JACKSON'S CABINET.

27

and afterwards, and, more than justly, made responsible for it. Only secondary, and in part even accidental circumstances, permitted the tendency which lay in the conditions. of the country and in its institutions thus suddenly to manifest itself. It is, however, true that Jackson carried the element of personality into it to an extent not possible for later presidents. In place of the personal kindly disposition of the president, which was now the governing consideration, came the interest of party, that is, of party leaders, great and small.

In the construction of his cabinet, Jackson himself paid little attention to party; and, back of the cabinet, there still stood the "Kitchen Cabinet," which always possessed undue power, and frequently exercised the deciding influence in the most important questions. Van Buren was the only member of the cabinet who, in a certain sense, enjoyed a national reputation; and he owed his selection less to his distinguished position in the party than to his great share in Jackson's success. The most important member after him was Berrien, the attorney general. Yet his reputation as a jurist was not such that, had the old practice been in vogue, Wirt would have been obliged to vacate for him the place which he had filled for twelve years with the greatest distinction. The chief merit of the remaining members of the cabinet was their common enmity to Henry Clay. The postmaster general, Barry, could, in addition to this, boast that, from being an intimate friend of Clay, he had become one of his enemies. Branch, the secretary of the navy, was an indifferent personage; he now obtained a place in the cabinet, just as he had previously, on account of his wealth and of his highly respectable social position, obtained the governorship of North Carolina and a seat in the senate of the Union. Ingham, of Pennsylvania, the secretary of the treasury, a clever business man, had long been a useful mem

ber of congress. He had recommended himself to Jackson chiefly by the part he played in producing the cry about the pretended "trade" between Clay and Adams. The secretary of war, Eaton, was, indeed, a United States senator, but had never played an important political part. He was chosen as a boon companion from Tennessee, and out of gratitude for his services in bringing the electoral campaign to a happy

issue.

Another, and an exceedingly piquant circumstance, which was attended by important political consequences, gave Eaton a further claim on Jackson's favor. Some months before the inauguration, Eaton had, after previous consultation with Jackson, married a certain Mrs. Timberlake, with whom, according to the reports circulated and universally credited in Washington, he had, for some time, maintained unlawful intercourse. Jackson's chivalrous nature led him, on every occasion, to espouse the cause of the weaker sex. But accusations of this kind especially provoked him to contradiction, for they had been made against himself also and his wife, to whom he clung with touching devotedness, and were renewed during the electoral campaign. It seems as if the deep acrimony which this had generated within him made it seem to him to be a duty towards the good genius of his life, who had died in the meantime, to restore the good name of Mrs. Eaton. Washington society, and especially the society of other members of the cabinet and their families, had to be compelled to look upon Mrs. Eaton as entitled to all the rights of their circle, and to recognize her to be entitled to them. But the lady rulers of Washington society were determined not to permit the disreputable woman to be forced upon them. The president was the cause of exceedingly angry scenes with the wives of foreign ambassadors; and with the married members of the cabinet, whose families were in Washington, he soon found himself engaged

DEFECTS OF JACKSON'S CHARACTER.

29

in an open and violent feud brought about by the question. Jackson was not used to meeting with an energy equal to his own. The contest, on this account, soon assumed a very malignant character, and finally became the real provocation to the complete reorganization of the cabinet-a reorganization which at first was not at all understood outside of Washington.

In this tragico-comic interlude, which is entirely sui generis in the history of the United States, every one of Jackson's characteristic qualities, good and bad, great and small, may be recognized. Opposition of any kind was insupportable to him. He was always too certain of the goodness of his cause, especially when his feelings came into play, to believe, much less to be able to understand, that the opposition arose from honest conviction. In political life, as in the field, he knew only friends and foes, and he was, therefore, ruthless in his battles with his enemies. But he was just as unreserved in his devotion to his friends. He made their cause his own completely. Personal questions which most frequently gave him offense, he grasped with such intensity that they became the real ones at issue to him. And just as the limits of what was personal to himself and the real question at issue faded one into the other, so also did the limits between political life and civil life. In addition to this, he was wanting in the ability to estimate the relative importance of different questions. He could not distinguish the small from the great, because he gave his entire thought and will to every task; and be, therefore, began nothing new until he had carried out his previous undertaking. His resolves were quickly made, and without any weighing of the possible consequences to his own person. But neither his formal education nor the schooling which life had given him, made him capable of objective examination and consideration. His own person, that is, his personal feeling,

assumption and belief were the starting point and the rallying point of all his deliberation, thought and action the one and the other subjectivity in the highest power. To shake an opinion which he had once formed, by argument, or even to modify it, was, therefore, almost impossible; but until he had formed a fixed opinion, he was like wax in skillful hands. This was all the more dangerous, since he could not at all distinguish between his person and his office. He not only made use, on a most extensive scale, of his official position in extra-official affairs, because he, in good faith, dragged his office into that which concerned only his own person; but, what was much more far-reaching in its consequences, he marked out the boundaries of the rights of the office in accordance with his own personal judgment and the wants of the moment, because he gave the duties of the office an improperly wide extension, and was conscious that he desired to fulfill them honestly. Since Louis XIV, the maxim, l'état c'est moi, has scarcely found, a second time, so ingenuous and complete an expression as in Andrew Jackson. The only difference is, that it was translated from the language of monarchy into the language of republicanism.

That such a phenomenon was possible in the republic, and that, at the same time, its political and social-political development kept on its course as undisturbed and consistently as if this singular man had never sat in the presidential chair, is easy of explanation. Washington was called the embodiment of the best traits of the American national character, and Jackson was the embodiment of all its typical traits. He was unquestionably a man of great parts, but he was at the same time entirely, incapable of rising, in any respect, to the height of a great man, because the disfavor of circumstances during the years that he was capable of being educated had kept him in the ingenuous coarseness of the child of nature. Spite of the frightful influence, in the

THE BANK-CONTROVERSY.

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real sense of the expression, which he exercised during the eight years of his presidency, he neither pointed out nor opened new ways to his people by the superiority of his mind, but only dragged them more rapidly onward on the road they had long been traveling, by the demoniacal power of his will. The supporters of his policy were the instincts of the masses; the sum and substance of it, the satisfaction of those instincts. The power of his will gave it absolute

sway.

These last lines give the key to the right understanding of the political bearing of the bank-controversy, which was mainly the occasion of so rude a development of personal rule that we may very properly speak of the reign of Andrew Jackson. This is not the place to discuss the general polit ical and purely economic question, whether the bank an swered equitable demands and did not abuse the privileges granted it. It is sufficient to indicate that the controversy was not, as the friends of the bank were wont to assert, an entirely baseless one. The bank question had, indeed, long ceased to be a party question, and men had learned to appreciate its advantages; but the masses of people continued to be filled with distrust of the immense power of its capital. It is probable, however, that this distrust would have remained latent until such time as the bank should apply for an extension of its franchise, had not Jackson made the question sooner the order of the day. What it was that first. provoked him to this, it is not possible to determine definitely. The tradition of the democratic party, to which Ban

'Even Story, who was a moderate man and far removed from partisanship, writes: "And I confess that I feel humiliated at the truth, which cannot be disguised, that though we live under the form of a republic, we are in fact under the rule of a single man." Life and Letters of J. Story, II, p. 154.

'The capital of the bank amounted to $35,000,000.