CANDIDATE FOR THE VICE-PRESIDENCY
During the twelve years that Mr. Gallatin was in the Treasury he was
continually looking for some man who could take his place in that
office, and aid in the direction of national politics; to use his own
words, "who could replace Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Madison, and himself."
Breckenridge of Kentucky only appeared and died. The eccentricities of
John Randolph unfitted him for leadership. William H. Crawford of
Georgia, Monroe's secretary of the treasury, alone filled Gallatin's
expectations. To a powerful mind Crawford "united a most correct
judgment and an inflexible integrity. Unfortunately he was neither
indulgent nor civil, and, consequently, was unpopular." Andrew Jackson,
Gallatin said, "was an honest man, and the idol of the worshipers of
military glory, but from incapacity, military habits, and habitual
disregard of laws and constitutional provisions, entirely unfit for the
office of president." John C. Calhoun he looked upon as "a smart fellow,
one of the first amongst second-rate men, but of lax political
principles and an inordinate ambition, not over-delicate in the means of
satisfying itself." Clay he considered to be a man of splendid talents
and a generous mind; John Quincy Adams to be 'wanting to a deplorable
degree in that most essential quality, a sound and correct judgment.'
The contest lay between Adams and Crawford. Crawford was the choice of
Jefferson and Madison as well as of Gallatin. The principles of the
Republican party had so changed that Nathaniel Macon could say in 1824,
in reply to a request from Mr. Gallatin to take part in a caucus for the
purpose of forwarding Mr. Crawford's nomination, that there were "not
five members of Congress who entertained the opinions which those did
who brought Mr. Jefferson into power." But Macon was of the Brutus stamp
of politicians; of that stern cast of mind which does not 'alter when it
alteration finds or bend with the remover to remove,' and held yielding
to the compulsion of circumstances to be an abandonment of principle.
Jefferson still held the consolidation of power to be the chief danger
of the country, and the barrier of state rights, great and small, to be
its only protection even against the Supreme Court. Gallatin took
broader ground, and found encouragement in the excellent working of
universal suffrage in the choice of representatives to legislative
bodies. But he was opposed to the extension of the principle to
municipal officers having the application of the proceeds of taxes,
forgetting that universal suffrage is the lever by which capital is
moved to educate labor and relieve it from the burdens of injury,
disease, and physical incapacity at the expense of the whole. Without
stopping to argue these debatable questions, Mr. Gallatin, with
practical statesmanship, determined to maintain in power the only agency
by which he could at all shape the political future, and he threw
himself into the canvass with zeal.
Crawford had unfortunately been stricken with paralysis, and the choice
of a vice-president became a matter of grave concern. Mr. Gallatin was
selected to take this place on the ticket. To this tender he replied
that he did not want the office, but would dislike to be proposed and
not elected, and he honestly felt that as a foreigner and a residuary
legatee of Federal hatred his name could not be of much service to the
cause. Still, he followed the only course by which any party can be held
together, and surrendered his prejudices and fears to the wishes of his
friends. The Republican caucus met on February 14, 1824, in the chamber
of the House of Representatives. Of the 216 members of the party only 66
attended. Martin Van Buren, then senator from New York, managed this,
the last congressional caucus for the selection of candidates.
The solemnity given to the congressional nominations, and the publicity
of the answers of candidates, Mr. Gallatin held to be political
blunders. In fact the plan was adroitly denounced as an attempt to
dictate to the people.
Crawford was nominated for president by 64 votes, Gallatin for
vice-president by 57. This nomination Mr. Gallatin accepted in a note to
Mr. Ruggles, United States senator, on May 10, 1824. But there were
elements of which party leaders of the old school had not taken
sufficient account. Macon was right when he said that "every generation,
like a single person, has opinions of its own, as much so in politics as
anything else," and that 'the opinions of Jefferson and those who were
with him were forgotten.' And Jefferson himself, in his complacent
reflection that even the name of Federalist was "extinguished by the
battle of New Orleans," did not see that the Republican party of the old
school had been snuffed out by the same event. The new democracy, whose
claims to rule were based, not on the policy of peace or restricted
powers, but on the seductive glitter of military glory, was in the
ascendant, and General Jackson was the favorite of the hour. New
combinations became necessary, and Mr. Gallatin was requested to
withdraw from the ticket, and make room for Mr. Clay, whose great
western influence it was hoped would save it from defeat. This he gladly
did in a declaration of October 2, addressed to Martin Van Buren, dated
at his Fayette home, and published in the "National Intelligencer." The
result of the election was singular. Calhoun was elected vice-president
by the people. The presidential contest was decided in the House, Adams
being chosen over Jackson and Crawford, by the influence of Clay. Mr.
Gallatin quickly discerned in the failure of the people to elect a
president the collapse of the Republican party. He considered it as
"fairly defunct."
Jackson had already announced the startling doctrine that no regard was
to be had to party in the selection of the great officers of government,
which Mr. Gallatin considered as tantamount to a declaration that
principles and opinions were of no importance in its administration. To
lose sight of this principle was to substitute men for measures.
Jackson's idea of party, however, was personal fealty. He engrafted the
_pouvoir personnel_ on the Democratic party as thoroughly as Napoleon
could have done in his place. Moreover, Gallatin considered Jackson's
assumption of power in his collisions with the judiciary at New Orleans
and Pensacola, and his orders to take St. Augustine without the
authority of Congress, as dangerous assaults upon the Constitution of
the country and the liberties of the people, and he dreaded the
substitution of the worship of a military chieftain for the maintenance
of that liberty, the last hope of man. Ten years later he uttered the
same opinion in a conversation with Miss Martineau, and he expressed a
preference for an annual president, a cipher, so that all would be done
by the ministry. But in the impossibility of this plan, he would have
preferred a four years' term without renewal or an extension of six
years; an idea adopted by Davis in his plan of disintegration by
secession. The presidency, Mr. Gallatin thought, was "too much power
for one man; therefore it fills all men's thoughts to the detriment of
better things."
When Mr. Gallatin visited Washington in 1829, he found a state of
society, political and social, widely at variance with his own
experience. The ways of Federalist and Republican cabinets were
traditions of an irrevocable past. Jackson was political dictator, and
took counsel only from his prejudices. The old simplicity had given way
to elegance and luxury of adornment. The east room of the presidential
mansion was covered with Brussels carpeting. There were silk curtains at
the windows, French mirrors of unusual size, and three splendid English
crystal chandeliers. In the dining-room were a hundred candles and
lamps, and silver plate of every description, and presiding over this
magnificence the strange successors of Washington and his stately dame,
of Madison and his no less elegant wife,--the Tennessee backwoodsman and
Peggy O'Neil.
When, it is not too soon to ask, in the general reform of civil service,
shall the possibility of such anomalies be entirely removed by
restricting the executive mansion to an executive bureau, and entirely
separating social ceremony from official state, to the final suppression
of back stairs influence and kitchen cabinets?