Chapter 6: The Mandate

Scene 1

The fire in the study grate had been built too high and too soon, and by the time Livingston arrived it had produced a heat that sat on the shoulders like wet wool. Jackson had not ordered it lowered. He sat at his writing table with his coat on, a thing he rarely did indoors, and the portrait of Rachel above the mantel caught the firelight so that her expression moved between severity and grief as the flames worked through the wood.

Livingston set the draft upon the table.

He was a careful man, Secretary Livingston — a jurist before he was a politician, which meant he could not entirely suppress the instinct to qualify. He had placed the pages squarely, edges aligned, as though their neatness constituted an argument for their contents. Jackson looked at them without touching them.

"You will find," Livingston said, "that I have preserved the essential position. The Union's authority over the revenue laws is affirmed throughout. The right of remonstrance is acknowledged — and then denied. The constitutional case is sound."

Jackson picked up the pages.

He read standing, which was how he read anything he expected to disagree with. The fire threw warmth across his left side and left his right in a chill from the ill-fitted window frame; the difference between his two hands was sharp — one warm, one cold — as he turned the pages. The smell of scorched wood rose from a log that had shifted against the grate's iron back.

Livingston waited. Somewhere below, a door was closed with more force than intended, the sound reaching them muffled and brief.

Jackson stopped at the third page. His eyes moved back over a passage, then forward, then back again.

"Here," he said.

"The passage on perpetual union?"

"The passage where you've made it a question." Jackson set the pages down. "You have written: whether the Union be perpetual must remain a subject upon which reasonable men may hold differing views." He said it without consulting the page. "That is not a proclamation. That is a law school exercise."

"General—"

"The Union is perpetual." The words came level, stripped of heat. "That is not a subject upon which reasonable men hold differing views. That is a fact. Disunion is treason. I will not publish a document that wraps those two sentences in enough qualifications that South Carolina may read one and ignore the other."

Livingston's colour did not rise — he was too practised for that — but something in his posture altered, a slight settling of weight, which Jackson registered without acknowledging.

"The constitutional consensus, among your own allies—"

"My own allies can read what I publish and form their own views."

"Mr. President." Livingston's voice took on a different quality — not louder, but more deliberate, the voice of a man who has decided the moment requires expenditure he would rather have avoided. "If the language goes as far as you propose — if we declare disunion equivalent to treason in terms that admit no qualification — I cannot in conscience affix my name to this document. Not as it stands."

Jackson looked at him for a long moment.

"Then I will affix mine alone. And the country will know who stood where."

Livingston's chin came up a fraction. "That is not what I — General, I am not refusing. I am asking you to consider what the Senate will make of language that gives Clay no ground to stand on but opposition. Van Buren has reservations. Benton has reservations."

"Van Buren always has reservations." Jackson reached for his pen. "It is his constitutional condition."

He pulled the draft toward him and drew a line through the passage — not a careful editorial stroke but a single crossing-out that went through the text and left a dark channel in the paper. Livingston watched it happen without speaking.

Then Jackson turned away from the table. His chest seized without warning, a cough that drove him forward, both hands finding the desk edge, and he held there, bent, while it ran its course. Perhaps ten seconds. He straightened, turned back, found the pen again.

He folded the blood-spotted handkerchief into his coat pocket without looking at it.

"Take this down," he said.

Livingston produced a small memorandum book from his coat and opened it.

Jackson dictated: "The Constitution forms a government, not a league. To say otherwise — to hold that any State may at its pleasure secede from the Union — is to say that the United States is not a nation. Disunion, by whatever name or theory it may be clothed, is treason against that nation, and will be treated as such."

Livingston wrote. His pen moved across the page in the warm, close room.

He did not look up when he had finished.

"That language," he said, "will be quoted against you by your own allies. Not merely by Clay. By men who have stood in this room and called themselves yours."

"Then I would rather be quoted than equivocated."

Livingston closed the memorandum book and set it inside his coat. He regarded Jackson with the expression of one who has discharged his obligation and will not be held responsible for what follows.

