Chapter 12: The Expungement

Scene 1

The dispatches on the desk had been squared and re-squared until their edges were true, and still Jackson's right hand moved to them, nudging the corner of the uppermost sheet a fraction north, then south, then back.

Eight o'clock by the mantel clock. Perhaps a quarter past. The fire had sunk to coals that threw more shadow than light, and the January wind found every seam in the window casements — not a draught so much as a cold insistence, pressing through wool, settling against the skin, refusing to be reasoned with. He had told Donelson not to send for more wood. He did not want the distraction of a servant moving in the room.

A floorboard creaked two rooms distant. A shutter somewhere on the north face, loose in its hinge, knocked against the frame with the patient, purposeless rhythm of something that did not know it was making a sound.

The Senate was in session. That was all he knew with certainty. If the vote failed tonight — if Southard's procedural objection held, if the quorum dissolved, if Benton could not carry the chamber — then the censure remained in the record, and Jackson left office in seven weeks with Clay's words still written in the nation's official memory, uncontested, permanent. The final verdict of the institution he had spent eight years at war with. There would be no further opportunity. The new Senate would not revisit it. Van Buren would not ask them to. And the republic would remember Andrew Jackson as a president rebuked by his own legislature — not for what he had done, but for what he had dared.

The knock came — three tentative taps, the knock of a subordinate who has been told the President is not to be disturbed and has weighed the consequences of both obedience and disobedience and chosen the latter.

"Enter."

The messenger was perhaps twenty-two, with the careful posture of someone recently promoted beyond his expectation. His dark coat had been brushed but not recently pressed. He held his hat before him with both hands, turning it at the brim. He stopped three paces inside the door.

"The Senator from Missouri presents his compliments, Mr. President. I am to report on the progress of the evening's proceedings."

"Then report."

"The debate continues, sir. Senator Benton has the floor and has spoken at considerable length in favour of the resolution." A pause. "There has been some difficulty."

Jackson did not move. His right hand rested on the dispatches, still.

"Define difficulty."

"The Whig members — a number of them, sir, perhaps eight or ten — have declined to remain in their seats. Senator Preston led them out some forty minutes past. Senator Clay—" The messenger faltered, recalibrated. "Senator Clay delivered certain remarks prior to departing. The presiding officer has been obliged to—"

"Clay is gone from the chamber?"

"Yes, sir. Before the vote was called."

The shutter knocked against the north wall, once, twice. Jackson said: "What remarks."

"Sir?"

"You said Senator Clay delivered certain remarks prior to departing. What was the substance of those remarks."

The hat-brim completed another slow rotation. "He declared, sir — I have it only as it was relayed to me, you understand — that the expungement was itself an act of tyranny. That the Senate was being compelled to deface its own journal at the direction of the executive. He spoke for perhaps eight minutes and then — then he walked out, Mr. President. Several of his colleagues followed."

"And the vote itself. Has it been taken."

"Not yet, sir. There was a procedural question raised by Senator Southard after Senator Clay's departure. Whether a quorum remained. The chair ruled in favour of proceeding, but Senator Southard has given notice of a further objection and—"

"Has the objection been sustained."

"It has not been ruled upon, sir. Not as of my departure from the Capitol."

Jackson aligned the top dispatch against the one beneath it, a small, precise adjustment. The coals shifted in the grate, releasing a brief thread of heat that reached his face and was gone.

"How many Whig members remain in the chamber."

The messenger blinked. "I — I cannot say with precision—"

"Approximately."

"Perhaps three, sir. Perhaps four."

Jackson pushed back from the desk and stood. He crossed to the window and set his back to the room, looking out at the avenue below — the dark shapes of trees against the darker sky, a lantern moving at some distance, the cold pressing itself flat against the glass an inch from his face. If Southard's objection held and the chair could not overrule it, the vote would not occur tonight. Seven weeks remained before the Congress rose. There was no further occasion after this one. The censure would stand in the journal until the republic itself dissolved or until some future generation troubled to revisit it, and by then Clay's words would have hardened into the permanent record of what Andrew Jackson had been.

