CHAPTER IV

UNITED STATES SENATOR.--REËSTABLISHMENT OF PARTIES.--PARTY LEADERSHIP

In December, 1821, Van Buren took his seat in the United States Senate.

The "era of good feeling" was then at its height. It was with perfect

sincerity that Monroe in his message of the preceding year had said: "I

see much cause to rejoice in the felicity of our situation." He had just

been reëlected president with but a single vote against him. The country

was in profound peace. The burdens of the war with England were no

longer felt; and its few victories were remembered with exuberant

good-nature. Two years before, Florida had been acquired by the strong

and persisting hand of the younger Adams. Wealth and comfort were in

rapid increase. The moans and rage of the defeated and disgraced

Federalists were suppressed, or, if now and then feebly heard, were

complacently treated as outbursts of senility and impotence. People were

not only well-to-do in fact, but, what was far more extraordinary, they

believed themselves to be so. In his great tariff speech but three or

four years later, Hayne called it the "period of general jubilee." Every

great public paper and speech, described the "felicity" of America. The

president pointed out to his fellow-citizens "the prosperous and happy

condition of our country in all the great circumstances which constitute

the felicity of a nation;" he told them that they were "a free,

virtuous, and enlightened people;" the unanimity of public sentiment in

favor of his "humble pretensions" indicated, he thought, "the great

strength and stability of our Union." And all was reciprocated by the

people. This modest, gentle ruler was in his very mediocrity agreeable

to them. He symbolized the comfort and order, the supreme respectability

of which they were proud. When in 1817 he made a tour through New

England, which had seen neither Jefferson nor Madison as visitors during

their terms of office, and in his military coat of domestic manufacture,

his light small-clothes and cocked hat, met processions and orators

without end, it was obvious that this was not the radical minister whom

Washington had recalled from Jacobin Paris for effusively pledging

eternal friendship and submitting to fraternal embraces in the National

Convention. Such youthful frenzy was now long past. America was enjoying

a great national idyl. Even the Federalists, except of course those who

had been too violent or who were still unrepentant, were not utterly

shut out from the light of the placid high noon. Jackson had urged

Monroe in 1816 "to exterminate that monster called party spirit," and to

let some Federalists come to the board. Monroe thought, however, "that

the administration should rest strongly on the Republican party," though

meaning to bring all citizens "into the Republican fold as quietly as

possible." Party, he declared, was unnecessary to free government; all

should be Republicans. And when Van Buren reached the sprawling,

slatternly American capital in 1821, all were Republicans.

There were of course personal feuds in this great political family.

Those of New York were the most notorious; but there were many others.

But such rivalries and quarrels were only a proof of the political calm.

When families are smugly prosperous they indulge petty dislikes, which

disappear before storm or tragedy. The halcyon days could not last.

Monroe's dream of a country with but one party, and that basking in

perpetual "felicity," was, in spite of what seemed for the moment a

close realization, as far from the truth as the dreams of later

reformers who would in politics organize all the honest, respectable

folk together against all the dishonest.

The heat of the Missouri question was ended at the session before Van

Buren's senatorial term began. It seemed only a thunder-storm passing

across a rich, warm day in harvest time, angry and agitating for the

moment, but quickly forgotten by dwellers in the pastoral scene when the

rainbow of compromise appeared in the delightful hues of Henry Clay's

eloquence. The elements of the tremendous struggle yet to come were in

the atmosphere, but they were not visible. The slavery question had no

political importance to Van Buren until fourteen years afterwards. In

judging the men of that day we shall seriously mistake if we set up our

own standards among their ideas. The moral growth in the twenty-five

years since the emancipation makes it irksome to be fair to the views of

the past generation, or indeed to the former views of half of our

present generation. Slavery has come to seem intrinsically wicked,

hideous, to be hated everywhere. But sixty-five years ago it still

lingered in several of the Northern States. It was wrong indeed; but the

temper of condemnation towards it was Platonic, full of the unavailing

and unpoignant regret with which men hear of poverty and starvation and

disease and crime which they do not see and which they cannot help. Nor

did slavery then seem to the best of men so very great a wrong even to

the blacks; there were, it was thought, many ameliorations and

compensations. Men were glad to believe and did believe that the human

chattels were better and happier than they would have been in Africa.

The economic waste of slavery, its corrupting and enervating effect upon

the whites, were thought to be objections quite as serious. Besides, it

was widely fancied to be at worst but a temporary evil. Jefferson's

dislike of it was shared by many throughout the South as well as the

North. The advantages of a free soil were becoming so apparent in the

strides by which the North was passing the South in every material

advantage, that the latter, it seemed, must surely learn the lesson.

For the institution within States already admitted to the Union,

anti-slavery men felt no responsibility. Forty years later the great

leader of the modern Republican party would not, he solemnly declared in

the very midst of a pro-slavery rebellion, interfere with slavery in the

States if the Union could be saved without disturbing it. If men in

South Carolina cared to maintain a ruinous and corrupting domestic

institution, even if it were a greater wrong against the slaves than it

was believed to be, or even if it were an injury to the whites

themselves, still men of Massachusetts and New York ought, it seemed to

them, to be no more disturbed over it than we feel bound to be over

polygamy in Turkey.

But as to the territory west of the Mississippi not yet formed into

States, there was a different sentiment held by a great majority at the

North and by many at the South. Slavery was not established there. The

land was national domain, whose forms of political and social life were

yet to be set up. Why not, before the embarrassments of slave settlement

arose, devote this new land to freedom,--not so much to freedom as that

shining goddess of mercy and right and justice who rose clear and

obvious to our purged vision out of the civil war, as to the less noble

deities of economic well-being, thrift, and industrial comfort?

Democrats at the North, therefore, were almost unanimous that Missouri

should come in free or not at all; and so with the rest of the territory

beyond the Mississippi, except the old slave settlement of Louisiana,

already admitted as a State. The resolution in the legislature of New

York in January, 1820, supported by Van Buren, that freedom be "an

indispensable condition of admission" of new States, was but one of many

exhibitions of feeling at the North. Monroe and the very best of

Americans did not, however, think the principle so sacred or necessary

as to justify a struggle. John Quincy Adams, hating slavery as did but

few Americans, distinctly favored the compromise by which Missouri came

in with slavery, and by which the other new territory north of the

present southern line of Missouri extended westward was to be free, and

the territory south of it slave. With no shame he acquiesced in the very

thing about which forty years later the nation plunged into war. "For

the present," he wrote, "this contest is laid asleep." So the stream of

peaceful sunshine and prosperity returned over the land.

Van Buren's views at this time were doubtless clear against the

extension of slavery. He disliked the institution; and in part saw how

inconsistent were its odious practices with the best civic growth, how

debasing to whites and blacks alike. In March, 1822, he voted in the

Senate, with Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts and Rufus King, for a

proviso in the bill creating the new Territory of Florida by which the

introduction of slaves was forbidden except by citizens removing there

for actual settlement, and by which slaves introduced in violation of

the law were to be freed. But he was in a minority. Northern senators

from Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Indiana refused to interfere with

free trade in slaves between the Southern States and this southernmost

territory.

Among the forty-eight members of the Senate which met in December, 1821,

neither Clay nor Calhoun nor Webster had a seat. The first was restless

in one of his brief absences from official life; the second was

secretary of war; and Webster, out of Congress, was making great law

arguments and greater orations. Benton was there from the new State of

Missouri, just beginning his thirty years. The warm friendship and

political alliance between him and Van Buren must have soon begun.

During all or nearly all Van Buren's senatorship the two occupied

adjoining seats. Two years later Andrew Jackson was sent to the Senate

by Tennessee, as a suitable preliminary to his presidential canvass.

During the next two sessions Van Buren, Benton, and Jackson were thrown

together; and without doubt the foundations were laid of their lifelong

intimacy and political affection. Benton and Jackson, personal enemies

years before, had become reconciled. Among these associates Van Buren

adhered firmly enough to his own clear views; he did not turn

obsequiously to the rising sun of Tennessee. William H. Crawford, the

secretary of the treasury, had, in the Republican congressional caucus

of 1816, stood next Monroe for the presidential nomination. For reasons

which neither history nor tradition seems sufficiently to have brought

us, he inspired a strong and even enthusiastic loyalty among many of his

party. His candidacy in 1824 was more "regular" than that of either

Adams, Jackson, or Clay, whose friends combined against him as the

strongest of them all. Though Crawford had been prostrated by serious

disease in 1823, Van Buren remained faithful to him until, in 1825,

after refusing a seat in Adams's cabinet, he retired from national

public life a thoroughly broken man.

