Part 10 (2/2)

It was the first battle, a sort of Bull Run, in the last and great political campaign between the interests of slavery and those of freedom.

On the first ballot for the candidate, Van Buren had 146 votes, 13 more than a majority. If after the vote on the two thirds rule anything more were required to show that some of these votes were given in mere formal obedience to instructions, the second ballot brought the proof. Van Buren then sank to 127, less than a majority; and on the seventh ballot to 99. A motion was made to declare him the nominee as the choice of a majority of the convention; and there followed a scene of fury, the President bawling for order amid savage taunts between North and South, and bitter denunciations of the treachery of some of those who had pledged themselves for Van Buren. Samuel Young of New York declared the ”abominable Texas question” to be the fire-brand thrown among them by the ”mongrel administration at Was.h.i.+ngton,” whose hero was now doubtless fiddling while Rome was burning. Nero seems to have been Calhoun, though between the G.o.d-like young devil of antiquity wreathed with sensual frenzy and infamy, and the solemn, even saturnine figure of the great modern advocate of human slavery, the likeness seemed rather slight. The motion was declared out of order; and the name of James K. Polk was presented as that of ”a pure whole-hogged Democrat.” On the eighth ballot he had 44 votes. Then followed the magnanimous scene of ”union and harmony” which has so often, after a conflict, charmed a political body into unworthy surrender. The great delegation from New York retired during the ninth balloting; and returned to a convention profoundly silent but thrilling with that b.a.s.t.a.r.d sense of coming glory in which a lately tumultuous and quarreling body waits the solution of its difficulties already known to be reached but not yet declared. Butler quoted a letter which Van Buren had given him authorizing the withdrawal of his name if it were necessary for harmony; he eulogized Polk as a strict constructionist, and closed by reading a letter from Jackson fervently urging Van Buren's nomination. Daniel S. d.i.c.kinson said that ”he loved this convention because it had acted so like the ma.s.ses,” and cast New York's 35 votes for Polk. The latter's nomination was declared with the utmost joy, and sent to Was.h.i.+ngton over Morse's first telegraph line, just completed. Silas Wright of New York, Van Buren's strong friend and a known opponent of annexation, was, in the fas.h.i.+on since followed, nominated for the vice-presidency, to soothe the feelings and the conscience of the defeated. Wright peremptorily telegraphed his refusal. He told his friends that he did ”not choose to ride behind on the black pony.” George M. Dallas of Pennsylvania took his place.

The Democratic party now threw away all advantage of the issue made by the undeserved defeat four years before. Thirty-six years later it repeated the blunder in discarding Van Buren's famous neighbor and disciple. Polk's was the first nomination by the party of a man of the second or of even a lower rank. Polk was known to have ability inferior not only to that of Van Buren and Calhoun, but to Ca.s.s, Buchanan, Wright, and others. He was the first presidential ”dark horse,” and indeed hardly that. His own State of Tennessee had, by resolution, presented him as its choice for vice-president with Van Buren in the first place. He had been speaker of the national House, and later, governor of his State; but since holding these places had been twice defeated for governor. In accepting the nomination he declared, with an apparent fling at Van Buren, that, if elected, he should not accept a renomination, and should thus enable the party in 1848 to make ”a free selection.”

The nomination aroused disgust enough. ”Polk! Great G.o.d, what a nomination!” Letcher, the Whig governor of Kentucky, wrote to Buchanan.

But the experiment of 1840 with the Whigs had been disastrous; the people had swung back to the strict doctrines of the Democracy. Van Buren faithfully kept his promise to support the nomination; under his urgency Wright finally accepted the nomination for governor of New York.

And by the vote of New York Henry Clay was defeated by a man vastly his inferior. Polk had 5000 plurality in that State; but Wright had 10,000.

