Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (16 page)

Jackson would be a candidate before the House; so would Adams. Clay and Crawford were battling for the third and final slot. After Jackson arrived in Washington, he watched intently to see if his despised rival would get it.

If Louisiana has not voted for Mr Clay he is not in the house.

Clay needed Louisiana’s electoral votes. It soon became clear that he didn’t win them. Jackson could feel victory getting closer.

I should never have aspired to the responsibility—but, let the lords will be done.

Now, however, the Speaker of the House took on a new role. As the House prepared to break the three-way deadlock, Clay could swing the election to one of the candidates who remained.

With or without Jackson’s consent,
his supporters reached out to Clay.
One was Sam Houston, the soldier who had climbed at General Jackson’s orders over the Creek barricade at Horseshoe Bend, and who was now a Tennessee congressman. Houston met a friend of Clay’s, and said Clay could end up as Jackson’s secretary of state. Congressman
James
Buchanan of Pennsylvania took a similar message directly to Clay. But Clay was leaning in another direction. Encountering John Quincy Adams at a dinner in honor of General Lafayette, Clay asked to have “
some confidential conversation upon public affairs.”

 • • • 

Clay told a Kentucky friend the House vote was a “
choice of evils.” This was not the warmest endorsement of Adams, but Clay probably believed that Adams would support the American System. It’s also likely that Clay’s ambition pushed him toward Adams, since Jackson was his rival for the affection of the West. But Clay’s political calculus was complex, since he would pay a price in Kentucky for opposing a western man. Clay’s own explanations for his decision are worth considering.

In the election of Mr Adams we shall not by the example inflict any wound upon the character of our institutions; but I should much fear hereafter, if not during the present generation, that the election of the General would give to the Military Spirit a Stimulus and a confidence that might lead to the most pernicious results.

Clay said this so often that he likely believed it was true. He’d been hearing confirmation of his judgment for years. “
Too much of a Soldier to be a civilian,” said Return J. Meigs Jr., a former Ohio governor and U.S. postmaster general (whose father, the longtime Cherokee Indian agent, worked with Jackson in Tennessee for many years). “There is more of the Dictator—than of the Consul in his Character.” A consul was a peacetime leader in ancient Rome, and the metaphor resonated in a country that dwelled on Greco-Roman precedents for its republican experiment. It was not by chance that Americans gave an ancient Roman name to the Senate, or put the Bank of the United States in a building that resembled an ancient Greek temple.
Latin was taught in many schools, including those set up for Indians. Even Clay, with his limited education, was
introduced to Greek and Roman writers while
serving as an apprentice to a Virginia jurist. Meigs, in his letter to Clay from Marietta, Ohio, threw in two lines in Latin from the Roman poet Horace, and assumed his friend in Kentucky would be able to decipher them. Clay’s 1819 speech summarized Jackson’s Florida campaign with Caesar’s famous phrase
“Veni, vidi, vici.”
Suddenly Jackson was Caesar and Clay was Cicero, the Roman senator who tried to stand in his way.

While Clay’s apprehensions were understandable, he could have viewed Jackson differently. It was true that as a general, Jackson found new and creative ways to exercise power—just as Clay found new and creative ways to exercise power as Speaker of the House. Each was a disruptive figure who unnerved conventional thinkers. Clay’s brooding on history blinded him to the reality of his rejection of Andrew Jackson: The candidate Clay considered least suited for the presidency was the one who most resembled Clay.

Clay visited Adams for a long talk, and took the opportunity to complain. Representatives of all the candidates had been appealing for his support in a manner he considered
“gross.” Obviously, Henry Clay was not going to make a “gross” bargain to support Adams. Adams’s diary noted that without requesting “any personal considerations for himself,” Clay told Adams
“he had no hesitation in saying that his preference would be for me.” The Speaker visited Adams again on January 27, “and sat with me a couple of hours, discussing all the prospects and probabilities of the presidential election. He spoke to me with the utmost freedom,” even discussing what to do about friends of Adams who seemed to be wavering in their support. With his self-confidence and ease, Clay had already assumed the position of adviser of the man he expected to make president. That was the way to gain a post in Adams’s cabinet without asking for it.

