Andrew Jackson

II Peofessob Of Political And Social Science In Yale Un1veesity

BOSTON AND NEW YOBK

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

M DCCC XCIX

0FCc*^

261899

of CtfpfS

24<

COPYRIGHT, 1882 AND 18W, BY WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER

COPYRIGHT, 1809. BY HOUGHTON. MIFFLIN & CO.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED d t^l^k

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

The fourth group of biographies in this series covers the period of Domestic Politics, the Tariff and Slavery being the matters of chief interest. It comprises the lives of Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Thomas H. Benton, and Lewis Cass.

With the election of Andrew Jackson the United States turned a political corner and set out upon a new course. It is noteworthy that, beginning with Washington, each successive president is included in this series until we close the line with Jackson's successor, Van Buren. But after Van Buren went out of office in March, 1841, not another president finds a place until we come to the inauguration of Lincoln in March, 1861. Of the propriety of all the inclusions of the first list no question can be raised, unless possibly a mild doubt as to Monroe ; concerning the exclusion of all the incumbents of the second period, covering twenty years, the editor certainly feels no doubt that his judgment has been correct, nor has he vi EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

ever known disapproval to be expressed among all the numerous criticisms and suggestions which he has heard concerning the series. Now this so strongly marked difference between the two lists cannot be attributed to two continuous series of accidents ; to assert this would be to tax even blind credulity too far. There must be, and in fact there is, an underlying reason.

At the time of Jackson's triumph over Adams, Democracy, though not at first under that name, had been in power ever since Jefferson won his campaign in 1800-1801. Jackson also was a Democrat, but with what a change in the signification of the word! Between Jeffersonian Democracy and Jacksonian Democracy there was indeed a great gulf. Jefferson had believed in the people upon the basis, tacitly understood, that they should always select for the places of power men like himself, who to natural ability should also add that aptitude for administering the government which might be supposed to spring from a broad education in historical and political directions, and a career of steadily widening experience in public affairs. If he had found them using their creative power in order to elevate men of not more than ordinary intellectual calibre and of little artificially acquired fitness, he would have indignantly rebuked them for betraying just expectations.

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION vii

Upon this ground the selection of Jackson would have offended him deeply, and not without reason ; for certainly that selection, though natural, did not show the element of soundness in the popular judgment, and was unfortunate in its results. Two or three inducements led to it. Jackson was the " hero of New Orleans," and the mass of the people, in whom the peace-loving Jefferson so implicitly believed, adored military heroes. They made Harrison president because of Tippecanoe ; they made Taylor president because of the Mexican war ; and for the same reason they long dangled the same office before the eyes of Scott, who never had quite the political skill to grasp it. Yet Jackson was no very great hero, after all. His famous victory was chiefly due to the blunders of his opponent ; and, though an opponent's blunders are an entirely justifiable means for triumphing over him, yet a victory thus won ought not to stand as a sole and all-sufficient reason for great military distinction. But Jackson's violent temperament corroborated the general impression that he was a great fighter. This domineering quality also pleased the multitude ; for all who have observed such phenomena will agree that the democratic crowd, while boisterously abusing a dominant class, will always obsequiously set over themselves a masterful individual. Furthermore, viii EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

it was much in Jackson's favor that he was an ignorant man, fully as devoid as the average citizen could be of all the training, through books or practice, which had theretofore been commonly regarded as constituting the odious superior qualifications of a detestable upper class.

Selected for such reasons, Jackson responded generously to the tastes of his following. He disgraced his office by the "Kitchen Cabinet," and by all the mal-odorous and undignified scandal of Peggy O'Neil. A low personal element permeated the administration and banished real statesmanship. Devotion to himself was the only quality which he found essential for the office-seeker. He has generally been accused of having foisted upon the country that noxious practice expressed by the aphorism : To the victors belong the spoils. But he really did much worse than this ; for perhaps some spoils must be allowed to the victors ; perhaps, even, they ought to be so allowed ; but his reading was, or would have been, had the saying been then in vogue : To the victor belong the spoils ; — and he himself was the victor.

Sometimes he may have deserved credit for his actions. Thus it has been held by many excellent authorities that, though the methods of the campaign against the Bank of the United States were open to severe criticism, yet the destruction of

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION ix

that institution was fortunate for the country. Not improbably this is a correct opinion, though it is difficult to speak with entire assurance when, of the two alternatives, only one has been brought to the test of experience. He won, also, great fame by his repression of the secession movement in South Carolina. But he did not wholly merit this fame. The outburst of his furious temper came at a critical moment, and brought a most happy result. But careful study of the facts shows that this outburst far outran what he was really ready to do. He was giving alarming indications of weakening when the recession instead of the secession of the Palmetto State left him in possession of another lucky victory — a victory which, as many writers have shown, must not be too curiously examined.

