Martin Van Buren
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Title: Martin Van Buren
Author: Edward Morse Shepard
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARTIN VAN BUREN ***
Standard Library Edition
AMERICAN STATESMEN
EDITED BY
JOHN T. MORSE, JR.
IN THIRTY-TWO VOLUMES
VOL. XVIII.
DOMESTIC POLITICS: THE TARIFF
AND SLAVERY
MARTIN VAN BUREN
[Illustration: M. Van Buren]
American Statesmen
STANDARD LIBRARY EDITION
[Illustration: The Home of Martin Van Buren]
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
American Statesmen
MARTIN VAN BUREN
BY
EDWARD M. SHEPARD
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1899
Copyright, 1888 and 1899,
BY EDWARD M. SHEPARD.
Copyright, 1899,
BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
_All rights reserved._
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION
Since 1888, when this Life was originally published, the history of
American Politics has been greatly enriched. The painstaking and candid
labors of Mr. Fiske, Mr. Adams, Mr. Rhodes, and others have gone far to
render unnecessary the _caveat_ I then entered against the unfairness,
or at least the narrowness, of the temper with which Van Buren, or the
school to which he belonged, had thus far been treated in American
literature, and which had prejudicially misled me before I began my
work. Such a _caveat_ is no longer necessary. Even now, when the
political creed of which Jefferson, Van Buren, and Tilden have been
chief apostles in our land, seems to suffer some degree of
eclipse,--only temporary, it may well be believed, but nevertheless
real,--those who, like myself, have undertaken to present the careers of
great Americans who held this faith need not fear injustice or prejudice
in the field of American literature.
In this revised edition I have made a few corrections and added a few
notes; but the generous treatment which has been given to the book has
confirmed my belief that historic truth requires no material change.
A passage from the diary of Charles Jared Ingersoll (Life by William M.
Meigs, 1897) tempts me, in this most conspicuous place of the book, to
emphasize my observation upon one injustice often done to Van Buren.
Referring, on May 6, 1844, to his letter, then just published, against
the annexation of Texas, Mr. Ingersoll declared that, in view of the
fact that nearly all of Van Buren's admirers and most of the Democratic
press were committed to the annexation, Van Buren had committed a great
blunder and become _felo de se_. The assumption here is that Van Buren
was a politician of the type so painfully familiar to us, whose sole and
conscienceless effort is to find out what is to be popular for the time,
in order, for their own profit, to take that side. That Van Buren was
politic there can be no doubt. But he was politic after the fashion of a
statesman and not of a demagogue. He disliked to commit himself upon
issues which had not been fully discussed, which were not ripe for
practical solution by popular vote, and which did not yet need to be
decided. Mr. Ingersoll should have known that the direct and simple
explanation was the true one,--that Van Buren knew the risk and meant to
take it. His letter against the annexation of Texas, written when he
knew that it would probably defeat him for the presidency, was but one
of several acts performed by him at critical periods, wherein he
deliberately took what seemed the unpopular side in order to be true to
his sense of political and patriotic duty. The crucial tests of this
kind through which he successfully passed must, beyond any doubt, put
him in the very first rank of those American statesmen who have had the
rare union of political foresight and moral courage.
EDWARD M. SHEPARD.
January, 1899.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. AMERICAN POLITICS WHEN VAN BUREN'S CAREER BEGAN.--
JEFFERSON'S INFLUENCE 1
II. EARLY YEARS.--PROFESSIONAL LIFE 14
III. STATE SENATOR: ATTORNEY-GENERAL: MEMBER OF THE
CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION 38
IV. UNITED STATES SENATOR.--REËSTABLISHMENT OF
PARTIES.--PARTY LEADERSHIP 88
V. DEMOCRATIC VICTORY IN 1828.--GOVERNOR 153
VI. SECRETARY OF STATE.--DEFINITE FORMATION OF THE
DEMOCRATIC CREED 177
VII. MINISTER TO ENGLAND.--VICE-PRESIDENT.--ELECTION
TO THE PRESIDENCY 223
VIII. CRISIS OF 1837 282
IX. PRESIDENT.--SUB-TREASURY BILL 325
X. PRESIDENT.--CANADIAN INSURRECTION.--TEXAS.--SEMINOLE
WAR.--DEFEAT FOR REËLECTION 350
XI. EX-PRESIDENT.--SLAVERY.--TEXAS ANNEXATION.--DEFEAT
BY THE SOUTH.--FREE SOIL CAMPAIGN.--LAST YEARS 398
XII. VAN BUREN'S CHARACTER AND PLACE IN HISTORY 449
INDEX 469
ILLUSTRATIONS
MARTIN VAN BUREN _Frontispiece_
From a photograph by Brady in the Library of the State
Department at Washington.
Autograph from a MS. in the Library of the Boston Athenæum.
The vignette of "Lindenwald," Mr. Van Buren's home, near
Kinderhook, N. Y., is from a photograph.
Page
DE WITT CLINTON _facing_ 110
From a painting by Inman in the New York State Library, Albany,
N. Y.
Autograph from a MS. in the Library of the Boston Athenæum.
EDWARD LIVINGSTON _facing_ 248
From a bust by Ball Hughes in the possession of Miss Julia Barton
Hunt, Barrytown on Hudson, N. Y.
Autograph from the Chamberlain Collection, Boston Public Library.
SILAS WRIGHT _facing_ 416
From a portrait painted by Whitehorne, 1844-1846, in the New York
City Hall.
Autograph from the Chamberlain Collection, Boston Public Library.
MARTIN VAN BUREN
CHAPTER I
AMERICAN POLITICS WHEN VAN BUREN'S CAREER BEGAN.--JEFFERSON'S INFLUENCE
It sometimes happened during the anxious years when the terrors of civil
war, though still smouldering, were nearly aflame, that on Wall Street
or Nassau Street, busy men of New York saw Martin Van Buren and his son
walking arm in arm. "Prince John," tall, striking in appearance, his
hair divided at the middle in a fashion then novel for Americans, was in
the prime of life, resolute and aggressive in bearing. His father was a
white-haired, bright-eyed old man, erect but short in figure, of precise
though easy and kindly politeness, and with a touch of deference in his
manner. His presence did not peremptorily command the attention of
strangers; but to those who looked attentively there was plain
distinction in the refined and venerable face. Passers-by might well
turn back to see more of the two men thus affectionately and
picturesquely together. For they were famous characters,--the one in
the newer, the other in the older politics of America. John Van Buren,
fresh from his Free Soil battle and the tussles of the Hards and Softs,
was striving, as a Democrat, to serve the cause of the Union, though
conscious that he rested under the suspicion of the party to whose
service, its divisions in New York now seemingly ended, he had
reluctantly returned. But he still faced the slave power with an
independence only partially abated before the exigencies of party
loyalty. The ex-President, definitely withdrawn from the same Free Soil
battle, a struggle into which he had entered when the years were already
heavy upon him, had survived to be once more a worthy in the Democratic
party, again to receive its formal veneration, but never again its old
affection. In their timid manoeuvres with slavery it was perhaps with
the least possible awkwardness that the northern Democrats sought to
treat him as a great Democratic leader; but they did not let it be
forgotten that the leader was forever retired from leadership. While the
younger man was in the thick of political encounters which the party
carried on in blind futility, the older man was hardly more than an
historical personage. He was no longer, his friends strove to think, the
schismatic candidate of 1848, but rather the ally and friend of Jackson,
or, better still and further away, the disciple of Jefferson.
For, more than any other American, Martin Van Buren had succeeded to the
preaching of Jefferson's political doctrines, and to his political
power as well, that curious and potent mingling of philosophy,
statesmanship, and electioneering. The Whigs' distrust towards Van Buren
was still bitter; the hot anger of his own party over the blow he had
dealt in 1848 was still far from subsided; the gratitude of most Free
Soil men had completely disappeared with his apparent acquiescence in
the politics of Pierce and Buchanan. Save in a narrow circle of
anti-slavery Democrats, Van Buren, in these last days of his, was judged
at best with coldness, and most commonly with dislike or even contempt.
Not much of any other temper has yet gone into political history; its
writers have frequently been content to accept the harshness of partisan
opinion, or even the scurrility and mendacity visited upon him during
his many political campaigns, and to ignore the positive records of his
career and public service. The present writer confesses to have begun
this Life, not indeed sharing any of the hatred or contempt so commonly
felt towards Van Buren, but still given to many serious depreciations of
him, which a better examination has shown to have had their ultimate
source in the mere dislike of personal or political enemies,--a dislike
to whose expression, often powerful and vivid, many writers have
extended a welcome seriously inconsistent with the fairness of history.
When Abraham Lincoln was chosen president in 1860, this predecessor of
his by a quarter century was a true historical figure. The bright,
genial old man connected, visibly and really, those stirring and
dangerous modern days with the first political struggles under the
American Constitution, struggles then long passed into the quiet of
history, to leave him almost their only living reminiscence. Martin Van
Buren was a man fully grown and already a politician when in 1801 the
triumph of Thomas Jefferson completed the political foundation of the
United States. Its profound inspiration still remained with him on this
eve of Lincoln's election. Under its influence his political career had
begun and had ended.
At Jefferson's election the aspiration and fervor which attended the
first, the new-born sense of American national life, had largely worn
away. The ideal visions of human liberty had long before grown dim
during seven years of revolutionary war, with its practical hardships,
its vicissitudes of meanness and glory, and during the four years of
languor and political incompetence which followed. In the agitation for
better union, political theories filled the minds of our forefathers.
Lessons were learned from the Achæan League, as well as from the Swiss
Confederation, the German Empire, and the British Constitution. Both
history and speculation, however, were firmly subordinated to an
extraordinary common sense, in part flowing from, as it was most finely
exhibited in, the luminous and powerful, if unexalted, genius of
Franklin. From the open beginning of constitution-making at Annapolis in
1786 until the inauguration of John Adams, the American people, under
the masterful governing of Washington, were concerned with the framework
upon which the fabric of their political life was to be wrought. The
framework was doubtless in itself of a vast and enduring importance. If
the consolidating and aristocratic schemes of Hamilton had not met
defeat in the federal convention, or if the separatist jealousies of
Patrick Henry and George Clinton had not met defeat in Virginia and New
York after the work of the convention was done, there would to-day be a
different American people. Nor would our history be the amazing story of
the hundred years past. But upon the governmental framework thus set up
could be woven political fabrics widely and essentially different in
their material, their use, and their enduring virtue. For quite apart
from the framework of government were the temper and traditions of
popular politics out of which comes, and must always come, the essential
and dominant nature of public institutions. In this creative and deeper
work Jefferson was engaged during his struggle for political power after
returning from France in 1789, during his presidential career from 1801
to 1809, and during the more extraordinary, and in American history the
unparalleled, supremacy of his political genius after he had left
office. In the circumstances of our colonial life, in our race
extractions, in our race fusion upon the Atlantic seaboard, and in the
moral effect of forcible and embittered separation from the parent
country, arose indeed, to go no further back, the political instincts of
American men. It is, however, fatal to adequate conception of our
political development to ignore the enormous formative influence which
the twenty years of Jefferson's rule had upon American political
character. But so partial and sometimes so partisan have been the
historians of our early national politics in their treatment of that
great man, that a just appreciation of the political atmosphere in which
Van Buren began his career is exceedingly difficult.
There was an American government, an American nation, when Washington
gladly escaped to Mt. Vernon from the bitterly factional quarrels of the
politicians at Philadelphia. The government was well ordered; the nation
was respectable and dignified. But most of the people were either still
colonial and provincial, or were rushing, in turbulence and bad temper,
to crude speculations and theories. Twenty-five years later, Jefferson
had become the political idol of the American people, a people
completely and forever saturated with democratic aspirations, democratic
ideals, what John Marshall called "political metaphysics," a people with
strong and lasting characteristics, no longer either colonial or
provincial, but profoundly national. The skill, the industry, the arts
of the politician, had been used by a man gifted with the genius and not
free from the faults of a philosopher, to plant in American usages,
prejudices, and traditions,--in the very fibre of American political
life, a cardinal and fruitful idea. The work was done for all time. For
Americans, government was thenceforth to be a mere instrument. No longer
a symbol, or an ornament or crown of national life, however noble and
august, it was a simple means to a plain end; to be always, and if need
be rudely, tested and measured by its practical working, by its service
to popular rights and needs. In those earlier days, too, there had been
"classes and masses," the former of whom held public service and public
policy as matters of dignity and order and high assertion of national
right and power, requiring in their ministers peculiar and esoteric
light, and an equipment of which common men ought not to judge, because
they could not judge aright. Afterward, in Monroe's era of good feeling,
the personal rivalries of presidential candidates were in bad temper
enough; but Americans were at last all democrats. Whether for better or
worse, the nation had ceased to be either British or colonial, or
provincial, in its character. In the delightful Rip Van Winkle of a
later Jefferson, during the twenty years' sleep, the old Dutch house has
gone, the peasant's dress, the quaint inn with its village tapster, all
the old scene of loyal provincial life. Rip returns to a noisy,
boastful, self-assertive town full of American "push" and "drive," and
profane disregard of superiors and everything ancient. It was hardly a
less change which spread through the United States in the twenty years
of Jefferson's unrivaled and fruitful leadership. Superstitious regard
for the "well-born," for institutions of government as images of
veneration apart from their immediate and practical use; the faith in
government as essentially a financial establishment which ought to be on
peculiarly friendly relations with banks and bankers; the treatment and
consideration of our democratic organization as an experiment to be
administered with deprecatory deference to European opinion; the idea
that upon the great, simple elements of political belief and practice,
the mass of men could not judge as wisely and safely as the opulent, the
cultivated, the educated; the idea that it was a capital feature of
political art to thwart the rashness and incompetence of the lower
people,--all these theories and traditions, which had firmly held most
of the disciplined thought of Europe and America, and to which the lurid
horrors of the French Revolution had brought apparent consecration,--all
these had now gone; all had been fatally wounded, or were sullenly and
apologetically cherished in the aging bitterness of the Federalists.
There was an American people with as distinct, as powerful, as
characteristic a polity as belonged to the British islanders. In 1776 a
youthful genius had seized upon a colonial revolt against taxation as
the occasion to make solemn declaration of a seeming abstraction about
human rights. He had submitted, however, to subordinate his theory
during the organization of national defense and the strengthening of
the framework of government. Nor did he shine in either of those works.
But with the nation established, with a union secured so that its people
could safely attend to the simpler elements of human rights, Jefferson
and his disciples were able to lead Americans to the temper, the
aspirations, and the very prejudices of essential democracy. The
Declaration of Independence, the ten amendments to the Constitution
theoretically formulating the rights of men or of the States, sank deep
into the sources of American political life. So completely indeed was
the work done, that in 1820 there was but one political party in
America; all were Jeffersonian Republicans; and when the Republican
party was broken up in 1824, the only dispute was whether Adams or
Jackson or Crawford or Clay or Calhoun best represented the political
beliefs now almost universal. It seemed to Americans as if they had
never known any other beliefs, as if these doctrines of their democracy
were truisms to which the rest of the world was marvelously blind.
Nothing in American public life has, in prolonged anger and even savage
desperation, equaled the attacks upon Jefferson during the steady growth
of his stupendous influence. The hatred of him personally, and the
belief in the wickedness of his private and public life, survive in our
time. Nine tenths of the Americans who then read books sincerely thought
him an enemy of mankind and of all that was sacred. Nine tenths of the
authors of American books on history or politics have to this day
written under the influence which ninety years ago controlled their
predecessors. And for this there is no little reason. As the American
people grew conscious of their own peculiar and intensely active
political force, there came to them a period of national and popular
life in which much was unlovely, much was crude, much was disagreeably
vulgar. Books upon America written by foreign travelers, from the days
of Jefferson down to our civil war, superficial and offensive as they
often were, told a great deal of truth. We do not now need to wince at
criticisms upon a rawness, an insolent condescension towards the
political ignorance of foreigners and the unhappy subjects of kings, a
harshness in the assertion of the equality of Caucasian men, and a
restless, boastful manner. The criticisms were in great measure just.
But the critics were stupid and blind not to see the vast and vital work
and change going on before their eyes, to chiefly regard the trifling
and incidental things which disgusted them. Their eyes were open to all
our faults of taste and manner, but closed to the self-dependent and
self-assertive energy the disorder of whose exhibition would surely pass
away. In every democratic experiment, in every experiment of popular or
national freedom, there is almost inevitable a vulgarizing of public
manners, a lack of dignity in details, which disturbs men who find
restful delight in orderly and decorous public life; and their disgust
is too often directed against beneficent political changes or reforms.
If one were to judge the political temper of the American people from
many of our own writers, and still more if he were to judge it from the
observations even of intelligent and friendly foreigners prior to 1861,
he would believe that temper to be sordid, mean, noisy, boastful, and
even cruel. But from the war of 1812 with England to the election of
Buchanan in 1856, the American people had been doing a profound,
organic, democratic work. Meantime many had seen no more than the
unsightly, the mean and trivial, the malodorous details, which were mere
incidents and blemishes of hidden and dynamic operations. Unimaginative
minds usually fail to see the greater and deeper movements of politics
as well as those of science. In the public virtues then maturing there
lay the ability long and strenuously to conduct an enterprise the
greatest which modern times have known, and an extraordinary popular
capacity for restraint and discipline. In those virtues was sleeping a
tremendously national spirit which, with cost and sacrifice not to be
measured by the vast figures of the statistician, on one side sought
independence, and on the other saved the Union,--an exalted love of men
and truth and liberty, which, after all the enervations of pecuniary
prosperity, endured with patience hardships and losses, and the less
heroic but often more dangerous distresses of taxation,--at the North a
magnanimity in victory unequaled in the traditions of men, and at the
South a composure and dignity and absence of either bitterness or
meanness which brought out of defeat far larger treasures than could
have come with victory. But these were not effects without a cause. In
them all was only the fruit, the normal fruit, of the political habits,
ideals, traditions, whose early and unattractive disorders had chagrined
many of the best of Americans, and had seemed so natural to foreigners
who feared or distrusted a democracy. There had been forming, during
forty or fifty years of a certain raw unloveliness, the peculiar and
powerful self-reliance of a people whose political independence meant
far more than a mere separate government.
In these years Van Buren was one of the chief men in American public
life. He and his political associates had been profoundly affected by
the Jeffersonian philosophy of government. They robustly held its tenets
until the flame and vengeance of the slavery conflict drove them from
political power. In our own day we have, in the able speeches with which
Samuel J. Tilden fatigued respectful though often unsympathetic hearers
at Democratic meetings, heard something of the same robust political
philosophy, brought directly from intercourse with his famous neighbor
and political master. Van Buren himself breathed it as the very
atmosphere of American public life, during his early career which had
just begun when Jefferson, his robes of office dropped and his faults of
administration forgotten, seemed the serene, wise old man presiding
over a land completely won to his ideals of democracy. Under this
extraordinary influence and in this political light, there opened with
the first years of the century the public life to be narrated in this
volume.