Had not James G. Birney, the abolitionist candidate who polled there 15,812 votes, been in the field, not even Van Buren's party loyalty would have prevented Clay's election. Van Buren's friends saved the State; but in doing so voted for annexation. In April, 1844, Clay had written a letter against annexation. As it appeared within a few days of Van Buren's letter, and as the personal relations between the two great party leaders were most friendly, some have inferred an arrangement between them to take the question out of politics. This would indeed have been an extraordinary occurrence. One might well wish to have overheard a negotiation between two rivals for the presidency to exclude a great question distasteful to both. After the Democratic convention, Tyler's treaty of annexation was rejected in the Senate by 35 to 16, six Democrats from the North, among them Wright of New York and Benton of Missouri, voting against it. During the campaign Clay had weakly abandoned even the mild emphasis of his first opposition, and by flings at the abolitionists had openly bid for the pro-slavery vote; thus perhaps losing enough votes in New York to Birney to defeat him. After the election the current for annexation seemed too strong; and a resolution pa.s.sed both Houses authorizing the admission of Texas as a State. The resolution provided for the formation of four additional States out of Texas. In any such additional State formed north of the Missouri compromise line, slavery was to be prohibited; but in those south of it slavery was to be permitted or prohibited as the inhabitants might choose.

Slavery was now clearly before the political conscience of the nation.

Van Buren was the conspicuous victim of the first encounter. The Baltimore convention had in its platform complimented ”their ill.u.s.trious fellow-citizen,” ”his inflexible fidelity to the Const.i.tution,” his ”ability, integrity, and firmness,” and had tendered to him, ”in honorable retirement,” the a.s.surance of the deeply-seated ”confidence, affection, and respect of the American Democracy.” This sentence to ”honorable retirement” Van Buren, who was only in his sixty-second year and in the amplitude of his natural powers, received with outward complacency. On the eve of the election he pointed out, probably referring to Ca.s.s, that the hostility to him had not been in the interest of Polk, and warmly said that, unless the Democratic creed were a delusion, personal feelings ought to be turned to nothing. Van Buren was, however, profoundly affected by what he deemed the undeserved Southern hostility to himself. For he hardly yet appreciated that his defeat was politically legitimate, and not the result of political treachery or envy. Between him and the Southern politicians had opened a true and deep division over the greatest single question in American politics since Jefferson's election.

With Polk's accession and the Mexican war, the schism in the Democratic ranks over the extension of American slave territory became plainer.

Even during the canva.s.s of 1844 a circular had been issued by William Cullen Bryant, David Dudley Field, John W. Edmonds, and other Van Buren men, supporting Polk, but urging the choice of congressmen opposed to annexation. Early in the new administration the division of New York Democrats into ”Barnburners” and ”Old Hunkers” appeared. The former were the strong pro-Van Buren, anti-Texas men, or ”radical Democrats,” who were likened to the farmer who burned his barn to clear it of rats. The latter were the ”Northern men with Southern principles,” the supporters of annexation, and the respectable, dull men of easy consciences, who were said to hanker after the offices. The Barnburners were led by men of really eminent ability and exalted character: Silas Wright, then governor, Benjamin F. Butler, John A. Dix, chosen in 1845 to the United States Senate, Azariah C. Flagg, the famous comptroller, and John Van Buren, the ex-President's son, and a singularly picturesque figure in politics, who was, in 1845, made attorney-general by the legislature. He had been familiarly called ”Prince John” since his travels abroad during his father's presidency. Daniel S. d.i.c.kinson and William L. Marcy were the chief figures in the Hunker ranks. Polk seemed inclined, at the beginning, to favor, or at least to placate, the Barnburners. He offered the Treasury to Wright, though he is said to have known that Wright could not leave the governors.h.i.+p. He offered Butler the War Department, but the latter's devotion to his profession, for which he had resigned the attorney-general's place in Van Buren's cabinet, made him prefer the freedom of the United States attorneys.h.i.+p at New York, and Marcy was finally given the New York place in the cabinet. Jackson's death in June, 1845, deprived the Van Buren men of the tremendous moral weight which his name carried, and which might have daunted Polk. It perhaps also helped to loosen the weight of party ties on the Van Buren men. After this the schism rapidly grew. In the fall election of 1845 the Barnburners pretty thoroughly controlled the Democratic party of the State in hostility to the Mexican war, which the annexation of Texas had now brought. Samuel J. Tilden of Columbia county, and a profound admirer of Van Buren, became one of their younger leaders.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Silas Wright]

