Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (33 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

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By this powerful show of force and purpose, coupled with conciliatory gestures to slave-holding, Jackson had shut down any thought of insurrection for perhaps a generation. Henceforth the cause of Union would rest chiefly on the ability of the free states to attract more immigration and spread westward more quickly than the more sluggish and agrarian slave states, so that insurrection would become unfeasible because of the greater strength of the Union states. This demonstrated Jackson’s strategic grasp, even if intuitively, of how to keep the Union together. The young republic had made its point in the world, but the world could also see that it was threatened by internal contradictions. Jackson loved the Union more than he approved slavery, and the United States owes him much for deferring the supreme test between the two unequal halves of the country until the Unionists, by the narrowest of margins and with the benefit of the most distinguished leadership in the country’s history, were strong enough to throttle the secessionists. Jackson may not have reacted for exactly this reason, but he saved the Union for a significant time at a decisive moment, and applied the only strategy that was going to preserve the country’s full potential for national greatness and benign world influence.

The 81-year-old (in 1832) James Madison, like Jefferson, had been disconcerted when their party was taken over by the comparative ruffian and warmonger Jackson, but they also had come to recognize the danger posed by the slavery issue. Jackson had politely referred to Madison as “a great civilian” but added that “the mind of a philosopher could not dwell on blood and carnage with any composure.”
⁷⁶Jackson had no such difficulties. He never lacked the steely resolve to deal severely with people and events. Once again, the American system seemed miraculously to have demonstrated that the office does seek the man, as it had turned up a leader who had terrible lapses of humanity, moderation, and scruple, but was providentially able to produce a policy of finely calibrated appeasement and intimidation of the slave-holding interest that would keep North and South together under the same constitutional roof for an indispensable further period of national maturation. By whatever combination of intuition, good fortune, and design, it was masterly strategy for the ultimate elimination of the Union’s great internal weakness (slavery).

Jackson’s next major step, the veto of the renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States, stirred another immense controversy. Clay urged the head of the Bank, Nicholas Biddle, to submit his application for recharter four years early, in 1832, to force Jackson’s hand and make an election issue of it. Biddle did so, and it was useful to Jackson, as the Bank was unpopular in the South and West, and seen as an elitist eastern organization that overly contracted credit in the faster-growing areas of the country. This also helped Jackson counter the nullifiers and appear generally as the champion of the little people. Biddle was judged too restrictive of credit through his ability to enforce ratios on smaller banks, and he was not accorded the credit the Bank generally deserved for avoiding inflation and keeping an orderly money supply. Shutting the Bank down was a mistake other than politically. Both houses of the Congress voted to renew, but they could not override Jackson’s veto. Jackson’s actions proved to be unsuccessful, but not as catastrophically mistimed as Madison’s inability to renew the charter in 1811.

Following the reelection of Jackson, Clay and Calhoun joined forces to get a House vote approving retention of government deposits in the Bank of the United States. Jackson felt he had won a clear mandate to get rid of the Bank, and Biddle thought his position justified his replying to Jackson’s war on him and his Bank by tightening credit, which he did. By the end of 1833, Biddle’s tactics had induced significant financial distress in the country, and Jackson had overcome a divided cabinet to remove federal government deposits from the Bank and place them in 23 state banks.

Jackson named Roger Taney, the attorney general, secretary of the Treasury to carry out the changes he sought, and as always with Jackson, there were insults and ruffled feathers all round. Clay got a censure vote against both Jackson and the Treasury through the Senate. Jackson’s transgression was that he refused to hand over to the Senate a paper he had read to his cabinet about the Bank recharter question. Jackson lodged a protest that he had been accused of an impeachable offense without being given an opportunity to defend himself. The Senate declined to confirm Taney at Treasury, but Jackson had him serve ad interim, and named him successfully, over strenuous opposition, as chief justice of the United States in 1835 when John Marshall died after 34 years in his office.
⁷⁷Taney was the first senior American official who was a Roman Catholic; he would serve 29 years as chief justice, with very mixed results. Benton eventually had the censure of Jackson expunged.

Inflation was abetted by the use of land-sale speculators’ notes as a form of transactional debt, and the huge increase in western land sales generated great increases in activity, and consequently in the de facto money supply, since these notes served as currency. Jackson ordered that only gold, silver, and in a few cases certain state-backed scrip would be accepted as payment in sales of federal lands. This turned inflation instantly into deflation, sharply reducing sales of federal lands and placing great strain on the state banks. Jackson’s unnuanced decrees in banking and monetary policy caused syncopated economic lurches that were often destructive to many, and reduced general levels of confidence in the rational administration of the country’s affairs.

Presidents (J.Q) Adams and Jackson had both offered to buy Texas from Mexico, without success. American settlement in Texas began in earnest with Moses Austin and his son Stephen F. Austin, and was agreed by successive Mexican governments until 1830, when Mexico outlawed slavery in Texas and forbade further American settlement there. Stephen Austin went to Mexico to negotiate with the president, the charming and imperishable scoundrel General Antonio López de Santa Anna, who was nine times president of his country (though serving only seven years), and called himself “the Napoleon of the West” among other encomia. Santa Anna arrested Austin and imprisoned him for eight months. A group of Texans asserted their independence in 1835. Santa Anna set out to crush Texas militarily, and invested the San Antonio fortress, the Alamo, on February 23, 1836, with 3,000 men. The fortress was defended by only 188 men, including folkloric figures William Travis and Davy Crockett. After 10 days, Santa Anna overwhelmed the defenders and all the Americans were massacred, as were several hundred other Americans at different locations in Texas.