"Answer me plainly," he said, without turning. "Is Benton confident of the chair's ruling, or is he merely hopeful."

The messenger's colour rose. "Senator Benton expressed — he expressed the view, sir, that the ruling would go as required."

"As required." Jackson turned from the window. "That is hope wearing a coat it did not purchase." He crossed back to the desk, took up a sheet of paper, dipped the pen, and wrote four lines in a rapid, angular hand. He sanded it, folded it, and held it out. "You will carry this to Senator Benton directly. Not to his clerk. To the Senator himself, before he yields the floor. He will understand its import."

The messenger took the note. His grip was steady enough, but he did not look at it.

A cough took Jackson without warning — deep, tearing, bending him forward. He pressed the handkerchief to his mouth, one hand raised — silence, wait — and rode it through five long seconds, six, until his lungs released him. He drew the cloth away and folded it inward without looking at it and set it on the arm of the chair.

"You will not return," he said, his voice restored to its customary flatness, "until the vote is entered in the record. Not when the objection is overruled. Not when Benton finishes. When the tally is written down. Do you understand me."

"Yes, Mr. President."

"Then go."

The door closed behind him with more care than it had opened.

Jackson stood at the desk. Clay had walked out before the vote was called. Had stood in the chamber of the United States Senate and pronounced the expungement a tyranny and then removed himself, refusing to witness what he could not prevent, leaving his name off the record of a verdict he could not change.

He had chosen the only field where he might still win: the judgment of posterity.

Jackson's hand returned to the dispatches. He squared them again. The shutter knocked in the wind. Southard's objection had not yet been ruled upon. The note was on its way. There was nothing further he could do, and the nothing was very loud in the room.

---

Scene 2

The second messenger came at a quarter past nine.

Blair had sent him — Blair, who understood that a president waiting alone required a human voice, not merely a paper. This one entered without ceremony, as he had been instructed, and stood at a respectful remove while Jackson took the dispatch from his hand.

Someone had rebuilt the fire while Jackson paced the corridor. Its warmth reached the surface of things and no further, as it always did in January — the mantelpiece warm to the touch, the air at the back of one's neck still carrying the season's bite. The smell of fresh pine resin threaded through the older scents of cold tobacco and paper. Jackson remained at his desk rather than sat. He had not been able to sit since the first messenger departed.

He looked at the dispatch. His name was at the top, written in Blair's rapid, confident hand. Beneath it, the account of the Senate's proceedings, set down in the spare language of a man who had spent thirty years reducing human events to their essential ledger. The vote: twenty-four to nineteen. The clerk: one Asbury Dickins, who had taken up his pen and his ruler and discharged the upper chamber's command with the unhurried precision of a man who understood that history, when it passed through his hands, required only a steady grip.

And the words of the expungement order itself, copied out verbatim:

Expunged by order of the Senate, this sixteenth day of January, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and thirty-seven.

Around those words — Clay's words, the words that had lived in the journal for three years like a splinter working toward the bone — the black lines. Drawn by a clerk's steady hand across the face of the resolution, boxing it, cancelling it, reducing it to a thing the republic had formally repudiated.

Jackson read it once in silence. He was aware of the messenger near the door, hat in hand, awaiting dismissal. He was aware of the pine resin sharpening in the heat, the cold still pressing from the window at his right. He was aware of the paper's weight between his fingers, thicker than it seemed.

He had carried those words so long he no longer had to look at them to see them. The President has assumed upon himself authority and power not conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in derogation of both. Clay's voice, that instrument polished by thirty years of Senate combat, reading them into the record while the galleries listened and the Democratic senators sat with their eyes on the floor. He had heard them in his sickbed in the winter of thirty-four. He had heard them in his sleep at the Hermitage. He had heard them in the silence after visitors departed, in the middle of sentences that had nothing to do with the Senate or the Bank or Henry Clay of Kentucky.

