Martin Van Buren

by Edward Morse Shepard

The failure of the caucus almost destroyed Crawford's chances, though Van Buren steadily kept up courage. A few days later he wrote a confidential letter complaining of the subserviency and ingratitude of the non-attendants, who had "partaken largely of the favor of the party;" but despondency, he said, was a weakness with which he was but little annoyed, and if New York should be firm and promptly explicit, the election would be substantially settled. But New York was neither firm nor promptly explicit. Its electoral vote was in doubt until the meeting of the legislature in November. The Adams and Clay forces then united, securing 31 out of the 36 electors, although one of the 31 seems finally to have voted for Jackson. Five Crawford electors were chosen with the help of the Adams men, who wished to keep Clay at the foot of the poll of presidential electors, and thus prevent his eligibility as one of the highest three in the House of Representatives. This device of the Adams men may have deprived Clay of the presidency. Thus Van Buren's New York campaign met defeat even in the legislature, where his friends had incurred odium rather than surrender the choice of electors to the people, while his forces were being thoroughly beaten by the people at the polls. In the electoral college Crawford received only 41 votes; Adams had 84 and Jackson 99; while Clay with only 37 was fourth in the race, and could not therefore enter the contest in the House. Georgia cast 9 electoral votes for Van Buren as vice-president.

Van Buren did not figure in the choice of Adams in the House by the coalition of Adams and Clay forces. Nor does his name appear in the traditions of the manœuvering at Washington in the winter of 1824-25, except in a vague and improbable story that he wished, by dividing the New York delegation in the House on the first vote by States, to prevent a choice, and then to throw the votes of the Crawford members for Adams, and thus secure the glory and political profit of apparently electing him. He did not join in the cry that Adams's election over Jackson was a violation of the democratic principle. Nor was it a violation of that principle. Jackson had but a minority of the popular vote. Clay was in political principles and habits nearer to Adams than Jackson. It was clearly Clay's duty to take his strength to the candidate whose administration was most likely to be agreeable to those opinions of his own which had made him a candidate. The coalition was perfectly natural and legitimate; and it was wholesome in its consequences. It established the Whig party; it at least helped to establish the modern Democratic party. That the acceptance of office by Clay would injure him was probable enough. Coalitions have always been unpopular in America and England, when there has seemed to follow a division of offices. They offend the strong belief in party government which lies deep in the political conscience of the two countries.

In the congressional session of 1824-25 president-making in the House stood in the way of everything else of importance. Van Buren, with increasing experience, was taking a greater and greater part in congressional work. He joined far more frequently in the debates. Again he spoke for the abolition of imprisonment for debt, his colleague, Rufus King, differing from him on this as he now seemed to differ from him on most disputed questions. King had not been reëlected senator, having declined to be a candidate, because, as he said, of his advancing years. But doubtless Van Buren was correct in telling John Quincy Adams, and the latter was correct in believing, as his diary records, that King could not have been re-chosen.

At this session Van Buren took definite stand against the schemes of internal improvement. On February 11, 1825, differing even from Benton, he voted against topographical surveys in anticipation of public works by the Federal government. On February 23 he voted against an appropriation of $150,000 to extend the Cumberland road, while Jackson and Benton both voted for it. So, also, the next day, when Jackson voted for federal subscriptions to help construct the Delaware and Chesapeake Canal and the Dismal Swamp Canal, Van Buren was against him. Two days before the session closed he voted against the bill for the occupation of Oregon, Benton and Jackson voting in the affirmative. Van Buren was one of the senatorial committee to receive the new president upon his inauguration. It was doubtless with the easy courtesy which was genuine with him that he welcomed John Quincy Adams to the political battle so disastrous to the latter.

When Congress met again, in December, 1825, Van Buren took a more important place than ever before in national politics. He now became a true parliamentary leader; for he, like Clay, had the really parliamentary career which has rarely been seen in this country. Dealing with amorphous political elements, Van Buren created out of them a party to promote his policy, and seized upon the vigor and popular strength of Jackson to lead both party and policy to supreme power. While, before 1825, Van Buren had not represented in the Senate a party distinctly constituted, from 1825 to 1828 he definitely led the formation of the modern Democratic party. In this work he was clearly chief. From the floor of the Senate he addressed those of its members inclined to his creed, and the sympathetic elements throughout the country, and firmly guided and disciplined them after that fashion which in very modern days is best familiar to us in the parliamentary conflicts of Great Britain. Since Van Buren wielded this organizing power, there has been in America no equally authoritative and decisive leadership from the Senate; although he has since been surpassed there, not only as an orator, but in other kinds of senatorial work. Seward seemed to exercise a like leadership in the six years or more preceding Lincoln's election; but he was far more the creature of the stupendous movement of the time than he was its creator. So, in the two years before General Grant's renomination in 1872, Charles Sumner and Carl Schurz, speaking from the Senate, created a new party sentiment; but the sentiment died in a "midsummer madness" but for which our later political history might have been materially different. In the interesting and fruitful three years of Van Buren's senatorial opposition, he showed the same qualities of firmness, supple tact, and distinct political aims which had given him his power in New York; but all now upon a higher plane.

