Military Career

The Spoils System

Throughout their campaign, Jackson’s supporters had promised to alter the status quo in the federal government by enacting a policy called “rotation in office.” They claimed it would remove entrenched elites who had come to regard their government posts as sinecures. In his inaugural address, Jackson emphasized “the task of reform” as necessary to stop appointment practices that “have placed or continued power in unfaithful or incompetent hands.” According to some scholars, rotation in office had merit by opening the door to ordinary Americans to participate in their government’s functions. And though turnover in the bureaucracy was higher than usual under Jackson, replacements were not as extensive as critics claimed. About a thousand people—a figure representing roughly 10% of the federal workforce—lost their government jobs and were replaced by Jackson loyalists.

Nevertheless, explanations about streamlining the government while overturning sclerotic bastions of privilege were belied by Jackson supporter William L. Marcy, a New York senator, who described the process with the simple declaration that “to the victor belongs the spoils.” Jackson’s antagonists took up the phrase to denounce “rotation in office” as a “spoils system,” but all parties used patronage for political purposes when they gained power. Indeed, in the half-century following Jackson’s presidency, the process of encouraging supporters with promises of office became routine, and office-seekers swarmed incoming administrations for slots on the government payroll. Meanwhile, turning people out of office to combat corruption never worked as touted. Petty venality and at least one case of spectacular misconduct riddled the Jackson administration. Samuel Swartwout, a Jackson stalwart, used his position as Collector of the Port of New York to steal more than one million dollars before fleeing to Europe to escape prosecution.

Cabinets

From the outset, Jackson’s cabinet appointments gave rise to criticism. In the main, it was undeserved. Pennsylvanian Samuel D. Ingham was a paper manufacturer who had served in the House of Representatives, and Jackson appointed him to head the Treasury Department because of his work in 1828 campaign. Some thought Ingham unqualified for the post, but he performed adequately. John Branch, North Carolina’s former governor and at the time its U.S. senator, would prove a competent Secretary of the Navy, and Georgian John Macpherson Berrien’s legal talent made him a suitable attorney general. Critics who complained that these men were not nationally prominent seemed eager to substitute celebrity for competence as a qualification for cabinet service. Otherwise, the award of the State Department to New Yorker Martin Van Buren angered southerners still smarting over Van Buren’s role in promoting the Tariff of 1828, but it was also Van Buren’s close relationship with Tennessean John Henry Eaton that portended trouble on several levels. Perhaps the most dubious of Jackson’s choices was his appointment of Eaton as Secretary of War. The move smacked of cronyism: Eaton was Jackson’s first biographer and a member of the Nashville Junto. But he was also widely disliked for reasons ranging from his involvement in Tennessee factional politics to his support of protective tariffs. John McLean, the postmaster general in the Adams administration, could have remained in that job, but he opposed the removal of capable men to make way for Jackson loyalists. Jackson appointed McLean to the Supreme Court soon after the inauguration, and Kentuckian William T. Barry was made postmaster general.

“This,” said one acerbic observer about Jackson’s cabinet, “is the Millennium of the Minnows.” Even supremely gifted statesmen, however, would have found service in the administration a challenge. Jackson had promised “to select men whose diligence and talents will ensure in their respective stations able and faithful cooperation.” But the effort to reward supporters from a diverse and sometimes conflicted coalition hobbled the cabinet from the start, and the bitter rivalry between Martin Van Buren and Vice-President John C. Calhoun gradually divided it into quarreling factions. President Jackson found their disagreements distracting at first and then exasperating. A scandal stemming from John Eaton’s marriage intensified disputes and led to the first reorganization of the cabinet in the spring of 1831, but the subsequent controversy over the second Bank of the United States continued to unsettle the cabinet’s functions and caused additional changes in personnel. By the end of his eight years in office, Jackson had appointed four secretaries of state, five secretaries of the treasury, two secretaries of war, three secretaries of the navy, three attorney generals, and two postmaster generals. As with many aspects of the Jackson presidency, the high turnover in these executive departments was unprecedented.

