Martin Van Buren

by Edward Morse Shepard

The House of Representatives was so divided that its control depended upon whether five Whig or five Democratic congressmen from New Jersey should be admitted. They had been voted for upon a general ticket through the whole State; and the Whig governor and council had given the certificate of election to the Whigs by acquiescing in the actions of the two county clerks who had, for irregularities, thrown out the Democratic districts of South Amboy and Millville. A collision arose curiously like the dispute over the electoral returns from Florida and Louisiana in 1877. This exclusion of the two districts the Democrats insisted to have been wrongful; and not improbably with reason, for at the next election in 1839 the State, upon the popular vote, gave a substantial majority against the Whigs, although by the district division of the State a majority of the legislature were Whigs and reëlected the Whig governor. The clerk of the national House had, according to usage, prepared a roll of members, which he proceeded to call. He seems to have placed on the roll the names of the New Jersey representatives holding the governor's certificates. But before calling their names, he stated to the House that there were rival credentials; that he felt that he had no power to decide upon the contested rights; and that, if the House approved, he would pass over the names until the call of the other States was finished. The rival credentials included a record of the votes upon which the governor's certificate was presumed to be based. Objection was made to passing New Jersey, and one of the governor's certificates was read. The New Jerseymen with certificates insisted that their names should be called. The clerk declined to take any step without the authority of the House, holding that he was in no sense a chairman. He behaved in the case with modesty and decorum, and the savage criticisms upon him seem to have no foundation except this refusal of his to decide upon the prima facie right to the New Jersey seats, or to act as chairman except upon unanimous consent. He was clearly right. He had no power. The very roll he prepared, and his reading it, had no force except such as the House chose to give them. Upon any other theory he would practically wield an enormous power justified neither by the Constitution nor by any law. On the fourth day of tumult a simple and lawful remedy was discovered to be at hand. Any member could himself act as chairman to put his own motion for the appointment of a temporary speaker; and if a majority acquiesced, there was at once an organization without the clerk's aid. This was in precise accord with the attitude of the clerk, hotly abused as he was by Adams and others who adopted his position. So Adams proposed himself to put the question on his own motion to call the roll with the members holding certificates. Further confusion then ensued, which was terminated by Rhett of South Carolina, who moved that John Quincy Adams act as chairman until a speaker should be chosen. Rhett put his own motion, and it was carried. Adams took the chair, rules were adopted, and order succeeded chaos. None of the New Jerseymen were permitted to vote for speaker, but a few Calhoun Democrats refused to vote for the administration candidate. Most of the administration members offered to accept a Calhoun man; but a few of them, naturally angry at South Carolina dictation, refused, under Benton's advice, to vote for him. At last the Whigs joined the Calhoun men, and ended this extraordinary contest. The speaker, Robert M. T. Hunter, was a so-called states-rights man, and a supporter of the independent treasury scheme. He had the fortune, after a singularly varied and even important career in the United States and the Confederate States, to be appointed by President Cleveland to the petty place of collector of customs at Tappahannock, in Virginia, and to live among Americans who were familiar with his prominence fifty years ago, but supposed him long since dead. The clerk, Hugh A. Garland, was reëlected, in spite of what Adams in his diary, after his picturesque but utterly unjustifiable fashion, called the "baseness of his treachery to his trust." The Whig New Jerseymen were refused seats, and the apparent perversion of the popular vote was rightly defeated by seating their rivals. The Whigs posed as defenders of the sanctity of state authority, and sought, upon that political issue, to force the Van Buren men to be the apologists for centralization.

It was at this session that the sub-treasury bill was passed. As a sort of new declaration of independence Van Buren signed it on July 4, 1840. His long and honorable and his greatest battle was won. It was the triumph of a really great cause. The people, by their labor and capital, were to support the federal government as a mere agency for limited purposes. That government was not, in this way at least, to support or direct or control either the people or their labor or capital. But the captain fell at the time of his victory. The financial disaster of 1839 had exhausted the good-nature and patience of the people. Dissertations on finance and economics, however wise, now served to irritate and disgust. These cool admonitions to economy and a minding of one's business were popularly believed to be heartless and repulsive.

