VI
Meanwhile Van Buren serenely went his way, undisturbed by the storm, and in the best of humor. Soon after the Baltimore Convention, the most unconventional campaign biography ever published in America was issued by a Philadelphia publishing house and given an extensive circulation. The present generation scarcely realizes that there were two Davy Crocketts—the man of the woods and the fight, and the less admirable creature who made a rather sorry figure in the Congress. It was the latter who was persuaded to write a part, and to father all, of this scurrilous biography of Van Buren, although it is generally accepted that Hugh Lawson White, the man of ponderous dignity and lofty ideals, was the man behind this questionable literary venture.[888] The personal references to Van Buren are crudely and coarsely offensive throughout.
“He is about fifty years old,” he wrote, “and notwithstanding his baldness, which reaches all around and half down his head, like a white pitch plaster, leaving a few white floating locks, he is only three years older than I am. His face is a good deal shriveled, and he looks sorry, not for anything he has gained, but what he may lose.”[889] In describing his subject’s mental operations, he found that “his mind beats round, like a tame bear tied to a stake, in a little circle, hardly bigger than the circumference of the head in which it is placed, seeking no other object than to convert the Government into an instrument to serve himself or his office-holding friends.”[890]
In explaining Van Buren’s rise, the hero of young Texas proceeded: “He has become a great man without any reason for it, and so have I. He has been nominated for President without the least pretensions; and so have I. But here the similarity stops. From his cradle he was on the non-committal tribe. I never was. He had always two ways to do a thing; I never had but one. He was generally half bent; I tried to be as straight as a gun barrel. He could not bear his rise; I never minded mine. He forgot all his old associates because they were poor folks; I stuck to the people that made me.”[891]
And in a superb bit of demagogy, Crockett described Van Buren as traveling through the country in an English coach with “English servants dressed in uniform—I think they call it livery”; refusing to mix “with the sons of the little tavern-keepers,” forgetting “his old companions and friends in the humbler walks of life”; eating “in a room by himself,” and carrying himself “so stiff in his gait and prim in his dress, that he was what the English call a Dandy.” The reader was assured that “when he enters the Senate Chamber in the morning, he struts and swaggers like a crow in a gutter,” that he “is laced up in corsets such as women in town wear, and if possible tighter than the best of them.” Indeed, Crockett found it “difficult to tell from his personal appearance whether he was a man or a woman.”[892] The Eaton scandal was salaciously served anew, the fight between Jackson and Benton was described in detail, and, unfortunately for his candidate for President, a chapter was devoted to a hot defense of White on the Bank and on the Fortifications Bill.
The book, now happily forgotten, is only interesting and historically important in indicating the tone of the political contests of the time, and the scurrility of the attacks on Van Buren in the campaign. If the Little Magician enjoyed the queer concoction, it was not without the realization of its possibility for doing harm. At any rate, a little later, another and a friendly biography by Holland was published, seriously reviewing Van Buren’s public career. While not written in bad taste, it aroused the ire of John Quincy Adams who took the time to read it. “A mere partisan electioneering work,” he wrote in his diary. “Van Buren’s personal character bears, however, a stronger resemblance to that of Mr. Madison than to that of Mr. Jefferson. These are both remarkable for their extreme caution in avoiding and averting personal collisions. Van Buren, like the Sosie of Molière’s ‘Amphitryon,’ is ‘l’ami de tout le monde.’ This is perhaps the secret of his great success in public life, and especially against the competitors with whom he is now struggling for the last step on the ladder of his ambition—Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun. They, indeed, are left upon the field for dead; and men of straw, Hugh L. White, William Henry Harrison, and Daniel Webster, are thrust forward in their places. Neither of these has a principle to lean upon.”[893]
If these intrigues and attacks disturbed Van Buren in the least, he gave no sign. During a ten-day sojourn in New York in October, Philip Hone, who vainly sought an open date to entertain him at dinner, found “his outward appearance like the unruffled surface of the majestic river which covers rocks and whirlpools, but shows no marks of the agitation beneath.”[894] In this same good temper, he faced the ordeal of presiding over the Senate, dominated by his political foes, in the long session preceding the election. We shall here find him threading his way among pitfalls provided by his enemies with such skill as to conceal all effort.
VII
The halls of Congress in the session of December, 1835, were used as the hustings, and there, largely, the presidential battle was fought. The first blow was struck by the Jacksonians in the election of Polk to the Speakership, over Bell. The latter was a man of much capacity, considered by Van Buren as the intellectual superior of White, and he had been elected to the Speakership, on the resignation of Stevenson, through a combination of the Whigs and anti-Administration Democrats. In seeking a reconciliation with the Jacksonians, he had hinted at a desire for a confidential conference with Van Buren, and the two were finally invited to dine with a mutual friend. Unhappily for Bell, a severe toothache, real or diplomatic, forced the candidate of the Jacksonian Democracy to retire the moment the ladies left the table. When a few days later the two found themselves together on the speakers’ rostrum on the occasion of the delivery of Adams’s oration on Lafayette, Bell had attempted to discuss the differences of the factions, but the canny Red Fox “put a civil end to the conversation with a few general remarks in regard to the duty the friends of Judge White owed” to the party, and soon afterward the Tennessee Senator had entered the field, and Bell was forced to espouse his cause.[895] Thus the course of history may have been changed by the toothache of a politician. At any rate, it was enough, to the Jacksonian leaders, to know that Polk had risked his popularity and future by taking the offensive in favor of Van Buren, and he was rewarded with the Speakership.
The Whigs instantly accepted the challenge by bitterly opposing the confirmation of Roger B. Taney as Chief Justice of the United States. No one questioned his professional ability or his eminent fitness for a high judicial position. Bitterly hostile as he was to Jackson’s Bank policy, John Marshall had recognized Taney’s qualifications for the bench when the President had previously made an unsuccessful attempt to elevate his former Secretary of the Treasury to that tribunal. At that time the venerable Chief Justice had quietly interested himself in his successor’s behalf, and among the papers of Senator Leigh, still in possession of the family, is the brief but significant note from Marshall: “If you have not made up your mind on the nomination of Mr. Taney, I have received some information in his favor which I would wish to communicate.”[896] But after Marshall’s death and Taney’s appointment, the Whig and pro-Bank politicians attempted to array all the late jurist’s friends and admirers against the confirmation by picturing Jackson as not only hostile to the trend of his decisions, but to the perpetuation of his memory. The “Richmond Whig” announced that “he [Jackson] thinks undue honors have been rendered to the memory of General Marshall, and predicts that the attempt to build a monument to his memory in Washington will fail.” This was a willful perversion of a comment actually made to the editor of the “Southern Literary Messenger” at Rip Raps, that, in view of Jackson’s inability to interest Congress in an appropriation for a monument to Washington, he was afraid that it would be impossible to build one to Marshall.[897] But the idea of the fighting Secretary of the Treasury in the seat of Marshall was maddening to the Whig leaders, and the nomination was attacked with intemperance and even scurrility by both Webster and Clay, and it was not until in March, three months after the nomination was sent to the Senate, that it was confirmed.