The first two sessions of Congress, after Van Buren's service began,

seemed drowsy enough. French land-titles in Louisiana, the settlement of

the accounts of public officers, the attempt to abolish imprisonment for

debt, the appropriation for money for diplomatic representatives to the

new South American states and their recognition,--nothing more exciting

than these arose, except Monroe's veto, in May, 1822, of the bill

authorizing the erection of toll-gates upon the Cumberland road and

appropriating $9000 for them. This brought distinctly before the public

the great question of internal improvements by the federal government,

which Van Buren, Benton, and Jackson afterwards chose as one of the

chief battle-grounds for their party. For this bill Van Buren indeed

voted, while Benton afterwards boasted that he was one of the small

minority of seven who discerned its true character. But this trifling

appropriation was declared by Barbour, who was in charge of the

measure, not to involve the general question; it was said to be a mere

incident necessary to save from destruction a work for which earlier

statesmen were responsible. Monroe, though declaring in his veto that

the power to adopt and execute a system of internal improvements

national in their character would have the happiest effect on all the

great interests of the Union, decided that the Constitution gave no such

power. Six years later, in a note to his speech upon the power of the

Vice-President to call to order for words spoken in debate in the

Senate, Van Buren apologized for his vote on the bill, because it was

his first session, and because he was sincerely desirous to aid the

Western country and had voted without full examination. He added that if

the question were again presented to him, he should vote in the

negative; and that it had been his only vote in seven years of service

which the most fastidious critic could torture into an inconsistency

with his principles upon internal improvements. In January, 1823, during

his second session, Van Buren spoke and voted in favor of the bill to

repair the road, but still took no decided ground upon the general

question. He said that the large expenditure already made on the road

would have been worse than useless if it were now suffered to decay;

that the road, being already constructed, ought to be preserved; but

whether he would vote for a new construction he did not disclose. Even

Benton, who was proud to have been one of the small minority against

the bill of the year before for toll-gates upon the road, was now with

Van Buren, constitutional scruples yielding to the statesmanlike

reluctance to waste an investment of millions of dollars rather than

spend a few thousands to save it.

In January, 1824, Van Buren proposed to solve these difficulties by a

constitutional amendment. Congress was to have power to make roads and

canals, but the money appropriated was to be apportioned among the

States according to population. No road or canal was to be made within

any State without the consent of its legislature; and the money was to

be expended in each State under the direction of its legislature. This

proposal seems to have fallen still-born and deservedly. It illustrated

Van Buren's jealousy of interference with the rights of States. But the

right of each State to be protected, he seemed to forget, involved its

right not to be taxed for improvements in other States which it neither

controlled nor promoted. Van Buren's speech in support of the proposal

would to-day seem very heretical to his party. A dozen years later he

himself would probably have admitted it to be so. He then believed in

the abstract proposition that such funds of the nation as could be

raised without oppression, and as were not necessary to the discharge of

indispensable demands upon the government, should be expended upon

internal improvements under restrictions guarding the sovereignty and

equal interests of the States. Henry Clay would not in theory have gone

much further. But to this subject in its national aspect Van Buren had

probably given but slight attention. The success of the Erie Canal, with

him doubtless as with others, made adverse theories of government seem

less impressive. But Van Buren and his school quickly became doubtful

and soon hostile to the federal promotion of internal improvements. The

opposition became popular on the broader reasoning that great

expenditures for internal improvements within the States were not only,

as the statesmen at first argued, violations of the letter of the

Constitution, whose sanctity could, however, be saved by proper

amendment, but were intrinsically dangerous, and an unwholesome

extension of the federal power which ought not to take place whether

within the Constitution or by amending it. Aided by Jackson's powerful

vetoes, this sentiment gained a strength with the people which has come

down to our day. We have river and harbor bills, but they are supposed

to touch directly or indirectly our foreign commerce, which, under the

Constitution and upon the essential theory of our confederation, is a

subject proper to the care of the Union.

In the same session Van Buren spoke at length in favor of the bill to

abolish imprisonment for debt, and drew with precision the distinction

wisely established by modern jurisprudence, that the property only, and

not the body of the debtor, should be at the mercy of his creditor,

where the debt involved no fraud or breach of trust.

The session of 1823-1824 was seriously influenced by the coming

presidential election. The protective tariff of 1824 was christened with

the absurd name of the "American system," though it was American in no

other or better sense than foreign war to protect fancied national

rights is an American system, and though the system had come from the

middle ages in the company of other restrictions upon the intercourse of

nations. It was carried by the factitious help of this designation and

the fine leadership of Clay. With Jackson and Benton, Van Buren voted

for it, against men differing as widely from each other as his

associate, the venerable Federalist Rufus King, differed from Hayne, the

brilliant orator of South Carolina. Upon the tariff Van Buren then had

views clearer, at least, than upon internal improvements. In 1824 he was

unmistakably a protectionist. The moderation of his views and the

pressure from his own State were afterwards set up as defenses for this

early attitude of his. But he declared himself with sufficient plainness

not only to believe in the constitutionality of a protective tariff, but

that 1824 was a fit year in which to extend its protective features. He

acted, too, with the amplest light upon the subject. The dislike of the

Holy Alliance, the hated recollections of the Orders in Council and the

Napoleonic decrees, the idea that, for self-defense in times of war, the

country must be forced to produce many goods not already

produced,--these considerations had great weight, as very well appears

in the speech for the bill delivered by Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky,

afterwards Van Buren's associate on the presidential ticket. "When the

monarchs of Europe are assembled together, do you think," he asked,

"that we are not a subject of their holy consultations?" But the support

of the bill was upon broader considerations. The debates upon the tariff

in the House of Representatives in February, March, and April, and in

the Senate in April, 1824, were admirable presentations of the subject.

Webster in the House and Hayne in the Senate put the free trade side.

The former, still speaking his own sentiments, declared that "the best

apology for laws of prohibition and laws of monopoly will be found in

that state of society, not only unenlightened but sluggish, in which

they are most generally established." But now, he said, "competition

comes in place of monopoly, and intelligence and industry ask only for

fair play and an open field." He repudiated the principle of protection.

"On the contrary," said he, "I think freedom of trade to be the general

principle, and restriction the exception."

Nor was Van Buren then left without the light which afterwards reached

him on the constitutional question. Rufus King said that, if gentlemen

wished to encourage the production of hemp and iron, they ought to bring

in a bill to give bounties on those articles; for there was the same

constitutional right to grant bounties as to levy restrictive duties

upon foreign products. Hayne made the really eloquent and masterly

speech for which he ought to stand in the first rank of orators, and

which summed up as well for free-traders now as then the most telling

arguments against artificial restrictions. He skillfully closed with

Washington's words: "Our commercial policy should hold an equal and

impartial hand, neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or

preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and

diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing

nothing." Hayne did not confine himself to the doctrines of Adam Smith,

or the hardships which protection meant to a planting region like his

own. For the chief interest of the South was in cotton; and the price of

cotton was largely determined by the ability of foreigners to import it

from America,--an ability in its turn dependent upon the willingness of

America to take her pay, directly or indirectly, in foreign commodities.

Hayne, however, went further. He clearly raised the question, whether

the encouragement of manufactures could constitutionally be made a

Federal object.

Sitting day after day under this long debate in the little senate

chamber then in use, where men listened to speeches, if for no other

reason, because they were easily heard, Van Buren could not, with his

ability and readiness, have misunderstood the general principles

involved. Early in the debate, upon a motion to strike out the duty on

hemp, he briefly but explicitly said that "he was in favor of

increasing the duty on hemp, with a view of affording protection to its

cultivation in this country." He voted against limiting the duty on wool

to twenty-five per cent., but voted against a duty of twenty-five per

cent. on India silks,--a revenue rather than a protective duty. He voted

for duties on wheat and wheat flour and potatoes. He voted against

striking out the duty on books, in spite of Hayne's grotesque but

forcible argument that they were to be considered "a raw material,

essential to the formation of the mind, the morals, and the character of

the people." It is difficult to understand the significance of all Van

Buren's votes on the items of the bill; but the record shows them to

have been, on the whole, protectionist, with a preference for moderate

rates, but a firm assertion of the wool interests of New York. Benton

tells us that Van Buren was one of the main speakers for the bill; but

the assertion is not borne out by the record. He delivered no general

speech upon the subject, as did most of the senators, but seems to have

spoken only upon some of the details as they were considered in

committee of the whole. The best to be said in Van Buren's behalf is,

that his judgment was not yet so ripe upon the matter as not to be still

open to great change. He was in his third session, and still new to

national politics, and there was before him the plain and strong

argument that his State wanted protection. In 1835 Butler, speaking for

him as a presidential candidate, said that his personal feelings had

been "at all times adverse to the high tariff policy." But "high tariff"

was then, as now, a merely relative term. His votes placed him in that

year very near Henry Clay. That from 1824 he grew more and more averse

to the necessary details and results of a protective policy is probably

true. Nor ought it to be, even from the standpoint of free-traders,

serious accusation that a public man varies his political utterances

upon the tariff question, if the variation be progressive and steadily

towards what they deem a greater liberality. To Van Buren, however, the

tariff question never had a capital importance. Even thirty-two years

later, while rehearsing from his retirement the achievements of his

party in excuse of the support he reluctantly gave Buchanan, he did not

name among its services its insistence upon merely revenue duties,

although he had then for years been himself committed to that doctrine.

Van Buren's vote for the tariff of 1824 had no very direct relation to

his political situation. His own successor was not to be chosen for

nearly three years. Crawford, whom he supported for the presidency, was

the only one of the four candidates opposed to the bill. Adams was

consistently a protectionist; he believed in actively promoting the

welfare of men, though chiefly if not exclusively American men, even

when they resisted their own welfare. He, like his father, was perfectly

ready to use the power of government where it seemingly promised to be

effective, without caring much for economical theories or constitutional

restrictions. Jackson himself was far enough away from the ranks of

strict constructionists on the tariff. In April, 1824, in the midst of

the debate, and while a presidential candidate, he wrote from the Senate

what free-traders, who afterwards supported him, would have deemed the

worst of heresies. Like most candidates, ancient and modern, he was "in

favor of a judicious examination and revision of" the tariff. He would

advocate a tariff so far as it enabled the country to provide itself

with the means of defense in war. But he would go further. The tariff

ought to "draw from agriculture the superabundant labor, and employ it

in mechanism and manufactures;" it ought to "give a proper distribution

to our labor, to take from agriculture in the United States 600,000 men,

women, and children." It is time, he cried, and quite as extravagantly

as Clay, that "we should become a little more Americanized." How slight

a connection the tariff had with the election of 1824 is further seen in

the fact that Jackson, who thus supported the bill, received the vote of

several of the States which strongly opposed the tariff.

