The rise of the "spoils" system, and the late coming, but steadily increasing perception of its corruptions and dangers, have seriously and justly dimmed Van Buren's fame. But history should be not less indulgent to him than to other great Americans. The practical politics which he first knew had been saturated with the abuse. He did no more than adopt accustomed means of political warfare. Neither he nor other men of his time perceived the kind of evil which political proscription of men in unpolitical places must yield. They saw the undoubted rightfulness of shattering the ancient idea that in offices there was a property right. They saw but too clearly the apparent help which the powerful love of holding office brings to any political cause, and which has been used by every great minister of state the world over. Van Buren had, however, no love of patronage in itself. The use of a party as a mere agency to distribute offices would have seemed to him contemptible. In neither of the great executive places which he held, as governor, secretary of state, or president, did he put into an extreme practice the proscriptive rules which were far more rigorously adopted about him. To his personal temper not less than to his conceptions of public duty the inevitable meanness and wrong of the system were distasteful.
Chief among the elements of Van Buren's public character ought to be ranked his moral courage and the explicitness of his political utterances,—the two qualities which, curiously enough, were most angrily denied him by his enemies. His well-known Shocco Springs letter of 1832 on the tariff was indeed lacking in these qualities; but he was then not chiefly interested. There was only a secondary responsibility upon him. But it is not too much to say that no American in responsible and public station, since the days when Washington returned from his walk among the miserable huts at Valley Forge to write to the Continental Congress, or to face the petty imbecilities of the jealous colonists, has shown so complete a political courage as that with which Van Buren faced the crisis of 1837, or in which he wrote his famous Texas letter. Nor did any American, stirred with ambition, conscious of great powers, as was this captain of politicians, and bringing all his political fortunes, as he must do, to the risks of universal suffrage, ever meet living issues dangerously dividing men ready to vote for him if he would but remain quiet, with clearer or more decided answers than did Van Buren in his Sherrod Williams letter of 1836 and in most of his chief public utterances from that year until 1844. The courtesies of his manner, his failure in trenchant brevity, and even the almost complete absence of invective or extravagance from his papers or speeches, have obscured these capital virtues of his character. He saw too many dangers; and he sometimes made it too clear that he saw them. But upon legitimate issues he was among the least timid and the most explicit of great Americans. No president of ours has in office been more courageous or more direct.
It is perhaps an interesting, it is at least a harmless speculation, to look for Van Buren's place of honor in the varied succession of men who have reached the first office, though not always the first place, in American public life. Every student will be powerfully, even when unconsciously, influenced in this judgment by the measure of strength or beneficence he accords to different political tendencies. With this warning the present writer will, however, venture upon an opinion.
Van Buren very clearly does not belong among the mediocrities or accidents of the White House,—among Monroe, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, and Pierce, not to meddle with the years since the civil war whose party disputes are still part of contemporary politics. Van Buren reached the presidency by political abilities and public services of the first order, as the most distinguished active member of his party, and with a universal popular recognition for years before his promotion that he was among the three or four Americans from whom a president would be naturally chosen. Buchanan's experience in public life was perhaps as great as Van Buren's, and his political skill and distinction made his accession to the presidency by no means unworthy. But he never led, he never stood for a cause; he never led men; he was never chief in his party; and in his great office he sank with timidity before the slaveholding aggressors, as they strove with vengeance to suppress freedom in Kansas, and before the menaces and open plunderings of disunion. Van Buren showed no such timidity in a place of equal difficulty.
Jackson stands in a rank by himself. He had a stronger and more vivid personality than Van Buren. But useful as he was to the creation of a powerful sentiment for union and of a hostility to the schemes of a paternal government, it is clear that in those qualities of steady wisdom, foresight, patience, which of right belong to the chief magistracy of a republic, he was far inferior to his less picturesque and less forceful successor. The first Adams, a man of very superior parts, competent and singularly patriotic, was deep in too many personal collisions within and without his party, and his presidency incurred too complete and lasting, and it must be added, too just a popular condemnation, to permit it high rank, though very certainly he belonged among neither the mediocrities nor the accidents of the White House.
If to the highest rank of American presidents be assigned Washington, and if after him in it come Jefferson and perhaps Lincoln (though more than a quarter of a century must go to make the enduring measure of his fame), the second rank would seem to include Madison, the younger Adams, and Van Buren. Between the first and the last of these, the second of them, as has been said, saw much resemblance. But if Madison had a mellower mind, more obedient to the exigencies of the time and of a wider scholarship, Van Buren had a firmer and more direct courage, a steadier loyalty to his political creed, and far greater resolution and efficiency in the performance of executive duties. If one were to imitate Plutarch in behalf of John Quincy Adams and Van Buren, he would need largely to compare their rival political creeds. But leaving these, it will not be unjust to say that in virile and indomitable continuance of moral purpose after official power had let go its trammels, and when the harassments and feebleness of age were inexorable, and though the heavens were to fall, the younger Adams was the greater; that in executive success they were closely together in a high rank; but that in skill and power of political leadership, in breadth of political purpose, in freedom from political vagaries, in personal generosity and political loyalty, Van Buren was easily the greater man.
Van Buren did not have the massive and forcible eloquence of Webster, or the more captivating though fleeting speech of Clay, or the delightful warmth of the latter's leadership, or the strength and glory which their very persons and careers gave to American nationality. But in the persistent and fruitful adherence to a political creed fitted to the time and to the genius of the American people, in that noble art which gathers and binds to one another and to a creed the elements of a political party, the art which disciplines and guides the party, when formed, to clear and definite purposes, without wavering and without weakness or demagogy, Van Buren was a greater master than either of those men, in many things more interesting as they were. In this exalted art of the politician, this consummate art of the statesman, Van Buren was close to the greatest of American party leaders, close to Jefferson and to Hamilton.
In his very last years the stir and rumbling of war left Van Buren in quiet recollection and anxious loyalty at Lindenwald. As his growing illness now and then spared him moments of ease, his mind must sometimes have turned back to the steps of his career, senator of his State, senator of the United States, governor, first cabinet minister, foreign envoy, vice-president, and president. There must again have sounded in his ears the hardly remembered jargon of Lewisites and Burrites, Clintonians and Livingstonians, Republicans and Federalists, Bucktails and Jacksonians and National Republicans, Democrats and Whigs, Loco-focos and Conservatives, Barnburners and Hunkers. There must rapidly though dimly have shifted before him the long series of his struggles,—struggles over the second war with England, over internal improvements, the Bank, nullification, the divorce of bank and state, the resistance to slavery extension. Through them all there had run, and this at least his memory clearly recalled, the one strong faith of his politics and statesmanship. In all his labors of office, in all his multifarious strifes, he never faltered in upholding the Union. But not less firmly would this true disciple of Jefferson restrain the activities of the federal government. Whatever wisdom, whatever integrity of purpose might belong to ministers and legislators at Washington,—though the strength of the United States might be theirs, and though they were panoplied in the august prestige rightly ascribed by American patriotism to that sovereign title of our nation,—still Van Buren was resolute that they should not do for the people what the States or the people themselves could do as well. To his eyes there was clear and undimmed from the beginning to the close of his career, the idea of government as an instrument of useful public service, rather than an object of superstitious veneration, the idea but two years after his death clothed with memorable words by a master in brief speech, the democratic idea of a "government of the people, by the people, for the people."