Part 2 (1/2)

In reading this, or indeed any of the utterances of Van Buren where the occasion required distinctness, it is difficult to find the ground of the charge of ”noncommittalism” so incessantly made against him. He doubtless refrained from taking sides on questions not yet ripe for decision, however clear, and whatever may have been his speculative opinions. But this is the duty of every statesman; it has been the practice of every politician who has promoted reform. Van Buren now pointed out how completely the events of the forty years past had discredited the grave speculative fears of Franklin, Hamilton, and Madison as to the result of some provisions of the Federal Const.i.tution.

With Burke he believed experience to be the only unerring touchstone. He conclusively showed that property had been as safe in those American communities which had universal suffrage as in the few which retained a property qualification; that venality in voting, apprehended from the change, already existed in the grossest forms at the parliamentary elections of England. Going to the truth which is at the dynamic source of democratic inst.i.tutions, he told the chancellor that when among the ma.s.ses of America the principles of order and good government should yield to principles of anarchy and violence and permit attacks on private property or an agrarian law, all const.i.tutional provisions would be idle and unavailing, because they would have lost all their force and influence. With a true instinct, however, Van Buren wished the steps to be taken gradually. He was not yet ready, he said, to admit to the suffrage the s.h.i.+fting population of cities, held to the government by no other ties than the mere right to vote. He was not ready for a really universal suffrage. The voter ought, if he did not partic.i.p.ate in the government by paying taxes or performing militia duty, to be a man who was a householder with some of the elements of stability, with something at stake in the community. Although they had reached ”the verge of universal suffrage,” he could not with his Democratic friends take the ”one step beyond;” he would not cheapen the invaluable right by conferring it with indiscriminating hand ”on every one, black or white, who would be kind enough to condescend to accept it.” Though a Democrat he was opposed, he said, to a ”precipitate and unexpected prostration of all qualifications;” he looked with dread upon increasing the voters in New York city from thirteen or fourteen thousand to twenty-five thousand, believing (curious prediction for a father of the Democratic party!) that the increase ”would render their elections rather a curse than a blessing,” and ”would drive from the polls all sober-minded people.”

The universal suffrage then postponed was wisely adopted a few years later. Democracy marched steadily on; and Van Buren was willing, probably very willing, to be guided by experience. He opposed in the convention a proposal supported by most of his party to restrict suffrage to white citizens, but favored a property qualification for black men, the $250 freehold owners.h.i.+p until then required of white voters. He would not, he said, draw from them a revenue and yet deny them the right of suffrage. Twenty-five years later, in 1846, nearly three-fourths of the voters of the State refused equal suffrage to the blacks; and even in 1869, six years after the emanc.i.p.ation proclamation, a majority still refused to give them the same rights as white men.

The question of appointments to office was the chief topic in the convention. Van Buren, as chairman of the committee on this subject, made an interesting and able report. It was unanimously agreed that the use of patronage by the council of appointment had been a scandal. Only a few members voted to retain the council, even if it were to be elected by the people. He recommended that military officers, except the highest, be elected by the privates and officers of militia. Of the 6663 civil officers whose appointment and removal by the council had for twenty years kept the State in turmoil, he recommended that 3643, being notaries, commissioners, masters and examiners in chancery, and other lesser officers, should be appointed under general laws to be enacted by the legislature; the clerks of courts and district attorneys should be appointed by the common pleas courts; mayors and clerks of cities should be appointed by their common councils, except in New York, where for years afterwards the mayors were appointed; the heads of the state departments should be appointed by the legislature; and all other officers, including surrogates and justices of the peace as well as the greater judicial officers, should be appointed by the governor upon the confirmation of the Senate. Van Buren declared himself opposed, here again separating himself from many of his party a.s.sociates, to the popular election of any judicial officers, even the justices of the peace. Of all this he was long after to be reminded as proof of his aristocratic contempt for democracy. His recommendations were adopted in the main; although county clerks and sheriffs, whom he would have kept appointive, were made elective. Upon this question he was in a small minority with Chancellor Kent and Rufus King, having most of his party friends against him. Thus was broken up the enormous political power so long wielded at Albany, and the patronage distributed through the counties. The change, it was supposed, would end a great abuse. It did end the concentration of patronage at the capital; but the partisan abuses of patronage were simply transferred to the various county seats, to exercise a different and wider, though probably a less dangerous, corruption.