In March, 1824, Van Buren urged the Senate to act upon a constitutional

amendment touching the election of president. As the amendment could not

be adopted in time to affect the pending canvass, there was, he said, no

room for partisan feeling. He insisted that if there were no majority

choice by the electors, the choice should not rest with the house of

representatives voting by States, but that the electors should be

reconvened, and themselves choose between the highest two candidates.

The debate soon became thoroughly partisan. Rufus King, with but thinly

veiled reference to Crawford's nomination, denounced the practice by

which a caucus at Washington deprived the constitutional electors of any

free choice; members of Congress were attending to president-making

rather than to their duties. He thought that the course of events had

"led near observers to suspect a connection existing between a central

power of this description at the seat of the general government and the

legislatures of Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, and New York, and

perhaps of other States." To this it was pointed out with much force

that such a caucus had chosen Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe without

scandal or injury; that members of Congress were distinguished and

representative persons familiar with national affairs, who might with

great advantage respectfully suggest a course of action to their

fellow-citizens. Van Buren went keenly to the real point of the belated

objection to the system; it lay in the particular action of the recent

caucus. He did not think it worth while to consider "those nice

distinctions which challenged respect for the proceedings of conventions

of one description and denied it to others; or to detect those still

more subtle refinements which regarded meetings of the same character

as sometimes proper, and at others destructive of the purity of

elections and dangerous to the liberties of the people." After much talk

about the will of the people, the Senate by a vote of 30 to 13 postponed

the consideration of the amendments until after the election. Benton

joined Van Buren in the minority, although they did not agree upon the

form of amendment; but Jackson, perhaps because he was a candidate, did

not vote.

It was highly probable that there would be embarrassment in choosing the

next president. It was already nearly certain that neither candidate

would have a majority of the electoral votes. The decision was then, as

in our own time, supposed to rest with New York; and naturally therefore

Van Buren's prestige was great, gained, as it had been, in that

difficult and opulent political field. His attachment to Crawford was

proof against the signs of the latter's decaying strength. Crawford was

to him the Republican candidate regularly chosen, and one agreeable to

his party by the vigorous democracy of his sentiments. His opposition to

Jefferson's embargo, and his vote for a renewal of the charter of the

Bank of the United States, had been forgotten since his warm advocacy of

the late war with England. His formal claims to the nomination were

great. For he had been in the Senate as early as 1807, and its president

upon the death of Vice-President Clinton in 1812; afterwards he had been

minister to France, and was now secretary of the treasury. In the

caucus of 1816 he had nearly as many votes as Monroe; and those votes

were cast for him, it was said, though without much probability, in

spite of his peremptory refusal to compete with Monroe. Moreover,

Crawford had a majesty and grace of personal appearance which, with

undoubtedly good though not great abilities, had, apart from these

details of his career, made him conspicuous in the Republican ranks; and

in its chief service he was, after the retirement of Monroe, the senior,

except Adams, whose candidacy was far more recent. Crawford's claim to

the succession was therefore very justifiable; he was the most obvious,

the most "regular," of the candidates.

It has been said that Van Buren was at first inclined to Adams. The

latter's unequaled public experience and discipline of intellect

doubtless seemed, to Van Buren's precise and orderly mind, eminent

qualifications for the first office in the land. Adams at this time, by

a coincidence not inexplicable, thought highly of Van Buren. He entered

in his diary a remark of his own, in February, 1825, that Van Buren was

"a man of great talents and of good principles; but he had suffered them

to be too much warped by party spirit." This from an Adams may be taken

as extreme praise. It is pretty certain that if Van Buren had

reprehensibly shifted his position from Adams to Crawford, we should

find a record of it in the vast treasure-house of damnations which Adams

left. Nor is there good reason to suppose that Van Buren was influenced

by the nomination which Crawford's friends in Georgia gave him in 1824

for the vice-presidency. This showed that New York had already

surrendered her favorite "son to the nation;" he was now definitely to

be counted a power in national politics, where he was known as the

"Albany director." Crawford's enemies in Georgia, the Clarkites,

ridiculed this nomination with the coarse and silly abuse which active

politicians to this day are always ready to use in their cynical

under-estimate of popular intelligence,--abuse which they are by and by

pretty sure to be glad to forget. Van Buren was pictured as half man and

half cat, half fox and half monkey, half snake and half mink. He was

dubbed "Blue Whiskey Van" and "Little Van." The Clarkites, being only a

minority in the Georgia Assembly, delighted to vote for him as their

standing candidate for doorkeeper and the like humbler positions.

New York was greatly disturbed through 1824 over the presidency. Its

politics were in the position described by Senator Cobb, one of

Crawford's Georgia supporters. "Could we hit upon a few great

principles," he wrote home from Washington in January, 1825, "and unite

their support with that of Crawford, we should succeed beyond doubt."

But the great principles were hard to find. The people and the greater

politicians were therefore swayed by personal preferences, without

strong reason for either choice; and the lesser politicians were simply

watching to see how the tide ran. Adams was the most natural choice of

the New York Republicans. The South had had the presidency for six

terms. His early secession from the Federalists; his aid in solidifying

the Republican sentiment at the North; his support of Jefferson in the

patriotic embargo struggle; his long, eminent, and fruitful services;

and his place of secretary of state, from which Madison and Monroe had

in turn been promoted to the presidency,--all these commended him to

Northern Republicans as a proper candidate.

De Witt Clinton admired and supported General Jackson. In 1819 the

latter had at a dinner in Tammany Hall amazed and affronted the former's

Bucktail enemies by giving as his toast, "De Witt Clinton, the

enlightened statesman and governor of the great and patriotic State of

New York." In January, 1824, Clinton was the victim of a political

outrage which illustrated the harsh partisanship then ruling in New York

politics, and may well have determined the choice of president. Clinton

had retired from the governor's chair; but he still held the honorary

and unpaid office of canal commissioner, to which he brought

distinguished honor but which brought none to him, and whose importance

he more than any other man had created. The Crawford men in the

legislature feared a combination of the men of the new People's party

with the Clintonians on the presidential question. Clinton seemed at the

time an unpopular character. To embarrass the People's party, Clinton's

enemies suddenly, and just before the rising of the legislature, offered

a resolution removing him from the canal commissionership. The People's

party, it was thought, by opposing the resolution, would incur popular

dislike through their alliance with the few and unpopular Clintonians;

while by supporting the resolution they would forfeit the support of the

latter upon which they relied. In either case the Crawford men would

apparently profit by the trick. The People's party men, including those

favoring Adams for president, at once seized the wrong horn of the

dilemma, and voted for Clinton's removal, which was thus carried by an

almost unanimous vote. But the people themselves were underrated; the

outrage promptly restored Clinton to popular favor. In spite of the

resistance of the politicians, he was, in the fall of 1824, elected by a

large majority to the governor's seat, to which, or to any great office,

it had been supposed he could never return; and this, although at the

same time and upon the same ticket one of those who had voted for his

removal was chosen lieutenant-governor. Van Buren was no party to this

removal, although his political friends at Albany were the first movers

in the scheme. He himself was far-sighted enough to see the probable

effect of so gross and indecent a use of political power. Nor was he so

relentless a partisan as to remember in unfruitful vengeance Clinton's

own prescriptive conduct, or to remove the latter from an honorary

seat which belonged to him above all other men. By this silly blunder

Clinton was again raised to deserved power, which he held until his

death.

[Illustration: De Witt Clinton]

The popular outburst consequent upon Clinton's removal in January, 1824,

made it very dangerous for the Bucktails to leave to the people in the

fall the choice of presidential electors. The rise of the People's party

for a time seriously threatened Van Buren's influence. Until 1824 the

presidential electors of New York had been chosen by its legislature.

The opponents of Crawford and Van Buren, fearing that the latter's

superior political skill would more easily capture the legislature in

November, 1824, raised at the legislative elections of 1823 a cry

against the Albany Regency, and demanded that presidential electors

should be chosen directly by the people. The Regency, popularly believed

to have been founded by Van Buren, consisted of a few able followers of

his, residing or in office at Albany. They were also called the

"conspirators." Chief among them were William L. Marcy, the comptroller;

Samuel A. Talcott, the attorney-general; Benjamin F. Butler, then

district attorney of Albany county; Edwin Croswell, the state printer;

Roger Skinner, the United States district judge; and Benjamin Knower,

the state treasurer. Later there joined the Regency, Silas Wright,

Azariah C. Flagg, Thomas W. Olcott, and Charles E. Dudley. Its members

were active, skillful, shrewd politicians; and they were much more. They

were men of strong political convictions, holding and observing a high

standard for the public service, and of undoubted personal integrity. In

1830 John A. Dix gave as a chief reason for accepting office at Albany

that he should there be "one of the Regency." His son, Dr. Morgan Dix,

describes their aggressive honesty, their refusal "to tolerate in those

whom they could control what their own fine sense of honor did not

approve;" and he quotes a remark made to him by Thurlow Weed, their long

and most formidable enemy, "that he had never known a body of men who

possessed so much power and used it so well." In his Memoirs, Weed

describes their "great ability, great industry, indomitable courage."

