ANDREW JACKSON’S YEARS IN OFFICE
Andrew Jackson assumed the office of president with a clear vision of what he wanted to
accomplish. This included removing senior officeholders and replacing them with his own
men in what came to be known as the spoils system. Jackson’s “rotation in office,”
though, had serious consequences as experienced officials vanished and some federal
services deteriorated. Jackson couldn’t stomach even some of his own cabinet officers,
preferring instead to rely on the advice of his Kitchen Cabinet of longtime friends.
Although Jackson distrusted government at all levels, he intended to be an activist
president. Indeed, he vetoed more congressional bills than all of his predecessors
combined, and his determination to pursue Indian Removal of the Cherokee and other
tribes to distant reservations in Oklahoma and surrounding states (Indian Territory) meant
that he was willing to harness and expand the powers of government to accomplish this
end. The Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole)
had lived in the Old SW area of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and many had
adapted white customs, intermarried with whites, and created a farm-based trading
culture. The sophisticated Cherokees had their own alphabet, invented by Sequoyah in
1821, and published a newspaper in both English and Cherokee. (Sequoyah went on to
devise an alphabet for the Choctaw as well.) The Cherokee also cultivated cotton along
with their white neighbors and some used the labor of enslaved Africans.
The impetus for removal began in 1824, when the governor of Georgia announced
that he was ending treaty rights for the Cherokee and Creeks. President John Quincy
Adams opposed him, turning the Georgia governor and his successor into active
campaigners for Andrew Jackson the next election. By 1828, Georgia announced that
state laws would extend into what had been Cherokee territory; whites immediately began
moving into these lands, and Andrew Jackson withdrew the U.S. troops that had been
protecting the Cherokees. Jackson’s Indian Removal Act was, he said, designed to
“protect” the Cherokee from Georgia laws, removing them to land that was completely
unfamiliar. Indian Territory (Oklahoma) was already populated by a number of Plains
Indian nations that had already relocated there; other tribes had lived there for
generations. Indian Removal became a source of debate in Congress and for many
Americans. Reformer Catharine Beecher organized women across the Northwest to
defend Indian rights and flood Congress with petitions. Missionaries also campaigned
vigorously in support of the Indians. Within Congress, Theodore Frelinghuysen (NJ) and
Henry Clay joined anti-removal forces, but in the end, the removal bill passed, squeaking
by in the House with a margin of just three votes. The Cherokee eventually went to U.S.
courts to assert their claims to their own lands. In both Cherokee Nation v. Georgia
(1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the Marshall court ruled that the Cherokees
were a “domestic dependent nation” and could not be forced to relinquish their lands.
Jackson simply ignored the court.
The result was the infamous Trail of Tears, which resulted in the deaths of a quarter
to a third of those who were forced to trek west. The migration actually occurred during
the presidency of Jackson’s successor, Martin van Buren. Before that, many of the
Indians had been housed in detention camps. For the Seminoles of Florida, the
experience offered an object lesson, and most resolved to stay, disappearing into the
swamps and byways. When soldiers tried to force a move, the Seminoles annihilated
them. The Second Seminole War was not resolved until 1842.
In April of 1832, Black Hawk, leader of the Sac and Fox tribes, which had already
been relocated, walked some 1000–2000 of his people back east, closer to their ancestral
lands. The Illinois governor took the move into Illinois as a hostile act, calling for militia
and federal troops. The Black Hawk War that followed resulted in the near destruction of
the Fox and Sac people, thanks to both white troops on the east and Sioux and Mississippi
troops on the west. By the end of the 1830s, only the Iroquois of New York, a few
Cherokee in North Carolina, and scattered small communities remained legally east of
the Mississippi.
Upon arrival in Indian Territory, the Cherokee adopted a new Constitution, and in 1844
began publishing the Cherokee Advocate. They also set up a school system, complete
with institutions of higher education along the European model. During the Civil War, the
tribe divided, but reunited in the postwar period.
Jackson came into office with strong views about a national bank. The Second Bank
of the United States was patterned after Hamilton’s model, which had closed in 1811
after the Jeffersonians refused to extend its charter. The new bank had been chartered
in 1816, after experience during the War of 1812 revealed the need for a national
institution that could issue currency, receive federal funds, and keep the country on a
solid financial footing. Yet divisions about such a national institution ran deep. The
Constitution made no mention of a bank, and strict constructionists were convinced that
its existence violated constitutional principle. Opponents were also convinced that the
Bank functioned to expand the power of commercial elites in the Northeast and the
expense of farmers in the South and West. Meanwhile, supporters of the Bank cited the
action of bank president Nicholas Biddle after the panic of 1819, where he used the
power of the Bank to help end hard times, stabilizing the currency and shoring up state
banks. But the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of the commercial elite
was something that Jackson could not stomach.
When Jackson launched his reelection campaign in 1832, the pro- and anti-Jackson
factions had crystallized into two distinct political parties. Jackson’s men were now simply
the Democrats, while his opponents, known for a time as the National Republicans,
now became the Whigs. With Henry Clay as their nominee, the Whigs strongly supported
a nationalist agenda, which included a strong Bank of the United States. Certain of their
support in Congress, Clay pressed Biddle to secure an extension of the Bank’s charter
well before it was set to expire; but the two had not counted on Andrew Jackson, who
vetoed the bill. Congress refused to override the veto. Then Jackson set out to destroy
what was left of the Bank. He ordered his treasury secretary to remove federal deposits
from the bank and place them in state banks that he selected (Pet Banks). When the
Treasury secretary refused to move the funds due to the lack of clear evidence that the
deposits were not secure where they were, Jackson fired him, along with his successor,
who also refused to move the funds. Finally, he found a willing third Treasury Secretary
Roger B. Taney. Taney’s reward: he would be named Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court.