"The proclamation goes to the printer Friday. If you intend further alterations, I will need them by Thursday evening."

"You will have them by Thursday morning."

Livingston departed. The door closed behind him with a precision that was itself a form of statement — not quite a slam, not quite a courtesy, something between the two that only a man of his particular training could have produced. Jackson was left alone with the fire and the portrait of Rachel and the crossed-out passage lying on the table.

He knew, with the settled certainty of long experience in men, that Livingston would carry his reservations to someone before Thursday morning arrived. Not to Clay directly — Livingston was not that kind. But he would speak, and the speaking would travel, and by Wednesday evening there would be questions in the corridors that had not been there on Tuesday. The proclamation would hold. The language would stand. But the questions would come before the ink was dry, and Jackson would need to be ready for them with something more than the proclamation itself.

He reached for a fresh sheet and began to write.

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Scene 2

The lamp at the far end of the table had been turned low — low enough that the maps rolled to the table's edge were barely legible, their coastlines and county boundaries dissolving into shadow. This was not an accident. The meeting-room windows gave onto the south portico, and the shutters had been drawn, all but one that Kendall had left with a gap of perhaps two inches, through which the night air moved in irregular pulses. The rain came in gusts. Between gusts, the silence was very complete.

Jackson sat at the table's centre. Taney was to his right, close enough that their voices need not carry. Kendall and Blair were arranged across from them, Blair's notebook open but his pen laid flat beside it — nothing committed to paper, not yet, not in this room.

"McLane has communicated his position," Jackson said. He did not raise his voice above the level the room required. "Not to me. Through a clerk."

The rain struck the shutters and withdrew.

Kendall reached into his coat and produced a folded sheet, which he did not open — he set it on the table between them and left his hand resting beside it. Taney's eyes went to it.

"Show him," Jackson said.

Kendall slid the sheet across. Taney unfolded it and read. The low light gave little away, but Jackson watched the slight compression at the corners of Taney's mouth as the pattern resolved — seven institutions, seven cities, the survey complete, the machinery assembled, and not one name on the list that had passed through a Treasury channel in the previous quarter.

Taney refolded the sheet and set it back on the table without returning it to Kendall.

"You began this before the election," he said, very quietly.

"Before the veto was signed."

A pause in which the rain did not come and the silence was absolute.

"General." Taney did not look up from the folded paper. "If this sheet is in this room, it must leave this room in one coat or another. It cannot remain here. And it cannot go through any channel that has been within McLane's sight in the past three months." He pressed two fingers against the paper — not possession, but emphasis, flattening the thing against the table. "McLane communicated through a clerk because he does not wish to be on record as having refused a direct order. Which means he has already begun speaking to someone. Which means we have less time than the calendar suggests."

"How much less?" Blair said, very low.

"The nullification vote is not yet settled." Taney kept his voice level, barely above the sound of the rain. "If word reaches the Senate floor — if Clay learns that this administration has been surveying alternative depositories while simultaneously demanding the Senate's cooperation on the Force Bill — he will not merely oppose the removal. He will bind the two questions together on the floor, and he will not be wrong to do so. We would hand him the argument entire."

Jackson's eyes moved to Kendall. "The survey goes no further through Treasury channels. The two additional institutions in the western Ohio counties — find them through other means. You know the means I intend."

Kendall took back the folded sheet and put it away.

"And the Globe?" Blair said.

"Nothing yet." The word fell with a finality that closed the question. "Not until the Force Bill is through. After that — three pieces, the constitutional ground and the plain case both, attributed to principle rather than to this office. Amos has the argument. He knows which portions of Taney's memorandum can be published without the whole."

Taney said nothing. He was looking at the space on the table where the paper had been.

"Will it hold?" Jackson said.

"It will hold." The words arrived with the quality of a verdict reached by independent reckoning, not reassurance. "Clay's faction will not sacrifice the Union to preserve their position on the Bank. The votes are there, and they know it."

