Political Fights, Popular Fêtes

The fluid political atmosphere produced two major blocs that faced off in the presidential contest of 1828: the National Republicans, headed by John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, and the Jacksonians (soon called Democrats), an assembly of Adams’s opponents who gathered around Andrew Jackson.

At the same time, another movement, the Antimasons, had unexpectedly appeared. Originating in 1827 in western New York, Anti-masonry at ?rst seemed like a splinter group that would disappear. Surprisingly, the party grew rapidly in New York and through much of New England and Pennsylvania. Soon it was a national force.

The cause of the Antimasonic movement was the kidnapping and apparent murder of William Morgan, an unemployed bricklayer in Batavia, New York. Morgan had joined a local chapter of Masons but fell into a dispute with its members. Morgan enraged the Masons by threatening to publish a retaliatory book revealing their secret rites. Morgan was jailed on a trumped-up charge for debt, released, and then quickly jailed again. On September 12, 1826, men later exposed as Masons appeared at the jail and paid his debt. They carried him off in a carriage, taking him to Fort Niagara. Then all trace of him disappeared. It was widely assumed that the kidnappers had murdered Morgan. A year later a man’s decomposed body was discovered in the Niagara River. Though positive identi?cation of the corpse was impossible, the story spread that the murder victim had been found. Was the cadaver really Morgan? It was “a good-enough Morgan until after the election,” the saying went.

Four men confessed to the abduction and were brought to trial but received light sentences. Antimasons charged that the crime was committed by a wicked cabal that had in?ltrated American life. Not only had Masons murdered Morgan, but his killers had gotten off virtually free as the result of a rigged trial in which most of the participants were Masons. Dangerous and widespread, the Masons threatened to create “a state of society as revolting as would be the vicinity of the prowling savage, with his midnight tomahawk and scalping knife,” one journalist wrote. The Morgan case, in this view, showed the amorality of a secret brotherhood that victimized common people.

But how about the many distinguished Americans who had been Masons, such as Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, James Monroe, and Lafayette? Yes, said the Antimasons, in a former time Freemasonry and patriotism ?t, but not now. The Masonic brotherhood, they argued, was undemocratic in its secrecy, sacrilegious in its rituals, and elitist in its exclusiveness.

The Antimasonic movement became the home for those who felt left out of the major parties, especially rural evangelical Christians and opponents of slavery. Because Freemasonary increasingly attracted upwardly mobile professionals, it seemed clubbish and aristocratic, stirring resentment among the country folk who swarmed to the Antimasons. The Rochester editor Thurlow Weed organized the movement, which became the training ground for some of the period’s most prominent ?gures, including William Henry Seward, Thaddeus Stevens, Horace Greeley, William Lloyd Garrison, and Millard Fillmore—all, except the last, destined to be leading antislavery spokesmen.

In state elections between 1827 and 1830, the Antimasonic Party performed well in New York and several other northern states. By the early 1830s the movement had become a vocal opponent of Andrew Jackson, a well-known Mason. In 1832 it became the ?rst political party to hold a national convention, nominating William Wirt for president. By then, the party boasted over one hundred newspapers nationwide. It won the governorships of Pennsylvania and Vermont. The movement soon died, however, as the perceived threat of Freemasonry faded and the Whig Party took its place in challenging the Jacksonians.

One of the main targets of Antimasonic wrath was Martin Van Buren, the U.S. senator from New York who organized the emerging Democratic Party. By the time the Antimasons appeared, Van Buren’s chief goal was the victory of Andrew Jackson in the presidential election of 1828. Van Buren wanted the presidency for himself but knew he would have to wait his turn. Neither the Antimasons nor anyone else would outsmart the smooth manipulator whose nicknames, the Red Fox and the Little Magician, re?ected his political savvy.

