Part 4 (1/2)
The death of De Witt Clinton left Van Buren easily the largest figure in public life, as he had for several years been the most powerful politician, in New York State. The gossip that the most important place in Jackson's cabinet was really allotted to him before the election of 1828 is probably true. But, whether true or not, there was, apart from a natural desire to administer the first office in his State, obvious advantage to his political prestige in pa.s.sing successfully through a popular election. The most cynical of managing politicians recognize the enormous strength of a man for whom the people have actually shown that they like to vote. Van Buren may have counted besides upon the advantage which Jackson's personal popularity brought to those in his open alliance, although Adams was known still to have, as the election showed he had, considerable Democratic strength. Van Buren took therefore the Bucktail nomination for governor of New York. The National Republicans, as the Adams men were called, nominated Smith Thompson, a judge of the federal Supreme Court. Van Buren got 136,794 and Thompson 106,444 votes.
But in spite of so large a plurality Van Buren did not quite have a majority of the popular vote. Solomon Southwick, the anti-Masonic candidate, received 33,345 votes. It was the first election after this extraordinary movement. The abduction of Morgan and his probable murder to prevent his revelation of Masonic secrets had occurred in the fall of 1826. The criminal trials consequent upon it had caused intense excitement; and a political issue was easily made, for many distinguished men of both parties were members of that secret order. How powerful for a time may be a popular cry, though based upon an utterly absurd issue, became more obvious still later when electoral votes for president were cast for William Wirt, the anti-Masonic candidate; and when John Quincy Adams, after graduating from the widest experience in public affairs of any American of his generation, was, as he himself records, willing to accept, and when William H. Seward was willing to tender him, a presidential nomination of the anti-Masonic party. As Southwick's preposterous vote was in 1828 drawn from both parties, Van Buren's prestige, although he had but a plurality vote, was increased by his victory at the polls. Jackson very truly said in February, 1832, that it was now ”the general wish and expectation of the Republican party throughout the Union” that Van Buren should take the place next to the President in the national administration. Jackson was himself elected by a very great popular and electoral majority. In New York, where on this single occasion the electors were chosen in districts, and where the anti-Masonic vote was cast against Jackson who held high rank in the Masonic order, Adams secured 16 votes to Jackson's 18; but to the latter were added the two electors chosen by the thirty-four district electors.
Van Buren's career as governor was very brief. He was inaugurated on January 1, 1829, and at once resigned his seat in the federal Senate. On March 12th of the same year he resigned the governor's seat. His inaugural message is said by Hammond, the political historian of New York, by no means too friendly to Van Buren, to have been ”the best executive message ever communicated to the legislature;” and after nearly sixty years, it seems, in the leather-covered tome containing it, a remarkably clear, wise, and courageous paper. The excitement over internal improvements in communication was then at its height. He declared that, whatever difference there might be as to whether such improvements ought to be undertaken by the federal government or by the States, none seriously doubted that it was wise to apply portions of the means of New York to such improvements. The investment of the State in the Delaware and Hudson ca.n.a.l, then just completed, had, he thought, been ”crowned with the most cheering success.” Splendid, too, as had been the success of the Erie and Champlain ca.n.a.ls, it was still clear that all had not been equally benefited. The friends of the state road and of the Chemung and Chenango ca.n.a.ls had urged him to recommend for them a legislative support. But it was a time, he said, for ”the utmost prudence and circ.u.mspection” upon that ”delicate and vitally interesting subject.”
The banking question, he told the legislature, would make the important business of its session. It turned out besides to be one of the important businesses of Van Buren's career. To meet the attacks upon him for having once been interested in a bank, he dexterously recited that, ”having for many years ceased to have an interest in those inst.i.tutions and declined any agency in their management,” he was conscious of his imperfect information. But he could not ignore a matter of such magnitude to their const.i.tuents. The whole bank agitation at this time showed the difficulties and scandals caused by the absence of a free banking system, and by the long accustomed grants of exclusive banking charters. Of the forty banks in the State, all specially incorporated, the charters of thirty-one would expire within one, two, three, or four years. Their actual capital was $15,000,000; their outstanding loans, more than $30,000,000. Van Buren urged, therefore, the legislature now to make by general law final disposition of the whole subject. The abolition of banks had, he said, no advocate, and a dependence solely upon those established by federal authority deserved none; but he rejected the idea of a state bank. ”Experience,” he declared, ”has shown that banking operations, to be successful, and consequently beneficial to the community, must be conducted by private men upon their own account.” He condemned the practice by which the State accepted a money bonus for granting a bank charter, necessarily involving some monopoly.