The council of revision fell with hardly a friend to speak for it. It was one of those checks upon popular power of which Federalists had been fond. It consisted of the governor with the chancellor and the judges of the Supreme Court, and had a veto power upon bills pa.s.sed by the legislature. As the chancellor and judges held office during good behavior until they had reached the limit of age, the council was almost a chamber of life peers. The exercise of its power had provoked great animosity. The chief judicial officers of the State, judges, and chancellors, to whom men of our day look back with a real veneration, had been drawn by it into a kind of political warfare, in which few of our higher magistrates, though popularly elected and for terms, would dare to engage. An act had been pa.s.sed by the legislature in 1814 to promote privateering; but Chancellor Kent as a member of the council objected to it. Van Buren maintained with him an open and heated discussion upon the propriety of the objections,--a discussion in which the judicial character justly enough afforded no protection. Van Buren's feeling against the judges who were his political adversaries was often exhibited. He said in the convention: ”I object to the council, as being composed of the judiciary, who are not directly responsible to the people. I object to it because it inevitably connects the judiciary--those who, with pure hearts and sound heads, should preside in the sanctuaries of justice--with the intrigues and collisions of party strife; because it tends to make our judges politicians, and because such has been its practical effect.” He further said that he would not join in the rather courtly observation that the council was abolished because of a personal regard for the peace of its members. He would have it expressly remembered that the council had served the ends of faction; though he added that he should regard the loss of Chancellor Kent from his judicial station as a public calamity. In his general position Van Buren was clearly right. Again and again have theorists, supposing judges to be sanctified and illumined by their offices, placed in their hands political power, which had been abused, or it was feared would be abused, by men fancied to occupy less exalted stations. Again and again has the result shown that judges are only men, with human pa.s.sions, prejudices, and ignorance; men who, if vested with functions not judicial, if freed from the checks of precedents and law and public hearings and appellate review, fall into the same abuses and act on the same motives, political and personal, which belong to other men. In the council of revision before 1821 and the electoral commission of 1877 were signally proved the wisdom of restricting judges to the work of deciding rights between parties judicially brought before them.

Van Buren's far from ”non-committal” talk about the judges was not followed by any support of the proposal to ”const.i.tutionize” them out of office. The animosity of a majority of the members against the judges then in office was intense; and they were not willing to accept the life of the council of revision as a sufficient sacrifice. Nor was the animosity entirely unreasonable. Butler, in one of his early letters to Jesse Hoyt, described the austerity with which Ambrose Spencer, the chief justice, when the young lawyer sought to address him, told him to wait until his seniors had been heard. In the convention there were doubtless many who had been offended with a certain insolence of place which to this day characterizes the bearing of many judges of real ability; and the opportunity of making repayment was eagerly seized. Nor was it unreasonable that laymen should, from the proceedings of judges when acting upon political matters which laymen understood as well as they, make inferences about the fairness of their proceedings on the bench upon which laymen could not always safely speak. By a vote of 66 to 39, the convention refused to retain the judges then in office,--a proceeding which, with all the faults justly or even naturally found with them, was a gross violation of the fundamental rule which ought to guide civilized lands in changing their laws. For the retention of the judges was perfectly consistent with the judicial scheme adopted. Van Buren put all this most admirably before voting with the minority. He told the convention, and doubtless truly, that from the bench of judges, whose official fate was then at their mercy, he had been a.s.sailed ”with hostility, political, professional, and personal,--hostility which had been the most keen, active, and unyielding;” but that he would not indulge individual resentment in the prostration of his private and political adversary. The judicial officer, who could not be reached by impeachment or the proceeding for removal by a two-thirds vote, ought not to be disturbed. They should amend the const.i.tution, he told the convention, upon general principles, and not descend to pull down obnoxious officers. He begged it not to ruin its character and credit by proceeding to such extremities. But the removal of the judges did not prove unpopular. Only eight members of the convention voted against the Const.i.tution; only fifteen others did not sign it. And the freeholders of the State, while deliberately surrendering some of their exclusive privileges, adopted it by a vote of 75,422 to 41,497.

