Martin Van Buren Part 2

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 Const.i.tution.

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 inst.i.tutions, he told the chancellor that when among the ma.s.ses 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 const.i.tutional 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 partic.i.p.ate 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 owners.h.i.+p 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 a.s.sociates, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sions, 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 "const.i.tutionize" 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 a.s.sailed "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 const.i.tution, 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 Const.i.tution; 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 a.s.sociates, 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.--REeSTABLISHMENT OF PARTIES.--PARTY LEADERs.h.i.+P

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 reelected 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 circ.u.mstances which const.i.tute 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 c.o.c.ked hat, met processions and orators without end, it was obvious that this was not the radical minister whom Was.h.i.+ngton had recalled from Jacobin Paris for effusively pledging eternal friends.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sing 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 pa.s.sing the South in every material advantage, that the latter, it seemed, must surely learn the lesson.

For the inst.i.tution 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 inst.i.tution, 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 embarra.s.sments of slave settlement arose, devote this new land to freedom,--not so much to freedom as that s.h.i.+ning G.o.ddess of mercy and right and justice who rose clear and obvious to our purged vision out of the civil war, as to the less n.o.ble 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 suns.h.i.+ne and prosperity returned over the land.

Van Buren's views at this time were doubtless clear against the extension of slavery. He disliked the inst.i.tution; 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 friends.h.i.+p and political alliance between him and Van Buren must have soon begun.

During all or nearly all Van Buren's senators.h.i.+p the two occupied adjoining seats. Two years later Andrew Jackson was sent to the Senate by Tennessee, as a suitable preliminary to his presidential canva.s.s.

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 a.s.sociates 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-t.i.tles 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 c.u.mberland 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 Const.i.tution 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, const.i.tutional 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 const.i.tutional amendment. Congress was to have power to make roads and ca.n.a.ls, but the money appropriated was to be apportioned among the States according to population. No road or ca.n.a.l 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 Ca.n.a.l, 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 Const.i.tution, whose sanct.i.ty 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 Const.i.tution 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 Const.i.tution 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 fact.i.tious help of this designation and the fine leaders.h.i.+p of Clay. With Jackson and Benton, Van Buren voted for it, against men differing as widely from each other as his a.s.sociate, 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 att.i.tude of his. But he declared himself with sufficient plainness not only to believe in the const.i.tutionality 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 a.s.sociate on the presidential ticket. "When the monarchs of Europe are a.s.sembled 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, "compet.i.tion 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 const.i.tutional 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 const.i.tutional 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 Was.h.i.+ngton'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 hards.h.i.+ps 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 const.i.tutionally 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 a.s.sertion of the wool interests of New York. Benton tells us that Van Buren was one of the main speakers for the bill; but the a.s.sertion 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 const.i.tutional 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 const.i.tutional amendment touching the election of president. As the amendment could not be adopted in time to affect the pending canva.s.s, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton deprived the const.i.tutional 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 embarra.s.sment 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 s.h.i.+fted his position from Adams to Crawford, we should find a record of it in the vast treasure-house of d.a.m.nations 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 coa.r.s.e 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 a.s.sembly, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 ill.u.s.trated the harsh partisans.h.i.+p 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 ca.n.a.l 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 embarra.s.s the People's party, Clinton's enemies suddenly, and just before the rising of the legislature, offered a resolution removing him from the ca.n.a.l commissioners.h.i.+p. 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 cooperation of many supporters of Adams and Clay. A bill was reported in the a.s.sembly, 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 pa.s.s 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 a.s.sent. At last, in February, 1824, a caucus was called, doubtless in the hope that many who had refused their a.s.sent 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 ingrat.i.tude 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 reelected 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 antic.i.p.ation of public works by the Federal government. On February 23 he voted against an appropriation of $150,000 to extend the c.u.mberland 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 Ca.n.a.l and the Dismal Swamp Ca.n.a.l, 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 const.i.tuted, 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 leaders.h.i.+p from the Senate; although he has since been surpa.s.sed there, not only as an orator, but in other kinds of senatorial work. Seward seemed to exercise a like leaders.h.i.+p 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 t.i.tular 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."