Part 1 (1/2)

Martin Van Buren.

by Edward M. Shepard.

CHAPTER I

AMERICAN POLITICS WHEN VAN BUREN'S CAREER BEGAN.--JEFFERSON'S INFLUENCE

It sometimes happened during the anxious years when the terrors of civil war, though still smouldering, were nearly aflame, that on Wall Street or Na.s.sau Street, busy men of New York saw Martin Van Buren and his son walking arm in arm. ”Prince John,” tall, striking in appearance, his hair divided at the middle in a fas.h.i.+on then novel for Americans, was in the prime of life, resolute and aggressive in bearing. His father was a white-haired, bright-eyed old man, erect but short in figure, of precise though easy and kindly politeness, and with a touch of deference in his manner. His presence did not peremptorily command the attention of strangers; but to those who looked attentively there was plain distinction in the refined and venerable face. Pa.s.sers-by might well turn back to see more of the two men thus affectionately and picturesquely together. For they were famous characters,--the one in the newer, the other in the older politics of America. John Van Buren, fresh from his Free Soil battle and the tussles of the Hards and Softs, was striving, as a Democrat, to serve the cause of the Union, though conscious that he rested under the suspicion of the party to whose service, its divisions in New York now seemingly ended, he had reluctantly returned. But he still faced the slave power with an independence only partially abated before the exigencies of party loyalty. The ex-President, definitely withdrawn from the same Free Soil battle, a struggle into which he had entered when the years were already heavy upon him, had survived to be once more a worthy in the Democratic party, again to receive its formal veneration, but never again its old affection. In their timid manoeuvres with slavery it was perhaps with the least possible awkwardness that the northern Democrats sought to treat him as a great Democratic leader; but they did not let it be forgotten that the leader was forever retired from leaders.h.i.+p. While the younger man was in the thick of political encounters which the party carried on in blind futility, the older man was hardly more than an historical personage. He was no longer, his friends strove to think, the schismatic candidate of 1848, but rather the ally and friend of Jackson, or, better still and further away, the disciple of Jefferson.

For, more than any other American, Martin Van Buren had succeeded to the preaching of Jefferson's political doctrines, and to his political power as well, that curious and potent mingling of philosophy, statesmans.h.i.+p, and electioneering. The Whigs' distrust towards Van Buren was still bitter; the hot anger of his own party over the blow he had dealt in 1848 was still far from subsided; the grat.i.tude of most Free Soil men had completely disappeared with his apparent acquiescence in the politics of Pierce and Buchanan. Save in a narrow circle of anti-slavery Democrats, Van Buren, in these last days of his, was judged at best with coldness, and most commonly with dislike or even contempt.

Not much of any other temper has yet gone into political history; its writers have frequently been content to accept the harshness of partisan opinion, or even the scurrility and mendacity visited upon him during his many political campaigns, and to ignore the positive records of his career and public service. The present writer confesses to have begun this Life, not indeed sharing any of the hatred or contempt so commonly felt towards Van Buren, but still given to many serious depreciations of him, which a better examination has shown to have had their ultimate source in the mere dislike of personal or political enemies,--a dislike to whose expression, often powerful and vivid, many writers have extended a welcome seriously inconsistent with the fairness of history.

When Abraham Lincoln was chosen president in 1860, this predecessor of his by a quarter century was a true historical figure. The bright, genial old man connected, visibly and really, those stirring and dangerous modern days with the first political struggles under the American Const.i.tution, struggles then long pa.s.sed into the quiet of history, to leave him almost their only living reminiscence. Martin Van Buren was a man fully grown and already a politician when in 1801 the triumph of Thomas Jefferson completed the political foundation of the United States. Its profound inspiration still remained with him on this eve of Lincoln's election. Under its influence his political career had begun and had ended.

At Jefferson's election the aspiration and fervor which attended the first, the new-born sense of American national life, had largely worn away. The ideal visions of human liberty had long before grown dim during seven years of revolutionary war, with its practical hards.h.i.+ps, its vicissitudes of meanness and glory, and during the four years of languor and political incompetence which followed. In the agitation for better union, political theories filled the minds of our forefathers.

