Transcript
Our Federal Union
April 13, 1830
April 13, 1830 Brown's Indian Queen Hotel · Washington
Jefferson's birthday dinner. Twenty-four scheduled toasts, most of them to Jefferson and Virginia. The planners wanted the room to hear states' rights.
Then the President was called on for a toast.
Andrew Jackson Our Union: it must be preserved.
Secretary of State Martin Van Buren wrote about it later.
Martin Van Buren I was obliged to stand on my chair to get a distinct view.
Senator Hayne ran to the President and begged him to add one word: Federal. Jackson cheerfully agreed.
Vice President Calhoun answered.
John C. Calhoun The Union, next to our liberty the most dear.
John C. Calhoun May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States,
John C. Calhoun and distributing equally the benefit and burden of the Union.
Two toasts, one word. Jackson put the Union first. Calhoun put liberty first.
In 1832, South Carolina defied a federal law. Jackson threatened to send an army. Georgia defied the Supreme Court. Jackson did not enforce its ruling.
The Cherokee Nation paid the difference. So when did Andrew Jackson believe in federal power, and who paid when he didn't?
Old Hickory
1767–1831
Andrew Jackson was born on the Carolina frontier in 1767.
In 1781, at fourteen, Jackson was a British prisoner. He said he refused to clean an officer's boots. The officer slashed him with a sword.
By the end of 1781, his mother and both brothers were dead. He was an orphan.
In Tennessee, Jackson became a lawyer and a judge. And he fought duels.
In 1806, Charles Dickinson shot Jackson in the chest. Jackson stayed standing, aimed, and killed him. The bullet stayed near his heart for life.
The Creek War and New Orleans made him a hero. His soldiers called him Old Hickory.
Jackson was also a cotton planter. At the Hermitage he enslaved about a hundred people.
Jackson thought the president, alone, spoke for all the people. He leaned on friends and newspaper editors his critics called the Kitchen Cabinet.
John Eaton, the secretary of war, married Peggy, an innkeeper's daughter. The vice president's wife, Floride Calhoun, led the cabinet wives in shunning her.
Rachel Jackson had died weeks before his inauguration. He blamed the gossip about her. On September 10, 1829, he held a cabinet meeting about Peggy Eaton's reputation.
Secretary of State Martin Van Buren was a widower, with no wife to object. He was charming to Peggy Eaton. Jackson noticed.
By spring 1831, Jackson had replaced nearly his whole cabinet.
Jackson had also learned that Vice President Calhoun once wanted him censured for invading Florida in 1818. Calhoun was out. Van Buren was the heir.
And Jackson had a favorite presidential power.
The Monster
1830–1832
May 1830. Congress voted money for a road from Maysville to Lexington, Kentucky. Sixty miles, all inside Henry Clay's home state. Jackson vetoed it.
A road inside one state, Jackson said, was local, not national. He still signed money for the National Road, which crossed several states.
Clay wanted federal roads and canals, a high tariff and a national bank. He called it the American System.
The biggest fight was over the Bank. The Second Bank of the United States held the government's money, with about 25 branches.
Its president, Nicholas Biddle, wrote poems and adored ancient Greece. Its Philadelphia headquarters was modeled on the Parthenon.
It did real work. Its notes were good anywhere in the country. Sending state banks' notes home for gold kept them from printing too much.
To Jackson, it was a monster: a private company, run from Philadelphia, with power over everyone's money. Some of its owners were British.
The charter ran to 1836, but Clay and Webster urged Biddle to ask early, in the election year. The plan: make Jackson choose, with the voters watching.
Congress passed the charter. Van Buren, home from London, found Jackson ill in bed. Van Buren remembered a calm vow: the Bank was trying to kill him, but he would kill it.
A week later, Jackson vetoed it.
Andrew Jackson It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.
Nicholas Biddle It has all the fury of a chained panther biting the bars of his cage.
Biddle was sure voters would recoil, so the Bank printed tens of thousands of copies.
The voters read it. Jackson won 219 electoral votes. Clay won 49.
Jackson's side drew the fight like this.
With no national bank to check them, state banks multiplied and printed more money. Remember that in 1837.
Meanwhile, South Carolina had found a weapon of its own.
Abominations
1828–1833
In 1828 Congress passed the highest tariff the country had seen. Southern critics named it the Tariff of Abominations.
It protected Northern mills and ironworks. South Carolina sold cotton abroad and paid higher prices for almost everything it bought.
Vice President John C. Calhoun wrote South Carolina's answer and left his name off it.
A state, he argued, could declare a federal law void inside its borders.
