Chapter 1:
The Democratic Revolution

GENERAL JACKSON’S friends had reason to be satisfied. The effect they had wrought was indeed dramatic, revolutionary. They had cut a line of cleavage between epoch and epoch in the history of the country. They had broken, once for all, the "Virginian dynasty," "the succession of Secretaries," the leadership of trained and trusted men; had set aside every tradition of national politics; and had begun the administration of the executive office of the Union afresh upon their own plan. They had not, indeed, won secure control of either house of Congress. Parties were not fixed enough as yet for that. There were not a few "Democrats" who still retained a covert liking for the liberal construction their opponents put upon the constitution, and who upon occasion wavered in their votes, or incontinently went over to the ranks of the "National Republicans," whom Mr. Clay led. In the Senate there could be found, upon most questions, a majority against the new President. But the whole atmosphere of affairs, the whole tone of the government changed, nevertheless, with the coming in of General Jackson. The new nation, its quality subtly altered, its point of view insensibly shifted by the movement into the West, had smiled with some degree of patient complacency upon Mr. Monroe, and had endured John Quincy Adams, but now for the first time chose after its own kind and preferred General Jackson. It was a second democratization of the government. And yet it differed radically from the first, which Mr. Jefferson had so shrewdly contrived. There was no kinship either in spirit or in method between Mr. Jefferson and this new hero of democracy. Mr. Jefferson had, indeed, expressed the greatest alarm "at the prospect of seeing General Jackson President." "He is," he said, "one of the most unfit men I know of for the place. He has had very little respect for laws or constitutions, and is, in fact, an able military chief. His passions are terrible. He has been much tried since I knew him, but he is a dangerous man." And had Mr. Jefferson lived to witness the result, he would hardly have altered his judgment. He had stood, for all he was so full of democratic doctrine, for conservative ways of political growth. General Jackson stood, it turned out, for personal government, party proscriptions, and the self-willed choices of personal power.

General Jackson professed to be of the school of Mr. Jefferson himself; and what he professed he believed. There was no touch of the charlatan or the demagogue about him. The action of his mind was as direct, as sincere, as unsophisticated as the action of the mind of an ingenuous child, though it exhibited also the sustained intensity and the range of the mature man. The difference between Mr. Jefferson and General Jackson was not a difference of moral quality so much as a difference in social stock and breeding. Mr. Jefferson, an aristocrat and yet a philosophical radical, deliberately practised the arts of the politician and exhibited oftentimes the sort of insincerity which subtle natures yield to without loss of essential integrity. General Jackson was incapable of arts or deceptions of any kind. He was in fact what his partisans loved to call him, a man of the people, of the common people. Mr. Jefferson was only a patron of the people: appealed to the rank and file, believed in them, but shared neither their tastes nor their passions. Moreover, the effective rank and file of the nation had changed since his day of ascendency. Step by step, one State following another, the old restrictions upon the suffrage, taken for granted in Jefferson’s time, had been removed, until in almost every part of the Union the men of the masses had be come the stuff of politics. These men Jackson really represented, albeit with a touch of the knight and chivalrous man of honor about him which common men do not have; and the people knew it; felt that an aristocratic order was upset, and that they themselves had at last come to their own.

It must have seemed so in very fact at their President’s inauguration. Washington filled with crowds come out of every quarter of the Union. All ceremony was overridden, all decorum cast aside. It seemed as if the place were in the possession of a good-natured mob, bent upon no serious mischief, but not to be restrained, not to be forbidden even the drawing rooms of the White House or the committee rooms and chambers of the Capitol. There was scarcely room enough in the streets for the passage of the procession which accompanied General Jackson to the place of inauguration. So great a crowd rushed, unbidden, into the White House, when General Jackson came to it from the Capitol, that he was himself forced against the wall of the reception chamber by its pressure, and was secured against serious danger only by a number of gentlemen linking arms and forming themselves into a barrier. Everywhere it was proclaimed that the people had come into possession of the government; that the domination of professional statesmen and politicians had been thrown off: that the rank and file were the victors, and that to the victors belonged "the spoils of the enemy."

That was unquestionably General Jackson’s creed. Men who understood him could play upon him. He had allowed ill-informed men who believed it, and designing men who pretended to believe it, to persuade him that the government had not only been monopolized but also corrupted by the politicians and statesmen who had hitherto controlled it; and he meant to purify it very radically. Among his advisers were men, like Mr. Martin Van Buren, of New York, who were past-masters in the art of party organization, and whose methods he willingly adopted for the establislment of the national power of his followers. They were methods which he could readily understand, and which seemed almost to fall within his own experience. He was a frontier soldier. Staunch comradeships, personal devotion, the close, unhesitating cohesion of friends, the intimate cooperation of men who knew and trusted one another by reason of joint efforts in a common affair, seemed to him the natural and proper basis for the discipline of a party no less than for the discipline and success of a frontier levy of volunteers. He knew and cared nothing for the orderly promotions of a regular service.

