It is the people, and they alone, who have a right to complain when a bad officer is substituted for a good one. He who is removed has the same means of obtaining a living that are enjoyed by the millions who never held office. The proposed limitation would destroy the idea of property now so generally connected with official station, and although individual distress may be sometimes produced, it would, by promoting that rotation which constitutes a leading principle in the republican creed, give healthful action to the system.
Andrew Jackson. Jackson Announces his Policy of Rotation in Office, Jackson announced his new policy by vetoing a bill to aid the Maysville Road in Kentucky in A string of similar vetoes followed, essentially halting federal internal improvement spending.
Reversing himself on the tariff, Jackson renounced protection in and endorsed a reduction in rates. Invoking Jeffersonian precedent, he urged a return to simple, frugal, minimal government. At the same time, Jackson reproved the increasingly strident Southern sectional opposition to the tariff headed by his own vice president, John C.
Calhoun of South Carolina. Radical South Carolinians blamed the tariff for all their economic woes and misfortunes. They denounced it as an unconstitutional exercise of congressional power, a measure to illegitimately channel wealth from South to North under the guise of an import tax.
Drawing on the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions against the Alien and Sedition Acts in , Calhoun fashioned an argument that an individual state, acting through a formal convention, could interpose its authority to declare null and void any federal law that it deemed to violate the Constitution. Jackson thought this nullification doctrine treasonous and absurd.
At a political dinner in he stamped his disapproval on it by staring at Calhoun and toasting, "Our federal Union: It must be preserved. Jackson was already becoming estranged from Calhoun over a simmering Washington scandal. Jackson's secretary of war, John Henry Eaton, was an old army comrade, Jackson's his campaign biographer, and a Tennessee neighbor. He was the President's one personal confidante in a cabinet made up of near-strangers.
Just before the inauguration, Eaton had married Margaret O'Neale Timberlake, the vivacious daughter of a Washington hotelier. Scandalous stories circulated about "Peggy" O'Neale, whose first husband, a purser in the Navy, had died abroad under mysterious circumstances not long before her marriage to Eaton.
Rumor said that he committed suicide over her dalliance with Eaton. Cabinet wives, including Calhoun's wife Floride, regarded Peggy with abhorrence and conspicuously shunned her. In the snubbing of Mrs. Eaton, Jackson saw the kind of vicious persecution that he believed had hounded his own Rachel to her death. He also believed he spied a plot to drive out Eaton from his cabinet, isolate him among strangers, and control his administration.
The master of the plot, Jackson came to decide, was Calhoun. He was also shown evidence that during the controversy over his Florida incursion back in , Calhoun had criticized him in Monroe's cabinet while publicly posturing as his defender.
Jackson now accused Calhoun of treachery, initiating an angry correspondence that ended with the severing of social relations between the two. The Eaton scandal cleaved Jackson's own household. Eaton, and Emily's husband, Jackson's nephew and private secretary Andrew Jackson Donelson, backed her up. The one cabinet officer who stood apart from the snubbing was a man with no wife to contend with—Secretary of State Martin Van Buren of New York, a widower.
Jackson was drawn to Van Buren both by his courtliness to Peggy Eaton and his policy views. Van Buren wished to return to the minimalist, strict constructionist governing philosophy of the old Jeffersonian party. In practical political terms, he sought to rebuild the coalition of "planters and plain republicans"—put concretely, an alliance of the South with New York and Pennsylvania—that had sustained Jefferson.
Van Buren opposed the American System, but on broad philosophical rather than narrow sectional grounds.
As Jackson separated from Calhoun, he became more intimate with Van Buren. By , the Eaton imbroglio threatened to paralyze the administration. Eaton and Van Buren created a way out: they resigned, giving Jackson an occasion to demand the resignations of the other secretaries and appoint a whole new cabinet. To reward Van Buren, Jackson named him as minister to Great Britain, the highest post in the American diplomatic service.
The nomination came before the Senate, where Vice-President Calhoun, on an arranged tie vote, cast the deciding vote against it. Van Buren, who had already assumed his station abroad, came home as a political martyr, Jackson's choice for vice-president in , and his heir apparent to the presidency. As Van Buren rose and Calhoun fell, the tariff controversy mounted to a crisis. Congress passed a new tariff in that reduced some rates but continued the protectionist principle.