The concern of the State, he pointed out, should be to make its banks and their circulation secure; and such security was impaired, not increased, by encouraging banks in compet.i.tion with one another, and ”stimulated by the golden harvest in view,” to make large payments for their charters. He submitted for legislative consideration the idea of the ”safety fund” communicated to him in an interesting and intelligent paper by Joshua Forman. Under this system all the banks of the State, whatever their condition, were to contribute to a fund to be administered under state supervision, the fund to be a security for all dishonored bank-notes. To this extent all the banks were to insure or indorse the circulation of each bank, thus saving the scandal and loss arising from the occasional failure of banks to redeem their notes, and making every bank watchful of all its a.s.sociates. In compelling the banks to submit to some general scheme, the representative of the people would indeed, he said, enter into ”conflict with the claims of the great moneyed interest of the country; but what political exhibition so truly gratifying as the return to his const.i.tuents of the faithful public servant after having turned away every approach and put far from him every sinister consideration!”
Van Buren proposed a separation of state from national elections; a question still discussed, and upon each side of which much is to be said. He attacked the use of money in elections, ”the practice of employing persons to attend the polls for compensation, of placing large sums in the hands of others to entertain the electors,” and other devices by which the most valuable of all our temporal privileges ”was brought into disrepute.” If the expenses of elections should increase as they had lately done, the time would soon arrive ”when a man in middling circ.u.mstances, however virtuous, will not be able to compete upon anything like equal terms with a wealthy opponent.” In long advance of a modern agitation for reform which, lately beginning with us, will, it is to be hoped, not cease until the abuses are removed, he proposed a law imposing ”severe and enforcible penalties upon the advance of money by individuals for any purposes connected with the election except the single one of printing.”
Turning to the field of general politics, he again declared the political faith to whose support he wished to rally his party. That ”a jealousy of the exercise of delegated political power, a solicitude to keep public agents within the precise limits of their authority, and an a.s.siduous adherence to a rigid and scrupulous economy, were indications of a contracted spirit unbecoming the character of a statesman,” he p.r.o.nounced to be a political heresy, from which he himself had not been entirely free, but which ought at once to be exploded. Official discretion, as a general rule, could not be confided to any one without danger of abuse. But he reproved the parsimony which disagreeably characterized the democracy of the time, and which inadequately paid great public servants like the chancellor and judges. In the tendency of the federal government to encroach upon the States lay, he thought, the danger of the federal Const.i.tution. But of the disposition and capacity of the American people to resist such encroachments as our political history recorded, there were, he said, without naming either Adams, ”two prominent and ill.u.s.trious instances.” As long as that good spirit was preserved, the republic would be safe; and for that preservation every patriot ought to pray.
The reputation of the country had in some degree suffered, he said, from ”the uncharitable and unrelenting scrutiny to which private as well as public character” had been subjected in the late election. But this injury had been ”relieved, if not removed, by seeing how soon the overflowing waters of bitterness” had spent themselves, and ”that already the current of public feeling had resumed its accustomed channels.” These excesses were the price paid for the full enjoyment of the right of opinion. With an a.s.sertion of ”perfect deference to that sacred privilege, and in the humble exercise of that portion of it”
which belonged to him, and of a sincere desire not to offend the feelings of those who differed from him, he ended his message by congratulating the legislature upon the election of Jackson and Calhoun.
This result, he said in words not altogether insincere or untrue, but full of the unfairness of partisan dispute, infused fresh vigor into the American political system, refuted the odious imputation that republics are ungrateful, dissipated the vain hope that our citizens could be influenced by aught save appeals to their understanding and love of country, and finally exhibited in ”bold relief the omnipotence of public opinion, and the futility of all attempts to overawe it by the denunciation of power, or to reduce it by the allurements of patronage.”
Among the Hoyt letters, afterwards published by Van Buren's rancorous enemy, Mackenzie, are two letters of his upon his patronage as governor.
