Martin Van Buren

by Edward Morse Shepard

The first great battle between the rapidly dividing forces was over the Panama mission, a creation of Clay's exuberant imagination. The president nominated to the Senate two envoys to an American congress called by the new South American republics of Columbia, Mexico, and Central America, and in which it was proposed that Peru and Chile also should participate. The congress was to be held at Panama, which, in the extravagant rhetoric of some of the Republicans of the South, would, if the world had to elect a capital, be pointed out for that august destiny, placed as it was "in the centre of the globe." Spain had not yet acknowledged the independence of her revolted colonies; and it was clear that the discussions of the congress must be largely concerned with a mutual protection of American nations which implied an attitude hostile to Spain. Adams, in his message nominating the envoys, declared that they were not to take part in deliberations of belligerent character, or to contract alliances or to engage in any project importing hostility to any other nation. But referring to the Monroe doctrine, Adams said that the mission looked to an agreement between the nations represented, that each would guard by its own means against the establishment of any future European colony within its borders; and it looked also to an effort on the part of the United States to promote religious liberty among those intolerant republics. The decisive inducement, he added, to join in the congress was to lay the foundation of future intercourse with those states "in the broadest principles of reciprocity and the most cordial feelings of fraternal friendship."

This was vague enough. But when the diplomatic papers were exhibited, it was plain that the southern republics proposed a congress looking to a close defensive alliance, a sort of confederacy or Amphictyonic council as Benton described it; and that it was highly improbable that the representatives from one country could responsibly participate in the congress without most serious danger of incurring obligations, or falling into precisely the embarrassments which the well settled policy of the United States had avoided. It was perfectly agreeable to Adams, resolute and aggressive American that he was, that his country should look indulgently upon the smaller American powers, should stand at their head, should counsel them in their difficulties with European nations, and jealously take their side in those difficulties. Clay's eager, enthusiastic mind delighted in the picture of a great leadership of America by the United States, an American system of nations, breathing the air of republicanism, asserting a young and haughty independence of monarchical Europe, and ready for opposition to its schemes. In all this there has been fascination to many American minds, which even in our own day we have seen influence American diplomacy. But it was a step into the entangling alliances against which American public opinion had from Washington's day been set. When Adams asked an appropriation for the expenses of the mission, he told the House of Representatives that he was hardly sanguine enough to promise "all or even any of the transcendent benefits to the human race which warmed the conceptions of its first proposer," but that it looked "to the melioration of the condition of man;" that it was congenial with the spirit which prompted our own declaration of independence, which dictated our first treaty with Prussia, and "which filled the hearts and fired the souls of the immortal founders of our revolution."

Such fanciful speculation the Republicans, led by Van Buren, opposed with strong and heated protests, in tone not unlike the Liberal protests of 1878 in England against Disraeli's Jingo policy. In the secret session of the Senate Van Buren proposed resolutions against the constitutionality of the mission, reciting that it was a departure from our wise and settled policy; that, for the conference and discussion contemplated, our envoys already accredited to the new republics were competent, without becoming involved as members of the congress. These resolutions, so the President at once wrote in his opulent and invaluable diary, "are the fruit of the ingenuity of Martin Van Buren and bear the impress of his character." The mission was, the opposition thus insisted, unconstitutional; a step enlarging the sphere of the federal government; a meddlesome and dangerous interference with foreign nations; and if it lay in the course of a strong and splendid policy, it was also part of a policy full of warlike possibilities almost sure to drag us into old-world quarrels. Clay's "American system," Hayne said in the senatorial debate, meant restriction and monopoly when applied to our domestic policy, and "entangling alliances" when applied to our foreign policy.