Two at least of the original members, Marcy and Butler, afterwards

justly rose to national distinction. Even to our own day, the Albany

Regency has been a strong and generally a sagacious influence in its

party. John A. Dix, Horatio Seymour, Dean Richmond, and Samuel J. Tilden

long directed its policy; and from the chief seat in its councils the

late secretary of the treasury, Daniel Manning, was chosen in 1885.

In November, 1823, the People's party elected only a minority of the

legislature; but many of the Democrats were committed to the support of

an electoral law, and the movement was clearly popular. A just, though

possibly an insufficient objection to the law was its proposal of a

great change in anticipation of a particular election whose candidates

were already before the public. But there was no resort to frank

argument. Its indirect defeat was proposed by the Democratic managers,

and accomplished with the coöperation of many supporters of Adams and

Clay. A bill was reported in the Assembly, where the Regency was in a

minority, giving the choice of the electors to the people directly, but

cunningly requiring a majority instead of a plurality vote to elect. If

there were no majority, then the choice was to be left to the

legislature. The Adams and Clay men were unwilling to let a plurality

elect, lest in the uncertain state of public feeling some other

candidate might be at the head of the poll; and they were probably now

quite as confident as the Bucktails, and with more reason, of their

strength upon joint ballot in the legislature. Divided as the people of

New York were between the four presidential candidates, it was well

known that this device would really give them no choice. The

consideration of the electoral law was postponed in the Senate upon a

pretense of objection to the form of the bill, and with insincere

protestations of a desire to pass it. The outcome of all this was that

in the election of November, 1824, the Democrats were punished at the

polls both for the wanton attack on Clinton and for their unprincipled

treatment of the electoral bill. The Regency got no more than a small

minority in the legislature; and De Witt Clinton, as has been said, was

chosen governor by a great majority.

Crawford's supporters at Washington believed that in a congressional

caucus he would have a larger vote than any other candidate. His

opponents, in the same belief, refused to join in a caucus, in spite of

the cry that their refusal was a treason to old party usage. The

Republicans at Albany, probably upon Van Buren's advice, had in April,

1823, declared in favor of a caucus, but without effect. Two thirds of

Congress would not assent. At last, in February, 1824, a caucus was

called, doubtless in the hope that many who had refused their assent

would, finding the caucus inevitable, attend through force of party

habit. But of the 261 members of Congress, only 66 attended; and they

were chiefly from New York, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia. In the

caucus 62 voted for Crawford for president and 57 for Albert Gallatin

for vice-president. A cry was soon raised against the latter as a

foreigner; so that in spite of his American residence of forty-five

years, and his invaluable services to the country and to the Republican

party through nearly all this period, he felt compelled to withdraw.

The failure of the caucus almost destroyed Crawford's chances, though

Van Buren steadily kept up courage. A few days later he wrote a

confidential letter complaining of the subserviency and ingratitude of

the non-attendants, who had "partaken largely of the favor of the

party;" but despondency, he said, was a weakness with which he was but

little annoyed, and if New York should be firm and promptly explicit,

the election would be substantially settled. But New York was neither

firm nor promptly explicit. Its electoral vote was in doubt until the

meeting of the legislature in November. The Adams and Clay forces then

united, securing 31 out of the 36 electors, although one of the 31 seems

finally to have voted for Jackson. Five Crawford electors were chosen

with the help of the Adams men, who wished to keep Clay at the foot of

the poll of presidential electors, and thus prevent his eligibility as

one of the highest three in the House of Representatives. This device of

the Adams men may have deprived Clay of the presidency. Thus Van Buren's

New York campaign met defeat even in the legislature, where his friends

had incurred odium rather than surrender the choice of electors to the

people, while his forces were being thoroughly beaten by the people at

the polls. In the electoral college Crawford received only 41 votes;

Adams had 84 and Jackson 99; while Clay with only 37 was fourth in the

race, and could not therefore enter the contest in the House. Georgia

cast 9 electoral votes for Van Buren as vice-president.

Van Buren did not figure in the choice of Adams in the House by the

coalition of Adams and Clay forces. Nor does his name appear in the

traditions of the manoeuvering at Washington in the winter of 1824-25,

except in a vague and improbable story that he wished, by dividing the

New York delegation in the House on the first vote by States, to prevent

a choice, and then to throw the votes of the Crawford members for

Adams, and thus secure the glory and political profit of apparently

electing him. He did not join in the cry that Adams's election over

Jackson was a violation of the democratic principle. Nor was it a

violation of that principle. Jackson had but a minority of the popular

vote. Clay was in political principles and habits nearer to Adams than

Jackson. It was clearly Clay's duty to take his strength to the

candidate whose administration was most likely to be agreeable to those

opinions of his own which had made him a candidate. The coalition was

perfectly natural and legitimate; and it was wholesome in its

consequences. It established the Whig party; it at least helped to

establish the modern Democratic party. That the acceptance of office by

Clay would injure him was probable enough. Coalitions have always been

unpopular in America and England, when there has seemed to follow a

division of offices. They offend the strong belief in party government

which lies deep in the political conscience of the two countries.

In the congressional session of 1824-25 president-making in the House

stood in the way of everything else of importance. Van Buren, with

increasing experience, was taking a greater and greater part in

congressional work. He joined far more frequently in the debates. Again

he spoke for the abolition of imprisonment for debt, his colleague,

Rufus King, differing from him on this as he now seemed to differ from

him on most disputed questions. King had not been reëlected senator,

having declined to be a candidate, because, as he said, of his advancing

years. But doubtless Van Buren was correct in telling John Quincy Adams,

and the latter was correct in believing, as his diary records, that King

could not have been re-chosen.

At this session Van Buren took definite stand against the schemes of

internal improvement. On February 11, 1825, differing even from Benton,

he voted against topographical surveys in anticipation of public works

by the Federal government. On February 23 he voted against an

appropriation of $150,000 to extend the Cumberland road, while Jackson

and Benton both voted for it. So, also, the next day, when Jackson voted

for federal subscriptions to help construct the Delaware and Chesapeake

Canal and the Dismal Swamp Canal, Van Buren was against him. Two days

before the session closed he voted against the bill for the occupation

of Oregon, Benton and Jackson voting in the affirmative. Van Buren was

one of the senatorial committee to receive the new president upon his

inauguration. It was doubtless with the easy courtesy which was genuine

with him that he welcomed John Quincy Adams to the political battle so

disastrous to the latter.

When Congress met again, in December, 1825, Van Buren took a more

important place than ever before in national politics. He now became a

true parliamentary leader; for he, like Clay, had the really

parliamentary career which has rarely been seen in this country.

Dealing with amorphous political elements, Van Buren created out of them

a party to promote his policy, and seized upon the vigor and popular

strength of Jackson to lead both party and policy to supreme power.

While, before 1825, Van Buren had not represented in the Senate a party

distinctly constituted, from 1825 to 1828 he definitely led the

formation of the modern Democratic party. In this work he was clearly

chief. From the floor of the Senate he addressed those of its members

inclined to his creed, and the sympathetic elements throughout the

country, and firmly guided and disciplined them after that fashion which

in very modern days is best familiar to us in the parliamentary

conflicts of Great Britain. Since Van Buren wielded this organizing

power, there has been in America no equally authoritative and decisive

leadership from the Senate; although he has since been surpassed there,

not only as an orator, but in other kinds of senatorial work. Seward

seemed to exercise a like leadership in the six years or more preceding

Lincoln's election; but he was far more the creature of the stupendous

movement of the time than he was its creator. So, in the two years

before General Grant's renomination in 1872, Charles Sumner and Carl

Schurz, speaking from the Senate, created a new party sentiment; but the

sentiment died in a "midsummer madness" but for which our later

political history might have been materially different. In the

interesting and fruitful three years of Van Buren's senatorial

opposition, he showed the same qualities of firmness, supple tact, and

distinct political aims which had given him his power in New York; but

all now upon a higher plane.

In December, 1825, Jackson was no longer in the Senate. His Tennessee

friends had placed him there as in a fitting vestibule to the White

House; but it seemed as hard then as it has been since, to go from the

Senate over the apparently broad and easy mile to the west on

Pennsylvania Avenue. So Jackson returned to the Hermitage, to await, in

the favorite American character of Cincinnatus, the popular summons

which he believed to be only delayed. Van Buren, now thoroughly

acquainted with the general, saw in him the strongest titular leader of

the opposition. It is pretty certain, however, that Van Buren's

preference was recent. The "Albany Argus," a Van Buren paper, had but

lately declared that "Jackson has not a single feeling in common with

the Republican party, and makes the merit of desiring the total

extinction of it;" while Jackson papers had ridiculed Crawford's

"Shallow knaves with forms to mock us,

Straggling, one by one, to caucus."