It is not unfair to suppose that he wrote many other letters like them, and they give a useful glimpse of the distribution of offices at Albany sixty years ago. These letters to Hoyt were of the most confidential character, and showed a strong but not uncontrolled desire to please party friends and to meet party expectations. But in none of them is there a suggestion of anything dishonorable. He asked, ”When will the Republican party be made sensible of the indispensable necessity of nominating none but true and tried men, so that when they succeed they gain something?” He was unable to oblige his ”good friend Coddington ...
in relation to the health appointments.” Dr. Westervelt's claims were ”decidedly the strongest; and much was due to the relations in which he stood to Governor Tompkins, especially from one who knew so well what the latter has done and suffered for this State.” He wrote of Marcy, whom he appointed a judge of the supreme court, that he ”was so situated that I must make him a judge or ruin him.” All this is doubtless not unlike what the best of public officers have sometimes said and thought, though rarely written; and, like most talk over patronage, it is not in very exalted tone. But if Van Buren admitted as one of Westervelt's claims to public office that he was of a Whig family and a Democrat ”from his cradle,” he found among his other claims that he was ”a gentleman and a man of talent,” and had been ”three years in the hospital and five years deputy health officer, until he was cruelly removed.” Dr. Manley he refused to remove from the health office, because ”his extraordinary capacity is universally admitted;” and pointed out that the removal ”could only be placed on political grounds, and as he was a zealous Jackson man at the last election, that could not have been done without danger.” ”I should not,” he said, however, ”have given Manley the office originally, if I could have found a competent Republican to take it.” William L. Marcy, whom he made judge, was already known as one of the ablest men in the State, and his appointment was admirable, though his salvation from ruin, if Van Buren was speaking seriously, was not a public end fit to be served by high judicial appointment. John C. Spencer, one of the best lawyers of New York, was appointed by Van Buren special counsel for the prosecution of Morgan's murderers. Hammond wondered ”how so rigid a party man as Mr. Van Buren was, came to appoint a political opponent to so important an office,”
but concluded that it was a fine specimen of his peculiar tact, because Spencer, though a man of talents and great moral courage, might be defeated in the prosecution, and thus be injured with the anti-Masons; while if he succeeded, his vigor and fidelity would draw upon him Masonic hostility. But the simpler explanation is the more probable. Van Buren desired to adhere in this, as he did in most of his appointments, to a high standard. Upon this particular appointment his own motives might be distrusted; and he therefore went to the ranks of his adversaries for one of their most distinguished and invulnerable leaders. Van Buren was long condemned as a ”spoils” politician; but he was not accused of appointing either incompetent or dishonest men to office. In the great place of governor he must have already begun to see how difficult and dangerous was this power of patronage. It must be fairly admitted that he pretty carefully limited, by the integrity and efficiency of the public service, the political use which he made of his appointments,--a use made in varying degrees by every American holding important executive power from the first Adams to our own time.
On March 12, 1829, Governor Van Buren resigned his office with the hearty and unanimous approval of his party friends, whom he gathered together on receiving Jackson's invitation to Was.h.i.+ngton. He was in their hands, he said, and should abide by their decision. Both houses of the legislature pa.s.sed congratulatory and even affectionate resolutions; and his brief and brilliant career in the executive chamber of the State ended happily, as does any career which ends that a seemingly greater one may begin.
CHAPTER VI
SECRETARY OF STATE.--DEFINITE FORMATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC CREED
Van Buren was appointed secretary of state on March 5, 1829; but did not reach Was.h.i.+ngton until the 22d, and did not act as secretary until April 4. James A. Hamilton, a son of Alexander Hamilton, but then an influential Jackson man, was acting secretary in the meantime. The two years of Van Buren's administration of this office are perhaps the most picturesque years of American political history. The Eaton scandal; the downfall of Calhoun's political power; the magical success of Van Buren; the ”kitchen cabinet;” the odious removals from office, and the outcries of the removed; the fiery pa.s.sion of Jackson; the horror both real and affected of the opposition,--all these have been an inexhaustible quarry to historical writers. Until very recently the larger use has been made of the material derived from hostile sources; and it has seemed easy to paint pictures of this really important time in the crudest and highest colors of dislike. The American democracy, at last let loose, driven by Jackson with a sort of demoniac energy and cunningly used by Van Buren for his own selfish and even Mephistophelian ends, is supposed to have broken from every sound and conservative principle. Perhaps for no other period in our history has irresponsible and unverified campaign literature of the time so largely become authority to serious writers; and for no other period does truth more strongly require a judgment upon well established results rather than upon partisan rumor and gossip.
