Martin Van Buren

by Edward Morse Shepard

Another unpopular duty fell to Van Buren during his presidency, a duty but for which New York might have been saved to him in 1840. In the Lower and Upper Canadas popular discontent and political tumult resulted late in 1837 in violence, so often the only means by which English dependencies have brought their imperial mistress to a respect for their complaints.[16] The liberality of the Whigs, then lately triumphant in England, was not broad enough to include these distant colonists. The provincial legislature in each of the Canadas consisted of a Lower House or assembly chosen by popular vote, and an Upper House or council appointed by the governor, who himself was appointed by and represented the crown. Reforms after reforms, proposed by the popular houses, were rejected by the council. In Lower Canada the popular opposition was among the French, who had never been embittered towards the United States. In Upper Canada its strength was among settlers who had come since the war closed in 1815. Lower Canada demanded in vain that the council be made elective. Its assembly, weary of the effectual opposition of the council to popular measures, began in 1832 to refuse votes of supplies unless their grievances were redressed; and by 1837 government charges had accrued to the amount of £142,100. On April 14, 1837, Lord John Russell, still wearing the laurel of a victor for popular rights, procured from the imperial parliament permission, without the assent of the colonial parliament, to apply to these charges the money in the hands of the receiver-general of Lower Canada. This extraordinary grant passed the House of Commons by 269 to 46. A far less flagitious case of taxation without representation had begun the American Revolution. The money had been raised under laws which provided for its expenditure by vote of a local representative body. It was expended by the vote of a body at Westminster, three thousand miles away, but few of whose members knew or cared anything for the bleak stretch of seventeenth-century France on the lower St. Lawrence, and none of whom had contributed a penny of it. To even Gladstone, lately the under-secretary for the colonies and then a "rising hope of unbending Tories," there seemed nothing involved but the embarrassment of faithful servants of the crown. This thoroughly British disregard of sentiment among other people roused a deep opposition which was headed by Papineau, eloquent and a hero among the French. An insurrection broke out in November, 1837, and blood was shed in engagements at St. Denis and St. Charles, not far from Montreal. But the insurgents were quickly defeated, and within three weeks the insurrection in Lower Canada was ended.

In Upper Canada there was considerable Republican sentiment, and the party of popular rights had among its leaders men of a high order of ability. One of them, Marshall S. Bidwell, through the magnanimity or procurement of the governor, escaped from Canada to become one of the most honored and stately figures at the bar of New York. Early in 1836, Sir Francis B. Head, a clever and not ill-natured man, arrived as governor. He himself wrote the unconscious Anglicism that "the great danger" he "had to avoid was the slightest attempt to conciliate any party." It was assumed with the usual insufferable affectation of omniscience that these hardy Western settlers were merely children who did not know what was best for them. Even the suggestions of concession sent him from England were not respected. In an election for the Assembly he had the issue announced as one of separation from England; and by the use, it was said, of his power and patronage, the colonial Tories carried a majority of the House. Hopeless of any redress, and fired by the rumors of the revolt in Lower Canada, an insurrection took place early in December near Toronto. It was speedily suppressed. One of the leaders, Mackenzie, escaped to Buffalo. Others were captured and punished, some of them capitally.

The mass of the Canadians were doubtless opposed to the insurrection. But there was among them a widespread and reasonable discontent, with which the Americans, and especially the people of northern and western New York, warmly sympathized. It was natural and traditional to believe England an oppressor; and there was every reason in this case to believe the Canadians right in their ill-feeling. The refugees who had fled to New York met with an enthusiastic reception, and, in the security of a foreign land, prepared to advance their rebellion. On the long frontier of river, lake, and wilderness, it was difficult, with the meagre force regularly at the disposal of the United States, to prevent depredations. This difficulty became enhanced by a culpable though not unnatural invasion of American territory by British troops. On December 12, 1837, Mackenzie, who had the day before arrived with a price of $4000 set upon his head, addressed a large audience at Buffalo. Volunteers were called for; and the next day, with twenty-five men, commanded by Van Rensselaer, an American, he seized Navy Island in the Niagara River, but a short distance above the cataract, and belonging to Canada. He there established a provisional government, with a flag and a great seal; and that the new State might be complete, paper money was issued. By January, 1838, there were several hundred men on the island, largely Americans, with arms and provisions chiefly obtained from the American side.

On the night of December 29, 1837, a party of Canadian militia crossed the Niagara to seize the Caroline, a steamer in the service of the rebels. It happened, however, that the steamer, instead of being at Navy Island, was at Schlosser, on the American shore. The Canadians seized the vessel, killing several men in the affray, and after setting her on fire, loosened her from the shore, to go blazing down the river and over the falls. This invasion of American territory caused indignant excitement through the United States. Van Buren had promptly sought to prevent hostility from our territory. On January 5, 1838, he had issued a proclamation reciting the seizure of Navy Island by a force, partly Americans, under the command of an American, with arms and supplies procured in the United States, and declared that the neutrality laws would be rigidly enforced and the offenders punished. Nor would they receive aid or countenance from the United States, into whatever difficulties they might be thrown by their violation of friendly territory. On the same day Van Buren sent General Winfield Scott to the frontier, and by special message asked from Congress power to prevent such offenses in advance, as well as afterwards to punish them,—a request to which Congress, in spite of the excitement over the invasion at Schlosser, soon acceded. The militia of New York were, on this invasion, called out by Governor Marcy, and placed under General Scott's command. But there was little danger. On January 13 the insurgents abandoned Navy Island. The war, for the time, was over, although excitement and disorder continued on the border and the lakes as far as Detroit; and in the fall of 1838 other incursions were made from American territory. But they were fruitless and short-lived. Nearly nine hundred arrests were made by the Canadian authorities. Many death sentences were imposed and several executed, and many more offenders were sentenced to transportation.

