Lone Star Nation (15 page)

Yet Jackson refused to be deterred. He opened fire with two small cannons, whose balls bounced futilely off the heavy logs. Reconsidering, he sent a squad of swimmers to the rear of the Red Stick position, where they lit fires to distract the defenders. As some of the latter turned to fight the flames, Jackson ordered an assault against the breastworks.

Sam Houston was among the first to respond. He braved bullets in racing across the open area in front of the fort, and he scrambled to the top of the wall, where an arrow impaled him in the upper thigh. He fought on, with the arrow protruding from below his belt, and inspired his comrades in the murderous clash that followed. The Indians thrust their rifles through the gun holes and blasted the attackers, who jammed their own guns in the holes and fired back. The fighting was so close and hot, one survivor explained, that “many of the enemy's balls were welded to the bayonets of our muskets.” In time the attackers drove the defenders away from the wall and into the interior of the fort.

At this point Houston accosted a fellow fighter and asked him to pull out the arrow. The missile was barbed and resisted withdrawal; Houston's impromptu surgeon quailed at the damage it would do if he continued to pull. Houston insisted that he try again, and threatened violence if he declined. The man gave a mighty heave, bringing out the shaft, barbed head, and a sizable chunk of Houston's flesh. Houston, correctly fearing that he'd bleed to death, retired from the fray and sought a real surgeon.

He was catching his breath when Jackson rode by. Pleased by what he had heard and now saw of Houston, the general ordered him to remain in the rear for the duration of the battle. But when the Red Sticks dug in, and Jackson called for volunteers for a final assault, Houston hobbled to the fore. He charged the Indian position against their desperate fire, stopping only when one bullet hit his right arm and another shattered his right shoulder. In pain and shock, in the gathering darkness, he staggered and fell to the ground.

The battle continued to a bloody, brutal finish. The outnumbered Red Sticks refused to surrender, which suited Jackson and his vengeful men. A body count the next day showed some nine hundred enemy Indians killed, against twenty-six of Jackson's soldiers and twenty-three of his Indian allies.

Houston almost joined the dead. His condition was so dire that the army surgeons, after an initial examination, triaged him in favor of those with a better chance of surviving. He fainted from shock and loss of blood and lay that night like a corpse on the clammy ground. To the surgeons' surprise and probably his own, he awoke the next morning. At this point his wounds received more thorough attention, and he gradually began to mend.

The Battle of Horseshoe Bend made Houston a Jackson man, and Jackson an Army man. Jackson's victory earned him a generalship in the regular Army, and when British forces, augmented by the veterans who had lately beaten Napoleon in Europe, approached New Orleans, Jackson was ordered to defend the city. He did so with the determination that friends and enemies had come to expect of him, and with a finesse of which almost no one thought him capable. Lacking the regular forces to repel the redcoats, he cobbled together an unlikely coalition of Cajun bayoumen, free and slave Negroes, New Orleans gentry, and delta-based pirates. The disciplined British assaulted the ragtag American lines once, twice, thrice, but each time fell back before the Americans' lethal rifle fire. Finally, with three of their generals dead, the British abandoned the field.

The victory at New Orleans elevated Jackson to status as a national hero, the only general to beat the British in an otherwise frustrating war. It didn't take long for anti-administration politicos to sense that Jackson might be just the man to break the Virginia chain of Jefferson, Madison, and now James Monroe. But Jackson admired Monroe and had no desire to oppose him. Jackson's boosters bided their time, looking toward 1824.

Jackson put the intervening years to vigorous use. The Seminole Indians were a comparative novelty among American tribes, having existed as a distinct group only since the middle of the eighteenth century, when war, famine, and disease depopulated northern Florida. Spanish officials there (like Spanish officials in Texas sixty years later) hoped to defend this frontier region by planting colonies in the border marches. They invited groups of Creeks to relocate south from Georgia, which the Creeks did. They brought their black slaves with them, and also accepted into their community runaway slaves from English and then American plantations. In time a people of mixed race emerged, called Seminoles—from the Spanish for “runaway”—by their neighbors.

As did the Comanches farther west, the Seminoles engaged in raids against the established communities of the border region, in their case crossing back over into Georgia and Alabama. A particular series of raids inspired the underemployed Jackson to retaliate. Jackson led a contingent of battle-hardened frontiersmen into Florida against the Seminole settlements. After smiting the Seminoles, he attacked the Spanish town of Pensacola, partly for abetting the Indians and partly because Spain was Britain's ally. To make the expedition further worthwhile he arrested and executed two British traders for arming the Indians and otherwise acting in an unneighborly manner.

Spain was outraged but impotent, as Jackson, who noted the unfolding revolution in Mexico and the continuing turmoil in Iberia, guessed it would be. Britain wasn't impotent, but neither was it genuinely outraged over the fate of two questionable characters; after filing a protest, London let the matter drop. Monroe and most of his cabinet recoiled at the controversy and distanced themselves from Jackson. His sole supporter was John Quincy Adams, who appreciated how the Tennesseean's impetuosity revealed the hollowness of Spanish power. The secretary of state exploited Jackson's coup and, in the treaty of 1819, ejected Spain from Florida.