 • • • 

Jackson was under increasing stress. He was flooded with callers at Gadsby’s hotel—
fifty to a hundred a day, according to Rachel. He ended a letter to one of his political managers: “Since I have sat down to write
this
I have been interrupted twenty times & oblige now to close it hastily—A.J.” The bills Jackson received from the hotel suggested the mounting costs of entertaining. On January 11 he paid for eight bottles of port wine, a pint of whiskey, three more bottles of wine, and “
2 Extra Dinners in Private Parlour.” On the fourteenth he was billed for claret, cigars, brandy, whiskey, champagne, three more dinners, and three bottles of “
wager wine”—this, of course, beyond the meals and lodging for himself, Rachel, three servants, and four horses.
He’d arrived in Washington with $2,300 but was running out of cash. He had to write to John Coffee in Alabama, asking him to send more. His health was more precarious than his finances. “
We are all well,” Rachel wrote home on January 27, “except bad colds (Mr Jackson has not been very well sinc He left home) his mind has kept him Down he Longs for retirement at His own fire side I knew from the first how wrong it was, but my advise was nothing.” One night after meeting a congressman,
Jackson slipped on his way up Gadsby’s stairs and painfully shifted one of the bullets in his body.

Despite his anxiety and pain, Jackson was writing letters to supporters that perfectly expressed his position. His ideas guided his supporters then, continued to guide them for years afterward, and would be emulated, in one form or another, down to the present day. He wrote to his old friend John Overton, a Tennessee judge:

Let me rise or fall upon the rule that the people have the right to choose the chief executive of the nation, and a majority of their voices have a right to govern, agreeable to the declared principles of the constitution—

Having been supported by the majority of the people, I can have no feelings on the occasion—If party or intrigue should prevail, and exclude me, I shall retire to my comfortable farm with great pleasure—there you know, was the height of my ambition.

It was a brilliant letter. If all its premises were accepted, there was no patriotic course for anyone to take except to salute Andrew Jackson on his way to the Executive Mansion. Jackson’s vision matched
perfectly with his political requirements, although it did not match with the facts.

the rule that the people have the right to choose the chief executive of their nation, and a majority of their voices have a right to govern

That was not a rule. While the Founders had respected the principle of majority rule, they found the power of the majority, like all power, to be dangerous if unchecked. Check it they did, including by the creation of the Electoral College, designed to filter the will of the people through the eminent men who would be voted into it.

Having been supported by the majority of the people

He hadn’t been supported by a majority. Never mind that women and nearly all racial minorities did not vote, or that several states did not hold popular elections for president at all. In the four-way race,
Jackson gained 42 percent of votes cast in the states that held a popular vote. Although Jackson led Adams’s 31 percent, neither had a majority. Of ten million Americans, about 359,000 voted, of whom about 151,217 marked ballots for Jackson.

If party or intrigue should prevail, and exclude me

Here Jackson did not see himself merely as a man fighting a three-way contest in the House as required by the Constitution. It was a one-man contest. Jackson was the only person whose victory could possibly be just. Any reverse he might suffer was by definition illegitimate, a betrayal of America through elitist “intrigue.”

Jackson engaged in some intrigue of his own. Letter after letter resembled the one he sent to a Philadelphia merchant, a supporter in Pennsylvania.

With regard to the Presidency, My Dear Sir, you must excuse my inability to inform you—I know nothing of the movement of parties, or of the combinations, which are alledged to be in secret caucus. It is true rumors of the kind exist.

Having denied any knowledge of the news, he passed on the most salacious news that he had: rumors of “combinations” involving Henry Clay. His supporters pushed the rumors into the open. Late in January a pro-Jackson newspaper in Pennsylvania published a devastating interpretation of events. An anonymous congressman claimed that the presidency had gone up for sale. John Quincy Adams was buying support from Henry Clay, and Clay’s price was to become secretary of state, “
should this unholy coalition prevail.”

Just to make sure this report had the proper effect, the pro-Jackson editor mailed a copy to Henry Clay. Clay read it. There he was, accused of a corrupt design to become secretary of state. The top post in the cabinet. The post that in the republic’s short history had become the surest springboard to the presidency. The posting Clay would want, should he serve in the cabinet at all. Now it was Clay’s turn to explode in fury, publicly challenging the source of the story to a duel, and demanding an investigation in the House. On January 29, he wrote a long letter to a friend that reads as if its coauthor were bourbon. Insiders in Washington

have turned upon me and with the most amiable unanimity agree to vituperate me. I am a deserter from Democracy; A Giant at intrigue; have sold the West—sold myself—defeating Gen Jacksons election to leave open the Western pretensions that I may hereafter fill them myself—blasting all my fair prospects &c &c &c. . . . The Knaves cannot comprehend how a man can be honest. They cannot conceive that I should have solemnly interrogated my Conscience and asked it to tell me seriously what I ought to do?

