Chapter 5: King Andrew

Scene 1

Washington in July was a punishment the republic visited upon itself by choosing this ground, this latitude, this miasmatic stretch of river bottom for its seat of government. The heat settled into the plaster walls through the long afternoon and by evening had nowhere to go, pressing down on a man's shoulders, thickening in his chest. Jackson sat at his desk with his coat off and his collar open and still the sweat gathered at his temples and ran. The candle nearest his right hand had been burning long enough that a pool of tallow had formed around its base, and the smell of it — faintly rancid, faintly sweet — hung in the still air like something that had given up moving.

Donelson came in without knocking, which was his right, and laid the bundle on the corner of the desk.

'The Pennsylvania situation.'

Jackson finished the letter he was reading, turned it face-down, and reached for the bundle.

'Tell me.'

'Carmichael at the Harrisburg Chronicle and Newbold at the Aurora have both gone silent since the tenth. No editorial on the veto. Nothing. Biddle's people have been in Harrisburg three days.' Donelson pulled a chair to the desk's edge and sat with the particular stillness of someone who has more to say than he has been asked for. 'Webster spoke in the Senate yesterday for two hours. They are printing it as a pamphlet already — I have a copy here. He calls the veto a usurpation of the judicial function and an insult to the intelligence of every trained lawyer in the republic.' A pause. 'He was not inaccurate about its reception in certain quarters.'

Jackson set down the letters and looked at his nephew for the first time.

'And the cartoon.'

Donelson reached into the bundle and produced it. The broadside was roughly printed, the ink still carrying the sharpness of a fresh run: a figure in crown and ermine, one hand raised with a sceptre, the other clutching a scroll marked VETO, a trampled Constitution beneath his feet. Beneath the image, in capitals: KING ANDREW THE FIRST.

Jackson took it. He held it at arm's length, tilting it toward the candlelight. A smile crossed his face that had nothing of warmth in it.

'The General's view,' Donelson continued, measuring his words with the care of someone who had lived in this house long enough to know where the tripwires were laid, 'of certain advisors — and I include Mr. Van Buren's people in New York — is that the veto message's language regarding the rich and powerful was perhaps more inflammatory than the occasion strictly required. That a conciliatory public statement, something assuring the commercial interests that the administration harbours no hostility toward banking as such, might arrest the drift in Pennsylvania before it becomes—'

'Before it becomes what.'

The candleflame bent in a breath of air from the window, straightening again. The room was no cooler for it.

'Before it becomes a problem in November,' Donelson said.

Jackson set the cartoon flat on the desk. He placed one finger on King Andrew's crown and held it there a moment, pressing the paper smooth.

'Andrew.' Jackson's finger remained on the crown. 'Who do you reckon is more afraid of this picture — the man in it, or the man who drew it?'

Donelson opened his mouth. Jackson did not wait.

'Write to Kendall tonight. I want the veto message — the full text, not a summary, not an extract — printed as a pamphlet and at every crossroads meeting between here and the Ohio before the end of the month. Every tavern, every church door, every militia muster. Let the people read what their President said and judge for themselves whether it sounds like a tyrant or a man who works for them.'

A coughing fit seized him then, sudden and absolute. He gripped the desk's edge with both hands and bent forward, the cough tearing through his chest in dry, successive heaves that would not stop, would not stop, and at last released him, leaving his head down and his breath coming in careful increments. He straightened. His voice, when it returned, carried a rawness that had not been there before — a scraped quality, as though the words were being drawn across damaged timber.

'The Pennsylvania editors want direction, you said. Here is their direction. The veto message is the reply to Webster. Every sentence of it. Tell them to print it alongside Webster's pamphlet and let any man in the state read both and choose his side.' He lifted the cartoon and held it out. 'Keep this. Frame it, if you like. When we have carried Pennsylvania by twenty thousand votes, you can hang it in your parlour as a reminder of what frightened men look like when they have run out of arguments.'

Donelson took the broadside. He folded it without ceremony and tucked it inside his coat.

'We do not conciliate the Monster, Andrew,' Jackson said. 'We name it.'

Donelson had his pen out. He was already writing.

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Scene 2

The dispatch had come up with the afternoon post, folded tight and sealed with a smear of common wax. Jackson carried it out to the White House portico rather than read it at his desk, needing the October air on his face, needing the quality of light that fell at this hour — flat, mild, the colour of old brass — across the stone rail and the elm beyond it. He pulled the chair to the rail's edge, set his feet against the lower balustrade, and broke the seal.