Born in Kinderhook, New York, in 1782, Van Buren was the son of a farmer and tavern keeper descended from early Dutch settlers. His father’s tavern was a political gathering place, and as a boy Van Buren heard debates over candidates and issues. At thirteen he quit school and apprenticed in law. Five years later he got a law job in New York City, where he stayed three years before returning to Kinderhook to practice law and run for of?ce. In 1807 he married his childhood sweetheart and distant cousin, Hannah Hoes. They had four sons before her untimely death twelve years later. Van Buren became associated with Tammany Hall politicians known as the Bucktails for the buck’s tail they wore on their hats at political meetings. Van Buren was elected a state senator and went on to become New York’s attorney general.

Short and paunchy, Van Buren had thinning sandy-red hair, muttonchops whiskers, and glittering eyes. A dapper man of great charm, wit, and manners, he was an effective organizer and strategist. As a leading Bucktail, he founded the political machine known as the Albany Regency, which controlled thousands of political jobs in the state. It was he who masterminded the change in New York’s election laws that opened the vote to most white males. A Jeffersonian Old Republican, he was elected in the early 1820s to the U.S. Senate.

He supported William Crawford in the 1824 presidential race, but when Crawford’s fortunes dimmed, he saw Jackson as the potential uni?er of the anti-Adams forces. In the Senate, he helped stonewall Adams’s policies and open the way for Jackson. A perennial foe of Federalism, Van Buren wanted to revive the two-party system that pitted the nationalist American System against a party that stood for states’ rights and a limited federal government. Although Jackson waffled on such issues, he was so popular a hero, and so different from the crusty Adams, that he seemed the perfect presidential candidate.

In December 1826, Van Buren met with Vice President Calhoun to plot Jackson’s election and coordinate opposition to the Adams administration. Calhoun desired the presidency just as much as did Van Buren, but he too sensed that his time had not come. Having abandoned Martin Van Buren nationalism for states’-rights republicanism, Calhoun agreed to throw his weight behind Jackson. Van Buren then contacted the influential Richmond editor Thomas Ritchie about reestablishing the Virginia—New York Republican axis that had formerly opposed New England Federalism. Ritchie jumped on the Jackson bandwagon, promising to support him in the columns of the Richmond Enquirer. The Richmond junto was aboard.

Soon enough, so was the Nashville junto. Jackson’s home state of Tennessee already had in place a tight team, which included the planter and bank president Judge John Overton, the ex-Indian ?ghter Major William B. Lewis, the lawyer-politician John H. Eaton, and the militia officer Sam Houston. When Van Buren approached the group about a coordinated effort behind the general, it responded enthusiastically. The Little Magician then strengthened Southern backing of Jackson in a March 1827 tour that took him to Savannah, Raleigh, Charleston, and Richmond.

By mid-1827 the Jackson juggernaut was a reality. Van Buren had helped get it moving, but even he could not foresee its power. Andrew Jackson was one of the rarities of American politics: a man whose personal magnetism transcended his ?aws. To his opponents, he was ignorant, violent, politically inexperienced, even immoral. But few could deny his courage, his self-reliance, and his ability to rise above adversity.

At sixty, the white-haired Jackson was a sick man. The bullet in his shoulder had created a chronic bone infection, and the one in his chest aggravated a lung condition that caused uncontrollable coughing ?ts, producing what he called “great quantities of slime.” He was arthritic, nearly toothless, and given to headaches. But he endured. He was tough. He expressed strong passions. He had come from a modest background and had become a leader. Though wealthy, he was unmistakably the people’s hero. More than ever, he was Old Hickory.

Melville in Moby Dick praises the “great democratic God! . . . who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne!” But one does not have to look to God to explain Jackson’s rise to power, which resulted from careful planning, tight organization, and well-timed mudslinging.

By late 1827 every state in the Union had established a network of committees in support of Jackson. Local committees were linked with county and state committees that communicated with committees in other states. If President Adams pointed toward the future in his federally funded improvements and ?rm foreign relations, Jackson was prophetic in his ability to garner such passionate support that many states around the nation organized on his behalf.