He pressed both palms flat on the desk, fingers spread, and did not lift them.

Then he read it aloud. Not loudly. Not for the messenger's benefit, nor for any benefit he could have named.

"Expunged by order of the Senate. This sixteenth day of January, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and thirty-seven."

He stopped.

The room had no answer. The fire shifted once, a log settling lower in the grate with a soft interior collapse of ash and ember. The resin smell sharpened briefly, then faded. The messenger was entirely still.

Jackson had not wept at Rachel's death. He had stood at her grave in the December cold and felt the earth harden under his boots and spoken the words that were required of him and returned to the house. He had not wept when they burned his effigy in Philadelphia, or when the Senate passed Clay's resolution by twenty-six to twenty, or when his physicians told him in voices carefully stripped of alarm what the bullet near his heart was doing to the tissue surrounding it. He had not wept in fifty years of public life, not that anyone had seen.

The tears came without announcement. Not in his throat, not as a burning behind his eyes — simply present on his face, two of them, and then more. He did not raise his hand to them. He stood with his palms on the desk and his face wet and did not move.

The messenger looked at the wall. He was young enough that he did not know what he was witnessing, and old enough to understand he must not acknowledge it.

After a time — not long, perhaps thirty seconds, perhaps a minute — Jackson straightened. He took up the dispatch and folded it. His hands were steady. He set it in the upper drawer of the desk, the drawer where he kept the documents that required no further action.

"You may go," he said.

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Scene 3

He sat alone. The room carried the scent of cold tobacco and the pine resin still threading from the rebuilt fire, and beneath both of them something faintly medicinal, rising from the poultice he had not bothered to remove. Two documents lay before him on the desk.

He had won. The word sat in his mind and would not settle, would not take on the weight it ought to carry. The censure was expunged. Clay's resolution was boxed in black and struck through, and the journal of the United States Senate bore the mark of its repudiation, and Andrew Jackson of Tennessee had lived long enough to see it done. He had won. Then why did the room feel no different than it had an hour ago, when the outcome was still in doubt?

He pulled the Treasury report toward him.

Woodbury's clerk had written it in a tight, precise hand, the figures arranged in columns that marched down the page with the impartiality of an indictment. The Mechanics' Bank of New York: notes outstanding, one million four hundred thousand dollars; reserves in coin, sixty-two thousand. The Commercial Bank of Cincinnati: notes outstanding, three hundred and forty thousand; coin on hand, eleven thousand, four hundred. The Planters' and Merchants' of Nashville — his own state, his own people — notes outstanding, eight hundred thousand; coin on hand, thirty-one thousand. The ratios ran down the right-hand margin. Fourteen to one. Thirty to one. Twenty-six to one.

He pressed his fist against his chest, the old bullet shifting with his breath, and for a moment the columns blurred. The pain ran its course. He lowered his hand.

The Specie Circular bore his signature. He had signed it in July, had signed it because the frontier land offices were drowning in paper not worth the printing, because something had to be done and this was the measure at hand. He did not regret the signing. He could not afford to regret it. But the document before him was not speaking of remedy. It was speaking of consequences already in motion — a cascade of credit called and notes refused, of land offices shuttered and merchants caught between obligations they could not meet and banks that would not extend. These consequences had been building since August, since before the ink on that circular had dried.

He read it again. Slower this time. His finger moved down the column, pausing at Nashville, pausing at Cincinnati, pausing at a small institution in Indiana — the name already gone from his memory — whose notes outstanding exceeded its reserves by a ratio the clerk had not troubled to set down because the disproportion was too plain to require it.

Jackson stood. The movement cost him; he braced one hand on the desk's edge and waited until the room steadied. He crossed to the window and looked out at the dark avenue. A carriage lantern moved at some distance, its light swinging with the motion of the horses, and was gone.

