The American Vice Presidency (13 page)

The appropriations provision passed, making Tompkins destitute and leading him to invite a federal suit against him so that he could publicly defend himself. He called witnesses who testified to his tireless efforts to pay troops and arm them in the War of 1812. In closing, this broken man urged the jury to let neither partisanship nor pity govern their judgment. “Could I believe that your verdict on this occasion was to be guided by your sympathy, I should despise both it and you. I demand of you justice only.”
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After several hours of deliberating, the jury ruled in his favor, saying the government owed him nearly $137,000, but further disputes continued. Finally Monroe stepped in, informing Congress that the Treasury Department had concluded it owed Tompkins about thirty-five thousand dollars and, at Monroe’s recommendation, had authorized that the vice president be paid as “an essential accommodation.”
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On January 21, 1824, Tompkins came to the Senate a final time, leaving on May 20 with a low-key farewell. A week later the Senate agreed to a last Monroe request to approve another sixty thousand dollars to Tompkins to
settle all claims. He continued, however, to drink heavily and, without a will, died as a private citizen on June 11, 1825. His estate on Staten Island was sold off to satisfy unsettled debts left to his wife, Hannah, who outlived him by nearly four years. In 1847, Congress finally voted to give fifty thousand dollars to his heirs.

The first postrevolutionary figure to aspire to the presidency, Daniel D. Tompkins reached a sorrowful early end at age fifty, which belied his great promise as a young governor and vice president. Like the holders of the second office before him, his marginal involvement in the administration in which he served denied him much opportunity to make his mark on the national stage. It might have been too much to say upon his death, as the former New York mayor and diarist Philip Hone did later, that “there was a time when no man in the state dared to compete with him for any office in the gift of the people; and his habits of intemperance alone prevented him from being President of the United States.”
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But Tompkins’s life story was certainly one of leadership potential derailed, by either personal weakness or misfortune or both.

JOHN C. CALHOUN

OF SOUTH CAROLINA

F
or the first time in the young Republic, a vice president was elected on one party ticket in 1824 and four years later was reelected on the ticket of another. Politics, personal animosities, and the quirks of the electoral system contrived to make John C. Calhoun of South Carolina the running mate of the National Republican nominee, John Quincy Adams, in the first election, and in 1828 Calhoun was elected again, this time with the Democratic president Andrew Jackson.

At the core of this unusual phenomenon was the manner of the second Adams’s victory in the 1824 election, in which Jackson surpassed the son of the former president in both the popular vote and the electoral college but failed to achieve the required electoral majority. The election thus was thrown into the House of Representatives, and Adams finally prevailed when one of the losing candidates, House Speaker Henry Clay, was said to have steered to Adams the electors he had won in three states. Calhoun meanwhile was easily elected vice president on his own.

When Adams subsequently named Clay to be his secretary of state, Jackson supporters loudly accused them of a “corrupt bargain,” and Calhoun shared the view. Nearly halfway through his term, Calhoun struck up an alliance with Jackson and joined him as his running mate in 1828, when they defeated Adams and his new running mate, Richard Rush of Pennsylvania.

Another twist of fate had placed Calhoun on the path to the vice presidency in the first place. In 1824, the South Carolina General Assembly chose William Lowndes as its nominee for president, but he died at sea. The assembly filled the vacancy with Calhoun, another native son, who was then President James Monroe’s secretary of war.
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Another presidential hopeful, the former senator William H. Crawford of Georgia, attacked Calhoun’s stewardship of the armed forces, citing allegations of waste and fraud in the War Department. But Calhoun’s stout defense of his role in mobilizing the military in the War of 1812 propelled him to national prominence and to the vice presidential nomination as Adams’s running mate. In the end, however, it was Calhoun’s fervent advocacy of the states’ right to nullify federal law and secede from the Union that led to the Civil War and his contentious place in American history.

The son of a Scots-Irish farmer who had emigrated from Virginia to the backcountry of South Carolina and become a fighter of Indians and lawless frontiersmen, John Caldwell Calhoun was raised with a strong sense of independence coupled with community responsibility, emulating his parents in local church and colonial politics. He had three brothers and one sister, and the family owned a dozen or more slaves, whose children became his playmates in youth, while also being deferential to him in keeping with the social imperatives of the time. Patrick Calhoun, the father, served a term in the House of Representatives, then in the South Carolina General Assembly, and later the state Senate. He led the way in the development of the back country and, not incidentally, in the expansion of slavery in the region.
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John Calhoun was only thirteen years old when his father died. Young Calhoun and his older brothers were required to work the farm diligently, often alongside the slave children. He also became an avid reader, and upon his father’s death and his brothers’ departure he assumed management of the twelve-hundred-acre plantation and its thirty slaves. When he was eighteen, his brothers urged him to go back to school, taking over the plantation and financing his education for the betterment of the whole family.