CHAPTER II
EARLY YEARS.--PROFESSIONAL LIFE
At the close of the American Revolution, Abraham Van Buren was a farmer
on the east bank of the Hudson River, New York. He was of Dutch descent,
as was his wife, whose maiden name Hoes, corrupted from Goes, is said to
have had distinction in Holland. But it would be mere fancy to find in
the statesman particular traits brought from the dyked swamp lands
whence some of his ancestors came. Those who farmed the rich fields of
Columbia county were pretty thorough Americans; their characteristics
were more immediately drawn from the soil they cultivated and from the
necessary habits of their life than from the lands, Dutch or English,
from which their forefathers had emigrated. Late in the eighteenth
century they were no longer frontiersmen. For a century and more this
eastern Hudson River country had been peacefully and prosperously
cultivated. There was no lack of high spirit; but it was shown in
lawsuits and political feuds rather than in skirmishes with red men. It
was close to the old town of Albany with its official and not
undignified life, and had comparatively easy access to New York by sloop
or the post-road. It had been an early settlement of the colony. Within
its borders were now the estates and mansions of large landed
proprietors, who inherited or acquired from a more varied and affluent
life some of the qualities, good and bad, of a country gentry. It was a
region of easy, orderly comfort, sound and robust enough, but not
sharing the straight and precise, though meddling, puritanical habits
which a few miles away, over the high Berkshire hills, had come from the
shores of New England.
The elder Van Buren was said by his son's enemies to have kept a tavern;
and he probably did. Farming and tavern-keeping then were fairly
interchangeable; and the gracious manner, the tact with men, which the
younger Van Buren developed to a marked degree, it is easy to believe
came rather from the social and varied life of an inn than from the
harsher isolation of a farm. The statesman's boyish days were at any
rate spent among poor neighbors. He was born at Kinderhook, an old
village of New York, on the 5th of December, 1782. The usual years of
schooling were probably passed in one of the dilapidated, weather-beaten
schoolhouses from which has come so much of what is best in American
life. He studied later in the Kinderhook Academy, one of the higher
schools which in New York have done good work, though not equaling the
like schools in Massachusetts. Here he learned a little Latin. But when
at fourteen years of age he entered a law office, he had of course the
chief discipline of book-learning still to acquire. In 1835 his campaign
biographer rather rejoiced that he had so little systematic education,
fearing that "from the eloquent pages of Livy, or the honeyed eulogiums
of Virgil, or the servile adulation of Horace, he might have been
inspired with an admiration for regal pomp and aristocratic dignity
uncongenial to the native independence of his mind," and have imbibed a
"contempt for plebeians and common people," unless, perhaps, the
speeches of popular leaders in Livy "had kindled his instinctive love of
justice and freedom," or the sarcastic vigor of Tacitus "had created in
his bosom a fixed hatred of tyranny in every shape." At an early age,
however, it is certain that Van Buren, like many other Americans of
original force and with instinctive fondness for written pictures of
human history and conduct, acquired an education which, though not that
of a professional scholar, was entirely appropriate to the skillful man
of affairs or the statesman to be set in conspicuous places. This work
must have been largely done during the comparative leisure of his legal
apprenticeship.
It was in 1796 that he entered the law office of Francis Sylvester at
Kinderhook, where he remained until his twentieth year. He there read
law. It is safe to say besides that he swept the office, lighted the
fires in winter, and, like other law students in earlier and simpler
days, had to do the work of an office janitor and errand boy, as well
as to serve papers and copy the technical forms of the common law, and
the tedious but often masterly pleadings of chancery. That his work as a
student was done with great industry and thoroughness is demonstrated by
the fact that at an early age he became a successful and skillful
advocate in arguments addressed to courts as distinguished from juries,
a division of professional work in which no skill and readiness will
supply deficiencies in professional equipment. His early reputation for
cleverness is illustrated by the story that when only a boy he
successfully summed up a case before a jury against his preceptor
Sylvester, being made by the justice to stand upon a bench because he
was so small, with the exhortation, "There, Mat, beat your master."
In 1802 Van Buren entered the office of William P. Van Ness, in the city
of New York, to complete his seventh and final year of legal study. Van
Ness was himself from Columbia county and an eminent lawyer. He was
afterwards appointed United States district judge by Madison; and was
then an influential Republican and a close friend and defender of Aaron
Burr, then the vice-president. The native powers and fascination of Burr
were at their zenith, though his political character was blasted. Van
Buren made his acquaintance, and was treated with the distinguished and
flattering attention which the wisest of public men often show to young
men of promise. Van Buren's enemies were absurdly fond of the fancy that
in this slight intercourse he had acquired the skill and grace of his
manner, and the easy principles and love of intrigue which they ascribe
to him. Burr, for years after he was utterly disabled, inspired a
childish terror in American politics. The mystery and dread about him
were used by the opponents of Jackson because Burr had early pointed him
out for the presidency, and by the opponents of Clay because in early
life he had given Burr professional assistance. But upon Burr's
candidacy for governor in 1804 Van Buren's freedom from his influence
was clearly enough exhibited.
In 1803 Van Buren, being now of age and admitted as an attorney,
returned to Kinderhook and there began the practice of his profession.
The rank of counsellor-at-law was still distinct and superior to that of
attorney. His half-brother on his mother's side, James J. Van Alen, at
once admitted the young attorney to a law partnership. Van Alen was
considerably older and had a practice already established. Van Buren's
career as a lawyer was not a long one, but it was brilliant and highly
successful. After his election to the United States Senate in 1821 his
practice ceased to be very active. He left his profession with a fortune
which secured him the ease in money matters so helpful and almost
necessary to a man in public life. Merely professional reputations
disappear with curious and rather saddening promptness and completeness.
Of the practice and distinction reached by Van Buren before he withdrew
from the bar, although they were unsurpassed in the State, no vestige
and few traditions remain beyond technical synopses of his arguments in
the instructive but hardly succulent pages of Johnson's, Wendell's, and
Cowen's reports.
At an early day the legal profession reached in our country a consummate
vigor. Far behind as Americans were in other learning and arts, they
had, within a few years after they escaped colonial dependence, judges,
advocates, and commentators of the first rank. Marshall, Kent, and Story
were securely famous when hardly another American of their time not in
public and political life was known. In the legal art Americans were
even more accomplished than in its science; and Columbia county and the
valley of the Hudson were fine fields for legal practice. Many
animosities survived from revolutionary days. The landed families, long
used to administer the affairs of others as well as their own, saw with
jealousy and fear the rapid spread of democratic doctrines and of
leveling and often insolent manners. Political feuds were rife, and
frequently appeared in the professionally profitable collisions of
neighbors with vagrant cows, or on watercourses insufficient for the
needs of the up-stream and the down-stream proprietors. There were
slander suits and libel suits, and suits for malicious prosecution. Into
the most legitimate controversies over doubts about property there was
driven the bitterness which turns a lawsuit from a process to ascertain
a right into a weapon of revenge.
Van Buren's political opinions were strong and clear from the beginning
of his law practice; but he was in a professional minority among the
rich Federalists of the county. The adverse discipline was invaluable.
Through zeal and skill and large industry, he soon led the Republicans
as their ablest lawyer, and the lawyers of Columbia county were famous.
William W. Van Ness, afterwards a judge of the supreme court of the
State, Grosvenor, Elisha Williams, and Jacob R. Van Rensselaer were
active at the bar. Williams, although his very name is nowadays hardly
known, we cannot doubt from the universal testimony of contemporaries,
had extraordinary forensic talents. He was a Federalist; and the most
decisive proof of Van Buren's rapid professional growth was his
promotion to be Williams's chief competitor and adversary. Van Buren's
extraordinary application and intellectual clearness soon established
him as the better and the more successful lawyer, though not the more
powerful advocate. Williams at last said to his rival, "I get all the
verdicts, and you get all the judgments." A famous pupil of Van Buren
both in law and in politics, Benjamin F. Butler, afterwards
attorney-general in his cabinet, finely contrasted them from his own
recollection of their conflicts when he was a law student. "Never," he
said, "were two men more dissimilar. Both were eloquent; but the
eloquence of Williams was declamatory and exciting, that of Van Buren
insinuating and delightful. Williams had the livelier imagination, Van
Buren the sounder judgment. The former presented the strong points of
his case in bolder relief, invested them in a more brilliant coloring,
indulged a more unlicensed and magnificent invective, and gave more life
and variety to his arguments by his peculiar wit and inimitable humor.
But Van Buren was his superior in analyzing, arranging, and combining
the insulated materials, in comparing and weighing testimony, in
unraveling the web of intricate affairs, in eviscerating truth from the
mass of diversified and conflicting evidence, in softening the heart and
moulding it to his purpose, and in working into the judgments of his
hearers the conclusions of his own perspicuous and persuasive
reasonings." Most of this is applicable to Van Buren's career on the
wider field of politics; and much here said of his early adversary on
the tobacco-stained floors of country court-houses might have been as
truly said of a later adversary of his, the splendid leader who, rather
than Harrison, ought to have been victor over Van Buren in 1840, and
over whom Van Buren rather than Polk ought to have been victor in 1844.
In a few years Van Buren outgrew the professional limitations of
Kinderhook. In February, 1807, he had been admitted as a counsellor of
the supreme court; and this promotion he most happily celebrated by
marrying Hannah Hoes, a young lady of his own age, and also of Dutch
descent, a kinswoman of his mother, and with whom he had been intimate
from his childhood. In 1808, the council of appointment becoming
Republican, he was made surrogate of Columbia county, succeeding his
partner and half-brother Van Alen, a Federalist in politics, who was,
however, returned to the place in 1815, when the Federalists regained
the council. The office was a respectable one, concerned with the
probate of wills, and the ordering of estates of deceased persons.
Within a year after this appointment, Van Buren removed to the new and
bustling little city of Hudson, directly on the river banks. Here he
practiced law with rapidly increasing success for seven years. His
pecuniary thrift now enabled him to purchase what was called "a very
extensive and well-selected library." With this advantage he applied
himself to "a systematic and extended course of reading," which left him
a well, even an amply, educated man. His severity in study did not,
however, exclude him from the social pleasures of which he was fond, and
for which he was perfectly fitted. He learned men quite as fast as he
learned books. A country surrogate, though then enjoying fees, since
commuted to a salary, had only a meagre compensation. But the duties of
Van Buren's office did not interfere with his activity in the private
practice of the law. On the contrary, the office enabled him to make
acquaintances, a process which, even without adventitious aid, he always
found easy and delightful.
In 1813, having been elected a member of the Senate of the State, he
became as such a member of the court for the correction of errors. This
was the court of last resort, composed, until 1847, of the chancellor,
the judges of the supreme court, the lieutenant-governor, and the
thirty-two senators. The latter, though often laymen, were members of
the court, partly through a curious imitation of the theoretical
function of the British House of Lords, and partly under the idea, even
now feebly surviving in some States, that some besides lawyers ought to
sit upon the bench in law courts to contribute the common sense which it
was fancied might be absent from their more learned associates. It was
not found unsuitable for members of this, the highest court, to be
active legal practitioners. While Van Buren held his place as a member
he was, in February, 1815, made attorney-general, succeeding Abraham Van
Vechten, one of the famous lawyers of the State. Van Buren was then but
thirty-two years old, and the professional eminence accorded to the
station was greater than now. Among near predecessors in it had been
Aaron Burr, Ambrose Spencer and Thomas Addis Emmett; among his near
successors were Thomas J. Oakley, Samuel A. Talcott, Greene C. Bronson
and Samuel Beardsley,--all names of the first distinction in the
professional life of New York. The office was of course political, as it
has always been, both in the United States and the mother country. But
Van Buren's appointment, if it were made because he was an active and
influential Republican in politics, would still not have been made
unless his professional reputation had been high. The salary was $5.50 a
day, with some costs,--not an unsuitable salary in days when the
chancellor was paid but $3000 a year. He held the office until July,
1819, when, upon the capture of the council of appointment by a
coalition of Clintonian Republicans and Federalists, he was removed to
give place to Oakley, the Federalist leader in the State Assembly.
In 1816 Van Buren, now rapidly reaching professional eminence, removed
to Albany, the capital of New York. Though then a petty city of mean
buildings and about 10,000 inhabitants, it had a far larger relative
importance in the professional and social life of the State than has the
later city of ten times the population, with its costly and enormous
state-house, its beautiful public buildings, and its steep and numerous
streets of fine residences. In 1820 he purposed removing to New York;
but, for some reason altering his plans, continued to reside at Albany
until appointed secretary of state in 1829. His professional career was
there crowned with most important and lucrative work. Soon after moving
to Albany, he took into partnership Butler, just admitted to the bar.
Between the two men there were close and life-long relations. The
younger of them, also a son of Columbia county, reached great
professional distinction, became a politician of the highest type, and
remained steadfast in his attachment to Van Buren's political fortunes,
and to the robust and distinctly marked political doctrines and
practices of the Albany Regency.
The law reports give illustrations of Van Buren's precision, his clear
and forcible common-sense, and his aptitude for that learning of the law
in which the great counsel of the time excelled. In 1813, soon after his
service began as state senator, he delivered an opinion in a case of
"escape;" and in very courteous words exhibited a bit of his dislike for
Kent, then chief justice of the supreme court, whose judgment he helped
to reverse, as well as his antipathy to imprisonment for debt, which he
afterwards helped to abolish. It was a petty suit against the sureties
upon the bond given by a debtor. Under a relaxation of the imprisonment
for debt recently permitted, the debtor was, on giving the bond,
released from jail, but upon the condition that he should keep within
the "jail liberties," which in the country counties was a prescribed
area around the jail. His bond was to be forfeit if he passed the
"liberties." While the debtor was driving a cow to or from pasture, the
latter contemptuously deviated "four, six, or ten feet" from the
liberties. The driver, yielding to inevitable bucolic impulse and
forgetting his bond, leaped over the imaginary line to bring back the
cow. He was without the liberties but a moment, and afterwards duly kept
within them. But the creditor was watchful, and for the technical
"escape" sued the sureties. Although the debtor was within the limits
when suit was brought, the lower court refused to pardon the debtor's
technical and unintentional fault. At common law the creditor was
entitled to satisfaction of the debtor's body; and the milder statute
establishing jail liberties was, the court said, to be strictly
construed against the debtor; it was not enough that the creditor had
the debtor's body when he called for it. The supreme court, headed by
Kent, affirmed this curiously harsh decision. In the court of errors,
Van Buren joined Chancellor Lansing in reversing the rule upon an
elaborate review of the law, which to this day is important authority,
and which could not have been more carefully done had something greater
seemed at stake than a bovine vagary and a few dollars. The young
lawyer, wearing for a time the judicial robes, now sat in a review, by
no means unpleasant, of the utterances of magistrates before whom he had
until then stood in considerable awe; and seized the opportunity,
doubtless with a keen perception of the drift of popular sentiment on
matters of personal liberty, to enlarge the mild policy of the later
law. When it was urged that, if the law were not technically
administered, imprisoned debtors would of a Sunday wander beyond the
"limits," securely able to return before Monday, when the creditor could
sue,--Van Buren, with a contemptuous fling at the supreme court,
confessed in Johnsonian sentences his lenient temper towards these
"stolen pleasures,"--his willingness that debtors should snatch the "few
moments of liberty which, although soured by constant perturbation and
alarm, are, notwithstanding, deemed fit subjects for judicial
animadversion." His rhetoric was rather agreeably florid when he
declared the law establishing "jail liberties" to be a concession for
humane purposes made by the inflexible spirit which authorized
imprisonment for debt. He strongly intimated his sympathy to be with
"the exertions of men of intelligence, reflection, and philanthropy to
mitigate its rigor; of men who viewed it as a practice fundamentally
wrong, a practice which forces their fellow-creatures from society, from
their friends, and their agonized families into the dreary walls of a
prison; which compels them to leave all those fascinating endearments to
become an inmate with vermin;" and all this, not for crime or frauds,
"but for the misfortune of being poor, of being unable to satisfy the
all-digesting stomach of some ravenous creditor." The practice was one
"confounding virtue and vice, and destroying the distinction between
guilt and innocence which should unceasingly be cherished in every
well-regulated government." Democrats rejoiced over this passage when
Van Buren was a candidate for the presidency. Richard M. Johnson, then
his associate upon the Democratic ticket, had successfully led an
agitation for the abolition of such imprisonment upon judgments rendered
in the federal courts.
Van Buren's professional life terminated with his election as governor
in 1828. In 1830, while secretary of state at Washington, he is said to
have appeared before the federal supreme court in the great litigation
between Astor and the Sailors' Snug Harbor, in which he had been counsel
below; but no record is preserved of his argument there. His last
well-known argument was before the court of errors at Albany in Varick
v. Jackson, a branch of the famous Medcef Eden litigation. This long and
highly technical battle was lighted up by the fame and competitions of
the counsel. It arose upon the question whether a will of Eden which
gave a landed estate to his son Joseph, but if Joseph died without
children, then to his surviving brother, Medcef Eden the younger,
created for Joseph the old lawyers' delight of an "estate tail." If it
were an "estate tail," then the law of 1782, which, in the general
tendency of American legislation after the Revolution, was directed
against the entailing of property, would have made the first brother,
Joseph, the absolute owner, and have defeated the later claim of Medcef.
Joseph had failed while in possession of the property. His creditors,
accepting the opinion of Alexander Hamilton, then the head of the bar,
insisted that he had been the absolute owner, that the provision for his
brother Medcef's accession to the property was nugatory as an attempt to
entail the estate; and upon this view the creditors sold the lands,
which by the rapid growth of the city soon became of large value.
Hamilton's opinion for years daunted the younger Medcef and his children
from asserting the right which it was morally plain his father had
intended for him. Aaron Burr, not less Hamilton's rival at the bar than
in the politics of New York, gave a contrary opinion; but after killing
Hamilton in 1804 and yielding up the vice-presidency in 1805, his
brilliant professional gifts were exiled from New York. On his return in
1812 from years of conspiracy, adventure, and romance, he took up the
discredited Medcef Eden claim; and in the judicial test of the question
he, and not Hamilton, proved to have been correct. The struggle went on
in a number of suits; and when in 1823 the question was to be finally
settled in the court of last resort, Burr, fearing, as he himself
intimated to the court, lest the profound suspicion under which he
rested might obscure and break the force of his legal arguments, or
conscious that his past twenty years had dimmed his faculties, called to
his aid Van Buren, then United States senator and a chief of the
profession. As Van Buren and Burr attended together before the court of
errors, they doubtless recalled their meetings in Van Ness's office
twenty years before, when Burr, still a splendid though clouded figure
in American life, hoped, by Federalist votes added to the Republican
secession which he led, to reach the governorship and recover his
prestige; those days in which the unknown but promising young countryman
had interested a vice-president and enjoyed the latter's skillful and
not always insincere flattery. The firm and orderly procedure of Van
Buren's life was now well contrasted with the discredited and profligate
ability of the returned wanderer. Against this earlier but long
deposed, and against this later and regnant chief in the Republican
politics of New York, were ranged in these cases David B. Ogden, the
famous lawyer of the Federalist ranks, Samuel A. Talcott, and Samuel
Jones. In Van Buren's long, masterly, and successful argument there was
again an edge to the zeal with which he attacked the opinion of Kent,
the Federalist chancellor, who asked the court of errors to overrule its
earlier decisions, and the chancellor's own decision as well, and defeat
the intention of the elder Medcef Eden.
