Volume II Part 3 (2/2)
Friends of the New Yorker loved to dwell upon his courage in thus placing himself in the chasm between failing banks and a patriotic people, often paralleling it with the historic leap of Marcus Curtius into the Roman Forum to save the republic. ”But with this difference,”
once exclaimed Andrew B. d.i.c.kinson, an unlearned but brilliant Steuben County Whig, generally known as Bray d.i.c.kinson: ”the Roman feller jumped into the gap of his own accord, but the people throw'd Van Buren in!”
On August 12, 1840, the Whigs renominated William H. Seward for governor, and in the following month the Democrats named William C.
Bouck. There was a rugged honesty and ability about Bouck that commended him to the people. He was not brilliant; he rarely attempted to speak in public; and his education had been limited to a few months of school in each winter; but he was a shrewd, wise Schoharie farmer, well read in the ways of men and in the book of the world. Seward thought him ”a kind, honest, amiable, and sagacious man, his easy and fascinating manners lacking neither dignity nor grace.” Beginning as town clerk, Bouck had served acceptably as sheriff, a.s.semblyman, and for nineteen years as ca.n.a.l commissioner, personally superintending the construction of the ca.n.a.l from Brockport to Lake Erie, and disbursing, without loss, eight millions of dollars. He had travelled up and down the State until the people came to know him as ”the old white horse,” in allusion to a favourite animal which he rode for many years; and to labourers and contractors his election became a matter of the greatest personal interest.
But the hards.h.i.+ps growing out of the panic of 1837 and the crisis of 1839 guided the actions of men. It made little difference to them that Bouck had been a faithful, prudent, and zealous supporter of the ca.n.a.ls, or that, like DeWitt Clinton, he had been removed as ca.n.a.l commissioner on purely political grounds. The issues were national--not state. Van Buren clearly saw the force and direction of public sentiment. Yet his sub-treasury measure, so beneficent in its aims that its theory was not lost in the necessities growing out of the Civil War, proved the strongest weapon in the armory of his opponents. Webster, with mingled pathos and indignation, denounced his ”disregard for the public distress” by his ”exclusive concern for the interest of government and revenue,” declaring that help must come to the people ”from the government of the United States--from thence alone!” This was the cry of the greenbacker in 1876 and the argument of the free silver advocate in 1896. ”Upon this,” said Webster, ”I risk my political reputation, my honour, my all. He who expects to live to see these twenty-six States resuming specie payments in regular succession once more, may expect to see the restoration of the Jews. Never. He will die without the sight.” Yet Webster lived to see the resumption of specie payments in a very short time, and he lived long enough also to exclude this St. Louis speech from his collected works. Nevertheless, Webster's eloquence contributed to Van Buren's overwhelming defeat.
Much has been written of the historic campaign of 1840. The enthusiasm has been called ”frenzy” and ”crazy fanatacism.” It has also been likened to the crusading spirit, aroused by the preaching of Peter the Hermit. ”The nation,” said Clay, ”was like the ocean when convulsed by some terrible storm.” Webster declared that ”every breeze says change; the cry, the universal cry, is for a change.” Long before campaigns usually begin New York was a blaze of excitement. Halls were insufficient to hold the crowds. Where hundreds had formerly a.s.sembled, thousands now appeared. The long lines of wagons, driven to the meeting places, raised clouds of dust such as mark the moving of armies. The Whig state convention at Utica became a ma.s.s-meeting of twenty-five thousand people, who formed into one great parade. ”How long is this procession?” asked a bystander of one of the marshals.
”Indeed, sir, I cannot tell,” was the reply. ”The other end of it is forming somewhere near Albany.”
The canva.s.s became one of song, of a.s.sociation, and of imagination, which aroused thoughts that were intensely animating and absorbing.
The taunt of a Virginia newspaper that Harrison should remain in his log cabin on the banks of the Ohio made the log cabin ”a symbol,” as Weed happily expressed it, ”of virtue that dwells in obscurity, of the hopes of the humble, of the privations of the poor, of toil and danger, of hospitality and charity and frugality.” Log cabins sprang up like gourds in a night. At the door, stood the cider barrel, and, hanging by the window, the omnipresent c.o.o.nskin swayed in the breeze.
They appeared on medals, in pictures, in fancy work, and in processions. Horace Greeley, who had done so much in 1838 through the columns of the _Jeffersonian_, now began the publication of the _Log Cabin_, filling whole sides of it with songs elaborately set to music, and making it so universally popular that the New York _Tribune_, established in the following year, became its legitimate successor in ability and in circulation.
