official hostess, shunned Peggy Eaton. Jackson valued domestic harmony and
personal loyalty. He assumed that schemers had invaded and subverted his own
household. Before long, his suspicions centered on Vice President Calhoun, whose
wife, Floride Bonneau Calhoun, a powerful Washington matron, was a leader of
the assault on Peggy Eaton. Only Secretary of State Van Buren, a widower and an
eminently decent man, included the Eatons in official functions. Sensing that
Jackson was losing his patience with Calhoun, Van Buren’s friends, soon after the Jefferson birthday banquet in spring 1830, showed Jackson a letter from William H.
Crawford revealing that while serving in Monroe’s cabinet, Calhoun, contrary to his protestations, had favored censuring Jackson for his unauthorized invasion of Florida in 1818. An open break with Calhoun became inevitable.
The Fall
Jackson resolved the Peggy Eaton controversy, as he would
of Calhoun
resolve nullification, in ways that favored Van Buren in his
contest with Calhoun. He sent Donelson, his wife, and his
sister-in-law back to Tennessee and invited his friend W. B. Lewis and his daughter to take their place, but he pointedly made Peggy Eaton the official hostess at the White House. In spring 1831, Van Buren gave Jackson a free hand to reconstruct
his tangled administration. He offered to resign his cabinet post and engineered the resignations of nearly all other members of the cabinet, thus allowing Jackson to remake his administration without firing anyone. Many of those who left were
southern supporters of Calhoun. Jackson replaced them with a mixed cabinet that
included political allies of Van Buren. Also at this time, President Jackson began to consult with an informal Kitchen Cabinet that included journalists Amos Kendall
and Francis Preston Blair, along with Van Buren and a few others. The Peggy
Eaton controversy and the resulting shakeup in the administration were contribut-
ing mightily to the success of Van Buren’s southern strategy.
Van Buren’s victory over Calhoun came to a quick conclusion. As part of his
cabinet reorganization, Jackson appointed Van Buren minister to Great Britain—
an important post that would temporarily remove him from the heat of Washington
politics. Vice President Calhoun, sitting as president of the Senate, rigged the confirmation so that he cast the deciding vote against Van Buren’s appointment—a petty
act that turned out to be his last exercise of national power. Jackson replaced
Calhoun with Van Buren as the vice presidential candidate in 1832 and let it be
known that he wanted Van Buren to succeed him as president.
Petitions, the
The Democratic Party promised to protect slavery with a
Gag Rule, and
disciplined national coalition committed to states’ rights
the Southern
within an inviolable Union. The rise of a northern antislav-
Mails
ery movement (see Chapter 12) posed a direct challenge to
that formulation. Middle-class evangelicals, who were
emerging as the reformist core of the northern Whig Party, had learned early on
that Jacksonian Democrats wanted to keep moral issues out of politics. In 1828
and 1829, when they petitioned the government to stop movement of the mail on
Sundays, Jackson had turned them down. They next petitioned the government
against Indian Removal. Again, the Jackson administration had refused. Northern
Jacksonian Democracy and the South
399
evangelicals suspected Jackson of immorality, and they were appalled by his
defense of Peggy Eaton and his attack on gentlewomen and preachers. Most of all,
reformist evangelicals disliked the Democrats’ rigid party discipline, which in each case had kept moral questions from shaping politics.
In the early 1830s, a radical minority of evangelicals formed societies commit-
ted to the immediate abolition of slavery, and they devised ways of making the
national government confront the slavery question. In 1835, abolitionists launched a “postal campaign,” flooding the mail—both North and South—with antislavery
tracts that southerners and most northerners considered incendiary. From 1836
onward, they bombarded Congress with petitions, most of them for the abolition
of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia (where Congress had
undisputed jurisdiction), others against the interstate slave trade, slavery in the federal territories, and the admission of new slave states.
Some Jacksonians, including Jackson, wanted to stop the postal campaign with
a federal censorship law. Calhoun and other southerners, however, argued that the states had the right to censor mail crossing their borders. Knowing that state
censorship of the mail was unconstitutional and that federal censorship of the mail would be a political disaster, Amos Kendall, a Van Burenite who had become postmaster general in the cabinet shuffle, proposed an informal solution. Without
changing the law, he would simply look the other way as local postmasters
removed abolitionist materials from the mail. Almost all such materials were pub-
lished in New York City and mailed from there. The New York postmaster, a loyal
appointee, proceeded to sift them out of the mail and thus cut off the postal campaign at its source. The few tracts that made it to the South were destroyed by local postmasters. Calhoun and his supporters continued to demand state censorship, but the Democrats had no intention of relinquishing federal control over the federal
mail. They made it clear, however, that no abolitionist literature would reach the South as long as Democrats controlled the U.S. Post Office.
The Democrats dealt in similar ways with antislavery petitions to Congress.
Southern extremists demanded that Congress disavow its power to legislate on slavery in the District of Columbia, but Van Buren, who was preparing to run for president, declared that Congress did have that power but should never use it. In dealing with the petitions, Congress simply voted at each session from 1836 to 1844 to table them without reading them, thus acknowledging that they had been received but
sidestepping any debate on them. This procedure, which became known as the
“gag rule,” was passed by southern Whigs and southern Democrats with the help of
most (usually 80 percent or more) of northern Democrats. Increasingly, abolitionists sent their petitions to ex-President John Quincy Adams, who had returned to
Washington as a Whig congressman from Massachusetts. Like other northern Whigs,
Adams openly opposed both slavery and the gag rule in Congress. Northern Whigs
began calling him Old Man Eloquent, while Calhoun dubbed him “a mischievous,
bad old man.” But most southerners saw what the Democrats wanted them to see:
that their surest guarantee of safety within the Union was a disciplined Democratic Party determined to avoid arguments about slavery.
Thus the Jacksonians answered the question that had arisen with the Missouri
debates: how to protect the slaveholding South within the federal Union. Whereas
Calhoun and other southern radicals found the answer in nullification and other
400