"Then we have six weeks, perhaps eight, before the question becomes unavoidable." Jackson pushed back from the table an inch — not rising, but shifting his weight, redistributing it. "McLane will receive a letter from this office before the week is out. He will be offered the mission to London, which he has long desired and which will place him at a sufficient remove from the proceedings."

Taney looked up then, and the lamplight caught his eyes.

"He will accept," Jackson said, before Taney could speak. "A man who sends his refusals through clerks has already made his reckoning. London allows him to do neither — to refuse nor to comply — and that is precisely what he wants. He will accept."

The rain came again, harder this time, pressing against the shuttered windows with a sound like thrown gravel. Somewhere in the building a clock struck the half-hour, the sound travelling through the walls and arriving in the room diminished and uncertain, as though the hour itself were not entirely confident of its own authority.

Taney refolded his hands on the table. He did not speak again. But his eyes went once more to the place where the paper had lain, and stayed there a moment longer than the occasion required.

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Scene 3

The counting was finished by nine o'clock, and Biddle already knew.

He had known it since mid-afternoon, when the quality of the silence on Chestnut Street changed — not the silence of anticipation, which carries a kind of held breath, but the silence of men who have received their verdict and are not yet ready to speak it aloud. The Western dispatches had come in through the day in a procession of dull confirmations, each one carrying Jackson's numbers with the patient insistence of a creditor who has been here before and expects to be here again.

Two hundred and nineteen electoral votes.

Forty-nine.

He read the tally sheet three times. Not because the figures admitted any interpretation beyond the obvious — they did not — but because there was a discipline in confronting an unpleasant fact with one's full attention, rather than glancing at it sideways and hoping for a mitigating clause that was not there. He had never been given to sideways glances. He had always considered that a point in his favour.

The Webster letter had arrived ahead of the final tallies, which was itself a species of information. Biddle read it with the attention he brought to all correspondence from the Senator — one part of his mind on the text, another on the calculation of what the text omitted.

What it omitted was any word of commiseration. What it said, in Webster's most elaborate periods, was that the Bank's branches in New England — and the Massachusetts branch in particular — had been insufficiently liberal in their lending through the autumn, that commercial confidence in the region required demonstration of institutional strength, and that the Senator trusted Mr. Biddle would find occasion to address this deficiency in the coming months.

Biddle set the letter down and placed a glass paperweight on top of it with deliberate, excessive care, as though pinning an insect to a board.

So. Jackson had won the republic entire, and Webster's first communication was a demand for credit.

The constitutional cause. The great question of implied powers and legislative prerogative. The republic's economic architecture — the bulwark against depreciated paper and the caprice of demagogues — Webster had delivered his orations for it, had taken his retainer for it, had stood in the Senate chamber and made the air ring with it, and now, the election being over and the constitutional argument having proven insufficient to move the uninstructed voter, the Senator from Massachusetts required more loans in New England, because a man must have something to show his constituents, and rhetoric, it transpired, did not discount at par.

Biddle pulled a sheet of foolscap toward him and uncapped his pen. He was not angry. Anger was the luxury of men who had not foreseen the event that produced it, and he had foreseen this — had foreseen it since July, had understood that the recharter gambit carried this possibility within it, that Jackson might win, that the veto message might strike the uninstructed as a declaration rather than a legal argument, that the republic's voters might prefer the rhetoric of persecution to the patient demonstration of economic utility. He had understood it and proceeded anyway, because the alternative — waiting, watching the charter bleed toward its 1836 expiration — was merely the slower defeat.

He wrote at the top of the sheet: Memorandum to the Board of Directors, Second Bank of the United States. November 1832. Confidential.

Then he set out, in the compact hand his board had come to associate with his most serious communications, the outline of what he intended.