Lessons were learned from the Achaean League, as well as from the Swiss Confederation, the German Empire, and the British Const.i.tution. Both history and speculation, however, were firmly subordinated to an extraordinary common sense, in part flowing from, as it was most finely exhibited in, the luminous and powerful, if unexalted, genius of Franklin. From the open beginning of const.i.tution-making at Annapolis in 1786 until the inauguration of John Adams, the American people, under the masterful governing of Was.h.i.+ngton, were concerned with the framework upon which the fabric of their political life was to be wrought. The framework was doubtless in itself of a vast and enduring importance. If the consolidating and aristocratic schemes of Hamilton had not met defeat in the federal convention, or if the separatist jealousies of Patrick Henry and George Clinton had not met defeat in Virginia and New York after the work of the convention was done, there would to-day be a different American people. Nor would our history be the amazing story of the hundred years past. But upon the governmental framework thus set up could be woven political fabrics widely and essentially different in their material, their use, and their enduring virtue. For quite apart from the framework of government were the temper and traditions of popular politics out of which comes, and must always come, the essential and dominant nature of public inst.i.tutions. In this creative and deeper work Jefferson was engaged during his struggle for political power after returning from France in 1789, during his presidential career from 1801 to 1809, and during the more extraordinary, and in American history the unparalleled, supremacy of his political genius after he had left office. In the circ.u.mstances of our colonial life, in our race extractions, in our race fusion upon the Atlantic seaboard, and in the moral effect of forcible and embittered separation from the parent country, arose indeed, to go no further back, the political instincts of American men. It is, however, fatal to adequate conception of our political development to ignore the enormous formative influence which the twenty years of Jefferson's rule had upon American political character. But so partial and sometimes so partisan have been the historians of our early national politics in their treatment of that great man, that a just appreciation of the political atmosphere in which Van Buren began his career is exceedingly difficult.

There was an American government, an American nation, when Was.h.i.+ngton gladly escaped to Mt. Vernon from the bitterly factional quarrels of the politicians at Philadelphia. The government was well ordered; the nation was respectable and dignified. But most of the people were either still colonial and provincial, or were rus.h.i.+ng, in turbulence and bad temper, to crude speculations and theories. Twenty-five years later, Jefferson had become the political idol of the American people, a people completely and forever saturated with democratic aspirations, democratic ideals, what John Marshall called ”political metaphysics,” a people with strong and lasting characteristics, no longer either colonial or provincial, but profoundly national. The skill, the industry, the arts of the politician, had been used by a man gifted with the genius and not free from the faults of a philosopher, to plant in American usages, prejudices, and traditions,--in the very fibre of American political life, a cardinal and fruitful idea. The work was done for all time. For Americans, government was thenceforth to be a mere instrument. No longer a symbol, or an ornament or crown of national life, however n.o.ble and august, it was a simple means to a plain end; to be always, and if need be rudely, tested and measured by its practical working, by its service to popular rights and needs. In those earlier days, too, there had been ”cla.s.ses and ma.s.ses,” the former of whom held public service and public policy as matters of dignity and order and high a.s.sertion of national right and power, requiring in their ministers peculiar and esoteric light, and an equipment of which common men ought not to judge, because they could not judge aright. Afterward, in Monroe's era of good feeling, the personal rivalries of presidential candidates were in bad temper enough; but Americans were at last all democrats. Whether for better or worse, the nation had ceased to be either British or colonial, or provincial, in its character. In the delightful Rip Van Winkle of a later Jefferson, during the twenty years' sleep, the old Dutch house has gone, the peasant's dress, the quaint inn with its village tapster, all the old scene of loyal provincial life. Rip returns to a noisy, boastful, self-a.s.sertive town full of American ”push” and ”drive,” and profane disregard of superiors and everything ancient. It was hardly a less change which spread through the United States in the twenty years of Jefferson's unrivaled and fruitful leaders.h.i.+p. Superst.i.tious regard for the ”well-born,” for inst.i.tutions of government as images of veneration apart from their immediate and practical use; the faith in government as essentially a financial establishment which ought to be on peculiarly friendly relations with banks and bankers; the treatment and consideration of our democratic organization as an experiment to be administered with deprecatory deference to European opinion; the idea that upon the great, simple elements of political belief and practice, the ma.s.s of men could not judge as wisely and safely as the opulent, the cultivated, the educated; the idea that it was a capital feature of political art to thwart the rashness and incompetence of the lower people,--all these theories and traditions, which had firmly held most of the disciplined thought of Europe and America, and to which the lurid horrors of the French Revolution had brought apparent consecration,--all these had now gone; all had been fatally wounded, or were sullenly and apologetically cherished in the aging bitterness of the Federalists.