It has been the tradition, carefully and doubtless sincerely begun by

John Quincy Adams, and adopted by most writers dealing with this period,

that Adams met his first Congress in a spirit which should have

commanded universal support; and that it was a factious opposition,

cunningly led by Van Buren, which thwarted his patriotic purposes. But

this is an untrue account of the second great party division in the

United States. The younger Adams succeeded to an administration which

had represented no party, or rather which had represented a party now

become so dominant as to practically include the whole country. As

president he found himself able to promote opinions with a weighty

authority which he had not enjoyed while secretary of state in an era of

good feeling, and under a president who was firm, even if gentle. Nor

was it likely that Adams, with his unrivaled experience, his resolute

self-reliance, and his aggressively patriotic feeling, would fail to

impress his own views upon the public service, lest he might disturb a

supposititious unanimity of sentiment. His first message boldly sounded

the notes of party division. The second war with England was well out of

the public mind; and his old Federalist associations, his belief in a

strong, active, beneficent federal government, his traditional dislike

of what seemed to him extreme democratic tendencies and constitutional

refinings away of necessary federal power,--all these made him promptly

and ably take an attitude very different from that of his predecessors.

The compliment was perfectly sincere which, in his inaugural address, he

had paid the Republican and Federalist parties, saying of them that both

had "contributed splendid talents, spotless integrity, ardent

patriotism, and disinterested sacrifices to the formation and

administration" of the government. But it was idle for him to suppose

that the successors of these parties, although from both had come his

own supporters, and although, as in his offer of the treasury to

Crawford, he showed his desire, even in the chief offices, to ignore

political differences, would remain united under him, if he espoused

causes upon which they widely differed. After recapitulating the tenets

of American political faith, and showing that most discordant elements

of public opinion were now blended into harmony, he was again perfectly

sincere in saying that only an effort of magnanimity needed to be made,

that individuals should discard every remnant of rancor against each

other. This advice he was himself unable to follow; and so were other

men. In his inaugural he distinctly adopted as his own the policy of

internal improvements by the federal government, although he knew how

wide and determined had been the opposition to it. His own late chief,

Monroe, had pronounced the policy unconstitutional. But he now told the

people that the magnificence and splendor of the public works, the roads

and aqueducts, of Rome, were among the imperishable splendors of the

ancient republic. He asked to what single individual our first national

road had proved an injury. Of the constitutional doubts which were

raised, he said, with a touch of the contempt of a practical

administrator: "Every speculative scruple will be solved by a practical

blessing." To the self-consecrated guardians of the Constitution this

was as corrupt as offers of largesses to plebeians at Rome. In his first

message he recommended again the policy of internal improvements, and

proposed the establishment of a national university. Although he

admitted the Constitution to be "a charter of limited powers," he still

intimated his opinion that its powers might "be effectually brought into

action by laws promoting the improvement of agriculture, commerce, and

manufactures, the cultivation and encouragement of the mechanic and of

the elegant arts, the advancement of literature, and the progress of the

sciences, ornamental and profound;" and that to refrain from exercising

these powers for the benefit of the people themselves, would be to hide

the talent in the earth, and a "treachery to the most sacred of trusts."

Further, he now broached the novel project of the congress at Panama,--a

project surely doubtful enough to permit conscientious opposition.

All this was widely different from the messages of content from

President Monroe. There was in these new utterances a clear political

diversion, marked not less by the brilliant and restless genius of Henry

Clay, now the secretary of state, than by the President's consciousness

of his own strong and disciplined ability. Here was a new policy

formally presented by a new administration; and a formal and organized

resistance was as sure to follow as effect to follow cause. Van Buren

was soon at the head of this inevitable opposition. It is difficult, at

least in the records of Congress, to find any evidence justifying the

long tradition that the opposition was factious or unworthy. It was

doubtless a warfare, with its surprises, its skirmishes, and its pitched

battles. Mistakes of the adversary were promptly used. Debates were not

had simply to promote the formal business before the House, but rather

to reach the listening voters. But all this belongs to parliamentary

warfare. Nor is it inconsistent with most exalted aims and an admirable

performance of public business in a free country. Gladstone, the

greatest living master in the work of political reform, has described

himself as an "old parliamentary hand." Nor in the motions, the

resolutions, the debates, led by Van Buren during his three years of

opposition, can one find any device which Palmerston or Derby or

Gladstone in one forum, and Seward and even Adams himself in his last

and best years in another, have not used with little punishment from

disinterested and enduring criticism.

Immediately after Adams's inauguration Van Buren voted for Clay's

confirmation as secretary of state, while Jackson and fourteen other

senators, including Hayne, voted to reject him, upon the unfounded story

of Clay's sale of the presidency to Adams for the office to which he was

now nominated. Van Buren's language and demeanor towards the new

administration were uniformly becoming. He charged political but not

personal wrong-doing; he made no insinuation of base motives; and his

opposition throughout was the more forcible for its very decorum.

The first great battle between the rapidly dividing forces was over the

Panama mission, a creation of Clay's exuberant imagination. The

president nominated to the Senate two envoys to an American congress

called by the new South American republics of Columbia, Mexico, and

Central America, and in which it was proposed that Peru and Chile also

should participate. The congress was to be held at Panama, which, in the

extravagant rhetoric of some of the Republicans of the South, would, if

the world had to elect a capital, be pointed out for that august

destiny, placed as it was "in the centre of the globe." Spain had not

yet acknowledged the independence of her revolted colonies; and it was

clear that the discussions of the congress must be largely concerned

with a mutual protection of American nations which implied an attitude

hostile to Spain. Adams, in his message nominating the envoys, declared

that they were not to take part in deliberations of belligerent

character, or to contract alliances or to engage in any project

importing hostility to any other nation. But referring to the Monroe

doctrine, Adams said that the mission looked to an agreement between the

nations represented, that each would guard by its own means against the

establishment of any future European colony within its borders; and it

looked also to an effort on the part of the United States to promote

religious liberty among those intolerant republics. The decisive

inducement, he added, to join in the congress was to lay the foundation

of future intercourse with those states "in the broadest principles of

reciprocity and the most cordial feelings of fraternal friendship."

This was vague enough. But when the diplomatic papers were exhibited, it

was plain that the southern republics proposed a congress looking to a

close defensive alliance, a sort of confederacy or Amphictyonic council

as Benton described it; and that it was highly improbable that the

representatives from one country could responsibly participate in the

congress without most serious danger of incurring obligations, or

falling into precisely the embarrassments which the well settled policy

of the United States had avoided. It was perfectly agreeable to Adams,

resolute and aggressive American that he was, that his country should

look indulgently upon the smaller American powers, should stand at their

head, should counsel them in their difficulties with European nations,

and jealously take their side in those difficulties. Clay's eager,

enthusiastic mind delighted in the picture of a great leadership of

America by the United States, an American system of nations, breathing

the air of republicanism, asserting a young and haughty independence of

monarchical Europe, and ready for opposition to its schemes. In all this

there has been fascination to many American minds, which even in our own

day we have seen influence American diplomacy. But it was a step into

the entangling alliances against which American public opinion had from

Washington's day been set. When Adams asked an appropriation for the

expenses of the mission, he told the House of Representatives that he

was hardly sanguine enough to promise "all or even any of the

transcendent benefits to the human race which warmed the conceptions of

its first proposer," but that it looked "to the melioration of the

condition of man;" that it was congenial with the spirit which prompted

our own declaration of independence, which dictated our first treaty

with Prussia, and "which filled the hearts and fired the souls of the

immortal founders of our revolution."

Such fanciful speculation the Republicans, led by Van Buren, opposed

with strong and heated protests, in tone not unlike the Liberal protests

of 1878 in England against Disraeli's Jingo policy. In the secret

session of the Senate Van Buren proposed resolutions against the

constitutionality of the mission, reciting that it was a departure from

our wise and settled policy; that, for the conference and discussion

contemplated, our envoys already accredited to the new republics were

competent, without becoming involved as members of the congress. These

resolutions, so the President at once wrote in his opulent and

invaluable diary, "are the fruit of the ingenuity of Martin Van Buren

and bear the impress of his character." The mission was, the opposition

thus insisted, unconstitutional; a step enlarging the sphere of the

federal government; a meddlesome and dangerous interference with foreign

nations; and if it lay in the course of a strong and splendid policy,

it was also part of a policy full of warlike possibilities almost sure

to drag us into old-world quarrels. Clay's "American system," Hayne said

in the senatorial debate, meant restriction and monopoly when applied to

our domestic policy, and "entangling alliances" when applied to our

foreign policy.

Van Buren's speech was very able. He did not touch upon the liberality

of the Spanish Americans towards races other than the Caucasian, which

peered out of Hayne's speech as one of the Southern objections. After

using the wise and seemingly pertinent language of Washington against

such foreign involvements, Van Buren skillfully referred to the very

Prussian treaty which the President had cited in his message to the

House. The elder Adams, the Senate was reminded, had departed from the

rule commended by his great predecessor. He had told his first Congress

that we were indeed to keep ourselves distinct and separate from the

political system of Europe "if we can," but that we needed early and

continual information of political projects in contemplation; that

however we might consider ourselves, others would consider us a weight

in the balance of power in Europe, which never could be forgotten or

neglected; and that it was natural for us, studying to be neutral, to

consult with other nations engaged in the same study. The younger Adams

had been, Van Buren pointed out, appointed upon the Berlin mission to

carry out these heretical suggestions of his father. The Republicans of

that day had vigorously opposed the mission; and for their opposition

were denounced as a faction, and lampooned and vilified "by all the

presses supporting and supported by the government, and a host of

malicious parasites generaled by its patronage." But, covered with

Washington's mantle, the Republicans of '98 had sought to strangle at

its birth this political hydra, this first attempt since the

establishment of the government to subject our political affairs to the

terms and conditions of political connection with a foreign nation.