The deposits were the question. They had always been the question. If Jackson moved against them — and Biddle had spent the better part of three months arriving at the settled conviction that Jackson would move against them, that the election had not satisfied him but merely armed him — then the Bank must be prepared to demonstrate, in terms the uninstructed could not misread, what the withdrawal of its credit meant for the commerce of the republic. The Western merchants, the Atlantic trade, the discount rates at the branch offices — he set it all out with the thoroughness the occasion required, leaving nothing to inference, because inference was what men reached for when they wished to claim, afterward, that they had not quite understood.

He did not write the word contraction. He wrote proportionate adjustment of the Bank's lending in response to the diminishment of its resources. The distinction would matter, later, when the memorandum was read by men who had not yet settled the question of how history would remember them. He was thinking of those men already. He was always thinking of them.

He wrote for twenty minutes without stopping, the scratch of the nib the only sound in the room. When he had finished, he read it through once, set it beside the paperweight and the Webster letter, and considered the three objects together: the demand, the results, and his answer.

A delegation of New York merchants had sent word that morning requesting an audience at his earliest convenience. He would receive them. He would explain — with the patient courtesy he extended to all who had not yet fully examined the question — that the Bank's capacity to serve the commercial interests of New York depended upon the security of its deposits, and that any diminishment of that security would require a corresponding adjustment of its obligations, and that they would therefore wish to make their sentiments regarding the deposits known to their representatives in Congress.

He would frame it as advice. He would frame it, in fact, as modified terms for recharter — a reasonable proposal, a middle ground, the kind of measured statesmanship that men of good faith could support. Clay would understand the manoeuvre. Clay would make use of it. Jackson would call it capitulation and refuse it, which was the point.

Biddle capped his pen and aligned the memorandum with the edge of the desk. Then he composed his reply to the Senator from Massachusetts. The loans, he wrote, would be considered in due course, as the Bank's resources and obligations permitted. He did not commit to a figure. He did not need to. Webster would understand that the Bank remained useful, and that useful things must be maintained, and that maintenance had its costs — a truth the Senator had always grasped with admirable speed when expressed in the right denominations.

He sealed the reply and set it with the outgoing correspondence. Then he drew toward him the list of branch managers he had been compiling since August and began, methodically, to mark beside each name the degree of latitude he intended to extend, and the degree he intended to withdraw. The New York merchants would arrive Thursday. By Thursday he would need to know precisely how much pressure the machine could bear before the first joint cracked.

Outside, the rain had resumed its work on the street, tapping against the tall windows in no particular pattern, and from somewhere to the north came the sound of a crowd — voices carried thin and distorted through the wet air, indistinguishable as celebration or protest. Biddle did not go to the window. He kept his eyes on the list, his pen moving steadily down the column of names, and the lamp threw his shadow large against the wall behind him, larger than the man, reaching nearly to the ceiling.

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Scene 4

The Force Bill had passed the Senate that morning. The Compromise Tariff had gone through the day before. South Carolina would back down — the crisis that had consumed the better part of three months, that had kept Jackson from sleeping and Taney from thinking of anything else, was over. They both knew it. Neither of them said so.

The study had grown close with the smell of rain — wet stone, wood smoke, the faint mineral sharpness of the night air pressing through the gaps in the sash. Jackson sat in his armchair with a blanket drawn up over his knees. Taney occupied the straight-backed chair opposite, his coat still damp at the shoulder from the walk across from his own office, his hands folded over one knee. The single lamp on the table between them threw a circle of light that did not reach the walls.

"McLane will not sign it," Jackson said.

"No," Taney said. "He will not."

"I have known it since October." Jackson shifted in the chair, and something in his chest tightened — he breathed through it, shallow and deliberate, until it released. "He told me as much, near enough. Not in those words. McLane wraps a refusal in so much courtesy you near mistake it for agreement."

"He has obligations he believes are genuine."

"His obligations are to this office."

A log shifted in the grate and sent a cascade of sparks up the chimney; both men watched it in silence for a beat, the firelight brightening briefly across the walls and the stacked papers on the side table, before the room contracted again around the lamp's radius.

