Martin Van Buren

by Edward Morse Shepard

In the engraved portrait of Van Buren in old age, prefixed to his "History of Parties," are plainly to be seen some of his traits,—the alert outlooking upon men, the bright, easy good-humor, the firm, self-reliant judgment. Inman's painting, now in the City Hall of New York,[20] gives the face in the prime of life,—the same shrewd, kindly expression, but more positively touched with that half cynical doubt of men which almost inevitably belongs to those in great places. The deep wrinkles of the old and retired ex-president were hardly yet incipient in the smooth, prosperous, almost complacent countenance of the governor. In the earlier picture the locks flared outwards from the face, as they did later; as yet, however, they were dark and a bit curling. His form was always slender and erect, but hardly reached the middle height, so that to his political enemies it was endless delight to call him "Little Van."

In the older picture one sees a scrupulous daintiness about the ruffled shirt and immaculate neckerchief; for Van Buren was fond of the elegance of life. The Whigs used to declare him an aristocrat, given to un-American, to positively British splendor. Very certainly he never affected contempt for the gracious and stately refinement suited to his long held place of public honor, that contempt which a silly underrating of American good sense has occasionally commended to our statesmen. At Lindenwald, among books and guests and rural cares, he led what in the best and truest sense was the life of a country gentleman, not set like an urban exotic among the farmers, but fond of his neighbors as they were fond of him, and unaffectedly sharing without loss of distinction or elegance their thrifty and homely cares. When he retired to this home he was able, without undignified or humiliating shifts, to live in ease and even affluence. For in 1841 his fortune of perhaps $200,000 was a generous one. His last days were not, like those of Jefferson and Monroe and Jackson, embittered by money anxieties, the penalty of the careless profusion the temptation to which, felt even by men wise in the affairs of others, is often greater than the certain danger and unwisdom of its indulgence. But no suggestion was breathed against his pecuniary integrity, public or private. Nor was there heard of him any story of wrong or oppression or ungenerous dealing.

Van Buren's extraordinary command of himself was apparent in his manners. They are finely described from intimate acquaintance by William Allen Butler, the son of Van Buren's long-time friend, in his charming and appreciative sketch printed just after Van Buren's death. They had, Mr. Butler said, a neatness and polish which served every turn of domestic, social, and public intercourse. "As you saw him once, you saw him always—always punctilious, always polite, always cheerful, always self-possessed. It seemed to anyone who studied this phase of his character as if, in some early moment of destiny, his whole nature had been bathed in a cool, clear, and unruffled depth, from which it drew this life-long serenity and self-control." An accomplished English traveler, "the author of 'Cyril Thornton,'" who saw him while secretary of state, and before he had been abroad, said that he had more of "the manner of the world" than any other of the distinguished men at Washington; that in conversation he was "full of anecdote and vivacity." Chevalier, one of our French critics, in his letters from America described him as setting up "for the American Talleyrand." John Quincy Adams, as has been said, sourly mistook all this, and even the especial courtesy Van Buren paid him after his political downfall, as mere proof of insincerity; and he more than once compared Van Buren to Aaron Burr, a comparison of which many Democrats were fond after 1848. In his better-natured moments, however, Adams saw in his adversary a resemblance to the conciliatory and philosophic Madison. For his "extreme caution in avoiding and averting personal collisions," he called him another Sosie of Molière's "Amphitryon," "ami de tout le monde."

Van Buren's skill in dealing with men was indeed extraordinary. It doubtless came from this temper of amity, and from an inborn genius for society; but it had been wonderfully sharpened in the unrivaled school of New York's early politics. When he was minister at London, he wrote that he was making it his business to be cordial with prominent men on both sides; a branch of duty, he said, in which he was not at home, because he had all his life been "wholly on one side." But he was jocosely unjust to himself. He was, for the politics of his day, abundantly fair to his adversaries. Sometimes indeed he saw too much of what might be said on the other side. Had he seen less, he would sometimes have been briefer, less indulgent in formal caution. Nor did he fail to avoid the unnecessary misery caused to many public men, the obstacles needlessly raised in their way, by personal disputes, or by letting into negotiations matters of controversy irrelevant to the thing to be done. Patience in listening, a steady and singularly acute observance of the real end he sought, and a quick, keen reading of men, saved him this wearing unhappiness so widespread in public life. Once he thus criticised his friend Cambreleng: "There is more in small matters than he is always aware of, although he is a really sensible and useful man." In this maxim of lesser things Van Buren was carefully practiced. During the Jackson-Adams campaign, the younger Hamilton was about sending to some important person an account of the general. Van Buren, knowing of this, wrote to Hamilton, and, after signing his letter, added: "P. S.—Does the old gentleman have prayers in his own house? If so, mention it modestly."