Probably anticipating the success of the administration senators by a

majority of five, Van Buren ingeniously reminded the Senate that those

early Republicans had failed with a majority of four against them. But

it was to be remembered, he continued, that after a few more such

Federalist victories the ruin of Federalism had been complete. Its

doctrines had speedily received popular condemnation. The new

administration under the presidency of that early minister to Prussia

had returned to the practices of the Federalist party, to which Van

Buren with courteous indirection let it be remembered that the president

had originally belonged. Except a guaranty to Spain of its dominions

beyond the Mississippi, which Jefferson had offered as part of the price

of a cession of the territory between that river and the Mobile, the

administrations of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe had strictly followed

the admonition of Washington: "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship

with all nations, entangling alliances with none." If we were asked to

form a connection with European states, such as was proposed with the

southern republics, Van Buren argued, no American would approve it; and

there was no sound reason, there was nothing but fanciful sentiment, to

induce us to distinguish between the states of Europe and those of South

America. Grant that there was a Holy Alliance in monarchical Europe, was

it not a hollow glory, inconsistent with a sober view of American

interests, to create a holy alliance in republican America? It might

indeed be easy to agree upon speculative opinions with our younger

neighbors at the south; but we should be humiliated in their eyes, and

difficulties would at once arise, when means of promoting those opinions

were proposed, and we were then to say we could talk but not fight. The

Monroe doctrine was not to be withdrawn; but we ought to be left free to

act upon it without the burden of promises, express or implied. The

proposed congress was a specious and disguised step towards an American

confederacy, full of embarrassment, full of danger; and the first step

should be firmly resisted. Such was the outline of Van Buren's argument;

and its wisdom has commanded a general assent from that day.

Dickerson of New Jersey very well phrased sound American sentiment when

he said in the debate that, next to a passion for war, he dreaded a

passion for diplomacy. The majestic declamation of Webster, his

pathetic picture of a South America once oppressed but now emancipated,

his eloquent cry that if it were weak to feel that he was an American it

was a weakness from which he claimed no exemption,--all this met a good

deal of exuberant response through the country. But it failed, as in our

history most such efforts have failed, to convince the practical

judgment of Americans, a judgment never long dazzled or inspired by the

picture of an America wielding enormous or dominant international power.

The Panama congress met in the absence of the American representatives,

who had been delayed. It made a treaty of friendship and perpetual

confederation to which all other American powers might accede within a

year. The congress was to meet annually in time of common war, and

biennially in times of peace. But it never met again. The "centre of the

world" was too far away from its very neighbors. Even South American

republics could not be kept together by effusions of republican glory

and international love.

In spite of its victory in Congress, Adams's administration had plainly

opened with a serious mistake. The opposition was perfectly legitimate;

and although in the debate it was spoken of as unorganized, it certainly

came out of the debate a pretty definite party. Before the debate Adams

had written in his diary, and truly, that it was the first subject upon

which a great effort had been made "to combine the discordant elements

of the Crawford and Jackson and Calhoun men into a united opposition

against the administration." Although some of the Southern opposition

was heated by a dislike of States in which negroes were to be

administrators, the division was not at all upon a North and South line.

With Van Buren voted Findlay of Pennsylvania, Chandler and Holmes of

Maine, Woodbury of New Hampshire, Dickerson of New Jersey, Kane of

Illinois, making seven Northern with twelve Southern senators. Against

Van Buren were eight senators from slave States, Barton of Missouri,

Bouligny and Johnston of Louisiana, Chambers of Alabama, Clayton and Van

Dyke of Delaware, Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, and Smith of Maryland.

It was an incipient but a true party division.

Throughout this session of 1824-25 Van Buren was very industrious in the

Senate, and nearly, if not quite, its most conspicuous member, if

account be not taken of Randolph's furious and blazing talents. Calhoun

was only in the chair as vice-president; the great duel between him and

Van Buren not yet begun. Clay was at the head of the cabinet, and

Webster in the lower House. Jackson was in Tennessee, watching with

angry confidence, and aiding, the rising tide with the political

dexterity in which he was by no means a novice. Having only a minority

with him, and with Benton frequently against him, Van Buren gradually

drilled his party into opposition on internal improvements,--a most

legitimate and important issue. In December, 1825, he threw down the

gauntlet to the administration, or rather took up its gauntlet. He

proposed a resolution "that Congress does not possess the power to make

roads and canals within the respective States." At the same time he

asked for a committee to prepare a constitutional amendment on the

subject like his earlier proposal, saying with a touch of very polite

partisanship that though the President's recent declaration, that the

power clearly existed in the Constitution, might diminish, it did not

obviate the necessity of an amendment. In March, April, and May, 1826,

he opposed appropriations of $110,000 to continue the Cumberland road,

and of $50,000 for surveys preparatory to roads and canals, and

subscriptions to stock of the Louisville and Portland Canal Company and

of the Dismal Swamp Canal Company. All these were distinctly

administration measures.

Although the principles advanced by Van Buren in this part of his

opposition have not since obtained complete and unanimous affirmance,

they have at least commanded so large, honorable, and prolonged support,

that his attitude can with little good sense be considered one of

factious difference. Especially wise was he on the question of

government subscriptions to private canal companies. Upon one of these

bills he said, in May, 1826, that he did not believe that the government

had the constitutional power to make canals or to grant money for them;

but he added that, if he believed otherwise, the grant of money should,

he thought, be made directly, and not by forming a partnership between

the government and a private corporation. In 1824 he had voted for the

road from Missouri to New Mexico; but this stood, as the Pacific railway

later stood, upon a different principle, the former as a road entirely

without state limits and a means of international commerce, and the

latter a road chiefly through federal territories, and of obvious

national importance in the war between the North and the South.

The proposed amendment of the Constitution to prevent the election of

president by a vote of States in the House of Representatives, upon

which Van Buren had spoken in 1824, had now acquired new interest. Van

Buren seized Adams's election in the House as a good subject for

political warfare; and it was clearly a legitimate topic for party

discussion and division. Van Buren would have been far more exalted in

his notions of political agitation than the greatest of political

leaders, had he not sought to use the popular feeling, that the American

will had been subverted by the decision of the House, to promote his

plan of constitutional reform. He told the Senate in May, 1826, that he

was satisfied that there was no one point on which the people of the

United States were more perfectly united than upon the propriety of

taking the choice of president from the House. But Congress was not

ready for the change; however much in theory was to be said against the

clumsy system which nearly made Burr president in 1801,[3] and which

produced in 1825 a choice which Adams himself declared that he would

vacate if the Constitution provided a mode of doing it.

As chairman of the judiciary committee, Van Buren participated in a most

laborious effort to enlarge the federal judiciary. Upon the question

whether the judges of the Supreme Court should be relieved from circuit

duty, he made an elaborate and very able speech upon the negative side.

The opportunity arose for a disquisition on the danger of centralized

government, and for a renewal of the criticisms he had made in the New

York Constitutional Convention upon the common and absurd picture of

judges as dwellers in an atmosphere above all human infirmity, and

beyond the reach of popular impression. Van Buren said, what all

sensible men know, that in spite of every effort, incompetent men will

sometimes reach the judicial bench. If always sitting among associates

_in banc_, their incompetence would be shielded, he said, by their abler

brethren. But if regularly compelled to perform their great duties alone

and in the direct face of the people, and not in the isolation of

Washington, there was another constraint, Van Buren said very

democratically and with substantial truth. "There is a power in public

opinion in this country," he declared, "and I thank God for it, for it

is the most honest and best of all powers, which will not tolerate an

incompetent or unworthy man to hold in his weak or wicked hands the

lives and fortunes of his fellow citizens." He added an expression to

which he would afterwards have given most narrow interpretation. The

Supreme Court stood, he said, "as the umpire between the conflicting

powers of the general and state governments." There was in the speech

very plain though courteous intimation of that jealousy with which Van

Buren's party examined the political utterances of the court from

Jefferson's time until, years after Van Buren's retirement, the party

found it convenient to receive from the court, with a sanctimonious air

of veneration, the most odious and demoralizing of all its expressions

of political opinion. In arguing for a close and democratic relation

between the judges and the different parts of the country, and against

their dignified and exalted seclusion at Washington which was so

agreeable to many patriotic Americans, Van Buren said, in a passage

which is fairly characteristic of his oratorical manner:--

"A sentiment I had almost said of idolatry for the Supreme Court

has grown up, which claims for its members an almost entire

exemption from the fallibilities of our nature, and arraigns with

unsparing bitterness the motives of all who have the temerity to

look with inquisitive eyes into this consecrated sanctuary of the

law. So powerful has this sentiment become, such strong hold has

it taken upon the press of this country, that it requires not a

little share of firmness in a public man, however imperious may be

his duty, to express sentiments that conflict with it. It is

nevertheless correct, sir, that in this, as in almost every other

case, the truth is to be found in a just medium of the subject. To

so much of the high-wrought eulogies (which the fashion of the

times has recently produced in such great abundance) as allows to

the distinguished men who now hold in their hands that portion of

the administration of public affairs, talents of the highest order,

and spotless integrity, I cheerfully add the very humble testimony

of my unqualified assent. That the uncommon man who now presides

over the court, and who I hope may long continue to do so, is, in

all human probability, the ablest judge now sitting upon any

judicial bench in the world, I sincerely believe. But to the

sentiment which claims for the judges so great a share of exemption

from the feelings that govern the conduct of other men, and for the

court the character of being the safest depository of political

power, I do not subscribe. I have been brought up in an opposite

faith, and all my experience has confirmed me in its correctness.