Van Buren's speech was very able. He did not touch upon the liberality of the Spanish Americans towards races other than the Caucasian, which peered out of Hayne's speech as one of the Southern objections. After using the wise and seemingly pertinent language of Washington against such foreign involvements, Van Buren skillfully referred to the very Prussian treaty which the President had cited in his message to the House. The elder Adams, the Senate was reminded, had departed from the rule commended by his great predecessor. He had told his first Congress that we were indeed to keep ourselves distinct and separate from the political system of Europe "if we can," but that we needed early and continual information of political projects in contemplation; that however we might consider ourselves, others would consider us a weight in the balance of power in Europe, which never could be forgotten or neglected; and that it was natural for us, studying to be neutral, to consult with other nations engaged in the same study. The younger Adams had been, Van Buren pointed out, appointed upon the Berlin mission to carry out these heretical suggestions of his father. The Republicans of that day had vigorously opposed the mission; and for their opposition were denounced as a faction, and lampooned and vilified "by all the presses supporting and supported by the government, and a host of malicious parasites generaled by its patronage." But, covered with Washington's mantle, the Republicans of '98 had sought to strangle at its birth this political hydra, this first attempt since the establishment of the government to subject our political affairs to the terms and conditions of political connection with a foreign nation. Probably anticipating the success of the administration senators by a majority of five, Van Buren ingeniously reminded the Senate that those early Republicans had failed with a majority of four against them. But it was to be remembered, he continued, that after a few more such Federalist victories the ruin of Federalism had been complete. Its doctrines had speedily received popular condemnation. The new administration under the presidency of that early minister to Prussia had returned to the practices of the Federalist party, to which Van Buren with courteous indirection let it be remembered that the president had originally belonged. Except a guaranty to Spain of its dominions beyond the Mississippi, which Jefferson had offered as part of the price of a cession of the territory between that river and the Mobile, the administrations of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe had strictly followed the admonition of Washington: "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." If we were asked to form a connection with European states, such as was proposed with the southern republics, Van Buren argued, no American would approve it; and there was no sound reason, there was nothing but fanciful sentiment, to induce us to distinguish between the states of Europe and those of South America. Grant that there was a Holy Alliance in monarchical Europe, was it not a hollow glory, inconsistent with a sober view of American interests, to create a holy alliance in republican America? It might indeed be easy to agree upon speculative opinions with our younger neighbors at the south; but we should be humiliated in their eyes, and difficulties would at once arise, when means of promoting those opinions were proposed, and we were then to say we could talk but not fight. The Monroe doctrine was not to be withdrawn; but we ought to be left free to act upon it without the burden of promises, express or implied. The proposed congress was a specious and disguised step towards an American confederacy, full of embarrassment, full of danger; and the first step should be firmly resisted. Such was the outline of Van Buren's argument; and its wisdom has commanded a general assent from that day.

Dickerson of New Jersey very well phrased sound American sentiment when he said in the debate that, next to a passion for war, he dreaded a passion for diplomacy. The majestic declamation of Webster, his pathetic picture of a South America once oppressed but now emancipated, his eloquent cry that if it were weak to feel that he was an American it was a weakness from which he claimed no exemption,—all this met a good deal of exuberant response through the country. But it failed, as in our history most such efforts have failed, to convince the practical judgment of Americans, a judgment never long dazzled or inspired by the picture of an America wielding enormous or dominant international power. The Panama congress met in the absence of the American representatives, who had been delayed. It made a treaty of friendship and perpetual confederation to which all other American powers might accede within a year. The congress was to meet annually in time of common war, and biennially in times of peace. But it never met again. The "centre of the world" was too far away from its very neighbors. Even South American republics could not be kept together by effusions of republican glory and international love.

In spite of its victory in Congress, Adams's administration had plainly opened with a serious mistake. The opposition was perfectly legitimate; and although in the debate it was spoken of as unorganized, it certainly came out of the debate a pretty definite party. Before the debate Adams had written in his diary, and truly, that it was the first subject upon which a great effort had been made "to combine the discordant elements of the Crawford and Jackson and Calhoun men into a united opposition against the administration." Although some of the Southern opposition was heated by a dislike of States in which negroes were to be administrators, the division was not at all upon a North and South line. With Van Buren voted Findlay of Pennsylvania, Chandler and Holmes of Maine, Woodbury of New Hampshire, Dickerson of New Jersey, Kane of Illinois, making seven Northern with twelve Southern senators. Against Van Buren were eight senators from slave States, Barton of Missouri, Bouligny and Johnston of Louisiana, Chambers of Alabama, Clayton and Van Dyke of Delaware, Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, and Smith of Maryland. It was an incipient but a true party division.