His self-command was not stilted or unduly precise or correct. He was very human. A candidate for governor of New York would to-day hardly write to another public man, however friendly to him, as Van Buren in August and September, 1828, wrote to Hamilton. "Bet on Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois," he said, "jointly if you can, or any two of them; don't forget to bet all you can." But this was the fashion of the day.[21] His life was entirely free from the charges of dissipation or of irregular habits, then so commonly, and often truly, made against great men. This very correctness was part of the offense he gave his rivals and their followers. It would hardly be accurate to describe him, even in younger years, as jovial with his friends; but he was perfectly companionable. Of a social and cheerful temper, he not only liked the decorous gaiety of receptions and public entertainment, but was delighted and delightful in closer and easier conversation and in the chat of familiar friends. His reminiscences of men are said to have been full of the charm which flows from a strong natural sense of humor, and a correct and vivid memory of human action and character.

There are many apocryphal stories of Van Buren's craft or cunning or selfishness in politics. It is a curious appreciation with which reputable historians have received such stories from irresponsible or anonymous sources; for they deserve as little credence as those told of Lincoln's frivolity or indecency. To them all may not only be pleaded the absence of any proof deserving respect, but they are refuted by positive proof, such as from earliest times has been deemed the best which private character can in its own behalf offer to history. In politics Van Buren enjoyed as much strong and constant friendship as he encountered strong and constant hatred. Nothing points more surely to the essential soundness of life and the generosity of a public man than the near and long-continued friendship of other able, upright, and honorably ambitious men. It was an extraordinary measure in which Van Buren enjoyed friendship of this quality. With all the light upon his character, Jackson was too shrewd to suffer long from imposition. His intimacy with Van Buren for twenty years and more was really affectionate; his admiration for the younger statesman was profound. The explanation is both unnecessary and unworthy, which ascribes to hatred of Clay all Jackson's ardor in the canvass of 1840 or his almost pathetic anxiety for Van Buren's nomination in 1844. Their peculiar and continuous association for six years at Washington had so powerfully established Van Buren in his love and respect, that neither distant separation nor disease nor the nearer intrigues and devices of rivals could abate them. Those who were especially known as Van Buren men, those who not only stood with him in the party but who went with him out of it, were men of great talents and of the highest character. Butler's career closely accompanied Van Buren's. Both were born at Kinderhook; they were together in Hudson, in Albany, in Washington; they were together as Bucktails, as Jacksonian Democrats, as Free-soil men; they were close to one another from Butler's boyhood until, more than a half-century later, they were parted by death. To this strong-headed and sound-hearted statesman, we are told by William Allen Butler, in a fine and wellnigh sufficient eulogy, that Van Buren was the object of an affection true and steadfast, faithful through good report and evil report, loyal to its own high sense of duty and affection, tender and generous. Benton, liberal and sane a slaveholder though he was, did not approve the Wilmot Proviso, or join the Free-soil revolt. But in retirement and old age, reviewing his "Thirty Years," during twenty of which he and Van Buren had, spite of many differences, remained on closely intimate terms, he showed a deep liking for the man. Silas Wright, Azariah C. Flagg, and John A. Dix, all strong and famous characters in the public life of New York, were among the others of those steadily faithful in loyal and unwavering regard for this political and personal chief. Nor were they deceived. Jackson and Butler, Wright and Flagg and Dix, sturdy, upright, skillful, experienced men of affairs, were not held in true and lifelong friendship and admiration by the insinuating manners, the clever management, the selfish and timid aims, which make the Machiavellian caricature of Van Buren so often drawn. No American in public life has shown firmer and longer devotion to his friends. His reputation for statesmanship must doubtless rest upon the indisputable facts of his career. But for his integrity of life, for his sincerity, for his fidelity to those obligations of political, party, and personal friendship, within which lies so much of the usefulness as well as of the singular charm of public life, his relations with these men make a proof not to be questioned, and surely not to be weakened by the malicious or anonymous stories of political warfare.