There was no enemy here to name. The Monster was dead. Biddle sat in Philadelphia managing a state charter and his own slow ruin. The deposits were removed. The pet banks held the government's money, and the government's money was — according to that right-hand column — extended against air.

He had not done this. He had done precisely the opposite. He had destroyed the institution that concentrated financial power in private hands and distributed it instead among the democratic institutions of the several states, and those institutions had taken that distribution and — what? Done what banks do. Done what the Monster had done, only without the Monster's discipline, without its reserves, without its power to curtail. He had killed the thing that restrained the lesser things, and the lesser things had gorged themselves on the freedom he had given them.

The thought pressed against something structural in him, some load-bearing conviction that had carried the weight of eight years of war, and he felt it flex but not break. Not yet.

He turned from the window and crossed back to the desk.

Van Buren's inauguration was seven weeks away. He could summon Woodbury tonight. The Secretary lived a quarter-mile distant. A note dispatched now would bring him before midnight, and they might together determine what measure remained available — some instruction to the deposit banks, some curtailment of note issue that would not announce itself as panic while yet forestalling the worst of what those figures portended. If Jackson did not act before March, the crisis would fall upon Van Buren's administration without warning, without preparation, without even the pretence that the outgoing president had seen it coming. The figures demanded a response. They had been demanding one for weeks.

He took up a fresh sheet of paper. He dipped the pen.

Then he set it down.

He turned the Treasury report face-down on the desk. He drew Blair's account from the drawer — the clerk's words, the spare language, the order of the Senate — and placed it on top. He sat with his hands flat on the page, the columns of figures invisible beneath it, and listened to the wind find something loose in the portico and set it rattling.

He had fought the Bank for eight years. He had buried his wife, carried a bullet, survived an assassin's pistol at point-blank range, endured the censure, watched Taney destroyed and rebuilt, and he had won. The journal said so. If the cost of that victory was now arriving in columns that no one wished to read — if the democratic institutions of the several states had proved no more virtuous than the Monster they replaced — then that was a reckoning for the next administration, and the next, and the one after that. His service was discharged; the Monster was dead. He could not also be expected to have foreseen what would grow in its place.

Somewhere in Indiana, a small bank whose name he had already forgotten was lending against air. The figures would be there in the morning. They would be there every morning until Van Buren sat at this desk and opened the drawer and found them waiting, patient as creditors, indifferent to the grandeur of the office that sheltered them.

Jackson did not summon Woodbury.

He sat with his hands on the page and did not move.

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Scene 4

March the fourth came in hard and bright, the kind of cold that scoured the sky to a pale, featureless blue and made every surface — the Capitol's white stone, the packed earth of the avenue, the brass buttons on a thousand coats — catch and throw the light without warmth. Jackson stood on the portico steps in his great cloak, the cane in his right hand, and watched the crowd fill the open ground below.

They had come from as far as Kentucky, some of them. He could see the frontier coats among the city broadcloth, the weathered faces, the women wrapped in shawls that had been washed too many times. They pressed against one another for warmth and for the vantage, and the sound they made was a low, sustained roar — not words, not yet, but the collective breath of several thousand people who had walked or ridden or taken the stage to stand in the cold and witness the transfer of power they believed they owned.

A colour-sergeant from the militia escort stood at rigid attention six paces to Jackson's left, the regimental standard snapping in the wind. Beyond him, the Marine band had assembled on the lower steps, their instruments catching the hard light, a trumpeter blowing into his fist to keep his lips from stiffening. The Capitol dome — still unfinished, its scaffolding a skeletal lattice against the pale sky — rose behind them all like a promise the republic had not yet kept.

Van Buren crossed the open ground toward him with that particular gliding walk, unhurried in all weather. He removed his hat. "General." A small bow.

"Martin."

