Martin Van Buren

by Edward Morse Shepard

"A sentiment I had almost said of idolatry for the Supreme Court has grown up, which claims for its members an almost entire exemption from the fallibilities of our nature, and arraigns with unsparing bitterness the motives of all who have the temerity to look with inquisitive eyes into this consecrated sanctuary of the law. So powerful has this sentiment become, such strong hold has it taken upon the press of this country, that it requires not a little share of firmness in a public man, however imperious may be his duty, to express sentiments that conflict with it. It is nevertheless correct, sir, that in this, as in almost every other case, the truth is to be found in a just medium of the subject. To so much of the high-wrought eulogies (which the fashion of the times has recently produced in such great abundance) as allows to the distinguished men who now hold in their hands that portion of the administration of public affairs, talents of the highest order, and spotless integrity, I cheerfully add the very humble testimony of my unqualified assent. That the uncommon man who now presides over the court, and who I hope may long continue to do so, is, in all human probability, the ablest judge now sitting upon any judicial bench in the world, I sincerely believe. But to the sentiment which claims for the judges so great a share of exemption from the feelings that govern the conduct of other men, and for the court the character of being the safest depository of political power, I do not subscribe. I have been brought up in an opposite faith, and all my experience has confirmed me in its correctness. In my legislation upon this subject I will act in conformity to those opinions. I believe the judges of the Supreme Court (great and good men as I cheerfully concede them to be) are subject to the same infirmities, influenced by the same passions, and operated upon by the same causes, that good and great men are in other situations. I believe they have as much of the esprit de corps as other men. Those who think[4] otherwise form an erroneous estimate of human nature; and if they act upon that estimate, will, soon or late, become sensible of their delusion."

At this session, upon the election by the Senate of their temporary president, Van Buren received the compliment of four votes. In May, 1826, he participated in Benton's report on the reduction of executive patronage, a subject important enough, but there crudely treated. The report strongly exhibited the jealousy of executive power which had long been characteristic of American political thought. By describing the offices within the president's appointment, their numbers and salaries, and the expense of the civil list, a striking picture was drawn—and in that way a striking picture can always be drawn—of the power of any great executive. By imagining serious abuses of power, the picture was darkened with the dangers of patronage, as it could be darkened to-day. The country was urged to look forward to the time when public revenue would be doubled, when the number of public officers would be quadrupled, when the president's nomination would carry any man through the Senate, and his recommendation any measure through Congress. Names, the report said, were nothing. The first Roman emperor was styled Emperor of the Republic; and the late French emperor had taken a like title. The American president, it was hinted, might by his enormous patronage and by subsidies to the press, nominally for official advertisements, subject us to a like danger. But the usefulness of such pictures as these of Benton and Van Buren depends upon the practical lesson taught by the artists. If there were disadvantages and dangers which our ancestors rightly feared, in placing the federal patronage under the sole control of the president, so there are disadvantages and dangers in scattering it by laws into various hands, or in its subjection to the traditions of "senatorial courtesy."

Six bills accompanied the report. Two of them proposed the appointment of military cadets and midshipmen, one of each from every congressional district; and this was afterwards done, giving a petty patronage to national legislators which public sentiment has but recently begun to compel them to use upon ascertained merit rather than in sheer favoritism. A third bill proposed that military and naval commissions should run "during good behavior" and not "during the pleasure of the president." A fourth sought with extraordinary unwisdom to correct the old but ever new abuse of government advertising, by depriving the responsible executive of its distribution and by placing it in the hands of congressmen, perhaps the very worst to hold it. Another required senatorial confirmation for postmasters whose emoluments exceeded an amount to be fixed. The remaining bill was very wise, and a natural sequence of Benton's not untruthful though too highly colored picture. The law of 1820, which fixed at four years the terms of many subordinate officers, was to be modified so as to limit the terms only for officers who had not satisfactorily accounted for public moneys. It has been commonly said that this act was a device of Crawford, when secretary of the treasury, more easily to use federal patronage for his presidential canvass. But there seems to be no sufficient reason to doubt that Benton's and Van Buren's committee correctly stated the intent of the authors of the law to have been no more than that the officer should be definitely compelled by the expiration of his term to render his accounts and have them completely audited; that it was not intended that some other person should succeed an officer not found in fault; and that the practice of refusing re-commissions to deserving officers was an unexpected perversion of the law. The committee simply proposed to accomplish the true intent of the law. The same bill required the president to state his reasons for removals of officers when he nominated their successors. The proposals in the last two bills were very creditable to Benton and Van Buren and their coadjutors. It is greatly to be lamented that they were not safely made laws while patronage was dispensed conscientiously and with sincere public spirit by the younger Adams, so far as he could control it. The biographer has more particularly to lament that during the twelve years of Van Buren's executive influence he seemed daunted by the difficulties of voluntarily putting in practice the admirable rules which as a senator he would have imposed by law upon those in executive stations. It was only three years after this report, that the great chieftain, whom Benton and Van Buren helped to the presidency, discredited all its reasoning by proposing "a general extension" of the law whose operation they would have thus limited. The committee also proposed by constitutional amendment to forbid the appointment to office of any senator or representative until the end of the presidential term in which he had held his seat. This was also one of the reforms whose necessity seems plain enough to the reformer, until in office he discovers the conveniences and perhaps the public uses of the practice he has wished to abolish.