There was an American people with as distinct, as powerful, as characteristic a polity as belonged to the British islanders. In 1776 a youthful genius had seized upon a colonial revolt against taxation as the occasion to make solemn declaration of a seeming abstraction about human rights. He had submitted, however, to subordinate his theory during the organization of national defense and the strengthening of the framework of government. Nor did he s.h.i.+ne in either of those works.

But with the nation established, with a union secured so that its people could safely attend to the simpler elements of human rights, Jefferson and his disciples were able to lead Americans to the temper, the aspirations, and the very prejudices of essential democracy. The Declaration of Independence, the ten amendments to the Const.i.tution theoretically formulating the rights of men or of the States, sank deep into the sources of American political life. So completely indeed was the work done, that in 1820 there was but one political party in America; all were Jeffersonian Republicans; and when the Republican party was broken up in 1824, the only dispute was whether Adams or Jackson or Crawford or Clay or Calhoun best represented the political beliefs now almost universal. It seemed to Americans as if they had never known any other beliefs, as if these doctrines of their democracy were truisms to which the rest of the world was marvelously blind.

Nothing in American public life has, in prolonged anger and even savage desperation, equaled the attacks upon Jefferson during the steady growth of his stupendous influence. The hatred of him personally, and the belief in the wickedness of his private and public life, survive in our time. Nine tenths of the Americans who then read books sincerely thought him an enemy of mankind and of all that was sacred. Nine tenths of the authors of American books on history or politics have to this day written under the influence which ninety years ago controlled their predecessors. And for this there is no little reason. As the American people grew conscious of their own peculiar and intensely active political force, there came to them a period of national and popular life in which much was unlovely, much was crude, much was disagreeably vulgar. Books upon America written by foreign travelers, from the days of Jefferson down to our civil war, superficial and offensive as they often were, told a great deal of truth. We do not now need to wince at criticisms upon a rawness, an insolent condescension towards the political ignorance of foreigners and the unhappy subjects of kings, a harshness in the a.s.sertion of the equality of Caucasian men, and a restless, boastful manner. The criticisms were in great measure just.

But the critics were stupid and blind not to see the vast and vital work and change going on before their eyes, to chiefly regard the trifling and incidental things which disgusted them. Their eyes were open to all our faults of taste and manner, but closed to the self-dependent and self-a.s.sertive energy the disorder of whose exhibition would surely pa.s.s away. In every democratic experiment, in every experiment of popular or national freedom, there is almost inevitable a vulgarizing of public manners, a lack of dignity in details, which disturbs men who find restful delight in orderly and decorous public life; and their disgust is too often directed against beneficent political changes or reforms.

If one were to judge the political temper of the American people from many of our own writers, and still more if he were to judge it from the observations even of intelligent and friendly foreigners prior to 1861, he would believe that temper to be sordid, mean, noisy, boastful, and even cruel. But from the war of 1812 with England to the election of Buchanan in 1856, the American people had been doing a profound, organic, democratic work. Meantime many had seen no more than the unsightly, the mean and trivial, the malodorous details, which were mere incidents and blemishes of hidden and dynamic operations. Unimaginative minds usually fail to see the greater and deeper movements of politics as well as those of science. In the public virtues then maturing there lay the ability long and strenuously to conduct an enterprise the greatest which modern times have known, and an extraordinary popular capacity for restraint and discipline. In those virtues was sleeping a tremendously national spirit which, with cost and sacrifice not to be measured by the vast figures of the statistician, on one side sought independence, and on the other saved the Union,--an exalted love of men and truth and liberty, which, after all the enervations of pecuniary prosperity, endured with patience hards.h.i.+ps and losses, and the less heroic but often more dangerous distresses of taxation,--at the North a magnanimity in victory unequaled in the traditions of men, and at the South a composure and dignity and absence of either bitterness or meanness which brought out of defeat far larger treasures than could have come with victory. But these were not effects without a cause. In them all was only the fruit, the normal fruit, of the political habits, ideals, traditions, whose early and unattractive disorders had chagrined many of the best of Americans, and had seemed so natural to foreigners who feared or distrusted a democracy. There had been forming, during forty or fifty years of a certain raw unloveliness, the peculiar and powerful self-reliance of a people whose political independence meant far more than a mere separate government.