In 1840 took place the most extraordinary of presidential campaigns. While Congress was wrangling over the New Jersey episode in December, 1839, the Whig national convention again nominated Harrison for President. Tyler was taken from the ranks of seceding Democrats as the candidate for Vice-President. The slaughter of Henry Clay, the father of the Whig party, had been effected by the now formidable Whig politicians of New York, cunningly marshaled by Thurlow Weed. Availability had its first complete triumph in our national politics. They had not come, Governor Barbour of Virginia, the president of the Whig convention, said, to whine after the fleshpots of Egypt, but to give perpetuity to Republican institutions. To reach this end (not very explicitly or intelligibly defined), it mattered not what letters of the alphabet spelled the name of the candidate; for his part, he could sing Hosanna to any alphabetical combination. No platform or declaration of principles was adopted, lest some of those discontented with Van Buren should find there a counter-irritant. The candidates, in accepting their nominations, refrained from political discussion. Harrison stood for the plain, honest citizen, coming, as one of the New York conventions said, "like another Cincinnatus from his plough," resolute for a generous administration, and ready to diffuse prosperity and to end hard times. Tyler, formerly a strict constructionist member of the Jackson party, was nominated to catch votes, in spite of his perfectly well known opposition to the whole Whig theory of government.

The Democratic, or Democratic-Republican, convention met at Baltimore on May 5, 1840. The party name was now definitely and exclusively adopted. Among the delegates were men long afterwards famous in the later Republican party, John A. Dix, Hannibal Hamlin, Simon Cameron. There was an air of despondency about the convention, for the enthusiasm over "log cabin and hard cider" was already abroad. But the convention without wavering announced its belief in a limited federal power, in the separation of public moneys from banking institutions; and its opposition to internal improvements by the nation, to the federal assumption of state debts, to the fostering of one industry so as to injure another, to raising more money than was required for necessary expenses of government, and to a national bank. Slavery now took for a long time its place in the party platform. The convention declared the constitutional inability of Congress to interfere with slavery in the States, and that all efforts of abolitionists to induce Congress to interfere with slavery were alarming and dangerous to the Union. An elaborate address to the people was issued. It began with a clear, and for a political campaign a reasonably moderate, defense of Van Buren's administration; it renewed the well-worn arguments for the limited activity of government; it made a silly assertion that Harrison was a Federalist, and an insinuation that the glory of his military career was doubtful; it denounced the abolitionists, whose fanaticism it charged the Whigs with enlisting in their cause. In closing, it recalled the Democratic revolution of 1800 which broke the "iron rod of Federal rule," and contrasted the "costly and stately pageants addressed merely to the senses" by the Whigs with the truth and reason of the Democracy.

During the canvass Van Buren submitted to frequent interrogation. In a fashion that would seem fatal to a modern candidate, he wrote to political friends and enemies alike, letter after letter, restating his political opinions. Especially was it sought to arouse Southern distrust of him. He was accused, with fire-eating anger, of having approved a sentence of a court-martial against a naval lieutenant which was based upon the testimony of negroes. He reiterated what he had already said upon slavery; but late in the canvass he went one step further. When asked his opinion as to the treatment by Congress of the abolition petitions, he replied, justly enough, that the President could have no concern with that matter; but lest he should be charged with "non-committalism," he declared that Congress was fully justified in adopting the "gag" rule. For years the petitions had been received and referred. On one occasion in each House the subject had been considered upon a report of a committee, and decided against the petitioners with almost entire unanimity. The rule had been adopted only after it was clear that the petitioners simply sought to make Congress an instrument of an agitation which might lead to a dissolution of the Union. It was thus that Van Buren made his extreme concession to the slavocracy. And there was obvious a material excuse. No president while in office could approve the perversion of legislative procedure from the making of laws to be a mere stimulant of moral excitement. To encourage or justify petitions intended to inflame public sentiment against a wrong might be legitimate for some men, however well they knew, as Adams said he knew, that the body addressed ought not to grant the petitioners' prayers. Such a course might be noble and praiseworthy for a private citizen, or possibly for a member of Congress representing the exalted moral sentiment of a single district. It would be highly illegitimate for a man holding a great public office, and there representing the entire people and its established system of laws. John Quincy Adams, under his sense of duty as president, had in 1828 pressed the humiliating claim that England should surrender American slaves escaped to English freedom; and there is little reason to doubt that, if he had remained in the field of responsible and executive public life, he would have agreed with Van Buren in his treatment of the matter of the abolition petitions, or rather in his expressions from the White House about them.