In the short session of 1826-1827, little of any importance was done. Van Buren refused to vote with Benton to abolish the duty on salt, a vote doubtless influenced by the apparent interest of New York, which itself taxed the production of salt to aid the State in its internal improvements, and which probably could not maintain the tax if foreign salt were admitted free. Van Buren did not, indeed, avow, nor did he disavow this reason. He was content to point out that the great canals of New York were of national use, though their expense was borne by his State alone. He voted at this session for lower duties on teas, coffees, and wines. He did not join Benton and others in their narrow unwillingness to establish a naval academy. Van Buren's temper was eminently free from raw prejudices against disciplined education. The death of one of the envoys to the Panama congress enabled him again at this session to renew his opposition by a vote against filling the vacancy. Another attempt was made to pass a bankruptcy bill; but again it failed through the natural and wholesome dislike of increasing the powers of the federal judiciary, and the preference that state courts and laws should perform all the work to which they were reasonably competent. The bill did not even pass the Senate, until by Van Buren's opposition it had been reduced to a bill establishing a summary and speedy remedy for creditors against fraudulent or failing traders, instead of a general system of bankruptcy, voluntary and involuntary, for all persons. Van Buren's speech against the insolvency features of the bill was made on January 23, 1827, only a few days before his successor as senator was to be chosen. But the thoughtless popularity which often accompanies sweeping propositions of relief to insolvents did not move him from resolute and successful opposition to what he called (and later experience has most abundantly justified him) "an injurious extension of the patronage of the federal government, and an insupportable enlargement of the range of its judicial power." On February 24, 1827, a few days after his reëlection, he delivered a lucid and elaborate speech on the long-perplexing topic of the restrictions upon American trade with the British colonies, a subject to be afterwards closely connected with his political fortunes.

The agitation of the coming presidential election left little of its turbulence upon the records of the long session from December, 1827, to May, 1828. Van Buren was doubtless busy enough out of the senate chamber. But he was still a very busy legislator. He spoke at least twice in favor of the bill to abolish imprisonment under judgments rendered by federal courts for debts not fraudulently incurred, the bill which Richard M. Johnson had pressed so long and so honorably; and at last he saw the bill pass in January, 1828. He spoke often upon the technical bill to regulate federal judicial process. Again he voted, and again in a minority and in opposition to Benton and other political friends, against bills to extend the Cumberland road and for other internal improvements. Besides the usual bills to appropriate lands for roads and canals, and to subscribe to the stock of private canal companies, a step further was now taken in the constitutional change led by Adams and Clay. Public land was voted for the benefit of Kenyon College, in the State of Ohio. There was plainly intended to be no limit to federal beneficence. In this session Van Buren again rushed to defend the salt duty so dear to New York.

