The American Vice Presidency (14 page)

Crawford won a sparsely attended congressional caucus victory but was soon hampered by a paralytic stroke. Calhoun’s entry surprised and angered Adams, but early support for Calhoun in Pennsylvania faded with
the political emergence of Jackson, so Calhoun withdrew. Pennsylvania backers of Adams and Jackson in the state endorsed Calhoun for the vice presidency, assuring his election.

But in the electoral college the tie vote between Adams and Jackson for president and the “corrupt bargain” that saw Henry Clay’s electors go to Adams disturbed Calhoun. He wrote a friend, “Mr. Clay has made the Prest
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against the voice of his constituents, and … has been rewarded by the man elevated by him by the first office in his gift, the most dangerous stab, which the liberty of this country has ever received. I will not be on that side. I am with the people, and shall remain so.”
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Calhoun found himself in an administration in which he would have little opportunity or inclination to play a major policy role. As presiding officer of the Senate, however, he was circumspect, not believing it was his prerogative to interrupt a senator as he spoke in debate, to limit his time to orate, or to call him to order for some perceived indiscretion. But of fifteen standing committees of the Senate, Calhoun gave chairmanships to eight administration men and seven to those somewhat or very hostile to the incumbent president.

Adams, however, didn’t want fairness or neutrality; he wanted his men heading all the committees. And Clay, displeased with Calhoun’s complaints about the “corrupt bargain,” recognized Calhoun as a threat to his own continuing presidential ambitions and to the Adams agenda, which in its pursuit of internal improvements would advance Clay’s own concept of the American System.

In 1825, when Adams sought Senate confirmation to send observers to a meeting of Central and South American ministers in Panama, Calhoun opposed the initiative. He viewed it as a step toward recognition of Haiti, which would be sending a delegation of former slaves and would disturb the American South. Van Buren saw the clash as an opportunity to recruit Calhoun for the next Jackson presidential bid.

Adams and Calhoun also clashed over Senate resolutions that would change electing the president and vice president to “a direct vote of the People, in districts.” It was to be done “without the intervention of the Senate or House of Representatives” and would prohibit “the appointment of any Member of Congress to any office of honor or trust under the United
States during the term for which the member had been elected.”
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The latter proposal was a direct assault on Clay, who had resigned from the House to become Adams’s secretary of state.

On March 30, 1826, John Randolph of Virginia tested Calhoun’s patience and endurance in the chair when he unleashed a tirade against Adams and Clay. A high administration official, believed by many to be Adams himself, then proceeded to castigate Calhoun in print for not halting the Randolph assault. The Senate later authorized its presiding officer to call any senator to order for offensive words uttered in debate. But Calhoun insisted that as president of the Senate he had not been elected by the senators and therefore had no power to silence any of them or to call them out of order for partisan remarks.
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The principal tangible outcome of Randolph’s verbal assault was a duel with Clay, who saw himself as insulted, and in April they exchanged fire on the southern shore of the Potomac. Neither man was hurt, and the irrepressible Randolph continued his obnoxious ways.
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In any event, the spectacle of a president or close associate publicly dressing down his vice president cemented the hostility between Adams and Calhoun. It inevitably drove Calhoun into the Jackson camp as his best vehicle for removing Adams from the presidency in the 1828 election. Knowing now he would not be offered a second term in the Adams administration nor wanting one, an alliance with Jackson was the surest way to keep alive his own political ambitions.

Adams and Calhoun had maintained a proper if cool relationship up to then. Upon Calhoun’s return to the Senate at the end of 1826, he found himself the subject of renewed accusations of profiteering by a chief aide when he was Monroe’s war secretary. He immediately called on the House of Representatives to investigate the allegations, saying meanwhile he would desist from presiding over the Senate. After six weeks of hearings Calhoun was exonerated, but the investigation threatened his aspirations to higher office.

By now Calhoun clearly had no political future in the Adams administration. Calhoun wrote Jackson of his disaffection from Adams over the “corrupt bargain” and indicated his interest in an alliance with Jackson to undo that wrong in the 1828 election. The issue, he said, was “between
power and liberty, and it must be determined in the next three years.” Jackson responded cordially, “I trust that my name will always be found on the side of the people, and that we shall march hand in hand in their cause.” Calhoun thereupon signed on, writing confidently, “Every indication is in our favor, or rather I should say in favor of the country’s cause.”
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Calhoun doubtless was attracted to the alliance by Jackson’s assertion that if elected he would serve only a single term, so Calhoun would be content running for another vice presidential term on the Jackson ticket, then seeking the presidency again in 1832 with greatly enhanced prospects of success.
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Van Buren saw Calhoun as the right fit for ousting Adams by wedding the “planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North.” He described the alliance as “the most natural and beneficial,” observing, “The country has once flourished under a party thus constituted and may again.”
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In another observation toward the creation of a Jacksonian Democratic Party, Van Buren wrote, “If Gen Jackson and his friends will put his election on old party grounds, preserve the old systems, avoid if not condemn the practices of the last campaign, we can by adding his personal popularity to the yet remaining force of old party feeling, not only succeed in electing him but our success will be worth something.”
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Calhoun sealed his place on the Jackson ticket with a string of unanimous nominations in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, and Kentucky, as well as support in New York and Virginia, the old North-South alliance. A potential conflict with Van Buren came in the spring of 1828 with the New Yorker’s role in the Senate passage of what soon was known as “the Tariff of Abominations.” It was hated in Calhoun’s home state for imposing greater hardships on the cotton and other agricultural interests of the South. Calhoun suggested to South Carolinians that tariff relief would come from the election of Jackson.