The Florida affair made Jackson more famous than ever. Ordinary westerners embraced him as the beau ideal of their region, the model of courage, will, ambition, and success. He wasn't exactly one of them, being a comparative aristocrat on his plantation, the Hermitage, outside Nashville; but, having risen from the humblest circumstances, he was something they all could hope to become. Easterners adopted a less favorable view of Jackson. To them he appeared uneducated (he
was
uneducated, in a formal sense, but not entirely unread), uncouth (by eastern standards, but not by those of the West, which exhibited greater tolerance for drinking, gambling, and dueling), and unprincipled (lacking, in particular, due respect for the prerogatives of business and finance). Moreover, with his prow of a forehead and his peninsular jaw, burning blue eyes, and wild white hair, he looked downright frightening—not a Hebrew prophet, perhaps, but an American equivalent.

And indeed Jackson was a prophet: of an approaching democracy. In Jackson's youth, the founders of the American republic had attempted to build a wall against excessive popular participation in government. The people's house was the House of Representatives, but it was balanced in Congress by the Senate, whose members were chosen not by the people but by the state legislatures. And against Congress were set the executive, whose chief was chosen by the electoral college, and the Supreme Court, with members even more insulated from popular passions. The franchise was very far from universal. Only adult white males voted, in most cases only those who owned property. Beyond the institutional safeguards against democracy—a term of opprobrium at the time of the Revolution—was the habit of deference that had long caused Englishmen to select their representatives from among their betters, and which was expected to inspire Americans to do the same.

Yet the Revolution, or rather the revolutionary spirit of which the revolt against King George was the most obvious manifestation, was corrosive of many old habits. By declaring all men equal, for the purpose of justifying the revolt, Jefferson and the Continental Congress made Americans feel equal for other purposes as well. And if “no taxation without representation” applied to Parliament, why shouldn't it apply to Congress and the state governments? The genie was out of the jar; having made a revolution in the name of the people's right to govern themselves, Americans had an ever harder time justifying that some people could vote and others not. And as the population expanded and moved west, away from the citadels of eastern privilege, and as other countries—France, Mexico, and most of Spanish America—took up the revolutionary cry and echoed it back to America, the logic of broader suffrage became overwhelming. Women and most blacks still stood beyond the pale, but by the mid-1820s nearly all white men in America could vote.

And the person they voted for most enthusiastically was Andrew Jackson. The 1824 race to succeed Monroe matched Jackson against Quincy Adams, among others, and was the most competitive in a generation. For the first time a westerner challenged the tidewater East; for the first time the West felt a compelling interest in the outcome. As far away as Texas, even expatriate Stephen Austin followed the campaign. “Our candidates for President are J. Q. Adams, W. H. Crawford, H. Clay and General Jackson,” Austin learned in a letter from John Sibley at Natchitoches. Sibley added, “Clay or Jackson will feel more interested for Mexico and of course will be our choice.”

Jackson proved to be the choice of the West, and of more American voters than any of the other three. But the four-way voting split precluded any candidate's getting a majority of electors, and the decision devolved to the House of Representatives. The last time this had happened—in 1800—the bitterness hadn't dissipated before Alexander Hamilton lay dead on the Hudson bank, the victim of Aaron Burr's bullet. Jackson intimated that his dueling days were over, but one could never be too sure about the volcanic old soldier. Henry Clay, however, hated Jackson more than he feared him, perhaps because “Harry of the West”—of Kentucky, to be precise—resented his eclipse at Jackson's hands, and he threw his support to Adams. A short while later, in what gave every appearance of being the back end of a bargain, Adams named Clay secretary of state. In those days the secretary of state was the heir presumptive to the presidency: in every election from 1800 to 1824 the winning candidate had apprenticed as secretary of state. Consequently Clay and the country had reason to believe he had traded his short ticket in the 1824 drawing for a winning ticket later on.

The Jacksonians grew apoplectic as the dimensions of what they called the “corrupt bargain” became evident. Jackson himself had expected no better. “So you see the
Judas
of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver,” he muttered grimly. “His end will be the same. Was there ever witnessed such bare faced corruption?”

The campaign of 1828 began at once, energized by the Jacksonian anger and amplified by the continued democratization of American politics. Until the 1820s voters typically did not choose presidential electors; state legislatures did. By 1828, however, that practice had largely vanished (only two states still let their legislatures choose electors), with the result that presidential contests became popular referendums. And in a popular referendum, Jackson was unbeatable. He polled 140,000 more votes than Adams (of 1.2 million cast), and swept into the presidency, the first candidate clearly the choice of the American people.

Jackson's inauguration was a brawl. The army of westerners who came to see the swearing-in of Old Hickory (the name he acquired in the campaign against the Creeks, and the first popular honorific applied to a president) surged up Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House, where they swarmed through the doors and windows, soiled the carpets, tore the drapes, broke the furniture, and smashed the china in the drunken glory of the victory they considered their own as much as Jackson's. “I never saw such a mixture,” declared an astonished Joseph Story, an associate justice of the Supreme Court. “The reign of King Mob seemed triumphant.” Senator James Hamilton accounted the affair “a regular Saturnalia . . . The mob broke in, in thousands—spirits black, yellow, and grey, poured in in one uninterrupted stream of mud and filth, among the throngs many fit subjects for the penitentiary.” One of the city's most proper hostesses rendered similar judgment: “What a scene did we witness! The
Majesty of the People
had disappeared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, negroes, women, children, scrambling, fighting, romping. What a pity, what a pity.”