He was also innovative in campaigning for himself. Presidential candidates did not usually do so. As one politician commented, “Candidates for the Presidency . . . ought not to say one word on the subject of the election. Washington, Jefferson, & Madison were as silent as the grave when they were before the American people for this of?ce.”

Jackson, in contrast, was not silent. He wrote a steady stream of newspaper articles (edited by others to correct his faulty English) in which he warded off attacks and defended his views. He corresponded with politicians around the country. He supervised a team of busy campaigners who traversed the country distributing pamphlets and handbills. He encouraged the creation of a huge nationwide network of supportive newspapers, led by Washington’s United States Telegraph, edited by the aggressive Duff Green.

Unlike Adams, Jackson knew how to make the most of an important appearance. When Adams was asked to woo Pennsylvania farmers by appearing at a canal celebration and using his knowledge of German, he declined, explaining that electioneering was against his taste and principles. He refused many other opportunities to campaign as well. Although Jackson did not abandon altogether the code against personal campaigning, he exploited his magnetic effect on crowds. When invited to appear in New Orleans on January 8, 1828, the anniversary of his famous battle, he agreed to do so if the event were kept “non-political.”

The result was a celebration almost as grand as those for the Erie Canal opening or the Bunker Hill Monument. Jackson arrived by steamboat, and as soon as he landed, an explosion of cheers and cannon greeted him. Laudatory speeches and the general’s ceremonial review of his surviving troops followed, with a tremendous dinner in the evening. The event was, said a reporter, “the most stupendous thing of the kind that had ever occurred in the United States;” from another perspective, it was “like a Dream. The World has never witnessed so glorious, so wonderful a Celebration.”

It took more than special appearances or aggressive campaigning to ensure Jackson’s victory. Also signi?cant were practical efforts in Congress to sway certain states in the Hero’s direction. One avenue Jackson’s supporters chose was surprising: a new tariff. Traditionally, the tariff was associated with the American System endorsed by Adams and Clay. Adams’s opponents turned the tables on him by pushing a high tariff that they believed would wound the president. They were right.

Martin Van Buren’s Bucktail ally Silas Wright, who had been elected to the House of Representatives in 1826, proposed a high tariff that raised duties between 30 percent and 50 percent on raw materials like wool, hemp, and iron, as well as on molasses and sail duck. A ploy to gain votes for Jackson, the tariff offered high protection to Middle Atlantic and Western states that produced certain raw goods while leaving the South and the East largely unprotected. The measure seemed so unfair that many then and since have assumed it was created by opponents of tariffs in order to be defeated. Henry Clay said the authors of the tariff did “not really desire the passage of their own measure” but instead hoped to make tariffs look absurd by presenting a caricature of one. Historians have shown, however, that the Jacksonians sponsored the tariff in order to court states like Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Kentucky, and Missouri that were crucial to Jackson. The South was appalled by the tariff but was securely in the Jackson camp anyway, with no intention of going for Adams. And so, with strong encouragement from the states it promised to bene?t, the mea sure passed over the complaints of those who labeled it the Tariff of Abominations.

In the end, the tariff back?red on Jackson and created the greatest crisis of his presidency. The South’s revulsion for the tariff found expression in Calhoun’s pamphlet Exposition and Protest, which laid the ground for the nulli?cation controversy of 1832, in which South Carolina’s rejection of the tariff almost led to its secession from the Union. But in the 1828 election, the tariff did its intended work, since the states it helped went overwhelmingly for Jackson.

As the election approached, mud ?ew in all directions, creating one of the nastiest races in American history. The Jacksonians repeated ad nauseam the charge that Adams was president as result of a corrupt bargain. They also painted him as a pampered aristocrat who ?lled the White House with leisure items such as a billiard table and a fancy chess set, purchased with public money. His wife, they charged, was born out of wedlock, and Adams had lived with her before marriage.

Their wildest accusation was that Adams had a history as a pimp. According to a story that circulated in the Jacksonian press, Adams, while serving as a minister to Russia, had turned his attractive nursemaid, Martha Godfrey, over to Czar Alexander, exchanging sexual favors for political ones.