Now arose the strife over the ”Wilmot Proviso,” in which was embodied the opposition to the extension of slavery into new Territories. Upon this proviso the modern Republican party was formed eight years later; upon it, fourteen years later, Abraham Lincoln was chosen president; and upon it began the war for the Union, out of whose throes came the vastly grander and unsought beneficence of complete emanc.i.p.ation. David Wilmot was a Democratic member of Congress from Pennsylvania; in New York he would have been a Barnburner. In 1846 a bill was pending to appropriate $3,000,000 for use by the President in a purchase of territory from Mexico as part of a peace. Wilmot proposed an amendment that slavery should be excluded from any territory so acquired. All the Democratic members, as well as the Whigs from New York, and most strongly the Van Buren or Wright men, supported the proviso. The Democratic legislature approved it by the votes of the Whigs with the Barnburners and the Soft Hunkers, the latter being Hunkers less friendly to slavery. It pa.s.sed the House at Was.h.i.+ngton, but was rejected by the Senate, not so quickly open to popular sentiment. In the Democratic convention of New York, in October, 1846, the ”war for the extension of slavery” was charged by the Barnburners on the Hunkers. The former were victorious, and Silas Wright was renominated for governor, to be defeated, however, at the election.

Polk, Marcy, and d.i.c.kinson, angered at the Democratic opposition in New York to the pro-slavery Mexican policy, now threw all the weight of federal patronage against the Barnburners, many of whom believed the administration to have been responsible for Wright's defeat. Van Buren and his influence were completely separated from the national administration. Just before the adjournment of Congress in 1847, the appropriation to secure territory from Mexico was again proposed. Again the Wilmot Proviso was added in the House; again it was rejected in the Senate, to the defeat of the appropriation; and again Barnburners and Whigs carried in the New York legislature a resolution approving it, and directing the New York senators to support it.

The tide was rising. It seemed that Mexican law prohibited slavery in New Mexico and California, and that upon their cession the principles of international law would preserve their condition of freedom. Benton, therefore, deemed the Wilmot Proviso unnecessary; a ”thing of nothing in itself, and seized upon to conflagrate the States and dissolve the Union.” For the Supreme Court had not then p.r.o.nounced slavery a necessary accompaniment of American supremacy. But the legal protection of freedom was practically unsubstantial, even if not technical; there could be no doubt of the determination of the South to carry slavery into these Territories, whatever might be the obligations of either munic.i.p.al or international law; and their conquest, therefore, made imminent a decision of the vital question whether slavery should be still further extended.

At the Democratic convention at Syracuse, in September, 1847, the Hunkers, after a fierce struggle over contested seats, seized control of the body. David Dudley Field, for the Barnburners, proposed a resolution that, although the Democracy of New York would faithfully adhere to the compromises of the Const.i.tution and maintain the reserved rights of the States, they would still declare, since the crisis had come, ”their uncompromising hostility to the extension of slavery into territory now free.” This was defeated. The Barnburners then seceded, and issued an address, in which Lawrence Van Buren, the ex-President's brother, joined. They protested that the anti-slavery resolution had been defeated by a fraudulent organization of the convention, and called a ma.s.s meeting at Herkimer, on October 26, ”to avow their principles and consult as to future action.” The Herkimer convention was really an important preliminary to the formation of the modern Republican party.

It was a gathering of the ex-President's friends. Cambreleng, his old a.s.sociate, presided; David Wilmot addressed the meeting; and John Van Buren, now very conspicuous in politics, reported the resolutions. In these the fraud at Syracuse was again denounced; a convention was called for Was.h.i.+ngton's birthday in 1848, to choose Barnburner delegates to contest the seats of those chosen by the Hunkers in the national Democratic convention. It was declared that the freemen of New York would not submit to slavery in the conquered provinces; and that, against the threat of Democrats at the South that they would support no candidate for the presidency who did not a.s.sent to the extension of slavery, the Democrats of New York would proclaim their determination to vote for no candidate who did so a.s.sent.

