Martin Van Buren

by Edward Morse Shepard

The election seemed to clarify some of the views of the administration. They now dared to speak more explicitly. On his way to the inauguration, Van Buren, declining a dinner at Philadelphia, recited with approval what he called Jackson's repeated and earnest recommendations of "a reduction of duties to the revenue standard." In his second inaugural Jackson said that there should be exercised "by the general government those powers only that are clearly delegated." In his message of December, 1833, he again spoke of "the importance of abstaining from all appropriations which are not absolutely required for the public interests, and authorized by the powers clearly delegated to the United States;" and this he said with the more emphasis because under the compromise tariff of 1833 a large decrease in revenue was anticipated.

In September, 1833, was announced Jackson's refusal longer to deposit the moneys of the government with the Bank of the United States. It is plain that the dangers of the proposed deposits of the moneys in the state banks were not appreciated. Van Buren at first opposed this so-called "removal of the deposits." Kendall tells of an interview with the Vice-President not long after his inauguration, and while he was a guest at the White House. Van Buren then warmly remonstrated against the continued agitation of the subject, after the resolution of the lower House at the last session that the government deposits were safe with the banks. Kendall replied that so certain to his mind was the success of the Whig party at the next presidential election and the consequent re-charter of the Bank, unless it were now stripped of the power which the charge of the public moneys gave it, that if the Bank were to retain the deposits he should consider further opposition useless and would lay down his pen, leaving to others this question and all other politics. "I can live," he said to the Vice-President, "under a corrupt despotism as well as any other man by keeping out of its way, which I shall certainly do." They parted in excitement. A few weeks later Van Buren confessed to Kendall, "I had never thought seriously upon the deposit question until after my conversation with you; I am now satisfied that you were right and I was wrong." Kendall was sent to ascertain whether suitable state banks would accept the deposits, and on what terms. While in New York Van Buren, with McLane lately transferred from the Treasury to the State Department, called on him and proposed that the order for the change in the government depositories should take effect on the coming first of January. The date being a month after the meeting of Congress, the executive action would seem less defiant; and in the mean time the friends of the administration could be more effectually united in support of the measure. Kendall yielded to the proposition though against his judgment, and wrote to the President in its favor. But Jackson would not yield. Whether or not its first inspiration came from Francis P. Blair or Kendall, the removal of the deposits was peculiarly Jackson's own deed. The government moneys should not be left in the hands of the chief enemy of his administration, to be loaned in its discretion, that it might secure doubtful votes in Congress and the support of presses pecuniarily weak. As the Bank's charter would expire within three years, it was pointed out that the government ought to prepare for it by withholding further deposits and gradually drawing out the moneys then on deposit. Van Buren's assent was given, but probably with no enthusiasm. He disliked the Bank heartily enough. The corrupting danger of intrusting government moneys to a single private corporation to loan in its discretion was clear. But a system of "pet banks" through the States was too slight an improvement, if an improvement at all. And any change would at least offend and alarm the richer classes. It is impossible to say what effect upon the re-charter of the Bank and the election of 1836 its continued possession of the deposits would have had. Its tremendous power over credits doubtless gave it many votes of administration congressmen. Possibly, as Jackson and Blair feared, it might have secured enough to pass a re-charter over a veto. If it had been thus re-chartered, it may be doubtful whether the blow to the prestige of the administration might not have been serious enough to elect a Whig in 1836. But it is not doubtful that Van Buren, and not Jackson, was compelled to face the political results of this heroic and imperfect measure.

Some financial disturbance took place in the winter of 1833-1834, which was ascribed by the Whigs to the gradual transfer of the government moneys from the United States Bank and its numerous branches to the state banks. For political effect, this disturbance was greatly exaggerated. Deputations visited Washington to bait Jackson. Memorial after memorial enabled congressmen to make friends by complimenting the enterprise and beauty of various towns, and to depict the utter misery to which all their industries had been brought, solely by a gradual transference throughout the United States of $10,000,000, from one set of depositories to another. The removal, Webster said, had produced a degree of evil that could not be borne. "A tottering state of credit, cramped means, loss of property and loss of employment, doubts of the condition of others, doubts of their own condition, constant fear of failures and new explosions, and awful dread of the future"—all these evils, "without hope of improvement or change," had resulted from the removal. Clay was more precise in his absurdity. The property of the country had been reduced, he declared, four hundred millions in value. Addressing Van Buren in the Vice-President's chair, he begged him in a burst of bathos to repair to the executive mansion and place before the chief magistrate the naked and undisguised truth. "Go to him," he cried, "and tell him without exaggeration, but in the language of truth and sincerity, the actual condition of this bleeding country, ... of the tears of helpless widows no longer able to earn their bread, and of unclad and unfed orphans." Van Buren, in the story often quoted from Benton, while thus apostrophized, looked respectfully and innocently at Clay, as if treasuring up every word to be faithfully borne to the President; and when Clay had finished, he called a senator to the chair, went up to the eloquent and languishing Kentuckian, asked him for a pinch of his fine maccoboy snuff, and walked away. But this frivolity was not fancied everywhere. At a meeting in Philadelphia it was resolved "that Martin Van Buren deserves and will receive the execrations of all good men, should he shrink from the responsibility of conveying to Andrew Jackson the message sent by the Honorable Henry Clay." The whole agitation was hollow enough. Jackson was not far wrong in saying in his letter to Hamilton of January 2, 1834: "There is no real general distress. It is only with those who live by borrowing, trade or loans, and the gamblers in stocks." The business of the country was not injured by refusing to let Nicholas Biddle and his subordinates, rather than other men, lend for gain ten millions of government money. But business was soon to be injured by permitting the state banks to do the same thing. The change did not, as Jackson thought, "leave all to trade on their own credit and capital without any interference by the general government except using its powers by giving through its mint a specie currency."

