Volume I Part 20 (1/2)
Tompkins' public life continued four years longer. In the autumn of 1820, the Legislature balanced his accounts and the country re-elected him Vice President. The next year his party made him a delegate to the const.i.tutional convention, and the convention made him its president; but he never recovered from the chagrin and mortification of his defeat for the governors.h.i.+p. Soon after the election, melancholy accounts appeared of the havoc wrought upon a frame once so full of animal spirits. He began to drink too freely even for those days of deep drink. His eye lost its l.u.s.tre; deep lines furrowed the round, sunny face; the unruffled temper became irritable; and, within three months after the close of his second term as Vice President, before he had entered his fifty-second year, he was dead.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE ALBANY REGENCY
1820-1822
When the Legislature a.s.sembled to appoint presidential electors in November, 1820, Bucktail fear of Clinton was at an end for the present. Before, his name had been one to conjure with; thenceforth it was to have no terrors. He had, indeed, been re-elected governor, but the small majority, scarcely exceeding one per cent. of the total vote, showed that he was now merely an independent, and a very independent member, of the Republican party. To the close of his career he was certain to be a commanding figure, around whom all party dissenters would quickly and easily rally; but it was now an individual figure, almost an eccentric figure, whose work as a political factor seemed to be closed.
Yet Clinton was not ready to go into a second retirement. On the theory, as he wrote Henry Post, that ”the meekness of Quakerism will do in religion, but not in politics,”[207] he looked about him for something to arouse public attention and to excite public indignation, and, for the want of a better subject, he charged the Monroe administration with interference in the recent state election. Post advised caution; but Clinton, stung by the defeat of his friends and by his own narrow escape, had become possessed with the suspicion that federal officials had used the patronage of the government against him. So, in his speech to the Legislature in November, he protested against the outrage. ”If the officers under the appointment of the federal government,” he declared, ”shall see fit as an organised and disciplined corps to interfere in state elections, I trust there will be found a becoming disposition in the people to resist these alarming attempts upon the purity and independence of their local governments.”[208] Clinton had no evidence upon which to support this charge. It was, at best, only a suspicion based upon his own methods; but the Senate demanded proof, and failing to get specifications, it declared it ”highly improper that the Chief Magistrate of the State should incriminate the administration of the general government, without ample testimony in his possession.” The resolutions closed with an expression of confidence in the patriotism and integrity of the government.
[Footnote 207: DeWitt Clinton's Letters to Henry Post, in _Harper's Magazine_, Vol. 50, p. 413.]
[Footnote 208: _Governors' Speeches_, November 7, 1820, p. 179.]
Meanwhile, Clinton was urging Post to help him out of his difficulty.
”I want authenticated testimony of the interference of the general government in our elections,” he wrote on November 19. ”Our friends must be up and doing on this subject. It is all important.”[209] Eight days later he stirred up Post again. ”What is the annual amount of patronage of the national government in this State?” he asked.[210]
”Knowing the accuracy of your calculations, I rely much on you.” Then he developed his plan: ”The course of exposition ought, I think, to be this--to collect a voluminous ma.s.s of doc.u.ments detailing facts, and to form from them a lucid, intelligible statement. On the representation of facts recourse must also be had to inferences, and it ought also to unite boldness and prudence.”[211] It is evident that thus far inferences outnumbered facts, for far into December Clinton was still calling upon his friends to collect testimony. ”Go on with your collection of proofs,” he wrote. ”I think with a little industry this matter will stand well.”[212]
[Footnote 209: DeWitt Clinton's Letters to Henry Post, in _Harper's Magazine_, Vol. 50, p. 413.]
[Footnote 210: _Ibid._, Vol. 50, p. 413.]
[Footnote 211: _Ibid._, Vol. 50, p. 414.]
[Footnote 212: _Ibid._, Vol. 50, p. 415.]
When submitted to the Legislature, on January 17, 1821, the doc.u.ments, according to the Governor's instructions, were indeed very voluminous.
It required a bag to take them to the capitol--the green bag message, it was called; but it proved to be smoke, with little fire. It fully established that the naval storekeeper at Brooklyn, and other federal officials were offensive partisans, just as they had been under Clinton's control, and just as they have been ever since. The Bucktails saw distinctly enough that the State could not be aroused into indignation by such a ma.s.s of doc.u.ments; but there was one letter from Van Buren to Henry Meigs, the congressman, dated April 5, 1820, advising the removal of postmasters at Bath, Little Falls, and Oxford, because it seemed impossible to secure the free circulation of Bucktail newspapers in the interior of the State, which provoked much criticism. How the Governor got it does not appear, but it gives a glimpse of Van Buren's political methods that is interesting. ”Unless we can alarm them (the Clintonians) by two or three prompt removals,”
he says, ”there is no limiting the injurious consequences that may result from it.”