Throughout this session of 1824-25 Van Buren was very industrious in the Senate, and nearly, if not quite, its most conspicuous member, if account be not taken of Randolph's furious and blazing talents. Calhoun was only in the chair as vice-president; the great duel between him and Van Buren not yet begun. Clay was at the head of the cabinet, and Webster in the lower House. Jackson was in Tennessee, watching with angry confidence, and aiding, the rising tide with the political dexterity in which he was by no means a novice. Having only a minority with him, and with Benton frequently against him, Van Buren gradually drilled his party into opposition on internal improvements,—a most legitimate and important issue. In December, 1825, he threw down the gauntlet to the administration, or rather took up its gauntlet. He proposed a resolution "that Congress does not possess the power to make roads and canals within the respective States." At the same time he asked for a committee to prepare a constitutional amendment on the subject like his earlier proposal, saying with a touch of very polite partisanship that though the President's recent declaration, that the power clearly existed in the Constitution, might diminish, it did not obviate the necessity of an amendment. In March, April, and May, 1826, he opposed appropriations of $110,000 to continue the Cumberland road, and of $50,000 for surveys preparatory to roads and canals, and subscriptions to stock of the Louisville and Portland Canal Company and of the Dismal Swamp Canal Company. All these were distinctly administration measures.

Although the principles advanced by Van Buren in this part of his opposition have not since obtained complete and unanimous affirmance, they have at least commanded so large, honorable, and prolonged support, that his attitude can with little good sense be considered one of factious difference. Especially wise was he on the question of government subscriptions to private canal companies. Upon one of these bills he said, in May, 1826, that he did not believe that the government had the constitutional power to make canals or to grant money for them; but he added that, if he believed otherwise, the grant of money should, he thought, be made directly, and not by forming a partnership between the government and a private corporation. In 1824 he had voted for the road from Missouri to New Mexico; but this stood, as the Pacific railway later stood, upon a different principle, the former as a road entirely without state limits and a means of international commerce, and the latter a road chiefly through federal territories, and of obvious national importance in the war between the North and the South.

The proposed amendment of the Constitution to prevent the election of president by a vote of States in the House of Representatives, upon which Van Buren had spoken in 1824, had now acquired new interest. Van Buren seized Adams's election in the House as a good subject for political warfare; and it was clearly a legitimate topic for party discussion and division. Van Buren would have been far more exalted in his notions of political agitation than the greatest of political leaders, had he not sought to use the popular feeling, that the American will had been subverted by the decision of the House, to promote his plan of constitutional reform. He told the Senate in May, 1826, that he was satisfied that there was no one point on which the people of the United States were more perfectly united than upon the propriety of taking the choice of president from the House. But Congress was not ready for the change; however much in theory was to be said against the clumsy system which nearly made Burr president in 1801,[3] and which produced in 1825 a choice which Adams himself declared that he would vacate if the Constitution provided a mode of doing it.

As chairman of the judiciary committee, Van Buren participated in a most laborious effort to enlarge the federal judiciary. Upon the question whether the judges of the Supreme Court should be relieved from circuit duty, he made an elaborate and very able speech upon the negative side. The opportunity arose for a disquisition on the danger of centralized government, and for a renewal of the criticisms he had made in the New York Constitutional Convention upon the common and absurd picture of judges as dwellers in an atmosphere above all human infirmity, and beyond the reach of popular impression. Van Buren said, what all sensible men know, that in spite of every effort, incompetent men will sometimes reach the judicial bench. If always sitting among associates in banc, their incompetence would be shielded, he said, by their abler brethren. But if regularly compelled to perform their great duties alone and in the direct face of the people, and not in the isolation of Washington, there was another constraint, Van Buren said very democratically and with substantial truth. "There is a power in public opinion in this country," he declared, "and I thank God for it, for it is the most honest and best of all powers, which will not tolerate an incompetent or unworthy man to hold in his weak or wicked hands the lives and fortunes of his fellow citizens." He added an expression to which he would afterwards have given most narrow interpretation. The Supreme Court stood, he said, "as the umpire between the conflicting powers of the general and state governments." There was in the speech very plain though courteous intimation of that jealousy with which Van Buren's party examined the political utterances of the court from Jefferson's time until, years after Van Buren's retirement, the party found it convenient to receive from the court, with a sanctimonious air of veneration, the most odious and demoralizing of all its expressions of political opinion. In arguing for a close and democratic relation between the judges and the different parts of the country, and against their dignified and exalted seclusion at Washington which was so agreeable to many patriotic Americans, Van Buren said, in a passage which is fairly characteristic of his oratorical manner:—