In the first election under a new party system, neither presidential nominee was spared personal vitriol. A scandal involving Jackson and his wife, Rachel, who had still been married though in the process of divorce when they first ran off together, was resurrected; Adams was still pummeled for the “corrupt bargain” that made Clay his secretary of state. Their running mates, Calhoun and Richard Rush of Pennsylvania, Adams’s minister to London, remained, however, essentially unmentioned as another
commentary on the general importance of their positions of the day. Under the Democratic Party banner or simply the Democratic Party, Jackson and Calhoun won easily.

Not having to campaign in person in 1828, Calhoun spent much of the preelection period at his Pendleton, South Carolina, home, preparing an analysis of the hated tariff at the request of the state legislature. The legislature in late 1827 had declared the tariff unconstitutional and called on Calhoun to lay out the case. Thereupon he wrote what came to be called the South Carolina Exposition and Protest, in which he revisited the same rights argument that Jefferson had mustered to challenge the Alien and Sedition Acts, enacted under Adams.

Calhoun contended again that in forming the Union the several states had entered into a compact with a federal government with limited powers but had not surrendered their sovereignty in the process. Therefore, he argued, the people of any state could elect delegates to a state convention, determine if they wished to declare a federal law unconstitutional, and declare it to be null and void within the state’s boundaries. Congress then would be faced with the option of accepting the nullification or passing a constitutional amendment bestowing power on the federal government to enact the law, subject to ratification by three-fourths of the states. Calhoun saw this reasoning as the remedy to the oppressive tariff that his and other southern states might take, short of outright secession from the Union.

Not wishing to begin his tenure in the Jackson administration with such a challenge to the federal government, of which he was now a part, Calhoun did not claim or disclose his role in writing the exposition. But Jackson and Van Buren, now as secretary of state, clearly had their suspicions.
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As Calhoun remained in the vice presidency, he almost at once ran into conflict with Van Buren, his earlier collaborator, called the “Little Magician” for his canny political skills. After resigning as governor of New York and relocating to Washington, Van Buren became a constant companion to the new president, whose wife had died shortly before the election, and set out to become the most influential member of the Jackson inner circle. From the protectionist North, Van Buren was on a collision course with Calhoun, who had spent much of his first year under Jackson back in South Carolina, crafting his case for states’ nullification of the tariff.

The situation disintegrated even more when a social scandal hit official
Washington, sparked not by Calhoun but by his wife, Floride. With Jackson a widower, much of the social entertaining fell to her as the mate of the vice president, including receiving courtesy visits from members of the president’s cabinet and their wives. It so happened that the wife of Secretary of War John Eaton, the former Margaret (Peggy) O’Neale Timberlake, the attractive daughter of a saloonkeeper, had what was known as a shady past. While her former husband, a naval purser, was away from home, she had been seen around town with Eaton, and after the husband’s death in a rumored suicide she and Eaton were married in January 1829. Eaton now was a close Jackson friend and Peggy a favorite of the president.

When Floride Calhoun refused to admit Peggy to the Jackson administration social circle on the basis of the rampant gossip, Calhoun supported her action, to the ire of the president. Other cabinet wives nervously followed Floride’s lead at first, causing more social turmoil, until Van Buren stepped in, included the Eatons in his own diplomatic entertaining, and arranged for the foreign ministers of England and Russia to invite them to their dinner parties.
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His actions thereby won even greater gratitude from Jackson while heightening his feud with Calhoun.

In the Senate in January 1830, Calhoun presided over a heated debate on the sale of public lands in the West, which turned into an argument over nullification. With Senate rules prohibiting his direct participation, the vice president sent coaching notes from the chair to his fellow South Carolinian senator Robert Hayne when Hayne was engaged on the issue by Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. Hayne reminded New England senators that they had considered nullification themselves and even the possibility of secession during the War of 1812. Webster countered that the federal government was not a mere agent of the states but an agent of the Union and that the arbiter of federal law was the U.S. Supreme Court, not any state. Any state attempting to put itself above the Union, Webster charged, would be committing an act of treason that could precipitate civil war. He closed with the memorable defense of “liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” destined to enter the history books.
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Other southern states at this juncture shied away from backing nullification. But soon after, at a dinner celebrating Jefferson’s birthday, with Jackson, Calhoun, and Van Buren in attendance, the president and vice president engaged in a dramatic moment that cryptically defined their
positions. Van Buren had reminded Jackson in advance that his own toast would be taken as a signal of the stand he intended the Democratic Party to support and a hush fell over the crowd as the president rose and held up his glass. Looking directly at Calhoun, Jackson toasted: “Our Federal Union—it must be preserved!” Calhoun then rose and replied with his own glass aloft: “The Union—next to our liberty the most dear. May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the states and distributing equally the benefits and burdens of the Union!”
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Van Buren diplomatically rose with a toast of his own, calling for “mutual forbearance and reciprocal concessions,” yet was satisfied that Jackson had put the vice president in his place. A few days later Jackson left no doubt about where he stood. He told a South Carolina congressman, “Give my compliments to my friends in your state, and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.”
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The Jackson-Calhoun relationship further soured in May 1830, when Crawford, as Jackson’s treasury secretary, sent Jackson a letter offering proof that Calhoun, as President Monroe’s secretary of war, had sought to have the general arrested and tried for invading Spanish Florida on his own authority during the suppression of the Seminole Indians. When Jackson demanded an explanation of Calhoun, he replied, “I cannot recognize the right on your part to call in question my conduct,” alluding to his position as Jackson’s civilian superior at the time. Calhoun dismissed the revival of the old argument as nothing more than politics, whereupon Jackson broke off the exchange, signaling a low point in their relations.
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