Van Buren's professional career was most enviable. It lasted twenty-five
years. It ended before he was forty-six, when he was in the early
ripeness of his powers, but not until a larger and more shining career
seemed surely opened before him. He left the bar with a competence
fairly earned, which his prudence and skill made grow into an ample
fortune, without even malicious suggestion in the scurrility of politics
that he had profited out of public offices. In money matters he was more
thrifty and cautious than most Americans in public places. His enemies
accused him of meanness and parsimony, but apparently without other
reason than that he did not practice the careless and useless profusion
and luxury which many of his countrymen in political life have thought
necessary to indulge even when their own tastes were far simpler. In the
course of professional employment he acquired an important estate near
Oswego, whose value rapidly enhanced with the rapid growth of western
New York and the development of the lake commerce from that port.
The chief interest now found in Van Buren's professional career lies in
its relation to his political life. He was the only lawyer of
conspicuous and practical and really great professional success who has
reached the White House. In the long preparation for the bar, in the
many hours of leisure at Kinderhook and Hudson and even Albany permitted
by the methods of practice in vogue before there were railways or
telegraphs, and when travel was costly and slow and postage a shilling
or more, he gained the liberal education more difficult of access to the
busier young attorney and counsel of these crowded days. Great lawyers
were then fond of illustrations from polite literature; they loved to
set off their speeches with quotations from the classics, and to give
their style finish and ornament not practicable to the precise, prompt
methods which their successors learn in the driving routine of modern
American cities. Van Buren did not, however, become a great orator at
the bar. His admirer, Butler, upon returning to partnership with him in
1820, wrote indeed to an intimate friend, Jesse Hoyt (destined
afterwards to bring grief and scandal upon both the partners), that if
he were Van Buren he "would let politics alone," and become, as Van
Buren might, the "Erskine of the State." But though his success, had he
continued in the profession, would doubtless have been of the very first
order, his oratory would never have reached the warm and virile
splendor of Erskine, or the weighty magnificence of Webster. Van Buren's
work as a lawyer brought him, however, something besides wealth and the
education and refinement of books, and something which neither Erskine
nor Webster gained. The profession afforded him an admirable discipline
in the conduct of affairs; and affairs, in the law as out of it, are
largely decided by human nature and its varying peculiarities. The
preparation of details; the keen and far-sighted arrangement of the
best, because the most practicable, plan; the refusal to fire off
ammunition for the popular applause to be roused by its noise and flame;
the clear, steady bearing in mind of the end to be accomplished, rather
than the prolonged enjoyment or systematic working out of intermediate
processes beyond a utilitarian necessity,--all these elements Van Buren
mastered in a signal degree, and made invaluable in legal practice. To
men more superbly equipped for _tours de force_, who ignored the uses of
long, attentive, varied, painstaking work, there was nothing admirable
in the methods which Van Buren brought into political life out of his
experience in the law. He was, to undisciplined or envious opponents, a
"little magician," a trickster. The same thing appears, in every
department of human activity, in the anger which failure often flings at
success.
The predominance of lawyers in our politics was very early established,
and has been a characteristic distinction between politics in England
and politics in America. Conspicuous as lawyers have been in the
politics of the older country, they have rarely been figures of the
first rank. They have served in all its modern ministries, and sometimes
in other than professional stations; but, with the unimportant exception
of Perceval, not as the chief. English opinion has not unjustly believed
its greater landed proprietors to be animated with a strong and peculiar
desire for English greatness and renown; nor has the belief been
destroyed by their frequent opposition to the most beneficent popular
movements. Among these proprietors and those allied with them, even when
not strictly in their ranks, England has found her statesmen. To this
day, the speech of a lawyer in the British House of Commons is fancied
to show the narrowness of technical training, or is treated as a bid for
promotion to some of the splendid seats open to the English bar. In
America, the great landed proprietor very early lost the direction of
public affairs. All the members of the "Virginian dynasty" were, it is
true, large land-owners, and in the politics of New York there were
several of them. But land-ownership was to Jefferson, Madison, and
Monroe simply a means of support while they attended to public affairs;
it was not one of their chief recommendations to the landed interest
throughout the country. For a time in the early politics of New York the
landed wealth of the Schuylers, Van Rensselaers, and Livingstons was of
itself a source of strength; but in the spread of democratic sentiment
it was found that to be a great landlord was entirely consistent with
dullness, narrowness, and timid selfishness. Among the landlords there
soon and inevitably decayed that sense of public obligation belonging to
exalted position and leadership which sometimes brings courage, high
public spirit, and even a sound and active political imagination, to
those who preside over bodies of tenants. The laws were changed which
facilitated family accumulations of land. Since these early years of the
century a great land-owner has been in politics little more than any
other rich man. Both have had advantages in that as in any other field
of activity. Certain easy graces not uncommon to inherited wealth have
often been popular,--not, however, for the wealth, but for themselves.
Where these graces have existed in America without such wealth, they
have been none the less popular; but in England a lifetime of vast
public service and the finest personal attainments have failed to
overcome the distrust of a landless man as a sort of adventurer.
When Van Buren's career began, the men who were making money in trade or
manufactures were generally too busy for the anxious and busy cares of
public life; the tradesmen and manufacturers who had already made money
were past the time of life when men can vigorously and skillfully turn
to a new and strange calling. There was no leisure class except
land-owners or retired men of business. Lawyers, far more than those of
any other calling, became public men, and naturally enough. Their
experience of life and their knowledge of men were large. The popular
interest in their art of advocacy; their travels from county seat to
county seat; their speeches to juries in towns where no other secular
public speaking was to be heard; the varieties of human life which
lawyers came to know,--varieties far greater where the same men acted as
attorneys and advocates than in England where they acted in only one of
these fields,--these and the like, combined with the equipment for the
forms of political and governmental work which was naturally gained in
legal practice and the systematic study of law, gave to distinguished
lawyers in America their large place in its political life. For this
place the liberality of their lives helped, besides, to fit them. They
had ceased to be disqualified for it by their former close alliance, as
in England, with the landed aristocracy; and they had not yet begun to
suffer a disqualification, frequently unjust, for their close relations
with corporate interests, between which and the public there often
arises an antagonism of interests. De Tocqueville, after his visit in
1832, said that lawyers formed in America its highest political class
and the most cultivated circle of society; that the American aristocracy
was not composed of the rich, but that it occupied the judicial bench
and the bar. And the descriptions of the liberal and acute though
theoretical Frenchman are generally trustworthy, however often his
striking generalizations are at fault. Such, then, was the intimacy of
relations between the professions of law and politics when Van Buren
shone in both. And when, in his early prime, he gave up the law, neither
forensic habits nor those of the attorney were yet too strongly set to
permit the easy and complete diversion of his powers to the more
generous and exalted activity of public life.
It is simpler thus separately to treat Van Buren's life as a lawyer,
because in a just view of the man it must be subordinate to his life as
a politician. It is to be remembered, however, that in his earlier years
his progress in politics closely attended in time, and in much more than
time, his professional progress. When, at thirty, he sat as an appellate
judge in the court of errors, he was already powerful in politics; when,
at thirty-two, he was attorney-general, he was the leader of his party
in the state senate; when, at forty-five, he had perhaps the most
lucrative professional practice in New York, he was the leader of his
party in the United States Senate. But it will be easier to follow his
political career without interruption from his work as a lawyer,
honorable and distinguished as it was, and much of his political ability
as he owed to its fine discipline.
Van Buren's domestic life was broken up by the death of his wife at
Albany, in February, 1819, leaving him four sons. To her memory Van
Buren remained scrupulously loyal until his own death forty-three years
afterwards. We may safely believe political enemies when, after saying
of him many dastardly things, they admitted that he had been an
affectionate husband. Nor were accusations ever made against the
uprightness and purity of his private life.
CHAPTER III
STATE SENATOR.--ATTORNEY-GENERAL.--MEMBER OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL
CONVENTION
The politics of New York State were never more bitter, never more
personal, than when Van Buren entered the field in 1803. The Federalists
were sheltered by the unique and noble prestige of Washington's name;
and were conscious that in wealth, education, refinement, they far
excelled the Republicans. They were contemptuously suspicious of the
unlettered ignorance, the intense and exuberant vanity, of the masses of
American men. It was by that contempt and suspicion that they invited
the defeat which, protected though they were by the property
qualifications required of voters in New York, they met in 1800 at the
hands of a people in whom the instincts of democracy were strong and
unsubmissive. This was in our history the one complete and final defeat
of a great national party while in power. The Federalists themselves
made it final,--by their silly and unworthy anger at a political
reverse; by their profoundly immoral efforts to thwart the popular will
and make Burr president; by their fatal and ingrained disbelief in
common men, who, they thought, foolishly and impiously refused to
accept wisdom and guidance from the possessors of learning and great
estates; and finally by their unpatriotic opposition to Jefferson and
Madison in the assertion of American rights on the seas during the
Napoleonic wars. All these drove the party, in spite of its large
services in the past and its eminent capacity for service in the future,
forever from the confidence of the American people. The Federalists
maintained, it is true, a party organization in New York until after the
second war with England; but their efforts were rather directed to the
division and embarrassment of their adversaries than to victories of
their own strength or upon their own policy. They carried the lower
house of the legislature in 1809, 1812, and 1813. There were among them
men of the first rank, who retained a strong hold on popular respect,
among whom John Jay and Rufus King were deservedly shining figures. But
never after 1799 did the Federalists elect in New York a governor, or
control both legislative houses, or secure any solid power, except by
coalition with one branch or another of the Republicans.
Van Buren's fondness for politics was soon developed. His father was
firmly attached to the Jeffersonians or Republicans,--a rather
discredited minority among the Federalists of Columbia county and the
estates of the Hudson River aristocracy. Inheriting his political
preferences, Van Buren, with a great body of other young Americans,
caught the half-doctrinaire enthusiasm which Jefferson then inspired, an
enthusiasm which in Van Buren was to be so enduring a force, and to
which sixty years later he was still as loyal as he had been in the hot
disputes on the sanded floors of the village store or tavern. During
these boyish years he wrote and spoke for his party; and before he was
eighteen he was formally appointed a delegate to a Republican convention
for Columbia and Rensselaer counties.
Van Buren returned from New York to Columbia county late in 1803, just
twenty-one years old. At once he became active in politics. The
Republican party, though not strong in his county, was dominant in the
State; and the game of politics was played between its different
factions, the Federalists aiding one or the other as they saw their
advantage. The Republicans were Clintonians, Livingstonians, or
Burrites. George Clinton, in whose career lay the great origin of party
politics of New York, was the Republican leader. The son of an Irish
immigrant, he had, without the aid of wealth or influential connections,
made himself the most popular man in the State. He was the first
governor after colonial days were over, and was repeatedly reëlected. It
was his opposition which most seriously endangered New York's adoption
of the Federal Constitution. But in spite of the wide enthusiasm which
the completed Union promptly aroused, this opposition did not prevent
his reëlection in 1789 and 1792. The majorities were small, however, it
being even doubtful whether in the latter year the majority were fairly
given him. In 1795 he declined to be a candidate, and Robert R.
Livingston, the Republican in his place, was defeated. In 1801 Clinton
was again elected. Later he was vice-president in Jefferson's second
term and Madison's first term; and his aspiration to the presidency in
1808 was by no means unreasonable. He was a strong party leader and a
sincerely patriotic man. The Livingston family interest in New York was
very great. The chancellor, Robert R. Livingston, who nowadays is
popularly associated with the ceremony of Washington's inauguration, had
been secretary for foreign affairs under the Articles of Confederation,
and had left the Federalists in 1790. After his sixty years had under
the law disqualified him for judicial office, he became Jefferson's
minister to France and negotiated with Bonaparte the Louisiana treaty.
Brockholst Livingston was a judge of the Supreme Court of New York in
1801. In 1807 Jefferson promoted him to the federal Supreme Court.
Edward Livingston, younger than his brother, the chancellor, by
seventeen years, was long after to be one of the finest characters in
our politics. Early in Washington's administration he had become a
strong pro-French Republican, and had opposed Jay's treaty with Great
Britain; though forty years later, when Jackson brought him from
Louisiana to be secretary of state, he was sometimes reminded of his
still earlier Federalism. Morgan Lewis, judge of the Supreme Court and
afterwards chief justice, and still later governor, was a brother-in-law
of the chancellor. Smith Thompson, also a judge and chief justice, and
later secretary of the navy under Monroe and a judge of the federal
Supreme Court, and Van Buren's competitor for governor in 1828, was a
connection of the family. There were sneers at the Livingston conversion
to Democracy as there always are at political conversions. But whether
or not Chancellor Livingston's Democracy came from jealousy of Hamilton
in 1790, it is at least certain that he and his family connections
rendered political services of the first importance during a half
century. The drafting of Jackson's nullification proclamation in 1833 by
Edward Livingston was one of the noblest and most signal services which
Americans have had the fortune to render to their country.
The best offices were largely held by the Clinton and Livingston
families and their connections, an arrangement very aristocratic indeed,
but which did not then seem inconsistent with efficient and decorous
performance of the public business. Burr naturally gathered around him
those restless, speculative men who are as immoral in their aspirations
as in their conduct, and whose adherence has disgraced and weakened
almost every democratic movement known to history. Burr had been
attorney-general; he had refused a seat in the Supreme Court; he had
been United States senator; and now in the second office of the nation
he presided with distinguished grace over the Federal Senate. His hands
were not yet red with Hamilton's blood when Van Buren met him at New
York in 1803; but Democratic faces were averted from the man who, loaded
with its honors and enjoying its confidence, had intrigued with its
enemies to cheat his exultant party out of their choice for president.
In tribute to the Republicans of New York, George Clinton had already
been selected in his place to be the next vice-president. While Van
Buren was near the close of his law studies at New York, Burr was
preparing to restore his fortunes by a popular election, for which he
had some Republican support, and to which the fatuity of the defeated
party, again rejecting Hamilton's advice, added a considerable
Federalist support. William P. Van Ness, as "Aristides," one of the
classical names under which our ancestors were fond of addressing the
public, had in the Burr interest written a bitter attack on the Clintons
and Livingstons, accusing them, and with reason, of dividing the offices
between themselves.
Van Buren was easily proof against the allurements of Burr, and even the
natural influence of so distinguished a man as Van Ness, with whom he
had been studying a year. Sylvester, his first preceptor, was a
Federalist. So was Van Alen, his half-brother, soon to be his partner,
who in May, 1806, was elected to Congress. But Van Buren was firm and
resolute in party allegiance. In the election for governor in April,
1804, Burr was badly beaten by Morgan Lewis, the Clinton-Livingston
candidate, whom Van Buren warmly supported, and Burr's political career
was closed. The successful majority of the Republicans was soon resolved
into the Clintonians, led by Clinton and Judge Ambrose Spencer, and the
Livingstonians, led by Governor Lewis. The active participation of
judges in the bitter politics of the time illustrates the universal
intensity of political feeling, and goes very far to justify Jefferson's
and Van Buren's distrust of judicial opinions on political questions.
Brockholst Livingston, Smith Thompson, Ambrose Spencer, Daniel D.
Tompkins,--all judges of the State Supreme Court,--did not cease when
they donned the ermine to be party politicians; neither did the
chancellors Robert R. Livingston and Lansing. Even Kent, it is pretty
obvious, was a man of far stronger and more openly partisan feelings
than we should to-day think fitting so great a judicial station as he
held. The quarrels over offices were strenuous and increasing from the
very top to the bottom of the community.
The Federalists in 1807 generally joined the Lewisites, or "Quids."
Governor Lewis, finding that the jealousy of the Livingston interests
would defeat his renomination by the usual caucus of Republican members
of the legislature, became the candidate of a public meeting at New
York, and of a minority caucus, and asked help from the Federalists.
Such an alliance always seemed monstrous only to the Republican faction
that felt strong enough without it. The regular legislative caucus,
controlled by the Clintonians, nominated Daniel D. Tompkins, then a
judge of the Supreme Court, and for years after the Republican
"war-horse." Van Buren adhered to the purer, older, and less patrician
Democracy of the Clintonians. Tompkins was elected, with a Clintonian
legislature; and the result secured Van Buren's first appointment to
public office. A Clintonian council of appointment was chosen. The
council, a complex monument of the distrust of executive power with
which George III. had filled his revolted subjects, was composed of five
members, being the governor and one member from each of the four
senatorial districts, who were chosen by the Assembly from among the six
senators of the district. The four senatorial members of the council
were always, therefore, of the political faith of the Assembly, except
in cases where all the senators from a district belonged to the minority
party in the Assembly. To this council belonged nearly every appointment
in the State, even of local officers. Prior to 1801 the governor
appointed, with the advice and consent of the council. After the
constitutional amendment of that year, either member of the council
could nominate, the appointment being made by the majority. Van Buren
became surrogate of Columbia county on February 20, 1808. There was no
prescribed term of office, the commission really running until the
opposition party secured the council of appointment. Van Buren held the
office about five years and until his removal on March 19, 1813, when
his adversaries had secured control of the council.
At this time the system of removing the lesser as well as the greater
officers of government for political reasons was well established in New
York. It is impossible to realize the nature of Van Buren's political
education without understanding this old system of proscription, whose
influence upon American public life has been so prodigious. The strife
over the Federal Constitution had been fierce. Its friends, after their
victory, sought, neither unjustly nor unnaturally, to punish Governor
Clinton for his opposition. Although Washington wished to stand neutral
between parties, he still believed it politically suicidal to appoint
officers not in sympathy with his administration.[1] Hamilton
undoubtedly determined the New York appointments when the new government
was launched, and they were made from the political enemies of Governor
Clinton,--a course provoking an animosity which not improbably appeared
in the more numerous state appointments controlled by Clinton and the
Republican council. After the excesses of the French Revolution the
Republicans were denounced as Jacobins and radicals, dangerous in
politics and corrupt in morals. The family feuds aided and exaggerated
the divisions in this small community of freehold voters. Appointments
were made in the federal and state services for political reasons and
for family reasons, precisely as they had long been made in England.
Especially along the rich river counties from New York to the upper
Hudson were so distributed the lucrative offices, which were eagerly
sought for their profit as well as for their honor.
The contests were at first for places naturally vacated by death or
resignation; the idea of the property right of an incumbent actually in
office lingered until after the last century was out. It is not clear
when the first removals of subordinate officers took place for political
reasons. Some were made by the Federalists during Governor Jay's
administration; but the first extensive removals seem to have occurred
after the elections of 1801. For this there were two immediate causes.
In that year the exclusive nominating power of the governor was taken
from him. Each of the other four members of the council of appointment
could now nominate as well as confirm. Appointments and removals were
made, therefore, from that year until the new Constitution of 1821, by
one of the worst of appointing bodies, a commission of several men
whose consultations were secret and whose responsibility was divided.
Systematic abuse of the power of appointment became inevitable. There
was, besides, a second reason in the anger against Federalists, which
they had gone far to provoke, and against their long and by no means
gentle domination. This anger induced the Republicans to seek out every
method of punishment. But for this, the abuse might have been long
deferred. Nor is it unlikely that the refusal of Jefferson, inaugurated
in March of that year, to make a "clean sweep" of his enemies, turned
the longing eyes of embittered Republicans in New York more eagerly to
the fat state offices enjoyed by their insolent adversaries of the past
twelve years.