In January 1830, Senator Robert Hayne argued that states could judge federal laws. Calhoun presided.
Daniel Webster answered for two days.
Daniel Webster Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable!
Schoolchildren memorized that line.
That April came Jackson's toast. Now you know what it meant.
John C. Calhoun I consider the Tariff act as the occasion, rather than the real cause of the present unhappy state of things.
He meant slavery. If Washington could overrule South Carolina on tariffs, it might someday overrule it on slavery.
A South Carolina convention declared the tariffs null and void. After February 1, no federal duties would be collected there.
Jackson sent warships to Charleston harbor and reinforced its forts.
Jackson wrote to South Carolina's people.
Andrew Jackson Disunion, by armed force, is treason. Are you really ready to incur its guilt?
Calhoun resigned as vice president, the first ever to do so. He took a Senate seat to defend South Carolina.
Jackson asked Congress for power to use the army. Then Henry Clay, the tariff's champion, offered a compromise.
Jackson signed both bills the same day. One gave him the army. The other let South Carolina back down.
South Carolina's convention repealed its nullification of the tariffs. Then, to have the last word, it nullified the Force Bill.
Jackson had stood up for federal law against a state. Now go to Georgia.
The Cherokee Nation
1821–1831
While Washington argued about a tariff, Georgia wanted something else. About 16,000 Cherokee lived here, on land United States treaties had promised them.
A silversmith named Sequoyah couldn't read English, so he invented a way to write Cherokee. Eighty-six symbols, one for each syllable. Within years, thousands were reading it.
They built a capital at New Echota. In 1827 they adopted a constitution with a legislature, courts and a principal chief.
In 1828 they started a newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, in English and Cherokee.
Some wealthy Cherokee, like wealthy Georgians, enslaved Black people. The new constitution barred people of African descent from voting.
In 1802 Georgia gave the United States its western lands. In return, Washington promised to end Native land claims inside Georgia, peacefully, when it could. Twenty-six years later, Georgia was still waiting.
Then, in 1829, gold turned up on Cherokee land. Thousands of miners rushed in. That December, Georgia declared Cherokee laws void and said state law would rule the Nation.
Jackson backed Georgia. He told Congress:
Andrew Jackson This emigration should be voluntary…
Andrew Jackson …if they remain within the limits of the States they must be subject to their laws.
In the Senate, Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey spoke against removal.
Theodore Frelinghuysen Do the obligations of justice change with the color of the skin?
The House passed the Indian Removal Act by five votes. Davy Crockett of Tennessee voted no. He lost his next election.
The Cherokee had an answer ready. They'd been building it for years.
They didn't take up arms. They hired William Wirt, a former attorney general of the United States, and sued.
Fell Still Born
1830–1833
In 1831 the Cherokee sued Georgia in the Supreme Court. Marshall called them “domestic dependent nations.”
John Marshall Their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian.
Not a foreign nation. So they couldn't sue.
Georgia hanged a Cherokee man, Corn Tassel, in December 1830. The Supreme Court had agreed to review his case.
Georgia required white residents of the Cherokee Nation to get a state license. The missionary Samuel Worcester refused.
He got four years at hard labor.
The Court ruled for Worcester.
John Marshall The Cherokee nation, then, is a distinct community, occupying its own territory,
John Marshall with boundaries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force.
In New Echota, the Cherokee rejoiced. Georgia ignored the ruling.
Andrew Jackson The decision of the supreme court has fell still born,
Andrew Jackson and they find that it cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.
You may have heard Jackson say, “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.”
John Marshall has made his decision: now let him enforce it!
It first appeared in print in 1864. Historians doubt he said it.
The letter is better evidence. The Court never ordered him to act.
South Carolina defied a federal law, and Jackson sent warships. Georgia defied the Supreme Court, and Jackson did nothing.
With South Carolina nullifying, Jackson wanted no second fight. In January 1833, Worcester dropped his case and Georgia freed him.
Georgia cut Cherokee land into lots and gave them away by lottery.
In 1835, John Ross came home to find Georgians living in his house. A lottery had given it away.
The Cherokee had won in court. It didn't matter.
King Andrew
1833–1841
Back in Washington, Jackson wasn't finished with the Bank.
In 1833 he decided to starve it before its charter ran out. He ordered the government's money moved into state banks.
His first Treasury secretary said no and got moved. The next said no and got fired. The third, Roger Taney, said yes.
Biddle hit back. He tightened credit across the country, on purpose.
Nicholas Biddle Nothing but the evidence of suffering abroad will produce any effect in Congress.
In the Senate, Henry Clay named the danger.
Henry Clay …the concentration of all power in the hands of one man.