After studying at Yale and Litchfield Law School, in Connecticut, Calhoun was admitted to the South Carolina bar in late 1807. That year, the British frigate
Leopard
attacked the American warship
Chesapeake
after being refused permission to board and search for deserters. He wrote a
resolution of protest that won him local praise and notoriety, leading to his election to the South Carolina House of Representatives.
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As chairman of the Committee on Claims, Calhoun encountered obligations dealing with the South’s “peculiar institution” of slavery that later would dominate his time, energies, and reputation in the history books. More than half a century earlier the General Assembly had stipulated that to make sure owners of slaves would “not be tempted to conceal the crimes of their slaves to the prejudice of the public,” owners of executed slaves could be compensated up to two hundred dollars each. Calhoun recommended that the owners of eight such slaves be paid $120.40 each. The situation was handled as a simple case of restitution for the destruction of private property.
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In 1810, Calhoun was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives at age twenty-nine. Now married with an infant son, he declared himself a nationalist, involved with the concerns of the whole country. He joined in confronting Great Britain over its intrusions into American shipping and the impressment of American seamen on English vessels, which led to the War of 1812. The new House Speaker, Henry Clay of Kentucky, invited Calhoun to join what was known as the “War Mess” of westerners of nationalist bent dining at a boardinghouse near the Capitol. In 1812 Calhoun was among those who accompanied Clay in urging Madison to call for a declaration of war.

The War of 1812, ill-conceived and for much of the time ill-conducted by the Madison administration, came perilously close to an American defeat. In 1814 it suffered the humiliation of the burning of the capital city, including the White House and both chambers of Congress. But Calhoun’s stolid support of the war effort earned him the reputation as the nation’s “young Hercules who carried the war on his shoulders,” as proclaimed by a Philadelphia lawyer.
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When the peace treaty was signed in 1815, Calhoun declared, “I feel pleasure and pride in being able to say that I am of a party which drew the sword … and succeeded in the contest.”
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His determined focus on maintaining the defense of the nation recommended Calhoun as war secretary in the new Madison administration. Resigning from the House in 1817 after seven years and accepting the post, Calhoun soon found himself on a collision course with the hero of the War of 1812, General Jackson. In 1816, while Calhoun was still in Congress,
Jackson, as commander of the army’s Southern Division, had sent a military surveyor into Indian country along the Mississippi River to examine lands where uprisings might occur. Without Jackson’s knowledge, President Madison’s war department ordered the surveyor to New York, where he finished and published his report on the Mississippi area survey. Jackson was livid at the intrusion and complained to Calhoun’s deputy, who curtly told Jackson that department orders superseded those of commanders in the field.

Still outraged, Jackson awaited the inaugural of James Monroe, the new president in 1817, and protested again, while commanding his troops that no orders were to be obeyed unless transmitted through appropriate military channels—meaning through him. Monroe chose to treat the matter as a misunderstanding, writing to the renowned hero of New Orleans: “The principal is clear, that every order from the dept. of war, to whomever directed, must be obeyed. I cannot think that you are of a different opinion.” But he warned, “Should the alternative be presented, I will not hesitate to do my duty.”
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In November 1817, an incident in what was still Spanish Florida added fuel to the dispute. The region was a weakly policed haven for escaped slaves and assorted criminals. Seminole Indians there now killed more than fifty American soldiers, women, and children near the Georgia border. Calhoun ordered the general in command in Georgia to pursue the Indians across the Florida line unless they took shelter under Spanish authorities. Ten days later, Calhoun ordered Jackson to relieve the general and “adopt the necessary measures to terminate” the incident.
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But Jackson took the orders as an invitation to invade and take over Florida. He wrote directly to Monroe, not Calhoun, warning of leaving the American troops idle outside some Spanish post, and offered to seize Florida while he was there. “Let it be signified to me through any channel … that the position of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States,” he suggested, “and in sixty days it will be accomplished.”
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In a subsequent letter to Calhoun, however, Jackson gave no indication of his grandiose intent.

In March 1818 Jackson moved his army into the Spanish territory, killing Seminoles, destroying their villages, pushing them into west Florida, and occupying the Spanish post of St. Mark’s. Monroe and Calhoun wanted
Jackson to calm things down in a way that Florida could be acquired by peaceful negotiations, but the hot-blooded general had his own ideas. Jackson biographer Irving Bartlett wrote later that by sending Jackson, “instead of a fox they sent a lion.”
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Unknown to Calhoun, Jackson pressed on to Pensacola in west Florida, surrounded Fort Barancas, where the Spanish governor and garrison were housed, and in two days achieved their surrender, along with that of the Seminoles who had sought refuge there. Two British men, accused of being foreign agents in prodding the Indians, were summarily court-martialed by Jackson and executed, complicating the American diplomatic case.

In all this, Monroe seemed unwilling to challenge Jackson as insubordinate, other than to tell the complaining British minister that the general had acted without authorization. A cabinet meeting concluded that Jackson had disregarded Monroe’s instructions and had engaged in an unauthorized war against Spain.
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Meanwhile, Jackson’s already immense popularity at home grew even greater.

Calhoun pointed out the obvious—that Jackson of all people should have accepted the imperative of observing the chain of command—and wanted an investigation of the general’s actions, including the possibility of a court-martial. But Monroe had no interest in a confrontation with Jackson. He settled for returning his Florida conquests to Spain as prerequisite to guarantees of peaceful border maintenance, and several months later he purchased Florida from Spain for five million dollars.

In Calhoun’s remaining time as war secretary, he made efforts to get along with Jackson, but not to the point of looking the other way on further acts of insubordination. Jackson finally retired from the army in June 1821, by which time his military feats had made him a serious prospect for the presidency in 1824. Calhoun likewise saw himself as a legitimate “Republican” candidate, along with Monroe’s treasury secretary, William Crawford, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, and Speaker Henry Clay. By now the rival Federalists of the immediate post–revolutionary era had shrunk to near invisibility or vanished altogether.