The Clintons and Livingstons had led the Republicans to a victory at the
state election in April, 1801. Later in that year George Clinton, now
again governor, called together the new council with the nominating
power vested in every one of its five members. This council acted under
distinguished auspices, and it deserves to be long remembered. Governor
Clinton presided, and his famous nephew, De Witt Clinton, was below him
in the board. The latter represented the Clintonian Republicans.[2]
Ambrose Spencer, a man of great parts and destined to a notable career,
represented the Livingstons, of whom he was a family connection.
Roseboom, the other Republican, was easily led by his two abler party
associates. The fifth member did not count, for he was a Federalist. Two
of the three really distinguished men of this council, De Witt Clinton
and Ambrose Spencer, it is not unjust to say, first openly and
responsibly established in New York the "spoils system" by removals, for
political reasons, of officers not political. The term of office of the
four senatorial members of this council had commenced while the
illustrious Federalist John Jay was governor; but they rejected his
nominations until he was tired of making them, and refused to call them
together. When Clinton took the governor's seat, he promptly summoned
the board, and in August, 1801, the work began. De Witt Clinton publicly
formulated the doctrine, but it did not yet reach its extreme form. He
said that the principal executive offices in the State ought to be
filled by the friends of the administration, and the more unimportant
offices ought to be proportionately distributed between the two parties.
The council rapidly divided the chief appointments among the Clintons
and Livingstons and their personal supporters. Officers were selected
whom Jay had refused to appoint. Edward Livingston, the chancellor's
brother, was given the mayoralty of New York, a very profitable as well
as important station; Thomas Tillotson, a brother-in-law of Chancellor
Livingston, was made secretary of state, in place of Daniel Hale,
removed; John V. Henry, a distinguished Federalist lawyer, was removed
from the comptrollership; the district attorney, the clerk and the
recorder of New York were removed; William Coleman, the founder of the
"Evening Post," and a strong adherent of Hamilton, was turned out of the
clerkship of the Circuit Court. And so the work went on through minor
offices. New commissions were required by the Constitution to be issued
to the puisne judges of the county courts and to justices of the peace
throughout the State once in three years. Instead of renewing the
commissions and preserving continuity in the administration of justice,
the council struck out the names of Federalists and inserted those of
Republicans. The proceedings of this council of 1801 have profoundly
affected the politics of New York to this day. Few political bodies in
America have exercised as serious and lasting an influence upon the
political habits of the nation. The tradition that Van Buren and the
Albany Regency began political proscription is untrue. The system of
removals was thus established several years before Van Buren held his
first office. Its founders, De Witt Clinton and Ambrose Spencer, were
long his political enemies. Governor Clinton, whose honorable record it
was that during the eighteen years of his governorship he had never
consented to a political removal, entered his protest--not a very hearty
one, it is to be feared--in the journal of the council; but in vain. In
the next year the two chief offenders were promoted,--De Witt Clinton
to be United States senator in the place of General Armstrong, a
brother-in-law of Chancellor Livingston, and Ambrose Spencer to be
attorney-general; and two years later Spencer became a judge of the
Supreme Court.
After the removals there began a disintegration of the party hitherto
successfully led by Burr, the Clintons, and the Livingstons. Colonel
Swartwout, Burr's friend, was called by De Witt Clinton a liar,
scoundrel and villain; although, after receiving two bullets from
Clinton's pistol in a duel, he was assured by the latter, with the
courtesy of our grandfathers, that there was no personal animosity.
Burr's friends had of course to be removed. But in 1805, after the
Clintons and the Livingstons had united in the election of Lewis as
governor over Burr, they too quarreled,--and naturally enough, for the
offices would not go around. So, after the Clintonians on the meeting of
the legislature early in 1806 had captured the council, they turned upon
their recent allies. Maturin Livingston was removed from the New York
recordership, and Tillotson from his place as secretary of state. The
work was now done most thoroughly. Sheriffs, clerks, surrogates, county
judges, justices of the peace, had to go. But at the corporation
election in New York in the same year, the Livingstonians and
Federalists, with a majority of the common council, in their fashion
righted the wrong, and, with a vigor not excelled by their successors a
half century later, removed at once all the subordinate municipal
officers subject to their control who were Clintonians. In 1807 the
Livingstonian Republicans, or, as they were now called from the
governor, the Lewisites, with the Federalists and Burrites, secured
control of the state council; and proceeded promptly to the work of
removals, defending it as a legitimate return for the proscriptive
course of their predecessors. In 1808 the Clintonians returned to the
council, and, through its now familiar labors, to the offices from which
the Lewisites were in their turn driven. In 1810 the Federalists
controlled the Assembly which chose the council; and they enjoyed a
"clean sweep" as keenly as had the contending Republican factions. But
the election of this year, the political record tells us, taught a
lesson which politicians have ever since refused to learn, perhaps
because it has not always been taught. The removal of the Republicans
from office "had the natural tendency to call out all their forces." The
Clintonians in 1811, therefore, were enabled by the people to reverse
the Federalist proscription of 1810. The Federalists, again in power in
1813, again followed the uniform usage then twelve years old. Political
removals had become part of the unwritten law.
At this time Van Buren suffered the loss of his office as surrogate, but
doubtless without any sense of private or public wrong. It was the
customary fate of war. In 1812 he was nominated for state senator from
the middle district, composed of Columbia, Dutchess, Orange, Ulster,
Delaware, Chenango, Greene, and Sullivan counties, as the candidate of
the Clintonian Republicans against Edward P. Livingston, the candidate
of the Lewisites or Livingstonians and Burrites as well as the
Federalists. Livingston was the sitting member, and a Republican of
powerful family and political connections. Van Buren, not yet thirty,
defeated him by a majority of less than two hundred out of twenty
thousand votes. In November, 1812, he took his seat at Albany, and
easily and within a few months reached a conspicuous and powerful place
in state politics.
These details of the establishment of the "spoils system" in New York
politics seem necessary to be told, that Van Buren's own participation
in the wrong may be fairly judged. It is a common historical vice to
judge the conduct of men of earlier times by standards which they did
not know. Van Buren found thoroughly and universally established at
Albany, when he entered its life, the rule that, upon a change in the
executive, there should be a change in the offices, without reference to
their political functions. He had in his own person experienced its
operation both to his advantage and to his disadvantage. Federalists and
Republicans were alike committed to the rule. The most distinguished and
the most useful men in active public life, whatever their earlier
opinion might have been, had acquiesced and joined in the practice. Nor
was the practice changed or extended after Van Buren came into state
politics. It continued as it had thus begun, until he became a national
figure. Success in it required an ability and skill of which he was an
easy master; nor does he seem to have shrunk from it. But he was neither
more nor less reprehensible than the universal public sense about him.
For it must be remembered that the "spoils system" was not then
offensive to the more enlightened citizens of New York. The system was
no excess of democracy or universal suffrage. It had arisen amidst a
suffrage for governor and senators limited to those who held in freehold
land worth at least £100, and for assemblymen limited to those who held
in freehold land worth £20, or paid a yearly rent of forty shillings,
and who were rated and actually paid taxes. It was practiced by men of
aristocratic habits chosen by the well-to-do classes. It grew in the
disputes of great family interests, and in the bitterness of popular
elements met in a new country, still strange or even foreign to one
another, and permitted by their release from the dangers of war and the
fear of British oppression to indulge their mutual dislikes.
The frequent "rotation" in office which was soon to be pronounced a
safeguard of republican institutions, and which Jackson in December,
1829, told Congress was a "leading principle in the Republicans' creed,"
was by no means an unnatural step towards an improvement of the civil
service of the State. Reformers of our day lay great stress upon the
fundamental rule of democratic government, that a public office is
simply a trust for the people; and they justly find the chief argument
against the abuses of patronage in the notorious use of office for the
benefit of small portions of the people, to the detriment of the rest.
In England, however, for centuries (and to some extent the idea survives
there in our own time), there was in an office a quality of property
having about it the same kind of sacred immunity which belongs to real
or personal estate. There were reversions to offices after the deaths of
their occupants, like vested remainders in lands. It was offensive to
the ordinary sense of decency and justice that the right of a public
officer to appropriate so much of the public revenue should be attacked.
It did not offend the public conscience that great perquisites should
belong to officers performing work of the most trifling value or none at
all. The same practices and traditions, weakened by distance from
England and by the simpler life and smaller wealth of the colonists,
came to our forefathers. They existed when the democratic movement,
stayed during the necessities of war and civil reconstruction, returned
at the end of the last century and became all-powerful in 1801. To break
this idea of property and right in office, to make it clear that every
office was a mere means of service of the people at the wish of the
people, there seemed, to very patriotic and generally very wise men, no
simpler way than that the people by their elections should take away and
distribute offices in utter disregard of the interests of those who
held them. The odious result to which this afterwards led, of making
offices the mere property of influential politicians, was but
imperfectly foreseen. Nor did that result, inevitable as it was, follow
for many years. There seems no reason to believe that the incessant and
extensive changes in office which began in 1801, seriously lowered the
standard of actual public service until years after Van Buren was a
powerful and conspicuous politician. Political parties were pretty
generally in the hands of honest men. The prostituted and venal
disposition of "spoils," though a natural sequence, was to come long
after. Rotation was practiced, or its fruits were accepted and enjoyed
with satisfaction, by public men of the State who were really statesmen,
who had high standards of public honor and duty, whose minds were
directed towards great and exalted public ends. If it seemed right to De
Witt Clinton, Edward Livingston, Robert R. Livingston, and Ambrose
Spencer, surely lesser gods of our early political Olympus could not be
expected to refuse its advantages or murmur at its hardships. Nor was
the change distasteful to the people, if we may judge by their political
behavior. No faction or party seems to have been punished by public
sentiment for the practice except in conspicuous cases like those of De
Witt Clinton and Van Buren, where sometimes blows aimed at single men
roused popular and often an undeserved sympathy. The idea that a public
officer should easily and naturally go from the ranks of the people
without special equipment, and as easily return to those ranks, has been
popularly agreeable wherever the story of Cincinnatus has been told.
Early in this century the closeness of offices to ordinary life, and the
absence of an organized bureaucracy controlling or patronizing the
masses of men, seemed proper elements of the great democratic reform.
There had not yet arisen the very modern and utilitarian and the vastly
better conception of a service, the responsible directors of whose
policy should be changed with popular sentiment, but whose subordinates
should be treated by the public as any other employer would treat them,
upon simple and unsentimental rules of business. Another practical
consideration makes more intelligible the failure of our ancestors to
perceive the dangers of the great change they permitted. Offices were
not nearly as technical, their duties not nearly as uniform, as they
have grown to be in the more complex procedures of our enormously richer
and more populous time. Every officer did a multitude of things.
Intelligent and active men in unofficial life shifted with amazing
readiness and success from one calling to another. A general became a
judge, or a judge became a general,--as, indeed, we have seen in later
days. A merchant could learn to survey; a farmer could keep or could
learn to keep fair records.
In the art of making of the lesser offices ammunition with which to
fight great battles over great questions, Van Buren became a master. His
imperturbable temper and patience, his keen reading of the motives and
uses of men, gave him so firm a hold upon politicians that it has been
common to forget the undoubted hold he long had upon the people. In
April, 1816, he was reëlected senator for a second term of four years.
His eight years of service in the senate expired in 1820.
In November, 1812, the first session of the new legislature was held to
choose presidential electors. Not until sixteen years later were
electors chosen directly by the people. Van Buren voted for the
candidates favorable to De Witt Clinton for president as against
Madison. In the successful struggle of the Clintonians for these
electors, he is said in this, his first session, to have shown the
address and activity which at once made him a Republican leader. For his
vote against Madison Van Buren's friends afterwards made many apologies;
his adversaries declared it unpardonable treachery to one of the revered
Democratic fathers. But the young politician was not open to much
condemnation. De Witt Clinton, though he had but just reached the
beginning of middle life, was a very able and even an illustrious man.
He had been unanimously nominated in an orderly way by a caucus of the
Republican members of the legislature of 1811 and 1812 of which Van
Buren was not a member. He had accepted the nomination and had declined
to withdraw from it. There was a strong Republican opposition to the
declaration of war at that time, because preparation for it had not
been adequately made. Most of the Republican members of Congress from
New York had voted against the declaration. The virtues and abilities of
Madison were not those likely to make a successful war, as the event
amply proved. There was natural and deserved discontent with the
treatment by Jefferson's administration, in which Madison had charge of
foreign relations, and by Madison's own administration, of the
difficulties caused by the British Orders in Council, the Berlin and
Milan decrees of Napoleon, and the unprincipled depredations of both the
great belligerents. Van Buren is said by Butler, then an inmate of his
family, to have been an open and decided advocate of the embargo, and of
all the strong measures proposed against Great Britain and of the war
itself. Nor was this very inconsistent with his vote for Clinton. He had
a stronger sense of allegiance to his party in the State than to his
party at Washington; and the Republican party of New York had regularly
declared for Clinton. For once at least Van Buren found himself voting
with the great body of the Federalists, men who had not, like John
Quincy Adams, become reconciled to the strong and obvious, though
sometimes ineffective, patriotism of Jefferson's and Madison's
administrations. But whatever had been the motives which induced Van
Buren to support Clinton, they soon ceased to operate. Within a few
months after this the political relations between the two men were
dissolved; and they were politically hostile, until Clinton's death
fourteen years afterwards called from Van Buren a pathetic tribute.
Although the youngest man but one, it was said, until that time elected
to the state senate, Van Buren was in January, 1814, chosen to prepare
the answer then customarily made to the speech of the governor. In it he
defended the war, which had been bitterly assailed in the address to the
governor made by the Federalist Assembly. Political divisions even when
carried to excess were, he said, inseparable from the blessings of
freedom; but such divisions were unfit in their resistance of a foreign
enemy. The great body of the New York Republicans, with Governor
Tompkins at their head, now gave Madison vigorous support; although
their defection in 1812 had probably made possible the Federalist
success at the election for the Assembly in 1813, which embarrassed the
national administration. Van Buren warmly supported Tompkins for his
reëlection in April, 1813, and prepared for the legislative caucus a
highly declamatory, but clear and forcible, address to Republican
electors in his behalf. The provocations to war were strongly set out.
It was declared that "war and war alone was our only refuge from
national degradation;" the "two great and crying grievances" were "the
destruction of our commerce, and the impressment of our seamen;" for
Americans did not anticipate the surrender at Ghent two years later to
the second wrong. While American sailors' "deeds of heroic valor make
old Ocean smile at the humiliations of her ancient tyrant," the address
urged Americans to mark the man, meaning the trading Federalist, who
believed "in commuting our sailors' rights for the safety of our
merchants' goods." In the sophomoric and solemn rhetoric of which
Americans, and Englishmen too, were then fond, it pointed out that the
favor of citizens was not sought "by the seductive wiles and artful
blandishments of the corrupt minions of aristocracy," who of course were
Federalists, but that citizens were now addressed "in the language which
alone becomes freemen to use,--the language to which alone it becomes
freemen to listen."
In the legislative sessions of 1813 and 1814 Van Buren gave a practical
and skillful support to administration measures. But many of them were
balked by the Federalists, until in the election of April, 1814, the
rising patriotism of the country, undaunted by the unskillful and
unfortunate conduct of the war, pronounced definitely in favor of a
strong war policy. The Republicans recovered control of the Assembly;
and there were already a Republican governor and Senate. An extra
session was summoned in September, 1814, through which exceedingly
vigorous measures were carried against Federalist opposition. Van Buren
now definitely led. Appropriations were made from the state treasury for
the pay of militia in the national service. The State undertook to
enlist twelve thousand men for two years, a corps of sea fencibles
consisting of twenty companies, and two regiments of colored men; slaves
enlisting with the consent of their masters to be freed. Van Buren's
"classification act" Benton afterwards declared to be the "most
energetic war measure ever adopted in this country." By it the whole
military population was divided into 12,000 classes, each class to
furnish one able-bodied man, making the force of 12,000 to be raised. If
no one volunteered from a class, then any member of the class was
authorized to procure a soldier by a bounty, the amount of which should
be paid by the members of the class according to their ability, to be
determined by assessors. If no soldier from the class were thus
procured, then a soldier was to be peremptorily drafted from each class.
Van Buren was proud enough of this act to file the draft of it in his
own handwriting with the clerk of the Senate, indorsed by himself: "The
original Classification Bill, to be preserved as a memento of the
patriotism, intelligence, and firmness of the legislature of 1814-15. M.
V. B. Albany, Feb. 15, 1815."
Cheered, after many disasters, by the victory at Plattsburg and the
creditable battle of Lundy's Lane, the Senate, in Van Buren's words,
congratulated Governor Tompkins upon "the brilliant achievements of our
army and navy during the present campaign, which have pierced the gloom
that for a time obscured our political horizon." The end of the war left
in high favor the Republicans who had supported it. The people were
good-humoredly willing to forget its many inefficiencies, to recall
complacently its few glories, and to find little fault with a treaty
which, if it established no disputed right, at least brought peace
without surrender and without dishonor. Jackson's fine victory at New
Orleans after the treaty was signed, though it came too late to
strengthen John Quincy Adams's dauntless front in the peace conference,
was quickly seized by the people as the summing up of American and
British prowess. The Republicans now had a hero in the West, as well as
a philosopher at Monticello. Van Buren drafted the resolution giving the
thanks of New York "to Major-General Jackson, his gallant officers and
troops, for their wonderful and heroic victory."
In the method then well established the Republicans celebrated their
political success in 1814. Among the removals, Abraham Van Vechten lost
the post of attorney-general, which on February 17, 1815, was conferred
upon Van Buren for his brilliant and successful leadership in the
Senate. He remained, however, a senator of the State. At thirty-two,
therefore, he was, next to the governor, the leader of the Tompkins
Republicans, now so completely dominant; he held two political offices
of dignity and importance; and he was conducting besides an active law
practice.
De Witt Clinton, after his defeat for the presidency, suffered other
disasters. It was in January, 1813, that he and Van Buren broke their
political relations; and the Republicans very largely fell off from him.
The reasons for this do not clearly appear; but were probably Clinton's
continuance of hostility to the national administration, which seemed
unpatriotic to the Republicans, and some of the mysterious matters of
patronage in which Clinton had been long and highly proscriptive. In
1815 the latter was removed from the mayoralty of New York by the
influence of Governor Tompkins in the council. He had been both mayor
and senator for several years prior to 1812. He was mayor and
lieutenant-governor when he was a candidate for the presidency.
In 1816 the Republicans in the Assembly, then closely divided between
them and the Federalists (who seemed to be favored by the
apportionment), sought one of those immoral advantages whose wrong in
times of high party feeling seems invisible to men otherwise honorable.
In the town of Pennington a Federalist, Henry Fellows, had been fairly
elected to the Assembly by a majority of 30; but 49 of his ballots were
returned as reading "Hen. Fellows;" and his Republican competitor, Peter
Allen, got the certificate of appointment. The Republicans, acting, it
seems, in open conference with Van Buren, insisted not only upon
organizing the house, which was perhaps right, but upon what was wrong
and far more important. They elected the council of appointment before
Fellows was seated, as he afterwards was by an almost unanimous vote.
The "Peter Allen legislature" is said to have become a term of reproach.
But, as with electoral abuses in later days, the Federalists were not as
much aided as they ought to have been by this sharp practice of their
rivals; the people perhaps thought that, as they were in the minority
everywhere but in the Assembly, they ought not to have been permitted,
by a capture of the council, to remove the Republicans in office.