Harrison hastened to clear his skirts of abolitionism. Congress could not, he declared, abolish slavery in the District of Columbia without the consent of Virginia and Maryland and of the District itself. For, as he argued, ignobly applying, as well as misquoting, the American words solemnly lauded by Lord Chatham in his speech on Quartering Soldiers in Boston, "what a man has honestly acquired is absolutely his own, which he may freely give, but which cannot be taken from him without his consent." He denounced as a slander the charge that he was an abolitionist, or that the vote he had given against anti-slavery restriction in Missouri had violated his conscience. He declared for the right of petition, which indeed nobody disputed; but he did not say what course should be taken with the anti-slavery petitions, which was the real question to be answered. The discussion by the citizens of the free States of slavery in the slave States was not, he said, "sanctioned by the Constitution." "Methinks," he said at Dayton, "I hear a soft voice asking, Are you in favor of paper money? I am;" and to that there were "shouts of applause."

In no presidential canvass in America has there been, as Mr. Schurz well says in his life of Henry Clay, "more enthusiasm and less thought" than in the Whig canvass of 1840. The people were rushing as from a long restraint. Wise saws about the duties of government had become nauseating. A plain every-day man administering a paternal and affectionate government was the ruling text, while Tyler and his strict construction quietly served their turn with some of the doctrinaires at the South. The nation, Clay said, was "like the ocean when convulsed by some terrible storm." There was what he called a "rabid appetite for public discussions."

Webster's campaign speeches probably marked the height of the splendid and effectual flood of eloquence now poured over the land. The breeze of popular excitement, he said, with satisfactory magniloquence, was flowing everywhere; it fanned the air in Alabama and the Carolinas; and crossing the Potomac and the Alleghanies, to mingle with the gales of the Empire State and the mountain blasts of New England, would blow a perfect hurricane. "Every breeze," he declared, "says change; the cry, the universal cry, is for a change." He had not, indeed, been born in a log cabin, but his elder brothers and sisters had; he wept to think of those who had left it; and if he failed in affectionate veneration for him who raised it, then might his name and the name of his posterity be blotted from the memory of mankind. He touched the bank question lightly; he denounced the sub-treasury as "the first in a new series of ruthless experiments," and declared that Van Buren's "abandonment of the currency" was fatal. Forgetting who had supported and who had opposed the continued distribution of surplus revenues among the States, he condemned the President for the low state of the treasury; and notwithstanding it declared his approval of a generous policy of internal improvements. He would not accuse the President of seeking to play the part of Cæsar or Cromwell because Mr. Poinsett, his secretary of war, had recommended a federal organization of militia, the necessity or convenience of which, it was supposed, had been demonstrated by the Canadian troubles; but the plan, he said, was expensive, unconstitutional, and dangerous to our liberties. He was careful to say nothing of slavery or the right of petition. Only in brief and casual sentences did he even touch the charges that Van Buren had treated political contests as "rightfully struggles for office and emolument," and that federal officers had been assessed in proportion to their salaries for partisan purposes. The President was pictured as full of cynical and selfish disregard of the people; he had disparaged the credit of the States; he had accused Madison, and, monstrous sacrilege, even Washington, of corruption. "I may forgive this," Webster slowly said to the appalled audience, "but I shall not forget it;" such "abominable violations of the truth of history" filled his bosom with "burning scorn." This was a highly imaginative allusion to Van Buren's statement that the national bank had been originally devised by the friends of privileged orders. Nor need the South, even Webster intimated, have any fear of the Whigs about slavery. Could the South believe that Harrison would "lay ruthless hands on the institutions among which he was born and educated?" No, indeed, for Washington and Hancock, Virginia and Massachusetts, had joined their thoughts, their hopes, their feelings. "How many bones of Northern men," he asked with majestic pathos, "lie at Yorktown?" Senator Rives, now one of the Conservatives, said that Van Buren was indeed "mild, smooth, affable, smiling;" but humility was "young and old ambition's ladder." The militia project meant military usurpation. Look at Cromwell, he said; look at Bonaparte. Were their usurpations not in the name of the people? Preston of South Carolina said that Van Buren had advocated diminished wages to others; now he should himself receive diminished wages. Harrison was, he said "a Southern man with Southern principles." As for Van Buren, this "Northern man with Southern principles," did he not come "from beyond the Hudson," had he not been "a friend of Rufus King, a Missouri restrictionist, a friend and advocate of free negro suffrage?" Clay said that it was no time "to argue;" a rule his party for the moment well observed. The nation had already pronounced upon the ravages Van Buren had brought upon the land, the general and widespread ruin, the broken hopes. With the mere fact of Harrison's election, "without reference to the measures of his administration," he told the Virginians at Hanover, "confidence will immediately revive, credit be restored, active business will return, prices of products will rise; and the people will feel and know that, instead of their servants being occupied in devising measures for their ruin and destruction, they will be assiduously employed in promoting their welfare and prosperity."