The suffrage had been thrown open in New York, as elsewhere, and Mr. Van Buren had become one of a small group of astute men there who had supplied the new voters, crowding without concert to the polls, with the organization they could not contrive for themselves. These "Albany regents," as their opponents dubbed them, had effected their propaganda and their nominations, through local caucuses, and through conventions composed of delegates whom the caucuses selected. The lieutenants whom they used to assist them in organizing the caucuses, superintending the selection and the business of the conventions, and looking after every local detail of party action, they rewarded when they could with offices and nominations for themselves. It was this association of men who stood by one another and served one another as personal allies and friends that won the admiration of General Jackson. "I am no politician," he said; "but if I were one, I would be a New York politician." Pennsylvanian politics were of the same sort: the politics of intimate personal association. There, too, democracy on the great scale had submitted to the same organization, the same leadership of consummate, watchful managers. It was the new organization of democracy. General Jackson both understood and relished it. He saw nothing immoral in the promise that when he came into office he would reward his friends and punish his enemies. That, on the contrary, was a fundamental first principle of morals on the frontier. He firmly believed his friends to be the friends also of the government,—of the government as it had been and ought to be; his enemies, enemies of the government as well. The earnestness and sincerity with which he believed it, the frankness with which he avowed the belief, were interesting proofs of his conscious integrity. With all the intensity of his nature he wished for the welfare of the country, the advancement of the Union, the success and permanency of its government; with all the terrible force of his will he purposed to secure both the one and the other. No doubt he had shown contempt for law, as Mr. Jefferson said, when he was upon the frontier, hampered by treaties and instructions; but his ideals were not those of the law-breaker. They were those of the ardent patriot. The peril of the country lay in the fact that he chose to disregard precedent and to interpret all laws for himself,—the law of the constitution no less than the law of the statute book.

And so there was almost a clean sweep of the federal offices to make room for General Jackson’s friends, and secure proper persons to execute General Jackson’s purposes. That the men dismissed had been long in office he deemed an additional argument for their discharge rather than an argument for their retention. Long terms of service he thought undemocratic. They slackened diligence, he believed, and made office-holders too carelessly secure. No doubt they fostered corruption, too. He did not himself conduct the proscription; he let those whom he trusted conduct it in his name. By the time the first Congress of his term assembled (December 7, 1829) it was estimated that fully a thousand federal officials had been removed, as against seventy-three at the most in all the previous history of the government. The Senate tried to stay the tide where it could, in its action on the nominations sent to it; but found the President imperious, irresistible, not to be gainsaid, and public opinion out-of-doors astonishingly ready to support and applaud him at every turn of the contest. "We give no reasons for our removals," said Mr. Van Buren; and apparently the mass of the voters wanted none. They were content to know that General Jackson was changing the government from top to bottom. Men without parts or reputation of course got into office, in the general scramble. There could be little choice or deliberation in that wholesale process. The men appointed were for the most part men who had put themselves forward. There were very few men of any experience at all in federal administration, and many adventurers, to be found in the ranks of the new party. "Very few reputable appointments have been made," Mr. Adams, the ruthless General’s predecessor in office, set down in his journal, "and those confined to persons who were indispensably necessary to the office." "The appointments are exclusively of violent partisans, and every editor of a scurrilous and slanderous newspaper is provided for."

It was only fair to remember that the new party drew of necessity upon its ranks, whether for ordinary officials or for leaders. If the minor office holders were new men, so were their chiefs also, who stood close about the President himself. The cabinet which General Jackson chose seemed conventional enough, indeed, for a party so recently made up. Mr. Van Buren had left the office of Governor of New York to become Secretary of State. He had been merely a local politician, no doubt, though he had served a term in the Senate, and had come but the other day into national prominence; but he was at least as well known as many another cabinet officer before him. The other heads of Departments, though even less generally known to the nation than he was, had played a public part in affairs, in Congress and out of it, and had been chosen for reasons familiar enough in politics. Major John H. Eaton, of Tennessee, was selected to be Secretary of War, because he was a trusted personal friend of the President’s; the Secretaries of the Treasury and of the Navy and the Attorney General owed their places to the fact that they were the friends of Mr. Calhoun, the Vice President, who stood at the front of the President’s party in the South. The Postmaster General had been a candidate for the governorship of Kentucky in the Jackson interest, and had been defeated by a nominee of the friends of Mr. Clay.