It was clear that Van Buren sympathized with all this. Relieved from the constraint of power, there strongly revived his old hostility to slavery; he recalled his vote twenty-eight years before against admitting Missouri otherwise than free. He now perceived how profound had really been the political division between him and the Southern Democrats when, in 1844, he wrote his Texas letter. Ignoring the legitimate character of the politics of Polk's administration in denying official recognition or reward to Barnburners,--legitimate if, as Van Buren had himself pretty uniformly maintained, patronage should go to friends rather than enemies, and if, as was obvious, there had arisen a true political division upon principles,--Van Buren was now touched with anger at the proscription of his friends. Excluded from the power which ought to have belonged to the chief of Democrats enjoying even in ”honorable retirement” the ”confidence, affection, and respect” of his party, independence rapidly grew less heinous in his eyes. One can hardly doubt that there now more freely welled up in his mind, to clarify its vision, the sense of personal wrong which, since Polk's nomination, had been so long held in magnanimous and dignified restraint,--though of this he was probably unconscious. Van Buren was not insincere when, in October, 1847, he wrote from Lindenwald to an enthusiastic Democratic editor in Pennsylvania, who had hoisted his name to the top of his columns for 1848. Whatever, he said, had been his aspirations in the past, he now had no desire to be President; every day confirmed him in the political opinions to which he had adhered.

Conscious of always having done his duty to the people to the best of his ability, he had ”no heart burnings to be allayed and no resentments to be gratified by a restoration of power.” Life at Lindenwald was entirely adapted to his taste; and he was (so he wrote, and so doubtless he had forced himself to think) ”sincerely and heartily desirous to wear the honors and enjoyments of private life uninterruptedly to the end.”

If tendered a unanimous Democratic support with the a.s.surance of the election it would bring, he should not ”hesitate respectfully and gratefully, but decidedly to decline it,” adding, however, the proviso so precious to public men, ”consulting only my own feelings and wishes.”

It was in the last degree improbable, he said,--and so it was,--that any emergency should arise in which this indulgence of his own preferences would, in the opinion of his true and faithful friends, conflict with his duty to the party to which his whole life had been devoted, and to which he owed any personal sacrifice. The Mexican war had, he said, been so completely sanctioned by the government that it must be carried through; and, he ominously added, the propriety of thereafter inst.i.tuting inquiries into the necessity of its occurrence, so as to fix the just responsibility to public opinion of public servants, was then out of season. Not a word of praise did he speak of Polk's administration; in this he was for once truly and grimly ”non-committal.”

In the New York canva.s.s of 1847, the Barnburners, after their secession, ”talked of indifferent matters.” The Whigs were therefore completely successful. In the legislature the Barnburners, or ”Free-soilers” as they began to be called, outnumbered the Hunkers. d.i.c.kinson proposed in the Senate at Was.h.i.+ngton a resolution, the precursor of Douglas's ”squatter sovereignty,”--that all questions concerning the domestic policy of the Territories should be left to their legislatures to be chosen by their people. Lewis Ca.s.s, now the coming candidate of the South, a.s.serted in December, 1847, the same proposition, pointing out that, if Congress could abolish the relation of master and servant in the Territories, it might in like manner treat the relation of husband and wife. After this ”Nicholson letter” of his, Ca.s.s might well have been asked whether he would have approved the admission of a State where the last relation was forbidden, and where concubinage existed as a ”domestic inst.i.tution.” d.i.c.kinson's proposal meant that the first settlers of each Territory should determine it to freedom or to slavery; it meant that in admitting new States the nation ought to be indifferent to their laws on slavery. If slavery were a mere incident in the polity of the State, a matter of taste or convenience, the proposition would have been true enough. But euphemistic talk about ”domestic inst.i.tutions” blinded none but theorists or lovers of slavery to the truth that slavery was a fearful and barbarous power, and that it must become paramount in any new Southern State, monstrous and corrupting in its tendencies towards savagery, unyielding, wasteful, and ruinous,--a power whose corruption and savagery, whose waste and ruin, debauched and enfeebled all communities closely allied to the States which maintained it,--a power in whose rapid growth, in whose affirmative and dictatorial arrogance, and in the intellectual ability and even the moral excellences of the aristocracy which administered it at the South, there was an appalling menace. As well might one propose the admission to political intimacy and national unity of a State whose laws encouraged leprosy or required the funeral oblations of the suttee. If there were already slave States in the confederacy, it was no less true that the nation had profoundly suffered from their slavery. Nor could all the phrases of const.i.tutional lawyers make the slave-block, the black laws, and all the practices of this barbarism mere local peculiarities, distasteful perhaps to the North but not concerning it, peculiarities to be ranked with laws of descent or judicial procedure. Ca.s.s and d.i.c.kinson for their surrender to the South were now called ”dough-faces” and ”slavocrats” by the Democratic Free-soilers. They were the true ”Northern men with Southern principles.”