Van Buren's service in this convention was that of a firm, sensible, far-seeing man, resolute to make democratic progress, but unwilling, without further light from experience, to take extreme steps difficult to retrace. With a strong inclination towards great enlargement of the suffrage, he pointed out that a mistake in going too far could never be righted ”except by the sword.” The wisdom of enduring temporary difficulties, rather than to make theoretical changes greater than were necessary to obviate serious and great wrongs, was common to him with the highest and most influential type of modern law-makers. With some men of the first rank, the convention had in it very many others crudely equipped for its work; and it met in an atmosphere of personal and political asperity unfavorable to deliberations over organic law. Van Buren was politically its most powerful member. It is clear that his always conservative temper, aided by his tact and by his temperate and persuasive eloquence, held back his Democratic a.s.sociates, headed by the impetuous and angered General Root, from changes far more radical than those which were made. Though eminent as a party man, he showed on this conspicuous field undoubted courage and independence and high sense of duty. Entering national politics he was fortunate therefore to be known, not only as a skillful and adroit and even managing politician, as a vigorous and clear debater, as a successful leader in popular movements, but also as a man of firm and upright patriotism, with a ripe and educated sense of the complexity of popular government, and a sober appreciation of the kind of dangers so subtly mingled with the blessings of democracy.

CHAPTER IV

UNITED STATES SENATOR.--REeSTABLISHMENT OF PARTIES.--PARTY LEADERs.h.i.+P

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 reelected 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 circ.u.mstances which const.i.tute 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 c.o.c.ked hat, met processions and orators without end, it was obvious that this was not the radical minister whom Was.h.i.+ngton had recalled from Jacobin Paris for effusively pledging eternal friends.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sing 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 pa.s.sing the South in every material advantage, that the latter, it seemed, must surely learn the lesson.

For the inst.i.tution 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 inst.i.tution, 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 embarra.s.sments of slave settlement arose, devote this new land to freedom,--not so much to freedom as that s.h.i.+ning G.o.ddess of mercy and right and justice who rose clear and obvious to our purged vision out of the civil war, as to the less n.o.ble 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 suns.h.i.+ne and prosperity returned over the land.

Van Buren's views at this time were doubtless clear against the extension of slavery. He disliked the inst.i.tution; 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 friends.h.i.+p and political alliance between him and Van Buren must have soon begun.

During all or nearly all Van Buren's senators.h.i.+p the two occupied adjoining seats. Two years later Andrew Jackson was sent to the Senate by Tennessee, as a suitable preliminary to his presidential canva.s.s.

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 a.s.sociates 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-t.i.tles 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 c.u.mberland 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 Const.i.tution 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, const.i.tutional 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 const.i.tutional amendment. Congress was to have power to make roads and ca.n.a.ls, but the money appropriated was to be apportioned among the States according to population. No road or ca.n.a.l 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 Ca.n.a.l, 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 Const.i.tution, whose sanct.i.ty 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 Const.i.tution 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 Const.i.tution 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 fact.i.tious help of this designation and the fine leaders.h.i.+p of Clay. With Jackson and Benton, Van Buren voted for it, against men differing as widely from each other as his a.s.sociate, 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 att.i.tude of his. But he declared himself with sufficient plainness not only to believe in the const.i.tutionality 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 a.s.sociate on the presidential ticket. ”When the monarchs of Europe are a.s.sembled 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.