Congressional Giants. J. Michael Martinez

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Jackson, and he never forgave his political enemies, including Henry Clay, for what he believed was their role in triggering her death. Clay had not been directly involved in the campaign to smear Rachel Jackson, but he had acquiesced as the innuendo circulated.

      Andrew Jackson won a decisive victory in 1828, sweeping President Adams and his secretary of state out of office. Fearing the frontiersman’s uncouth ways and his populist appeal, Clay was dismayed to see Jackson victorious. He believed that the old general was unqualified and represented a clear danger to the republic. Without high office to support his opposition, however, Clay had no choice. He returned to private life, breeding horses at his estate, Ashland, near Lexington, Kentucky.²⁹

      Within a few years, however, he reentered political life. In 1831, the state legislature returned Clay to the U.S. Senate after an absence of more than two decades. He would serve from 1831 until 1842, and then again from 1849 until 1852. During his term in the 1830s, he vehemently opposed Jackson’s policies, which he believed to be ruinous, especially when the president sought to dismantle Clay’s American system.³⁰

      Their confrontation came to a head regarding the renewal of the charter for the Second Bank of the United States. The bank was supposed to be rechartered in 1836, but Nicholas Biddle, the bank’s president, pushed for an early renewal with the expectation that Jackson’s concerns for reelection would temper his well-known antipathy toward the bank. Congress passed a bill to renew the charter, and the president vetoed it. In his veto message, Jackson explained that he had acted “to make it compatible with justice, with sound policy, or with the Constitution of our country.” He ordered his treasury secretary, William J. Duane, to remove federal funds from the national bank and send them to Jackson’s pet banks. When Duane refused, the president pressured him to resign. Duane’s successor, Roger B. Taney, was far more compliant.

      Clay and his allies were furious. “We are in the midst of a revolution, hitherto bloodless, but rapidly tending toward a total change of the pure republican character of the government, and to the concentration of power in the hand of one man,” Clay said as he introduced a resolution in the Senate to censure Jackson. “The powers of Congress are paralyzed, except when exerted in conformity with his will, by frequent and extraordinary exercise of the executive veto, not anticipated by the founders of our Constitution, and not practiced by any of the predecessors of the present chief magistrate.” The Senate complied with Clay’s request, passing the censure, which amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist. In 1837, the Democrats gained control of the chamber and expunged the record. For all practical purposes, the censure had no effect, but Jackson later mused that as he retired from the presidency, his only major regret was in not shooting Henry Clay or hanging John C. Calhoun.³¹

      Jackson was sixty-five years old in 1832, and his health was declining. Many observers believed he would not seek a second term. With John Quincy Adams’s defeat in the 1828 election, Henry Clay had become the National Republicans’ leading figure. He looked to the 1832 election as yet another opportunity to ascend into the presidency. If he could succeed Jackson, perhaps he could undo some of Old Hickory’s more damaging policies.

      Jackson surprised the field of potential candidates when he announced that he would seek a second term. The 1828 election had involved a splintering of the remnants of Jefferson’s old Democratic-Republicans. Four years later, the dissolution was complete, and new factions emerged. Jackson’s Democrats, formerly a loose association of pro-Jackson men, now formed into a recognizable political party favoring Jackson’s policies: opposition to the national bank, forcible removal of Native Americans from land in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, and opposition to proposals nullifying national laws.

      Jackson’s opponents were disorganized. The Anti-Masonic Party, created to fight the spread of Freemasons, nominated a former attorney general, William Wirt, for president. The so-called Independent Party (the Nullifiers) nominated Virginia Governor John Floyd. Clay captured the National Republican nomination, but he worried that the presence of so many parties and candidates would allow Jackson to win a second term. He was right to be worried. When the votes were tallied, Jackson won 286 electoral votes, carrying 26 states, while Clay earned 49 electoral votes and carried 6 states. Wirt carried Vermont (7 electoral votes) and Floyd carried South Carolina (11 electoral votes).³²

      He had known disappointment in the presidential arena, but this loss was especially poignant because he tasted defeat at the hands of a bitter foe. Still smarting from the election, Clay settled back into his Senate career. He immediately faced a long-festering nullification crisis.

      When Congress enacted the Tariff of 1828, southerners were upset because the measure appeared to protect northern factories at the expense of southern agricultural exports. Denouncing the “tariff of abominations,” southerners claimed the right to nullify national tariff laws and refused to enforce them. If the administration enforced the laws, southerners reserved the right to secede from the Union. Another tariff, enacted in 1832, only added to southerners’ anger. Although President Jackson was born and reared in the South and purported to be a champion of state rights, he would not acknowledge the right of a state or any of its citizens to nullify a law or secede from the Union. He promised to send troops into the South to enforce the law, if necessary. He would hang traitors, he said.

      Henry Clay favored high tariffs and he recoiled from any talk of nullification or secession, but he feared that Jackson’s bellicose rhetoric only worsened the rift between North and South. Reaching out to John C. Calhoun, a South Carolinian who had started his career as a nationalist but appeared to be moving into the state rights camp, Clay again relied on his penchant for compromise to broker a deal. It appeared to be an unbridgeable chasm. For Clay to step away from a protective tariff after he had spent so much of his political career talking up the need to protect American manufacturing was almost unthinkable. Even more unimaginable was the notion that Calhoun, a stern man of principle, unyielding where the interests of the South were concerned, would agree to a compromise. Yet, something had to be done to cut the Gordian knot.³³

      The Compromise of 1833, coupled with the Force Bill allowing the president to enforce tariff collection, eased the crisis. Although the compromise tariff was similar to the tariff of 1832, it provided that all tariff rates above 20 percent would be reduced by a tenth every two years, with the final reductions amounting to 20 percent—the original rate—in 1842. The measure pleased everyone, and no one, as compromise measures often do. Southerners could claim that they successfully reduced tariff rates, albeit gradually, and northerners could brag that they refused to kowtow to southerners’ insistence on immediate tariff relief, and they were not intimidated by talk of nullification or secession.³⁴

      

      Despite his preference for compromise on large questions that might wreck the Union, Clay remained as fiercely partisan as ever. During an anti-Jackson speech in 1834, he likened his opposition to Jackson’s monarchical tendencies to the Whigs, a British political party famous for its criticism of monarchy. With the National Republicans essentially obsolete, Clay’s supporters gravitated to the notion of a Whig Party, and so they brought it to life.³⁵

      During these years, Clay contemplated retirement from elective office. He was almost sixty—a greatly advanced age at a time when life expectancy hovered around the late thirties or early forties—and he had suffered a series of personal misfortunes, including the death of his daughter, Anna. In fact, Clay was so despondent that he chose not to run for the presidency in 1836. Because Jackson was retiring and his hand-picked successor, Vice President Martin Van Buren, was hardly a formidable opponent, Clay might have eked out a victory in 1836, but he could not bring himself to enter the race.³⁶

      In his absence, the Whigs failed to unite behind a single presidential candidate. General William Henry Harrison ran in all free states except Massachusetts, as well as in the slave states of Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky. Henry Lawson White, formerly a Jackson man, now realigned СКАЧАТЬ