In these years Van Buren was one of the chief men in American public life. He and his political a.s.sociates had been profoundly affected by the Jeffersonian philosophy of government. They robustly held its tenets until the flame and vengeance of the slavery conflict drove them from political power. In our own day we have, in the able speeches with which Samuel J. Tilden fatigued respectful though often unsympathetic hearers at Democratic meetings, heard something of the same robust political philosophy, brought directly from intercourse with his famous neighbor and political master. Van Buren himself breathed it as the very atmosphere of American public life, during his early career which had just begun when Jefferson, his robes of office dropped and his faults of administration forgotten, seemed the serene, wise old man presiding over a land completely won to his ideals of democracy. Under this extraordinary influence and in this political light, there opened with the first years of the century the public life to be narrated in this volume.

CHAPTER II

EARLY YEARS.--PROFESSIONAL LIFE

At the close of the American Revolution, Abraham Van Buren was a farmer on the east bank of the Hudson River, New York. He was of Dutch descent, as was his wife, whose maiden name Hoes, corrupted from Goes, is said to have had distinction in Holland. But it would be mere fancy to find in the statesman particular traits brought from the d.y.k.ed swamp lands whence some of his ancestors came. Those who farmed the rich fields of Columbia county were pretty thorough Americans; their characteristics were more immediately drawn from the soil they cultivated and from the necessary habits of their life than from the lands, Dutch or English, from which their forefathers had emigrated. Late in the eighteenth century they were no longer frontiersmen. For a century and more this eastern Hudson River country had been peacefully and prosperously cultivated. There was no lack of high spirit; but it was shown in lawsuits and political feuds rather than in skirmishes with red men. It was close to the old town of Albany with its official and not undignified life, and had comparatively easy access to New York by sloop or the post-road. It had been an early settlement of the colony. Within its borders were now the estates and mansions of large landed proprietors, who inherited or acquired from a more varied and affluent life some of the qualities, good and bad, of a country gentry. It was a region of easy, orderly comfort, sound and robust enough, but not sharing the straight and precise, though meddling, puritanical habits which a few miles away, over the high Berks.h.i.+re hills, had come from the sh.o.r.es of New England.

The elder Van Buren was said by his son's enemies to have kept a tavern; and he probably did. Farming and tavern-keeping then were fairly interchangeable; and the gracious manner, the tact with men, which the younger Van Buren developed to a marked degree, it is easy to believe came rather from the social and varied life of an inn than from the harsher isolation of a farm. The statesman's boyish days were at any rate spent among poor neighbors. He was born at Kinderhook, an old village of New York, on the 5th of December, 1782. The usual years of schooling were probably pa.s.sed in one of the dilapidated, weather-beaten schoolhouses from which has come so much of what is best in American life. He studied later in the Kinderhook Academy, one of the higher schools which in New York have done good work, though not equaling the like schools in Ma.s.sachusetts. Here he learned a little Latin. But when at fourteen years of age he entered a law office, he had of course the chief discipline of book-learning still to acquire. In 1835 his campaign biographer rather rejoiced that he had so little systematic education, fearing that ”from the eloquent pages of Livy, or the honeyed eulogiums of Virgil, or the servile adulation of Horace, he might have been inspired with an admiration for regal pomp and aristocratic dignity uncongenial to the native independence of his mind,” and have imbibed a ”contempt for plebeians and common people,” unless, perhaps, the speeches of popular leaders in Livy ”had kindled his instinctive love of justice and freedom,” or the sarcastic vigor of Tacitus ”had created in his bosom a fixed hatred of tyranny in every shape.” At an early age, however, it is certain that Van Buren, like many other Americans of original force and with instinctive fondness for written pictures of human history and conduct, acquired an education which, though not that of a professional scholar, was entirely appropriate to the skillful man of affairs or the statesman to be set in conspicuous places. This work must have been largely done during the comparative leisure of his legal apprentices.h.i.+p.