“I perceive,” Clay went on, “that I am unconsciously writing a sort of defence, which you may possibly think imp[lies] guilt.”

The distraction did not keep Clay from the task to which he had set himself. He lined up the votes Adams needed, twisting arms so effectively that when the House met in its great echoing chamber, the lawmakers made John Quincy Adams the president-elect on the first ballot.

 • • • 

Jackson bore defeat well in public, walking into a crowded reception at the Executive Mansion and offering Adams his congratulations. Probably Lafayette was in the crowd; his secretary Levasseur was there, and found Jackson “
open and sincere.” In private, everything was different. Within days, Jackson supporters met the president-elect to present an ultimatum: Clay must be denied the post of secretary of state, or a “
determined opposition” would be organized against Adams from the very start of his administration. Adams, refusing to be intimidated, offered Clay the State Department.
Clay hesitated, sensing the danger, but accepted: yet another of his fateful choices with unintended effects.

By then Jackson had long since issued his judgment in a letter from Gadsby’s hotel. The nation had never witnessed “
such a bare faced corruption,” wrote the general who had bullied, intrigued, and bribed Indians into surrendering tens of millions of acres of real estate. None of that was important now. What mattered was that Henry Clay had betrayed him.

So you see the Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver—his end will be the same.

A
t the time of Lafayette’s visit, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs administered native matters from offices in Georgetown, on the western edge of Washington. The bureau was run by Thomas McKenney, who was considered an expert on the tribes. McKenney’s offices included a special room that was once seen by the traveling English novelist Frances Trollope.
“The walls,” she wrote, “are entirely covered with original portraits of all the chiefs who, from time to time, have come to negociate with their great father, as they call the President.” McKenney paid to have each visitor sit with the same painter. Some of the Indians wore expressions of “
noble and warlike daring,” while others were shown with “a gentle and
naïve
simplicity.” At some point Major Ridge went up on the wall, as did John Ross, both of whom visited Washington in the early part of 1825.

There is no record that either man met Lafayette, though at least one visited Gadsby’s while Lafayette was staying there. Major Ridge arrived at the hotel on January 10, joining the stream of visitors to see Gadsby’s other famous guest, Andrew Jackson. “
Our heads have become white,” Ridge observed when the two veterans of Horseshoe Bend met. Ridge was around fifty-three, Jackson fifty-seven. Possibly using
his English-speaking son John Ridge as interpreter, the Cherokee leader delivered a short and respectful speech. “
Our hearts have been with you always,” Ridge assured his former commander. Left unstated was Ridge’s reason for visiting Washington. He was acting as an adviser to the Creek Nation as it tried to avoid losing more land; this was the mission that earned Ridge and his son
commissions totaling $25,000.

A few weeks later John Ross arrived in the capital to join Ridge in the latest Cherokee delegation. Georgia was making another demand for Cherokee territory. It was Thomas McKenney’s duty to pass on this demand to the Cherokees, even though he knew what the answer would be. He made his request in a desultory, one-sentence note.

Friends and Brothers: I am directed by the Secretary of War to enquire if you have authority to negotiate with the Government for a sale of your lands; and especially for that portion of them lying in the limits of Georgia.

The answer penned by Ross walked right up to the edge of sarcasm.

It would seem from the enquiry that the Secretary of War is impressed with the belief that our nation may be disposed to make a cession of our lands.

So that the secretary “may have full information,” Ross said the Cherokees’ refusal to sell was “unchangeable.” This caused a problem for the government, since Georgia’s desire for Cherokee as well as Creek land within the state was equally unchangeable.

The duty of resolving these irreconcilable demands fell on John Quincy Adams soon after his inauguration. Adams’s elevation must have been a hopeful sign to the Cherokees who’d so often visited his home. But if Adams appreciated the propaganda he’d been given about
the Cherokee Nation, he was not enthusiastic about their prospects. In a cabinet meeting during his first year in office, President Adams heard Henry Clay remark that Indians were an
“essentially inferior” race, “not an improvable breed,” and on their way to extinction. Some in the room were shocked, but Adams was not. He wrote afterward that “I fear there is too much foundation” for Clay’s opinions. Indians thus depended on a president who recognized their rights but regarded them as a lost cause. Adams’s resolve would promptly be tested—so soon, in fact, that when General Lafayette bid good-bye to the new president after the election and resumed his tour of all twenty-four states, he would reach the states of the emerging Deep South in time to witness a portion of the test.

