President Andrew Jackson not only hated John Quincy Adams and opposed him politically, but he also believed that Adams specifically rigged the government to work against him. In a letter to Brigadier General John Coffee on March 19, 1829, Jackson wrote: "Since I have been here my time has been constantly employed with a press of business left undone by the preceding administration, and many things done by them, intended no doubt, to embarass the present". By 'embarass', Jackson did not mean "humiliate", but rather to put up obstacles. Jackson was convinced that Adams left behind a faction of corrupt civil service appointees bent on trying to de-rail his agenda, and he was determined to root them out. Jackson meant business, and Tobias Watkins, Adams' auditor of the Treasury learned this lesson in a very hard way.
Jackson's first attack, was on the Treasury department where he appointed Amos Kendall as the new auditor at the Treasury Department. Kendall was instructed to report directly to Jackson, and almost immediately he uncovered that the previous auditor Tobias Watkins and confidant of Henry Clay had embezzled $7,000. In May, Jackson had Tobias Watkins indicted and he was convicted on three indictments "for certain offences against the United States". He was sentenced to prison for three months plus $3050 in fines. The prison term and fine was set quite low, which seems to indicate that Watkins was not indicted on the most egregious crimes that Kendall had uncovered. Nevertheless Watkins ended up spending much more time in prison than only three months. Even though that the punishment set by the original judge did not specify that the fines be paid before he could be released, the District of Columbia Attorney General ordered that Watkins remain in prison until all the fines were paid. In 1833, Watkins was still fighting to be released from prison when his case finally made it to the Supreme Court where Watkins enlisted the counsel of Brent and Coxe to request a writ of habeas corpus. Representing the U.S. government was Roger B. Taney, then Attorney General for the United States. Watkins' complaint was that after his term had expired, he was kept in prison illegally on the grounds that he was unable to pay his fines. On January 1, 1833 Chief Justice Joseph Story delivered the majority opinion of the court, ruling no principle or authority could be found to justify the continued detention of Tobias Watkins, and ruled that a writ of habeas corpus ought to be issued.
It is quite possible that Jackson himself had given the orders to the District of Columbia Attorney General to keep Watkins in jail. Perhaps, Jackson did not feel that Watkins punishment fit his crime. Three months does seem like a very light sentence for embezzling funds from the U.S. Treasury, especially for one who was appointed by Adams and was a confidant of Henry Clay. Jackson may have been trying to send a message to the entire department. In total, Kendall discovered that more than a dozen Adams' Treasury personnel and customs house agents were involved in fraud. In letter to John C. McLemore, Jackson referred to these men as 'rats' when he wrote, "we are getting on here well, we labour night and day, and will continue to do so, until we destroy all the rats, who have been plundering the Treasury." In his first State of the Union address, Jackson reported to Congress that "since the last session of Congress numerous frauds on the Treasury have been discovered" and that Jackson had dutifully tried to get criminal prosecutions for. Unfortunately, due to loopholes in the existing laws were useless in bringing the accused to trial, and instead the prosecutors had to resort to the application of common law. This may explain, why Tobial Watkins was given only a three-month sentence. Thus, Jackson wanted stronger laws, and he urged Congress to re-visit the laws recently passed to protect the U.S. Treasury. Jackson, called it a dangerous situation, that our existing laws were inadequate to protect against the "most fraudulent appropriation of the public funds to their own use".
"Since the last session of Congress numerous frauds on the Treasury have been discovered, which I thought it my duty to bring under the cognizance of the United States court for this district by a criminal prosecution. It was my opinion and that of able counsel who were consulted that the cases came within the penalties of the act of the 17th Congress approved [1823-03-03], providing for punishment of frauds committed on the Government of the United States. Either from some defect in the law or in its administration every effort to bring the accused to trial under its provisions proved ineffectual, and the Government was driven to the necessity of resorting to the vague and inadequate provisions of the common law. It is therefore my duty to call your attention to the laws which have been passed for the protection of the Treasury. If, indeed, there be no provision by which those who may be unworthily intrusted with its guardianship can be punished for the most flagrant violation of duty, extending even to the most fraudulent appropriation of the public funds to their own use, it is time to remedy so dangerous an omission; or if the law has been perverted from its original purposes, and criminals deserving to be punished under its provisions have been rescued by legal subtleties, it ought to be made so plain by amendatory provisions as to baffle the arts of perversion and accomplish the ends of its original enactment."Jackson pointed to one instance where the court was unable to prosecute the case because of the 2-year statue of limits had expired. In this case, Jackson explained that there was enough evidence and knowledge to prove that the fraud had been committed, but it was too late to prosecute them. In the current law, the 2 years started when the crime was committed, Jackson suggested that it be changed to be 2 years since the crime was discovered. I have not been able to connect the dots here to the Watkins case here, but it does seem plausible that Jackson's phrase, "public officer who continues to defraud the Treasury and conceal the transaction for the brief term of two years" could be a veiled reference to Tobias Watkins.
"In one of the most flagrant causes the court decided that the prosecution was barred by the statute which limits prosecutions for fraud to two years. In this case all the evidences of the fraud, and, indeed, all knowledge that a fraud had been committed, were in possession of the party accused until after the two years had elapsed. Surely the statute ought not to run in favor of any man while he retains all the evidences of his crime in his own possession, and least of all in favor of a public officer who continues to defraud the Treasury and conceal the transaction for the brief term of two years. I would therefore recommend such an alteration of the law as will give the injured party and the Government two years after the disclosure of the fraud or after the accused is out of office to commence their prosecution."
note: By the end of 1829, Amos Kendall found that almost $300,000 had turned up missing at the Treasury Department alone. Additional fraud was found in almost every department and formed the backdrop for one of Jackson's most controversial political reforms, the implementation of rotation in office. During his first year in office, Jackson used this reform to destroy what he considered to be the political establishment that stole the presidency from him in 1825. I will cover that in much greater detail in another post, since Jackson dedicated a good portion of his first State of the Union address to this subject.
References
Presidency.ucsb.edu. (2018). Andrew Jackson: First Annual Message. [online] Available at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29471 [Accessed 30 Aug. 2018].Findlaw. (2018). FindLaw's United States Supreme Court case and opinions.. [online] Available at: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/32/568.html [Accessed 5 Sep. 2018].
Jackson, A. and Feller, D. (2007). The papers of Andrew Jackson. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, p.104.
Memory.loc.gov. (2018). Correspondence of Andrew Jackson. Edited by John Spencer Bassett.. [online] Available at: http://memory.loc.gov/master/mss/maj/aj04/aj04.sgm [Accessed 5 Sep. 2018].
Wilentz, S. (2006). The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton, pp.314-315.
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