What Hath God Wrought (41 page)

President Adams allowed Clay and his secretary of the Treasury, Richard Rush of Pennsylvania, to take the lead in pressing for tariff protection. He thus deferred just a bit to what was left of the old free-trade sentiment in maritime New England. However, no one had any doubt where the president’s sympathies lay on the tariff question. Protectionism embodied the conscious encouragement that Adams wanted the federal government to give to economic development. Clay encouraged protariff forces to hold a convention in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, during the summer of 1827. Because of its popularity in strategic places like Pennsylvania (already appropriately nicknamed “the Keystone State”), protectionism potentially provided a winning issue for the Adams administration.

Martin Van Buren began to worry about the groundswell of opinion building up in favor of a tariff increase. Van Buren realized that he needed to neutralize Clay’s efforts politically, lest the tariff issue help reelect Adams. In theory, Van Buren was a strict constructionist of the Old Republican school. In practice, however, he recognized the strength of protectionism in the Middle Atlantic region, including his own New York state. Accordingly, Van Buren determined to construct a tariff that could be turned to the advantage of the Jackson presidential campaign. Led by Silas Wright of New York and James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, Van Buren’s followers in Congress took control of the administration’s tariff initiative. They reshaped it to add benefits for pivotal regions that Jackson sought to carry, cynically disregarding the interests of regions whose electoral votes were not in doubt: New England (sure to go for Adams) and the cotton South (sure to go for Jackson). To help sheep raisers (like Van Buren himself ), raw wool got high protection, though it increased the price masters would have to pay for “slave cloth.” The transformed bill sharply increased tariffs on other raw materials like molasses, hemp, and iron, to the disadvantage of New England distillers, ropemakers, and shipbuilders, not to mention consumers. The result was the well-named “Tariff of Abominations.” John Randolph’s witticism got repeated often: The tariff bill had been designed to promote not the manufacture of broadcloths and bed blankets but the manufacture of a president. Van Buren was happy for the bill to pass in the form he had given it, “ghastly, lopsided, and unequal” though it was.
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Southern Jacksonians hoped that Van Buren’s bill had become so objectionable to New England that Yankee congressmen would join them in voting against its final passage. They therefore prevented it from being amended in the House of Representatives. In the Senate, however, amendments were added making the tariff slightly less unpalatable to New England. It then finally passed by the combined votes of Van Buren’s followers plus the administration supporters, who accepted the general principle of protection while deploring particular features of the bill. The act served the Little Magician’s purpose of allowing Jacksonians in the middle states to board the tariff bandwagon. Jackson backers in the South felt bitter and betrayed but had nowhere else to turn, since Adams was the only alternative. They consoled themselves that Calhoun would be Jackson’s running mate and hoped the South Carolinian could exert more influence on the next administration. Embarrassing the hope of Adams and Clay for government-promoted economic development, Van Buren’s Tariff of Abominations demonstrated how government intervention in the economy could be manipulated for political advantage.

VII

The campaign for the presidential election of 1828 lasted the whole four years of John Quincy Adams’s administration. Eventually defenders of the national administration started calling themselves “National” Republicans, while the supporters of the man who claimed the popular mandate called themselves “Democratic” Republicans, later simply “Democrats.” The terms came into use only very slowly. For Adams and his followers, to recognize the emergence of partisanship was to confess failure. Jackson and his followers saw themselves as the legitimate Jeffersonian Republican party and referred to their opponents as a corrupt clique of “federalists.” Accustomed as we are to a two-party system, we seize upon labels that contemporaries hesitated to employ. By the time the new party names gained acceptance, the election was over.

What came to be called the National Republicanism of Adams and Clay represented a continuation of the new Republican nationalism that had arisen out of the experience of the War of 1812. The Democratic Republicans of Jackson, Van Buren, and the recently transformed Calhoun recruited the proslavery Radicals of William H. Crawford and embraced the state-rights tradition of Old Republicanism. Despite the role played by Van Buren in putting together the opposition coalition, Jackson always controlled his own campaign, operating it from his headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee. The few remaining Federalists generally joined the Adams party in New England, the Jackson party in the South, and divided between them in the middle states.