During these years there was definitely and practically formed, under the auspices of Jackson's administration, a political creed, a body of principles or tendencies in politics which have ever since strongly held the American people. Some of them have become established by a universal acquiescence. During the same years there began an extension into federal politics of the ”spoils system,” which has been an evil second only to slavery, and from which we are only now recovering. To Van Buren more than to any man of his time must be awarded the credit of forming the creed of the Jacksonian Democracy. And in the shame of the abuse, which has so greatly tended to neutralize the soundest articles of political faith, Van Buren must partic.i.p.ate with other and inferior men of his own time, and with the very greatest of the men who followed him.
In this narrative it is impossible to ignore some of the petty and undignified details which characterized the time,--details from part of the discredit of which Van Buren cannot escape. But it would lead to gross error to let such details obscure the vital and lasting political work of the highest order in which Van Buren was a central and controlling power.
Besides Van Buren, Jackson's cabinet included Ingham of Pennsylvania in the Treasury, Eaton in the War Department, Branch in the Navy, Berrien of Georgia attorney-general, and Barry of Kentucky in the Post-Office, succeeding McLean, who after a short service was appointed to the Supreme Court. Eaton, Branch, and Berrien had been federal senators, the first chiefly commended by Jackson's strong personal liking for him.
Ingham, Branch, and Berrien represented, or were supposed to represent, the Calhoun influence. Van Buren in ability and reputation easily stood head and shoulders above his a.s.sociates. When he left Albany for Was.h.i.+ngton he was believed to have done more than any one else to secure the Republican triumph; and if Webster's recollections twenty years later were correct, he did more to prevent ”Mr. Adams's reelection in 1828, and to obtain General Jackson's election, than any other man--yes, than any ten other men--in the country.” He was the first politician in the party; Calhoun and he were its most distinguished statesmen. Already the succession after Jackson belonged to one of them, the only doubt being to which; and in that doubt was stored up a long and complicated feud. The rivalry between these two great men was inevitable; it was not dishonorable to either. Calhoun's fame was the older; he was already one of the junior candidates for the presidency, popular in Pennsylvania and even in New England, when Van Buren was hardly known out of New York. In 1829 he had been chosen vice-president for the second time. He had shown talents of a very high order. But he had now suffered some years from the presidential fever which distorts the vision, and which, when popularity wanes, becomes heavy with enervating melancholy. He was an able doctrinaire, but narrow and dogmatic. The jealous and ravenous temper of the rich slaveholders of South Carolina already possessed him.
He was a Southern man; and all the presidents thus far, except the elder and younger Adams, had been Southerners. In 1824 he had stood indifferent between Jackson and Adams, and in Jackson's final triumph had borne no decisive part. Van Buren's wider, richer, and more constructive mind, his superior political judgment, his mellower personality, his practical skill in affairs, sufficiently explain his victory over Calhoun, without resort to the bitter rumors of tricks and magical manoeuvres spread by Calhoun's and Clay's friends, and which, though without authentic corroboration, have to our own day been widely accepted.
Before Jackson's inauguration, Calhoun sought to prevent Van Buren's selection for the State Department. He told the general that Tazewell of Virginia ought to be appointed. New York, he said, would have been secured by Clinton if he had lived; but now New York needed no appointment. Jackson listened coldly to the plainly jealous appeal; and James A. Hamilton, who was at the time on intimate terms with Jackson, supposed it to be Calhoun's last interview with Jackson about the cabinet. Van Buren had been Jackson's choice a year ago; and to all the reasons which had then existed were now added his great services in the canva.s.s, and the prestige of his popular election as governor.