What was really singular and significant was, that these gentlemen did not, under General Jackson, form a real cabinet at all. The country presently learned that the President did not hold cabinet meetings: that he took counsel, when he felt in need of it, with private friends, some of whom had no recognized post or standing in the government at all. Chief among these were one William B. Lewis, of Tennessee, a kinsman and neighbor of General Jackson’s, and one Amos Kendall, a Massachusetts man now identified with Kentucky. It was Major Lewis who, more than any other man, had first forced him into candidacy for the presidency, who had set the stage for him at every turn of his political career, who had set afoot, superintended, fomented, and with an infinite art and diligence brought successfully to a head the many influences, public and private, which were to bring him finally into office and to the leadership of his party. General Jackson consulted and used him without in the least realizing that he had in him a consummate master of the arts whereby opinion is made and individual men are set forward in their ambition. He had made Major Lewis Second Auditor of the Treasury; but Lewis was not a man who played for himself. He played for Jackson, and loved every subtle turn of the game: used his gifts of management like one who played for his own hand, and yet remained a man of honor and served his friend more than he served himself. Amos Kendall was a master of the art political, not in action, but upon paper. He had gifts as a writer which could be turned to account in the composition of the most serious state papers. He caught the impressive tone of public business and mastered its calm way of reasoning as readily as he caught the tones of partisan controversy and spent his force in its bitter energy. He could frame a significant innuendo or prepare an editorial for the party press that bit as deep as anything that Tom. Paine or William Cobbett could have written. He seemed a statesman or a mere partisan by turns; it was difficult to tell which he was either by nature or by choice. He was perhaps each in turn; but nothing out of the closet.

There were others of the "Kitchen Cabinet" besides: the editors of Jacksonian newspapers; but the heart of it lay in Major Lewis and Mr. Kendall. Mr. Van Buren and Major Eaton, of Tennessee, the Secretary of War, were freely admitted into this inner circle; but not as members of the cabinet, only as personal friends and confidants of the President. And so a veritable personal government was set up, so far as the Executive and the discipline of the Executive’s friends in Congress were concerned; and allegiance to General Jackson became the test of fidelity for every Democrat who wished to be admitted to the party’s counsels. The President’s mere audacity won many men to him, for the masses of the country loved bold individual initiative. His rugged honesty, his sincerity, his own power of devotion, his frank friendliness, his confiding faith in his friends won more. Towards women he showed the gracious, deferential courtesy of the man who would be every woman’s knight and champion. Foreign ministers who had expected to find in him the rough frontiersman were amazed at his natural dignity and ease, the air almost of elegance and of majesty that hung about him because of his quiet self-respect, his grave and unaffected courtesy, and the striking sadness and reserve of his deep-set eyes. No President since Washington had so taken hold upon the imagination, and every month he remained in office his ascendency became the more assured.

It made a startling difference to the country. It broke the course of all settled policy, forced every question to square itself with the President’s standards, altered the elements of parties. The country got its first taste of the effect to be wrought upon policy in connection with the troublesome question of the removal of the Indians from Georgia and Alabama to lands beyond the Mississippi. Georgia had got rid of the Creek Indians while Mr. Adams was President. Both Creeks and Cherokees held their Georgia lands under treaties with the United States such as the constitution explicitly authorized the President to negotiate; the Creeks had relied upon the treaties and steadfastly refused to sell their lands or suffer themselves to be driven out of the State; and Mr. Adams had sought by every means in his power to protect them. But Congress had supported him very lukewarmly, and Georgia had succeeded at last in exhorting from the unwilling chiefs of the tribe terms which put their people forth into the West, where Congress was ready to provide for them. The Cherokees were not to be so cajoled or dealt with. They mustered thirteen thousand strong; had settled to the occupations and learned the arts of peace; boasted a system of self-government and of orderly obedience to their own laws which seemed to promise, not extinction or decay or any decline of their power, but a great development and an assured permanency; and would not entertain any proposition whatever which involved the sale or relinquishment of the rich lands they occupied. General Jackson, however, unlike his predecessor, thought the State ought to be rid of them. Georgia and Alabama, therefore, relying on his countenance, extended their laws over the Indian country in despite of treaties; the President, when Georgia requested him to do so, withdrew the federal troops stationed there; and the Indians were obliged to yield. "I informed the Indians inhabiting parts of Georgia and Alabama," the President told Congress in his first message, "that their attempt to establish an independent government would not be countenanced by the Executive of the United States, and advised them to migrate beyond the Mississippi or to submit to the laws of those States." Life on the frontier had left him no patience to consider the rights of red men.

