Chapter X: The Age of Hickory; Or, Jackson’s Epoch

1829–1837.

Military Men, domesticated to Civil Life, like tamed Animals.—General
Jackson’s Camp Traits in the White Den at Washington.—His Prehensile
Habits claw out the Eyes of several Measures.—How he foraged on his
Political Enemies, and turned his Troops of Friends into the Public
Pastures.—Lord Palmerston’s Remark upon Gladstone; and its American
Application.—An Insurrection among the Household Cabinet Troops.—How
the vigorous Hickory Club, wielded chivalrously for a Woman, quelled
it.—The President moves on the Bank and captures all its Fortified
Points.—Chicago starts in 1830.—Why it did not overtake and annex the
United States.—South Carolina threatens Nullification, and is
threatened.—Mr. Calhoun violently promised an elevated Position
between two Posts. Mr. Clay’s Compromise.—Horace Greeley starts the
First Daily Paper.—Its untimely End bewailed in Verse.—Black Hawk
caged and shown around.—Georgia, the Cherokees and the Supreme
Court.—Three Celebrities gained by the Seminole War.—Of Arkansas and
its Papal Little Rock.—Prospects for the Pope when flung from the
Tarpeian.—An Arkansas Paul preaching in the American Athens and
Corinth.—Old Hickory and the Nuts left to be cracked.

Naturalists tell us that certain animals, domesticated from a wild state, retain some primeval habits so tenaciously as never to shed them; that these animals, for example, never lie down on their new and softer beds without turning around and beating about as in their forest lairs. So military men, tamed down from the independence of camp into the regulated routine of civil life, never lose their unrest in attempting to adjust themselves to their new condition. General Jackson carried the defiant bravery of his campaigns against the Indians into the white den at Washington. He disdained to cover the prehensile claws of new measures with the velvet sheath of official prudence.

Over the eyes of schemes or institutions which he designed to scratch out he cast no glamour.

During his eight years of civil campaigning, he stormed several forts that had become mossed by age through preceding administrations. His first care was to live off the enemy, the Adamites, whose Federal offices he took as forage for his own troops of friends; an example from the military code which every successor, civil or uncivil, has unfortunately hastened to follow. Lord Palmerston once declared “that Mr. Gladstone had not a command of language, but that language commanded him.” So it has resulted from this tough, hickory precedent, that the offices now command the government.

This campaign over, his next exploit was to quell an insurrection among the household troops led by Vice-President Calhoun, Mr. Ingham, Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Branch, Secretary of the Navy, and Mr. Berrien, Attorney-General. These officers were soon cashiered and their places filled by Mr. McLane, Mr. Woodbury, and Mr. Taney. The lily-white arm of a lady, whose social exclusion from the Calhoun set the vigorous old warrior resented, moved the iron sinews of the hickory club which cleaned out the Secretarys’ stables.

The General next moved on the United States Bank, up whose slopes, although jagged with ores and hoary with legislative fortifications, he rushed, carrying them at all points with a _coup de main_.

His first term, however, was made illustrious, not so much by these destructions as by the first appearance of Chicago. This was in 1830. At this time, fortunately, the population of the United States had reached 12,866,020, and were thus saved from being overtaken and immediately annexed to that rapid and rapidly pushing place. This Northern cosmical event attracted less attention, however, because the public mind was at last and about this time fixed upon the State of Mr. C. C. Pinckney, which, under the guidance of Mr. Calhoun, threatened to exclude the Federal hickory government from its plantation, unless the Tariff Act was repealed.

The old military chief issued a public proclamation, asserting his determination to execute the laws over South Carolina, and private threats to raise the main nullifier to a lofty post under the government. Indeed, he promised to some of his close personal friends, with ejaculations truly Jacksonian, to put him between two posts for the rest of his life.

This was the first sprouting of the carefully engrafted scion of slavery upon the stock of State rights.

Again, the Kentucky compromiser was ready with a harmonizing remedy, which scaled the tariff rates for the next ten years, and then planed them all down to the horizontal level of twenty per cent. South Carolina, lying, like Achilles, near her ships, professed to be appeased. Mr. Calhoun was saved his hempen elevation.

The year following, 1833, Horace Greeley started in New York “The Morning Post,” the first daily paper ever projected, which lived only three weeks, and wondered why it ever lived at all;

“Whose all of life, a morning ray,
Blushed into dawn then passed away.”

The Sacs, Foxes, and Winnebagoes, with tomahawks in their talons, and led by Black Hawk, swooped in hovering circles around the white chickens of Illinois; but were brought down by those practised marksmen, Generals Scott and Atkinson. The old Hawk was captured and shown through the United States in his drooping feathers. In Georgia, on the other hand, the whites were the aggressors, seeking to push the Creeks and Cherokees from their coveted possessions. The Indians fled to the Supreme Court of the United States, which bade Georgia restore the poor Naboths to their vineyards. The Ahab sovereignty of that State resisted. The President refused to interfere. The nullification by Georgia of a decree of the Supreme Court, restoring Indians to their rights, was, in the eyes of the old Indian fighter, quite a different matter from the nullification by Calhoun-led South Carolina of an act of Congress. So far from being a hair-splitter, the General could not even see whole shocks, if the poll was long, straight, and black. In 1835 arose another Seminole war in Florida, caused by an attempt on the part of the government to remove that powerful tribe, under a mock treaty, somewhere, nowhere, anywhere, so that it was west of the Mississippi, and away from present cupidity. On the public debt, now dwarfed to $291,089, this war was like an April shower. Florida had the satisfaction, for the third time in sixteen years, of increasing the obligations of the United States for, if not to, her. In this peninsular campaign, we obtained three celebrities to knob the flat surface of our history,—Generals Zachariah Taylor, Jessup, and Gaines,—gains compared with which the loss of life and lucre are not to be mentioned, except to stiffen our virtues by reproaching their suggestion.

The red tribes began sensibly to experience the truth of that sad tradition, which depicts their fate under the figure of a spirited bull, Manitou, which, chased from Cordillera to higher peak, across plain and river, ever westward, stands frequently on his reluctant retreat at bay, and tosses in vain from his frontlet the burning spears whose arrowy flames the waters of the Pacific only can quench.

After a pause of sixteen years, Arkansas, in 1836, strode, bowie-knife in belt, into the American camp. With Little Rock for its capital, it bids fair for the honor of sheltering the Pope when flung off from the Tarpeian at Rome. Its Saul-like Legarès, having been struck down by miraculous lights since 1861, we shall probably see, becoming zealous Pauls, mending apostolic nets on the Red River, and preaching to the ignorant worshippers of unknown gods, in the Athens of New England and the Corinth of New York.

At threescore and ten, Old Hickory was transplanted to the Hermitage. The merits and demerits of his administration, his political principles and his personal character, constitute still the Flanders of American parties, over which much hard swearing and fighting are still vigorously carried on. The rough-nutted tree has been well shaken by friend and foe; and its shaggy fruit we leave to be cracked, at family firesides, to season insipid pauses and to flavor uneffervescing drowsiness.

THE ROMANCE OF INDIAN WARFARE.
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