his malapropos son, “you have only two faults; one is, that you are good for nothing before breakfast, and the other is, that you are not a whit better after breakfast.” So said of the unpartisan President his political fathers, the heads of committees; and their opinion outbalanced in the scale the petty weights of general prosperity, peace at home and abroad, a careful, scrupulous economy, that kept the entire expenses of the government below thirteen millions annually, and a steady payment on the national debt of seven and a half millions a year. The friendly blunder of appointing Mr. Clay Secretary of State was a political crime; the retention of those already in office, political unrighteousness; the refusal to appoint clamorous partisans to paying places, exaggerated political depravity. History at last inscribes over the gateway of his term “Arabia Felix,” over the place where popular misconception and partisan disappointment had hastily chiselled “Arabia Petrea.”
CHAPTER X.
THE AGE OF HICKORY; OR, JACKSON’S EPOCH.
1829–1837.
Military Men, domesticated to Civil Life, like tamed Animals.—General Jackson’s Camp Traits in the White Den at Washington.—His Prehensile Habits claw out the Eyes of several Measures.—How he foraged on his Political Enemies, and turned his Troops of Friends into the Public Pastures.—Lord Palmerston’s Remark upon Gladstone; and its American Application.—An Insurrection among the Household Cabinet Troops.—How the vigorous Hickory Club, wielded chivalrously for a Woman, quelled it.—The President moves on the Bank and captures all its Fortified Points.—Chicago starts in 1830.—Why it did not overtake and annex the United States.—South Carolina threatens Nullification, and is threatened.—Mr. Calhoun violently promised an elevated Position between two Posts. Mr. Clay’s Compromise.—Horace Greeley starts the First Daily Paper.—Its untimely End bewailed in Verse.—Black Hawk caged and shown around.—Georgia, the Cherokees and the Supreme Court.—Three Celebrities gained by the Seminole War.—Of Arkansas and its Papal Little Rock.—Prospects for the Pope when flung from the Tarpeian.—An Arkansas Paul preaching in the American Athens and Corinth.—Old Hickory and the Nuts left to be cracked.
Naturalists tell us that certain animals, domesticated from a wild state, retain some primeval habits so tenaciously as never to shed them; that these animals, for example, never lie down on their new and softer beds without turning around and beating about as in their forest lairs. So military men, tamed down from the independence of camp into the regulated routine of civil life, never lose their unrest in attempting to adjust themselves to their new condition. General Jackson carried the defiant bravery of his campaigns against the Indians into the white den at Washington. He disdained to cover the prehensile claws of new measures with the velvet sheath of official prudence.
Over the eyes of schemes or institutions which he designed to scratch out he cast no glamour.
During his eight years of civil campaigning, he stormed several forts that had become mossed by age through preceding administrations. His first care was to live off the enemy, the Adamites, whose Federal offices he took as forage for his own troops of friends; an example from the military code which every successor, civil or uncivil, has unfortunately hastened to follow. Lord Palmerston once declared “that Mr. Gladstone had not a command of language, but that language commanded him.” So it has resulted from this tough, hickory precedent, that the offices now command the government.
This campaign over, his next exploit was to quell an insurrection among the household troops led by Vice-President Calhoun, Mr. Ingham, Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Branch, Secretary of the Navy, and Mr. Berrien, Attorney-General. These officers were soon cashiered and their places filled by Mr. McLane, Mr. Woodbury, and Mr. Taney. The lily-white arm of a lady, whose social exclusion from the Calhoun set the vigorous old warrior resented, moved the iron sinews of the hickory club which cleaned out the Secretarys’ stables.
The General next moved on the United States Bank, up whose slopes, although jagged with ores and hoary with legislative fortifications, he rushed, carrying them at all points with a coup de main.
His first term, however, was made illustrious, not so much by these destructions as by the first appearance of Chicago. This was in 1830. At this time, fortunately, the population of the United States had reached 12,866,020, and were thus saved from being overtaken and immediately annexed to that rapid and rapidly pushing place. This Northern cosmical event attracted less attention, however, because the public mind was at last and about this time fixed upon the State of Mr. C. C. Pinckney, which, under the guidance of Mr. Calhoun, threatened to exclude the Federal hickory government from its plantation, unless the Tariff Act was repealed.
The old military chief issued a public proclamation, asserting his determination to execute the laws over South Carolina, and private threats to raise the main nullifier to a lofty post under the government. Indeed, he promised to some of his close personal friends, with ejaculations truly Jacksonian, to put him between two posts for the rest of his life.