CHAPTER VI
SECRETARY OF STATE.—DEFINITE FORMATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC CREED

Van Buren was appointed secretary of state on March 5, 1829; but did not reach Washington until the 22d, and did not act as secretary until April 4. James A. Hamilton, a son of Alexander Hamilton, but then an influential Jackson man, was acting secretary in the meantime. The two years of Van Buren's administration of this office are perhaps the most picturesque years of American political history. The Eaton scandal; the downfall of Calhoun's political power; the magical success of Van Buren; the "kitchen cabinet;" the odious removals from office, and the outcries of the removed; the fiery passion of Jackson; the horror both real and affected of the opposition,—all these have been an inexhaustible quarry to historical writers. Until very recently the larger use has been made of the material derived from hostile sources; and it has seemed easy to paint pictures of this really important time in the crudest and highest colors of dislike. The American democracy, at last let loose, driven by Jackson with a sort of demoniac energy and cunningly used by Van Buren for his own selfish and even Mephistophelian ends, is supposed to have broken from every sound and conservative principle. Perhaps for no other period in our history has irresponsible and unverified campaign literature of the time so largely become authority to serious writers; and for no other period does truth more strongly require a judgment upon well established results rather than upon partisan rumor and gossip. During these years there was definitely and practically formed, under the auspices of Jackson's administration, a political creed, a body of principles or tendencies in politics which have ever since strongly held the American people. Some of them have become established by a universal acquiescence. During the same years there began an extension into federal politics of the "spoils system," which has been an evil second only to slavery, and from which we are only now recovering. To Van Buren more than to any man of his time must be awarded the credit of forming the creed of the Jacksonian Democracy. And in the shame of the abuse, which has so greatly tended to neutralize the soundest articles of political faith, Van Buren must participate with other and inferior men of his own time, and with the very greatest of the men who followed him. In this narrative it is impossible to ignore some of the petty and undignified details which characterized the time,—details from part of the discredit of which Van Buren cannot escape. But it would lead to gross error to let such details obscure the vital and lasting political work of the highest order in which Van Buren was a central and controlling power.

Besides Van Buren, Jackson's cabinet included Ingham of Pennsylvania in the Treasury, Eaton in the War Department, Branch in the Navy, Berrien of Georgia attorney-general, and Barry of Kentucky in the Post-Office, succeeding McLean, who after a short service was appointed to the Supreme Court. Eaton, Branch, and Berrien had been federal senators, the first chiefly commended by Jackson's strong personal liking for him. Ingham, Branch, and Berrien represented, or were supposed to represent, the Calhoun influence. Van Buren in ability and reputation easily stood head and shoulders above his associates. When he left Albany for Washington he was believed to have done more than any one else to secure the Republican triumph; and if Webster's recollections twenty years later were correct, he did more to prevent "Mr. Adams's reëlection in 1828, and to obtain General Jackson's election, than any other man—yes, than any ten other men—in the country." He was the first politician in the party; Calhoun and he were its most distinguished statesmen. Already the succession after Jackson belonged to one of them, the only doubt being to which; and in that doubt was stored up a long and complicated feud. The rivalry between these two great men was inevitable; it was not dishonorable to either. Calhoun's fame was the older; he was already one of the junior candidates for the presidency, popular in Pennsylvania and even in New England, when Van Buren was hardly known out of New York. In 1829 he had been chosen vice-president for the second time. He had shown talents of a very high order. But he had now suffered some years from the presidential fever which distorts the vision, and which, when popularity wanes, becomes heavy with enervating melancholy. He was an able doctrinaire, but narrow and dogmatic. The jealous and ravenous temper of the rich slaveholders of South Carolina already possessed him. He was a Southern man; and all the presidents thus far, except the elder and younger Adams, had been Southerners. In 1824 he had stood indifferent between Jackson and Adams, and in Jackson's final triumph had borne no decisive part. Van Buren's wider, richer, and more constructive mind, his superior political judgment, his mellower personality, his practical skill in affairs, sufficiently explain his victory over Calhoun, without resort to the bitter rumors of tricks and magical manœuvres spread by Calhoun's and Clay's friends, and which, though without authentic corroboration, have to our own day been widely accepted.

Before Jackson's inauguration, Calhoun sought to prevent Van Buren's selection for the State Department. He told the general that Tazewell of Virginia ought to be appointed. New York, he said, would have been secured by Clinton if he had lived; but now New York needed no appointment. Jackson listened coldly to the plainly jealous appeal; and James A. Hamilton, who was at the time on intimate terms with Jackson, supposed it to be Calhoun's last interview with Jackson about the cabinet. Van Buren had been Jackson's choice a year ago; and to all the reasons which had then existed were now added his great services in the canvass, and the prestige of his popular election as governor.