At the same session was passed the "tariff of abominations," a measure so called from the oppressive provisions loaded on it by its enemies, but in spite of which it passed. Van Buren, though he sat still during the debate, cast for the bill a protectionist vote, with Benton and several others whose convictions were against it, but who yielded to the supposed public sentiment or the peremptory instructions of their States, or who did not yet dare to make upon the tariff a presidential issue. The votes of the senators were sectionally thus distributed: For the tariff,—New England, 6; Middle States, 8; Louisiana, 1; and the Western States, 11; in all 26. Against it,—New England, 5; Maryland, 2; Southern States, 13; and Tennessee, 1. It was a victory of neither political party, but of the Middle and Western over the Southern States. Only three negative votes were cast by senators who had voted against the administration on the Panama question in 1826; while of the votes for the tariff, fourteen were cast by senators who had then opposed the administration. Of the senators in favor of the tariff, six, Van Buren, Benton, Dickerson of New Jersey, Eaton of Tennessee (Jackson's close friend), Kane of Illinois, and Rowan of Kentucky, had in 1826 been in opposition, while ten of those voting against the tariff had then been with them.[5] The greater number of the opposition senators were therefore against the tariff, though very certainly the votes of Van Buren, Benton, and Eaton prevented the opposition from taking strong ground or suffering injury on the tariff in the election. Van Buren's silence in this debate of 1828 indicated at least a temper now hesitant. But he and his colleague, Sanford, according to the theory then popular that senators were simply delegated agents of their States, were constrained, whatever were their opinions, by a resolution of the legislature of New York passed almost unanimously in January, 1828. It stated a sort of ultima ratio of protection, commanding the senators "to make every proper exertion to effect such a revision of the tariff as will afford a sufficient protection to the growers of wool, hemp, and flax, and the manufacturers of iron, woolens, and every other article, so far as the same may be connected with the interest of manufactures, agriculture, and commerce." The senators might perhaps have said to this that, if they were to protect not only iron and woolens but also every other article, they ought not to levy prohibitory duties on some and not on other articles; that if they were equally to protect manufactures, agriculture, and commerce, they could do no better than to let natural laws alone. But the silly instruction said what no intelligent protectionist means; his system disappears with an equality of privilege; that equality must, he argues, at some point yield to practical necessities. Van Buren took the resolution, however, in its intended meaning, and not literally. Hayne concluded his fine struggle against the bill by a solemn protest upon its passage that it was a partial, unjust, and unconstitutional measure.

At this session Van Buren, upon the consideration of a rule giving the Vice-President power to call to order for words spoken in debate, made perhaps the most elaborate of his purely political speeches. It was a skillful and not unsuccessful effort to give philosophical significance to the coming struggle at the polls. He spoke of "that collision, which seems to be inseparable from the nature of man, between the rights of the few and the many," of "those never-ceasing conflicts between the advocates of the enlargement and concentration of power on the one hand, and its limitation and distribution on the other." The one party, he said, had "grown out of a deep and settled distrust of the people and of the States:" the other, out of "a jealousy of power justified by all human experience." The advocates of "a strong government," having been defeated in much that they sought in the federal convention, had since, he said, "been at work to obtain by construction what was not included or intended to be included in the grant." He declared the incorporation of the United States Bank to be the "great pioneer of constitutional encroachments." Thence had followed those famous usurpations, the alien and sedition laws of the older Adams's administration. Then came the doctrine that the House of Representatives was bound to make all appropriations necessary to carry out a treaty made by the President and Senate; and then "the bold avowal that it belonged to the President alone to decide upon the propriety" of a foreign mission, and that it was for the Senate only "to pass on the fitness of the individuals selected as ministers." He lamented the single lapse of Madison, "one of the most, if not the most, accomplished statesman that our country has produced," in signing the bill to incorporate the new bank. The younger Adams, Van Buren declared, had "gone far beyond the utmost latitude of construction" therefore claimed; and he added a reference, decorous enough but neither fair nor gracious, to Adams's own early entrance in the public service upon a mission unauthorized by Congress. It was now demonstrated, he said, that the result of the presidential choice of 1825 "was not only the restoration of the men of 1798, but of the principles of that day." The spirit of encroachment had, it was true, become more wary; but it was no more honest. The system had then been coercion; now it was seduction. Then unconstitutional powers had been exercised to force submission; now they were assumed to purchase golden opinions from the people with their own means. Isolated acts of the Federalists had not produced an unyielding exclusion from the confidence of a majority of the people, for more than a quarter of a century, of large masses of men distinguished for talent and private worth. The great and glorious struggle had proceeded from something deeper, an opposition to the principle of an extension of the constructive powers of the government. Without harsh denunciation, and by suggestion rather than assertion, the administration of John Quincy Adams was grouped with the administration of his father. The earlier administration had deserved and met the retribution of a Republican victory. The later one now deserved and ought soon to meet a like fate.

