Martin Van Buren

by Edward Morse Shepard

The heat of the Missouri question was ended at the session before Van Buren's senatorial term began. It seemed only a thunder-storm passing 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 emancipation 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 passing the South in every material advantage, that the latter, it seemed, must surely learn the lesson. For the institution 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 institution, 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 Massachusetts 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 embarrassments of slave settlement arose, devote this new land to freedom,—not so much to freedom as that shining goddess of mercy and right and justice who rose clear and obvious to our purged vision out of the civil war, as to the less noble 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 sunshine and prosperity returned over the land.

Van Buren's views at this time were doubtless clear against the extension of slavery. He disliked the institution; 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 Massachusetts 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 friendship and political alliance between him and Van Buren must have soon begun. During all or nearly all Van Buren's senatorship the two occupied adjoining seats. Two years later Andrew Jackson was sent to the Senate by Tennessee, as a suitable preliminary to his presidential canvass. 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 associates 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-titles 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 Cumberland 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 Constitution 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, constitutional 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 constitutional amendment. Congress was to have power to make roads and canals, but the money appropriated was to be apportioned among the States according to population. No road or canal 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 illustrated 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 Canal, 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 Constitution, whose sanctity 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 Constitution 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 Constitution 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 factitious help of this designation and the fine leadership of Clay. With Jackson and Benton, Van Buren voted for it, against men differing as widely from each other as his associate, 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 attitude of his. But he declared himself with sufficient plainness not only to believe in the constitutionality 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 associate on the presidential ticket. "When the monarchs of Europe are assembled 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. The former, still speaking his own sentiments, declared that "the best apology for laws of prohibition and laws of monopoly will be found in that state of society, not only unenlightened but sluggish, in which they are most generally established." But now, he said, "competition comes in place of monopoly, and intelligence and industry ask only for fair play and an open field." He repudiated the principle of protection. "On the contrary," said he, "I think freedom of trade to be the general principle, and restriction the exception."

Nor was Van Buren then left without the light which afterwards reached him on the constitutional question. Rufus King said that, if gentlemen wished to encourage the production of hemp and iron, they ought to bring in a bill to give bounties on those articles; for there was the same constitutional right to grant bounties as to levy restrictive duties upon foreign products. Hayne made the really eloquent and masterly speech for which he ought to stand in the first rank of orators, and which summed up as well for free-traders now as then the most telling arguments against artificial restrictions. He skillfully closed with Washington's words: "Our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand, neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing." Hayne did not confine himself to the doctrines of Adam Smith, or the hardships which protection meant to a planting region like his own. For the chief interest of the South was in cotton; and the price of cotton was largely determined by the ability of foreigners to import it from America,—an ability in its turn dependent upon the willingness of America to take her pay, directly or indirectly, in foreign commodities. Hayne, however, went further. He clearly raised the question, whether the encouragement of manufactures could constitutionally be made a Federal object.

Sitting day after day under this long debate in the little senate chamber then in use, where men listened to speeches, if for no other reason, because they were easily heard, Van Buren could not, with his ability and readiness, have misunderstood the general principles involved. Early in the debate, upon a motion to strike out the duty on hemp, he briefly but explicitly said that "he was in favor of increasing the duty on hemp, with a view of affording protection to its cultivation in this country." He voted against limiting the duty on wool to twenty-five per cent., but voted against a duty of twenty-five per cent. on India silks,—a revenue rather than a protective duty. He voted for duties on wheat and wheat flour and potatoes. He voted against striking out the duty on books, in spite of Hayne's grotesque but forcible argument that they were to be considered "a raw material, essential to the formation of the mind, the morals, and the character of the people." It is difficult to understand the significance of all Van Buren's votes on the items of the bill; but the record shows them to have been, on the whole, protectionist, with a preference for moderate rates, but a firm assertion of the wool interests of New York. Benton tells us that Van Buren was one of the main speakers for the bill; but the assertion is not borne out by the record. He delivered no general speech upon the subject, as did most of the senators, but seems to have spoken only upon some of the details as they were considered in committee of the whole. The best to be said in Van Buren's behalf is, that his judgment was not yet so ripe upon the matter as not to be still open to great change. He was in his third session, and still new to national politics, and there was before him the plain and strong argument that his State wanted protection. In 1835 Butler, speaking for him as a presidential candidate, said that his personal feelings had been "at all times adverse to the high tariff policy." But "high tariff" was then, as now, a merely relative term. His votes placed him in that year very near Henry Clay. That from 1824 he grew more and more averse to the necessary details and results of a protective policy is probably true. Nor ought it to be, even from the standpoint of free-traders, serious accusation that a public man varies his political utterances upon the tariff question, if the variation be progressive and steadily towards what they deem a greater liberality. To Van Buren, however, the tariff question never had a capital importance. Even thirty-two years later, while rehearsing from his retirement the achievements of his party in excuse of the support he reluctantly gave Buchanan, he did not name among its services its insistence upon merely revenue duties, although he had then for years been himself committed to that doctrine.