The episode of Mrs. Eaton, the wife of the new secretary of war, was absurd enough in a constitutionally governed country; but this silly "court scandal," which might very well have enlivened the pages of a secretary of a privy council or an ambassador from a petty German prince, did no more than hasten the inevitable division. In the hastening, however, Van Buren doubtless reaped some profit in Jackson's greater friendship. Many respectable people in Washington believed that unchastity on the part of this lady had induced her former husband, Timberlake, to cut his throat. Her second marriage to Eaton had just taken place in January, 1829, after Jackson, learning of the scandal but disbelieving it, had said to Eaton, "Your marrying her will disprove these charges, and restore Peg's good name." The general treated with violent contempt the persons, some of them clergymen, "whose morbid appetite," he wrote the Rev. Dr. Ely on March 23, 1829, "delights in defamation and slander." Burning with anger at those who had dared in the recent canvass to malign his own wife now dead, he defended with chivalrous resolution the lady whom his own wife "to the last moment of her life believed ... to be an innocent and much-injured woman." Even Mrs. Madison, he said, "was assailed by these fiends in human shape." When protests were made against Eaton's appointment to the cabinet, Jackson savagely cried, "I will sink or swim with him, by God!" All this had happened before Van Buren reached Washington. There then followed the grave question, whether Mrs. Eaton should be adjudged guilty by society and sentenced to exclusion from its ceremonious enjoyments. The ladies generally were determined against her, even the ladies of Jackson's own household. Jackson proposed the task, impossible even to an emperor, of compelling recognition of this distressed and persecuted consort of a minister of state. The unfortunate married men in the cabinet were in embarrassment indeed. They would not if they could, so they said,—or at least they could not if they would,—induce their wives to visit or receive visits from the wife of their colleague. Jackson showed them very clearly that no other course would satisfy him. Calhoun in his matrimonial state was at the same disadvantage. Even foreign ministers and their wives met the President's displeasure for not properly treating the wife of the American secretary of war.

When Van Buren entered this farcical scene, his widowed condition, and the fortune of having sons rather than daughters, left him quite unembarrassed. He politely called upon his associate's wife, as he called upon the others; he treated her with entire deference of manner. It is probable, though by no means clear, for popular feeling was supposed to run high in sacred defense of the American home, that this was the more politic course. It is now, however, certain that by doing so he gave to Jackson, and some who were personally very close to Jackson, more gratification than he gave offense elsewhere; and this has been the occasion of much aspersion of Van Buren's motives. But whether his course were politic or not, it is easy enough to see that any other course would have been inexcusable. It would have been dastardly in the extreme for Van Buren, reaching Washington and finding a controversy raging whether or not the wife of one of his associates were virtuous, to pronounce her guilty, as he most unmistakably would have done had he refused her the attention which etiquette required him to pay all ladies in her position. Parton in his Life of Jackson quotes from an anonymous Washington correspondent, whose account he says was "exaggerated and prejudiced but not wholly incorrect," the story that Van Buren induced the British and Russian ministers, both of whom to their immediate peace of mind happened to be bachelors, to treat Mrs. Eaton with distinction at their entertainments. But the supposition seems quite gratuitous. Neither of those unmarried diplomats was likely to do so absurdly indefensible a thing as to insult by marked exclusion a cabinet minister's wife, whom the President for any reason, good or bad, treated with special distinction and respect. Van Buren's common sense was a strong characteristic; and he doubtless looked upon the whole affair with amused contempt. As the cabinet officer who had most to do with social ceremonies, he may well have sought to calm the irritation and establish for Mrs. Eaton, where he could, the usual forms of civility. Like many other blessings of etiquette, these forms permit one to hold unoffending neutrality upon the moral deserts of persons whom he meets. It happened that Calhoun's friends had tried to prevent Eaton's appointment to the War Department, and afterwards sought to remove him from the cabinet. The episode added, therefore, keen edge to the growing hostility of Jackson and his near friends to Calhoun, and thus tended to strengthen his rival. But all this would have signified little but for something deeper and broader. The preference of Van Buren had been dictated by powerful causes long before Mrs. Timberlake became Mrs. Eaton. These causes now grew more and more powerful.