"The survey is complete," Jackson said. "Seven sound institutions, geographically distributed. The machinery is ready." He pulled the blanket higher over his knees with both hands — it made him look, for a moment, very old — and then fixed Taney with eyes that were anything but old. "What is not ready is the hand to turn it."

Taney looked at his hands on his knee. He had understood since he walked through the door. He had perhaps understood since October, in the drawing room, when Kendall had produced the list and Jackson had aligned it parallel to the table's edge with that single, confirming tap of his forefinger. The understanding had been present in him since then like a stone in a boot — always there, not yet addressed, waiting for the moment when the road grew long enough that it could no longer be ignored.

"You will want someone who knows the constitutional argument entire," Taney said. "Who can defend it before the Committee, before the Senate, before the press."

"I want someone I trust."

"General." Taney stopped. Began again. "The principle, properly understood, requires not merely that the removal be legally defensible. It requires that the Secretary who executes it be willing to stand before the Senate and be rejected, if the Senate chooses rejection." He placed the words with the precision of a man walking a known path in darkness. "McLane would not sign the order. Duane, if you appoint him, will not sign it either — I believe that to be true, though I cannot yet prove it to you. Which brings us to the question you have not asked aloud."

"I have asked it," Jackson said. "I am asking it now."

The rain struck the glass in a brief gust, then withdrew. Taney held the silence.

"And if the Senate refuses to confirm me, General?"

"Then we shall have learned something useful about the Senate."

The answer arrived without inflection, without apology, without the softening gesture of one who understands he is asking for blood. Taney looked at his hands. The fire put a low sound into the room, the rain another.

He did not say yes. He did not say no. He sat very still, as though the argument had already run its course inside him and arrived somewhere he could not yet name aloud, and the silence between them was not empty — it was full of the weight of what had just been understood, and what had not been said, and what could not now be unsaid.

Jackson did not press him. He reached instead for the lamp and turned the wick down a fraction — not enough to extinguish it, but enough to draw the light closer, tighter, so that the two men sat in a smaller circle of it, the rest of the room given over to shadow and the sound of rain.

"There is one matter more," Jackson said. His voice had dropped — not from weakness, but from the deliberateness of a man now speaking the part he has not rehearsed. "Livingston will carry his reservations to someone before Thursday. He will not act against this office — he is not that kind of man — but he will speak, and the speaking will reach Clay before the week is out, and Clay will begin asking questions about what is being prepared." He paused. "I want you to be in Philadelphia by Wednesday."

Taney looked up.

"Not to speak to Biddle," Jackson said. "I want you to be seen in Philadelphia. I want it understood that the Attorney General is conducting a review of the Bank's compliance with the existing charter — routine, methodical, nothing that requires alarm. Give Biddle something to think about that is not the deposits. Give Clay something to explain that is not the removal."

"A review," Taney said carefully, "that has no findings."

"A review that has whatever findings the evidence warrants." Jackson held his eyes steady. "I expect the evidence will prove instructive."

Taney rose from the chair. He stood for a moment in the lamplight, his coat still carrying the damp smell of the night's rain. Those who knew him would have read his face then — the composure of the last stage before commitment, not resolution exactly, but the closing of a door that had been standing open.

He said: "I will take the Wednesday coach."

He moved toward the door. Jackson did not call him back. The door opened, admitting a brief cold draught from the corridor beyond, and closed.

Jackson sat alone. The lamp guttered once in the draught's aftermath, then steadied. He pressed his right hand flat against his chest — the old wound site, the gesture so habitual it arrived before thought — and held it there while the fire worked through the last of the wood.

Three hundred miles to the northeast, the lamp on Chestnut Street still burned. The pen still moved. The list of branch managers grew shorter by one entry at a time, each mark deliberate, each degree of latitude and withdrawal calculated with the cold arithmetic of someone who has already settled the question of ends and turns now only to the calibration of means — who intends to have his answer before Thursday, before the merchants from New York arrive, before the Attorney General steps down from the Wednesday coach into the cold Philadelphia air and begins, methodically, to look for what the evidence warrants.