Soon after, two of the postmasters were removed. If the charge was true, that postmasters were preventing the circulation of Bucktail newspapers, Van Buren's course was very charitable. Evidently he did not want places for his friends so much as a proper delivery of the mails; for otherwise he would have insisted upon the removal of all offenders. The gentle suggestion that the removal of two or three would be a warning to others, explains how this devout lover of men lived through a long life on most intimate terms with his neighbours.
If such conditions existed under the modern management of the Post-Office Department, every wrong-doer would be summarily dismissed, regardless of party or creed. Van Buren's methods had no such drastic discipline; yet his letter became the subject of much animadversion by the Clintonians, not so much because they disapproved the suggestion as because Van Buren wrote it. ”It is very important to destroy this prince of villains,” Clinton declared, in a letter to Post of December 2, 1820.[213]
[Footnote 213: DeWitt Clinton's Letters to Henry Post, in _Harper's Magazine_, Vol. 50, p. 415.
Clearly discerning Van Buren as his most formidable compet.i.tor for political leaders.h.i.+p, Clinton's letters to Post from 1817 to 1824 abound in vituperative allusions, as, for example: ”Whom shall we appoint to defeat the arch scoundrel Van Buren?” November 30, 1820.
”Of his cowardice there can be no doubt. He is lowering daily in public opinion, and is emphatically a corrupt scoundrel,” August 30, 1820. ”Van Buren is now excessively hated out of the State as well as in it. There is no doubt of a corrupt sale of the vote of the State, although it cannot be proved in a court of justice,” August 6, 1824.
”We can place no reliance upon the goodwill of Van Buren. In his politics he is a confirmed knave.” And again: ”With respect to Van Buren, there is no developing the man. He is a scoundrel of the first magnitude, ... without any fixture of principle or really of virtue.”
”Van Buren must be conquered through his fears. He has no heart, no sincerity.”]
Like many other brilliant political leaders, Van Buren was somewhat thin-skinned; he happened, too, to be out of the State Senate, and thus was compelled to endure, in silence, the attacks of the opposition. It is believed that at this time, Van Buren had a strong inclination to accept a Supreme Court judges.h.i.+p, and thus withdraw forever from political life. But the fates denied him any chance of making this serious anti-climax in his great political career. While the green bag message convulsed the Clintonians with simulated indignation, the Bucktails declared him, by a caucus vote of fifty-eight to twenty-four, their choice for United States senator in place of Nathan Sanford, whose term expired on March 4, 1821.
It appeared then as it appears now, that Martin Van Buren was ”the inevitable man.” He was thirty-nine years of age, in the early ripeness of his powers, a leader at the bar, and the leader of his party. He had acc.u.mulated from his practice the beginnings of the fortune which his Dutch thrift and cautious habits made ample for his needs. The simple and natural rules governing his astute political leaders.h.i.+p seemed to leave him without a rival, or, at least, without an opponent who could get in his way. Times had changed, too, since the days when United States senators resigned to become postmasters and mayors of New York. A seat in the United States Senate had become a great honour, because it was a place of great power and great influence; and in pa.s.sing from Albany to Was.h.i.+ngton Van Buren would add to state leaders.h.i.+p an opportunity of becoming a national figure.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Clinton sought to defeat him; for he had ever been ready to retaliate upon men who ventured to cross his purposes. But Clinton's scheme had no place in the plans of Bucktails. ”I am afraid Van Buren will beat Sanford for senator,” he wrote Post as early as the 30th of December, 1820. ”He will unless his friends stand out against a caucus decision.”[214] This is what Clinton wanted the twenty-four Sanford delegates to do, and, to encourage such a bolt, he compelled every Federalist and Clintonian, save one, to vote for him, although Sanford represented Tammany and its bitter hostility to Clinton. But the Bucktails had at last established a party organisation that could not be divided by Clinton intrigue, and Van Buren received the full party vote.
[Footnote 214: DeWitt Clinton's Letters to Henry Post, in _Harper's Magazine_, Vol. 50, p. 414.]