Each side embraced its own version of modernity. The administration’s supporters endorsed economic modernization and appealed for votes on the basis of their improvement program. The Jacksonians emphasized their candidate rather than a program but developed a very modern political organization with attendant publicity and rallies. The one step they did not take was to hold a national party convention, but they did sponsor many state conventions. The Adams supporters followed suit; in the face of Jackson’s political machine, their aspiration to classical nonpartisanship could not practically be maintained. Taking advantage of improvements in communications, both sides relied heavily on partisan newspapers to get across their message, though Jackson’s followers kept theirs under tighter control. Handbills and campaign biographies also made use of the new opportunities for printed propaganda. Mindful of ethnic divisions, both sides published some campaign literature in German.
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The techniques of electioneering reflected the increased public participation in the election of the president. By 1828, all but two states (Delaware and South Carolina) chose their presidential electors by popular vote. Most states opted for electing them at large, since that maximized the state’s influence, although it would have been more democratic (that is, reflected public opinion more accurately) to choose the electors by congressional district.
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As in 1824, Jackson campaigned against Washington insiders. He himself described the contest as a “struggle between the virtue of the people and executive patronage”—an ironic expression indeed, in view of his party’s exploitation of the spoils of office once in power, but there is no reason to suppose it not sincerely felt.
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Rather than debate policy, Jacksonians harped on the “corrupt bargain” that had robbed the people of their preferred candidate. The charge played well in provincial America, where Yankees like Adams were often unpopular peddlers and storekeepers, notorious for cheating farm wives with wooden nutmegs and driving many a small “corrupt bargain.”
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(Through much of the American hinterland, Yankees were the functional equivalent of Jews in rural Europe.) Contrasted with such a figure of metropolitan guile appeared the Old Hero Jackson, a leader of stern virtue, a frontiersman who had made his own legend. To celebrate his victory at New Orleans, Jackson’s campaign marketed the song “The Hunters of Kentucky”—in defiance of the historical record, which showed that Jackson had reproached the Kentucky militia for their conduct in the battle. Where Adams exhorted his countrymen to a program of deliberate “improvement,” the Jacksonians celebrated their unrefined “natural” leader. Old Hickory was portrayed as a straightforward man of action, a hero the common man could trust.
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The Adams press responded that Jackson’s personal attributes actually disqualified, rather than qualified, him for the presidency. He possessed a notoriously fiery temper and had repeatedly displayed vindictive anger. Adams partisans reminded the public that Jackson had been involved in several brawls and duels, killing a man in one of them. The “coffin handbill” distributed by Philadelphia newspaperman John Binns called sympathetic attention to the six militiamen executed by Jackson’s orders in February 1815. (In retaliation, pro-Jackson mobs persecuted Binns and his wife.)
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The Adams-Clay supporters also indicted Jackson’s character on the basis of his sex life. Back in 1790, young Jackson had set up housekeeping with Rachel Robards, a woman married to another man. Though divorce was difficult and rare, Rachel’s husband, Lewis Robards, successfully divorced her on grounds of desertion and adultery. In 1794, after learning of the divorce, Andrew and Rachel underwent a marriage ceremony; prior to that time they had been “living in sin,” as respectable nineteenth-century opinion understood it. (On the eighteenth-century frontier, people did not inquire closely into such matters; Andrew and Rachel had simply been accepted as Mr. and Mrs. Jackson.) This juicy story was resurrected by an Adams newspaper, the
Cincinnati Gazette
, on March 23, 1827. Jackson’s Nashville campaign office responded with an elaborately contrived narrative claiming that Andrew and Rachel had participated in an earlier marriage ceremony in 1791 under the mistaken belief that Lewis Robards had obtained a divorce then, so their adultery had been inadvertent and merely technical. No evidence has ever been found of this alleged wedding, and Jackson’s scrupulous biographer Robert Remini must be right in concluding that no 1791 ceremony took place, and that in any case Andrew and Rachel were living together as husband and wife as early as 1790.
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Raising the subject of adultery related to the larger issue of Jackson’s character, the charge that he was so willful, impetuous, and impatient of restraint that he could not be trusted with supreme responsibility. In the vocabulary of the time, it was said that Jackson’s “passions” ruled him. The general almost played into his critics’ hands during the campaign. When Samuel Southard (Adams’s secretary of the navy) suggested at a dinner party that Secretary of War Monroe might have been entitled to some of the credit for the New Orleans victory, Old Hickory wrote a furious message to him preparing the way for a duel. Jackson’s friend Sam Houston managed to get the letter rephrased.
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The Jackson campaign did not confine its falsehoods to defenses of the candidate’s honor but invented others to attack his rival. The scrupulous, somber Adams might not seem to offer much of a target for salacious arrows, but Jacksonians did not let this inhibit their imagination. Jackson’s New Hampshire supporter Isaac Hill retailed the libel that while U.S. minister to Russia, Adams had procured an American girl for the sexual gratification of the tsar. Less preposterous, and therefore perhaps more dangerous, was the accusation that Adams had put a billiard table in the White House at public expense. In truth, Adams did enjoy the game and had bought such a table, but paid for it out of his own pocket. Adams’s religion was not exempt from attack: The Presbyterian Ezra Stiles Ely denounced the president’s Unitarian theological views as heresy and called on all sound Christians to vote for Jackson. Taken together, the accusations against Adams were designed to show him as aristocratic, intellectual, and un-American.
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The hope that Adams and Clay had entertained that the election might constitute a referendum on the American System evaporated. Instead, the presidential campaign of 1828 was probably the dirtiest in American history. It seems only fair to observe that while the hostile stories circulated about Adams were largely false, those about Jackson were largely true. An exception was the charge appearing in an Adams paper that Jackson’s mother had been a prostitute.
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However, shifting the focus of the campaign from program to personalities generally benefited the Jacksonians. They were only too willing to see the choice posed as a popular ditty had it: “Between J. Q. Adams, who can write/And Andy Jackson, who can fight.” Depressed by the turn the campaign was taking, Adams stopped recording events in his diary in August and did not resume until after the election.