The Senate censured Jackson, saying that he had gone beyond his authority as
conferred by the Constitution. The action neither hurt Jackson nor saved the bank, which,
although it did take a few years to die, in the end, did just that. As a wholly private bank,
it soon went bankrupt. Just after Jackson left office in 1837, another financial panic swept
the country, and this time there was no national entity to stabilize the economy. For
decades thereafter, the paper currency in circulation would be issued by state banks with
uneven credit ratings. (The U.S. government would issue paper currency once more
during the Civil War, and the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913 once again
provided a central bank to regulate the economy.)
Jackson’s vice-president was John C. Calhoun, a former nationalist increasingly
concerned with sectional issues. The two were not friendly; under the auspices of the
Twelfth Amendment, separate ballots were cast for president and vice-president, and
there was no party nominating convention to give Jackson a say in who his running mate
would be. Initially, the two disagreed over the treatment of the recently-widowed Margaret
O’Neill Eaton, who had recently married John Eaton, Jackson’s Secretary of War. The
daughter of a tavern-keeper, Peggy Eaton became an object of ridicule among many of
the Cabinet wives, who helped to fuel rumors that she had been in an adulterous affair
with Eaton long before the two had wed, and that her first husband had committed suicide
when the relationship was revealed to him. The ringleader of all this was Calhoun’s wife,
Floride. When Jackson learned that Washington society was shunning Peggy Eaton, he
jumped to her defense, and never forgave the Calhouns.
Meanwhile, Calhoun’s own political views were changing. The former nationalist was
becoming the nation’s strongest supporter of states’ rights. Jackson, who favored states’
rights himself, was nevertheless a firm advocate of presidential authority. In Calhoun’s
home state of South Carolina, the South Carolina Radicals dominated government,
advocating the right of states to declare any federal law null and void and even to secede
from the Union. The reason was clear: South Carolinians feared the abolition of slavery
more than the people of any other state. Most residents of the state—54%—were of
African descent, and in rice-growing regions, that figure could approach 90%. Many white
South Carolinians were convinced that any federal activity, such as tariffs and internal
improvements, were simply the first step down a slippery slope that would lead to it
legislating the end of slavery. And fears intensified after word spread that the British
government was about to abolish slavery throughout its empire.
In 1828, Calhoun wrote the South Carolina Exposition and Protest, arguing for the
right of any state to nullify a federal law that was not operating in its interest. He believed
that because state conventions had ratified the Constitution, state conventions therefore
had the authority to decide what was constitutional. Under this scenario, a law could only
be forced on a state through constitutional amendment. (Reminiscent of Virginia and
Kentucky, right?)
Although the impetus behind nullification was the need to protect the institution of
slavery, South Carolina used the tariff to bring the issue forward. Tariffs (taxes on
imported goods, as opposed to excise taxes, or taxes levelled domestically) were popular
in many sections of the country (primarily the North) because they protected local
industries from foreign competition and the revenue raised helped finance internal
improvements like roads and canals. In 1828, Van Buren negotiated a new tariff that
raised the prices of products that many Americans bought from foreign sources. Southern
plantation owners, who had discouraged the emergence of home-grown manufacturing,
saw the cost of everything they needed increased while no protection was provided for
the price of goods that they produced for the international market. The 1828 tariff came
to be known as the Tariff of Abominations, but it passed Congress. South Carolina saw
the tariff as both a hardship and an affront. The issue was argued in the U.S. senate early
in 1830, when South Carolina Senator Robert Hayne (Calhoun’s protégée) debated
Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, perhaps the most famous orator of the day. It
was clear in the debate that the issue underlying it all was not the tariff, but slavery.
Webster’s “Second Reply To Hayne,” asserting the need for a strong federal union that
no state could undermine, became a part of required reading for generations of
schoolchildren.
For his part, Jackson embraced Webster’s nationalistic vision, annoyed with what he
saw as Calhoun’s self-serving strategic maneuvering and convinced that a munity by the
states would, in the end, benefit no one. Yet he was prepared to compromise about the
tariff itself, even as he asserted the supremacy of federal authority over state action. John
Quincy Adams, who had been elected to the House of Representatives from
Massachusetts (he’s the only president in history to return to Congress after he had
served as the nation’s executive) helped reduced the duties on imports not produced in
the United States, but retained tariffs to protect growing U.S. industries, especially iron
and cotton textiles. He also reduced the tariff on cheap wool—which slaves wore—a
significant concession to the slave states. Most of the South was willing to go along with
Adams’ new tariff. But not good ol’ South Carolina, where its dependence on slave labor
made state leaders believe they needed to win the right to nullify law before the issue of
abolition had been introduced in Congress. In November of 1832, a South Carolina state
convention declared that both the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were unconstitutional and
declared that the state would secede should the federal government try to force it to back
down (not the first time they threaten that, lol). The next month, Calhoun resigned as vicepresident and returned to the Senate as a very belligerent member. Meanwhile, the South
Carolina legislature raised a militia of 25,000. Jackson responded with a proclamation
stating that the state was in violation of its duty and did not have the authority to raise its
own army. He reinforced federal garrisons in the state and used his influence to keep the
other states of the south at bay. In March of 1833, Congress passed a compromise tariff,
with the help of Henry Clay, that allowed South Carolina to back down and save face. It
also gave the president the authority to put down the rebellion through the Force Bill.
(This is partially reminiscent of the situation with the Townshend Duties.) Then, the South
Carolina state convention reconvened and nullified the Force Bill, just because they’re
South Carolina. Subsequent state legislation required state officeholders to swear primary
allegiance to South Carolina and only conditional loyalty to the federal government. This
effectively barred moderates from holding office there, and you know exactly where these
sentiments led.