Stories about cabinet contretemps led to rumors that Jackson was relying on an unofficial entourage of close associates to set policy. Critics of the administration eventually called this supposed shadow government the “Kitchen Cabinet,” but many historians doubt it existed, even as a semi-formal body. At most, they see it as an intimate circle of friends who provided Andrew Jackson solace and counsel during the turbulence caused by his official cabinet’s perpetual disagreements. The group of men that critics labeled a “Kitchen Cabinet” never resembled an institutional entity. Its membership was quite fluid with those in its circle wielding growing or ebbing influence according to changing circumstances. Some in Jackson’s cabinet, such as Eaton and Van Buren and later Roger Taney, were part of the “Kitchen Cabinet,” while it also included newspaper editors (such as Francis Preston Blair, Amos Kendall, and Isaac Hill) or political operatives (such as William B. Lewis and John Overton).

Nevertheless, at least one member of Jackson’s official cabinet believed there was an informal one with significant influence. Levi Woodbury, who served as Jackson’s second secretary of the navy and his final secretary of the treasury, confided to his journal that Jackson “shuns consulting all, as he is so military & dislikes councils of War & Cabinets.” Woodbury noted how even after Jackson had reorganized his troublesome first cabinet, he consulted subsequent ones only because “public opinion fav[or]ed Cabinet meetings & [they were] urged on him by us.”

The Petticoat Affair

Secretary of War John Eaton’s marriage to Margaret Timberlake, the widow of a Navy purser, caused a controversy that rapidly grew serious enough to preoccupy the president and disrupt the capital’s social interactions. (Her friends never called Margaret Timberlake “Peggy,” but she would become known to history under that diminutive.) A Washington innkeeper’s daughter, her relationship with Eaton before her husband’s death had caused gossip. Their marriage on January 1, 1829, came soon after her husband’s death, and the timing along with Eaton’s appointment to the cabinet magnified the problem. Vice President John C. Calhoun’s wife Floride (pronounced “Florida”) refused to visit or receive the Eatons. The wives of other cabinet secretaries along with other prominent Washington hostesses did the same and insisted that their husbands follow suit. As the so-called Petticoat Affair became the controversy known as the “Eaton Malaria,” social antagonisms even affected President Jackson’s family when Emily Donelson, serving as Jackson’s official hostess, made plain that she did not approve of Margaret Eaton.

Rachel Jackson’s ordeal made Andrew Jackson particularly sympathetic to Margaret Eaton’s plight. He blamed Rachel’s death on scandal mongering during the presidential campaign and consequently defended Mrs. Eaton with a resolve that was gallant but hardly prudent. He ordered his cabinet secretaries to accept Mrs. Eaton, even at the hazard of their wives’ displeasure. He sent Emily Donelson, whom he adored, and her husband, Andrew Jackson Donelson, one of his most trusted advisers as well as his nephew, home to Tennessee because they refused to comply.

The controversy was more significant than a squabble over social propriety. It became a part of the Van Buren–Calhoun rivalry when the secretary of state was able to exploit Jackson’s displeasure with Calhoun over the treatment of the Eatons. As a widower, Van Buren could join Jackson in championing the Eatons without crossing an angry spouse. He thus boosted his standing as a gentleman with Andrew Jackson while dismantling Calhoun’s reputation as a loyal lieutenant. Van Buren persuaded Eaton to resign on April 7, 1831, and Van Buren followed suit two days later, though both stayed in place until Jackson named their successors in May. Most important, however, their gestures gave Jackson the excuse to reorganize his cabinet, which resulted in the ouster of Calhoun’s allies Samuel Ingham, John Branch, and John Berrien. These three left their posts reluctantly and not without additional controversy. Reacting to public reports of their behavior and the reasons for it, Eaton called them out as cads and cowards and even challenged Samuel Ingham to a duel. Ingham icily refused the challenge, but the tawdry conclusion of the dispute undermined public confidence in the stability of Jackson’s presidency.

Biographers and historians have weighed the enduring significance of the Petticoat Affair from different perspectives. In a 1931 biography of Margaret Eaton (Peggy Eaton: Democracy’s Mistress), Queena Pollack believed Margaret revealed the tensions between the classes in Washington society that made her the victim of haughty capital elites. In a similar vein, John Marszalek’s study, The Petticoat Affair: Manners, Mutiny, and Sex in Andrew Jackson’s White House (2000), regarded Margaret Eaton as a pioneer for feminist activism who fought against class and status as essential for participation in society and public discourse. Taking a contrary view, Daniel Walker Howe, in his monumental examination of the period, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (2007), saw the women who objected to Margaret Eaton as the vanguard of a unique type of American feminism. Their rejection of Europe’s indifference to casual immorality promoted a strict code of conduct to ensure national virtue and public rectitude.

