Van Buren received the seemingly crushing defeat with dignity and composure. While the cries of "Van, Van, he's a used-up man," were coming with some of the sting of truth through the White House windows, he prepared the final message with which he met Congress in December, 1840. The year, he said, had been one of "health, plenty, and peace." Again he declared the dangers of a national debt, and the equal dangers of too much money in the treasury; for "practical economy in the management of public affairs," he said, "can have no adverse influence to contend with more powerful than a large surplus revenue." Again he attacked the national bank scheme. During four years of the greatest pecuniary embarrassments ever known in time of peace, with a decreasing public revenue, with a formidable opposition, his administration had been able punctually to meet every obligation without a bank, without a permanent national debt, and without incurring any liability which the ordinary resources of the government would not speedily discharge. If the public service had been thus independently sustained without either of these fruitful sources of discord, had we not a right to expect that this policy would "receive the final sanction of a people whose unbiased and fairly elicited judgment upon public affairs is never ultimately wrong?" Again with a clear emphasis he declared against any attempt of the government to repair private losses sustained in private business, either by direct appropriations or by legislation designed to secure exclusive privileges to individuals or classes. In the very last words of this, his last message, he gave an account of his efforts to suppress the slave trade, and to prevent "the prostitution of the American flag to this inhuman purpose," asking Congress, by a prohibition of the American trade which took supplies to the slave factories on the African coast, to break up "those dens of iniquity."
The short session of Congress was hardly more than a jubilee of the Whigs, happily ignorant of the complete chagrin and frustration of their hopes which a few months would bring. Some new bank suspensions occurred in Philadelphia, and among banks closely connected with that city. The Bank of the United States, after a resumption for twenty days, succumbed amid its own loud protestations of solvency, its final disgrace and ruin being, however, deferred a little longer.
Van Buren's cabinet had somewhat changed since his inauguration. In 1838 his old friend and ally, and one of the chief champions of his policy, Benjamin F. Butler, resigned the office of attorney-general, but without any break political or personal, as was seen in his fine and arduous labors in the canvass of 1840 and in the Democratic convention of 1844. Felix Grundy of Tennessee then held the place until late in 1839, when he resigned. Van Buren offered it, though without much heartiness, to James Buchanan, who preferred, however, to retain his seat in the Senate; and Henry D. Gilpin, another Pennsylvanian, was appointed. Amos Kendall's enormous industry and singular equipment of doctrinaire convictions, narrow prejudices, executive ability, and practical political skill and craft, were lost to the administration through the failure of his health in the midst of the campaign of 1840. In an address to the public he gave a curious proof that for him work was more wearing in public than in private service. He stated that as he was poor he should resort to private employment suitable to his health; and that he proposed, therefore, during the canvass to write for the "Globe" in defense of the President, in whose integrity, principles, and firmness his confidence, he said, had increased. In 1838, when his health had threatened to be unequal to his work, Van Buren had offered him the mission to Spain, if it should become vacant. John M. Niles, formerly a Democratic senator from Connecticut, took Kendall's place in the post-office.
Van Buren welcomed Harrison to the White House, and before the inauguration entertained him there as a guest, with the easy and dignified courtesy so natural to him, and in marked contrast to the absence of social amenities on either side at the great change twelve years before. Under Van Buren indeed the executive mansion was administered with elevated grace. There was about it, while he was its master, the unostentatious elegance suited to the dwelling of the chief magistrate of the great republic. There were many flings at him for his great economy, and what was called his parsimony; but he was accused as well of undemocratic luxury. The talk seemed never to end over the gold spoons. The contradictory charges point out the truth. Van Buren was an eminently prudent man. He did not indulge in the careless and useless waste which impoverished Jefferson and Jackson. By sensible and honorable economy he is said to have saved one half of the salary of $25,000 a year then paid to the President.[17] Returning to private life, he was spared the humiliation of pecuniary trouble, which had distressed three at least of his predecessors. But with his exquisite sense of propriety, he had not failed to order the White House with fitting decorum and a modest state. His son Abraham Van Buren was his private secretary; and after the latter's marriage, in November, 1838, to Miss Singleton of South Carolina, a niece of Andrew Stevenson, and a relation of Mrs. Madison, he and his wife formed the presidential family. In 1841 they accompanied the ex-President to his retirement at Lindenwald.
Under Andrew Jackson the social air of the White House had suffered from his ill-health and the bitterness of his partisanship; and in this respect the change to his successor was most pleasing. Van Buren used an agreeable tact with even his strongest opponents; and about his levees and receptions there were a charm and a grace by no means usual in the dwellings of American public men. He had, we are told in the Recollections of Sargent, a political adversary of his, "the high art of blending dignity with ease and gravity." He introduced the custom of dining with the heads of departments and foreign ministers, although with that exception he observed the etiquette of never being the guest of others at Washington. Judge Story mentions the "splendid dinner" given by the President to the judges in January, 1839.
John Quincy Adams's diary bears unintended testimony to Van Buren's admirable personal bearing in office. From the time he reached Washington as secretary of state, he had treated Adams in his defeat with marked distinction and deference, which Adams, as he records, accepted in his own house, in the White House, and elsewhere. At a social party the President, he said, "was, as usual, courteous to all, and particularly to me." Van Buren had therefore every reason to suppose that there was between himself and Adams a not unfriendly personal esteem. But Adams, in his churlish, bitter temper, apparently found in these wise and generous civilities only evidence of a mean spirit. After one visit at the White House during the height of the crisis of 1837, he recorded that he found Van Buren looking, not wretched, as he had been told, but composed and tranquil. Returning home from this observation of the President's "calmness, his gentleness of manner, his easy and conciliatory temper," this often unmannerly pen described besides "his obsequiousness, his sycophancy, his profound dissimulation and duplicity, ... his fawning civility." In a passage which was remarkable in that time of political bitterness so largely personal, Clay said, in his parliamentary duel with Calhoun, after the latter rejoined the Democratic party, that he remembered Calhoun attributing to the President the qualities of "the most crafty, most skulking, and the meanest of the quadruped tribe." Saying that he had not shared Calhoun's opinion, he then added of Van Buren:—
"I have always found him in his manner and deportment, civil, courteous, and gentlemanly; and he dispenses in the noble mansion which he now occupies, one worthy the residence of the chief magistrate of a great people, a generous and liberal hospitality. An acquaintance with him of more than twenty years' duration has inspired me with a respect for the man, although I regret to be compelled to say, I detest the magistrate."