Their rights were duly tested in the courts. Three several times was the matter taken, on appeal, to the Supreme Court of the United States, and each time the court decided the question submitted to it in favor of the Indians, upholding the treaties and denying the right of any State, or any authority whatever, to violate or ignore them. But General Jackson would not enforce its decisions. His attitude towards the Indians was frankly that of the frontier soldier. They had no right, in his eyes, to stand in the way of the white man. By the time the last of the decisions of the Supreme Court was rendered in the matter (1832) another presidential election was at hand and he was a candidate for re-election. He said that he would leave the question to the people,—such was his constitutional theory of right! The constitution did indeed give the federal Executive the authority to negotiate treaties with the Indian tribes, and Congress the right to regulate commerce with them, as if they were to be treated in all respects like independent bodies politic, in no way subject to the jurisdiction of the separate States. But the constitution also explicitly commanded that no new State should be "formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other State" without the express consent of the legislature of that State and of Congress; and the Cherokees were obviously in a fair way to create a virtually independent commonwealth within the State of Georgia should they remain. It was a nice point of law, which General Jackson should have recognized the right of the Supreme Court to decide. But with him his own judgment was more conclusive, and a vote of the people the solution of all doubts.

It was significant how quick the new democracy he stood for was to take fire against the courts and turn, by way of ultimate appeal, to the people in all things. In Mr. Jefferson’s day also the courts had seemed the strongholds of Federalism, and the leaders of Congress had wished to see their judges removed at pleasure upon the address of the houses. Now they seemed again the barriers, the only barriers, set up against the people’s will. Many an observant eye had remarked how dramatic a thing it was that General Jackson, like Mr. Jefferson, should take the oath of office from John Marshall, the steadfast champion of Federalist doctrine and of the reign of law under a constitution which was itself the supreme law of the land. When Mr. Jefferson took office John Marshall had but just come to his power, a man in his prime, the incoming President’s junior by a dozen years. Now he was the new President’s senior by as many years, though General Jackson, for all his erect and slender height, was a gray veteran of sixty-two. The aged Chief Justice was as straight at seventy-four as the soldier to whom he administered the oath of office, and bore his years as well; but General Jackson stood, his years notwithstanding, for a new age coming in, the aged judge for an old order passing away. The fire that shone in the eyes of the old soldier burned hot against the authority that sat upon the quiet brow of the aged lawyer.

In the very inaugural address which he uttered that day of his coming into office the grizzled President threw out his challenge to the court, and made bold to give it upon a matter of graver moment for the whole country than the rights of Indian tribes even and the sacredness of the treaties which gave them a standing in the court. He doubted, he gave the country to understand, whether Congress had acted within its constitutional powers in creating the Bank of the United States. That had once, as everybody understood, been a debatable question; but the Supreme Court had given judgment upon it in the celebrated case of McCullock vs. Maryland (1819), in which it had explicitly affirmed the right, as drawn by just inference from the undoubted powers of Congress; and since then it had been deemed a question settled once for all. But General Jackson regarded no question as settled which altered circumstances could reopen. The twenty-year charter of the Bank was not to run out, indeed, until 1836, a year which lay beyond his term; but a reconsideration of it was to come. Apparently he had no intention of going now beyond a mere preliminary expression of opinion in the matter. He simply put this forth as a companion thought to his declaration of the conviction that the surplus revenue of the federal government ought to be distributed among the States, not spent for objects, like internal improvements, which the constitution, in his opinion, gave Congress no authority to undertake or pay for. He was merely setting forth at the outset of his time of power, after his usual blunt, uncompromising fashion, what he conceived to be the true democratic creed in matters of national finance. Other more pressing matters called for first attention, and for action.

These initial declarations of opinion and intimations of policy on the part of the President were eminently satisfactory to the men of the South and West whose candidate he had been. Here were the views of strict construction for which they had looked. In his very first message he solemnly warned Congress "against all encroachments upon the legitimate sphere of state sovereignty"; and conservative men, whose thought had been formed by Mr. Jefferson, drew about him with almost as much confidence as was shown by those who had the adventurous and aggressive spirit of the new age at their hearts and desired change.

But when the President was put to the test by the Carolinians for whom Mr. Calhoun had formulated the extreme doctrine of state rights, they suddenly saw him in another light. They then saw, what they might have seen at first, that he was of the West, not of the South. He stood, as all other western men did, for the principle that every community must have its own life in the free partnership it had formed, and its own unhindered, unbidden development, unchecked by the national government: for he believed that to be the end and object of the Union, to make the States secure of their individual development and set them forward in their own ways. But there was an infection of national feeling, too, upon the stirring frontier where he had been bred which no man could escape; a sense as of a people’s life a-making upon a continental scale; an ardor for broad schemes and vast achievement, in bands united and backed by the nation’s power. "The legitimate sphere of state sovereignty" did not, when projected there upon the prairies, encroach upon the equally legitimate sphere of the federal power. The two were inseparable parts of a single conception. No frontiersman reasoned subtly upon them: instinct and the spirit of conquest resolved all doubts and discountenanced all refinements. Argument was excluded. In any case General Jackson, as President, would have excluded it. To challenge the authority of the federal government now was to challenge his own authority; and there need have been no doubt what he would do in that event.