Van Buren versus Calhoun

Whatever its social and cultural implications, the Eaton controversy’s most notable political consequence was its pretext for ousting Calhoun from the administration while more securely installing Van Buren in Andrew Jackson’s inner circle. Rather than Floride Calhoun ruining her husband’s career, Calhoun’s actions, especially those while in service as President James Monroe’s secretary of war, had already made him suspect in Andrew Jackson’s estimation. In the aftermath of Jackson’s 1818 invasion of Florida, Calhoun had recommended punishing Jackson for his unauthorized act, a position that Calhoun later tried to hide. By the time of Jackson’s presidency, though, Calhoun’s behavior had become something of an open secret. And though Calhoun as John Quincy Adams’s vice president had broken with the Adams administration to support Jackson as early as 1825, Jackson’s closest advisers never trusted the South Carolinian. Van Buren doubted Calhoun’s loyalty not only to Jackson but also to the American Union when southern anger over the Tariff of 1828 compelled Calhoun to abandon his earlier nationalism. He adopted increasingly pro-South positions that favored the region’s economic and political interests, particularly those related to slavery. Before the election of 1828, Calhoun drafted the “South Carolina Exposition and Protest,” a pamphlet espousing the doctrine of nullification as a way for a state to defy federal law. Calhoun tried to keep his authorship of this tract secret, but by 1830, Jackson knew the truth of the matter, likely because Martin Van Buren had revealed it to him.

The break between Jackson and Calhoun became public at the Jefferson Birthday Dinner of 1830 when the two exchanged hostile toasts. Jackson raised a glass while glaring at his vice president to declare: “Our federal union: it must be preserved!” Calhoun answered, “The Union: next to our liberty, most dear.” The tensions between the two were further strained when Calhoun tried to counter the president’s criticisms by publishing correspondence, an act that reflected poorly on him. Against the backdrop of the controversy over Margaret Eaton, the cabinet reorganization clearly defined the antagonists as Calhoun and Van Buren, and an outright contest between them ensued. Calhoun as the presiding officer of the Senate blocked Jackson’s plan to make Van Buren minister to Great Britain. Instead of thwarting Van Buren, he opened the way for Van Buren to replace him as vice president on Jackson’s 1832 ticket. In the aftermath, Van Buren became Jackson’s chosen successor for the presidency in 1836.

Indian Removal

The most controversial policy of Andrew Jackson’s presidency was Indian removal, which has tarnished his reputation among both historians and subsequent generations of Americans. Even at the time, Indian removal’s humanitarian and legal implications troubled many citizens who objected to uprooting large native populations and marching them to alien climes and dangerous lands. The treks of these people could be grueling and deadly in and of themselves. The Cherokee route to the West would be dubbed the “Trail of Tears” because almost a third of the Cherokee nation perished on it.

Indian removal stemmed from the complaints of southeastern states that saw Indians as obstacles to settlement. The states saw the federal government as obstructing state governments’ plans to take possession of Indian lands. As Jackson sought the presidency, part of his appeal in those states was the near certainty that he would push for a program to relocate Indian tribes west of the Mississippi River. Shortly after he assumed office in 1829, Jackson used part of his first annual message (the equivalent of today’s State of the Union address) to describe the removal of native populations as a humanitarian initiative. Jackson insisted that the government’s decades-old program of assimilation—the policy since George Washington’s administration in the 1790s—had made the Indians vulnerable to white hostility while jeopardizing the survival of their culture. Isolating Indians from white interference by resettling them on western lands, explained Jackson, would provide them the opportunity both to sustain their traditions and to practice them unmolested.

Though many whites and almost all Indians rejected this reasoning, Jackson’s supporters in Congress secured the passage of the Indian Removal Act following a series of fierce debates. The margin of victory for the measure was narrow in the Senate (28–19) and razor thin in the House (102–97). Jackson signed removal into law on May 30, 1830. It authorized the negotiation of treaties, particularly with the “Five Civilized Tribes” of the Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, and Cherokee tribes, who lived primarily in Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. Such negotiated agreements could portray resettlement as voluntary, but treaties only partly masked the reality of coercion. The truth emerged when segments of the Creek nation and almost all Seminoles refused to submit. The Second Seminole War in Florida was to be among America’s most protracted military conflicts, stretching beyond Jackson’s second term and ending with many Seminoles remaining in Florida.

