Anything for a Vote Page 5

  MOST COMPREHENSIVE WHY-YOU-SHOULDN’T-VOTE-FOR-HIM STATEMENT This, from an anti-Jackson pamphlet, pretty much covers it all: “You know that Jackson is no jurist, no statesman, no politician; that he is destitute of historical, political, or statistical knowledge, that he is unacquainted with the orthography, concord, and government of his language; you know that he is a man of no labor, no patience, no investigation; in short that his whole recommendation is animal fierceness and organic energy. He is wholly unqualified by education, habit, and temper for the station of the President.”

  Bible-thumping Republicans described Andrew Jackson’s wife as a “dirty black wench” and worse.

  ANDREW JACKSON

  VS.

  HENRY CLAY

  “THE KING UPON THE THRONE: THE PEOPLE IN THE DUST!!!”

  —Anti-Jackson headline

  One of the supreme ironies about Andrew Jackson is that although he was the first president to be born in a log cabin and saw himself primarily as the champion of the common man, his enemies in the 1832 election claimed he was a dictator.

  After Jackson paid for the damage to the Executive Mansion caused by the Animal House–style antics of his inauguration, one of his first acts was to try to rid the Civil Service of incompetent bureaucrats with lifelong sinecures. Claiming that “the duties of all public officers … are so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance” (translation: any idiot can do these jobs), he initiated what he called rotation in office. His opponents dubbed it the spoils system since, naturally, any fired officeholder was replaced by a Democrat. Only some 10 percent of federal officeholders actually lost their jobs, but the new president became feared throughout the bureaucracy.

  The 1832 election would change the political landscape by introducing the first national party conventions—an attempt to regulate nominations currently being held by state legislatures, which tended to fracture into local, sectional disputes.

  The first convention was held by the Antimasons, a third political party that had sprung up in opposition to such powerful secret societies as the Masons. Their candidate was the well-known orator William Wirt; the party was also the first to introduce such lasting convention features as the party platform and rules committee.

  The National-Republicans—soon to start calling themselves the Whigs—held their convention in December 1831. They nominated Congressman Henry Clay for president, with former Attorney General John Sergeant as his running mate.

  The Democrats met in a hotel saloon in Baltimore in May 1832, and naturally they renominated Jackson for president. Martin Van Buren was Jackson’s handpicked VP. The Democrats also came up with an innovation in political conventions, declaring that the majority of delegates from each state would henceforth designate the single nominee.

  THE CANDIDATES

  DEMOCRAT: ANDREW JACKSON In many ways, Andrew Jackson was a hollow man without his beloved Rachel. Although he could be chivalrous and courteous in private, his public persona was increasingly cold, unbending, and given to fits of rage. In fact, much of the time Jackson’s opponents gave in to him because they were afraid of his temper.

  NATIONAL-REPUBLICAN: HENRY CLAY Clay was the silver-tongued senator from Kentucky who had been a bitter enemy of the Democrats ever since the election of 1824, when Jackson accused him of entering into a “corrupt bargain.” He and Jackson had something in common, however. Both were dueling men—Clay had fought one against Senator John Randolph, while Jackson fought anywhere from two to (if you believed the smears proffered by his opponents) more than one hundred.

  THE CAMPAIGN

  The American public was decidedly uninterested in the election of 1832, and for two reasons. First, a deadly cholera epidemic had struck the eastern United States in the summer of 1832; most people found it hard to focus on politics with a plague in the land. Second, the main issue of the election was Jackson’s attack on the Bank of the United States—an important concern, but not something that really drove voter turnout.

  Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, had established the Bank of the United States to accept tax revenue deposits to fund the national debt and issue paper money. But Jackson liked coins that clinked and rattled in his pocket; he hated the Bank of the United States and, in particular, its president, Nicholas Biddle, a Republican old-money man. Jackson (with some accuracy) felt the bank was an elitist institution with too much power, one that made “the rich richer and the potent more powerful.”