In March 1834 the Senate censured the President, 26 to 20. It is the only time the Senate has ever done that.
His enemies became the Whigs, named for the English party that opposed kings. Whigs wanted a national bank, high tariffs and federal roads. Democrats didn't.
Their name for Jackson was King Andrew. And they printed this.
Jackson answered the Senate himself.
Andrew Jackson The President is the direct representative of the American people, but the Secretaries are not.
In 1837 Jackson's allies took over the Senate and expunged the censure. The clerk drew black lines around it in the journal.
In 1835 a Charleston mob burned antislavery pamphlets taken from the mail. Jackson asked Congress to ban them from the Southern mail. Congress refused.
State banks lent freely, and people borrowed to buy Western land. Much of it had been taken from Native nations.
To cool the boom, Jackson's Treasury demanded gold or silver for large land purchases.
On May 10, 1837, New York's banks stopped paying out gold and silver. A depression followed. British interest rates and falling cotton prices helped cause it too.
The blame landed on Jackson's chosen successor, Martin Van Buren. The Whigs called him Martin Van Ruin.
A Democratic paper sneered at the new Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison. Give him hard cider and a pension, it said, and he'll stay in his log cabin.
The Whigs made the cabin and the cider barrel his symbols. Harrison was born on a Virginia plantation.
Harrison won, and died a month into his term. His successor, John Tyler, vetoed the Whigs' new national bank. Twice.
Removal
1830–1839
In the 1830s the United States moved most Native nations east of the Mississippi to the West. Tens of thousands of people.
The Choctaw went first. In 1831 a young Frenchman watched some of them cross the Mississippi.
Alexis de Tocqueville No cry, no sob was heard amongst the assembled crowd; all were silent.
Some fought. In 1832 the Sauk leader Black Hawk led about a thousand people back across the Mississippi. Soldiers chased them north. At the Bad Axe River, they fired on people trying to cross.
Black Hawk surrendered that August.
Black Hawk Black-hawk is an Indian. He has done nothing for which an Indian ought to be ashamed.
In Florida, Seminoles and Black allies, many of them escaped from slavery, fought the army for seven years. Osceola was seized under a flag of truce. He died a prisoner at Fort Moultrie, in Charleston harbor.
The Creek were forced out in 1836, some of the men in chains. The Chickasaw followed in 1837.
The Cherokee divided. Most stood with John Ross and would not sell. Major Ridge, his son John and Elias Boudinot thought removal could not be stopped. They wanted the best terms they could get.
In December 1835, at New Echota, that group signed away all Cherokee land east of the Mississippi for five million dollars. A few hundred Cherokee came. The elected government did not sign.
The Senate ratified the treaty by a single vote. John Ross wrote to Congress.
John Ross We are denationalized; we are disfranchised. We are deprived of membership in the human family!
In May 1838 the army came for the Cherokee who had stayed. That was most of the nation. Soldiers under General Winfield Scott marched families into stockades.
Hundreds died in the camps that summer. Ross won permission for the Cherokee to lead their own removal. Thirteen groups set out.
In January 1839, a traveler from Maine met a Cherokee column on a road in Kentucky.
A traveler from Maine …even aged females, apparently nearly ready to drop into the grave, were traveling with heavy burdens attached to the back… with no covering for the feet except what nature had given them.
Enslaved Black people, held by Cherokee families, were taken west too. John Ross's wife, Quatie, died on the way. A month before, President Van Buren told Congress:
Martin Van Buren …their removal has been principally under the conduct of their own chiefs, and they have emigrated without any apparent reluctance.
About 16,000 Cherokee were forced west. Thousands died in the stockades and on the road. The usual estimate is four thousand.
Who Paid
1839 and after
In June 1839, Cherokee men who blamed the treaty killed three of its signers. Major Ridge. John Ridge. Elias Boudinot.
That September, at Tahlequah, the Cherokee wrote a new constitution, for one nation again. The land was gone. The Nation was not.
South Carolina got a lower tariff. Georgia got the land. The Cherokee Nation paid.
Jackson used federal power on nullifiers, on the Bank, and on abolitionist mail. Against Georgia, he wouldn't. He wanted what Georgia wanted.
His defenders drew a hero. They're right that he faced down nullification. His critics drew a king. They're right about the Court and the Cherokee.
The Cherokee Nation's capital is still Tahlequah. Its newspaper is the Cherokee Phoenix again.
Removal emptied the land. Cotton filled it, and enslaved people grew the cotton.
And Calhoun's idea, that a state could say no, didn't die in 1833. In 1861, eleven states used it to leave.