Van Buren took a permanent residence in Washington after his inauguration as vice-president. He now held a rank accorded to no other vice-president before or since. He was openly adopted by the American Augustus, and seemed already to wear the title of Cæsar. As no other vice-president has been, he was the chief adviser of the President, and as much the second officer of the government in power as in the dignity of his station. His only chance of promotion did not lie in the President's death. That the President should live until after the election of 1836 was safely over, Van Buren had every selfish motive as well as many generous motives to desire. His ambition was no-wise disagreeable to his chief. To see that ambition satisfied would gratify both patriotic and personal wishes of the tempestuous but not erratic old man in the White House. For there was the utmost intimacy and confidence between the two men. Van Buren had every reason, personal, political, and patriotic, to desire the entire success of the administration. He was not only the second member of it; but in his jealous and anxious watch over it he was preserving his own patrimony. His ability and experience were far greater than those of any other of its members. After Taney had been transferred from the attorney-general's office to the Treasury, in September, 1833, to make the transfer of the deposits, Jackson appointed Benjamin F. Butler, Van Buren's intimate friend, his former pupil and partner, to Taney's place. Louis McLane, Van Buren's predecessor in the mission to England, and his successor, after Edward Livingston, in the State Department, resigned the latter office in the summer of 1834. He had disapproved Jackson's removal of the deposits; he believed it would be unpopular, and the presidential bee was buzzing in his bonnet. John Forsyth of Georgia, an admirer of Van Buren, and one of his defenders in the senatorial debate at the time of his rejection, then took the first place in the cabinet. Van Buren accompanied Jackson during part of the latter's visit to the Northeast in the summer of 1833, when as the adversary of nullification his popularity was at its highest, so high indeed that Harvard College, to Adams's disgust, made him a Doctor of Laws. But the exciting events of Jackson's second term hardly belong, with the information we yet have, to Van Buren's biography. They have been often and admirably told in the lives of Jackson and Clay, the seeming chiefs on the two sides of the long encounter.

Van Buren's nomination for the presidency, bitter as the opposition to it still was, came as matter of course. The large and serious secession of Calhoun and his followers from the Jacksonian party was followed by the later and more serious defection of the Democrats who made a rival Democratic candidate of Hugh L. White, a senator from Tennessee, and formerly a warm friend and adherent of Jackson. It was in White's behalf that Davy Crockett wrote, in 1835, his entertaining though scurrilous life of Van Buren. Jackson's friendship for Van Buren, Crockett said, had arisen from his hatred to Calhoun, of which Van Buren, who was "secret, sly, selfish, cold, calculating, distrustful, treacherous," had taken advantage. Jackson was now about to give up "an old, long-tried, faithful friend, Judge White, who stuck to him through all his tribulations, helped to raise his fortunes from the beginning; adventurers together in a new country, friends in youth and in old age, fought together in the same battles, risked the same dangers, starved together in the same deserts, merely to gratify this revengeful feeling." Van Buren was "as opposite to General Jackson as dung is to a diamond."

It is difficult to find any justification for White's candidacy. He was a modest, dignified senator whose popularity in the Democratic Southwest rendered him available to Van Buren's enemies. But neither his abilities nor his services to the public or his party would have suggested him for the presidency. Doubtless in him as with other modest, dignified men in history, there burned ambition whose fire never burst into flame, and which perhaps for its suppression was the more troublesome. He consented, apparently only for personal reasons, to head the Southern schism from Jackson and Van Buren; and in his political destruction he paid the penalty usually and justly visited upon statesmen who, through personal hatred or jealousy or ambition, break party ties without a real difference of principle. Benton said that White consented to run "because in his advanced age he did the act which, with all old men, is an experiment, and with most of them an unlucky one. He married again; and this new wife having made an immense stride from the head of a boarding-house table to the head of a senator's table, could see no reason why she should not take one step more, and that comparatively short, and arrive at the head of the presidential table."

The Democratic-Republican Convention met at Baltimore on May 20, 1835, nearly eighteen months before the election. There were over five hundred delegates from twenty-three States. South Carolina, Alabama, and Illinois were not represented. Party organization was still very imperfect. The modern system of precise and proportional representations was not yet known. The States which approved the convention sent delegates in such number as suited their convenience. Maryland, the convention being held in its chief city, sent 183 delegates; Virginia, close at hand, sent 102; New York, although the home of the proposed candidate, sent but 42, the precise number of its electoral votes. Tennessee sent but one; Mississippi and Missouri, only two each. In making the nominations, the delegates from each State, however numerous or few, cast a number of votes equal to its representation in the electoral college. The 183 delegates from Maryland cast therefore but ten votes; while the single delegate from Tennessee, much courted man that he must have been, cast 15.

