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.