Like Jefferson, Jackson enjoyed the privilege of naming his successor, and he gave the honor to Van Buren. It is my opinion that Van Buren has never had justice done to him. He is too commonly regarded as a man of moderate capacity, little strength of character, and a somewhat too suave deportment. He certainly presented a strong contrast to his predecessor, and the nation which had learned to worship Jacksonian outbursts could hardly be expected to be enthusiastic over Van Buren's urbanity. He was unfortunate, morex EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

over, in having his incumbency marked by the terrible financial disasters of that ever-memorable year, 1837. He was no more responsible for them, and no more able to cure them, than if the outbreak had been of cholera or small-pox ; indeed, he was much less so. But of course the multitude looked to him for a remedy, and, getting none, they contemned him as incompetent. In point of fact, while no one would think of saying that Van Buren was very great intellectually or very strong as a controller of men or events, yet he really had much of the statesman in him ; he had distinct policies, and reasons for them, and he pursued them intelligently. Later on in his career he showed that, though of a temperament to which quarreling was distastefid, yet he had genuine moral and political principles to which he would adhere in the face of opponents and against his own selfish interests. His life in this series seems to me a very interesting and able presentation of a period which has not generally been well appreciated. If we measure him with those who had gone before him, he seems of moderate dimensions, but in comparison with those who came after him he appears almost distinguished. With him, as has been said, we bid a long farewell to presidential biographies ; but his exclusion would have been a great error ; he was really a man of mark.

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION xi

Between the time when John Quincy Adams left the presidency and Abraham Lincoln came to it, some brilliant reputations reached their zenith, and many great changes took place. Webster, Clay, Calhoun, will rise to the memory of every reader ; their great battles, their superb oratory, seem almost to call for Homeric description. But it will not do for me to magnify my office, and to forget that I am writing merely a brief — or what should be a brief — prefatory introduction to a group or period. One general remark, however, I must find room for, in order to call attention to the new development of political life in the country. By the time that Monroe left office the United States had escaped from European entanglements ; the French Eevolution was burned out ; we had only to forget our brush with Great Britain. Then for a while a political calm succeeded ; there were almost no politics at all, only personal scrambling of politicians. But before Jackson was comfortably established in the White House, a new order of business was already well to the front. For a long while thereafter the country was to be occupied with domestic affairs. Questions of internal policy absorbed the people. There was first the tariff and then slavery ; while in a practical direction the Southwest and the Northwest were growing rapidly in importance, xii EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

politically as well as in every other respect. The lives of Benton and Cass tell these especial stories of the growth of the new regions ; while all the lives combine to tell the stories of tariff and slavery conflicts. The tariff rose and fell, — I do not mean financially, but as a topic of political discussion. But slavery kept very steadily rising, with few and brief intervals of rest, until finally it crowded out all else and absorbed all popular interest for itself alone. To my mind, I must say that this new condition presents itself as more satisfactory than either the calm, or the foreign excitements, which had preceded it. To see American statesmen busied with American affairs is vastly more gratifying than to see them, with at least one eye askance, scanning the doings of other peoples. Nor in the histories of many nations and eras does the reader find an episode more intensely exciting, more fascinating in all the swayings of the struggle, than was the anti-slavery movement. What moral qualities, what intellectual wrestlings, what defeats and victories, and renewals of the unwearying contest, does not one witness ! It is a narrative which cannot stale ; which can never, by repetition, lose its freshness ; and the stories of the lives of those engaged in that quarter-century of strife will never, I hope, cease to enthrall American readers.

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION xiii

Further it may be said that it is in the history of this period that the distinctive national character is most strongly marked. As a natural consequence of the fact that the people were wholly engrossed in their own affairs, they began to develop traits sufficiently peculiar to themselves to differentiate them from other peoples. In the earlier years Americans had grown out of English colonists, but now they had grown away from them. With our own special domestic interests and our own internal policies, we began also to have our own characteristics infused through the people at large, and finding expression in those who were engaged in the conduct of our public affairs. The reader who wants to study genuine Americanism must seek its establishment in the administration of the second Adams, and watch its rapid and strong development from that time until the death of Mr. Lincoln. It is not only the questions of that era, but the statesmen also, that were American. Their lives are full of instruction and suggestion in this respect, and the interest which this quality confers upon them is very great. In a great measure this condition comes to an end, perhaps only temporarily, at or soon after the close of the civil war, collaterally with the rapid growth of material prosperity which then occurred, and with the accompanying inundaxiv EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