Benton wrote with a soldier's economy: dates, numbers, the sequence of events rendered without ornament. Jackson read through the account of the Nashville clearing — several hundred gathered, mechanics and farmers, men who had ridden two days on mule-back — and felt the scene assemble itself in his mind with the involuntary clarity of a place he had never left. The rough platform of boards, bunting strung between the pine trunks in red and blue. The schoolmaster who had read the letter aloud twice, pitching his voice against the open air.

He set the dispatch on his knee and looked out at the elm.

He had dictated that letter at two in the morning ten days past, in this same chair, with the lamp guttering and Donelson half-asleep at the escritoire. He had not thought, while dictating, of what it would sound like read aloud to men who had never been addressed by a president as though they were the republic's subjects rather than its objects. He thought of it now. The humble members of society — the farmer, the mechanic, the laborer. The silence before the first sentence. The murmur that would rise at those words, not because they were eloquent but because they were true, and truth spoken plainly in a public place produces in the listener something between relief and fury.

He returned to the dispatch.

Then the Bank's man had come.

Benton described him as a clerk from the Nashville branch — young, carrying a leather satchel, moving through the edge of the crowd to distribute handbills. Printed, not written: which meant Biddle had ordered them prepared before the rally's date was even public. The handbills told the farmers that Andrew Jackson meant to destroy the currency, that Bank notes held by honest men would be worthless before spring, that every man who had borrowed on Bank paper to plant his winter crop would be called to account. Your savings. Your notes. Your livelihood. Plain language, carefully aimed at men who carried debt the way other men carried their names.

A dull ache spread through his left side — the bullet's old commentary — and he shifted in the chair, pressing his palm flat against his ribs until the worst of it passed. The afternoon lay quiet around him, broken only by the mockingbird in the elm, running through its catalogue with the mechanical insistence of something that could not be interrupted.

He found his place again.

Benton had not allowed it to proceed. The Senator from Missouri had taken one of the handbills from a farmer who held it with the bewildered expression of a man handed a document in a foreign tongue, and had read it aloud — not with contempt, Benton wrote, but with a careful, deliberate emphasis that let the words indict themselves. Then he had produced a twenty-dollar Bank note from his coat pocket, held it up so the crowd could see the engraving, the flourished signature, and put the question to them directly: whether they trusted a piece of paper with Nicholas Biddle's name on it, or the word of Andrew Jackson.

The crowd's answer had not required recording.

The Bank's clerk had been escorted from the clearing by three men who did not touch him but whose proximity constituted a form of argument he found persuasive. He departed at a pace that suggested he had somewhere else to be.

Jackson folded the dispatch and tucked it inside his coat, close against his chest.

He called for paper and his writing things, and when Donelson's boy brought them out he did not wait for the desk to be properly arranged but wrote standing at the portico's stone rail, the paper held flat against the cold surface, the elm's shadow falling across his hands.

The letter to Benton was seven lines. It authorised the Senator from Missouri to speak at any and all Western rallies in the President's name, with the full authority of the executive. It instructed him to name the Bank of the United States as an enemy of republican government — without qualification, without apology, and without the softening language that moderate men in Washington had been counselling for three months. It said: They have brought their war to Tennessee. Let them learn what Tennessee does with enemies.

He signed it, blotted it, folded it before the ink was properly dry, and gave it to the boy with instructions that it go south with the next post, before evening.

Then he stood at the rail a moment longer, listening to the mockingbird. It had not paused once in all that time. He envied it nothing except its certainty.

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Scene 3

The fire had been built too high for the season, and the oval drawing room breathed out a dry, close warmth that pressed against the skin like the interior of a kiln. Someone — Blair, most likely, who took cold easily — had instructed the servants to lay on extra wood, and now the four men sat in its excess, coats shed, collars loosened, maps and electoral tallies spread across the central table in the manner of dispatches covering a campaign tent floor the night before a crossing.

Jackson wore a shawl regardless. He had not removed it when he sat, and he did not remove it now.