At any rate the election in April, 1816, while the "Peter Allen
legislature" was still in office, went heavily in favor of the
Republicans, Van Buren receiving his second election to the Senate. On
March 4, 1816, he was chosen by the legislature a regent of the
University of the State of New York, an office which he held until 1829.
The University was then, as now, almost a myth, being supposed to be the
associated colleges and academies of the State. But the regents have had
a varying charge of educational matters.
In 1817 the agitation, so superbly and with such foresight conducted by
De Witt Clinton, resulted in the passage of the law under which the
construction of the Erie Canal began. Van Buren's enmity to Clinton did
not cause him to oppose the measure, of which Hammond says he was an
"early friend." With a few others he left his party ranks to vote with
Clinton's friends; and this necessary accession from the "Bucktails" is
said by the same fair historian to have been produced by Van Buren's
"efficient and able efforts." In his speech favoring it he declared
that his vote for the law would be "the most important vote he ever gave
in his life;" that "the project, if executed, would raise the State to
the highest possible pitch of fame and grandeur," an expression not
discredited by the splendid and fruitful result of the enterprise.
Clinton, after hearing the speech, forgot for a moment their political
collisions, and personally thanked Van Buren.
In April, 1817, Clinton was elected governor by a practically unanimous
vote. His resolute courage and the prestige of the canal policy
compelled this tribute from the Republicans, in spite of his
sacrilegious presidential aspiration in 1812, and his dismissal from the
mayoralty of New York in 1815. Governor Tompkins, now vice-president,
was Clinton's only peer in New York politics. The popular tide was too
strong for the efforts of Tompkins, Van Buren, and their associates. In
the eagerness to defeat Clinton, it was even suggested that Tompkins
should serve both as governor and vice-president; should be at once
ruler at Albany and vice-ruler at Washington. Van Buren did not,
however, go with the hot-heads of the legislature in opposing a bill for
an election to fill the vacancy left by the resignation, which it was at
last thought necessary for Tompkins to make, of the governorship. No one
dared run against Clinton; and he triumphantly returned to political
power. Under this administration of his, the party feud took definite
form. Clinton's Republican adversaries were dubbed "Bucktails" from the
ornaments worn on ceremonial occasions by the Tammany men who had long
been Clinton's enemies. The Bucktails and their successors were the
"regular" Republicans, or the Democrats as they were later called; and
they kept their regularity until, long afterwards, the younger and
greater Bucktail leader, when venerable and laden with honors, became
the titular head of the Barnburner defection. The merits of the feud
between Bucktails and Clintonians it is now difficult to find. Each
accused the other of coquetting with the Federalists; and the accusation
was nearly always true of one or the other of them. Politics was a
highly developed and extremely interesting game, whose players, though
really able and patriotic men, were apparently careless of the
undignified parts they were playing. Nor are Clintonians and Bucktails
alone in political history. Cabinets of the greatest nations have, in
more modern times, broken on grounds as sheerly personal as those which
divided Clinton and Van Buren in 1818. British and French ministries, as
recent memoirs and even recent events have shown, have fallen to pieces
in feuds of as little essential dignity as belonged to those of New York
seventy years ago.
In 1819 the Bucktails suffered the fate of war; and Van Buren, their
efficient head, was removed from the attorney-general's office. Thurlow
Weed, then a country editor, grotesquely wrote at the time that
"rotation in office is the most striking and brilliant feature of
excellence in our benign form of government; and that by this doctrine,
bottomed, as it is, upon the Magna Charta of our liberties, Van Buren's
removal was not only sanctioned, but was absolutely required." The
latter still remained state senator, and soon waged a short and decisive
campaign to recover political mastery. He now came to the aid of
Governor Tompkins, who during the war with England had borrowed money
for public use upon his personal responsibility, and in the disbursement
of several millions of dollars for war purposes had, through
carelessness in bookkeeping or clerical detail, apparently become a
debtor of the State. The comptroller, in spite of a law passed in 1819
to indemnify Tompkins for his patriotic services, took a hostile
attitude which threatened the latter with pecuniary destruction. In
March, 1820, Van Buren threw himself into the contest with a skill and
generous fervor which saved the ex-governor. Van Buren's speech of two
days for the old chief of the Bucktails, is described by Hammond, a
political historian of New York not unduly friendly to Van Buren, to
have been "ingenious, able, and eloquent."
It was also in 1820 that Van Buren promoted the reëlection of Rufus
King, the distinguished Federalist, to the United States Senate. His
motives in doing this were long bitterly assailed; but as the choice was
intrinsically admirable, Van Buren was probably glad to gratify a
patriotic impulse which was not very inconsistent with party advantage.
In 1819 the Republican caucus, the last at which the Bucktails and
Clintonians both attended, was broken up amid mutual recriminations.
John C. Spencer, the son of Ambrose Spencer, and afterwards a
distinguished Whig, was the Clintonian candidate, and had the greater
number of Republican votes. In the legislature there was no choice,
Rufus King having fewer votes than either of the Republicans. When the
legislature of 1820 met, there appeared a pamphlet skillfully written in
a tone of exalted patriotism. This decided the election for King. Van
Buren was its author, and was said to have been aided by William L.
Marcy. Both had suffered at the hands of Clinton. However much they may
have been so influenced in secret, they gave in public perfectly sound
and weighty reasons for returning this old and distinguished statesman
to the place he had honored for many years. In 1813 King had received
the votes of a few Republicans, without whom he would have been defeated
by a Republican competitor. The Clintonians and their adversaries had
since disputed which of them had then been guilty of party disloyalty.
But it can hardly be doubted that King's high character and great
ability, with the revolutionary glamour about him, made his choice seem
patriotic and popular, and therefore politically prudent.
Van Buren's pamphlet of 1820 was addressed to the Republican members of
the legislature by a "fellow-member" who told them that he knew and was
personally known to most of them, and that he had, "from his infancy,
taken a deep interest in the honor and prosperity of the party." This
anonymous "fellow-member" pronounced the support of King by Republicans
to "be an act honorable to themselves, advantageous to the country, and
just to him." He declared that the only reluctance Republicans had to a
public avowal of their sentiments arose from a "commendable apprehension
that their determination to support him under existing circumstances
might subject them to the suspicion of having become a party to a
political bargain, to one of those sinister commutations of principle
for power, which they think common with their adversaries, and against
which they have remonstrated with becoming spirit." He showed that there
were degrees even among Federalists; that some in the war had been
influenced by "most envenomed malignity against the administration of
their own government;" that a second and "very numerous and respectable
portion" had been those "who, inured to opposition and heated by
collision, were poorly qualified to judge dispassionately of the
measures of government," who thought the war impolitic at the time, but
who were ignorantly but honestly mistaken; but that a third class of
them had risen "superior to the prejudices and passions of those with
whom they once acted." In the last class had been Rufus King; at home
and in the Senate he had supported the administration; he had helped
procure loans to the State for war purposes. The address skillfully
recalled his Revolutionary services, his membership in the convention
which framed the Federal Constitution, his appointment by Washington as
minister to the English court, and his continuance there under
Jefferson. He was declared to be opposed to Clinton. The address
concluded by reciting that there had been in New York "exceptionable and
unprincipled political bargains and coalitions," which with darker
offenses ought to be proved, to vindicate the great body of citizens
"from the charge of participating in the profligacy of the few, and to
give rest to that perturbed spirit which now haunts the scenes of former
moral and political debaucheries;" but added that the nature of a vote
for King precluded such suspicions.
The last statement was just. King's return was free from other suspicion
than that he probably preferred the Van Buren to the Clinton
Republicans. Van Buren, seeing that the Federalist party was at an end,
was glad both to do a public service and to ally with his party, in the
divisions of the future, some part of the element so finely represented
by Rufus King. In private Van Buren urged the support of King even more
emphatically. "We are committed," he wrote, "to his support. It is both
wise and honest, and we must have no fluttering in our course. Mr.
King's views towards us are honorable and correct.... Let us not, then,
have any halting. I will put my head on its propriety." Van Buren's
partisanship always had a mellow character. He practiced the golden rule
of successful politics, to foresee future benefits rather than remember
past injuries. Indeed, it is just to say more. In sending King to the
Senate he doubtless experienced the lofty pleasure which a politician of
public spirit feels in his occasional ability to use his power to reach
a beneficent end, which without the power he could not have reached,--a
stroke which to a petty politician would seem dangerous, but which the
greater man accomplishes without injury to his party standing. A year or
two after King's election, when Van Buren joined him at Washington,
there were established the most agreeable relations between them. The
refinement and natural decorum of the younger man easily fell in with
the polished and courtly manner of the old Federalist. Benton, who had
then just entered the Senate, said it was delightful to behold the
deferential regard which Van Buren paid to his venerable colleague, a
regard always returned by King with marked kindness and respect.
In this year the era of good feeling was at its height. Monroe was
reëlected president by an almost unanimous vote, with Tompkins again as
vice-president. The good feeling, however, was among the people, and not
among the politicians. The Republican party was about to divide by
reason of the very completeness of its supremacy. The Federalist party
was extinguished and its members scattered. The greater number of them
in New York went with the Clintonian Republicans, with whom they
afterwards formed the chief body of the Whig party. A smaller number of
them, among whom were James A. Hamilton and John C. Hamilton, the sons
of the great founder of the Federalist party, William A. Duer, John A.
King (the son of the reëlected senator), and many others of wealth and
high social position, ranged themselves for a time in the Bucktail ranks
under Van Buren's leadership. In the slang of the day, they were the
"high-minded Federalists," because they had declared that Clinton's
supporters practiced a personal subserviency "disgusting to high-minded
and honorable men." With this addition, the Bucktails became the
Democratic party in New York. In April, 1820, the gubernatorial election
was between the Clintonians supporting Clinton, and the Bucktails
supporting Tompkins, the Vice-President. Clinton's recent and really
magnificent public service made him successful at the polls, but his
party was beaten at other points.
Rufus King's reëlection to the Senate was believed to have some relation
to the Missouri question, then agitating the nation. In one of his
letters urging his Republican associates to support King, Van Buren
declared that the Missouri question concealed no plot so far as King was
concerned, but that he, Van Buren, and his friends, would "give it a
true direction." King's strong opposition to the admission of Missouri
as a slave State was, however, perfectly open. If he returned to the
Senate, it was certain he would steadily vote against any extension of
slavery. Van Buren knew all this, and doubtless meant that King was
bargaining away none of his convictions for the senatorship. But what
the "true direction" was which was to be given the Missouri question, is
not clear. About the time of King's reëlection Van Buren joined in
calling a public meeting at Albany to protest against extending slavery
beyond the Mississippi. He was absent at the time of the meeting, and
refused the use of his name upon the committee to send the anti-slavery
resolutions to Washington. Nor is it clear whether his absence and
refusal were significant. He certainly did not condemn the resolutions;
and in January, 1820, he voted in the state Senate for an instruction to
the senators and representatives in Congress "to oppose the admission,
as a State in the Union, of any territory not comprised within the
original boundary of the United States, without making the prohibition
of slavery therein an indispensable condition of admission." This
resolution undoubtedly expressed the clear convictions of the
Republicans in New York, whether on Van Buren's or Clinton's side, as
well as of the remaining Federalists.
Van Buren's direct interest in national politics had already begun. In
1816 he was present in Washington (then a pretty serious journey from
Albany) when the Republican congressional caucus was held to nominate a
president. Governor Tompkins, after a brief canvass, retired; and
Crawford, then secretary of war, became the candidate against Monroe,
and was supported by most of the Republicans from New York. Van Buren's
preference was not certainly known, though it is supposed he preferred
Monroe. In 1820 he was chosen a presidential elector in place of an
absentee from the electoral college, and participated in the all but
unanimous vote for Monroe. He voted with the other New York electors for
Tompkins for the vice-presidency. In April, 1820, he wrote to Henry
Meigs, a Bucktail congressman then at Washington, that the rascality of
some of the deputy postmasters in the State was intolerable, and cried
aloud for relief; that it was impossible to penetrate the interior of
the State with friendly papers; and that two or three prompt removals
were necessary. The postmaster-general was to be asked "to do an act of
justice and render us a partial service" by the removal of the
postmasters at Bath, Little Falls, and Oxford, and to appoint successors
whom Van Buren named. In January, 1821, Governor Clinton sent this
letter to the legislature, with a message and other papers so numerous
as to be carried in a green bag, which gave the name to the message, in
support of a charge that the national administration had interfered in
the state election. But the "green-bag message" did Van Buren little
harm, for Clinton's own proscriptive rigor had been great, and it was
only two years before that Van Buren himself had been removed from the
attorney-generalship. In 1821 the political division of the New York
Republicans was carried to national politics. When a speaker was to be
chosen in place of Clay, Taylor of New York, the Republican candidate,
was opposed by the Bucktail congressmen, because he had supported
Clinton.
In February, 1821, Van Buren gained the then dignified promotion to the
federal Senate. He was elected by the Bucktails against Nathan Sanford,
the sitting senator, who was supported by the Clintonians and
Federalists. Van Buren was now thirty-eight years old, and in the early
prime of his powers. He had run the gauntlet of two popular elections;
he had been easily first among the Republicans of the state Senate; he
had there shown extraordinary political skill and an intelligent and
public spirit; he had ably administered the chief law office of the
State which was not judicial. Though not yet keenly interested in any
federal question,--for his activity and thought had been sufficiently
engaged in affairs of his own State,--he turned to the new field with an
easy confidence, amply justified by his mastery of the problems with
which he had so far grappled. He reached Washington the undoubted leader
of his party in the State. The prestige of Governor Tompkins, although
just reëlected vice-president, had suffered from his recent defeat for
the governorship, and from his pecuniary and other difficulties; and
besides, he obviously had not Van Buren's unrivaled equipment for
political leadership.
Before Van Buren attended his first session in the federal capital he
performed for the public most honorable service in the state
constitutional convention which sat in the autumn of 1821. This body
illustrated the earnest and wholesome temper in which the most powerful
public men of the State, after many exhibitions of partisan, personal,
and even petty animosities, could treat so serious and abiding a matter
as its fundamental law. The Democrats sent Vice-President Tompkins, both
the United States senators, King and Van Buren, the late senator,
Sanford, and Samuel Nelson, then beginning a long and honorable career.
The Clintonians and Federalists sent Chancellor Kent and Ambrose
Spencer, the chief justice. Van Buren was chosen from Otsego, and not
from his own county, probably because the latter was politically
unfavorable to him.
This convention was one of the steps in the democratic march. It was
called to broaden the suffrage, to break up the central source of
patronage at Albany, and to enlarge local self-administration. The
government of New York had so far been a freeholders' government, with
those great virtues, and those greater and more enduring vices, which
were characteristic of a government controlled exclusively by the owners
of land. The painful apprehension aroused by the democratic resolution
to reduce, if not altogether to destroy, the exclusive privileges of
land-owners, was expressed in the convention by Chancellor Kent. He
would not "bow before the idol of universal suffrage;" this extreme
democratic principle, he said, had "been regarded with terror by the
wise men of every age;" wherever tried, it had brought "corruption,
injustice, violence, and tyranny;" if adopted, posterity would "deplore
in sackcloth and ashes the delusion of the day." He wished no laws to
pass without the free consent of the owners of the soil. He did not
foresee English parliaments elected in 1885 and 1886 by a suffrage not
very far from universal, or a royal jubilee celebrated by democratic
masses, or the prudent conservatism in matters of property of the
enfranchised French democracy,--he foresaw none of these when he
declared that England and France could not sustain the weight of
universal suffrage; that "the radicals of England, with the force of
that mighty engine, would at once sweep away the property, the laws, and
the liberty of that island like a deluge." Van Buren distinguished
himself in the debate. Upon this exciting and paramount topic he did not
share the temper which possessed most of his party. His speech was
clear, explicit, philosophical, and really statesmanlike. It so
impressed even his adversaries; and Hammond, one of them, declared that
he ought for it to be ranked "among the most shining orators and able
statesmen of the age."
In reading this, or indeed any of the utterances of Van Buren where the
occasion required distinctness, it is difficult to find the ground of
the charge of "noncommittalism" so incessantly made against him. He
doubtless refrained from taking sides on questions not yet ripe for
decision, however clear, and whatever may have been his speculative
opinions. But this is the duty of every statesman; it has been the
practice of every politician who has promoted reform. Van Buren now
pointed out how completely the events of the forty years past had
discredited the grave speculative fears of Franklin, Hamilton, and
Madison as to the result of some provisions of the Federal Constitution.
With Burke he believed experience to be the only unerring touchstone. He
conclusively showed that property had been as safe in those American
communities which had universal suffrage as in the few which retained a
property qualification; that venality in voting, apprehended from the
change, already existed in the grossest forms at the parliamentary
elections of England. Going to the truth which is at the dynamic source
of democratic institutions, he told the chancellor that when among the
masses of America the principles of order and good government should
yield to principles of anarchy and violence and permit attacks on
private property or an agrarian law, all constitutional provisions would
be idle and unavailing, because they would have lost all their force and
influence. With a true instinct, however, Van Buren wished the steps to
be taken gradually. He was not yet ready, he said, to admit to the
suffrage the shifting population of cities, held to the government by
no other ties than the mere right to vote. He was not ready for a
really universal suffrage. The voter ought, if he did not participate in
the government by paying taxes or performing militia duty, to be a man
who was a householder with some of the elements of stability, with
something at stake in the community. Although they had reached "the
verge of universal suffrage," he could not with his Democratic friends
take the "one step beyond;" he would not cheapen the invaluable right by
conferring it with indiscriminating hand "on every one, black or white,
who would be kind enough to condescend to accept it." Though a Democrat
he was opposed, he said, to a "precipitate and unexpected prostration of
all qualifications;" he looked with dread upon increasing the voters in
New York city from thirteen or fourteen thousand to twenty-five
thousand, believing (curious prediction for a father of the Democratic
party!) that the increase "would render their elections rather a curse
than a blessing," and "would drive from the polls all sober-minded
people."
The universal suffrage then postponed was wisely adopted a few years
later. Democracy marched steadily on; and Van Buren was willing,
probably very willing, to be guided by experience. He opposed in the
convention a proposal supported by most of his party to restrict
suffrage to white citizens, but favored a property qualification for
black men, the $250 freehold ownership until then required of white
voters. He would not, he said, draw from them a revenue and yet deny
them the right of suffrage. Twenty-five years later, in 1846, nearly
three-fourths of the voters of the State refused equal suffrage to the
blacks; and even in 1869, six years after the emancipation proclamation,
a majority still refused to give them the same rights as white men.