For the absurdly sinister touch which his political enemies gave to his character, it is difficult now to find any just reason. It may be that the cool and imperturbable appearance of good-nature, with which he received the savage and malevolent attacks so continually made upon him, to many seemed so impossible to be real as to be sheer hypocrisy;[22] and from the fancy of such hypocrisy it was easy for the imagination to infer all the arts and characteristics of deceit. Doubtless the caution of Van Buren's political papers irritated impatient and angry opponents. They found them full of elaborate and subtle reservations, as they fancied, against future political contingencies; a charge, it ought to be remembered, which is continually made against the ripest, bravest, and greatest character in English politics of to-day or of the century.[23] Van Buren's reasoning was perfectly clear, and his style highly finished. But he had not the sort of genius which in a few phrases states and lights up a political problem. The complexity of human affairs, the danger of short and sweeping assertions, pressed upon him as he wrote; and the amplitude of his arguments, sometimes tending to prolixity, seemed timid and lawyer-like to those who disliked his conclusions.

Van Buren was not, however, an unpopular man, except as toward the last his politics were unpopular as politics out of sympathy with those of either of the great parties, and except also at the South, where he was soon suspected and afterwards hated as an anti-slavery man. He was on the whole a strong candidate at the polls. In his own State and at the Northeast his strength with the people grew more and more until his defeat by the slaveholders in 1844. Perhaps the most striking proof of this strength was the canvass of 1848, when in New York he was able to take fully half of his party with him into irregular opposition, a feat with hardly a precedent in our political history. And there was complete reciprocity. Van Buren was profoundly democratic in his convictions. He thoroughly, honestly, and without demagogy believed in the common people and in their competence to deal wisely with political difficulties. Even when his faith was tried by what he deemed the mistakes of popular elections, he still trusted to what in a famous phrase of his he called "the sober second thought of the people."[24]

However widely the student of history may differ from the politics of Van Buren's associates, the politics of Benton, Wright, Butler, and Dix, and in a later rank of his New York disciples, of Samuel J. Tilden and Sanford E. Church, it is impossible not to see that their political purpose was at the least as long and steady as their friendship for Van Buren. Love for the Union, a belief in a simple, economical, and even unheroic government, a jealousy of taking money from the people, and a scrupulous restriction upon the use of public moneys for any but public purposes, a strict limitation of federal powers, a dislike of slavery and an opposition to its extension,—these made up one of the great and fruitful political creeds of America, a creed which had ardent and hopeful apostles a half century ago, and which, save in the articles which touched slavery and are now happily obsolete, will doubtless find apostles no less ardent and hopeful a half century hence. Each of its assertions has been found in other creeds; but the entire creed with all its articles made the peculiar and powerful faith only of the Van Buren men. As history gradually sets reputations aright, the leader of these men must justly wear the laurel of a statesman who, apart from his personal and party relations and ambitions, has stood clearly for a powerful and largely triumphant cause.

No vague, no thoughtless rush of popular sentiment touched or shook this faith of Van Buren. Had there been indeed a readier emphasis about him, a heartier and quicker sympathy with the temper of the day, he would perhaps have aroused a popular enthusiasm, he might perhaps have been the hero which in fact he never was. But his intellectual perceptions did not permit the subtle self-deceit, the enthusiastic surrender to current sentiment, to which the striking figures that delight the masses of men are so apt to yield. Van Buren was steadfast from the beginning to the end, save when the war threats of slavery alarmed his old age and the sober second thought of a really patient and resolute people seemed a long time coming. Two years before his death Jefferson wrote to Van Buren an elaborate sketch of his relations with Hamilton and of our first party division. Two years before his own death Van Buren was finishing a history of the same political division written upon the theory and in the tone running through Jefferson's writings. It was composed by Van Buren in the very same temper in which he had respectfully read the weighty epistle from the great apostle of Democracy. Between the ending life at Monticello and that at Lindenwald, the political faith of the older man had been steadily followed by the younger.