The smell of tallow from three candles on the mantelpiece reached across the room in faint, insistent waves, mingling with the sharper reek of Francis Preston Blair's pipe, which had gone cold an hour since but still held its ghost in the upholstery. Amos Kendall stood at the table's edge, one finger tracing the western counties of Ohio, his shirtsleeve rolled to the elbow. Blair occupied the chair nearest the fire, settled back, arms folded, his silence the particular silence of a verdict already rendered — he was waiting, with no great patience, for the evidence to confirm him. Taney sat by the window, a leather satchel at his feet, and had not yet opened it.

'Pennsylvania holds,' Kendall said, not looking up from the map. 'The Susquehanna counties we were uncertain of — I have a letter from Muhlenberg dated the twenty-third. The Bank's men made their circuit through Lancaster in September, but the farmers there have short memories for pamphlets and long ones for interest rates. We carry them.'

'Then we carry the state.'

'We carry it, sir, if we do not give Clay a new issue before the vote.'

The caution in it was plain. Jackson heard it and let it stand.

Taney lifted the satchel from the floor and set it across his knees. His movements were deliberate in the way that suggested the next several minutes had been arranged in his mind well before he arrived. He drew out a sheaf of papers bound in a linen cord and placed it on the table without untying the cord.

'I have been preparing this since August.' He set one hand flat on the binding. 'It must be observed that what I have prepared is not complete — it wants a further argument on the statutory construction, which I intend to supply before the term ends. But the constitutional foundation is here.'

Jackson drew the shawl tighter around his shoulders.

'The Secretary of the Treasury's authority over the deposits is statutory, not constitutional. The statute confers the power, and the statute may be read — properly read — as subordinate to the President's constitutional duty to execute the laws faithfully. The argument presents certain difficulties.' Taney paused. His gaze moved briefly to the fire, then returned to Jackson. 'Considerable difficulties, I will not conceal. But it is sound, and it is defensible, and it will not be easily dismissed by a court that has not yet been presented with the question directly.'

'Then deploy it.'

'Not yet.' No change in Taney's voice — the same measured construction, the same careful placement of each word. 'The memorandum must not be disclosed, must not be acted upon, until after a decisive electoral victory. A margin of fifty electoral votes or more. Anything less, and what is a constitutional argument becomes, in the public eye, the act of a president who could not persuade the people and resolved to proceed by other means. The legal soundness will not protect it from that characterisation. The political moment must be unambiguous.'

Blair's pipe tapped against his knee. The sound was small and dry in the overheated room.

Jackson's own pipe had gone out some minutes past. He reached for the taper on the side table and touched the flame to the bowl, drawing twice, a third time, the pause filling the room with silence that no one moved to break. Smoke reached him finally, thin and dry. He set the taper down.

'I accept your condition,' he told Taney.

Then, without turning: 'Kendall.'

Kendall looked up from the Ohio counties.

'Begin identifying state banks. Quietly. I want a list — institutions of sound standing, distributed geographically — before the first of December. Speak to no one in the Treasury.'

Taney's gaze moved to Jackson. Jackson met it and held it. Neither spoke. The fire gave out its unnecessary heat, Blair studied the middle distance, and Kendall's finger returned to the map.

'Yes, sir,' Kendall said.

A silence settled over the room — not the silence of agreement, but the silence of four men who have each understood, separately, what the agreement will cost. Outside, the wind came up against the windows and found no purchase, and the candles on the mantelpiece burned straight and still.

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Scene 4

The lamp needed trimming. Its flame guttered and held, guttered again, throwing the bedchamber wall into intermittent relief — the portrait of Rachel, the escritoire with its scattered dispatches, the single chair where Donelson had sat for three hours now, reading numbers aloud into the dark.

'Virginia confirmed.' He turned the page. His voice had gone flat with exhaustion, stripped of the relief he had worn so openly in the first hour. 'Ohio — we have Ohio, sir. The Western returns are—'

A spasm seized Jackson's jaw — the old wound's familiar commentary on cold air from the ill-fitted window — and he clenched his teeth and closed his eyes. Donelson's voice continued, the figures arriving through darkness: fourteen thousand, two hundred and— He felt the numbers more than heard them. When he opened his eyes, Donelson's face was still bent to the page.

'Pennsylvania,' Jackson said.

'The full count is not yet—'

'Give me what you have.'

Donelson set the page flat on his knee. 'Forty-seven thousand, nine hundred and eleven for us. Clay at thirty-nine thousand, four hundred and—' He paused. 'It is decisive, sir.'

The lamp guttered once more and held.