The question of appointments to office was the chief topic in the
convention. Van Buren, as chairman of the committee on this subject,
made an interesting and able report. It was unanimously agreed that the
use of patronage by the council of appointment had been a scandal. Only
a few members voted to retain the council, even if it were to be elected
by the people. He recommended that military officers, except the
highest, be elected by the privates and officers of militia. Of the 6663
civil officers whose appointment and removal by the council had for
twenty years kept the State in turmoil, he recommended that 3643, being
notaries, commissioners, masters and examiners in chancery, and other
lesser officers, should be appointed under general laws to be enacted by
the legislature; the clerks of courts and district attorneys should be
appointed by the common pleas courts; mayors and clerks of cities should
be appointed by their common councils, except in New York, where for
years afterwards the mayors were appointed; the heads of the state
departments should be appointed by the legislature; and all other
officers, including surrogates and justices of the peace as well as the
greater judicial officers, should be appointed by the governor upon the
confirmation of the Senate. Van Buren declared himself opposed, here
again separating himself from many of his party associates, to the
popular election of any judicial officers, even the justices of the
peace. Of all this he was long after to be reminded as proof of his
aristocratic contempt for democracy. His recommendations were adopted in
the main; although county clerks and sheriffs, whom he would have kept
appointive, were made elective. Upon this question he was in a small
minority with Chancellor Kent and Rufus King, having most of his party
friends against him. Thus was broken up the enormous political power so
long wielded at Albany, and the patronage distributed through the
counties. The change, it was supposed, would end a great abuse. It did
end the concentration of patronage at the capital; but the partisan
abuses of patronage were simply transferred to the various county seats,
to exercise a different and wider, though probably a less dangerous,
corruption.
The council of revision fell with hardly a friend to speak for it. It
was one of those checks upon popular power of which Federalists had been
fond. It consisted of the governor with the chancellor and the judges of
the Supreme Court, and had a veto power upon bills passed by the
legislature. As the chancellor and judges held office during good
behavior until they had reached the limit of age, the council was almost
a chamber of life peers. The exercise of its power had provoked great
animosity. The chief judicial officers of the State, judges, and
chancellors, to whom men of our day look back with a real veneration,
had been drawn by it into a kind of political warfare, in which few of
our higher magistrates, though popularly elected and for terms, would
dare to engage. An act had been passed by the legislature in 1814 to
promote privateering; but Chancellor Kent as a member of the council
objected to it. Van Buren maintained with him an open and heated
discussion upon the propriety of the objections,--a discussion in which
the judicial character justly enough afforded no protection. Van Buren's
feeling against the judges who were his political adversaries was often
exhibited. He said in the convention: "I object to the council, as being
composed of the judiciary, who are not directly responsible to the
people. I object to it because it inevitably connects the
judiciary--those who, with pure hearts and sound heads, should preside
in the sanctuaries of justice--with the intrigues and collisions of
party strife; because it tends to make our judges politicians, and
because such has been its practical effect." He further said that he
would not join in the rather courtly observation that the council was
abolished because of a personal regard for the peace of its members. He
would have it expressly remembered that the council had served the ends
of faction; though he added that he should regard the loss of Chancellor
Kent from his judicial station as a public calamity. In his general
position Van Buren was clearly right. Again and again have theorists,
supposing judges to be sanctified and illumined by their offices, placed
in their hands political power, which had been abused, or it was feared
would be abused, by men fancied to occupy less exalted stations. Again
and again has the result shown that judges are only men, with human
passions, prejudices, and ignorance; men who, if vested with functions
not judicial, if freed from the checks of precedents and law and public
hearings and appellate review, fall into the same abuses and act on the
same motives, political and personal, which belong to other men. In the
council of revision before 1821 and the electoral commission of 1877
were signally proved the wisdom of restricting judges to the work of
deciding rights between parties judicially brought before them.
Van Buren's far from "non-committal" talk about the judges was not
followed by any support of the proposal to "constitutionize" them out of
office. The animosity of a majority of the members against the judges
then in office was intense; and they were not willing to accept the life
of the council of revision as a sufficient sacrifice. Nor was the
animosity entirely unreasonable. Butler, in one of his early letters to
Jesse Hoyt, described the austerity with which Ambrose Spencer, the
chief justice, when the young lawyer sought to address him, told him to
wait until his seniors had been heard. In the convention there were
doubtless many who had been offended with a certain insolence of place
which to this day characterizes the bearing of many judges of real
ability; and the opportunity of making repayment was eagerly seized. Nor
was it unreasonable that laymen should, from the proceedings of judges
when acting upon political matters which laymen understood as well as
they, make inferences about the fairness of their proceedings on the
bench upon which laymen could not always safely speak. By a vote of 66
to 39, the convention refused to retain the judges then in office,--a
proceeding which, with all the faults justly or even naturally found
with them, was a gross violation of the fundamental rule which ought to
guide civilized lands in changing their laws. For the retention of the
judges was perfectly consistent with the judicial scheme adopted. Van
Buren put all this most admirably before voting with the minority. He
told the convention, and doubtless truly, that from the bench of judges,
whose official fate was then at their mercy, he had been assailed "with
hostility, political, professional, and personal,--hostility which had
been the most keen, active, and unyielding;" but that he would not
indulge individual resentment in the prostration of his private and
political adversary. The judicial officer, who could not be reached by
impeachment or the proceeding for removal by a two-thirds vote, ought
not to be disturbed. They should amend the constitution, he told the
convention, upon general principles, and not descend to pull down
obnoxious officers. He begged it not to ruin its character and credit by
proceeding to such extremities. But the removal of the judges did not
prove unpopular. Only eight members of the convention voted against the
Constitution; only fifteen others did not sign it. And the freeholders
of the State, while deliberately surrendering some of their exclusive
privileges, adopted it by a vote of 75,422 to 41,497.
Van Buren's service in this convention was that of a firm, sensible,
far-seeing man, resolute to make democratic progress, but unwilling,
without further light from experience, to take extreme steps difficult
to retrace. With a strong inclination towards great enlargement of the
suffrage, he pointed out that a mistake in going too far could never be
righted "except by the sword." The wisdom of enduring temporary
difficulties, rather than to make theoretical changes greater than were
necessary to obviate serious and great wrongs, was common to him with
the highest and most influential type of modern law-makers. With some
men of the first rank, the convention had in it very many others crudely
equipped for its work; and it met in an atmosphere of personal and
political asperity unfavorable to deliberations over organic law. Van
Buren was politically its most powerful member. It is clear that his
always conservative temper, aided by his tact and by his temperate and
persuasive eloquence, held back his Democratic associates, headed by the
impetuous and angered General Root, from changes far more radical than
those which were made. Though eminent as a party man, he showed on this
conspicuous field undoubted courage and independence and high sense of
duty. Entering national politics he was fortunate therefore to be known,
not only as a skillful and adroit and even managing politician, as a
vigorous and clear debater, as a successful leader in popular movements,
but also as a man of firm and upright patriotism, with a ripe and
educated sense of the complexity of popular government, and a sober
appreciation of the kind of dangers so subtly mingled with the blessings
of democracy.
CHAPTER IV
UNITED STATES SENATOR.--REËSTABLISHMENT OF PARTIES.--PARTY LEADERSHIP
In December, 1821, Van Buren took his seat in the United States Senate.
The "era of good feeling" was then at its height. It was with perfect
sincerity that Monroe in his message of the preceding year had said: "I
see much cause to rejoice in the felicity of our situation." He had just
been reëlected president with but a single vote against him. The country
was in profound peace. The burdens of the war with England were no
longer felt; and its few victories were remembered with exuberant
good-nature. Two years before, Florida had been acquired by the strong
and persisting hand of the younger Adams. Wealth and comfort were in
rapid increase. The moans and rage of the defeated and disgraced
Federalists were suppressed, or, if now and then feebly heard, were
complacently treated as outbursts of senility and impotence. People were
not only well-to-do in fact, but, what was far more extraordinary, they
believed themselves to be so. In his great tariff speech but three or
four years later, Hayne called it the "period of general jubilee." Every
great public paper and speech, described the "felicity" of America. The
president pointed out to his fellow-citizens "the prosperous and happy
condition of our country in all the great circumstances which constitute
the felicity of a nation;" he told them that they were "a free,
virtuous, and enlightened people;" the unanimity of public sentiment in
favor of his "humble pretensions" indicated, he thought, "the great
strength and stability of our Union." And all was reciprocated by the
people. This modest, gentle ruler was in his very mediocrity agreeable
to them. He symbolized the comfort and order, the supreme respectability
of which they were proud. When in 1817 he made a tour through New
England, which had seen neither Jefferson nor Madison as visitors during
their terms of office, and in his military coat of domestic manufacture,
his light small-clothes and cocked hat, met processions and orators
without end, it was obvious that this was not the radical minister whom
Washington had recalled from Jacobin Paris for effusively pledging
eternal friendship and submitting to fraternal embraces in the National
Convention. Such youthful frenzy was now long past. America was enjoying
a great national idyl. Even the Federalists, except of course those who
had been too violent or who were still unrepentant, were not utterly
shut out from the light of the placid high noon. Jackson had urged
Monroe in 1816 "to exterminate that monster called party spirit," and to
let some Federalists come to the board. Monroe thought, however, "that
the administration should rest strongly on the Republican party," though
meaning to bring all citizens "into the Republican fold as quietly as
possible." Party, he declared, was unnecessary to free government; all
should be Republicans. And when Van Buren reached the sprawling,
slatternly American capital in 1821, all were Republicans.
There were of course personal feuds in this great political family.
Those of New York were the most notorious; but there were many others.
But such rivalries and quarrels were only a proof of the political calm.
When families are smugly prosperous they indulge petty dislikes, which
disappear before storm or tragedy. The halcyon days could not last.
Monroe's dream of a country with but one party, and that basking in
perpetual "felicity," was, in spite of what seemed for the moment a
close realization, as far from the truth as the dreams of later
reformers who would in politics organize all the honest, respectable
folk together against all the dishonest.
The heat of the Missouri question was ended at the session before Van
Buren's senatorial term began. It seemed only a thunder-storm passing
across a rich, warm day in harvest time, angry and agitating for the
moment, but quickly forgotten by dwellers in the pastoral scene when the
rainbow of compromise appeared in the delightful hues of Henry Clay's
eloquence. The elements of the tremendous struggle yet to come were in
the atmosphere, but they were not visible. The slavery question had no
political importance to Van Buren until fourteen years afterwards. In
judging the men of that day we shall seriously mistake if we set up our
own standards among their ideas. The moral growth in the twenty-five
years since the emancipation makes it irksome to be fair to the views of
the past generation, or indeed to the former views of half of our
present generation. Slavery has come to seem intrinsically wicked,
hideous, to be hated everywhere. But sixty-five years ago it still
lingered in several of the Northern States. It was wrong indeed; but the
temper of condemnation towards it was Platonic, full of the unavailing
and unpoignant regret with which men hear of poverty and starvation and
disease and crime which they do not see and which they cannot help. Nor
did slavery then seem to the best of men so very great a wrong even to
the blacks; there were, it was thought, many ameliorations and
compensations. Men were glad to believe and did believe that the human
chattels were better and happier than they would have been in Africa.
The economic waste of slavery, its corrupting and enervating effect upon
the whites, were thought to be objections quite as serious. Besides, it
was widely fancied to be at worst but a temporary evil. Jefferson's
dislike of it was shared by many throughout the South as well as the
North. The advantages of a free soil were becoming so apparent in the
strides by which the North was passing the South in every material
advantage, that the latter, it seemed, must surely learn the lesson.
For the institution within States already admitted to the Union,
anti-slavery men felt no responsibility. Forty years later the great
leader of the modern Republican party would not, he solemnly declared in
the very midst of a pro-slavery rebellion, interfere with slavery in the
States if the Union could be saved without disturbing it. If men in
South Carolina cared to maintain a ruinous and corrupting domestic
institution, even if it were a greater wrong against the slaves than it
was believed to be, or even if it were an injury to the whites
themselves, still men of Massachusetts and New York ought, it seemed to
them, to be no more disturbed over it than we feel bound to be over
polygamy in Turkey.
But as to the territory west of the Mississippi not yet formed into
States, there was a different sentiment held by a great majority at the
North and by many at the South. Slavery was not established there. The
land was national domain, whose forms of political and social life were
yet to be set up. Why not, before the embarrassments of slave settlement
arose, devote this new land to freedom,--not so much to freedom as that
shining goddess of mercy and right and justice who rose clear and
obvious to our purged vision out of the civil war, as to the less noble
deities of economic well-being, thrift, and industrial comfort?
Democrats at the North, therefore, were almost unanimous that Missouri
should come in free or not at all; and so with the rest of the territory
beyond the Mississippi, except the old slave settlement of Louisiana,
already admitted as a State. The resolution in the legislature of New
York in January, 1820, supported by Van Buren, that freedom be "an
indispensable condition of admission" of new States, was but one of many
exhibitions of feeling at the North. Monroe and the very best of
Americans did not, however, think the principle so sacred or necessary
as to justify a struggle. John Quincy Adams, hating slavery as did but
few Americans, distinctly favored the compromise by which Missouri came
in with slavery, and by which the other new territory north of the
present southern line of Missouri extended westward was to be free, and
the territory south of it slave. With no shame he acquiesced in the very
thing about which forty years later the nation plunged into war. "For
the present," he wrote, "this contest is laid asleep." So the stream of
peaceful sunshine and prosperity returned over the land.
Van Buren's views at this time were doubtless clear against the
extension of slavery. He disliked the institution; and in part saw how
inconsistent were its odious practices with the best civic growth, how
debasing to whites and blacks alike. In March, 1822, he voted in the
Senate, with Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts and Rufus King, for a
proviso in the bill creating the new Territory of Florida by which the
introduction of slaves was forbidden except by citizens removing there
for actual settlement, and by which slaves introduced in violation of
the law were to be freed. But he was in a minority. Northern senators
from Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Indiana refused to interfere with
free trade in slaves between the Southern States and this southernmost
territory.
Among the forty-eight members of the Senate which met in December, 1821,
neither Clay nor Calhoun nor Webster had a seat. The first was restless
in one of his brief absences from official life; the second was
secretary of war; and Webster, out of Congress, was making great law
arguments and greater orations. Benton was there from the new State of
Missouri, just beginning his thirty years. The warm friendship and
political alliance between him and Van Buren must have soon begun.
During all or nearly all Van Buren's senatorship the two occupied
adjoining seats. Two years later Andrew Jackson was sent to the Senate
by Tennessee, as a suitable preliminary to his presidential canvass.
During the next two sessions Van Buren, Benton, and Jackson were thrown
together; and without doubt the foundations were laid of their lifelong
intimacy and political affection. Benton and Jackson, personal enemies
years before, had become reconciled. Among these associates Van Buren
adhered firmly enough to his own clear views; he did not turn
obsequiously to the rising sun of Tennessee. William H. Crawford, the
secretary of the treasury, had, in the Republican congressional caucus
of 1816, stood next Monroe for the presidential nomination. For reasons
which neither history nor tradition seems sufficiently to have brought
us, he inspired a strong and even enthusiastic loyalty among many of his
party. His candidacy in 1824 was more "regular" than that of either
Adams, Jackson, or Clay, whose friends combined against him as the
strongest of them all. Though Crawford had been prostrated by serious
disease in 1823, Van Buren remained faithful to him until, in 1825,
after refusing a seat in Adams's cabinet, he retired from national
public life a thoroughly broken man.
The first two sessions of Congress, after Van Buren's service began,
seemed drowsy enough. French land-titles in Louisiana, the settlement of
the accounts of public officers, the attempt to abolish imprisonment for
debt, the appropriation for money for diplomatic representatives to the
new South American states and their recognition,--nothing more exciting
than these arose, except Monroe's veto, in May, 1822, of the bill
authorizing the erection of toll-gates upon the Cumberland road and
appropriating $9000 for them. This brought distinctly before the public
the great question of internal improvements by the federal government,
which Van Buren, Benton, and Jackson afterwards chose as one of the
chief battle-grounds for their party. For this bill Van Buren indeed
voted, while Benton afterwards boasted that he was one of the small
minority of seven who discerned its true character. But this trifling
appropriation was declared by Barbour, who was in charge of the
measure, not to involve the general question; it was said to be a mere
incident necessary to save from destruction a work for which earlier
statesmen were responsible. Monroe, though declaring in his veto that
the power to adopt and execute a system of internal improvements
national in their character would have the happiest effect on all the
great interests of the Union, decided that the Constitution gave no such
power. Six years later, in a note to his speech upon the power of the
Vice-President to call to order for words spoken in debate in the
Senate, Van Buren apologized for his vote on the bill, because it was
his first session, and because he was sincerely desirous to aid the
Western country and had voted without full examination. He added that if
the question were again presented to him, he should vote in the
negative; and that it had been his only vote in seven years of service
which the most fastidious critic could torture into an inconsistency
with his principles upon internal improvements. In January, 1823, during
his second session, Van Buren spoke and voted in favor of the bill to
repair the road, but still took no decided ground upon the general
question. He said that the large expenditure already made on the road
would have been worse than useless if it were now suffered to decay;
that the road, being already constructed, ought to be preserved; but
whether he would vote for a new construction he did not disclose. Even
Benton, who was proud to have been one of the small minority against
the bill of the year before for toll-gates upon the road, was now with
Van Buren, constitutional scruples yielding to the statesmanlike
reluctance to waste an investment of millions of dollars rather than
spend a few thousands to save it.
In January, 1824, Van Buren proposed to solve these difficulties by a
constitutional amendment. Congress was to have power to make roads and
canals, but the money appropriated was to be apportioned among the
States according to population. No road or canal was to be made within
any State without the consent of its legislature; and the money was to
be expended in each State under the direction of its legislature. This
proposal seems to have fallen still-born and deservedly. It illustrated
Van Buren's jealousy of interference with the rights of States. But the
right of each State to be protected, he seemed to forget, involved its
right not to be taxed for improvements in other States which it neither
controlled nor promoted. Van Buren's speech in support of the proposal
would to-day seem very heretical to his party. A dozen years later he
himself would probably have admitted it to be so. He then believed in
the abstract proposition that such funds of the nation as could be
raised without oppression, and as were not necessary to the discharge of
indispensable demands upon the government, should be expended upon
internal improvements under restrictions guarding the sovereignty and
equal interests of the States. Henry Clay would not in theory have gone
much further. But to this subject in its national aspect Van Buren had
probably given but slight attention. The success of the Erie Canal, with
him doubtless as with others, made adverse theories of government seem
less impressive. But Van Buren and his school quickly became doubtful
and soon hostile to the federal promotion of internal improvements. The
opposition became popular on the broader reasoning that great
expenditures for internal improvements within the States were not only,
as the statesmen at first argued, violations of the letter of the
Constitution, whose sanctity could, however, be saved by proper
amendment, but were intrinsically dangerous, and an unwholesome
extension of the federal power which ought not to take place whether
within the Constitution or by amending it. Aided by Jackson's powerful
vetoes, this sentiment gained a strength with the people which has come
down to our day. We have river and harbor bills, but they are supposed
to touch directly or indirectly our foreign commerce, which, under the
Constitution and upon the essential theory of our confederation, is a
subject proper to the care of the Union.
In the same session Van Buren spoke at length in favor of the bill to
abolish imprisonment for debt, and drew with precision the distinction
wisely established by modern jurisprudence, that the property only, and
not the body of the debtor, should be at the mercy of his creditor,
where the debt involved no fraud or breach of trust.