The Cherokees’ sincere efforts to adopt white culture made their fate especially poignant. They lived in orderly communities that mirrored the customs as well as the architecture of white neighborhoods; they adopted a native alphabet, published a newspaper, and some embraced Christianity through the teachings of resident missionaries. When confronted with the plan to evict them from their homes, the Cherokees did not take up arms but sought relief in the courts. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), however, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that because Indian nations were dependent entities, they had no standing before the judiciary. The Court, therefore, lacked jurisdiction to exempt the Cherokees from Georgia law. More promising was the case arising from Georgia’s use of onerous regulations to diminish the prominent missionary presence in the Cherokee nation. Worcester v. Georgia (1832) concerned Georgia’s arrest and conviction of Samuel Worcester, an American citizen, for his refusal to submit to a law requiring non-Indians residing on Indian lands to obtain a state license. Worcester had clear standing before the Court, and Marshall’s decision voided his conviction under the claim that states had no criminal jurisdiction within Indian nations. It was in response to this ruling that Andrew Jackson was alleged to have said, “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it!” The statement is almost certainly apocryphal, but the Jackson administration reflected its sentiment. Perhaps fearing a disastrous clash between the judicial and executive branches of the government, Marshall did not press for the enforcement of his decision. Consequently, nothing came of the Cherokee court challenges, and the ruling in Worcester did not impede the government’s removal policy.

The consequences of Indian removal make it impossible to defend, even conceding the most charitable judgment of it as well-meaning but misguided. Arguments over submission or resistance to removal fractured Indian tribal councils. Congressional debates ended old friendships, shattered old coalitions, and were a precursor to wider public revulsion over the rigors of many grueling treks of which the Trail of Tears is just the most notorious. The human toll on Indian populations was significant, and the blemish on a nation that prided itself on fair dealing and honest accord was conspicuous and shameful.

Vetoes

On May 27, 1830, President Jackson vetoed congressional legislation to invest federal funds in a Kentucky company planning to build a road from Lexington to Maysville, a distance of fewer than seventy miles (approximately 112 kilometers). Jackson argued that because the road would fall within the state of Kentucky, it was wrong to use federal money for an entirely local project. Critics countered that the Maysville road was a segment in the interstate Cumberland Road, a truly national project. Also, Maysville’s location on the Ohio River made it part of an immense commercial network dependent on riverine navigation including many interior states. The veto was popular in northern states that had funded their own road and canal construction projects as well as with southern states concerned in general about the expanding power of the federal government.

More significant than the effect on the Maysville Road project, though, was Andrew Jackson’s novel application of the veto in general. American dissatisfaction with the veto as an instrument of executive power dated from the colonial period when royal governors had broadly used their authority to strike down legislation and discipline colonial assemblies. The feeling persisted during and after the American Revolution. By the time the Constitutional Convention met in 1787, only Massachusetts and New York had given their governors the veto, but the delegates to the Constitutional Convention used these two states, especially Massachusetts, as the model for the executive’s veto power in Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution. Beginning with George Washington, American presidents had used the power sparingly. The first six administrations during the first forty years of constitutional governance vetoed only ten bills. Washington vetoed two bills in eight years; John Adams and Thomas Jefferson did not strike down any legislation; James Madison vetoed seven bills in eight years; James Monroe vetoed only one bill; and John Quincy Adams, like his father and Jefferson, did not veto anything.

Presidential restraint with vetoes had almost always limited them to legislation the executive deemed unconstitutional. In this fashion, the veto functioned as another check on the potential for legislative excess in the same way that judicial review did. In the ten vetoes before Jackson’s presidency, only two occasions slightly departed from the routine of a president exclusively citing constitutional objections. George Washington vetoed a bill that cut military spending because he thought it would jeopardize national security. James Madison vetoed a bill establishing a national bank because he thought the institution would be ineffectual. Otherwise, presidents did not veto legislation over policy disagreements because to do so would have thwarted the will of the people as expressed by their congressional representatives.

Jackson’s presidency was unique in both the number of vetoes and his justifications for them. He vetoed twelve bills over his eight years in office, more than all his predecessors combined. He also cited his judgment on policy as the grounds for striking down legislation he found disagreeable. The most obvious instance of this was Jackson’s veto of a bill rechartering the Second Bank of the United States (the BUS).