The episode of Mrs. Eaton, the wife of the new secretary of war, was absurd enough in a const.i.tutionally governed country; but this silly ”court scandal,” which might very well have enlivened the pages of a secretary of a privy council or an amba.s.sador from a petty German prince, did no more than hasten the inevitable division. In the hastening, however, Van Buren doubtless reaped some profit in Jackson's greater friends.h.i.+p. Many respectable people in Was.h.i.+ngton believed that unchast.i.ty on the part of this lady had induced her former husband, Timberlake, to cut his throat. Her second marriage to Eaton had just taken place in January, 1829, after Jackson, learning of the scandal but disbelieving it, had said to Eaton, ”Your marrying her will disprove these charges, and restore Peg's good name.” The general treated with violent contempt the persons, some of them clergymen, ”whose morbid appet.i.te,” he wrote the Rev. Dr. Ely on March 23, 1829, ”delights in defamation and slander.” Burning with anger at those who had dared in the recent canva.s.s to malign his own wife now dead, he defended with chivalrous resolution the lady whom his own wife ”to the last moment of her life believed ... to be an innocent and much-injured woman.” Even Mrs. Madison, he said, ”was a.s.sailed by these fiends in human shape.”
When protests were made against Eaton's appointment to the cabinet, Jackson savagely cried, ”I will sink or swim with him, by G.o.d!” All this had happened before Van Buren reached Was.h.i.+ngton. There then followed the grave question, whether Mrs. Eaton should be adjudged guilty by society and sentenced to exclusion from its ceremonious enjoyments. The ladies generally were determined against her, even the ladies of Jackson's own household. Jackson proposed the task, impossible even to an emperor, of compelling recognition of this distressed and persecuted consort of a minister of state. The unfortunate married men in the cabinet were in embarra.s.sment indeed. They would not if they could, so they said,--or at least they could not if they would,--induce their wives to visit or receive visits from the wife of their colleague.
Jackson showed them very clearly that no other course would satisfy him.
Calhoun in his matrimonial state was at the same disadvantage. Even foreign ministers and their wives met the President's displeasure for not properly treating the wife of the American secretary of war.
When Van Buren entered this farcical scene, his widowed condition, and the fortune of having sons rather than daughters, left him quite unembarra.s.sed. He politely called upon his a.s.sociate's wife, as he called upon the others; he treated her with entire deference of manner.
It is probable, though by no means clear, for popular feeling was supposed to run high in sacred defense of the American home, that this was the more politic course. It is now, however, certain that by doing so he gave to Jackson, and some who were personally very close to Jackson, more gratification than he gave offense elsewhere; and this has been the occasion of much aspersion of Van Buren's motives. But whether his course were politic or not, it is easy enough to see that any other course would have been inexcusable. It would have been dastardly in the extreme for Van Buren, reaching Was.h.i.+ngton and finding a controversy raging whether or not the wife of one of his a.s.sociates were virtuous, to p.r.o.nounce her guilty, as he most unmistakably would have done had he refused her the attention which etiquette required him to pay all ladies in her position. Parton in his Life of Jackson quotes from an anonymous Was.h.i.+ngton correspondent, whose account he says was ”exaggerated and prejudiced but not wholly incorrect,” the story that Van Buren induced the British and Russian ministers, both of whom to their immediate peace of mind happened to be bachelors, to treat Mrs. Eaton with distinction at their entertainments. But the supposition seems quite gratuitous.
Neither of those unmarried diplomats was likely to do so absurdly indefensible a thing as to insult by marked exclusion a cabinet minister's wife, whom the President for any reason, good or bad, treated with special distinction and respect. Van Buren's common sense was a strong characteristic; and he doubtless looked upon the whole affair with amused contempt. As the cabinet officer who had most to do with social ceremonies, he may well have sought to calm the irritation and establish for Mrs. Eaton, where he could, the usual forms of civility.
Like many other blessings of etiquette, these forms permit one to hold unoffending neutrality upon the moral deserts of persons whom he meets.
It happened that Calhoun's friends had tried to prevent Eaton's appointment to the War Department, and afterwards sought to remove him from the cabinet. The episode added, therefore, keen edge to the growing hostility of Jackson and his near friends to Calhoun, and thus tended to strengthen his rival. But all this would have signified little but for something deeper and broader. The preference of Van Buren had been dictated by powerful causes long before Mrs. Timberlake became Mrs.
Eaton. These causes now grew more and more powerful.