When Mr. Adams was entering this new field of labor, Mr. Clay asked him how he felt at turning boy again, and going into the House of Representatives; and observed that he would find his situation extremely laborious. Mr. Adams replied: "I well know this; but labor I shall not refuse so long as my hands, my eyes, and my brain, do not desert me."
To understand the position in which Mr. Adams was placed, on his taking his seat in the House of Representatives, it is important that some of the events which had occurred during his absence from public life should be briefly recapitulated. General Jackson had been two years President of the United States. The alliance which he had entered into with Mr. Van Buren for their mutual advancement, to which allusion has been made in a former chapter, had not resulted immediately as the high contracting parties probably intended. An obstacle to the advancement of Mr. Van Buren to the Vice-Presidency presented itself which was insurmountable. John C. Calhoun, of South Carolina, possessed an influence in the slave states which it was important to conciliate, and imprudent to set at defiance. The allies were, consequently, compelled to accede to his nomination as Vice-President, and Van Buren was forced to be content with the prospect of being appointed Secretary of State.
The elevation of Calhoun to the Vice-Presidency, there is reason to believe, could not have been acceptable to Jackson. It appears, by the documents published by Calhoun in connection with his account of his controversy with Jackson, that William H. Crawford had, as early as December, 1827, taken direct measures to render the friendship of Calhoun suspected by Jackson. On the 14th of that month he wrote a letter to Alfred Balch, at Nashville, with the express purpose of its being shown to Jackson, containing the following statement: "My opinions upon the next presidential election" (against Adams and in favor of Jackson) "are generally known. When Mr. Van Buren and Mr. Cambreling made me a visit, last April, I authorized them, upon every proper occasion, to make these opinions known. The vote of the State of Georgia will, as certainly as that of Tennessee, be given to General Jackson, in opposition to Mr. Adams. The only difficulty that this state has upon that subject is, that, if Jackson should be elected, Calhoun will come into power. I confess I am not apprehensive of such a result. For —— —— writes to me, Jackson ought to know, and if he does not he shall know, that, at the Calhoun caucus in Columbia, the term military chieftain was bandied about even more flippantly than it had been by Henry Clay, and that the family friends of Mr. Calhoun were most active in giving it currency; and I know, personally, that Calhoun favored Mr. Adams' pretensions until Mr. Clay declared for him. He well knew that Clay would not have declared for Adams without it was well understood that he, Calhoun, was to be put down if Adams could effect it. If he was not friendly to his election, why did he suffer his paper to be purchased up by Adams' printers, without making some stipulation in favor of Jackson? If you can ascertain that Calhoun will not be benefited by Jackson's election, you will do him a service by communicating the information to me. Make what use you please of this letter, and show it to whom you please."[23] ]
That these opinions of Crawford concerning Calhoun were communicated to Van Buren and Cambreling when they visited him, as he states, on their electioneering tour, in April, 1827, cannot be reasonably questioned: and that Crawford's letter to Balch was also communicated to Jackson can as little be doubted. That at this period Calhoun's want of political sympathy with Jackson was publicly known and talked about at Nashville, is apparent from Calhoun's address to the people of the United States in his controversy with Jackson, in which he bitterly complains: "I remained ignorant and unsuspicious of these secret movements against me till the spring of 1828, when vague rumors reached me that some attempts were making at Nashville to injure me."
Why statements made by such a high authority as Crawford, so well adapted to kindle the inflammatory temperament of Jackson, and at once so auspicious to the hopes of Van Buren and so ominous to those of Calhoun, were not immediately made the subject of action, can only be accounted for by the fact that Calhoun was at that time too strong in the affections of the South for them then to commence hostilities; for, in that case he would, as Crawford intimated, have "favored the pretensions of Adams," and possibly have defeated the plans of the alliance. Jackson, therefore, yielded, and allowed Calhoun to be run as a candidate for the Vice-Presidency on the same ticket with himself, and postponed any attempt to deprive him of his chance of succession until a more convenient opportunity. To this arrangement Van Buren also was compelled to submit, and, after Adams was superseded, and Jackson inaugurated President, he was appointed Secretary of State.[24] ]
In April, 1830, when the Legislatures of New York and Pennsylvania took incipient measures to nominate Jackson for a second term of office, the favorable moment arrived to bring his artillery to bear upon Calhoun. At this time two letters of Crawford were brought to the mind of General Jackson,—the one to Alfred Balch, already referred to; the other to John Forsyth, dated the 30th of April, 1830,[25] ] —in which Crawford expressly stated that "Mr. Calhoun had made a proposition to the cabinet of Monroe for punishing him for his conduct in the Seminole war." Jackson, greatly excited, immediately, on the 12th of May, 1830, addressed a letter to Mr. Calhoun, declaring his great surprise at the information those letters contained, and inquiring whether he had moved or sustained any attempt seriously to affect him in Monroe's cabinet council. Calhoun replied, that he "could not recognize the right of General Jackson to call in question his conduct in the discharge of a high official duty, and under responsibility to his conscience and his country only." The anger of Jackson was not in the least assuaged by this reply, nor by the explanations which accompanied it. A correspondence ensued, which, with collateral and documentary evidence, occupied fifty-two pages of an octavo pamphlet; resulting in Jackson's declaration of his poignant mortification to see in Calhoun's letter, instead of a negative, an admission of the truth of Crawford's allegations. An irreconcilable alienation between Jackson and Calhoun was evinced in this correspondence; a state of feeling which for the time was concealed from the public, but was well known to their respective partisans, who understood that at the approaching election the influence of the former would be thrown into the scale of Van Buren. Jackson's intention of standing for the Presidency a second time was kept a profound secret until January, 1831. Under the supposition that he might decline, the partisans of Calhoun, Clay, and Van Buren, engaged in active measures to put them respectively into the field.