All this was far more glorious than the brutally true advice of the old man with a broad-axe on his shoulders, whom the Democrats quoted. When asked what was to become of everybody in the heavy distress of the panic, he answered, "Damn the panic! If you would all work as I do, you would have no panic." The people no longer cared about "the interested few who desire to enrich themselves by the use of public money." If, as the Democrats said, the interested few had been thwarted, an almost universal poverty had for some reason or other come with their defeat. Perhaps the reflecting citizen thought that he might become, if he were not already, one of the "interested few." Nor was the demagogy all on the side of the Whigs, although they enjoyed the more popular quality of the quadrennial product. Van Buren himself, in the futile fashion of aging parties which suppose that their ancient victories still stir the popular heart, recalled "the reign of terror" of the elder Adams, and how the "Samson of Democracy burst the cords which were already bound around its limbs," how "a web more artfully contrived, composed of a high protective tariff, a system of internal improvements, and a national bank, was then twined around the sleeping giant" until he was "roused by the warning voice of the honest and intrepid Jackson." Harrison's own numerous speeches were awkward and indefinite enough; but still they showed an honest and sincere man, and in the enthusiasm of the day they did him no harm.

The revolts against the severe party discipline of the Democracy, aided by the popular distress, were serious. Calhoun, indeed, had returned; but all his supporters did not return with him. The Southern defection headed by White in 1836 was still most formidable, and was now reënforced by the Conservative secession North and South. Even Major Eaton forgot Van Buren's gallantry ten years before, and joined the enemy. The talk of "spoils" was amply justified; but the abuses of patronage had not prevented Jackson's popularity, and under Van Buren they were far less serious. This cry did not yet touch the American people. The most serious danger of "spoils" still lay in the future. Patronage abuses had injured the efficiency of the public service, but they had not yet begun to defeat the popular will. Jackson came resolutely to Van Buren's aid in the fashionable letter-writing. "The Rives Conservatives, the Abolitionists and Federalists" had combined, the ex-President vivaciously said, to obtain power "by falsehood and slander of the basest kind;" but the "virtue of the people," he declared in what from other lips would have seemed cant, would defeat "the money power." Van Buren's firmness and ability entitled him, he thought, to a rank not inferior to Jefferson or Madison, while he rather unhandsomely added that he had never admired Harrison as a military man.