The issue that was to be joined and settled was first drawn to the light, with painful vividness, by a debate in the Senate on the disposition of the western lands. The New England men wanted the settlement of the West held back as much as possible. So long as land was to be had there almost for the mere asking, at no cost except that of the journey and of a few farmer’s tools and a beast or two for the plough, the active men of their own section, whom they counted on as skilled workmen in building up their manufactures, must be constantly enticed away by the score and hundred, to seek an independent life and livelihood in the West; high wages, very high wages, must be paid to keep them, if indeed they could be kept at all; and the maintenance of manufactures must cost more than even protective tariffs could make good. Here was an issue between East and West. The tariff itself was an issue between North and South, and drew after it, when read into the question of the western lands, no less a matter than the extension of slavery and the domination of sections in the politics of the country. Heavy tariffs, which fostered manufactures in the States where there were no slaves, insured growth of wealth and population in the East and North, but left the South to stand still and gain nothing. If her people could not go into the West and build up slave states there to make good the altering balance of power in the Union, they must look to see all things go steadily against them.

All these critical matters crept inevitably, as it seemed, into the debate on the western lands; and the country was aroused by it almost as it had been aroused ten years before by the debates on the admission of Missouri. It turned upon a resolution to limit the sales of the western lands which Mr. Foot, of Connecticut, introduced in the Senate late in December, 1829. Ordinary men could not have raised it to such a climax of interest; but the men engaged were not ordinary men. It was not Mr. Benton’s hot protest that the men of New England should be always jealous of the growth and prosperity of the West that caught the ear of the country; it was the speeches of Mr. Hayne, of South Carolina, and Mr. Webster, of Massachusetts. The debate, as they handled it, swung abroad over the whole ground of the many closely related topics which lay upon the borders of the immediate question it concerned. Mr. Hayne was of the extreme school of South Carolina, and took occasion to expound at length the doctrine of nullification which his colleagues in that school had so lately perfected. It was out of the question, he said, that a State, when wronged by an exercise of federal power, should leave the decision of the matter of right entirely to the Supreme Court of the United States, part and organ of the very government whose power was challenged. The constitution was a compact, he maintained, the Union a free partnership; States must stand ever upon the ground of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and effect their own protection against deliberate and palpable excesses of power. Mr. Webster as fearlessly took the extreme ground of the opposite view. It was this splendid audacity on either side that quickened the pulses of all who listened, this hardy, intrepid pushing of the issue to its last analysis,—and that issue nothing less than the nation’s destiny.

The debaters were already marked men. The Senator from South Carolina, though not yet forty, had won his laurels as a lad in the war of 1812, had been elected to the legislature of his State at twenty-three and made Speaker of its House at twenty-five; made his way as much by personal charm as by eloquence and a gift for business, had a grace and ardor in his speech which won all men’s attention and liking, wore always the air of a man of honor and high spirit, and used his singular powers of persuasion with a fine force of conviction. Daniel Webster, his opponent, had first come into Congress from New Hampshire, as the war with England was drawing to a close (1813), and then, upon a change of residence, had been sent first to the House (1823), finally to the Senate (1827), from Massachusetts, and was now at forty-eight one of the most noticeable figures of the country, an orator and constitutional lawyer whose mastery every man acknowledged. Twice he had taken his stand, with a force of argument it would have been difficult to enhance, against protective tariffs; but, seeing his constituents deliberately and persistently stake their whole economic fortune as a community upon them, he at last had yielded, and was now the accepted champion of New England against the violent onset of the South. He replied to Mr. Hayne that the constitution was no compact, the Union no mere dissoluble partnership, but a government, sovereign though not consolidated, a banded State which nothing but revolution could dissolve, its laws to be set aside or resisted only by acts of treason.

No such charm hung about the person of Mr. Webster as that which made Mr. Hayne so excellent an image of the courtly gentleman and the persuasive orator. Alike in person and in utterance, Mr. Webster was compact, not of grace, but of force. Mr. Hayne’s sentences rode high, upon rhetoric that sought often an adventurous flight; Mr. Webster used words as if he meant only to clarify and strengthen the thoughts he touched and cared nothing for cadence or ornament. And yet he spread them in ranks so fair that they caught and held the eye like a pageant. Beauty came upon them as they moved as if out of the mere passion of the thought rather than by the design of the orator. And he himself gave to the eye, as he stood, in his own person the same image of clean-cut strength, beautiful only by reason of its perfect action, so square was he, massive, and indomitable, and with a head and face whose mass, whose calm breadth above the deep-set, slumbrous eyes, seemed the fittest possible throne for the powers he displayed. There was imagination wrought into all that he said, but not the imagination of the rhetorician. Mr. Hayne’s speech seemed to those who heard it worthy of the great reply it had called forth; but the country did not read it as it read what Mr. Webster had said. That was everywhere printed and read; and as the slow mails carried it forth it was as if the national spirit had suddenly been cried wide awake by its thrilling sentences. It was not the mere reasoner who won this triumph: reason was here touched with fire. The imagination of every man who could see the vision of a people united, indivisible, bound in sacred concord, was taken captive by these sonorous periods; the conviction of every man who saw the task and destiny of the nation as a whole was confirmed and heartened and made glad. There was magic in the printed words, as there was magic in the thrilling voice and the magnificent presence of the man himself, in his massive stature and Olympian head, and in his eyes, burning dark with steady fire within their deep covert.

