transformed the Canadian-American frontier from a battleground into the
peaceful border that it has been ever since. He pacified the southern border as
well. In 1819, following Jackson’s raid into Florida, the Adams-Ónis Treaty
procured Florida for the United States and defined the U.S.-Spanish border west
of the Mississippi in ways that gave the Americans claims to the Pacific Coast in the Northwest.
Trickier problems had arisen when Spanish colonies in the Americas declared
their independence. Spain could not prevent this, and the powers of Europe, vic-
torious over Napoleon and determined to roll back the republican revolution,
talked openly of helping Spain or of annexing South American territory for them-
selves. Both the Americans and the British opposed such a move, and the British
proposed a joint statement outlawing the interference of any outside power
(including themselves) in Latin America. Adams had thought it better for the
United States to make its own policy than to “come in as cock-boat in the wake
of the British man-of-war.” In 1823, he wrote what became known as the
Monroe Doctrine. Propounded at the same time that the United States recognized
the new Latin American republics, it declared American opposition to any
European attempt at colonization in the New World without (as the British had
wanted) denying the right of the United States to annex new territory. Although
the international community knew that the British navy, and not the Monroe
Doctrine, kept the European powers out of the Americas, Adams had announced
that the United States was determined to become the preeminent power in the
Western Hemisphere.
Nationalism
As president, Adams translated his fervent nationalism into
at Home
domestic policy. Adams had dealt smoothly with European
diplomats, but as president of a democratic republic he went
out of his way to isolate himself and to offend popular opinion. In his first annual message to Congress, Adams outlined an ambitious program for national development under the auspices of the federal government: roads, canals, a national uni-
versity, a national astronomical observatory (“lighthouses of the skies”), and other costly initiatives:
The spirit of improvement is abroad upon the earth.… While foreign nations less
blessed with … freedom … than ourselves are advancing with gigantic strides in the career of public improvement, were we to slumber in indolence or fold up our arms and proclaim to the world that we are palsied by the will of our constituents, would it not … doom ourselves to perpetual inferiority?
Congressmen could not believe their ears. Here was a president who had
received only one in three votes and who had entered office accused of intrigues
against the democratic will. And yet at the first opportunity he told Congress to pass an ambitious program and not to be “palsied” by the will of the electorate.
Hostile politicians and journalists never tired of joking about Adams’s “lighthouses to the skies.” More lasting, however, was the connection they drew between federal public works projects and high taxes, intrusive government, the denial of democratic majorities, and expanded opportunities for corruption, secret deals, and special favors. Even members of Congress who favored Adams’s program were afraid
Adams versus Jackson
389
to vote for it. Congress never acted on the president’s proposals, and the Adams
administration emerged as little more than a long prelude to the election of 1828.
The Birth of the
As early as 1825, it was clear that the election of 1828 would
Democratic
pit Adams against Andrew Jackson. Van Buren and like-
Party
minded Republicans, with their candidate Crawford hope-
lessly incapacitated, switched their allegiance to Jackson. They
wanted Jackson elected, however, not only as a popular hero but as head of a disciplined and committed Democratic Party that would continue the states’-rights,
limited-government positions of the old Jeffersonian Republicans.
The new Democratic Party linked white democracy with the defense of
southern slavery. Van Buren began preparations for 1828 with a visit to John
C. Calhoun of South Carolina. Calhoun was moving along the road from
postwar nationalism to states’-rights conservatism. He also wanted to stay on
as vice president and thus keep his presidential hopes alive. After convincing
Calhoun to support Jackson, Van Buren wrote to Thomas Ritchie, editor of the
Richmond Enquirer and leader of Virginia’s Republicans. Ritchie could deliver
Crawford’s southern supporters to Jackson. In his letter, Van Buren proposed
to revive the alliance of “the planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North” that had elected Jefferson. Reminding Ritchie of how one-party government had allowed the Missouri question to get out of hand, Van Buren
insisted that “if the old [party loyalties] are suppressed, prejudices between free and slave holding states will inevitably take their place.”
Thus a new Democratic Party, committed to states’ rights and minimal gov-
ernment and dependent on the votes of both slaveholding and nonslaveholding
states (beginning, much like Jefferson’s old party, with Van Buren’s New York
and Ritchie’s Virginia), would ensure white democracy, the continuation of slav-
ery, and the preservation of the Union. The alternative, Van Buren argued, was
an expensive and invasive national state (Adams’s “lighthouses of the skies”), the isolation of the slaveholding South, and thus mortal danger to the republic.
The Election
The presidential campaign of 1828 was an exercise in slan-
of 1828
der rather than a debate on public issues. Adhering to cus-
tom, neither Adams nor Jackson campaigned directly, but
their henchmen viciously personalized the campaign. Jacksonians hammered away
at the Corrupt Bargain of 1825, while the Adams forces attacked Jackson’s char-
acter. They reminded voters of his duels and tavern brawls and circulated a “coffin handbill” describing Jackson’s execution of militiamen during the Creek War. One
of Henry Clay’s newspaper friends circulated the rumor that Jackson was a bastard and that his mother was a prostitute, but the most egregious slander centered on
Andrew Jackson’s marriage. In 1790, Jackson had married Rachel Donelson,
probably aware that she was estranged but not divorced from a man named
Robards. Branding the marriage an “abduction,” the Adams team screamed that
Jackson had “torn from a husband the wife of his bosom,” and had lived with her
in a state of “open and notorious lewdness.” They branded Rachel Jackson (now a
deeply pious plantation housewife) an “American Jezebel,” a “profligate woman,”
390