The Barnburners met at Utica on February 16, an earlier day than that first appointed, John Van Buren again being the chief figure. The convention praised John A. Dix for supporting the Wilmot Proviso; and declared that Benton, a senator from a slave State, but now a st.u.r.dy opponent of extending the evil, and long the warm friend and admirer of Van Buren, had ”won a proud preeminence among the statesmen of the day.”

Delegates were chosen to the national convention to oppose the Hunkers.

In April, 1848, the Barnburner members of the legislature issued an address, the authors of which were long afterwards disclosed by Samuel J. Tilden to be himself and Martin and John Van Buren. At great length it demonstrated the Free-soil principles of the Democratic fathers.

The national convention a.s.sembled in May, 1848. It offered to admit the Barnburner and Hunker delegations together to cast the vote of the State. The Barnburners rejected the compromise as a simple nullification of the vote of the State, and then withdrew. Lewis Ca.s.s was nominated for president, the Wilmot Proviso being thus emphatically condemned. For Ca.s.s had declared in favor of letting the new Territories themselves decide upon slavery. The Barnburners, returning to a great meeting in the City Hall Park at New York, cried, ”The lash has resounded through the halls of the Capitol!” and condemned the cowardice of Northern senators who had voted with the South. Among the letters read was one from Franklin Pierce, who had in 1844 voted against annexation, a letter which years afterwards was, with a reference to his famous friend and biographer, called the ”Scarlet Letter.” The delegates issued an address written by Tilden, fearlessly calling Democrats to independent action. In June a Barnburner convention met at Utica. Its president, Samuel Young, who had refused at the convention at Baltimore in 1844 to vote for Polk when the rest of his delegation surrendered, said that if the convention did its duty, a clap of political thunder would in November ”make the propagandists of slavery shake like Belshazzar.”

Butler, John Van Buren, and Preston King, afterwards a Republican senator, were there. David Dudley Field read an explicit declaration from the ex-President against the action and the candidates of the national convention. This letter, whose prolixity is an extreme ill.u.s.tration of Van Buren's literary fault, created a profound impression. He declared his ”unchangeable determination never again to be a candidate for public office.” The requirement by the national convention that the New York delegates should pledge themselves to vote for any candidate who might be nominated was, he said, an indignity of the rankest character. The Virginia delegates had been permitted, without incurring a threat of exclusion, to declare that they would not support a certain nominee. The convention had not allowed the Democrats of New York fair representation, and its acts did not therefore bind them.

The point of political regularity, when discussed upon a technical basis, was, however, by no means clear. The real question was whether the surrender of the power of Congress over the Territories, and the refusal to use that power to exclude slavery, accorded with Democratic principles. On this Van Buren was most explicit. Jefferson had proposed freedom for the Northwest Territories; and all the representatives from the slaveholding States had voted for the ordinance. Not only Was.h.i.+ngton and the elder and younger Adams had signed bills imposing freedom as the condition of admitting new Territories or States, but those undoubted Democrats, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson, had signed such bills; and so had he himself in 1838 in the case of Iowa. This power of Congress was part of ”the compromises of the Const.i.tution,” compromises which, ”deeply penetrated” as he had been ”by the convictions that slavery was the only subject that could endanger our blessed Union,” he had, he was aware, gone further to sustain against Northern attacks than many of his best friends approved. He would go no further. As the national convention had rejected this old doctrine of the Democracy, he should not vote for its candidate, General Ca.s.s; and if there were no other candidate but General Taylor, he should not vote for president. If our ancestors, when the opinion and conduct of the world about slavery were very different, had rescued from slavery the territory now making five great States, should we, he asked, in these later days, after the gigantic efforts of Great Britain for freedom, and when nearly all mankind were convinced of its evils, doom to slavery a territory from which as many more new States might be made. He counseled moderation and forbearance, but still a firm resistance to injustice.

This powerful declaration from the old chief of the Democracy was decisive with the convention. Van Buren was nominated for president, and Henry Dodge, a Democratic senator of Wisconsin, for vice-president.

Dodge, however, declined, proud though he would be, as he said, to have his name under other circ.u.mstances a.s.sociated with Van Buren's. But his State had been represented in the Baltimore convention; and as one of its citizens he cordially concurred in the nomination of Ca.s.s. A national convention was called to meet at Buffalo on August 9, 1848.

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