  He vetoed the bank’s recharter, essentially trying to put it out of business. None of this made Republican Party hounds very happy. They began baying. “A more deranging, radical, law-upsetting document was never promulgated by the wildest Roman fanatic,” wrote one New England editor about Jackson’s veto. A mob of anti-Jacksonians went to the bank’s headquarters in Philadelphia to announce that Jackson had “wantonly trampled upon the interests of his fellow citizens.” Noah Webster proclaimed that in vetoing the Bank recharter, Jackson had announced: “I AM THE STATE!”

  But Jackson continued the attack. He hated banks that issued paper money, or, as he put it, “wretched rag money.” Jackson’s followers made toasts to “Gold and silver, the only currency recognized by the Constitution.” Jackson branded Nicholas Biddle as Czar Nick. (No wonder Biddle used funds from the bank—money deposited there by the U.S. government—to support Jackson’s enemies, including Henry Clay.)

  Republicans responded by tagging Jackson as King Andrew I. They also spread stories about Jackson’s illnesses—his health, in the blunt phrase of former Vice President John C. Calhoun, was “deranged”—and attacked him for traveling on Sunday (ironic, since the same slur had been used against John Quincy Adams by the Democrats).

  But Jackson’s party organization won the day. One visiting French official saw a torchlight parade for Jackson in New York City that was a mile long. Jackson even won over Clay’s home state of Kentucky, where one disheartened Clay supporter reported that large crowds of people held hickory bushes and sticks in honor of Old Hickory.

  THE WINNER: ANDREW JACKSON

  In the end, Jackson ran away with the election—he won 701,780 votes to Clay’s 484,205. He had defeated “the overwhelming influence” of the “corrupt Aristocracy” of the Bank of the United States and continued—in a way that would influence the way Americans thought about their future presidents—to amass executive power for himself.

  LAMPOONING JACKSON Commercial lithography had taken hold in America in the 1820s, making it easier to turn out newspaper cartoons (before that, all illustrations had to be engraved or cut into wood or copper). And something in Andrew Jackson’s tall, spare demeanor, with his Woody Woodpecker thatch of gray hair, made Republican cartoonists salivate.

  During the campaign of 1832, Jackson was painted as a pig about to be dissected at a barbecue by a ravenous Clay and Webster; a decrepit old man playing poker with opposition candidates Clay and William Wirt (the cards in Jackson’s hand read “Intrigue,” “Corruption,” and “Imbecility”); and as a king with a crown and scepter and royal robes, stomping on the Constitution and Bank Charter, under the heading “Born to Command.”

  ZOUNDS! Much like Thurston Howell III on the television show Gilligan’s Island, Andrew Jackson was given to wonderfully apocalyptic oaths. “By Almighty God!” “By the Eternal!” and the Shakespearian “S’blood!” (God’s Blood!). The only other president to match him for such rich cursing was probably Lyndon Johnson—in some ways, Jackson’s twentieth-century counterpart—who was known to rip off a few really choice phrases from time to time (see this page).

  THE GALLANT JACKSON During his first term, Jackson lost almost his entire cabinet to the so-called Peggy Eaton Affair. When Jackson’s close friend and Secretary of War John Henry Eaton married Peg O’Neale, the beautiful but notoriously not virtuous daughter of a Washington tavern keeper, the wives of Jackson’s cabinet members and Vice President John C. Calhoun shunned her. Jackson�
��still hurting from the attacks made against his wife, Rachel—defended Peg as “chaste as a virgin,” causing much hilarity among his enemies. However, Secretary of State Martin Van Buren saw this as a wonderful opportunity to forward his own ambitions for the presidency and so defended Peg Eaton at every turn.

  The colorful Peg Eaton continued to be a legend in her own time. Her husband died, leaving her a fortune; later, as a much older woman, she married an Italian ballet master who turned around and ran off with her granddaughter.

  Republicans accused Andrew Jackson of being a petty tyrant—but not to his face.

  MARTIN VAN BUREN

  VS.

  WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON

  “… his [Martin Van Buren’s] mind beats round like a tame bear tied to a stake, in a little circle.”

