In 1822, Jackson, wounded and exhausted, collapsed after his victories, coughing blood, but he recuperated then built his Democratic Party, and ran for president against John Quincy Adams. He lost the first campaign but won the second in 1828, which was viciously fought: Jackson was accused of being the cannibal son of a prostitute and a ‘mulatto’, married to a bigamist. Warning that ‘the most important powers of government have been given or bartered away’ and that he would reclaim them for the people, Jackson achieved 56 per cent of the popular vote, growling, ‘Desperate courage makes one a majority.’ But Rachel, anguished by the abuse, died of a heart attack just afterwards. Jackson had to be prised off the body, and at her funeral at Hermitage he warned, ‘God Almighty forgive her murderers, as I know she forgave them. I never can.’
Jackson’s politics like his life was visceral: he regularly swore to kill his rivals; he loathed bankers and told a delegation, ‘You’re a den of vipers and thieves, and by the eternal God, I will rout you out.’ Taking the oath on 4 March 1829, Jackson invited the public to his inaugural party in the White House and supposedly escaped the ensuing carnival through the window. In office he purged the bureaucracy of ‘unfaithful or incompetent hands’, launching the system of presidents appointing their own civil services. Jackson’s government was no cleaner than his predecessors’: he preferred to rule through his cronies, nicknamed the Kitchen Cabinet, instead of his ministers, the Parlour Cabinet, who infuriated him by protesting against the morality of his war minister’s wife.
Jackson aggressively pushed forward the American frontier, passing his Indian Removal Act that forced Native Americans on to reservations in Oklahoma – thousands of Cherokee died on the way in their ‘Trail of Tears’. In the west, fur traders, some working for Astor, pioneered the Santa Fe and Oregon trails, guided and protected by Mountain Men: James Kirker, an Irish immigrant, came to personify the feral darkness of frontier life. A younger colleague, Kit Carson, later became its glamorous face, hero of ‘dime novels’ and newspaper articles. Both were illiterates who started as fur traders, dabbling in silver and copper mining. They lived like natives, often married native wives – and killed natives. Kirker, the older of the two, had commanded an American privateer against the British in 1812, then, hunting furs, lived beside the Apache, even joining their raids. Carson, joining a western expedition, killed his first Native Americans at nineteen. They had stolen his horses. ‘During our pursuit for the lost animals, we suffered considerably,’ he wrote, ‘but the success of having recovered our horses and sending many a redskin to his long home, our sufferings were soon forgotten.’ The Americans scalped their victims just as the natives would scalp them. Yet Carson married two Native American women, Singing Grass and Making Out Road.
Jackson’s Indian policy was linked to his expansionist plans for Spanish America. He hoped to buy Texas from a new country that had emerged from the Spanish provinces of New Spain: Mexico. His opponent was Antonio López de Santa Anna, whose career, based on a famous victory against a European imperial power, resembled his own. Six times president, Santa Anna dominated Mexico for fifty years.*
As Santa Anna built up his estates in Veracruz and rose to general, he made his name in 1829 defeating a final Spanish attempt to retake New Spain, after which he declared himself Napoleon of the West. In 1833 he was elected president, but he was happiest either holding court at his hacienda, seducing women (he married two heiresses, the second being sixteen when she married the forty-something general; he recognized four illegitimate children) or leading an army. But Mexico was vast, stretching from California to Texas and encompassing most of central America. Comanche and Apache ranged across its northern provinces, fighting for its prizes, cattle and human. A Comanche
Santa Anna disdained his Amerindian and mixed-race citizens. ‘A hundred years to come,’ he told an American, ‘my people won’t be fit for liberty. They don’t know what it is; a despotism is a proper government for them, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be a wise and virtuous one.’ He believed he was the man to provide it. The president enforced a new centralized government, but he faced Jackson, who hoped to do in Texas what he had done in Florida. The American capture of Texas was once presented as a noble enterprise against primitive Mexicans. In fact, in 1829, Mexico had abolished slavery; the Americans wished to restore it.
