Jackson’s policy toward Indians was also rather repressive, and was based on removing all Indians to west of the Mississippi, chiefly to free up land for more slaves baling cotton in the South. To this end, over 250,000 Indians were transported west, and many thousands died of illnesses contracted on the voyage. Treaties with Indians were routinely violated, especially when gold was discovered on Cherokee land in Georgia, and the Supreme Court overruled the state’s expropriation of the gold-yielding property. Jackson allegedly said: “The chief justice [Marshall] has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” Armed resistance to forced movement by the Sac and Fox Indians led to the Black Hawk War in 1832, but the resistance was futile. Jackson’s enthusiasm for slavery and shabby treatment of the Indians are two great failings of his character and administration, though, again, they helped get the Union through a vital and vulnerable period.
The Nat Turner slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, August 13 to 23, 1831, killed 57 whites and over 100 blacks, and led to the execution of 20 slaves and the deterioration of slave-holding conditions throughout the South, restricting the movements of slaves, reducing their education levels, and making emancipation of individual slaves more difficult. There was great agitation in the South to prevent the dissemination of abolitionist propaganda through the mails. Jackson, ever faithful to his formula of safety for slavery in the South but no secession, proposed a bill banning such literature from the mails. Robert Hayne’s successor as governor of South Carolina, George McDuffie, in a splendid local flourish, demanded the death penalty for such offenders, “without benefit of clergy.”9 The following year, the New England Anti-Slavery League was founded by William Lloyd Garrison, and there were similar organizations elsewhere in the North, as the entrenchment of positions on the issue on each side deepened slowly and ominously.
13. JACKSON’S SECOND TERM: NULLIFICATION AND THE NATIONAL BANK
Jackson had been renominated to the presidency without opposition by what was now officially called the Democratic Party, and having purged Calhoun, he secured the nomination for vice president of his friend and protégé Martin Van Buren. The National Republicans held a convention in Baltimore and nominated Henry Clay for president and John Sergeant of Pennsylvania for vice president. There was also an Anti-Masonic Party. The main campaign issue was Jackson’s declared opposition to the renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States. Jackson and Van Buren won easily, as they were the party of effective Unionism, and Jackson represented the Bank of the U.S. as an elitist and exploitive enterprise operated by corrupt plutocrats friendly with Clay. Jackson had about 55 percent of the vote and 219 electoral votes to 49 for Clay.
Although Calhoun had helped generate the nullification controversy with his co-sponsorship of the Tariff of Abominations, this fed the nullification argument, and Jackson advocated a reduction of some tariffs sensitive to South Carolina in 1832, to reduce frictions. But the nullification party won the South Carolina elections in October 1832. Calhoun had stopped acting through surrogates and overtly championed nullification in a number of speeches and letters, dressing it up in relatively plausible constitutional argument. A South Carolina state convention was called for November 19. The convention was largely boycotted by South Carolina’s Unionists, and adopted a nullification ordinance, which declared the 1828 and 1832 tariffs nullified and forbade their collection in the state; required a state loyalty oath for all state employees except members of the legislature; forbade appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court of any matter arising from the ordinance; and stated that any use of force by the federal government against a state would be grounds for secession. The convention then voted to authorize and pay for a force of military resistance; this was taking matters to the verge of insurrection, and with the wrong president. Jackson ordered the war secretary to put the federal forts in Charleston Harbor on alert and put General Winfield Scott in command of all federal forces in South Carolina. About 8,000 South Carolina Unionists volunteered for the federal militia to suppress the nullifiers if necessary. For good measure, Jackson told a congressman that “If one drop of blood be shed there in defiance of the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man of them I can get my hands on to the first tree I can find.” When South Carolina senator Robert Hayne expressed skepticism to Senator Thomas Hart Benton that Jackson would follow through, Benton replied: “When Jackson begins to talk about hanging, they can begin to look for rope.”10 (Benton had been Jackson’s aide at New Orleans, with the rank of colonel, and then represented his interests in Washington. They quarreled and Benton shot and wounded Jackson in a frontier brawl, though they were later reconciled. Among Benton’s several famous sayings was: “I don’t quarrel, but I fight, sir; and when I fight, a funeral follows.” He and Jackson were birds of a feather, but he renounced slavery in later years, and thus was denied a sixth term as U.S. senator from Missouri.)
In his message to the Congress on December 4, 1832, Jackson recommended further downward revision of the tariff, and in his Proclamation to the People of South Carolina six days later (drafted by Livingston and a very substantial state paper), Jackson described nullification as a “practical absurdity” and reaffirmed the supremacy of a sovereign and indivisible federal government. No state could disobey federal law and none could leave the Union, and any attempt to do so “by armed force is treason.” Calhoun resigned as vice president a couple of months before the end of his term, on December 28, having already been reelected to the U.S. Senate replacing Hayne, who had just been elected governor of South Carolina. South Carolina called for a general convention of other states in solidarity, but was rebuffed. On January 16, 1833, Jackson sent Congress his Force Bill, authorizing the collection of tariff duties in South Carolina by the U.S. Army if necessary, though what was actually foreseen was offshore collection, which would have made armed clashes less likely.
Daniel Webster again led the Unionist forces in debate, against Calhoun, and it was a memorable single-warrior combat, though Webster had the better of the argument and was the ne plus ultra of American political orators of the time. Henry Clay, exercising again his great talent for conciliating the apparently irreconcilable, introduced a compromise tariff. Both Jackson’s Force Bill and Clay’s tariff passed and both were signed into law by Jackson on March 2, 1833, two days before he was reinaugurated. Six weeks before, South Carolina, supposedly in response to Clay’s approaching tariff bill, but certainly not without awareness of Jackson’s aroused threats, suspended its nullification ordinance, and rescinded it when the tariff was enacted, but also purported to nullify the Force Bill.
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.”11 Jackson 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