There was no such magic in Mr. Hayne’s speech: only the force of argument and of an able, clear-thinking man in earnest. Mr. Webster had taken new ground. The men of the first generation of federal statesmen had not spoken thus of the constitution, at whose conception and establishment they had been present. They had admitted that it was an experiment, though they had hastened at once to push it, if they could, beyond its experimental stage. No man had attributed treason to the authors of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, whose language Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Hayne now revived. Every man who felt the power and the hope that were in the spirit of nationality as the men of the West did, as the constructive statesmen did who had stood with Washington and Hamilton in their generation, and with the young war enthusiasts who cried bravo to Mr. Madison in the war with England in theirs, protested very hotly when New England men talked of disunion, first because of the purchase of Louisiana, and then because of the embargo. But they protested, not as against rebellion; they protested as against mad folly, rather, and narrow selfishness: as against those who would mar a great history to push a sectional interest. Not until a whole generation had gone by from the making of the government did this new doctrine of nationality which Mr. Webster so elequently and convincingly preached get its currency: this doctrine of a national existence based, not upon sentiment and agreement, but upon an imperative fundamental law.

Here again, as in the broadening of the suffrage and the coming in of the day of pure democracy which had brought General Jackson to the saddle with its dawn. The subtle force of national expansion moved and brooded upon the face of all things. The vast spread and movements of a people, the growth and interlacings of industry, the springing up of States come from the loins of the Union itself, all the visible increase of peaceful empire bred this spirit as of a nation—no longer merely confederated, a nation knit and united for a common history of achievement. General Jackson, coming from the frontier, where this mighty force of nationality was visibly afoot, seemed to embody the new spirit of power in his rough, imperious sense of a right, as President, to override and command. Mr. Webster, though no friend of Jackson’s, clothed what was In effect the same conception in terms of statesmanship and law. Under his touch the constitution seemed to partake of the growth which it had only engendered. It was of necessity, as he read it, no mere document, but a vehicle of life. Its sanctions could be made to cover every change that added to the unity or the greatness of the nation. Its quiet phrases could always be heard to speak the spirit of the times.

But what of those parts of the nation which had kept to the old models of federal life, which did not change, and would accept no law but that which read as it had always read since they were nurtured? The South had had little part or lot in the transformations of the new age. Her life was unaltered from of old. She lived and thought as she had always lived and thought. The Union was still the same to her that it had been to all the States alike in that first generation whose life and thought she kept. There had been no amendment of the fundamental law. Could the law change because men’s thoughts had changed and their interests? No doubt, in her reaction against what she saw afoot, she stiffened the old doctrines and exaggerated them. Mr. Madison, who had drafted the Virginia Resolutions of ’98, rejected very warmly the nullification doctrines of Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Hayne, not a little stirred and agitated in his quiet retirement at Montpellier by this new threat of disunion. Any doctrine would have worn a look of heightened rigor stated in Mr. Calhoun’s clear, uncompromising way, and probably no man of the elder generation, had he been willing to formulate it at all, would have stated it so absolutely. The exigency and the sudden passion of opposition had given it this sharp and novel phrase. Mr. Webster, with characteristic genius, had met it with its opposite, as sharp and uncompromising, the ideal for which the men of the constitutional convention had prayed and which since their day had sprung into life while no man observed.

The times seemed to bring all things to an issue. No doctrine which touched practice so nearly could very long remain a thing of theory while General Jackson was on the field of action, and the advocates of nullification were of no mind to stop with the debate on the western lands. On April 13, 1830, the leading Democrats at Washington celebrated Mr. Jefferson’s birthday by a formal banquet, to which the President was bidden. They took their cue from Mr. Calhoun and the southerners, and the toasts they gave smacked shrewdly of nullification. When the President saw their drift he got to his feet and bluntly proposed this sentiment as his own: "Our federal Union: it must be preserved." "Liberty, dearer than the Union," cried the Vice President, in retort; but retort only hardened the President’s temper; and Mr. Calhoun presently proved the least likely person in the country to be able to soften it. The very month that followed that memorable banquet General Jackson learned for the first time that Mr. Calhoun, who had been Secretary of War during his campaign against the Seminoles in 1818, had emphatically condemned his unauthorized capture of Pensacola as a wanton act of war against Spain, and had demanded an official investigation of it, with a view to its repudiation. Hitherto he had deemed Mr. Calhoun his friend; now he deemed him basely deceitful for having played his friend after such conduct in cabinet against him. He could not separate official action in such a matter from personal enmity; and no explanation that Mr. Calhoun could make did more than increase his bitter anger. He turned from all who followed or consorted with the South Carolinian.