The session of 1823-1824 was seriously influenced by the coming
presidential election. The protective tariff of 1824 was christened with
the absurd name of the "American system," though it was American in no
other or better sense than foreign war to protect fancied national
rights is an American system, and though the system had come from the
middle ages in the company of other restrictions upon the intercourse of
nations. It was carried by the factitious help of this designation and
the fine leadership of Clay. With Jackson and Benton, Van Buren voted
for it, against men differing as widely from each other as his
associate, the venerable Federalist Rufus King, differed from Hayne, the
brilliant orator of South Carolina. Upon the tariff Van Buren then had
views clearer, at least, than upon internal improvements. In 1824 he was
unmistakably a protectionist. The moderation of his views and the
pressure from his own State were afterwards set up as defenses for this
early attitude of his. But he declared himself with sufficient plainness
not only to believe in the constitutionality of a protective tariff, but
that 1824 was a fit year in which to extend its protective features. He
acted, too, with the amplest light upon the subject. The dislike of the
Holy Alliance, the hated recollections of the Orders in Council and the
Napoleonic decrees, the idea that, for self-defense in times of war, the
country must be forced to produce many goods not already
produced,--these considerations had great weight, as very well appears
in the speech for the bill delivered by Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky,
afterwards Van Buren's associate on the presidential ticket. "When the
monarchs of Europe are assembled together, do you think," he asked,
"that we are not a subject of their holy consultations?" But the support
of the bill was upon broader considerations. The debates upon the tariff
in the House of Representatives in February, March, and April, and in
the Senate in April, 1824, were admirable presentations of the subject.
Webster in the House and Hayne in the Senate put the free trade side.
The former, still speaking his own sentiments, declared that "the best
apology for laws of prohibition and laws of monopoly will be found in
that state of society, not only unenlightened but sluggish, in which
they are most generally established." But now, he said, "competition
comes in place of monopoly, and intelligence and industry ask only for
fair play and an open field." He repudiated the principle of protection.
"On the contrary," said he, "I think freedom of trade to be the general
principle, and restriction the exception."
Nor was Van Buren then left without the light which afterwards reached
him on the constitutional question. Rufus King said that, if gentlemen
wished to encourage the production of hemp and iron, they ought to bring
in a bill to give bounties on those articles; for there was the same
constitutional right to grant bounties as to levy restrictive duties
upon foreign products. Hayne made the really eloquent and masterly
speech for which he ought to stand in the first rank of orators, and
which summed up as well for free-traders now as then the most telling
arguments against artificial restrictions. He skillfully closed with
Washington's words: "Our commercial policy should hold an equal and
impartial hand, neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or
preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and
diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing
nothing." Hayne did not confine himself to the doctrines of Adam Smith,
or the hardships which protection meant to a planting region like his
own. For the chief interest of the South was in cotton; and the price of
cotton was largely determined by the ability of foreigners to import it
from America,--an ability in its turn dependent upon the willingness of
America to take her pay, directly or indirectly, in foreign commodities.
Hayne, however, went further. He clearly raised the question, whether
the encouragement of manufactures could constitutionally be made a
Federal object.
Sitting day after day under this long debate in the little senate
chamber then in use, where men listened to speeches, if for no other
reason, because they were easily heard, Van Buren could not, with his
ability and readiness, have misunderstood the general principles
involved. Early in the debate, upon a motion to strike out the duty on
hemp, he briefly but explicitly said that "he was in favor of
increasing the duty on hemp, with a view of affording protection to its
cultivation in this country." He voted against limiting the duty on wool
to twenty-five per cent., but voted against a duty of twenty-five per
cent. on India silks,--a revenue rather than a protective duty. He voted
for duties on wheat and wheat flour and potatoes. He voted against
striking out the duty on books, in spite of Hayne's grotesque but
forcible argument that they were to be considered "a raw material,
essential to the formation of the mind, the morals, and the character of
the people." It is difficult to understand the significance of all Van
Buren's votes on the items of the bill; but the record shows them to
have been, on the whole, protectionist, with a preference for moderate
rates, but a firm assertion of the wool interests of New York. Benton
tells us that Van Buren was one of the main speakers for the bill; but
the assertion is not borne out by the record. He delivered no general
speech upon the subject, as did most of the senators, but seems to have
spoken only upon some of the details as they were considered in
committee of the whole. The best to be said in Van Buren's behalf is,
that his judgment was not yet so ripe upon the matter as not to be still
open to great change. He was in his third session, and still new to
national politics, and there was before him the plain and strong
argument that his State wanted protection. In 1835 Butler, speaking for
him as a presidential candidate, said that his personal feelings had
been "at all times adverse to the high tariff policy." But "high tariff"
was then, as now, a merely relative term. His votes placed him in that
year very near Henry Clay. That from 1824 he grew more and more averse
to the necessary details and results of a protective policy is probably
true. Nor ought it to be, even from the standpoint of free-traders,
serious accusation that a public man varies his political utterances
upon the tariff question, if the variation be progressive and steadily
towards what they deem a greater liberality. To Van Buren, however, the
tariff question never had a capital importance. Even thirty-two years
later, while rehearsing from his retirement the achievements of his
party in excuse of the support he reluctantly gave Buchanan, he did not
name among its services its insistence upon merely revenue duties,
although he had then for years been himself committed to that doctrine.
Van Buren's vote for the tariff of 1824 had no very direct relation to
his political situation. His own successor was not to be chosen for
nearly three years. Crawford, whom he supported for the presidency, was
the only one of the four candidates opposed to the bill. Adams was
consistently a protectionist; he believed in actively promoting the
welfare of men, though chiefly if not exclusively American men, even
when they resisted their own welfare. He, like his father, was perfectly
ready to use the power of government where it seemingly promised to be
effective, without caring much for economical theories or constitutional
restrictions. Jackson himself was far enough away from the ranks of
strict constructionists on the tariff. In April, 1824, in the midst of
the debate, and while a presidential candidate, he wrote from the Senate
what free-traders, who afterwards supported him, would have deemed the
worst of heresies. Like most candidates, ancient and modern, he was "in
favor of a judicious examination and revision of" the tariff. He would
advocate a tariff so far as it enabled the country to provide itself
with the means of defense in war. But he would go further. The tariff
ought to "draw from agriculture the superabundant labor, and employ it
in mechanism and manufactures;" it ought to "give a proper distribution
to our labor, to take from agriculture in the United States 600,000 men,
women, and children." It is time, he cried, and quite as extravagantly
as Clay, that "we should become a little more Americanized." How slight
a connection the tariff had with the election of 1824 is further seen in
the fact that Jackson, who thus supported the bill, received the vote of
several of the States which strongly opposed the tariff.
In March, 1824, Van Buren urged the Senate to act upon a constitutional
amendment touching the election of president. As the amendment could not
be adopted in time to affect the pending canvass, there was, he said, no
room for partisan feeling. He insisted that if there were no majority
choice by the electors, the choice should not rest with the house of
representatives voting by States, but that the electors should be
reconvened, and themselves choose between the highest two candidates.
The debate soon became thoroughly partisan. Rufus King, with but thinly
veiled reference to Crawford's nomination, denounced the practice by
which a caucus at Washington deprived the constitutional electors of any
free choice; members of Congress were attending to president-making
rather than to their duties. He thought that the course of events had
"led near observers to suspect a connection existing between a central
power of this description at the seat of the general government and the
legislatures of Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, and New York, and
perhaps of other States." To this it was pointed out with much force
that such a caucus had chosen Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe without
scandal or injury; that members of Congress were distinguished and
representative persons familiar with national affairs, who might with
great advantage respectfully suggest a course of action to their
fellow-citizens. Van Buren went keenly to the real point of the belated
objection to the system; it lay in the particular action of the recent
caucus. He did not think it worth while to consider "those nice
distinctions which challenged respect for the proceedings of conventions
of one description and denied it to others; or to detect those still
more subtle refinements which regarded meetings of the same character
as sometimes proper, and at others destructive of the purity of
elections and dangerous to the liberties of the people." After much talk
about the will of the people, the Senate by a vote of 30 to 13 postponed
the consideration of the amendments until after the election. Benton
joined Van Buren in the minority, although they did not agree upon the
form of amendment; but Jackson, perhaps because he was a candidate, did
not vote.
It was highly probable that there would be embarrassment in choosing the
next president. It was already nearly certain that neither candidate
would have a majority of the electoral votes. The decision was then, as
in our own time, supposed to rest with New York; and naturally therefore
Van Buren's prestige was great, gained, as it had been, in that
difficult and opulent political field. His attachment to Crawford was
proof against the signs of the latter's decaying strength. Crawford was
to him the Republican candidate regularly chosen, and one agreeable to
his party by the vigorous democracy of his sentiments. His opposition to
Jefferson's embargo, and his vote for a renewal of the charter of the
Bank of the United States, had been forgotten since his warm advocacy of
the late war with England. His formal claims to the nomination were
great. For he had been in the Senate as early as 1807, and its president
upon the death of Vice-President Clinton in 1812; afterwards he had been
minister to France, and was now secretary of the treasury. In the
caucus of 1816 he had nearly as many votes as Monroe; and those votes
were cast for him, it was said, though without much probability, in
spite of his peremptory refusal to compete with Monroe. Moreover,
Crawford had a majesty and grace of personal appearance which, with
undoubtedly good though not great abilities, had, apart from these
details of his career, made him conspicuous in the Republican ranks; and
in its chief service he was, after the retirement of Monroe, the senior,
except Adams, whose candidacy was far more recent. Crawford's claim to
the succession was therefore very justifiable; he was the most obvious,
the most "regular," of the candidates.
It has been said that Van Buren was at first inclined to Adams. The
latter's unequaled public experience and discipline of intellect
doubtless seemed, to Van Buren's precise and orderly mind, eminent
qualifications for the first office in the land. Adams at this time, by
a coincidence not inexplicable, thought highly of Van Buren. He entered
in his diary a remark of his own, in February, 1825, that Van Buren was
"a man of great talents and of good principles; but he had suffered them
to be too much warped by party spirit." This from an Adams may be taken
as extreme praise. It is pretty certain that if Van Buren had
reprehensibly shifted his position from Adams to Crawford, we should
find a record of it in the vast treasure-house of damnations which Adams
left. Nor is there good reason to suppose that Van Buren was influenced
by the nomination which Crawford's friends in Georgia gave him in 1824
for the vice-presidency. This showed that New York had already
surrendered her favorite "son to the nation;" he was now definitely to
be counted a power in national politics, where he was known as the
"Albany director." Crawford's enemies in Georgia, the Clarkites,
ridiculed this nomination with the coarse and silly abuse which active
politicians to this day are always ready to use in their cynical
under-estimate of popular intelligence,--abuse which they are by and by
pretty sure to be glad to forget. Van Buren was pictured as half man and
half cat, half fox and half monkey, half snake and half mink. He was
dubbed "Blue Whiskey Van" and "Little Van." The Clarkites, being only a
minority in the Georgia Assembly, delighted to vote for him as their
standing candidate for doorkeeper and the like humbler positions.
New York was greatly disturbed through 1824 over the presidency. Its
politics were in the position described by Senator Cobb, one of
Crawford's Georgia supporters. "Could we hit upon a few great
principles," he wrote home from Washington in January, 1825, "and unite
their support with that of Crawford, we should succeed beyond doubt."
But the great principles were hard to find. The people and the greater
politicians were therefore swayed by personal preferences, without
strong reason for either choice; and the lesser politicians were simply
watching to see how the tide ran. Adams was the most natural choice of
the New York Republicans. The South had had the presidency for six
terms. His early secession from the Federalists; his aid in solidifying
the Republican sentiment at the North; his support of Jefferson in the
patriotic embargo struggle; his long, eminent, and fruitful services;
and his place of secretary of state, from which Madison and Monroe had
in turn been promoted to the presidency,--all these commended him to
Northern Republicans as a proper candidate.
De Witt Clinton admired and supported General Jackson. In 1819 the
latter had at a dinner in Tammany Hall amazed and affronted the former's
Bucktail enemies by giving as his toast, "De Witt Clinton, the
enlightened statesman and governor of the great and patriotic State of
New York." In January, 1824, Clinton was the victim of a political
outrage which illustrated the harsh partisanship then ruling in New York
politics, and may well have determined the choice of president. Clinton
had retired from the governor's chair; but he still held the honorary
and unpaid office of canal commissioner, to which he brought
distinguished honor but which brought none to him, and whose importance
he more than any other man had created. The Crawford men in the
legislature feared a combination of the men of the new People's party
with the Clintonians on the presidential question. Clinton seemed at the
time an unpopular character. To embarrass the People's party, Clinton's
enemies suddenly, and just before the rising of the legislature, offered
a resolution removing him from the canal commissionership. The People's
party, it was thought, by opposing the resolution, would incur popular
dislike through their alliance with the few and unpopular Clintonians;
while by supporting the resolution they would forfeit the support of the
latter upon which they relied. In either case the Crawford men would
apparently profit by the trick. The People's party men, including those
favoring Adams for president, at once seized the wrong horn of the
dilemma, and voted for Clinton's removal, which was thus carried by an
almost unanimous vote. But the people themselves were underrated; the
outrage promptly restored Clinton to popular favor. In spite of the
resistance of the politicians, he was, in the fall of 1824, elected by a
large majority to the governor's seat, to which, or to any great office,
it had been supposed he could never return; and this, although at the
same time and upon the same ticket one of those who had voted for his
removal was chosen lieutenant-governor. Van Buren was no party to this
removal, although his political friends at Albany were the first movers
in the scheme. He himself was far-sighted enough to see the probable
effect of so gross and indecent a use of political power. Nor was he so
relentless a partisan as to remember in unfruitful vengeance Clinton's
own prescriptive conduct, or to remove the latter from an honorary
seat which belonged to him above all other men. By this silly blunder
Clinton was again raised to deserved power, which he held until his
death.
[Illustration: De Witt Clinton]
The popular outburst consequent upon Clinton's removal in January, 1824,
made it very dangerous for the Bucktails to leave to the people in the
fall the choice of presidential electors. The rise of the People's party
for a time seriously threatened Van Buren's influence. Until 1824 the
presidential electors of New York had been chosen by its legislature.
The opponents of Crawford and Van Buren, fearing that the latter's
superior political skill would more easily capture the legislature in
November, 1824, raised at the legislative elections of 1823 a cry
against the Albany Regency, and demanded that presidential electors
should be chosen directly by the people. The Regency, popularly believed
to have been founded by Van Buren, consisted of a few able followers of
his, residing or in office at Albany. They were also called the
"conspirators." Chief among them were William L. Marcy, the comptroller;
Samuel A. Talcott, the attorney-general; Benjamin F. Butler, then
district attorney of Albany county; Edwin Croswell, the state printer;
Roger Skinner, the United States district judge; and Benjamin Knower,
the state treasurer. Later there joined the Regency, Silas Wright,
Azariah C. Flagg, Thomas W. Olcott, and Charles E. Dudley. Its members
were active, skillful, shrewd politicians; and they were much more. They
were men of strong political convictions, holding and observing a high
standard for the public service, and of undoubted personal integrity. In
1830 John A. Dix gave as a chief reason for accepting office at Albany
that he should there be "one of the Regency." His son, Dr. Morgan Dix,
describes their aggressive honesty, their refusal "to tolerate in those
whom they could control what their own fine sense of honor did not
approve;" and he quotes a remark made to him by Thurlow Weed, their long
and most formidable enemy, "that he had never known a body of men who
possessed so much power and used it so well." In his Memoirs, Weed
describes their "great ability, great industry, indomitable courage."
Two at least of the original members, Marcy and Butler, afterwards
justly rose to national distinction. Even to our own day, the Albany
Regency has been a strong and generally a sagacious influence in its
party. John A. Dix, Horatio Seymour, Dean Richmond, and Samuel J. Tilden
long directed its policy; and from the chief seat in its councils the
late secretary of the treasury, Daniel Manning, was chosen in 1885.
In November, 1823, the People's party elected only a minority of the
legislature; but many of the Democrats were committed to the support of
an electoral law, and the movement was clearly popular. A just, though
possibly an insufficient objection to the law was its proposal of a
great change in anticipation of a particular election whose candidates
were already before the public. But there was no resort to frank
argument. Its indirect defeat was proposed by the Democratic managers,
and accomplished with the coöperation of many supporters of Adams and
Clay. A bill was reported in the Assembly, where the Regency was in a
minority, giving the choice of the electors to the people directly, but
cunningly requiring a majority instead of a plurality vote to elect. If
there were no majority, then the choice was to be left to the
legislature. The Adams and Clay men were unwilling to let a plurality
elect, lest in the uncertain state of public feeling some other
candidate might be at the head of the poll; and they were probably now
quite as confident as the Bucktails, and with more reason, of their
strength upon joint ballot in the legislature. Divided as the people of
New York were between the four presidential candidates, it was well
known that this device would really give them no choice. The
consideration of the electoral law was postponed in the Senate upon a
pretense of objection to the form of the bill, and with insincere
protestations of a desire to pass it. The outcome of all this was that
in the election of November, 1824, the Democrats were punished at the
polls both for the wanton attack on Clinton and for their unprincipled
treatment of the electoral bill. The Regency got no more than a small
minority in the legislature; and De Witt Clinton, as has been said, was
chosen governor by a great majority.
Crawford's supporters at Washington believed that in a congressional
caucus he would have a larger vote than any other candidate. His
opponents, in the same belief, refused to join in a caucus, in spite of
the cry that their refusal was a treason to old party usage. The
Republicans at Albany, probably upon Van Buren's advice, had in April,
1823, declared in favor of a caucus, but without effect. Two thirds of
Congress would not assent. At last, in February, 1824, a caucus was
called, doubtless in the hope that many who had refused their assent
would, finding the caucus inevitable, attend through force of party
habit. But of the 261 members of Congress, only 66 attended; and they
were chiefly from New York, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia. In the
caucus 62 voted for Crawford for president and 57 for Albert Gallatin
for vice-president. A cry was soon raised against the latter as a
foreigner; so that in spite of his American residence of forty-five
years, and his invaluable services to the country and to the Republican
party through nearly all this period, he felt compelled to withdraw.
The failure of the caucus almost destroyed Crawford's chances, though
Van Buren steadily kept up courage. A few days later he wrote a
confidential letter complaining of the subserviency and ingratitude of
the non-attendants, who had "partaken largely of the favor of the
party;" but despondency, he said, was a weakness with which he was but
little annoyed, and if New York should be firm and promptly explicit,
the election would be substantially settled. But New York was neither
firm nor promptly explicit. Its electoral vote was in doubt until the
meeting of the legislature in November. The Adams and Clay forces then
united, securing 31 out of the 36 electors, although one of the 31 seems
finally to have voted for Jackson. Five Crawford electors were chosen
with the help of the Adams men, who wished to keep Clay at the foot of
the poll of presidential electors, and thus prevent his eligibility as
one of the highest three in the House of Representatives. This device of
the Adams men may have deprived Clay of the presidency. Thus Van Buren's
New York campaign met defeat even in the legislature, where his friends
had incurred odium rather than surrender the choice of electors to the
people, while his forces were being thoroughly beaten by the people at
the polls. In the electoral college Crawford received only 41 votes;
Adams had 84 and Jackson 99; while Clay with only 37 was fourth in the
race, and could not therefore enter the contest in the House. Georgia
cast 9 electoral votes for Van Buren as vice-president.