Some Southerners claimed this as a sign of progress, but South Carolinians saw it as reason to abandon hope in Washington. In November, a state convention declared the tariff unconstitutional and hence null and void. South Carolina's legislature followed up with measures to block the collection of federal custom revenues at the state's ports and to defend the state with arms against federal incursion.
Jackson responded on two fronts. He urged Congress to reduce the tariff further, but he also asked for strengthened authority to enforce the revenue laws.
Privately, and perhaps for calculated political effect, he talked about marching an army into South Carolina and hanging Calhoun. In December, he issued a ringing official proclamation against nullification. Drafted largely by Secretary of State Edward Livingston, the document questioned Carolinians' obsession with the tariff, reminded them of their patriotic heritage, eviscerated the constitutional theory behind nullification, and warned against taking this fatal step: "Be not deceived by names.
Disunion by armed force is treason. Are you really ready to incur its guilt? Henry Clay, leader of the congressional opposition to Jackson and stalwart of the American System, joined in odd alliance with John C. Calhoun, who had resigned his lame-duck vice-presidency for a seat in the Senate. They fashioned a bill to reduce the tariff in a series of stages over nine years. Early in , Congress passed this Compromise Tariff and also a "force bill" to enforce the revenue laws.
Though the Clay-Calhoun forces sought to deny Jackson credit for the settlement, he was fully satisfied with the result. South Carolina, claiming victory, rescinded its nullification of the tariff but nullified the force bill in a final gesture of principled defiance. The Compromise of brought an end to tariff agitation until the s. First with internal improvements, then with the tariff, the American System had been essentially stymied. The congressional Clay-Calhoun alliance foreshadowed a convergence of all Jackson's enemies into a new opposition party.
The issue that sealed this coalition, solidified Jackson's own following, and dominated his second term as President was the Second Bank of the United States.
The Bank of the United States was a quasi-public corporation chartered by Congress to manage the federal government's finances and provide a sound national currency. Headquartered in Philadelphia with branches throughout the states, it was the country's only truly national financial institution.
The federal government owned one-fifth of the stock and the President of the United States appointed one-fifth of the directors. Like other banks chartered by state legislatures, the Bank lent for profit and issued paper currency backed by specie reserves. Its notes were federal legal tender. By law, it was also the federal government's own banker, arranging its loans and storing, transferring, and disbursing its funds. The Bank's national reach and official status gave it enormous leverage over the state banks and over the country's supply of money and credit.
Opposition to it was one of the founding tenets of the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican party. That party allowed the Bank to expire when its twenty-year charter ran out in But the government's financial misadventures in the War of forced a reconsideration. In , Congress chartered the Second Bank, again for twenty years. Imprudent lending and corrupt management brought the Second Bank into deep disrepute during the speculative boom-and-bust cycle that culminated in the Panic of Calls arose for revocation of the charter.
But the astute stewardship of new Bank president Nicholas Biddle did much to repair its reputation in the s. By , when Jackson was first elected, the Bank had ceased to be controversial. Indeed, most informed observers deemed it indispensable. Startling his own supporters, Jackson attacked the Bank in his very first message to Congress in Biddle attempted to conciliate him, but Jackson's opposition to renewing the charter seemed immovable.
He was convinced that the Bank was not only unconstitutional—as Jefferson and his followers had long maintained—but that its concentrated financial power represented a dire threat to popular liberty. They calculated that Jackson would not dare issue a veto on the eve of the election; if he did, they would make an issue of it in the campaign. The recharter bill duly passed Congress and on July 10, Jackson vetoed it. In certain respects, Jackson was truly a self-made man.
Born in in a frontier region along the North and South Carolina border, he was the first president to be born in a log cabin. His father, a poor farmer from Northern Ireland, died two weeks before his birth, while his mother and two brothers died during the American Revolution. At the age of 13, Jackson volunteered to fight in the American Revolution. As a land speculator, cotton planter, and attorney, he accumulated a large personal fortune and acquired more than slaves.
Expanding the Powers of the Presidency In office, Jackson greatly enhanced the power and prestige of the presidency. While each member of Congress represented a specific regional constituency, only the president, Jackson declared, represented all the people of the United States.
Jackson convinced many Americans that their votes mattered.
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