Martin Van Buren

by Edward Morse Shepard

Van Buren's vote for the tariff of 1824 had no very direct relation to his political situation. His own successor was not to be chosen for nearly three years. Crawford, whom he supported for the presidency, was the only one of the four candidates opposed to the bill. Adams was consistently a protectionist; he believed in actively promoting the welfare of men, though chiefly if not exclusively American men, even when they resisted their own welfare. He, like his father, was perfectly ready to use the power of government where it seemingly promised to be effective, without caring much for economical theories or constitutional restrictions. Jackson himself was far enough away from the ranks of strict constructionists on the tariff. In April, 1824, in the midst of the debate, and while a presidential candidate, he wrote from the Senate what free-traders, who afterwards supported him, would have deemed the worst of heresies. Like most candidates, ancient and modern, he was "in favor of a judicious examination and revision of" the tariff. He would advocate a tariff so far as it enabled the country to provide itself with the means of defense in war. But he would go further. The tariff ought to "draw from agriculture the superabundant labor, and employ it in mechanism and manufactures;" it ought to "give a proper distribution to our labor, to take from agriculture in the United States 600,000 men, women, and children." It is time, he cried, and quite as extravagantly as Clay, that "we should become a little more Americanized." How slight a connection the tariff had with the election of 1824 is further seen in the fact that Jackson, who thus supported the bill, received the vote of several of the States which strongly opposed the tariff.

In March, 1824, Van Buren urged the Senate to act upon a constitutional amendment touching the election of president. As the amendment could not be adopted in time to affect the pending canvass, there was, he said, no room for partisan feeling. He insisted that if there were no majority choice by the electors, the choice should not rest with the house of representatives voting by States, but that the electors should be reconvened, and themselves choose between the highest two candidates. The debate soon became thoroughly partisan. Rufus King, with but thinly veiled reference to Crawford's nomination, denounced the practice by which a caucus at Washington deprived the constitutional electors of any free choice; members of Congress were attending to president-making rather than to their duties. He thought that the course of events had "led near observers to suspect a connection existing between a central power of this description at the seat of the general government and the legislatures of Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, and New York, and perhaps of other States." To this it was pointed out with much force that such a caucus had chosen Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe without scandal or injury; that members of Congress were distinguished and representative persons familiar with national affairs, who might with great advantage respectfully suggest a course of action to their fellow-citizens. Van Buren went keenly to the real point of the belated objection to the system; it lay in the particular action of the recent caucus. He did not think it worth while to consider "those nice distinctions which challenged respect for the proceedings of conventions of one description and denied it to others; or to detect those still more subtle refinements which regarded meetings of the same character as sometimes proper, and at others destructive of the purity of elections and dangerous to the liberties of the people." After much talk about the will of the people, the Senate by a vote of 30 to 13 postponed the consideration of the amendments until after the election. Benton joined Van Buren in the minority, although they did not agree upon the form of amendment; but Jackson, perhaps because he was a candidate, did not vote.

It was highly probable that there would be embarrassment in choosing the next president. It was already nearly certain that neither candidate would have a majority of the electoral votes. The decision was then, as in our own time, supposed to rest with New York; and naturally therefore Van Buren's prestige was great, gained, as it had been, in that difficult and opulent political field. His attachment to Crawford was proof against the signs of the latter's decaying strength. Crawford was to him the Republican candidate regularly chosen, and one agreeable to his party by the vigorous democracy of his sentiments. His opposition to Jefferson's embargo, and his vote for a renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States, had been forgotten since his warm advocacy of the late war with England. His formal claims to the nomination were great. For he had been in the Senate as early as 1807, and its president upon the death of Vice-President Clinton in 1812; afterwards he had been minister to France, and was now secretary of the treasury. In the caucus of 1816 he had nearly as many votes as Monroe; and those votes were cast for him, it was said, though without much probability, in spite of his peremptory refusal to compete with Monroe. Moreover, Crawford had a majesty and grace of personal appearance which, with undoubtedly good though not great abilities, had, apart from these details of his career, made him conspicuous in the Republican ranks; and in its chief service he was, after the retirement of Monroe, the senior, except Adams, whose candidacy was far more recent. Crawford's claim to the succession was therefore very justifiable; he was the most obvious, the most "regular," of the candidates.