The Bank Veto

Jackson was ambivalent about banks and paper currency in general. He believed banks tended to favor the rich and exploit the poor while paper currency encouraged reckless spending and ruinous debt. He had no plans, however, to assail the BUS when he assumed office. It was unpopular with many of his supporters who blamed it for the economic Panic of 1819 and the depression that followed, but financial circles uniformly praised the BUS’s performance under the leadership of Nicholas Biddle. The Supreme Court had affirmed the bank’s constitutionality in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), and by the late 1820s, the BUS had established sound credit and a stable currency.

The BUS was not only politically popular but also economically vital, which counseled against any attempt to undermine it. Jackson’s advisers cautioned him to move slowly, if at all, especially in the absence of a viable institutional alternative. In his first Annual Message on December 8, 1829, Jackson actually spoke approvingly of the BUS and Biddle, although with a caveat about his abiding concern over the bank’s constitutionality. The BUS continued to enjoy strong support in Congress, but within the administration Jackson found himself divided between those who praised the bank as a crucial part of the economy and those who characterized it as corrupt and manipulative. The president gradually embraced the latter view and came to believe that the bank’s charter, set to expire in 1836, should not be renewed. His attitude was evident in his second Annual Message on December 7, 1830, which contained more strongly stated criticisms of the bank as unconstitutional. These sentiments and the emergence of a concerted effort in Congress to undermine the bank’s legitimacy alarmed its supporters.

The cabinet reorganization caused by the controversy over Margaret Eaton brought in a new secretary of the treasury, Louis McLane, who was positively disposed to the BUS, as was the new secretary of state, Edward Livingston. McLane even took the lead in trying to satisfy Jackson’s objections to the BUS with a compromise he worked out with Nicholas Biddle. Apprehensive that the bank’s popularity would force him to consent to recharter during his bid for reelection, Jackson insisted that bank proponents would not move on the matter until after the 1832 election.

Despite McLane’s efforts, Jackson’s anti-bank advisers, especially his new attorney general Roger B. Taney, pushed him to include criticisms of the bank in his Annual Message of December 6, 1831. The move coincided with Jacksonian attacks on McLane in Congress. These events convinced the bank’s supporters to seek recharter before the 1832 election, a move sure to be interpreted as bad faith by the president. Recharter was also tied to the presidential nomination of Kentucky senator Henry Clay, a stalwart champion of the BUS, who sought to make the bank a central issue of the election. Clay’s supporters helped to eliminate conciliatory gestures in the recharter bill with the aim of forcing Jackson to veto it. Clay was certain that such a veto would politically damage Jackson.

The move to recharter the BUS began in earnest on January 9, 1832. It commenced the first phase of what would later be called “the Bank War.” After a lengthy and heated congressional debate, recharter passed both houses of Congress in the summer of 1832. Jackson vetoed the bill on July 10, 1832.

For the message accompanying the veto, Jackson relied heavily on his unofficial advisers, particularly the journalist Amos Kendall, who drafted a message that criticized the bank as a privileged institution advancing the interests of elites over those of ordinary people. The appeal to class envy was a remarkable shift in the tone of presidential state papers. The veto message claimed that because the president represented all the American people, the power of the people as centered in the executive did not compel deference to Supreme Court decisions or the acceptance of congressional legislation that the people, as represented by the president, found repugnant for social, political, or economic reasons.

The executive veto had always placed the president at the conclusion of the legislative process, but Jackson’s claim to such extensive authority moved the president to the center of that process in all its stages. Congress had to take into account the president’s opinion when considering legislation. Moving forward in the face of presidential disapproval risked a veto that would require a super majority of two-thirds to override and enact legislation. It meant the mere threat of a veto could cause the radical alteration or even the absolute elimination of legislative proposals.

Jackson’s political opponents loudly objected to this cavalier assumption of unprecedented power, the beginning of their charge that such executive usurpation was the behavior of a king. Those objections helped to coalesce opposition into a new political party, the Whigs, so named because their opposition to “King Andrew” was seen as comparable to the loyal opposition to the British Crown in the eighteenth century. Yet, Clay’s calculations about the injurious nature of the bank veto proved wrong. With its appeal to the rights of ordinary people against interests portrayed as manipulative and predatory, the veto was popular and did not hurt Jackson politically in the least. Indeed, it was central factor in securing Jackson’s reelection in the autumn of 1832.