In December, 1825, Jackson was no longer in the Senate. His Tennessee friends had placed him there as in a fitting vestibule to the White House; but it seemed as hard then as it has been since, to go from the Senate over the apparently broad and easy mile to the west on Pennsylvania Avenue. So Jackson returned to the Hermitage, to await, in the favorite American character of Cincinnatus, the popular summons which he believed to be only delayed. Van Buren, now thoroughly acquainted with the general, saw in him the strongest titular leader of the opposition. It is pretty certain, however, that Van Buren's preference was recent. The "Albany Argus," a Van Buren paper, had but lately declared that "Jackson has not a single feeling in common with the Republican party, and makes the merit of desiring the total extinction of it;" while Jackson papers had ridiculed Crawford's

"Shallow knaves with forms to mock us,
Straggling, one by one, to caucus."

It has been the tradition, carefully and doubtless sincerely begun by John Quincy Adams, and adopted by most writers dealing with this period, that Adams met his first Congress in a spirit which should have commanded universal support; and that it was a factious opposition, cunningly led by Van Buren, which thwarted his patriotic purposes. But this is an untrue account of the second great party division in the United States. The younger Adams succeeded to an administration which had represented no party, or rather which had represented a party now become so dominant as to practically include the whole country. As president he found himself able to promote opinions with a weighty authority which he had not enjoyed while secretary of state in an era of good feeling, and under a president who was firm, even if gentle. Nor was it likely that Adams, with his unrivaled experience, his resolute self-reliance, and his aggressively patriotic feeling, would fail to impress his own views upon the public service, lest he might disturb a supposititious unanimity of sentiment. His first message boldly sounded the notes of party division. The second war with England was well out of the public mind; and his old Federalist associations, his belief in a strong, active, beneficent federal government, his traditional dislike of what seemed to him extreme democratic tendencies and constitutional refinings away of necessary federal power,—all these made him promptly and ably take an attitude very different from that of his predecessors. The compliment was perfectly sincere which, in his inaugural address, he had paid the Republican and Federalist parties, saying of them that both had "contributed splendid talents, spotless integrity, ardent patriotism, and disinterested sacrifices to the formation and administration" of the government. But it was idle for him to suppose that the successors of these parties, although from both had come his own supporters, and although, as in his offer of the treasury to Crawford, he showed his desire, even in the chief offices, to ignore political differences, would remain united under him, if he espoused causes upon which they widely differed. After recapitulating the tenets of American political faith, and showing that most discordant elements of public opinion were now blended into harmony, he was again perfectly sincere in saying that only an effort of magnanimity needed to be made, that individuals should discard every remnant of rancor against each other. This advice he was himself unable to follow; and so were other men. In his inaugural he distinctly adopted as his own the policy of internal improvements by the federal government, although he knew how wide and determined had been the opposition to it. His own late chief, Monroe, had pronounced the policy unconstitutional. But he now told the people that the magnificence and splendor of the public works, the roads and aqueducts, of Rome, were among the imperishable splendors of the ancient republic. He asked to what single individual our first national road had proved an injury. Of the constitutional doubts which were raised, he said, with a touch of the contempt of a practical administrator: "Every speculative scruple will be solved by a practical blessing." To the self-consecrated guardians of the Constitution this was as corrupt as offers of largesses to plebeians at Rome. In his first message he recommended again the policy of internal improvements, and proposed the establishment of a national university. Although he admitted the Constitution to be "a charter of limited powers," he still intimated his opinion that its powers might "be effectually brought into action by laws promoting the improvement of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures, the cultivation and encouragement of the mechanic and of the elegant arts, the advancement of literature, and the progress of the sciences, ornamental and profound;" and that to refrain from exercising these powers for the benefit of the people themselves, would be to hide the talent in the earth, and a "treachery to the most sacred of trusts." Further, he now broached the novel project of the congress at Panama,—a project surely doubtful enough to permit conscientious opposition.

All this was widely different from the messages of content from President Monroe. There was in these new utterances a clear political diversion, marked not less by the brilliant and restless genius of Henry Clay, now the secretary of state, than by the President's consciousness of his own strong and disciplined ability. Here was a new policy formally presented by a new administration; and a formal and organized resistance was as sure to follow as effect to follow cause. Van Buren was soon at the head of this inevitable opposition. It is difficult, at least in the records of Congress, to find any evidence justifying the long tradition that the opposition was factious or unworthy. It was doubtless a warfare, with its surprises, its skirmishes, and its pitched battles. Mistakes of the adversary were promptly used. Debates were not had simply to promote the formal business before the House, but rather to reach the listening voters. But all this belongs to parliamentary warfare. Nor is it inconsistent with most exalted aims and an admirable performance of public business in a free country. Gladstone, the greatest living master in the work of political reform, has described himself as an "old parliamentary hand." Nor in the motions, the resolutions, the debates, led by Van Buren during his three years of opposition, can one find any device which Palmerston or Derby or Gladstone in one forum, and Seward and even Adams himself in his last and best years in another, have not used with little punishment from disinterested and enduring criticism.

Immediately after Adams's inauguration Van Buren voted for Clay's confirmation as secretary of state, while Jackson and fourteen other senators, including Hayne, voted to reject him, upon the unfounded story of Clay's sale of the presidency to Adams for the office to which he was now nominated. Van Buren's language and demeanor towards the new administration were uniformly becoming. He charged political but not personal wrong-doing; he made no insinuation of base motives; and his opposition throughout was the more forcible for its very decorum.