Calhoun was serving his second term as Vice-President. A third term for that office was obnoxious to the rule already established for the presidency. Calhoun therefore desired Jackson to be content with one term; for if he took a second, Calhoun feared, and with good reason, that he himself, being then out of the vice-presidency, and so no longer in sight on that conspicuous seat of preparation, might fall dangerously out of mind. So it was soon known that Calhoun's friends were opposed to a second term for Jackson. At a Pennsylvania meeting on March 31, 1830, the opposition was openly made. Before this, and quite apart from Jackson's natural hostility to the nullification theory which had arisen in Calhoun's State, he had conceived a strong dislike for Calhoun for a personal reason. With this Van Buren had nothing whatever to do, so far as appears from any evidence better than the uncorroborated rumors which ascribe to Van Buren's magic every incident which injured Calhoun's standing with Jackson. Years before, Monroe's cabinet had discussed the treatment due Jackson for his extreme measures in the Seminole war. Calhoun, then secretary of war, had favored a military trial of the victorious general; but John Quincy Adams and Monroe had defended him, as did also Crawford, the secretary of the treasury. For a long while Jackson had erroneously supposed that Calhoun was the only member of the cabinet in his favor; and Calhoun had not undeceived him. Some time before Jackson's election, Hamilton had visited Crawford to promote the desired reconciliation between him and the general; and a letter was written by Governor Forsyth of Georgia to Hamilton, quoting Crawford's explanation of the real transactions in Monroe's cabinet. Jackson was ignorant of all this until a dinner given by him in honor of Monroe in November, 1829. Ringold, a personal friend of Monroe's, in a complimentary speech at seeing Jackson and Monroe seated together, said to William B. Lewis that Monroe had been "the only one of his cabinet" friendly to Jackson in the Seminole controversy; and after dinner the remark, after being discussed between Lewis and Eaton the secretary of war, was repeated by the latter to Jackson, who said he must be mistaken. Lewis then told Jackson of Forsyth's letter, which greatly excited him, already disliking Calhoun as he did, and not unnaturally susceptible about his reputation in a war which had been the subject of violent and even savage attacks upon him in the recent canvass. Jackson sent at once to New York for the letter. But Hamilton was unwilling to give it without Forsyth's permission; and when Forsyth, on the assembling of Congress, was consulted, he preferred that Crawford should be directly asked for the information. This was done, and Crawford wrote an account which in May, 1830, Jackson sent to Calhoun with a demand for an explanation. Calhoun admitted that he had, after hearing of the seizure of the Spanish forts in Florida and Jackson's execution of the Englishmen Arbuthnot and Ambrister, expressed an opinion against him, and proposed an investigation of his conduct by a court of inquiry. He further told Jackson, with much dignity of manner, that the latter was being used in a plot to effect Calhoun's political extinction and the exaltation of his enemies. The President received Calhoun's letter on his way to church, and upon his return from religious meditation wrote to the Vice-President that "motives are to be inferred from actions and judged by our God;" that he had long repelled the insinuations that it was Calhoun, and not Crawford, who had secretly endeavored to destroy his reputation; that he had never expected to say to Calhoun, "Et tu, Brute!" and that there need be no further communication on the subject. Thus was finally established the breach between Calhoun and Jackson, which this personal matter had widened but had by no means begun. In none of it did Van Buren have any part. When Jackson sent Lewis to him with Calhoun's letter and asked his opinion, he refused to read it, saying that an attempt would undoubtedly be made to hold him responsible for the rupture, and he wished to be able to say that he knew nothing of it. This course was doubtless politic, and deserves no applause; but it was also simply right. On getting this message Jackson said, "I reckon Van is right; I dare say they will attempt to throw the whole blame on him."

A few weeks before, on April 13, 1830, the dinner to celebrate Jefferson's birthday was held at Washington. It was attended by the President and Vice-President, the cabinet officers, and many other distinguished persons. There were reports at the time that it was intended to use Jefferson's name in support of the state-rights doctrines, and against internal improvements and a protective tariff. This shows how clearly were already recognized some of the great causes underlying the political movements and personal differences of the time. The splendid parliamentary encounter between Hayne and Webster had taken place but two or three months before. In his speech Hayne, who was understood, as Benton tells us, to give voice to the sentiments of Calhoun, had plainly enough stated the doctrine of nullification. Jackson at the dinner robustly confronted the extremists with his famous toast, "Our federal Union: it must be preserved." Calhoun, already conscious of his leadership in a sectional controversy, followed with the sentiment, true indeed, but said in words very sinister at that time: "The Union: next to our liberty the most dear. May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States, and distributing equally the benefit and burden of the Union." The secretary of state next rose with a toast with little ring or inspiration in it, but plainly, though in conciliatory phrase, declaring for the Union. He asked the company to drink, "Mutual forbearance and reciprocal concessions: through their agency the Union was established. The patriotic spirit from which they emanated will forever sustain it."