tion of many foreign and alien elements. For the time being, we have ceased to be homogeneous, and it is hard to say what is the American character to-day, or indeed whether any such character is now established. We have the power and consideration which come with wealth and numbers ; perhaps we are developing a new and it may be a grander national character; certainly we are becoming what is vaguely called cosmopolitan ; but in getting much we are also parting with something, — we are losing, or have actually lost, the group of distinguishing traits which marked the period to which this group of our series belongs. That period had very definite boundaries ; it was of exceptional importance, and its great men command an unusual measure of interest and attention. It may be differentiated as the era of Americanism, nationalism, nativism, by whichever phrase one may prefer to describe the new and original conditions, political, moral, and social, of the country.

JOHN T. MORSE, JR.

September, 1898.

Preface

This new edition of this book has been revised line by line, and the corrections, amendments, and additions, which have been collected during the sixteen years since it was first written, are now incorporated in it. I have had the very great advantage of using a collection of unpublished letters of Jackson to William B. Lewis, 250 in number, the property of the Messrs. Ford. I have been allowed to avail myself of all the material in these letters which was useful for my purpose ; and I have now to make my acknowledgments to the owners of them for their courtesy and generosity. In the quotations from Jackson's letters I have reproduced the original exactly, as respects spelling, punctuation, and capitals, not even correcting obvious slips of the pen, or inaccuracies of an old man. It is left to the reader to make such allowances where necessary. As I have been under strict injunctions not to increase the size of the book, I have cancelled much which was intended, in the first edition, to elucidate events or proceedings of Jackson's time, but which did not xvi PREFACE

strictly belong to it. The cancelled passages were especially important in Chapters VIII., IX., and X. of the first edition. The great number of excellent works which have been added to the literature of American history within sixteen years make these passages less necessary. On the whole, therefore, I have curtailed the history and extended the biography.

W. G. SUMNER.

Yale University, October, 1898.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. The First Forty-five Years of Jackson's Life 1

II. The Creek War and the War with England 30

Chapter I The First Forty-five Years Of Jackson's Life

In the middle of the last century a number of Scotchmen and Scotch-Irishmen migrated to the uplands of North and South Carolina. Among these was Andrew Jackson, who came over in 1765, with his wife and two sons, being accompanied also by several neighbors and connections from Carrickfergus, County Antrim, Ireland. They appear to have been led to the spot at which they settled, on the upper waters of the Catawba river, by the fact that persons of their acquaintance in Ireland had previously found their way thither, under special inducements which were offered to immigrants.1 The settlement was called the Waxhaw Settlement, and was in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, but close to the South Carolina

1 2 Hewitt, 13, 268, 272. A bounty was offered equal to the cost of passage. Ship captains became immigration agents.

For the full titles of books referred to, see the list at the end of the volume.

boundary. Andrew Jackson had no capital, and never became an owner of land. In 1767 he died. His son Andrew was born within a few days of the father's death, March 15, 1767. Parton fixes his birthplace in Union County, North Carolina ; Kendall in South Carolina. In Jackson's Proclamation of 1832, in a letter of December 24, 1830,1 and in his will, he speaks of himself as a native of South Carolina.

It appears that Andrew Jackson's mother abandoned the settlement which her husband had commenced, and it is probable that she owed much to the assistance of her relatives and connections while Andrew was a child. Circumstances of birth more humble than those of this child can scarcely be imagined. It was not, probably, hard to sustain life in such a frontier community. Coarse food was abundant; but to get more out of life than beasts get when they have enough to eat was no doubt very difficult. The traditions of Jackson's education are vague and uncertain. Of book-learning and school- training he appears to have got very little indeed.

The population of the district was heterogeneous, and, when the Revolutionary War broke out, the differences of nationality and creed divided the people by opposing sympathies as to the war. The English penetrated the district several times in the hope of winning recruits and strengthening the tories. On one of these raids Andrew Jackson 1 39 Niles, 385.