On April 21, Sam Houston led several hundred men stealthily across the San Jacinto River, near what is today the city of Houston, and defeated about 1,200 Mexicans at San Jacinto and captured Santa Anna, who was released to secure Mexican recognition of the independence of Texas. The Mexicans rejected this and Houston was elected president of the independent Republic of Texas. There were resolutions from both houses of the Congress for recognition of Texas, which Jackson, uncharacteristically, was hesitant to do. He wished to honor treaty obligations with Mexico and claimed not to wish a war with that country, though he would normally find such a prospect appetizing. He was more concerned with causing a split in the Democratic Party between pro- and anti-slavery forces, but on his last full day as president, March 3, 1837, Jackson did send a chargé to Texas in an act of quasi-recognition. This was another time bomb that Jackson would leave for his successors.

The National Republicans of Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams, favoring protective tariffs and a strong federal government, including a national bank, and cool to the spread of slavery, merged with former Democrats opposed to Jackson’s Bank policy, and with the more prosperous southern planters and northern industrialists, who found Jackson a dangerous rabble-rouser. They all joined, very implausibly, with southern opponents of Jackson’s anti-nullification policy, to form what was called, at Clay’s suggestion, the Whig Party. The remnants of the previous election’s Anti-Masonic Party (which had carried Vermont in 1832) joined the Whigs, a catchment of all those fragments that had been scattered in all directions by the onslaught of the Jackson juggernaut. In Congress, they were a relatively coherent group led by Clay and Webster and Calhoun, who were well-settled into their long domination of the Congress. But in the country, they were an incongruous hodgepodge of elements awkwardly lined up in opposition to the galvanizing figure of the president, who carried the torch of national unity in the North and wore the mantle and laurels of the regional defender of slavery in the South, and was a war hero to all. Andrew Jackson remains one of the seven or eight most important presidents in the country’s history—inventor of the spoils system, champion of the slaveholders, betrayer of the Indians, agent of financial disorder, but redeemer of an ill-considered war, leader of the populist Democrats, and conservator pro tempore of the American Union.

14. STRATEGIC REVIEW

It was 77 years from the start of the Seven Years’ War to the reinauguration of Andrew Jackson, and in that time America had deftly moved through eight distinct strategic phases. Franklin had had the vision of the Great Power of the New World, and had fastened it admirably onto Pitt’s vision of the British Empire to encourage the permanent expulsion of France from North America. This was the sine qua non to the possibility of American independence, which would have been impractical if France had remained in contention for control of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys (1756–1763). For the fulfillment of Franklin’s vision, France and Britain would both have to go from America, but France would have to go first.

When the king and the king’s men refused to govern equitably as between the British of the home islands and of America, Washington’s genius for guerrilla war (for it was genius and it was guerrilla war) was married to Franklin’s diplomatic genius in enticing France self-destructively to the aid of republicanism, and to Jefferson’s genius for presenting the quarrel in epochal, libertarian terms, and independence was won (1764–1783). Washington then displayed a political cunning and integrity and resistance to the temptations of force no triumphant general in an important country would show again until Charles de Gaulle patiently awaited the collapse of the French Fourth Republic 170 years later (1783–1787). Washington and Franklin sponsored the constitutional efforts of Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, and a stable and durable and adequately flexible system of government resulted (1787–1789).

Washington, Hamilton, and Adams launched the government of the new republic with surpassing insight and distinction, establishing strong economic policies and fiscal institutions, asserting federal authority and retaining sufficient military strength to be able to exchange non-aggression against Canada and the British West Indies for British liberality toward American commerce on the high seas, and used the status quo with Britain to lever a firm line against revolutionary and Napoleonic France (1789–1801).

The opposition came peacefully to power, often the litmus test of a new national regime. And Jefferson and Madison retained Hamilton’s financial institutions and industrial policy, while expanding the country into the interior of the continent, broadening the franchise, and shrinking and decentralizing government. Their economic reprisals against Britain failed and Madison lost the opportunity to seize Canada, but at least registered again, in the otherwise pointless War of 1812, America’s determined autonomy opposite Britain (1801–1817).

Monroe and John Quincy Adams continued the wiser policies of all their predecessors and seized the coat-tails and the elbow of their late British adversary, preponderant in the post-Napoleonic world, as tightly as Britain would embrace America when the correlation of forces between them tipped three-quarters of a century later. For the United States, it was solidarity in apparent equality with the only potentially threatening adversary, all in the interest of American hemispheric preeminence (1818–1829).

And Andrew Jackson would impose the acceptance of slavery where it existed and within its established latitude in implicit exchange for the inviolability of the Union, which the South, in its defensiveness about slavery, was already trying to redefine. Given demographic and economic trends, this would ensure the ability of the free states with skillful political leadership to prevail over the slave states, should the issue be forced, if the test of strength could be deferred by 20 or 30 years (1832–1860).

If these trends of growth and development could be retained and the slavery threat resolved, the United States, barely 80 years after Yorktown, would be one of the greatest powers in the world, as Franklin had foreseen. Of the founders of the country, Madison was the only one still alive in 1833, and he saw the danger and the promise. It would all be down to the next great leader of the American project, a raw-boned young Illinoisan, teaching himself law and wondering about slavery.

TWO

THE PREDESTINED PEOPLE, 1836–1933

CHAPTER FIVE

Slavery

The House Divided, 1836–1860