  —Davy Crockett

  The year 1836 was a volatile time in American history. Davy Crockett fought at the Alamo in March; Samuel Colt received a patent for what would soon be America’s favorite “peacemaker,” the Colt revolver; and Andrew Jackson, gaunter and more pissed-off than ever, continued his campaign against Nicholas Biddle and the Bank of the United States. He refused to deposit tax revenues into the bank’s coffers and instead placed the money into his own “pet” banks—institutions run by his cronies. (Naturally, many of these banks made unwise loans, and the government revenues were lost.) When his first two treasury secretaries protested against this plan, Jackson fired them and eventually found one who would cooperate.

  Jackson followed the tradition of leaving office after two terms and made sure that Democrats nominated Martin Van Buren, his handpicked successor. To do this, he insisted that the Democrats hold a national convention in Baltimore, in May 1835, a good year and three-quarters before the election. Van Buren was nominated in good order, although there were problems when Jackson pushed through the nomination of the vice-presidential candidate, Richard M. Johnson. Johnson was a hero of the War of 1812 Battle of the Thames, where he supposedly killed the Indian leader Tecumseh. But he had openly lived with a black woman named Julia Chinn and had two daughters with her. Because Johnson actually had the nerve to present his family in public, he was reviled by Southern Democrats who “hissed most ungraciously” when his name was presented.

  Meanwhile, Jackson’s enemies, the Republicans, had coalesced into a new party. The Whigs were composed of Republicans, Antimasons, and disaffected Democrats who shared one thing in common: their dislike of Andrew Jackson and his policies. The Whigs (named after the British Reform Party that battled for the supremacy of Parliament over the king) skipped a nominating convention and instead threw three candidates at Van Buren and Johnson, hoping to keep Van Buren from a majority victory and force the election into the House of Representatives. The Whig candidates were Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, Tennessee Senator Hugh White, and William Henry Harrison, the sixty-three-year-old former Indiana Territory governor and hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe. Of the three, Harrison was by far the strongest contender.

  THE CANDIDATES

  DEMOCRAT: MARTIN VAN BUREN Fifty-three years old, Van Buren had been New York’s governor and senator and was a bit of a dandy who took on aristocratic airs, even though (or because) he had come from a very middle-class family—his father had been a popular tavernkeeper near Albany, New York. His chief qualities, according to both his friends and enemies, were his loyalty to Andrew Jackson, whom he served well as vice president, and his political astuteness (which is how he earned the nickname “Little Magician”).

  WHIG: WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON Harrison, a congressman and senator from Ohio, was the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Despite a tendency to get into personal financial trouble, he was picked to run for president because he was a hero of the War of 1812; destroying the Shawnee Indians at the Battle of Tippecanoe had earned him the nickname “Old Tip.” And having three or more Anglo-Saxon names has never hurt a presidential candidate—consider John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson and George Herbert Walker Bush and … well, you get the picture.

  THE CAMPAIGN

  The campaign kicked into high gear early in 1835 as the Whig rag the New York Courier and the Enquirer got beastly on Van Buren, comparing him to “the fox prowling near the barn; the mole burrowing near the ground; the pilot fish who plunges deep in the ocean in one spot and comes up in another to breathe the air.” One cartoon shows Van Buren and Harrison, both bare-chested and boxing. Van Buren, getting the worst of it, cries: “Stand by me Old Hickory or I’m a gone Chicken!”

  Feeling confident of victory, Democrats had a hard time rousing their ire against the Whig triumvirate of candidates. They labeled them as “Federalists, nullifiers, and bank men,” but otherwise depended, as usual, on their superb state organizations to carry the day for Van Buren.

  But as with many elections that follow the presidency of a popular and charismatic chief executive, the 1836 contest was not so much about Van Buren or Harrison as it was about Andrew Jackson. If you liked him, you voted for Van Buren. If not, you went for Harrison or one of the other Whig candidates.

