Expansion and Conflict

by William Edward Dodd

CHAPTER IV[ToC]

CONFLICT AND COMPROMISE

The man against whom these powerful leaders were directing all their energies was still counted an amateur in politics, irascible and indiscreet. He was laughed at in the cities as a boor and condemned in New England as an ignoramus, though Harvard College, under some strange inspiration, was soon to award him the doctorate of laws. Having come to power by means of a combination of South and West, Jackson had found his followers divided and somewhat unmanageable. Half the members of his Cabinet, S. D. Ingham, Secretary of the Treasury; John Branch, Secretary of the Navy; and John M. Berrien, Attorney-General, looked to Calhoun as their chief, while the others, Martin Van Buren; Secretary of State, John H. Eaton, Secretary of War, and William T. Barry, the Postmaster-General, distrusted their colleagues and clung to the President. It was natural, therefore, that cabinet meetings should be embarrassing and that a nondescript group of clerks and newspaper editors, William B. Lewis, Frank P. Blair, and Amos Kendall, all from the West, should become a sort of closet cabinet with whom Jackson should take council.

Moreover, Jackson increased his difficulties by gratifying the Western demand that a clean sweep in the offices should be made. New and untried men and hot-headed partisans were placed in the thousands of vacancies created by removals. Such a change in the civil and subordinate offices of the Government had never before been made, and Washington society, which always takes a hearty interest in the offices, was not slow to manifest its contempt for “the man of the people” and his “hungry” followers. But there was still another trouble. Secretary Eaton had married the daughter of a tavern-keeper; her reputation was unsavory and notorious. She now proposed to enter Washington social life as a leader, and Jackson gave her his blessing. The wives of the members of the Cabinet refused to recognize Mrs. Eaton, and a social war followed, in which President, preachers to the various local churches, and newspaper editors had their say. Division in the Cabinet, bitter enmity between certain leaders of the party, and the greater war between the powerful industrial and agricultural sections of the country gave every assurance that a storm was approaching.

To postpone the evil day Jackson resorted to evasions and oracular utterances on the tariff and the other serious problems in all his public papers and speeches. But the South pressed every day its free-trade program; the East demanded at least a continuation of the measure of protection already accorded to its interests; and the West, really needing roadways and canals, insisted on the building of these improvements and on the opening of the public lands to settlement on easier terms. If the President yielded to any of these groups, his administration was likely to fail. He naturally sought to shift the issue and felt the public pulse on the question of a renewal of the charter of the National Bank, which was not to expire till 1836. This was looking to the future; but on this subject it was possible to continue the union of South and West. The first annual message, in which the Bank was discussed, aroused at once the great financial interests, and they set in motion influences which speedily isolated the President and secured to the Bank the enthusiastic support of a Cabinet, divided on everything else, and of a majority of both houses of Congress. Instead of preventing a disruption of his party, Jackson had only hastened the event.

The people of South Carolina, supported as they hoped by most of the South, pressed through Calhoun, during the winter of 1828-29 and again in 1829-30, for some assurance that the President would aid them in their attack upon the protective policy of the Government, threatening state intervention in case of refusal. The East was no less insistent that nothing should be done. Congress seemed to be completely deadlocked. Under these circumstances Senator Foote, of Connecticut, voicing the fears of his section, introduced December 29, 1829, his famous resolution which contemplated the discontinuance of the federal land sales and the substantial curbing of the growing West. It was a blow at Benton and Jackson which was at once accepted by all the West as a challenge. The representatives of all three sections were deeply interested. Benton took the lead in the discussion which followed, and he urged once more his preëmption and graduation bills. In the former he would guarantee the prior claims of squatters on lands they had already unlawfully taken up; in the latter he meant to regulate the price of public lands according to quality and location. In both the object was to make the way of the pioneer easy; and the West supported him solidly. Whether the South would keep its tacit pledges in the face of Jackson's non-committal attitude on the tariff was the query of all until Hayne, an intimate friend of Calhoun and the recognized spokesman of his section, arose on January 19, 1830, and took the strongest ground on behalf of Benton and the West, and attacked the East for its long-continued resistance to westward expansion. The next day Webster made reply, and the debate between the two representative men continued to the end of the month. The importance to the present-day reader of this discussion consists in the revelation of the directly opposing and hostile attitudes of South and East on the great problems then before the country: (1) the South would support the West in its policy of easy lands and rapid development; the East would resist that policy; (2) the East would appeal to the nationalist sentiment of the interior and the West on behalf of its program of protection to industry, while the South would resist that program even to the extent of declaring national tariff laws null and void. Hayne and Benton showed in their speeches the substantial solidarity of the alliance of South and West. Webster undertook to break that alliance by his powerful appeal to the feelings of Western men who loved the Union, which the New Englander sought to show to be in especial danger. What was really on trial was the American system, the Tariff of 1828. It was a serious national crisis, as Calhoun wrote in May following: “The times are perilous beyond any that I have ever witnessed; all the great interests of the country are coming into conflict.” The protectionists thought they must control the country or the Union would be worth little to them; the Southern free traders insisted upon the mastery of the Government or else they would have a quiet dissolution of the Confederation; while the Western men must have freer control of the public lands and more immigrants or their sturdy nationalism would rapidly disappear.