The bitterness with which the campaign was waged manifested the intensity of the feelings it aroused. For beyond the mudslinging, important national issues were at stake. Adams stood for a vision of coherent economic progress, of improvement both personal and national, directed by deliberate planning. Instead of pursuing improvement, Jacksonians accepted America the way it was, including its institution of slavery. They looked upon government planners as meddlesome, although they were more than willing to seek government favors on an ad hoc basis, as when a particular internal improvement or tariff rate gratified a particular local interest. They did not publicize a comprehensive program as the national administration did. But they too had a vision of the future, and theirs centered not on economic diversification but on opening new lands to white settlement, especially if those lands could be exploited with black labor. Jackson the frontier warrior personified this vision, and it had potential appeal not only to the slaveholders of the South but also among the common white men of both sections.

Martin Van Buren set out the strategic logic behind the Jackson campaign in a letter he wrote to Thomas Ritchie on January 13, 1827. Editor of the
Richmond Enquirer
, Ritchie was a key opinion-maker in the southern Radical circles that had supported Crawford in 1824. Van Buren wanted Ritchie to swing his influence behind Jackson in 1828. But this time the Little Magician had more than just a temporary, tactical purpose in mind; he aspired to forge a fundamental realignment in American politics. Van Buren despised the nonpartisan, meritocratic ideal of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams; he wanted to re-create the party system that had divided Republicans from Federalists. Van Buren wrote to persuade Ritchie of the merits of a political alliance “between the planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North.” This alliance around Jackson should claim the mantle of the Jeffersonian Republican party and stigmatize its opponents as Federalists. Political parties are inevitable, Van Buren argued, so it behooved the Jackson supporters not only to embrace partisanship openly but also to define the parties in as advantageous a way as possible. If a second party system were not created, Van Buren believed, the result would be a politics based on sectionalism. In the absence of strong party distinctions, “prejudices between free and slave holding states will inevitably take their place,” he warned Ritchie. The Missouri debate illustrated the danger, he pointed out. The senator from New York did not scruple to appeal to the southern Radical’s desire to preserve slavery from northern interference. “Party attachment in former times furnished a complete antidote for sectional prejudices by producing counteracting feelings.” Van Buren held out the creation of the Jacksonian Democratic Party as a promised means of containing antislavery. Ritchie was persuaded.
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