In my legislation upon this subject I will act in conformity to

those opinions. I believe the judges of the Supreme Court (great

and good men as I cheerfully concede them to be) are subject to the

same infirmities, influenced by the same passions, and operated

upon by the same causes, that good and great men are in other

situations. I believe they have as much of the _esprit de corps_ as

other men. Those who think[4] otherwise form an erroneous estimate

of human nature; and if they act upon that estimate, will, soon or

late, become sensible of their delusion."

At this session, upon the election by the Senate of their temporary

president, Van Buren received the compliment of four votes. In May,

1826, he participated in Benton's report on the reduction of executive

patronage, a subject important enough, but there crudely treated. The

report strongly exhibited the jealousy of executive power which had long

been characteristic of American political thought. By describing the

offices within the president's appointment, their numbers and salaries,

and the expense of the civil list, a striking picture was drawn--and in

that way a striking picture can always be drawn--of the power of any

great executive. By imagining serious abuses of power, the picture was

darkened with the dangers of patronage, as it could be darkened to-day.

The country was urged to look forward to the time when public revenue

would be doubled, when the number of public officers would be

quadrupled, when the president's nomination would carry any man through

the Senate, and his recommendation any measure through Congress. Names,

the report said, were nothing. The first Roman emperor was styled

Emperor of the Republic; and the late French emperor had taken a like

title. The American president, it was hinted, might by his enormous

patronage and by subsidies to the press, nominally for official

advertisements, subject us to a like danger. But the usefulness of such

pictures as these of Benton and Van Buren depends upon the practical

lesson taught by the artists. If there were disadvantages and dangers

which our ancestors rightly feared, in placing the federal patronage

under the sole control of the president, so there are disadvantages and

dangers in scattering it by laws into various hands, or in its

subjection to the traditions of "senatorial courtesy."

Six bills accompanied the report. Two of them proposed the appointment

of military cadets and midshipmen, one of each from every congressional

district; and this was afterwards done, giving a petty patronage to

national legislators which public sentiment has but recently begun to

compel them to use upon ascertained merit rather than in sheer

favoritism. A third bill proposed that military and naval commissions

should run "during good behavior" and not "during the pleasure of the

president." A fourth sought with extraordinary unwisdom to correct the

old but ever new abuse of government advertising, by depriving the

responsible executive of its distribution and by placing it in the hands

of congressmen, perhaps the very worst to hold it. Another required

senatorial confirmation for postmasters whose emoluments exceeded an

amount to be fixed. The remaining bill was very wise, and a natural

sequence of Benton's not untruthful though too highly colored picture.

The law of 1820, which fixed at four years the terms of many subordinate

officers, was to be modified so as to limit the terms only for officers

who had not satisfactorily accounted for public moneys. It has been

commonly said that this act was a device of Crawford, when secretary of

the treasury, more easily to use federal patronage for his presidential

canvass. But there seems to be no sufficient reason to doubt that

Benton's and Van Buren's committee correctly stated the intent of the

authors of the law to have been no more than that the officer should be

definitely compelled by the expiration of his term to render his

accounts and have them completely audited; that it was not intended that

some other person should succeed an officer not found in fault; and that

the practice of refusing re-commissions to deserving officers was an

unexpected perversion of the law. The committee simply proposed to

accomplish the true intent of the law. The same bill required the

president to state his reasons for removals of officers when he

nominated their successors. The proposals in the last two bills were

very creditable to Benton and Van Buren and their coadjutors. It is

greatly to be lamented that they were not safely made laws while

patronage was dispensed conscientiously and with sincere public spirit

by the younger Adams, so far as he could control it. The biographer has

more particularly to lament that during the twelve years of Van Buren's

executive influence he seemed daunted by the difficulties of voluntarily

putting in practice the admirable rules which as a senator he would have

imposed by law upon those in executive stations. It was only three

years after this report, that the great chieftain, whom Benton and Van

Buren helped to the presidency, discredited all its reasoning by

proposing "a general extension" of the law whose operation they would

have thus limited. The committee also proposed by constitutional

amendment to forbid the appointment to office of any senator or

representative until the end of the presidential term in which he had

held his seat. This was also one of the reforms whose necessity seems

plain enough to the reformer, until in office he discovers the

conveniences and perhaps the public uses of the practice he has wished

to abolish.

In the short session of 1826-1827, little of any importance was done.

Van Buren refused to vote with Benton to abolish the duty on salt, a

vote doubtless influenced by the apparent interest of New York, which

itself taxed the production of salt to aid the State in its internal

improvements, and which probably could not maintain the tax if foreign

salt were admitted free. Van Buren did not, indeed, avow, nor did he

disavow this reason. He was content to point out that the great canals

of New York were of national use, though their expense was borne by his

State alone. He voted at this session for lower duties on teas, coffees,

and wines. He did not join Benton and others in their narrow

unwillingness to establish a naval academy. Van Buren's temper was

eminently free from raw prejudices against disciplined education. The

death of one of the envoys to the Panama congress enabled him again at

this session to renew his opposition by a vote against filling the

vacancy. Another attempt was made to pass a bankruptcy bill; but again

it failed through the natural and wholesome dislike of increasing the

powers of the federal judiciary, and the preference that state courts

and laws should perform all the work to which they were reasonably

competent. The bill did not even pass the Senate, until by Van Buren's

opposition it had been reduced to a bill establishing a summary and

speedy remedy for creditors against fraudulent or failing traders,

instead of a general system of bankruptcy, voluntary and involuntary,

for all persons. Van Buren's speech against the insolvency features of

the bill was made on January 23, 1827, only a few days before his

successor as senator was to be chosen. But the thoughtless popularity

which often accompanies sweeping propositions of relief to insolvents

did not move him from resolute and successful opposition to what he

called (and later experience has most abundantly justified him) "an

injurious extension of the patronage of the federal government, and an

insupportable enlargement of the range of its judicial power." On

February 24, 1827, a few days after his reëlection, he delivered a lucid

and elaborate speech on the long-perplexing topic of the restrictions

upon American trade with the British colonies, a subject to be

afterwards closely connected with his political fortunes.

The agitation of the coming presidential election left little of its

turbulence upon the records of the long session from December, 1827, to

May, 1828. Van Buren was doubtless busy enough out of the senate

chamber. But he was still a very busy legislator. He spoke at least

twice in favor of the bill to abolish imprisonment under judgments

rendered by federal courts for debts not fraudulently incurred, the bill

which Richard M. Johnson had pressed so long and so honorably; and at

last he saw the bill pass in January, 1828. He spoke often upon the

technical bill to regulate federal judicial process. Again he voted, and

again in a minority and in opposition to Benton and other political

friends, against bills to extend the Cumberland road and for other

internal improvements. Besides the usual bills to appropriate lands for

roads and canals, and to subscribe to the stock of private canal

companies, a step further was now taken in the constitutional change led

by Adams and Clay. Public land was voted for the benefit of Kenyon

College, in the State of Ohio. There was plainly intended to be no limit

to federal beneficence. In this session Van Buren again rushed to defend

the salt duty so dear to New York.

At the same session was passed the "tariff of abominations," a measure

so called from the oppressive provisions loaded on it by its enemies,

but in spite of which it passed. Van Buren, though he sat still during

the debate, cast for the bill a protectionist vote, with Benton and

several others whose convictions were against it, but who yielded to

the supposed public sentiment or the peremptory instructions of their

States, or who did not yet dare to make upon the tariff a presidential

issue. The votes of the senators were sectionally thus distributed: For

the tariff,--New England, 6; Middle States, 8; Louisiana, 1; and the

Western States, 11; in all 26. Against it,--New England, 5; Maryland, 2;

Southern States, 13; and Tennessee, 1. It was a victory of neither

political party, but of the Middle and Western over the Southern States.

Only three negative votes were cast by senators who had voted against

the administration on the Panama question in 1826; while of the votes

for the tariff, fourteen were cast by senators who had then opposed the

administration. Of the senators in favor of the tariff, six, Van Buren,

Benton, Dickerson of New Jersey, Eaton of Tennessee (Jackson's close

friend), Kane of Illinois, and Rowan of Kentucky, had in 1826 been in

opposition, while ten of those voting against the tariff had then been

with them.[5] The greater number of the opposition senators were

therefore against the tariff, though very certainly the votes of Van

Buren, Benton, and Eaton prevented the opposition from taking strong

ground or suffering injury on the tariff in the election. Van Buren's

silence in this debate of 1828 indicated at least a temper now hesitant.

