Andrew Jackson: Check your emotions

Leadership lessons of the presidents

Andrew Jackson was the most loyal friend a person could have. He was also the bitterest enemy. Both aspects of Jackson’s personality cost him and America during his presidency.

Jackson knew John Eaton from Tennessee. Eaton had stuck with Jackson through some Jackson difficulties, and Jackson never forgot it. Upon his election, Jackson made Eaton secretary of war.

Trouble soon began. Eaton’s wife Margaret, called Peggy, had a past that the wives of other Jackson cabinet members considered scandalous. They refused to attend receptions or dinners where Peggy Eaton was present. Several prevailed on their husbands to boycott the social events, too.

At the head of the blacklisters was Floride Calhoun, the wife of John Calhoun, the vice president. Vice presidents were not formal members of presidents’ cabinets, but in time they would be considered important members of presidential administrations. Not in Jackson's day. Presidential electors chose vice presidents independently of presidents. In the case of Calhoun, he was not simply independent of Jackson but a rival. Calhoun quietly abetted the confusion the ostracism of Peggy Eaton caused Jackson.

If Jackson had been less loyal to Eaton he might have asked the war secretary to resign. The interest of the nation in having a smoothly functioning executive outweighed the demands of personal friendship, Jackson could have said.

But he didn't. He wasn't going to abandon a friend.

The deadlock persisted for months. Only at length did Jackson orchestrate a wholesale turnover of the cabinet. Eaton and Peggy weren't singled out in the popular mind. Jackson’s petticoat problem — as it was called by the gossips of the day — was solved, but his administration lost momentum it was not able to regain.

Jackson's loyalty to friends was matched his enmity to those who crossed him. Nicholas Biddle was head of the Bank of the United States, a nationally chartered institution that handled the accounts of the federal government. Jackson disliked the bank for favoring the wealthy and also for being, in his view, unconstitutional. Yet the bank’s twenty-year charter would expire in a few years and he was willing to let it die a natural death.

Biddle had different plans. Encouraged by Henry Clay, a supporter of the bank and the leader of the anti-Jackson Whig party, to seek early renewal of the bank's charter, Biddle did so. Congress obliged in time for the national bank to become a central issue of the 1832 presidential campaign, in which Clay challenged Jackson. Clay and Biddle dared Jackson to veto the charter renewal. If he did veto, the shock to the American economy would discredit Jackson and lead to his defeat, they reasoned. If he did not veto, he would be seen as weak, and the bank would live for another two decades. Either way, Clay and Biddle would come out ahead.

Jackson vetoed. But the expected disruption didn't keep Jackson's supporters from returning him to office.

That might have been that, but Biddle then overreached. Determined to demonstrate the bank’s importance to American prosperity, he called in loans and engineered a financial panic. Jackson would have no choice but to yield, Biddle thought.

He didn't know Jackson, to whom the bank question suddenly became personal. “The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me," he told Martin Van Buren, who had replaced John Calhoun as vice president. “But I shall kill it."

Jackson did just that. He withdrew federal funds from the bank, starving it of its lifeblood. Long before its charter ran out, it was a zombie institution.

Jackson celebrated his victory as a triumph for democracy over monopoly. By Jackson's lights it was.

But it proved a disaster for the economy and thereby for the livelihoods of millions of Americans, including many of Jackson's followers. The funds he withdrew from the national bank were spread among state banks which went on a lending spree. A real estate bubble inflated and then burst, producing a financial panic in 1837 and a subsequent depression.

Had Jackson not let his contest with Biddle become personal, this might have been avoided. He could have allowed an orderly transition from the national bank to the state banks. The bubble and its bursting might never have happened. America would have been better off.

But Jackson did let things get personal. Americans paid the price.