Van Buren did not figure in the choice of Adams in the House by the
coalition of Adams and Clay forces. Nor does his name appear in the
traditions of the manoeuvering at Washington in the winter of 1824-25,
except in a vague and improbable story that he wished, by dividing the
New York delegation in the House on the first vote by States, to prevent
a choice, and then to throw the votes of the Crawford members for
Adams, and thus secure the glory and political profit of apparently
electing him. He did not join in the cry that Adams's election over
Jackson was a violation of the democratic principle. Nor was it a
violation of that principle. Jackson had but a minority of the popular
vote. Clay was in political principles and habits nearer to Adams than
Jackson. It was clearly Clay's duty to take his strength to the
candidate whose administration was most likely to be agreeable to those
opinions of his own which had made him a candidate. The coalition was
perfectly natural and legitimate; and it was wholesome in its
consequences. It established the Whig party; it at least helped to
establish the modern Democratic party. That the acceptance of office by
Clay would injure him was probable enough. Coalitions have always been
unpopular in America and England, when there has seemed to follow a
division of offices. They offend the strong belief in party government
which lies deep in the political conscience of the two countries.
In the congressional session of 1824-25 president-making in the House
stood in the way of everything else of importance. Van Buren, with
increasing experience, was taking a greater and greater part in
congressional work. He joined far more frequently in the debates. Again
he spoke for the abolition of imprisonment for debt, his colleague,
Rufus King, differing from him on this as he now seemed to differ from
him on most disputed questions. King had not been reëlected senator,
having declined to be a candidate, because, as he said, of his advancing
years. But doubtless Van Buren was correct in telling John Quincy Adams,
and the latter was correct in believing, as his diary records, that King
could not have been re-chosen.
At this session Van Buren took definite stand against the schemes of
internal improvement. On February 11, 1825, differing even from Benton,
he voted against topographical surveys in anticipation of public works
by the Federal government. On February 23 he voted against an
appropriation of $150,000 to extend the Cumberland road, while Jackson
and Benton both voted for it. So, also, the next day, when Jackson voted
for federal subscriptions to help construct the Delaware and Chesapeake
Canal and the Dismal Swamp Canal, Van Buren was against him. Two days
before the session closed he voted against the bill for the occupation
of Oregon, Benton and Jackson voting in the affirmative. Van Buren was
one of the senatorial committee to receive the new president upon his
inauguration. It was doubtless with the easy courtesy which was genuine
with him that he welcomed John Quincy Adams to the political battle so
disastrous to the latter.
When Congress met again, in December, 1825, Van Buren took a more
important place than ever before in national politics. He now became a
true parliamentary leader; for he, like Clay, had the really
parliamentary career which has rarely been seen in this country.
Dealing with amorphous political elements, Van Buren created out of them
a party to promote his policy, and seized upon the vigor and popular
strength of Jackson to lead both party and policy to supreme power.
While, before 1825, Van Buren had not represented in the Senate a party
distinctly constituted, from 1825 to 1828 he definitely led the
formation of the modern Democratic party. In this work he was clearly
chief. From the floor of the Senate he addressed those of its members
inclined to his creed, and the sympathetic elements throughout the
country, and firmly guided and disciplined them after that fashion which
in very modern days is best familiar to us in the parliamentary
conflicts of Great Britain. Since Van Buren wielded this organizing
power, there has been in America no equally authoritative and decisive
leadership from the Senate; although he has since been surpassed there,
not only as an orator, but in other kinds of senatorial work. Seward
seemed to exercise a like leadership in the six years or more preceding
Lincoln's election; but he was far more the creature of the stupendous
movement of the time than he was its creator. So, in the two years
before General Grant's renomination in 1872, Charles Sumner and Carl
Schurz, speaking from the Senate, created a new party sentiment; but the
sentiment died in a "midsummer madness" but for which our later
political history might have been materially different. In the
interesting and fruitful three years of Van Buren's senatorial
opposition, he showed the same qualities of firmness, supple tact, and
distinct political aims which had given him his power in New York; but
all now upon a higher plane.
In December, 1825, Jackson was no longer in the Senate. His Tennessee
friends had placed him there as in a fitting vestibule to the White
House; but it seemed as hard then as it has been since, to go from the
Senate over the apparently broad and easy mile to the west on
Pennsylvania Avenue. So Jackson returned to the Hermitage, to await, in
the favorite American character of Cincinnatus, the popular summons
which he believed to be only delayed. Van Buren, now thoroughly
acquainted with the general, saw in him the strongest titular leader of
the opposition. It is pretty certain, however, that Van Buren's
preference was recent. The "Albany Argus," a Van Buren paper, had but
lately declared that "Jackson has not a single feeling in common with
the Republican party, and makes the merit of desiring the total
extinction of it;" while Jackson papers had ridiculed Crawford's
"Shallow knaves with forms to mock us,
Straggling, one by one, to caucus."
It has been the tradition, carefully and doubtless sincerely begun by
John Quincy Adams, and adopted by most writers dealing with this period,
that Adams met his first Congress in a spirit which should have
commanded universal support; and that it was a factious opposition,
cunningly led by Van Buren, which thwarted his patriotic purposes. But
this is an untrue account of the second great party division in the
United States. The younger Adams succeeded to an administration which
had represented no party, or rather which had represented a party now
become so dominant as to practically include the whole country. As
president he found himself able to promote opinions with a weighty
authority which he had not enjoyed while secretary of state in an era of
good feeling, and under a president who was firm, even if gentle. Nor
was it likely that Adams, with his unrivaled experience, his resolute
self-reliance, and his aggressively patriotic feeling, would fail to
impress his own views upon the public service, lest he might disturb a
supposititious unanimity of sentiment. His first message boldly sounded
the notes of party division. The second war with England was well out of
the public mind; and his old Federalist associations, his belief in a
strong, active, beneficent federal government, his traditional dislike
of what seemed to him extreme democratic tendencies and constitutional
refinings away of necessary federal power,--all these made him promptly
and ably take an attitude very different from that of his predecessors.
The compliment was perfectly sincere which, in his inaugural address, he
had paid the Republican and Federalist parties, saying of them that both
had "contributed splendid talents, spotless integrity, ardent
patriotism, and disinterested sacrifices to the formation and
administration" of the government. But it was idle for him to suppose
that the successors of these parties, although from both had come his
own supporters, and although, as in his offer of the treasury to
Crawford, he showed his desire, even in the chief offices, to ignore
political differences, would remain united under him, if he espoused
causes upon which they widely differed. After recapitulating the tenets
of American political faith, and showing that most discordant elements
of public opinion were now blended into harmony, he was again perfectly
sincere in saying that only an effort of magnanimity needed to be made,
that individuals should discard every remnant of rancor against each
other. This advice he was himself unable to follow; and so were other
men. In his inaugural he distinctly adopted as his own the policy of
internal improvements by the federal government, although he knew how
wide and determined had been the opposition to it. His own late chief,
Monroe, had pronounced the policy unconstitutional. But he now told the
people that the magnificence and splendor of the public works, the roads
and aqueducts, of Rome, were among the imperishable splendors of the
ancient republic. He asked to what single individual our first national
road had proved an injury. Of the constitutional doubts which were
raised, he said, with a touch of the contempt of a practical
administrator: "Every speculative scruple will be solved by a practical
blessing." To the self-consecrated guardians of the Constitution this
was as corrupt as offers of largesses to plebeians at Rome. In his first
message he recommended again the policy of internal improvements, and
proposed the establishment of a national university. Although he
admitted the Constitution to be "a charter of limited powers," he still
intimated his opinion that its powers might "be effectually brought into
action by laws promoting the improvement of agriculture, commerce, and
manufactures, the cultivation and encouragement of the mechanic and of
the elegant arts, the advancement of literature, and the progress of the
sciences, ornamental and profound;" and that to refrain from exercising
these powers for the benefit of the people themselves, would be to hide
the talent in the earth, and a "treachery to the most sacred of trusts."
Further, he now broached the novel project of the congress at Panama,--a
project surely doubtful enough to permit conscientious opposition.
All this was widely different from the messages of content from
President Monroe. There was in these new utterances a clear political
diversion, marked not less by the brilliant and restless genius of Henry
Clay, now the secretary of state, than by the President's consciousness
of his own strong and disciplined ability. Here was a new policy
formally presented by a new administration; and a formal and organized
resistance was as sure to follow as effect to follow cause. Van Buren
was soon at the head of this inevitable opposition. It is difficult, at
least in the records of Congress, to find any evidence justifying the
long tradition that the opposition was factious or unworthy. It was
doubtless a warfare, with its surprises, its skirmishes, and its pitched
battles. Mistakes of the adversary were promptly used. Debates were not
had simply to promote the formal business before the House, but rather
to reach the listening voters. But all this belongs to parliamentary
warfare. Nor is it inconsistent with most exalted aims and an admirable
performance of public business in a free country. Gladstone, the
greatest living master in the work of political reform, has described
himself as an "old parliamentary hand." Nor in the motions, the
resolutions, the debates, led by Van Buren during his three years of
opposition, can one find any device which Palmerston or Derby or
Gladstone in one forum, and Seward and even Adams himself in his last
and best years in another, have not used with little punishment from
disinterested and enduring criticism.
Immediately after Adams's inauguration Van Buren voted for Clay's
confirmation as secretary of state, while Jackson and fourteen other
senators, including Hayne, voted to reject him, upon the unfounded story
of Clay's sale of the presidency to Adams for the office to which he was
now nominated. Van Buren's language and demeanor towards the new
administration were uniformly becoming. He charged political but not
personal wrong-doing; he made no insinuation of base motives; and his
opposition throughout was the more forcible for its very decorum.
The first great battle between the rapidly dividing forces was over the
Panama mission, a creation of Clay's exuberant imagination. The
president nominated to the Senate two envoys to an American congress
called by the new South American republics of Columbia, Mexico, and
Central America, and in which it was proposed that Peru and Chile also
should participate. The congress was to be held at Panama, which, in the
extravagant rhetoric of some of the Republicans of the South, would, if
the world had to elect a capital, be pointed out for that august
destiny, placed as it was "in the centre of the globe." Spain had not
yet acknowledged the independence of her revolted colonies; and it was
clear that the discussions of the congress must be largely concerned
with a mutual protection of American nations which implied an attitude
hostile to Spain. Adams, in his message nominating the envoys, declared
that they were not to take part in deliberations of belligerent
character, or to contract alliances or to engage in any project
importing hostility to any other nation. But referring to the Monroe
doctrine, Adams said that the mission looked to an agreement between the
nations represented, that each would guard by its own means against the
establishment of any future European colony within its borders; and it
looked also to an effort on the part of the United States to promote
religious liberty among those intolerant republics. The decisive
inducement, he added, to join in the congress was to lay the foundation
of future intercourse with those states "in the broadest principles of
reciprocity and the most cordial feelings of fraternal friendship."
This was vague enough. But when the diplomatic papers were exhibited, it
was plain that the southern republics proposed a congress looking to a
close defensive alliance, a sort of confederacy or Amphictyonic council
as Benton described it; and that it was highly improbable that the
representatives from one country could responsibly participate in the
congress without most serious danger of incurring obligations, or
falling into precisely the embarrassments which the well settled policy
of the United States had avoided. It was perfectly agreeable to Adams,
resolute and aggressive American that he was, that his country should
look indulgently upon the smaller American powers, should stand at their
head, should counsel them in their difficulties with European nations,
and jealously take their side in those difficulties. Clay's eager,
enthusiastic mind delighted in the picture of a great leadership of
America by the United States, an American system of nations, breathing
the air of republicanism, asserting a young and haughty independence of
monarchical Europe, and ready for opposition to its schemes. In all this
there has been fascination to many American minds, which even in our own
day we have seen influence American diplomacy. But it was a step into
the entangling alliances against which American public opinion had from
Washington's day been set. When Adams asked an appropriation for the
expenses of the mission, he told the House of Representatives that he
was hardly sanguine enough to promise "all or even any of the
transcendent benefits to the human race which warmed the conceptions of
its first proposer," but that it looked "to the melioration of the
condition of man;" that it was congenial with the spirit which prompted
our own declaration of independence, which dictated our first treaty
with Prussia, and "which filled the hearts and fired the souls of the
immortal founders of our revolution."
Such fanciful speculation the Republicans, led by Van Buren, opposed
with strong and heated protests, in tone not unlike the Liberal protests
of 1878 in England against Disraeli's Jingo policy. In the secret
session of the Senate Van Buren proposed resolutions against the
constitutionality of the mission, reciting that it was a departure from
our wise and settled policy; that, for the conference and discussion
contemplated, our envoys already accredited to the new republics were
competent, without becoming involved as members of the congress. These
resolutions, so the President at once wrote in his opulent and
invaluable diary, "are the fruit of the ingenuity of Martin Van Buren
and bear the impress of his character." The mission was, the opposition
thus insisted, unconstitutional; a step enlarging the sphere of the
federal government; a meddlesome and dangerous interference with foreign
nations; and if it lay in the course of a strong and splendid policy,
it was also part of a policy full of warlike possibilities almost sure
to drag us into old-world quarrels. Clay's "American system," Hayne said
in the senatorial debate, meant restriction and monopoly when applied to
our domestic policy, and "entangling alliances" when applied to our
foreign policy.
Van Buren's speech was very able. He did not touch upon the liberality
of the Spanish Americans towards races other than the Caucasian, which
peered out of Hayne's speech as one of the Southern objections. After
using the wise and seemingly pertinent language of Washington against
such foreign involvements, Van Buren skillfully referred to the very
Prussian treaty which the President had cited in his message to the
House. The elder Adams, the Senate was reminded, had departed from the
rule commended by his great predecessor. He had told his first Congress
that we were indeed to keep ourselves distinct and separate from the
political system of Europe "if we can," but that we needed early and
continual information of political projects in contemplation; that
however we might consider ourselves, others would consider us a weight
in the balance of power in Europe, which never could be forgotten or
neglected; and that it was natural for us, studying to be neutral, to
consult with other nations engaged in the same study. The younger Adams
had been, Van Buren pointed out, appointed upon the Berlin mission to
carry out these heretical suggestions of his father. The Republicans of
that day had vigorously opposed the mission; and for their opposition
were denounced as a faction, and lampooned and vilified "by all the
presses supporting and supported by the government, and a host of
malicious parasites generaled by its patronage." But, covered with
Washington's mantle, the Republicans of '98 had sought to strangle at
its birth this political hydra, this first attempt since the
establishment of the government to subject our political affairs to the
terms and conditions of political connection with a foreign nation.
Probably anticipating the success of the administration senators by a
majority of five, Van Buren ingeniously reminded the Senate that those
early Republicans had failed with a majority of four against them. But
it was to be remembered, he continued, that after a few more such
Federalist victories the ruin of Federalism had been complete. Its
doctrines had speedily received popular condemnation. The new
administration under the presidency of that early minister to Prussia
had returned to the practices of the Federalist party, to which Van
Buren with courteous indirection let it be remembered that the president
had originally belonged. Except a guaranty to Spain of its dominions
beyond the Mississippi, which Jefferson had offered as part of the price
of a cession of the territory between that river and the Mobile, the
administrations of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe had strictly followed
the admonition of Washington: "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship
with all nations, entangling alliances with none." If we were asked to
form a connection with European states, such as was proposed with the
southern republics, Van Buren argued, no American would approve it; and
there was no sound reason, there was nothing but fanciful sentiment, to
induce us to distinguish between the states of Europe and those of South
America. Grant that there was a Holy Alliance in monarchical Europe, was
it not a hollow glory, inconsistent with a sober view of American
interests, to create a holy alliance in republican America? It might
indeed be easy to agree upon speculative opinions with our younger
neighbors at the south; but we should be humiliated in their eyes, and
difficulties would at once arise, when means of promoting those opinions
were proposed, and we were then to say we could talk but not fight. The
Monroe doctrine was not to be withdrawn; but we ought to be left free to
act upon it without the burden of promises, express or implied. The
proposed congress was a specious and disguised step towards an American
confederacy, full of embarrassment, full of danger; and the first step
should be firmly resisted. Such was the outline of Van Buren's argument;
and its wisdom has commanded a general assent from that day.
Dickerson of New Jersey very well phrased sound American sentiment when
he said in the debate that, next to a passion for war, he dreaded a
passion for diplomacy. The majestic declamation of Webster, his
pathetic picture of a South America once oppressed but now emancipated,
his eloquent cry that if it were weak to feel that he was an American it
was a weakness from which he claimed no exemption,--all this met a good
deal of exuberant response through the country. But it failed, as in our
history most such efforts have failed, to convince the practical
judgment of Americans, a judgment never long dazzled or inspired by the
picture of an America wielding enormous or dominant international power.
The Panama congress met in the absence of the American representatives,
who had been delayed. It made a treaty of friendship and perpetual
confederation to which all other American powers might accede within a
year. The congress was to meet annually in time of common war, and
biennially in times of peace. But it never met again. The "centre of the
world" was too far away from its very neighbors. Even South American
republics could not be kept together by effusions of republican glory
and international love.
In spite of its victory in Congress, Adams's administration had plainly
opened with a serious mistake. The opposition was perfectly legitimate;
and although in the debate it was spoken of as unorganized, it certainly
came out of the debate a pretty definite party. Before the debate Adams
had written in his diary, and truly, that it was the first subject upon
which a great effort had been made "to combine the discordant elements
of the Crawford and Jackson and Calhoun men into a united opposition
against the administration." Although some of the Southern opposition
was heated by a dislike of States in which negroes were to be
administrators, the division was not at all upon a North and South line.
With Van Buren voted Findlay of Pennsylvania, Chandler and Holmes of
Maine, Woodbury of New Hampshire, Dickerson of New Jersey, Kane of
Illinois, making seven Northern with twelve Southern senators. Against
Van Buren were eight senators from slave States, Barton of Missouri,
Bouligny and Johnston of Louisiana, Chambers of Alabama, Clayton and Van
Dyke of Delaware, Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, and Smith of Maryland.
It was an incipient but a true party division.
Throughout this session of 1824-25 Van Buren was very industrious in the
Senate, and nearly, if not quite, its most conspicuous member, if
account be not taken of Randolph's furious and blazing talents. Calhoun
was only in the chair as vice-president; the great duel between him and
Van Buren not yet begun. Clay was at the head of the cabinet, and
Webster in the lower House. Jackson was in Tennessee, watching with
angry confidence, and aiding, the rising tide with the political
dexterity in which he was by no means a novice. Having only a minority
with him, and with Benton frequently against him, Van Buren gradually
drilled his party into opposition on internal improvements,--a most
legitimate and important issue. In December, 1825, he threw down the
gauntlet to the administration, or rather took up its gauntlet. He
proposed a resolution "that Congress does not possess the power to make
roads and canals within the respective States." At the same time he
asked for a committee to prepare a constitutional amendment on the
subject like his earlier proposal, saying with a touch of very polite
partisanship that though the President's recent declaration, that the
power clearly existed in the Constitution, might diminish, it did not
obviate the necessity of an amendment. In March, April, and May, 1826,
he opposed appropriations of $110,000 to continue the Cumberland road,
and of $50,000 for surveys preparatory to roads and canals, and
subscriptions to stock of the Louisville and Portland Canal Company and
of the Dismal Swamp Canal Company. All these were distinctly
administration measures.
Although the principles advanced by Van Buren in this part of his
opposition have not since obtained complete and unanimous affirmance,
they have at least commanded so large, honorable, and prolonged support,
that his attitude can with little good sense be considered one of
factious difference. Especially wise was he on the question of
government subscriptions to private canal companies. Upon one of these
bills he said, in May, 1826, that he did not believe that the government
had the constitutional power to make canals or to grant money for them;
but he added that, if he believed otherwise, the grant of money should,
he thought, be made directly, and not by forming a partner
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