THE STUDY OF LAW 3

was wounded by an officer, who struck him because he refused to brush the officer's boots. He and his brother were taken prisoners to Camden. The war cost the lives of both Andrew's brothers, and also that of his mother, who died while on a journey to Charleston to help care for the prisoners there. Andrew Jackson accordingly came to entertain a vigorous hatred of the English from a very early age. In 1781 he was alone in the world. What means of support he had we do not know, but, after trying the saddler's trade, he became, in 1784, a student of law at Salisbury, North Carolina. The traditions collected by Parton of Jackson's conduct at this time give us anything but the picture, so familiar in political biography, of the orphan boy hewing his way up to the presidency by industry and self-denial. If the information is trustworthy, Jackson was gay, careless, rollicking, fond of horses, racing, cock-fighting, and mischief. Four years were spent in this way.

It is necessary to note the significance of the fact that a young man situated as Jackson was should undertake to " study law."

In the generation before the Revolution the intellectual activity of the young men, which had previously been expended in theology, began to be directed to the law. As capital increased and property rights became more complicated there was more need for legal training. In an agricultural community there was a great deal of leisure at certain seasons of the year, and the actual outlay required for an education was small. The standard of attainments was low, and it was easy for a farmer's boy of any diligence to acquire, in his winter's leisure, as much book-learning as the best colleges gave. In truth the range of ideas, among the best classes, about law, history, political science, and political economy, was narrow in the extreme. What the aspiring class of young men who were self-educated lacked, as compared with the technically "educated," was the bits of classical and theological dogmatism which the colleges taught by tradition, and the culture which is obtained by frequenting academical society, however meagre may be the positive instruction given by the institution. What the same aspiring youths had in excess of the regularly educated was self-confidence, bred by ignorance of their own short-comings. They were therefore considered pushing and offensive by the colonial aristocracy of placeholders and established families, who considered that " the ministry " was the proper place for aspiring cleverness, and that it was intrusive when it pushed into civil life. The restiveness of the aspiring class under this repression was one of the great causes of the Revolution. The lawyers became the leaders in the revolt everywhere. The established classes were, as classes, tories. After the war the way was clear for every one who wanted office, or influence, or notoriety, to attain these ends. The first step was to study law. If a young man heard a public speaker, and was fired by the

THE STUDY OF LAW 5

love of public activity and applause, or if he became engaged in political controversy, and was regarded by his fellows as a good disputant, or if he chanced to read something which set him thinking, the result was very sure to be that he read some law. The men, whose biographies we read because they rose to eminence, present us over and over again the same picture of a youth, with only a common school education, who spends his leisure in reading law, while he earns his living by teaching or by farm work. Those, however, whose biographies we read are only the select few who succeeded, out of the thousands who started on the same road, and who were arrested by one circumstance or another, which threw them back into the ranks of farmers and store-keepers. We shall see that Andrew Jackson so fell back into the position of a farmer and store-keeper. Chance plays a great role, in a new community, just as it does in a primitive civilization. Chance had very much to do with Jackson's career. We have no evidence that he was dissatisfied with his circumstances, and set himself to work to get out of them, or that he had any strong ambition towards which the law was a step. There is no proof that he ever was an ambitious man ; but rather the contrary. He never learned any law, and never to the end of his life had a legal tone of mind ; even his admirer, Kendall, admits this.1 His study of law had no influence on his career, and no significance for his

1 Jackson, 109.

character, except that it shows him following the set or fashion of the better class of young men of his generation. If conjecture may be allowed, it is most probable that he did not get on well with his relatives, and that he disliked the drudgery of farming or saddle-making. A journey which he made to Charleston offers a very possible chance for him to have had his mind opened to plans and ideas.

In 1789, Jackson's friend, John McNairy, was appointed judge of the Superior Court of Law and Equity of the District of Mero, i. c, Davidson, Sumner, and Tennessee Counties, Tennessee. McNairy and Jackson were admitted to the bar at Greenville, in May, 1788, the Court sitting there, under the authority of the State of North Carolina, without interruption, for the first time after the Franklin troubles.1 Jackson arrived in Tennessee in the fall of 1789 or the spring of 1790. He settled in Jonesboro. Tennessee was then a wild frontier country, in which the whites and Indians were engaged in constant hostilities. It was shut off from connection with the Atlantic States by the mountains, and its best connection with civilization was down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Such frontier communities have always had a peculiar character. In them the white man has conformed,

1 Haywood, 194. Haywood writes Frankland. Allison (29) says that Sevier's Correspondence shows that the State was named after Franklin. Inasmuch as Allison claims to have searched court records, etc., his dates, etc., are here followed.

