A Republic No More. Jay Cost

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      In his three-volume biography of Jackson, Remini sets up his entrance into national politics as a tonic for the “Age of Corruption” we have been discussing. He argues that Old Hickory saw himself fundamentally as a reformer, in the mold of Jefferson and the old guard Republicans (who by that point fancied themselves as the “Quids,” or a third force aligned against the remaining Federalists and the National Republicans), carving out the rot that had grown within the institutions of government. Indeed, examining Jackson’s two most noteworthy policy messages—his vetoes of the Maysville Road spending bill and of the recharter for the Second Bank—it is clear that he saw himself as a Republican committed to limited, constitutional government as a bulwark against corruption.

      Yet a fair examination of the historical record demonstrates that, while Jackson may have been reacting to the venality of his age, he approached the office of president with a level of capriciousness that had not been seen before his day, and perhaps not after, either. As we shall see, Jackson’s sins against the republican virtues he presumed to defend were certainly greater than those that got Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton impeached, and his crimes against the Native Americans were far worse than anything Richard Nixon ever did.

      Jackson often comes across as a kind of American caesar. Deeply committed to the rule of law and the empowerment of the common folk, he nevertheless conflated, time and again, those virtues with his own interests. Indeed, as historian Daniel Walker Howe ably demonstrates, “It was his personal authority, rather than that of the federal government or even the presidential office, which Jackson zealously maintained.”⁵⁰

      His character was fully evident well before he ever assumed the presidency. His past deeds included holding the city of New Orleans under martial law until well after news of the Treaty of Ghent was made known; extorting fraudulent treaties from the Native Americans, in which the latter were forced to give up tens of thousands of acres; disobeying orders by attacking Spanish positions in Florida, then declaring martial law; and even profiting from his military adventures (his family and friends received advance notice of his Florida conquest, with an advisory that land prices in Florida would soon be going upward).⁵¹ As chief executive of the United States from 1829 to 1837, Jackson’s record does not so much justify his self-perception as a Republican reformer combating corrupt practices, but rather portrays a fundamentally lawless ruler using corruption to combat (equally corrupt) politicians whose interests diverged from his own.

      At the core of the republican ideology is the idea that similarly situated people should be treated similarly; deviation from this norm suggests the existence of corruption, be it technically legal or not. And on that measure Jackson was enormously deficient, in small ways and large. On the small end of the scale was his hypocrisy on internal improvements. In the statement accompanying his veto of the Maysville Road—a favored project of his political rival Clay—Jackson worries that the Constitution did not permit such an expenditure, which “concedes to the government an unlimited power.”⁵² Instead, he claims to favor only internal improvements based on the principle that they benefit the nation as a whole. Otherwise, the country ran the risk of

      promot(ing) a mischievous and corrupting influence upon elections by holding out to the people the fallacious hope that the success of a certain candidate will make navigable their neighboring creek or river, bring commerce to their doors, and increase the value of their property. It thus favors combinations to squander the treasure of the country upon a multitude of local objects, as fatal to just legislation as to the purity of public men.⁵³

      If ever there was a fair articulation of the Republican concern about internal improvements, this was it, but Jackson failed to live up to his own rhetoric. The fact of the matter is that government spending on internal improvements skyrocketed during Jackson’s tenure, reaching an average cost of nearly $0.13 per person, more than any other president in the antebellum period.⁵⁴ And this spending did not follow pure Republican principle; rather, federal appropriations during this period had the distinct flavor of pork barrel politics to it. Jackson and his party loyalists in Congress often distributed funds for internal improvements based on the political salience of the appropriation.⁵⁵

      Jackson was also an inconsistent advocate of national authority, with the only clear dividing line being what was and was not his political priority. The story of Jackson staring down the South Carolina nullifiers is well known. The Palmetto State’s Ordinance of Nullification of 1832 declared the tariff laws recently passed into law null and void in South Carolina. Jackson—whose political coalition had been responsible for the abusive Tariff of Abomination—reacted with righteous indignation. He warned South Carolina that it had no authority to do that, and promised “that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.”⁵⁶

      Jackson, of course, was right to be outraged by South Carolina’s blatantly illegal actions. What is less known, however, is how happily he excused the equally lawless maneuvers by the states of Georgia and Mississippi in their efforts to oust the Native Americans from their legal property. Sharp Knife had stronger opinions on Native American affairs than any of his recent predecessors in the White House; while the latter acknowledged that removal of the native tribes to an area west of the Mississippi was advisable, Jackson made this a priority of his administration.⁵⁷ The trouble for Jackson was that the tribes of the region had treaties with the federal government that protected their lands from state encroachment. It was such a treaty with the Creek nation that prompted Quincy Adams to send the federal attorney to Georgia to warn that, if the state’s agents entered Creek territory to conduct an illegal survey, they would be arrested. While not as celebrated as Jackson’s victory over the South Carolina nullifiers, Adams’s justification rested on the same basis: the supremacy of federal laws over the states.⁵⁸ But Jackson had no time for any of this. Clearing the Native Americans out was a priority for him, and he used the states as the bad cop to his good cop. Taking on the pretensions of a benevolent father, Jackson warned the Native American tribes that he could not stop the states from abusing the treaties, and urged them to remove to the West.⁵⁹ Never mind, of course, that he simultaneously was threatening to hang South Carolinians who violated the tariff laws.

      In Jacksonian America, “princeps legibus solutus est”: the sovereign is not bound by the law.⁶⁰ Biddle would learn this the hard way.