Before another year was out he had reconstructed his cabinet, to purge it of Mr. Calhoun’s friends, to constitute it of men really in his confidence; partly also to discipline those members of the first cabinet who had failed to satisfy him in a social quarrel. The ladies of the cabinet circle refused recognition to Mrs. Eaton, the wife of the Secretary of War, deeming her reputation not unimpeachable. General Jackson believed her innocent of their charges, was ready, indeed, to believe any woman innocent, as his own wife had been, against whom cruel things had been said unjustly; and was glad to show his resentment against Mrs. Eaton’s enemies by putting the men forth from his counsels whose wives had slighted her against his wishes.

The breach between the President and Mr. Calhoun was a serious sign of the times. It not only embittered the President, it also cut all party ties for Mr. Calhoun, and set him free to work out as he pleased the opposition of his State to the burdensome tariff of 1828. It also made Mr. Calhoun’s theories of nullification seem all the blacker, all the more like treason, to the unforgiving old soldier, sure always of being and of having been in the right. It freed Mr. Calhoun and his friends from entangling alliances. They moved the straighter towards their goal, the vindication of the rights of the "staple States" against the policy of federal tariffs. The hopes of 1828 had been dissipated and the clash of sectional parties was at hand. In 1832 Congress, willing to divert the rising storm by moderate concessions, passed a new tariff Act, substituting for the "abominations" of 1828 a schedule of duties substantially the same as those of 1824. But the new measure, like the old, yielded nothing of the principle of protection, and the South Carolinian leaders were in a humor now to contest the principle itself and have done with it.

The year 1832 brought the season in which choice was once more to be made of a President, and other matters waited a little until the choice should be certainly known. A novel variety was lent to the field of contest by the entrance of a new party. In 1826 one William Morgan, of northwestern New York, had advertised a book which should make known the secrets of Freemasonry, and had been kidnapped and was never seen again. Popular indignation had fixed upon the society of Freemasons itself as responsible for the crime, and an anti-Masonic party had sprung up whose object it was to keep Freemasons out of places of public trust. It had spread with surprising stir and persistency from State to State, and in September, 1831, it summoned a national convention of its partisans to display its strength and name candidates of its own for the presidency and vice presidency. The regular parties followed its cue. They also chose delegates out of the several States to meet in nominating conventions and put their candidates in the field by formal vote. The National Republicans nominated Mr. Clay, now leader of the Senate and unquestioned leader of the party. The Democrats nominated General Jackson, as of course, for a second term, and with him, for Vice President, not Mr. Calhoun, but his own chosen lieutenant, Mr. Martin Van Buren. The vote of the electors was decisive, as before. But six States voted for Mr. Clay (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky); seventeen voted for General Jackson. Vermont gave her votes to the candidates of the Anti-Masons. The electors of South Carolina, chosen as always by the legislature, held punctiliously off from all parties and voted for candidates of their own.

The election over, General Jackson once more chosen, her party ties broken, her principles of opposition still unsanctioned and untested, South Carolina proceeded with her radical programme of redress. On the 24th of November (1832) a state convention, summoned for the purpose and formed upon the model of a constitutional convention, adopted and promulgated a formal Ordinance of Nullification, which declared the tariff Acts of 1828 and 1832 null and void and without force of law within the jurisdiction of South Carolina, and gave solemn warning to the rest of the country that any attempt on the part of the federal government to enforce the nullified laws within her limits would sever South Carolina’s connection with the Union and force her to organize a separate government. The legislature of the State immediately took steps looking towards a resumption of some of the powers before formally surrendered to the Union, and provided for putting the State in readiness to resist coercion by force of arms. Mr. Hayne was recalled from Washington to become governor of the State; and Mr. Calhoun resigned the vice presidency to take his place upon the floor of the Senate, that he might, there contest every inch of the ground in debate.

The President acted as every one who really knew him knew that he would act. Opposition itself would in any case have been sufficient incitement to action; but now the tonic of the election was in his veins. The natural, straightforward, unhesitating vigor of the man dictated what should be done. "Please give my compliments to my friends in your State," said the imperious old soldier to a member of the House from South Carolina who asked his commands, "and say to then, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach." No one doubted that he meant what he said. Before South Carolina’s convention met he had instructed the collector of the port of Charleston to collect the duties, resistance or no resistance; and when the Ordinance of Nullification reached him he replied to it with a proclamation whose downright terms no man could misread. For a little space he argued; but only for a little. For the most part he commanded. "The laws of the United States," he said, "must be executed. I have no discretionary power on the subject,—my duty is emphatically pronounced in the constitution. Those who told you that you might peacefully prevent their execution deceived you…. Their object is disunion, and disunion by armed force is treason." It was the doctrine of Webster in the mouth of a soldier. Congress voted the President full power to deal with the crisis as circumstances should demand.