In his biography of Henry Clay, Schurz says that in no presidential canva.s.s has there ever been ”less thought.” It is likely if there had been no log cabins, no cider, no c.o.o.n-skins, and no songs, the result would have been the same, for, in the presence of great financial distress, the people seek relief very much as they empty a burning building. But the reader of the _Log Cabin_ will find thought enough.
Greeley's editorials summed up the long line of mistakes leading to the panic of 1837, and the people understood the situation. They were simply unwilling longer to trust the party in power.
Evidence of this distrust astonished Democrats as much as it pleased the Whigs. The September election in Maine, followed in October by the result in Ohio and Indiana, both of which gave large Whig majorities, antic.i.p.ated Harrison's overwhelming election in November. In New York, however, the returns were somewhat disappointing to the Whigs.
Harrison carried the State by thirteen thousand majority, receiving in all 234 electoral votes to 60 for Van Buren; but Seward's majority of ten thousand in 1838 now dropped to five thousand,[316] while the Whig majority in the a.s.sembly was reduced to four.
[Footnote 316: William H. Seward, 222,011; William C. Bouck, 216,808.--_Civil List, State of New York_ (1887), p. 166.]
Seward's weakness undoubtedly grew out of his message in the preceding January. With the approval of Dr. Knott of Union College, and Dr.
Luckey, a distinguished Methodist divine, he recommended the establishment of separate schools for the children of foreigners and their instruction by teachers of the same faith and language. The suggestion created an unexpected and bitter controversy. Influential journals of both parties professed to see in it only a desire to win Catholic favour, charging that Bishop Hughes of New York City had inspired the recommendation. At that time, the Governor had neither met nor been in communication, with the Catholic prelate; but, in the excitement, truth could not outrun misstatement, nor could the patriotism that made Seward solicitous to extend school advantages to the children of foreign parents, who were growing up in ignorance, be understood by zealous churchmen.
After his defeat, Van Buren retired to Lindenwald, in the vicinity of Kinderhook, his native village, where he was to live twenty-one years, dying at the age of eighty. Lindenwald was an old estate, whose acres had been cultivated for one hundred and sixty years. William P. Van Ness, the distinguished jurist and orator, once owned it, and, thirty years before the ex-President bought it, Irving had secluded himself amidst its hills, while he mourned the death of his betrothed, and finished the _Knickerbocker_. As the home of Van Buren, Lindenwald did not, perhaps, become a Monticello or a Montpelier. Jefferson and Madison, having served eight years, the allotted term of honour, had formally retired, and upon them settled the halo of peace and triumph that belongs to the sage; but life at Lindenwald, with its leisure, its rural quiet, and its freedom from public care, satisfied Van Buren's bucolic tastes, and no doubt greatly mitigated the anguish arising from bitter defeat, the proscription of friends, and the loss of party regard which he was destined to suffer during the next decade.
CHAPTER IV
HUMILIATION OF THE WHIGS
1841-1842
The Whig state convention, a.s.sembled at Syracuse on October 7, 1842, looked like the ghost of its predecessor in 1840. The buoyancy which then stamped victory on every face had given place to fear and forebodings. Eighteen months had left nothing save melancholy recollections. Even the log cabins, still in place, seemed to add to Whig depression, being silent reminders of the days when melody and oratory, prophetic of success, filled hearts which could no longer be touched with hope and faith. This meant that the Whigs, in the election of 1841, had suffered a decisive defeat, losing the a.s.sembly, the Senate, and most of the congressmen. Even Francis Granger, whose majority usually ran into the thousands, was barely elected by five hundred. Orleans County, at one time the centre of the anti-masonic crusade, sent Sanford E. Church to Albany, the first Democrat to break into the a.s.sembly from the ”infected district” since the abduction of William Morgan.
Several reasons accounted for this change. Harrison's death, within a month after his inauguration, made John Tyler President, and Tyler first refused appointments to Whigs, and then vetoed the bill, pa.s.sed by a Whig Congress, re-establis.h.i.+ng the United States Bank. He said that he had been opposed, for twenty-five years, to the exercise of such a power, if any such power existed under the Const.i.tution. This completed the break with the party that elected him. Henry Clay denounced his action, the Cabinet, except Webster, resigned in a body, and the Whigs with great unanimity indorsed the Kentucky statesman for President in 1844. To add to the complications in New York, John C.
Spencer, who now became secretary of war, so zealously espoused and warmly defended the President that feelings of mutual distrust and ill-will soon grew up between him and Weed. It is doubtful if any New York Whig, at a time of such humiliation, could have accepted place in Tyler's Cabinet and remained on terms of political intimacy with Weed; but, of all men, John C. Spencer was the least likely to do so. In Freeman's celebrated cartoon, ”The Whig Drill,” Spencer is the only man in the squad out of step with Thurlow Weed, the drum-major.
