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.