Even then South Carolina did not flinch or draw back; but men who loved peace pressed forward on both sides to effect a compromise. Mr. Clay planned and urged measures of accommodation with all the skill and ardor and persuasiveness which made him so great a master of men, and the tariff which was a thorn in South Carolina’s side, though not in principle abandoned, was radically modified. A schedule of progressive annual reductions was agreed upon (March, 1833) which should by July, 1842, bring practically all duties to the uniform rate of twenty percent. The Ordinance of Nullification was first suspended, then repealed; and the conflict between the States and the Union was for a little while put off.

The principal general authorities for the interesting events covered by this chapter are the second volume of Schouler, the first and second volumes of Von Hoist, the fourth volume of Tucker, the fourth volume of Bryant and Gay; A. W. Young’s The American Statesman; R. McK. Ormsby’s History of the Whig Party; Edward Stanwood’s History of the Presidency; Alexander Johnston’s History of America n Politics; James Parton’s Life of Andrew Jackson; William G. Sumner’s Andrew Jackson in the American Statesmen Series; Edward M. Shepard’s Martin Van Buren, in the same series; Carl Schurz’s Henry Clay, in the same series; Calvin Colton’s Life and Times of Henry Clay; George Ticknor Curtis’s Life of Daniel Webster and Life of James Buchanan; John T. Morse’s John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln in the American Statesmen Series; and Anson D. Morse’s Political Influence of Andrew Jackson in the first volume of The Political Science Quarterly. With these are to be placed, as general authorities for this, that, or the other special phase or aspect of the time and its affairs, Jabez D. Hammond’s History of Political Parties in the State of New York; Arthur Holmes’s Parties and their Principles; Byrdsall’s History of the Loco Foco, or Equal Rights, Party; John McGregor’s Progress of America; F. W. Taussig’s History of the Tariff; Henry A. Wise’s Seven Decades of the Union; Alexander H. Stephens’s Constitutional View of the War Between the States; the admirable articles on the several topics of American history during these years by Alexander Johnston in Lalor’s Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and United States History; D. F. Houston’s Critical Study of nullification in South Carolina (the third volume of the Harvard Historical Studies); Frederick Law Olmsted’s Cotton Kingdom; the second volume of W. W. Story’s Life of Joseph Story; Henry C. Lodge’s Daniel Webster, H. Von Hoist’s John C. Calhoun, Theodore Roosevelt’s Thottias H. Benton, and A. .C. McLaughlin’s Lewis Cass in the American Statesmen Series; James Bryce’s Predictions of Hamilton and De Tocqueville in the fifth volume of the Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science; Lucy M. Salmon’s History of the Appointing Power; and E. C. Mason’s Veto Power (first volume of the Harvard Historical Studies).

The chief sources are the Register of Debates and Congressional Documents; The Congressional Globe, which begins with these years; Thomas H. Benton’s Abridgment of the Debates of Congress; The Statesman’s Manual, vol. II. ; viles’s Register, volumes XXXV.-XLIV.; the Tenth Census, Population; the first volume of Alexander Johnston’s Representative American Orations; F. W. Taussig’s State Papers and Speeches on the Tariff; the American State Papers; Josiah Quincy’s Figures of the Past; George Tucker’s Progress of the United States in Fifty Years; John Trumbull’s Autobiography; Amos Kendall’s Autobiography; Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America; S. G. Goodrich’s Recollections of a Lifetime; Hugh McCulloch’s Men and Measures of Half a Century; Nathan Sargent’s Public Men and Events; John Quincy Adams’s Memoirs; J. A. Hamilton’s Reminiscences; Men and Events at Home and Abroad; Thomas H. Benton’s Thirty Years’ View; Ben. Perley Poore’s Perley’s Reminiscences; Mrs. Chapman Coleman’s Life of John J. Crittenden; Basil Hall’s Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and 1828; John Finch’s Travels in the United States and Canada (1833); Mrs. Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans; Michael Chevalier’s Society, Manners, and Politics in the United States (1834-1835); Harriet Martineau’s Society in America (1834-1836); Seba Smith’s Letters of Major Jack Downing (satirical); Martin Van Buren’s Inquiry into the Origin and Growth of Political Parties in the United States; General Court of Massachusetts, State Papers on Nullification; the Letters, Speeches, and Works of the leading public men of the day.