It has been said that Van Buren was at first inclined to Adams. The latter's unequaled public experience and discipline of intellect doubtless seemed, to Van Buren's precise and orderly mind, eminent qualifications for the first office in the land. Adams at this time, by a coincidence not inexplicable, thought highly of Van Buren. He entered in his diary a remark of his own, in February, 1825, that Van Buren was "a man of great talents and of good principles; but he had suffered them to be too much warped by party spirit." This from an Adams may be taken as extreme praise. It is pretty certain that if Van Buren had reprehensibly shifted his position from Adams to Crawford, we should find a record of it in the vast treasure-house of damnations which Adams left. Nor is there good reason to suppose that Van Buren was influenced by the nomination which Crawford's friends in Georgia gave him in 1824 for the vice-presidency. This showed that New York had already surrendered her favorite "son to the nation;" he was now definitely to be counted a power in national politics, where he was known as the "Albany director." Crawford's enemies in Georgia, the Clarkites, ridiculed this nomination with the coarse and silly abuse which active politicians to this day are always ready to use in their cynical under-estimate of popular intelligence,—abuse which they are by and by pretty sure to be glad to forget. Van Buren was pictured as half man and half cat, half fox and half monkey, half snake and half mink. He was dubbed "Blue Whiskey Van" and "Little Van." The Clarkites, being only a minority in the Georgia Assembly, delighted to vote for him as their standing candidate for doorkeeper and the like humbler positions.

New York was greatly disturbed through 1824 over the presidency. Its politics were in the position described by Senator Cobb, one of Crawford's Georgia supporters. "Could we hit upon a few great principles," he wrote home from Washington in January, 1825, "and unite their support with that of Crawford, we should succeed beyond doubt." But the great principles were hard to find. The people and the greater politicians were therefore swayed by personal preferences, without strong reason for either choice; and the lesser politicians were simply watching to see how the tide ran. Adams was the most natural choice of the New York Republicans. The South had had the presidency for six terms. His early secession from the Federalists; his aid in solidifying the Republican sentiment at the North; his support of Jefferson in the patriotic embargo struggle; his long, eminent, and fruitful services; and his place of secretary of state, from which Madison and Monroe had in turn been promoted to the presidency,—all these commended him to Northern Republicans as a proper candidate.

De Witt Clinton admired and supported General Jackson. In 1819 the latter had at a dinner in Tammany Hall amazed and affronted the former's Bucktail enemies by giving as his toast, "De Witt Clinton, the enlightened statesman and governor of the great and patriotic State of New York." In January, 1824, Clinton was the victim of a political outrage which illustrated the harsh partisanship then ruling in New York politics, and may well have determined the choice of president. Clinton had retired from the governor's chair; but he still held the honorary and unpaid office of canal commissioner, to which he brought distinguished honor but which brought none to him, and whose importance he more than any other man had created. The Crawford men in the legislature feared a combination of the men of the new People's party with the Clintonians on the presidential question. Clinton seemed at the time an unpopular character. To embarrass the People's party, Clinton's enemies suddenly, and just before the rising of the legislature, offered a resolution removing him from the canal commissionership. The People's party, it was thought, by opposing the resolution, would incur popular dislike through their alliance with the few and unpopular Clintonians; while by supporting the resolution they would forfeit the support of the latter upon which they relied. In either case the Crawford men would apparently profit by the trick. The People's party men, including those favoring Adams for president, at once seized the wrong horn of the dilemma, and voted for Clinton's removal, which was thus carried by an almost unanimous vote. But the people themselves were underrated; the outrage promptly restored Clinton to popular favor. In spite of the resistance of the politicians, he was, in the fall of 1824, elected by a large majority to the governor's seat, to which, or to any great office, it had been supposed he could never return; and this, although at the same time and upon the same ticket one of those who had voted for his removal was chosen lieutenant-governor. Van Buren was no party to this removal, although his political friends at Albany were the first movers in the scheme. He himself was far-sighted enough to see the probable effect of so gross and indecent a use of political power. Nor was he so relentless a partisan as to remember in unfruitful vengeance Clinton's own prescriptive conduct, or to remove the latter from an honorary seat which belonged to him above all other men. By this silly blunder Clinton was again raised to deserved power, which he held until his death.