FRONTIER SOCIETY 7

in no small degree, to the habits and occupations of the Indians. Cut off from tools, furniture, clothing, and other manufactured articles such as civilized men use, he has been driven to such substitutes as he could produce by bringing his intelligence to bear on the processes and materials used by the Indians. Living where game is abundant, and where the forests make agriculture difficult, he has often sunk back to the verge of the hunting stage of civilization.1 The pioneers, so much lauded in song and story, were men who first broke the path into the wilderness, but who derogated from the status of their race to do it. They became incapacitated for the steady labor of civilized industry, and when the country became so filled up that game was scarce, agriculture a necessity, and « "law" began to be recognized and employed, the pioneers moved on into the wilderness. In their habits they were idle and thriftless, and almost always too fond of strong drink. The class of settlers who succeeded them were but little better in their habits, although they began to clear the forests and till the soil. They were always very

1 See Collins's Kentucky, Putnam's Middle Tennessee, Ford's Illinois, and Kendall's Jackson, 74. To "indianize " was a current term for this social phenomenon. The worst manifestation of it was the adoption of the custom of scalping, and the acts of legislation by which bounties were offered for scalps, even for those of women and children. During the war of the Revolution there were, in the mountains of East Tennessee, white people " more savage than the Indians. They possess every one of their vices but not one of their virtues." 2 Hanger, 404.

litigious. Court clay was an occasion which drew the men to the county town, forming an event in a monotonous existence, and offering society to people oppressed by isolated life. This concourse of people furnished occasion for gossip and newsmongering, and the discussion of the affairs of everybody for miles around. " Public opinion " took control of everything. Local quarrels involved the whole county sooner or later. Friendships, alliances, feuds, and animosities grew up and were intensified in such a state of society. If there was an election pending, the same concourse of people furnished an opportunity for speech-making and argument. The institution of " stump-speaking" was born and developed in these circumstances. In the court itself the parties to the suits and the jury enjoyed a place before the public eye. The judge and the counsel made reputation day by day. The lawyers, as actual or prospective candidates for office, were directly and constantly winning strength with the electors. They passed from the bar to the stump or the tavern parlor, and employed the influence which their eloquence had won in the court room to advance the interests which they favored in the election. There are features of American democracy which are inexplicable unless one understands this frontier society. Some of our greatest political abuses have come from transferring to our now large and crowded cities maxims and usages which were convenient and harmless in backwoods county towns.

FRONTIER SOCIETY 9

Another feature of the frontier society which it is important to notice is, that in it the lack of capital and the intimacy of personal relations led to great abuses of credit. Idleness, drink, debt, and quarrels produced by gossip have been the curses of such society. The courts and the lawyers were always busy with the personal collisions which arose where no one was allowed to practise any personal reserve, where each one's business was everybody's business, where gossip never rested, and where each one was in debt to some others.

In such a state of society the public prosecutor is the general of the advancing army of civilization. He has to try to introduce law and order, the fulfilment of contracts, and the recognition of rights into the infant society. This was the task which Jackson undertook in Tennessee. It required nerve and vigor. The western counties of North Carolina were in a state of anarchy, resulting from the attempt to set up the State of Franklin, and the population were so turbulent and lawless that the representative of legal order was at open war with them. There had been civil war in the district for four years.

The proceedings by which the State of Franklin was brought into existence were suggested and carried out upon principles and notions which can only be characterized as squatterism. The colonists at the outset, especially those of New England, took their stand on squatterism, without reflection or question. The primary standpoint or view on which it rests is the notion that a group of people who find themselves in what the New Englanders called a " vacuum domicilium " (putting it in Latin to give it emphasis since it lacked contents) may hold a mass meeting, and create a state, without regard to the jurisdiction of some political body already existing, which has historical and legal authority over the territory in which they are. Many conflicts arose in the colonial history from the collision between squatterism and constituted authority, and three or four very important cases have occurred in the federal history.1 Franklin was the first. The conflict is always attended by big declarations about " liberty " on the part of the squatters, and when they are forced to submit to law and constitutional order, great irritation is sure to be produced.

The Indians and whites were also engaged in the final struggle of the former before yielding their hunting-grounds to the cultivation of the white man. Jackson had to travel up and down the country in the discharge of his duties, when he was in danger of his life upon the road. He brought all the required force and virtue to the discharge of the duties of this office. He pursued his way without fear and without relenting. He made strong enemies, and he won strong friends. Kendall says that Jackson settled at Nashville, because the debtors there tried to drive him away, he having taken some collection cases.2 His merits

1 See p. 446. 2 Kendall's Jackson, 90.

JACKSON'S MARRIAGE 11