In his diary, Adams fumed that this fabricated tale was “a new form of slander—one of the thousand malicious lies which outvenom all the worms of the Nile, and are circulated in every part of the country in newspapers and pamphlets.” He publicly corrected the story by explaining that the czar had met the maid brie?y with not the least suggestion of illicit intentions. But his opponents ignored the explanation just as they dismissed evidence that he had bought the billiard table with his own money or that he and Louisa were sexually irreproachable.

While Adams griped about “the numberless calumnies and forgeries now swarming in the newspapers against me,” his supporters hurled lots of mud too. They made much of the anomalies of Jackson’s marriage, claiming that when Jackson wed Rachel Donelson before making sure her ?rst husband had divorced her, the pair lived illicitly for two years before getting legally married. As one opponent asked, “Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest of?ces of this free and Christian land?” Another asked, “If General Jackson should be elected President, what effect, think you, fellow-citizens, will it have upon the American youth?” Nor did the sexual slurs stop with Jackson himself. His mother, it was reported, had been “a COMMON PROSTITUTE” who “afterwards married a MULATTO MAN, with whom she had several children, of which number General JACKSON IS ONE! ! !” In this imaginative tale, Jackson had an older brother who was sold as a slave in South Carolina.

Then there was Jackson’s violence, which his opponents portrayed as uncontrollable and brutish. His duels, canings, and street ?ghts marked him as a murderous thug, they said, and he had executed, without just cause, six militiamen during the Creek War and several other soldiers and Indians in different con?icts. The Philadelphia editor John Binns sensationalized Jackson’s alleged crimes by publishing a sheet known as the Coffin Handbill, which featured pictures of eighteen black coffins and stories illustrating “Some Account of some of the Bloody Deeds of General Jackson.” Meant to harm Jackson, this and similar handbills may have piqued additional interest in him. For an American public that would soon dive enthusiastically into sensational penny newspapers and P. T. Barnum’s freak shows, coffin handbills held a lurid fascination.

At any rate, being bombarded by ?lth did not much diminish Jackson’s popularity. Pro-Jackson rallies, parades, barbecues, and other festivities abounded. Towns and villages around the nation put hickory poles in public squares or along streets. Hickory canes, hickory sticks, hickory brooms were everywhere. Placards blazoned the words “Jackson and Reform.” The meaning of the words was not clear, given the General’s fuzziness on major issues. But Jackson had the genuine conviction that he was the people’s champion come to wage war on corruption and patronage.

For President Adams, the hoopla surrounding Jackson was a dreary spectacle. Completely averse to campaigning, Adams virtually conceded victory to Jackson as early as December 1827, long before the election. He told Clay that there was a “base and pro?igate combination” against him, and “General Jackson will therefore be elected.”

His words were prophetic. Jackson won the election by a comfortable margin. In the staggered balloting process of those days, different states held elections from September through November. In the electoral college, which met on December 3, Jackson gained an overwhelming victory. He won all the states to the west and south of New Jersey, except for Maryland and Delaware. In New York, where electoral votes were split, he beat Adams twenty to sixteen. As anticipated, New England went for Adams, though Jackson managed to squeeze one electoral vote out of Maine.

The popular vote was closer, with 642,553 going to Jackson and 500,897 to Adams. Since the general had only a small popular edge in the swing states of Ohio, Kentucky, and New York, even the electoral race was tighter than it appeared. Nationally, though, 56 percent of all those who voted chose Jackson, a margin unmatched in the nineteenth century.

Voter participation surged. More than twice as many eligible voters cast ballots than four years earlier. The increase was partly due to the fact that four states—New York, Vermont, Georgia, and Louisiana—had recently transferred the selection of presidential electors from the legislature to the people. But the swelling turnout also owed much to the unprecedented excitement of the campaign, particularly the magnetism of the man known as the Hero of New Orleans, or simply the Hero.