  THE WINNER: MARTIN VAN BUREN

  It was an easy victory for Van Buren, who pulled 764,176 votes to a total of 738,124 for all the Whig candidates combined. (The Whigs did manage to confuse the vice-presidential contest; since a clear majority was not attained by any one candidate, the outcome was decided by the Senate. They voted for Richard Johnson.)

  The Whigs, however, were encouraged by William Henry Harrison’s 550,816 vote count. And they knew that Van Buren’s election win was a triumph of party politics and the power of Andrew Jackson—Van Buren himself did not inspire passion. It all boded well for the election of 1840.

  DAVY CROCKETT, ATTACK DOG When one reads about Davy Crockett’s career in politics, one gets a very different picture than that of the honorable homespun hero of 1950s TV coonskin cap fame. Crockett was a Whig attack dog, the Ann Coulter of his time. In his insanely spurious The Life of Martin Van Buren, Heir-Apparent to the ‘Government,’ and the Appointed Successor of General Andrew Jackson. Containing Every Authentic Particular by Which His Extraordinary Character Has Been Formed. With a Concise History of the Events That Have Occasioned His Unparalleled Elevation; Together with a Review of His Policy as a Statesman, Crockett (or his ghostwriter) claims that Martin Van Buren “is fifty-three years old; and notwithstanding his baldness, which reaches all round and over half down his head, like a white pitch plaster, leaving a few white floating locks, he is only three years older than I am. His face is a good deal shrivelled, and he looks sorry, not for any thing he has gained, but what he may lose.”

  Crockett goes on to administer the coup de grace thusly: “Martin Van Buren is laced up in corsets, such as women in a town wear, and if possible tighter than the best of them. It would be difficult to say from his personal appearance, whether he was a man or a woman, but for his large red and gray whiskers.”

  Davy, unfortunately, was skewered on a Mexican bayonet before he could observe whether his skewering of Van Buren hit home.

  OLD EXECUTIONERS NEVER DIE, THEY JUST … WISH THEY HAD KILLED MORE On the day after Van Buren’s inauguration, Andrew Jackson sat reminiscing over his presidency with a friend. He remarked that he had only two regrets. One, he should have shot Henry Clay. Two, it would have been nice if he’d had a chance to hang John C. Calhoun.

  Congressman Davy Crockett accused Martin Van Buren of wearing women’s corsets. How would Davy know?

  WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON

  VS.

  MARTIN VAN BUREN

  “Passion and prejudice properly aroused and directed would do about as well as principle and reason in a party contest.”

  —Thomas Elder, Whig politician

  Martin Van Buren didn’t know it when he entered the presidency, but he was a “gone chicken” before he had barely begun—all thanks to the Panic of 1837, the worst economic recession the country had yet seen, and the reason why the Whigs started joking a
bout Martin Van Ruin.

  That this panic was partially the result of Andrew Jackson’s monetary policies made things even worse for Van Buren. Under Jackson, the United States government made millions of dollars by selling land to speculators. The government then deposited the money in Jackson’s “pet” banks—run by his cronies—instead of the Bank of the United States, which Jackson had gutted. These local banks made large loans, often to speculators who bought even more land from the government. Add to this vicious circle high inflation, a crop failure in 1835, and a new “hard money” law forcing banks to repay money borrowed from the government in specie rather than currency, and by the summer of 1837 America’s economic life had ground to a standstill. The panic would last several years, forcing factories to close and sending families to beg on the streets.

  The Whigs held their first national nominating convention in December of 1839, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A strange thing happened—the boisterous convention, attended by farmers, disgruntled bankers, protariff and antitariff forces, slaveholders and abolitionists, resembled nothing more than a passionate Democratic rally. Henry Clay hoped to be the Whig candidate (a young Illinois lawyer in attendance, Abraham Lincoln, pronounced him the “beau ideal of a statesman”), but because Clay was a Mason, the Antimasons would not vote for him. The nomination instead went to Old Tip, William Henry Harrison. His vice-presidential ticket-balancer was Virginia Senator John Tyler.