The issue was clearly made. The parties were formed. The result rested with the people. On February 6, 1827, Van Buren had been reëlected senator by a large majority in both houses of the New York legislature. In his brief letter of acceptance he said no more on public questions than that it should be his "constant and zealous endeavor to protect the remaining rights reserved to the States by the federal Constitution," and "to restore those of which they have been divested by construction." This had been the main burden of his political oratory from the inauguration of Adams. There are many references in books to doubts of Van Buren's position until 1827; but such doubts are not justified in the face of his prompt and perfectly explicit utterances in the session of 1825-1826, and from that time steadily on.

De Witt Clinton's death on February 11, 1828, removed from the politics of New York one of its most illustrious men, a statesman of the first rank, able and passionate, and of the noblest aspirations. The understanding reached between him and Van Buren in 1826, for the support of Jackson, had not produced a complete coalition. In spite of the union on Jackson, the Bucktails nominated and Van Buren loyally supported for governor against Clinton in 1826, William B. Rochester, a warm friend and supporter of Adams and Clay, and one of the members of the very Panama mission against which so strenuous a fight had been made. Clinton was reëlected by a small majority. In a meeting at Washington after his death, Van Buren declared the triumph of his talents and patriotism to be monuments of high and enduring fame. He was glad that, though in their public careers there had been "collisions of opinions and action at once extensive, earnest, and enduring," they had still been "wholly free from that most venomous and corroding of all poisons, personal hatred." These collisions were now "turned to nothing and less than nothing." Speaking of his respect for Clinton's name and gratitude for his signal services, Van Buren concluded with this striking tribute: "For myself, so strong, so sincere, and so engrossing is that feeling, that I, who whilst living, never—no, never, envied him anything, now that he has fallen, am greatly tempted to envy him his grave with its honors."

With this session of 1827-1828 ended Van Buren's senatorial career and his parliamentary leadership. From 1821 to 1828 the Senate was not indeed at its greatest glory. Webster entered it only in December, 1827. Hayne and Benton with Van Buren are to us its most distinguished members, if Randolph's rather indescribable and useless personality may be excepted. But to neither of them has the opinion of later times assigned a place in the first rank of orators, although Hayne's tariff speech in 1824 deserves to be set with the greatest of American political orations. The records and speeches of the Senate in which Van Buren sat have come to us with fine print and narrow margins; they have not contributed to the collected works of great men. But the Senate was then an able body. The principles of American politics were never more clearly stated. When the books are well dusted, and one has broken through the starched formality in which the speakers' phrases were set, he finds a copious fund of political instruction. The federal Senate was more truly a parliamentary body in those formative days than perhaps at any other period. Several at least of its members were in doubt as to the political course they should follow; they were in doubt where they should find their party associations. To them, debates had therefore a real and present significance. There were some votes to be affected, there were converts to be gained, by speeches even on purely political questions; there were some senators whose votes were not inexorably determined for them by the will of their parties or their constituents. Much that was said had therefore a genuine parliamentary ring. The orators really sought to convince and persuade those who heard them within the easy and almost conversational limits of the old senate chamber. There was little of the mere pronouncing of essays or declamations intended to have their real and only effect elsewhere. In this art of true parliamentary speaking rather than oratory, Van Buren was a master such as Lord Palmerston afterwards became. He was not eloquent. His speeches, so far as they are preserved, interest the student of political history and not of literature. They are sensible, clear, practical arguments made in rather finished sentences. One does not find quotations from them in books of school declamation. But they served far more effectively the primary end of parliamentary speaking than did the elaborate and powerful disquisitions of Calhoun, or the more splendid flood of Webster's eloquence. Van Buren's speeches were intended to convince, and they did convince some of the men in the seats about him. They were meant to persuade, and they did persuade. They were lucid exhibitions of political principles, generally practical, and touched sufficiently but not morbidly with the theoretical fears so common to our earlier politics. Some of those fears have since been shown to be groundless; but out of many of them has come much that is best in the modern temper of American political institutions. Van Buren's speeches did not rise beyond the reach of popular understanding, although they never warmly touched popular sympathy. They were intended to formulate and spread a political faith in which he plainly saw that there was the material of a party,—a faith founded upon the jealousy of federal activity, however beneficent, which sought to avoid state control or encourage state dependence. The prolixity which was a grave fault of his state papers and political letters was far less exhibited in his oratorical efforts. His style was generally easy and vigorous, with little of the turgid learning which loaded down many sensible speeches of the time. Now and then, however, he resorted to the sentences of stilted formality which sometimes overtake a good public speaker, as a good actor sometimes lapses into the stage strut.