The popular outburst consequent upon Clinton's removal in January, 1824, made it very dangerous for the Bucktails to leave to the people in the fall the choice of presidential electors. The rise of the People's party for a time seriously threatened Van Buren's influence. Until 1824 the presidential electors of New York had been chosen by its legislature. The opponents of Crawford and Van Buren, fearing that the latter's superior political skill would more easily capture the legislature in November, 1824, raised at the legislative elections of 1823 a cry against the Albany Regency, and demanded that presidential electors should be chosen directly by the people. The Regency, popularly believed to have been founded by Van Buren, consisted of a few able followers of his, residing or in office at Albany. They were also called the "conspirators." Chief among them were William L. Marcy, the comptroller; Samuel A. Talcott, the attorney-general; Benjamin F. Butler, then district attorney of Albany county; Edwin Croswell, the state printer; Roger Skinner, the United States district judge; and Benjamin Knower, the state treasurer. Later there joined the Regency, Silas Wright, Azariah C. Flagg, Thomas W. Olcott, and Charles E. Dudley. Its members were active, skillful, shrewd politicians; and they were much more. They were men of strong political convictions, holding and observing a high standard for the public service, and of undoubted personal integrity. In 1830 John A. Dix gave as a chief reason for accepting office at Albany that he should there be "one of the Regency." His son, Dr. Morgan Dix, describes their aggressive honesty, their refusal "to tolerate in those whom they could control what their own fine sense of honor did not approve;" and he quotes a remark made to him by Thurlow Weed, their long and most formidable enemy, "that he had never known a body of men who possessed so much power and used it so well." In his Memoirs, Weed describes their "great ability, great industry, indomitable courage." Two at least of the original members, Marcy and Butler, afterwards justly rose to national distinction. Even to our own day, the Albany Regency has been a strong and generally a sagacious influence in its party. John A. Dix, Horatio Seymour, Dean Richmond, and Samuel J. Tilden long directed its policy; and from the chief seat in its councils the late secretary of the treasury, Daniel Manning, was chosen in 1885.

In November, 1823, the People's party elected only a minority of the legislature; but many of the Democrats were committed to the support of an electoral law, and the movement was clearly popular. A just, though possibly an insufficient objection to the law was its proposal of a great change in anticipation of a particular election whose candidates were already before the public. But there was no resort to frank argument. Its indirect defeat was proposed by the Democratic managers, and accomplished with the coöperation of many supporters of Adams and Clay. A bill was reported in the Assembly, where the Regency was in a minority, giving the choice of the electors to the people directly, but cunningly requiring a majority instead of a plurality vote to elect. If there were no majority, then the choice was to be left to the legislature. The Adams and Clay men were unwilling to let a plurality elect, lest in the uncertain state of public feeling some other candidate might be at the head of the poll; and they were probably now quite as confident as the Bucktails, and with more reason, of their strength upon joint ballot in the legislature. Divided as the people of New York were between the four presidential candidates, it was well known that this device would really give them no choice. The consideration of the electoral law was postponed in the Senate upon a pretense of objection to the form of the bill, and with insincere protestations of a desire to pass it. The outcome of all this was that in the election of November, 1824, the Democrats were punished at the polls both for the wanton attack on Clinton and for their unprincipled treatment of the electoral bill. The Regency got no more than a small minority in the legislature; and De Witt Clinton, as has been said, was chosen governor by a great majority.

Crawford's supporters at Washington believed that in a congressional caucus he would have a larger vote than any other candidate. His opponents, in the same belief, refused to join in a caucus, in spite of the cry that their refusal was a treason to old party usage. The Republicans at Albany, probably upon Van Buren's advice, had in April, 1823, declared in favor of a caucus, but without effect. Two thirds of Congress would not assent. At last, in February, 1824, a caucus was called, doubtless in the hope that many who had refused their assent would, finding the caucus inevitable, attend through force of party habit. But of the 261 members of Congress, only 66 attended; and they were chiefly from New York, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia. In the caucus 62 voted for Crawford for president and 57 for Albert Gallatin for vice-president. A cry was soon raised against the latter as a foreigner; so that in spite of his American residence of forty-five years, and his invaluable services to the country and to the Republican party through nearly all this period, he felt compelled to withdraw.