In these years Van Buren was one of the chief men in American public life. He and his political associates had been profoundly affected by the Jeffersonian philosophy of government. They robustly held its tenets until the flame and vengeance of the slavery conflict drove them from political power. In our own day we have, in the able speeches with which Samuel J. Tilden fatigued respectful though often unsympathetic hearers at Democratic meetings, heard something of the same robust political philosophy, brought directly from intercourse with his famous neighbor and political master. Van Buren himself breathed it as the very atmosphere of American public life, during his early career which had just begun when Jefferson, his robes of office dropped and his faults of administration forgotten, seemed the serene, wise old man presiding over a land completely won to his ideals of democracy. Under this extraordinary influence and in this political light, there opened with the first years of the century the public life to be narrated in this volume.

CHAPTER II
EARLY YEARS.—PROFESSIONAL LIFE

At the close of the American Revolution, Abraham Van Buren was a farmer on the east bank of the Hudson River, New York. He was of Dutch descent, as was his wife, whose maiden name Hoes, corrupted from Goes, is said to have had distinction in Holland. But it would be mere fancy to find in the statesman particular traits brought from the dyked swamp lands whence some of his ancestors came. Those who farmed the rich fields of Columbia county were pretty thorough Americans; their characteristics were more immediately drawn from the soil they cultivated and from the necessary habits of their life than from the lands, Dutch or English, from which their forefathers had emigrated. Late in the eighteenth century they were no longer frontiersmen. For a century and more this eastern Hudson River country had been peacefully and prosperously cultivated. There was no lack of high spirit; but it was shown in lawsuits and political feuds rather than in skirmishes with red men. It was close to the old town of Albany with its official and not undignified life, and had comparatively easy access to New York by sloop or the post-road. It had been an early settlement of the colony. Within its borders were now the estates and mansions of large landed proprietors, who inherited or acquired from a more varied and affluent life some of the qualities, good and bad, of a country gentry. It was a region of easy, orderly comfort, sound and robust enough, but not sharing the straight and precise, though meddling, puritanical habits which a few miles away, over the high Berkshire hills, had come from the shores of New England.

The elder Van Buren was said by his son's enemies to have kept a tavern; and he probably did. Farming and tavern-keeping then were fairly interchangeable; and the gracious manner, the tact with men, which the younger Van Buren developed to a marked degree, it is easy to believe came rather from the social and varied life of an inn than from the harsher isolation of a farm. The statesman's boyish days were at any rate spent among poor neighbors. He was born at Kinderhook, an old village of New York, on the 5th of December, 1782. The usual years of schooling were probably passed in one of the dilapidated, weather-beaten schoolhouses from which has come so much of what is best in American life. He studied later in the Kinderhook Academy, one of the higher schools which in New York have done good work, though not equaling the like schools in Massachusetts. Here he learned a little Latin. But when at fourteen years of age he entered a law office, he had of course the chief discipline of book-learning still to acquire. In 1835 his campaign biographer rather rejoiced that he had so little systematic education, fearing that "from the eloquent pages of Livy, or the honeyed eulogiums of Virgil, or the servile adulation of Horace, he might have been inspired with an admiration for regal pomp and aristocratic dignity uncongenial to the native independence of his mind," and have imbibed a "contempt for plebeians and common people," unless, perhaps, the speeches of popular leaders in Livy "had kindled his instinctive love of justice and freedom," or the sarcastic vigor of Tacitus "had created in his bosom a fixed hatred of tyranny in every shape." At an early age, however, it is certain that Van Buren, like many other Americans of original force and with instinctive fondness for written pictures of human history and conduct, acquired an education which, though not that of a professional scholar, was entirely appropriate to the skillful man of affairs or the statesman to be set in conspicuous places. This work must have been largely done during the comparative leisure of his legal apprenticeship.

It was in 1796 that he entered the law office of Francis Sylvester at Kinderhook, where he remained until his twentieth year. He there read law. It is safe to say besides that he swept the office, lighted the fires in winter, and, like other law students in earlier and simpler days, had to do the work of an office janitor and errand boy, as well as to serve papers and copy the technical forms of the common law, and the tedious but often masterly pleadings of chancery. That his work as a student was done with great industry and thoroughness is demonstrated by the fact that at an early age he became a successful and skillful advocate in arguments addressed to courts as distinguished from juries, a division of professional work in which no skill and readiness will supply deficiencies in professional equipment. His early reputation for cleverness is illustrated by the story that when only a boy he successfully summed up a case before a jury against his preceptor Sylvester, being made by the justice to stand upon a bench because he was so small, with the exhortation, "There, Mat, beat your master."

In 1802 Van Buren entered the office of William P. Van Ness, in the city of New York, to complete his seventh and final year of legal study. Van Ness was himself from Columbia county and an eminent lawyer. He was afterwards appointed United States district judge by Madison; and was then an influential Republican and a close friend and defender of Aaron Burr, then the vice-president. The native powers and fascination of Burr were at their zenith, though his political character was blasted. Van Buren made his acquaintance, and was treated with the distinguished and flattering attention which the wisest of public men often show to young men of promise. Van Buren's enemies were absurdly fond of the fancy that in this slight intercourse he had acquired the skill and grace of his manner, and the easy principles and love of intrigue which they ascribe to him. Burr, for years after he was utterly disabled, inspired a childish terror in American politics. The mystery and dread about him were used by the opponents of Jackson because Burr had early pointed him out for the presidency, and by the opponents of Clay because in early life he had given Burr professional assistance. But upon Burr's candidacy for governor in 1804 Van Buren's freedom from his influence was clearly enough exhibited.

In 1803 Van Buren, being now of age and admitted as an attorney, returned to Kinderhook and there began the practice of his profession. The rank of counsellor-at-law was still distinct and superior to that of attorney. His half-brother on his mother's side, James J. Van Alen, at once admitted the young attorney to a law partnership. Van Alen was considerably older and had a practice already established. Van Buren's career as a lawyer was not a long one, but it was brilliant and highly successful. After his election to the United States Senate in 1821 his practice ceased to be very active. He left his profession with a fortune which secured him the ease in money matters so helpful and almost necessary to a man in public life. Merely professional reputations disappear with curious and rather saddening promptness and completeness. Of the practice and distinction reached by Van Buren before he withdrew from the bar, although they were unsurpassed in the State, no vestige and few traditions remain beyond technical synopses of his arguments in the instructive but hardly succulent pages of Johnson's, Wendell's, and Cowen's reports.

At an early day the legal profession reached in our country a consummate vigor. Far behind as Americans were in other learning and arts, they had, within a few years after they escaped colonial dependence, judges, advocates, and commentators of the first rank. Marshall, Kent, and Story were securely famous when hardly another American of their time not in public and political life was known. In the legal art Americans were even more accomplished than in its science; and Columbia county and the valley of the Hudson were fine fields for legal practice. Many animosities survived from revolutionary days. The landed families, long used to administer the affairs of others as well as their own, saw with jealousy and fear the rapid spread of democratic doctrines and of leveling and often insolent manners. Political feuds were rife, and frequently appeared in the professionally profitable collisions of neighbors with vagrant cows, or on watercourses insufficient for the needs of the up-stream and the down-stream proprietors. There were slander suits and libel suits, and suits for malicious prosecution. Into the most legitimate controversies over doubts about property there was driven the bitterness which turns a lawsuit from a process to ascertain a right into a weapon of revenge.