England, in her then usual fashion, was duly waked to duty by actual bloodshed. Sir Francis B. Head left Canada, and the Melbourne ministry sent over the Earl of Durham, one of the finest characters in English public life, to be governor-general over the five colonies; to redress their wrongs; to conciliate, and perhaps yield to demands for self-government: all which might far better have been done five years before. Lord Durham used a wise mercy towards the rebels. He made rapid progress in the reforms, and, best and first of all, he won the confidence and affection of the people. But England used to distrust an English statesman who practiced this kind of rule towards a dependency. A malevolent attack of Lord Brougham was successful, and Lord Durham returned to ministerial disgrace, though to a wiser popular applause, soon to die in what ought to have been but an early year in his generous and splendid career. Although punishing her benefactor, England was shrewd enough to accept the benefit. The concessions which Lord Durham had begun were continued, and Canada became and has remained loyal. Before leaving Canada, Lord Durham was invited by a very complimentary letter of Van Buren to visit Washington, but the invitation was courteously declined.

Mackenzie was arrested at Buffalo and indicted. After his indictment he addressed many public meetings through the United States in behalf of his cause, one at Washington itself. In 1839, however, he was tried and convicted. Van Buren, justly refusing to pardon him until he had served in prison two thirds of his sentence, thus made for himself a persistent and vindictive enemy.

Upon renewed raids late in 1838, the President, by a proclamation, called upon misguided or deluded Americans to abandon projects dangerous to their own country and fatal to those whom they professed a desire to relieve; and, after various appeals to good sense and patriotism, warned them that, if taken in Canada, they would be left to the policy and justice of the government whose dominions they had, "without the shadow of justification or excuse, nefariously invaded." This had no uncertain sound. Van Buren was promptly declared to be a British tool. The plain facts were ignored that the great majority of the Canadians, however much displeased with their rulers, were hostile to Republican institutions and to a separation from England, and that the majority in Canada had the same right to be governed in their own fashion as the majority here. There was seen, however, in this firm performance of international obligations, only additional proof of Van Buren's coldness towards popular rights, and of his sycophancy to power.

The system of allowing to actual settlers, at the minimum price, a preëmption of public lands already occupied by them, was adopted at the long session of 1837-38. Webster joined the Democrats in favoring the bill, against the hot opposition of Clay, who declared it "a grant of the property of the whole people to a small part of the people." The dominant party was now wisely committed to the policy of using the public domain for settlers, and not as mere property to be turned into money. But a year or two before, the latter system had in practice wasted the national estate and corrupted the public with a debauchery of speculation.

The war between Mexico and the American settlers in her revolted northeast province began in 1835. Early in 1836 the heroic defense of the Alamo against several thousand Mexicans by less than two hundred Americans, and among them Davy Crockett, Van Buren's biographer, and the butchery of all but three of the Americans, had consecrated the old building, still proudly preserved by the stirring but now peaceful and pleasing city of San Antonio, and had roused in Texas a fierce and resolute hatred of Mexico. In April, 1836, Houston overwhelmed the Mexicans at San Jacinto, and captured their president, Santa Anna.

In his message of December 21, 1836, Jackson, although he announced these successes of the Texans and their expulsion of Mexican civil authority, still pointed out to Congress the disparity of physical force on the side of Texas, and declared it prudent that we should stand aloof until either Mexico itself or one of the great powers should have recognized Texan independence, or at least until the ability of Texas should have been proved beyond cavil. The Senate had then passed a resolution for recognition of Texan independence. But the House had not concurred; and before Van Buren's inauguration Congress had done no more than authorize the appointment of a diplomatic agent to Texas whenever the President should be satisfied of its independence. In August, 1837, the Texan representative at Washington laid before Van Buren a plan of annexation of the revolted Mexican state. The offer was refused; and it was declared that the United States desired to remain neutral, and perceived that annexation would necessarily lead to war with Mexico. In December, 1837, petitions were presented in Congress against the annexation of Texas, now much agitated at the South; and Preston, Calhoun's senatorial associate from South Carolina, offered a resolution for annexation. Some debate on the question was had in 1838, in which both the pro-slavery character of the movement and the anti-slavery character of the opposition clearly appeared. But this danger to Van Buren was delayed several years. Nor was he yet a character in the drama of the slavery conflict which by 1837 was well opened. The agitation over abolition petitions and the murder of Lovejoy the abolitionist are now readily enough seen to have been the most deeply significant occurrences in America between Van Buren's inauguration and his defeat; but they were as little part of his presidency as the arrival at New York from Liverpool on April 22 and 23, 1838, of the Sirius and the Great Western, the first transatlantic steamships. In Washington the slavery question did not get beyond the halls of Congress. The White House remained for several years free from both the dangers and the duties of the question accompanying the discussion.