They were alone for the moment, or near enough — the colour-sergeant's gaze was fixed forward with the discipline of a soldier who has been told to see nothing. Below them, the crowd's murmur shifted as they recognised the two figures on the portico, and a cheer went up from the near ranks, ragged at first, then gathering force.

Van Buren did not acknowledge the cheering. His voice dropped. "I have had Woodbury's figures these three days, sir. The specie reserves in the deposit banks—" He paused, and in the pause arranged something behind his eyes. "I am told the Treasury's position warrants close attention."

He did not say alarming. He did not say ruinous. He said close attention, and the courtesy was so thorough it carried the full weight of an indictment.

"The figures have been before me," Jackson said. "I have considered them."

"And?"

"And the republic has endured worse exigencies than a tightening of credit." Jackson shifted the cane to his left hand, took Van Buren's hand in both of his own, and gripped it. The crowd below saw the gesture and cheered again — they could not hear what was being said, and the handclasp looked like benediction. "The Monster is dead. The deposits rest with the people's own institutions. The Specie Circular will steady the land markets in time. You will find the ground firmer than your advisors have told you."

Van Buren held Jackson's gaze. The muscle along his jaw moved once. "I am grateful for your confidence, General."

"It is not confidence. It is the truth."

He released the hand.

Van Buren had not come this morning to be reassured. He had come to ensure that Jackson understood the inheritance being transferred, and to have that understanding witnessed — so that when the reckoning arrived, and the figures in the drawer made plain that it would arrive, there would be no question of who had known what, and when, and what had been said on a cold March morning on the portico steps. He had not asked for a remedy. He had asked for a record.

Van Buren replaced his hat, inclined his head, and moved toward the ceremony's appointed position. He did not look back. Jackson watched him go — the set of the shoulders, the slight forward inclination of a body already bracing against what was coming. Below, the Marine band struck up a march, the brass cutting through the cold air with a brightness that had nothing to do with warmth, and the crowd surged forward against the rope barriers, pressing toward the platform where the oath would be administered.

Jackson did not descend the steps. He stood with the cane planted before him and watched the ceremony arrange itself below — the Chief Justice taking his position, the Bible produced, Van Buren turning to face the assembled city with the composure of one who has rehearsed the expression he will wear when the weight settles on him. Taney stood at the centre of the platform in his black robes, the wind pressing the silk against his thin frame, and even at this distance Jackson could see the stillness in him — the absolute, judicial stillness of a man who has learned to make his face say nothing while his mind says everything.

Taney would administer the oath. The man the Senate had destroyed would swear in the man who would inherit the destruction's consequences. The symmetry was too precise to be accidental, and too bitter to be satisfying.

The oath carried faintly on the wind — Van Buren's voice, thin at this distance, repeating the words Taney spoke. Jackson could not make out the phrases. He did not need to. He had spoken them himself, eight years ago, on a March morning not unlike this one, when the republic had seemed a simpler thing and the enemies arrayed against it had worn the courtesy of identifying themselves.

The crowd roared. Van Buren was President. Jackson was not.

He stood on the portico a moment longer. The cold had worked through the cloak, through the linen, and settled against his chest where the bullet lay. Below him, the crowd was already turning — some toward the new President, some toward the street, some simply milling in the bright, hard cold, reluctant to leave the spectacle. The colour-sergeant had not moved. The regimental standard still snapped in the wind.

Jackson descended the first step, then the second. The cane found the stone with a sound like a clerk's stamp — precise, final, authoritative. He would take the train to Baltimore this afternoon, and from Baltimore the stage south and west, toward Nashville, toward the Hermitage, toward the land that had made him and that would, before very much longer, receive him back into itself.

Behind him, on the desk in the room he would never again enter, the Treasury report lay face-down beneath Blair's account of the Senate's verdict, its columns patient, its ratios extending into a future that had already begun to arrive.

The cane struck the third step. The fourth. The sound was very small against the noise of the crowd, and no one marked it.