Governor Seward also played a part in the story of his party's downfall. The school question, growing out of his recommendation that separate schools for the children of Roman Catholics should share in the public moneys appropriated by the State for school purposes, lost none of its bitterness; the McLeod controversy put him at odds with the national Administration; and the Virginia controversy involved him in a correspondence that made him odious in the South. In his treatment of the McLeod matter, Seward was clearly right. Three years after the destruction of the _Caroline_, which occurred during the Canadian rebellion, Alexander McLeod, while upon a visit in the State, boasted that he was a member of the attacking party and had killed the only man shot in the encounter. This led to his arrest on a charge of murder and arson. The British Minister based his demand for McLeod's release on the ground that the destruction of the _Caroline_ ”was a public act of persons in Her Majesty's service, obeying the orders of their superior authorities.” In approving the demand, Lord Palmerston suggested that McLeod's execution ”would produce war, war immediate and frightful in its character, because it would be a war of retaliation and vengeance.” Webster, then secretary of state, urged Seward to discontinue the prosecution and discharge McLeod; but the Governor, promising a pardon if McLeod was convicted, insisted that he had no power to interfere with the case until after trial, while the courts, upon an application for McLeod's discharge on habeas corpus, held that as peace existed between Great Britain and the United States at the time of the burning of the _Caroline_, and as McLeod held no commission and acted without authority, England's a.s.sumption of responsibility for his act after his arrest did not oust the court of its jurisdiction. Fortunately, McLeod, proving his boast a lie by showing that he took no part in the capture of the _Caroline_, put an end to the controversy, but Seward's refusal to intervene broke whatever relations had existed between himself and Webster.
The Virginia correspondence created even greater bitterness. The Governor discovered that a requisition for the surrender of three coloured men, charged with aiding the escape of a fugitive slave, was based upon a defective affidavit; but, before he could act, the court discharged the prisoners upon evidence that no offence had been committed against the laws of Virginia. Here the matter might very properly have ended; but, in advising Virginia's governor of their discharge, Seward voluntarily and with questionable propriety, enlarged upon an interpretation of the const.i.tutional provision for the surrender of fugitives from justice, contending that it applied to acts made criminal by the laws of both States, and not to ”an act inspired by the spirit of humanity and of the Christian religion,”
which was not penal in New York. This was undoubtedly as good law as it was poor politics, for it needlessly aroused the indignation of Virginia, whose legislature retaliated by imposing special burdens upon vessels trading between Virginia and New York until such time as the latter should repeal the statute giving fugitive slaves the right of trial by jury.
The immediate cause of the Whig defeat, however, had its origin in disasters incident to the construction of the ca.n.a.ls. It had been the policy of Governor Marcy, and other Democratic leaders, to confine the annual ca.n.a.l expenditures to the surplus revenues, and, in enlarging the Erie, it was determined to continue this policy. On the other hand, the Whigs advocated a speedy completion of the public works, limiting the state debt to an amount upon which interest could be paid out of the surplus revenues derived from the ca.n.a.l. This policy, backed by several Democratic members of the Senate in 1838, resulted in the authorisation of a loan of four millions for the Erie enlargement. In 1839 Seward, still confident of the State's ability to sustain the necessary debt, advised other improvements, including the completion of the Genesee Valley and Black River ca.n.a.ls, as well as the construction of three railroads, at a total estimated expenditure of twelve to fifteen millions. By 1841, the debt had increased to eighteen millions, including the loan of four millions, while the work was scarcely half finished. To add to the difficulty, state stocks depreciated over twenty per cent., embarra.s.sing the administration in its efforts to raise money. The Democrats p.r.o.nounced such a policy disastrous and ruinous; and, although the Whigs replied that the original estimates were wrong, that the price of labour and material had advanced, and that when completed the ca.n.a.ls would speedily pay for themselves, the people thought it time to call a halt, and in the election of 1841 they called it.[317]
[Footnote 317: ”Seward had faults, which his accession to power soon displayed in bold relief. His natural tendencies were toward a government not merely paternal, but prodigal--one which, in its multiform endeavours to make every one prosperous, if not rich, was very likely to whelm all in general embarra.s.sment, if not in general bankruptcy. Few governors have favoured, few senators voted for more unwisely lavish expenditures than he. Above the suspicion of voting money into his own pocket, he has a rooted dislike to opposing a project or bill whereby any of his attached friends are to profit.
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