 • • • 

The journal of Lafayette’s secretary, Levasseur, recorded memorable scenes as the party moved southward. Somewhere below Norfolk, Virginia, the group stopped at a “
small, solitary inn,” where the owner served whiskey and bread. The owner’s wife brought in their son, a toddler who, repeating after his father, thanked Lafayette for their liberty. Approaching Charleston, South Carolina, Levasseur smelled the city before he saw it. “
The coolness of the night had condensed the perfumes from the orange, peach, and almond trees, covered with flowers, and embalmed the air.” The city gave Lafayette “
balls, displays of artificial fire-works, and entertainments” that lasted for days. While on a steamboat in the harbor,
the great man was saluted with cannon fire from Fort Moultrie, which had guarded Charleston since the Revolution.
Army engineers were finally planning a new fortress, to be built on a shoal in the harbor and to be called Fort Sumter.

Between the blasts of cannons and toasts to the Revolution, Lafayette’s secretary noticed a
pervasive emotion: “fear.” South Carolina was a slave state, with a majority black population. The white minority had been terrified just three years before, in 1822, to learn that a free black
man named
Denmark Vesey was plotting a slave insurrection. Authorities hanged Vesey and dozens of alleged co-conspirators, and by the time of Lafayette’s visit, intensified security regulations gave South Carolina the feel of a police state.
One measure decreed that when ships docked at Charleston, any free black sailors on board must be jailed so they could not carry messages to black people onshore. When a Supreme Court justice found the imprisonments unconstitutional, South Carolina openly defied the ruling, saying that stopping “
insubordination” was “paramount” to “all laws” and “all constitutions.” Baffled by this early example of a state nullifying federal law, national officials did nothing.

In the 1820s progressive thinkers in the South were reluctant to fully endorse slavery. They defended it only as a necessary evil inherited from past generations. South Carolina’s great political thinker John C. Calhoun even suggested it was a passing phase, telling a northerner in 1823 that slavery was “
scaffolding, scaffolding, Sir—it will come away when the building is finished.” But he neglected to specify who was going to take down the scaffolding, and Lafayette’s perceptive secretary noticed that no one was available. A vote against slavery would be a vote against the personal fortunes of many leading politicians.

State officials proved active enough on issues better aligned with their interests, such as opening up the countryside for white settlement. On his way to Charleston, Lafayette had spent the night in a new settlement under construction,
sleeping in the only house that had a roof, and rising in the morning to see that the surrounding forest had only recently been cleared. Developing new towns and surrounding farms required the continuing removal of the state’s Indians, which in turn required the state to engage in some lobbying. Since only the federal government was allowed to do business with Indians, states pressed for federal help. In 1816, as part of a broader negotiation with the Cherokees, the government proposed to buy their South Carolina land. This was the same negotiation in which Cherokees, including John Ross,
focused on preserving two million acres in Alabama threatened by Andrew Jackson. Though they won back the Alabama land, at least temporarily, they had to give up something.
They sold their stake in South Carolina for $5,000.

 • • • 

A ship took the national guest and his party from Charleston down the coast to Savannah, Georgia, in March 1825. Waiting for Lafayette amid the crowd at the waterside was His Excellency G. M. Troup, governor and commander in chief of the armed forces of Georgia, and also Lafayette’s host. He had brought along some of Georgia’s troops to fire a salute to the approaching boat in the harbor. The salute was only the start; the legislature had authorized Troup to draw
unlimited funds from the treasury to arrange Lafayette’s travel across the state and onward to Alabama.

Governor Troup is worth dwelling on for a moment, this welcoming politician waiting by the waterside. He was a curly-haired, sideburned, cold-eyed planter’s son. He had strong views about natives; he was the same man who claimed that even Andrew Jackson was laggardly in 1814 because he failed to clear all of the Indians from Georgia. And as Lafayette’s boat neared shore in 1825, Troup was in the midst of an operation designed to push out many natives who remained.

He was a man accustomed to conflict. He was born in 1780, in the midst of the Revolution, to a wealthy family that apparently stayed loyal to the British crown. The
family Bible recorded their flight from one loyalist safe haven to another—Mobile Bay, London, British-controlled Charleston. At the close of the war the Troups returned to Savannah and made their peace with the new order, although Troup spent his youth in a society that was still polarized and suspicious. He became a politician almost as soon as he graduated from Princeton, and developed a withering, apocalyptic, paranoid style. In 1825, thirty-six years before the Civil War, he was already telling constituents that they must
prepare “
to stand to your arms.” Washington, he declared in a message to the legislature that spring, would “soon, very soon” be aiming for “the destruction of every thing valuable in the Southern country.” Troup was a template for a certain kind of American politician who would persist in later generations. In his world, the people were besieged by radical judges, conspiracies, and imminent plots to overturn their way of life. Washington officials were not at all what they claimed to be. He predicted that Supreme Court justices and Congress would soon collude and, “discarding the mask,” reveal themselves as “fanatics” who would free Georgia’s slaves without even paying for them.