But he and his colleague, Sanford, according to the theory then popular

that senators were simply delegated agents of their States, were

constrained, whatever were their opinions, by a resolution of the

legislature of New York passed almost unanimously in January, 1828. It

stated a sort of _ultima ratio_ of protection, commanding the senators

"to make every proper exertion to effect such a revision of the tariff

as will afford a sufficient protection to the growers of wool, hemp, and

flax, and the manufacturers of iron, woolens, and every other article,

so far as the same may be connected with the interest of manufactures,

agriculture, and commerce." The senators might perhaps have said to this

that, if they were to protect not only iron and woolens but also every

other article, they ought not to levy prohibitory duties on some and not

on other articles; that if they were equally to protect manufactures,

agriculture, and commerce, they could do no better than to let natural

laws alone. But the silly instruction said what no intelligent

protectionist means; his system disappears with an equality of

privilege; that equality must, he argues, at some point yield to

practical necessities. Van Buren took the resolution, however, in its

intended meaning, and not literally. Hayne concluded his fine struggle

against the bill by a solemn protest upon its passage that it was a

partial, unjust, and unconstitutional measure.

At this session Van Buren, upon the consideration of a rule giving the

Vice-President power to call to order for words spoken in debate, made

perhaps the most elaborate of his purely political speeches. It was a

skillful and not unsuccessful effort to give philosophical significance

to the coming struggle at the polls. He spoke of "that collision, which

seems to be inseparable from the nature of man, between the rights of

the few and the many," of "those never-ceasing conflicts between the

advocates of the enlargement and concentration of power on the one hand,

and its limitation and distribution on the other." The one party, he

said, had "grown out of a deep and settled distrust of the people and of

the States:" the other, out of "a jealousy of power justified by all

human experience." The advocates of "a strong government," having been

defeated in much that they sought in the federal convention, had since,

he said, "been at work to obtain by construction what was not included

or intended to be included in the grant." He declared the incorporation

of the United States Bank to be the "great pioneer of constitutional

encroachments." Thence had followed those famous usurpations, the alien

and sedition laws of the older Adams's administration. Then came the

doctrine that the House of Representatives was bound to make all

appropriations necessary to carry out a treaty made by the President and

Senate; and then "the bold avowal that it belonged to the President

alone to decide upon the propriety" of a foreign mission, and that it

was for the Senate only "to pass on the fitness of the individuals

selected as ministers." He lamented the single lapse of Madison, "one

of the most, if not the most, accomplished statesman that our country

has produced," in signing the bill to incorporate the new bank. The

younger Adams, Van Buren declared, had "gone far beyond the utmost

latitude of construction" therefore claimed; and he added a reference,

decorous enough but neither fair nor gracious, to Adams's own early

entrance in the public service upon a mission unauthorized by Congress.

It was now demonstrated, he said, that the result of the presidential

choice of 1825 "was not only the restoration of the men of 1798, but of

the principles of that day." The spirit of encroachment had, it was

true, become more wary; but it was no more honest. The system had then

been coercion; now it was seduction. Then unconstitutional powers had

been exercised to force submission; now they were assumed to purchase

golden opinions from the people with their own means. Isolated acts of

the Federalists had not produced an unyielding exclusion from the

confidence of a majority of the people, for more than a quarter of a

century, of large masses of men distinguished for talent and private

worth. The great and glorious struggle had proceeded from something

deeper, an opposition to the principle of an extension of the

constructive powers of the government. Without harsh denunciation, and

by suggestion rather than assertion, the administration of John Quincy

Adams was grouped with the administration of his father. The earlier

administration had deserved and met the retribution of a Republican

victory. The later one now deserved and ought soon to meet a like fate.

The issue was clearly made. The parties were formed. The result rested

with the people. On February 6, 1827, Van Buren had been reëlected

senator by a large majority in both houses of the New York legislature.

In his brief letter of acceptance he said no more on public questions

than that it should be his "constant and zealous endeavor to protect the

remaining rights reserved to the States by the federal Constitution,"

and "to restore those of which they have been divested by construction."

This had been the main burden of his political oratory from the

inauguration of Adams. There are many references in books to doubts of

Van Buren's position until 1827; but such doubts are not justified in

the face of his prompt and perfectly explicit utterances in the session

of 1825-1826, and from that time steadily on.

De Witt Clinton's death on February 11, 1828, removed from the politics

of New York one of its most illustrious men, a statesman of the first

rank, able and passionate, and of the noblest aspirations. The

understanding reached between him and Van Buren in 1826, for the support

of Jackson, had not produced a complete coalition. In spite of the union

on Jackson, the Bucktails nominated and Van Buren loyally supported for

governor against Clinton in 1826, William B. Rochester, a warm friend

and supporter of Adams and Clay, and one of the members of the very

Panama mission against which so strenuous a fight had been made. Clinton

was reëlected by a small majority. In a meeting at Washington after his

death, Van Buren declared the triumph of his talents and patriotism to

be monuments of high and enduring fame. He was glad that, though in

their public careers there had been "collisions of opinions and action

at once extensive, earnest, and enduring," they had still been "wholly

free from that most venomous and corroding of all poisons, personal

hatred." These collisions were now "turned to nothing and less than

nothing." Speaking of his respect for Clinton's name and gratitude for

his signal services, Van Buren concluded with this striking tribute:

"For myself, so strong, so sincere, and so engrossing is that feeling,

that I, who whilst living, never--no, never, envied him anything, now

that he has fallen, am greatly tempted to envy him his grave with its

honors."

With this session of 1827-1828 ended Van Buren's senatorial career and

his parliamentary leadership. From 1821 to 1828 the Senate was not

indeed at its greatest glory. Webster entered it only in December, 1827.

Hayne and Benton with Van Buren are to us its most distinguished

members, if Randolph's rather indescribable and useless personality may

be excepted. But to neither of them has the opinion of later times

assigned a place in the first rank of orators, although Hayne's tariff

speech in 1824 deserves to be set with the greatest of American

political orations. The records and speeches of the Senate in which Van

Buren sat have come to us with fine print and narrow margins; they have

not contributed to the collected works of great men. But the Senate was

then an able body. The principles of American politics were never more

clearly stated. When the books are well dusted, and one has broken

through the starched formality in which the speakers' phrases were set,

he finds a copious fund of political instruction. The federal Senate was

more truly a parliamentary body in those formative days than perhaps at

any other period. Several at least of its members were in doubt as to

the political course they should follow; they were in doubt where they

should find their party associations. To them, debates had therefore a

real and present significance. There were some votes to be affected,

there were converts to be gained, by speeches even on purely political

questions; there were some senators whose votes were not inexorably

determined for them by the will of their parties or their constituents.

Much that was said had therefore a genuine parliamentary ring. The

orators really sought to convince and persuade those who heard them

within the easy and almost conversational limits of the old senate

chamber. There was little of the mere pronouncing of essays or

declamations intended to have their real and only effect elsewhere. In

this art of true parliamentary speaking rather than oratory, Van Buren

was a master such as Lord Palmerston afterwards became. He was not

eloquent. His speeches, so far as they are preserved, interest the

student of political history and not of literature. They are sensible,

clear, practical arguments made in rather finished sentences. One does

not find quotations from them in books of school declamation. But they

served far more effectively the primary end of parliamentary speaking

than did the elaborate and powerful disquisitions of Calhoun, or the

more splendid flood of Webster's eloquence. Van Buren's speeches were

intended to convince, and they did convince some of the men in the seats

about him. They were meant to persuade, and they did persuade. They were

lucid exhibitions of political principles, generally practical, and

touched sufficiently but not morbidly with the theoretical fears so

common to our earlier politics. Some of those fears have since been

shown to be groundless; but out of many of them has come much that is

best in the modern temper of American political institutions. Van

Buren's speeches did not rise beyond the reach of popular understanding,

although they never warmly touched popular sympathy. They were intended

to formulate and spread a political faith in which he plainly saw that

there was the material of a party,--a faith founded upon the jealousy of

federal activity, however beneficent, which sought to avoid state

control or encourage state dependence. The prolixity which was a grave

fault of his state papers and political letters was far less exhibited

in his oratorical efforts. His style was generally easy and vigorous,

with little of the turgid learning which loaded down many sensible

speeches of the time. Now and then, however, he resorted to the

sentences of stilted formality which sometimes overtake a good public

speaker, as a good actor sometimes lapses into the stage strut.

In Van Buren's senatorial speeches there is nothing to justify the

charge of "non-committalism" so much made against him. When he spoke at

all he spoke explicitly; and he plainly, though without acerbity,

exhibited his likes and dislikes. Jackson was struck with this when he

sat in the Senate with him. "I had heard a great deal about Mr. Van

Buren," he said, "especially about his non-committalism. I made up my

mind that I would take an early opportunity to hear him and judge for

myself. One day an important subject was under debate in the Senate. I

noticed that Mr. Van Buren was taking notes while one of the senators

was speaking. I judged from this that he intended to reply, and I

determined to be in my seat when he spoke. His turn came; and he rose

and made a clear, straightforward argument, which, to my mind, disposed

of the whole subject. I turned to my colleague, Major Eaton, who sat

next to me. 'Major,' said I, 'is there anything non-committal about

that?' 'No, sir,' said the major." Van Buren scrupulously observed the

amenities of debate. He was uniformly courteous towards adversaries; and

the calm self-control saved him, as some greater orators were not

saved, from a descent to the aspersion of motive so common and so futile

in political debate. He could not, indeed, help now and then an allusion

to the venality and monarchical tendency of the Federalists and their

successors; but this was an old formula which strong haters had years

before made very popular in the Republican phrase-book, and which, as to

the venality, meant nobody in particular.