It was in 1796 that he entered the law office of Francis Sylvester at Kinderhook, where he remained until his twentieth year. He there read law. It is safe to say besides that he swept the office, lighted the fires in winter, and, like other law students in earlier and simpler days, had to do the work of an office janitor and errand boy, as well as to serve papers and copy the technical forms of the common law, and the tedious but often masterly pleadings of chancery. That his work as a student was done with great industry and thoroughness is demonstrated by the fact that at an early age he became a successful and skillful advocate in arguments addressed to courts as distinguished from juries, a division of professional work in which no skill and readiness will supply deficiencies in professional equipment. His early reputation for cleverness is ill.u.s.trated by the story that when only a boy he successfully summed up a case before a jury against his preceptor Sylvester, being made by the justice to stand upon a bench because he was so small, with the exhortation, ”There, Mat, beat your master.”

In 1802 Van Buren entered the office of William P. Van Ness, in the city of New York, to complete his seventh and final year of legal study. Van Ness was himself from Columbia county and an eminent lawyer. He was afterwards appointed United States district judge by Madison; and was then an influential Republican and a close friend and defender of Aaron Burr, then the vice-president. The native powers and fascination of Burr were at their zenith, though his political character was blasted. Van Buren made his acquaintance, and was treated with the distinguished and flattering attention which the wisest of public men often show to young men of promise. Van Buren's enemies were absurdly fond of the fancy that in this slight intercourse he had acquired the skill and grace of his manner, and the easy principles and love of intrigue which they ascribe to him. Burr, for years after he was utterly disabled, inspired a childish terror in American politics. The mystery and dread about him were used by the opponents of Jackson because Burr had early pointed him out for the presidency, and by the opponents of Clay because in early life he had given Burr professional a.s.sistance. But upon Burr's candidacy for governor in 1804 Van Buren's freedom from his influence was clearly enough exhibited.

In 1803 Van Buren, being now of age and admitted as an attorney, returned to Kinderhook and there began the practice of his profession.

The rank of counsellor-at-law was still distinct and superior to that of attorney. His half-brother on his mother's side, James J. Van Alen, at once admitted the young attorney to a law partners.h.i.+p. Van Alen was considerably older and had a practice already established. Van Buren's career as a lawyer was not a long one, but it was brilliant and highly successful. After his election to the United States Senate in 1821 his practice ceased to be very active. He left his profession with a fortune which secured him the ease in money matters so helpful and almost necessary to a man in public life. Merely professional reputations disappear with curious and rather saddening promptness and completeness.

Of the practice and distinction reached by Van Buren before he withdrew from the bar, although they were unsurpa.s.sed in the State, no vestige and few traditions remain beyond technical synopses of his arguments in the instructive but hardly succulent pages of Johnson's, Wendell's, and Cowen's reports.

At an early day the legal profession reached in our country a consummate vigor. Far behind as Americans were in other learning and arts, they had, within a few years after they escaped colonial dependence, judges, advocates, and commentators of the first rank. Marshall, Kent, and Story were securely famous when hardly another American of their time not in public and political life was known. In the legal art Americans were even more accomplished than in its science; and Columbia county and the valley of the Hudson were fine fields for legal practice. Many animosities survived from revolutionary days. The landed families, long used to administer the affairs of others as well as their own, saw with jealousy and fear the rapid spread of democratic doctrines and of leveling and often insolent manners. Political feuds were rife, and frequently appeared in the professionally profitable collisions of neighbors with vagrant cows, or on watercourses insufficient for the needs of the up-stream and the down-stream proprietors. There were slander suits and libel suits, and suits for malicious prosecution. Into the most legitimate controversies over doubts about property there was driven the bitterness which turns a lawsuit from a process to ascertain a right into a weapon of revenge.

Van Buren's political opinions were strong and clear from the beginning of his law practice; but he was in a professional minority among the rich Federalists of the county. The adverse discipline was invaluable.