But there were no such nightmare visions now, for Lafayette’s boat had finally come ashore. The curly-haired governor was greeting the visiting hero, and guiding him through Savannah.
Horses pulled them on a kind of parade float as ladies threw flowers on the ground. “
La Fayette mania,” scoffed a Savannah woman, Mary Telfair. She claimed the celebrations were overblown, and reported that a friend was referring to the nation’s guest as “the
nations jest.”
Her nonchalance was an act. Telfair had been just as jaded the previous fall when she was visiting Philadelphia and Lafayette arrived there, but she went to see him anyway. Most likely in Savannah too she joined the crowds that lined the streets.

Governor Troup brought Lafayette inland, to the state capital at Milledgeville, where the hero of liberty was thronged by admirers in the statehouse. The next morning his carriage was on the road. The party rolled through Macon, Georgia, “
a civilized speck lost in the yet immense domain of the original children of the soil,” wrote Levasseur. “Within a league of this place, we are again in the bosom of the virgin forests,” surrounded by trees so enormous they “appear as records of the age of the world.” Not long after that the travelers were in Creek country. Their progress slowed as the road grew worse. The track was often washed away by the spring rains, and Creeks often helped them manhandle a small carriage they’d brought along.
Once the party had to cross a stream that was so swollen the water flowed over the bridge. A double line of
Indians waded out onto the submerged planking, in racing water breast-high, holding hands in order to guide Lafayette’s party safely across.

Stopping at a cluster of cabins, they encountered two Creek men at a front door, “one young, the other middle aged, both remarkable for their beauty and form. They were dressed in a short frock, of light material, fastened around the body by a wampum belt. Their heads were wrapped with shawls of brilliant colours, their leggings of buckskin reached above the knee.” Lafayette and Levasseur fell into conversation with the younger man, named Hamley, who spoke English.

Lafayette had heard something about the Creeks on his way here. He’d heard that they were about to be removed from this forest. Some Creeks had agreed to sell their land in Georgia. The sellers were led by a chief known as General William McIntosh, or M’Intosh. “General” was an honorific title, given him because of his service fighting under the command of Andrew Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. When Lafayette began asking about this sale,

[
Hamley’s] countenance became somber, he stamped on the ground, and, placing his hand upon his knife, murmured the name of M’Intosh in such a manner, as to make us tremble for the safety of that chief; and when we appeared to be astonished, “M’Intosh,” exclaimed he, “has sold the land of his fathers, and sacrificed us all to his avarice. The treaty he has concluded in our name, it is impossible to break, but the wretch!” He stopped on making this violent exclamation, and shortly afterwards quietly entered on some other topic of conversation.

It is possible that Hamley had personal knowledge of the treaty he despised. The treaty bore the name of a “William Hambly,” an interpreter. But even if this Hamley was not a witness, the story would have been familiar to every Creek family in Georgia. General Lafayette’s host, Governor Troup, had found the way to obtain the Creek land, using McIntosh as his accomplice.

In January 1825, while Lafayette was in Washington and the capital was consumed with
the presidential election, two men appeared at the Creek Indian agency in Georgia. They said they were U.S. commissioners, empowered to negotiate a treaty with the Creeks. This was true, but not the whole truth. They were also Georgians, and federal officials including the president himself later concluded that the men acted as agents for Georgia. Working in collaboration with Governor Troup, the commissioners pressed to buy every square foot of Creek land in Georgia. When many Creeks resisted, the commissioners dealt with William McIntosh, who was not the principal chief, but was well known to white leaders. He had a white father. His cousin was Governor George M. Troup.

McIntosh also had a certain reputation. In 1821, when the Creeks signed a treaty ceding some of their land, McIntosh arranged to receive 1,640 acres for himself. He used some of the land to build an inn at Indian Springs, where the waters were said to have healing powers. In 1823 he wrote a letter to John Ross of the Cherokees, saying he could pass on
a bribe of $2,000 from the white men if Ross would help to sell off Cherokee land. “Nobody shall know it,” McIntosh promised in the letter. Rather than take the money, Ross had the document read aloud at a Cherokee leadership meeting. Cherokees never trusted McIntosh again, but for the federal commissioners in 1825 he was the man to see.