Having failed for the moment to rally the leaders of his disintegrating party on the Bank issue, Jackson and his intimate advisers decided that above all things it was necessary for the old hero to stand again for the Presidency in the next election. Van Buren, who had been steadily growing in the estimation of Jackson, while Calhoun had been losing ground, was the foremost to urge a second term despite the understanding and the public promises that Jackson was to hold office only one term. Amos Kendall and William B. Lewis supported his view heartily, fearing as they did that Henry Clay would otherwise be the next President. At the dinner on Jefferson Day, April 13, 1830, for which elaborate preparations had been made, the President chose to give expression to more decided opinions than had been customary during his first year in office. His toast, “The Union, it must be preserved,” was akin to the utterances of Webster in the debate with Hayne. It was plain to the South that he would not longer support their contentions, that he would appeal to the same nationalist sentiment which had been shown to exist by the speeches of the great New England orator. The cause of the Southern radicals was lost in so far as it depended on the President, and, moreover, the arrangement whereby Calhoun was to succeed Jackson was dissolved. South Carolina, so long a leader in public life, was isolated.

Meanwhile the friends of Clay and the devotees of the tariff had prepared an internal improvements measure which was drawn so that the appropriation would apply to purposes wholly within the State of Kentucky. The Maysville Road Bill proposed to build a national highway from Maysville on the Ohio to Lexington, Clay's home, and it was drawn in order to compel the President to exercise his right of veto on a proposition in which the West was interested, and thus break down his popularity in that region. The proposed law came to him in May. Van Buren had been sounding public opinion in the Middle States, and with some hesitation he advised a veto. The President was of the same mind, and a vigorous veto message was sent to Congress. To the dismay of the tariff men, the country approved heartily, the West giving every evidence of its continued faith in the Executive. The atmosphere in Washington began to clear up; it was plain that a reorganization of the Cabinet must ensue, and that the lower South, as yet in sympathy with the stern anti-tariff policy of Calhoun, must be won away from the South Carolinian. It seemed that the West would support the President even if it were called upon to give up something that was held to be very important.

In due time William B. Lewis produced a letter from William H. Crawford which showed, what Jackson must have known since the summer of 1828, that Calhoun had not been the President's defender in 1818, when he was threatened with court-martial for his conduct during the Seminole War. Jackson now made an issue of this, and welcomed a controversy with the man who had done most to elevate him to the Presidency. Mrs. Eaton also became a more important character, and the attitude of the families of other members of the Cabinet were made subjects of official discussion and displeasure. Calhoun's friends were commanded to receive her into their circle or take the consequences. When these refused, it seemed that this tempest in a teapot was about to become a grave matter of state. None knew better than Jackson and Calhoun that other and deeper causes were forcing the disruption of the party of 1828, the alliance which had driven Adams and Clay from office.

Convinced that Van Buren had been the marplot of the Administration, Calhoun attacked him publicly, and all the world saw what some astute minds had long seen, that the two wings of the party in power were irreconcilable enemies. Congress adjourned in March, 1831, and in April the President demanded the resignations of all the friends of the Vice-President in the Cabinet. Calhoun and Hayne returned sadly to their constituents to advise actual resistance to the tariff, since both the President—"an ungrateful son of Carolina"—and Congress had, during two years, refused all relief to the suffering planters. Not one of the problems, the solution of which had been the purpose of Jackson's election, had been settled or seriously attacked. The East had defeated Benton's land program; the President had refused to take up the tariff; and internal improvements as a national policy had only been toyed with in the Maysville Bill. As Calhoun had said, all the great interests of the country had come into conflict, and even the most resolute of men knew not how to proceed.