Somewhere below stairs, a door opened and shut, and a courier's boots struck the marble floor of the entrance hall — quick, eager steps that slowed as they met a servant's quieter tread. The house was full of such sounds tonight: the creak of the floorboards in the east passage, the muffled exchange of voices rising and falling since ten o'clock. A republic conducting its arithmetic.

Jackson lay against the pillows and said nothing.

Donelson waited, the page still open across his knee, shoulders forward, as though the weight of what he carried had not yet found permission to be set down.

'Two hundred and nineteen,' he said at last. 'Against forty-nine. That is what the tallies say.'

Still Jackson did not speak.

'Uncle.' The word was almost inaudible. 'It is done. You have won—' Donelson stopped himself. He pressed his lips together and looked toward the window, where the curtain shifted against glass black with November.

Jackson reached toward the empty pillow beside him — the slight depression in the bolster, the cool expanse of linen that no warmth had touched in four years — and then his hand withdrew and lay flat on the dispatches instead.

The lamp hissed.

'You should sleep,' Donelson said.

'Presently.'

'The physicians have said—'

'I have heard what the physicians have said.' His voice was level, stripped of anger, stripped of everything except its own weight. He shifted against the pillows and looked at the ceiling. 'What does Clay carry?'

'Massachusetts. Rhode Island. Connecticut. Delaware. Kentucky.'

'Kentucky.' A sound escaped him that was not quite a laugh. 'He cannot carry his own state entire.'

'No, sir.'

The fire had burned low; the room breathed cold from the walls, and the smell of tallow from the lamp's struggling wick had thickened into something almost rancid — the smell of hours accumulated in a closed space. The tallies spread across the coverlet — Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York — they were a kind of country laid flat before him, and he read them the way he had always read ground before a battle: not with satisfaction but with cold, deliberate attention, calculating what the terrain would cost.

Donelson rose to fetch the next dispatch. His coat was creased across the back from long sitting.

When the door closed, Jackson was alone.

The lamp threw its uncertain light against Rachel's portrait, and her eyes held the expression he had always read there: the patient endurance of a woman who had known what the world cost and had not complained. They will not let you alone, she had said once, in the autumn of 1828, when the pamphlets were circulating in Tennessee. They will not let either of us alone. She had been right. And they had killed her for the trouble of being right — those men, those Bank men, those Clay men, those men who had decided that Andrew Jackson had no business ascending to what they had always regarded as their own.

He lay still.

It is enough, some part of him said. It is finished. The veto stands. The people have spoken. Rest now.

He knew that voice. He had heard it at New Orleans, in the hour before the British came, when the cold was so deep that men's fingers could not close on their muskets and the ground was hard as iron under the frost. You have done sufficient. No man could ask more.

'Now,' he said aloud, to the guttering lamp, to Rachel's patient eyes, 'we finish it.'

Not the veto. Not the campaign. The Bank itself — its deposits, its charter, its marble columns and its Philadelphia president who had spent the public's own money to destroy the public's servant. That was the mandate written in two hundred and nineteen electoral votes. Not hold the line. Destroy it.

He was reaching for the nearest dispatch when the door opened again and Donelson entered with a fresh sheaf of returns — and behind him, half a step, a second courier, mud-spattered to the knee, who had ridden hard from the south.

Donelson's face had changed.

'Sir.' He held out the sealed packet before he had fully crossed the threshold. 'This arrived not an hour past, from the Governor's office. It concerns South Carolina.'

Jackson took it and broke the seal.

He read it once. Then he read it again, and the room was very quiet except for the lamp and the courier's careful breathing and the distant creak of the house settling against the November cold.

South Carolina had passed its Ordinance of Nullification.

His eyes moved to the window. Somewhere out there, the republic was celebrating his victory with bonfires and bells; he could hear, faintly, the percussion of it carrying across the city. And here, in his hands, was the second war — not the Bank's war, not Clay's war, but a war against the Union itself, and it would not wait for him to finish the first.

He set the packet on the dispatches. His right hand remained on it a moment.

Donelson stood waiting. The courier had not moved from the doorway.

Two enemies. One exhausted, failing body. And the bonfires still burning outside, celebrating a victory that had, in the time it took to read a single page, become something far more complicated than triumph. He would need to send to Calhoun before morning. He would need to recall Van Buren from New York. He would need, above all, to decide which war to fight first — and he understood, with the cold clarity that had always served him better than counsel, that the answer to that question would determine whether the republic he had just been given to govern survived the winter intact.