It was the second national convention of the party. The members assembled at the "place of worship of the Fourth Presbyterian Church." Instead of the firm and now long-recognized opening by the chairman of the national committee provided by the well-geared machinery of our later politics, George Kremer of Pennsylvania first "stated the objects of the meeting." Andrew Stevenson of Virginia, the president, felt it necessary in his opening speech to defend the still novel party institution. Efforts, he said, would be made at the approaching election to divide the Republican party and possibly to defeat an election by the people in their primary colleges. Their venerable president had advised, but in vain, constitutional amendments securing this election to the people, and preventing its falling to the House of Representatives. A national convention was the best means of concentrating the popular will, the only defense against a minority party. It was recommended by prudence, sanctioned by the precedent of 1832, and had proved effectual by experience. They must guard against local jealousies. "What, gentlemen," he said, "would you think of the sagacity and prudence of that individual who would propose the expedient of cutting up the noble ship that each man might seize his own plank and steer for himself?" The inquiries must be: Who can best preserve the unity of the Democratic party? Who best understands the principles and motives of our government? Who will carry out the principles of the Jeffersonian era and General Jackson's administration? These demands clearly enough pointed out Van Buren. Prayers were then offered up "in a fervent, feeling manner." The rule requiring two thirds of the whole number of votes for a nomination was again adopted, because "it would have a more imposing effect," though nearly half the convention, 210 to 231, thought a majority was more "according to Democratic principles." Niles records that the formal motion to proceed to the nomination caused a smile among the members, so well settled was it that Van Buren was to be the nominee. He received the unanimous vote of the convention. A strong fight was made for the vice-presidency between the friends of Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky and William C. Rives of Virginia. The former received barely the two-thirds vote. The Virginia delegation upon the defeat of the latter did what would now be a sacrilegious laying of violent hands on the ark. Party regularity was not yet so chief a deity in the political temple. The Virginians had, they said, an unpleasant duty to perform; but they would not shrink from it. They would not support Johnson for the vice-presidency; they had no confidence in his principles or his character; they had come to the convention to support principles, not men; they had already gone as far as possible in supporting Mr. Van Buren, and they would not go further. Not long afterwards Rives left the party. No platform was adopted; but a committee was appointed to prepare an address to the people.

The Whigs nominated General William Henry Harrison for the presidency and Francis Granger for the vice-presidency. They had but a forlorn hope of direct success. But the secession from the Democratic party of the nullifiers, and the more serious secession in the Southwest headed by White, made it seem possible to throw the election into the House. John Tyler of Virginia was the nominee of the bolting Democrats, for vice-president upon the ticket with White. The Whigs of Massachusetts preferred their unequaled orator; for they then and afterwards failed to see, as the admirers of some other famous Americans have failed to see, that other qualities make a truer equipment for the first office of the land than this noble art of oratory. South Carolina would vote against Calhoun's victorious adversary; but she would not, in the first instance at least, vote with the Whig heretics.

It was a disorderly campaign, lasting a year and a half, and never reaching the supreme excitement of 1840 or 1844. The opposition did not deserve success. It had neither political principle nor discipline. Calhoun described the Van Buren men as "a powerful faction (party it cannot be called) held together by the hopes of public plunder and marching under a banner whereon is written 'to the victors belong the spoils.'" There was in the rhetorical exaggeration enough truth perhaps to make an issue. But the political removals under Jackson were only incidentally touched in the canvass. Amos Kendall, then postmaster-general, towards the close of the canvass wrote a letter which, coming from perhaps the worst of Jackson's "spoils-men," shows how far public sentiment was even then from justifying the political interference of federal officers in elections. Samuel McKean, senator from Pennsylvania, had written to Kendall complaining that three employees of the post-office had used the time and influence of their official stations to affect elections, by written communications and personal importunities. This, he said, was "a loathsome public nuisance," though admitting that since Kendall became postmaster-general he had given no cause of complaint. Kendall replied on September 27, 1836, that though it was difficult to draw the line between the rights of the citizen and the assumptions of the officeholder, he thought it dangerous to our institutions that government employees should "assume to direct public opinion and control the results of elections in the general or state government." His advice to members of his department was to keep as clear from political strife as possible, "to shun mere political meetings, or, if present, to avoid taking any part in their proceedings, to decline acting as members of political committees or conventions." In making appointments he would prefer political friends; but he "would not remove a good postmaster and honest man for a mere difference of political opinion." The complaints were for offenses committed under his predecessor; one of the three offenders had left the service; the other two had been free from criticism for seventeen months. There can be little doubt that the standard thus set up in public was higher than the general practice of Kendall or his subordinates; but the letter showed that public sentiment had not yet grown callous to this odious abuse.