Jackson called his victory “the triumph of the virtue of the people over the corrupting in?uence of executive patronage.” But he had qualms about his forthcoming presidency. “Responsibility so great,” he wrote, “I cannot anticipate without disquietude or fear,” because of “my inadequacy to meet its numerous, and arduous requisitions.” The harshness of the campaign had left him feeling down. He confessed, “I am ?lled with gratitude, still my mind is depressed.”

Within a month of the certifcation of his victory, he suffered a tremendous blow: the death of his wife, Rachel. The deeply pious Rachel had always looked askance at her husband’s political activities. She wanted the White House for him, but not for herself. She prized the small chapel he had built for her on the grounds of the Hermitage more than she did the trappings of power. “I would rather be a door-keeper in the house of my God,” she said, “than to dwell in that palace in Washington.” She was disturbed that her husband was so wrapped up in politics that he didn’t make a public profession of faith (that would come after her death, when grief drove him to piety).

But she supported him—and, in private life, governed him. Having experienced chest pains for a year, she suffered her ?nal illness while preparing a massive victory celebration to be held for him at the Hermitage on December 23, 1828. Reportedly, she was shopping in Nashville when she went to relax in the parlor of an inn, where she overheard locals gossiping about reports of her having committed adultery and bigamy—the kind of reports her husband had tried to shield her from during the campaign. She was overcome with heart spasms. After several days of seizures, she died. The many notables who arrived at the Hermitage for a victory banquet attended a funeral instead.

Convinced that his wife had been killed by vicious rumormongers, Jackson had her buried near his home beneath a granite slab inscribed with an epitaph that included the line: “A being so gentle, and yet so virtuous, slander might wound, but could not dishonor.” The memory of Rachel obsessed him. Until his death, he wore a miniature of her. In his room, he kept a picture of her as a young woman, plumply beautiful with lustrous eyes, full lips, and dark ringlets accented by a lace cap that hung veil-like to her shoulders. He constantly read her Bible and prayer book, and he insisted on being driven around Washington in a carriage he had bought for her.

He found female companionship in Emily Donelson, the twenty-one-year-old wife of Rachel’s nephew, and Sarah Jackson, who was married to Rachel’s adopted son. The beautiful, headstrong Emily and her husband moved into the White House, where she served as hostess and gave birth to three of her four children before her death of tuberculosis in 1836. Sarah tended to the Hermitage, then took over as unofficial First Lady when Emily fell ill. Surrounded by relatives, Jackson had the semblance of a family atmosphere.

President Adams also confronted tragedy. In the months after losing the election, Adams retired to his home in Quincy, where he and Louisa struggled with melancholia and even more so with signs of mental disorder in their son George. Given to loose living, George had been a constant worry for his parents. He dabbled in Massachusetts politics, serving brie?y in the state legislature, but never showed the ambition or the discipline of his father or grandfather. He fought alcoholism and grew irritable.

His parents barraged him with advice and admonition, but to no avail. By the spring of 1829 his erratic behavior gave way to lunacy. In the early morning darkness of April 30, while on a steamboat between Providence and New York, George had hallucinations, wandered around the boat, and fell (or jumped) overboard. Several weeks later his body washed ashore. His parents were paralyzed with grief.

It is a testament to the resiliency of Jackson and Adams that both rebounded from these crushing blows. Although Jackson never regained his former happiness after losing Rachel, he not only persevered but proved himself over two terms to be one of the most forceful and influential presidents in American history. Although Adams’s depressive tendencies worsened after his son’s apparent suicide, he gained unexpected prominence as a congressman who stood ?rm against the Southern slave power.

Jackson had taken the presidency from Adams, but Adams had not wholly lost. Time would prove that “John Quincy Adams / Who can write” could also ?ght. And “Andrew Jackson / Who can ?ght” could use words as dexterously as he had once used pistols.

Excerpted from Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, by David S. Reynolds. Reprinted by arrangement with Harper, an Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Copyright © September, 2008.

—David S. Reynolds is Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include John Brown, Abolitionist, Walt Whitman’s America, and Beneath the American Renaissance.