From the party movements during this uncertainty it was clearly perceived that, if Jackson was not again a candidate, a contest between Van Buren and Calhoun for the Presidency was unavoidable. Calhoun's chance of success was preëminent, for he would unite in his favor all the votes and influence of the South,—Van Buren not having then had an opportunity to evince his entire subserviency to the slaveholding power. Jackson, into whose heart Van Buren had wound himself, looked with little complacency on the probable success of Calhoun. Under these circumstances, he resolved to enter the lists himself as a candidate for the Presidency, and, by taking Van Buren with him for the Vice-Presidency, put him at once in the best position to become his successor. Van Buren coïncided in these views, and acquiesced in, if he did not originate, this measure. He foresaw that the popularity of Jackson would throw Calhoun out of the field, whether he was a candidate at the next ensuing election for the Presidency or Vice-Presidency. The time had now come to put an end to the hopes of Calhoun for the attainment of either of those high stations, by making public the animosity of Jackson; but this could not be done without a struggle. Branch, Ingham, and Berrien, all members of Jackson's cabinet, were known friends to Calhoun, and far from being well disposed to Van Buren. Under these circumstances, Jackson resolved to dissolve his cabinet, in which Van Buren himself held a place, and form another, better adapted to their united views. As a violent contest with the friends of Calhoun was anticipated, Van Buren, if he should continue Secretary of State, would be considered responsible for all Jackson's proceedings to frustrate Calhoun's aspirations for the Presidency, which might injuriously affect his popularity in the Southern States. Van Buren therefore retired upon a mission to England.
Such were the general views and policy of these allied aspirants to the two highest offices of state, which public documents now make apparent, when, in April, 1831, say the newspapers of the period, "an explosion took place in the cabinet at Washington, the announcement of which came upon the public like a clap of thunder in a cloudless day."[26] ] On the 7th of April, the Secretary of War, General Eaton, resigned, without giving any other reason than his own inclination, and that he deemed the moment favorable, as General Jackson's "course of policy had been advantageously commenced." On the 11th of April, Van Buren resigned the office of Secretary of State. So far as his motive could be discerned through the haze of ambiguous and diplomatic language, it was that his name had been connected with that distracting topic, the question of successorship, which rendered his continuance in the cabinet embarrassing, and might be injurious to the public service. The two other secretaries, Ingham and Branch, were kept in ignorance of these resignations until the 19th of April, when Jackson informed them that, to command public confidence and satisfy public opinion, he deemed it proper to select a cabinet of entirely new materials,[27] ] and therefore requested them to resign their respective offices. They accordingly tendered their resignations, which were accepted by the President, in a letter to each, couched in language perfectly identical, in which he admits that the dismissed officers had faithfully performed their respective official duties, but intimates that the want of harmony in the cabinet "made its entire renovation requisite."[28] ] Branch and Ingham both denied any want of harmony in the cabinet, and the latter declared that "it had never been interrupted for a moment, nor been divided in a single instance by difference of opinion as to the measures of the government."[29] ] These contradictions, thus openly made, created intense curiosity, and public clamor for a full development of facts. Branch, in a letter dated May 31st, 1831, addressed to certain citizens of Bertie County, North Carolina, declared that "discord had been introduced into the ranks of the administration by the intrigues of selfish politicians."[30] ]
The Attorney-General, Mr. Berrien, did not resign until the 15th of June ensuing, nor until he also had been invited to do so by Jackson. He then declared that he resigned "simply on account of the President's will," and that he knew of no want of harmony in the cabinet which either had or ought to have impeded the operations of the administration.[31] ] In July, Mr. Ingham, on returning home, was received by a great cavalcade of his fellow-citizens, and was called upon for an explanation of "the extraordinary measure, the dissolution of the cabinet, which had shocked the public mind." He replied, that it was exclusively the act of the President, who alone could perfectly explain his own motives, and he deemed it improper for him to anticipate the explanation which the President must deem it his duty to make.[32] ] As Jackson made no explanation, Mr. Branch, after being repeatedly called upon in the public papers, authorized the publication of a letter he had addressed to Edmund B. Freeman, dated the 22d of August, 1831,[33] ] in which he gave a full statement of the overbearing language and conduct of Jackson, and unequivocally declared that the contemporaneous resignation of Eaton and Van Buren was a measure adopted for the purpose of getting rid of the three offensive members of the cabinet; that "their dismission had been stipulated for, and the reason was that Van Buren, having discovered that the three members of the cabinet (afterwards ejected) disdained to become tools to subserve his ambitious aspirings, had determined to leave them as little power to defeat his machinations as possible; and that he had become latterly almost the sole confidant and adviser of the President."
The details of this controversy belong to general history, and will be found in the documents of the period. Enough has been given to indicate the great influence Van Buren had acquired, for his own political advancement, by an unscrupulous subserviency to the overbearing violence of the President.