Martin Van Buren

by Edward Morse Shepard

The Federalists in 1807 generally joined the Lewisites, or "Quids." Governor Lewis, finding that the jealousy of the Livingston interests would defeat his renomination by the usual caucus of Republican members of the legislature, became the candidate of a public meeting at New York, and of a minority caucus, and asked help from the Federalists. Such an alliance always seemed monstrous only to the Republican faction that felt strong enough without it. The regular legislative caucus, controlled by the Clintonians, nominated Daniel D. Tompkins, then a judge of the Supreme Court, and for years after the Republican "war-horse." Van Buren adhered to the purer, older, and less patrician Democracy of the Clintonians. Tompkins was elected, with a Clintonian legislature; and the result secured Van Buren's first appointment to public office. A Clintonian council of appointment was chosen. The council, a complex monument of the distrust of executive power with which George III. had filled his revolted subjects, was composed of five members, being the governor and one member from each of the four senatorial districts, who were chosen by the Assembly from among the six senators of the district. The four senatorial members of the council were always, therefore, of the political faith of the Assembly, except in cases where all the senators from a district belonged to the minority party in the Assembly. To this council belonged nearly every appointment in the State, even of local officers. Prior to 1801 the governor appointed, with the advice and consent of the council. After the constitutional amendment of that year, either member of the council could nominate, the appointment being made by the majority. Van Buren became surrogate of Columbia county on February 20, 1808. There was no prescribed term of office, the commission really running until the opposition party secured the council of appointment. Van Buren held the office about five years and until his removal on March 19, 1813, when his adversaries had secured control of the council.

At this time the system of removing the lesser as well as the greater officers of government for political reasons was well established in New York. It is impossible to realize the nature of Van Buren's political education without understanding this old system of proscription, whose influence upon American public life has been so prodigious. The strife over the Federal Constitution had been fierce. Its friends, after their victory, sought, neither unjustly nor unnaturally, to punish Governor Clinton for his opposition. Although Washington wished to stand neutral between parties, he still believed it politically suicidal to appoint officers not in sympathy with his administration.[1] Hamilton undoubtedly determined the New York appointments when the new government was launched, and they were made from the political enemies of Governor Clinton,—a course provoking an animosity which not improbably appeared in the more numerous state appointments controlled by Clinton and the Republican council. After the excesses of the French Revolution the Republicans were denounced as Jacobins and radicals, dangerous in politics and corrupt in morals. The family feuds aided and exaggerated the divisions in this small community of freehold voters. Appointments were made in the federal and state services for political reasons and for family reasons, precisely as they had long been made in England. Especially along the rich river counties from New York to the upper Hudson were so distributed the lucrative offices, which were eagerly sought for their profit as well as for their honor.

The contests were at first for places naturally vacated by death or resignation; the idea of the property right of an incumbent actually in office lingered until after the last century was out. It is not clear when the first removals of subordinate officers took place for political reasons. Some were made by the Federalists during Governor Jay's administration; but the first extensive removals seem to have occurred after the elections of 1801. For this there were two immediate causes. In that year the exclusive nominating power of the governor was taken from him. Each of the other four members of the council of appointment could now nominate as well as confirm. Appointments and removals were made, therefore, from that year until the new Constitution of 1821, by one of the worst of appointing bodies, a commission of several men whose consultations were secret and whose responsibility was divided. Systematic abuse of the power of appointment became inevitable. There was, besides, a second reason in the anger against Federalists, which they had gone far to provoke, and against their long and by no means gentle domination. This anger induced the Republicans to seek out every method of punishment. But for this, the abuse might have been long deferred. Nor is it unlikely that the refusal of Jefferson, inaugurated in March of that year, to make a "clean sweep" of his enemies, turned the longing eyes of embittered Republicans in New York more eagerly to the fat state offices enjoyed by their insolent adversaries of the past twelve years.

The Clintons and Livingstons had led the Republicans to a victory at the state election in April, 1801. Later in that year George Clinton, now again governor, called together the new council with the nominating power vested in every one of its five members. This council acted under distinguished auspices, and it deserves to be long remembered. Governor Clinton presided, and his famous nephew, De Witt Clinton, was below him in the board. The latter represented the Clintonian Republicans.[2] Ambrose Spencer, a man of great parts and destined to a notable career, represented the Livingstons, of whom he was a family connection. Roseboom, the other Republican, was easily led by his two abler party associates. The fifth member did not count, for he was a Federalist. Two of the three really distinguished men of this council, De Witt Clinton and Ambrose Spencer, it is not unjust to say, first openly and responsibly established in New York the "spoils system" by removals, for political reasons, of officers not political. The term of office of the four senatorial members of this council had commenced while the illustrious Federalist John Jay was governor; but they rejected his nominations until he was tired of making them, and refused to call them together. When Clinton took the governor's seat, he promptly summoned the board, and in August, 1801, the work began. De Witt Clinton publicly formulated the doctrine, but it did not yet reach its extreme form. He said that the principal executive offices in the State ought to be filled by the friends of the administration, and the more unimportant offices ought to be proportionately distributed between the two parties. The council rapidly divided the chief appointments among the Clintons and Livingstons and their personal supporters. Officers were selected whom Jay had refused to appoint. Edward Livingston, the chancellor's brother, was given the mayoralty of New York, a very profitable as well as important station; Thomas Tillotson, a brother-in-law of Chancellor Livingston, was made secretary of state, in place of Daniel Hale, removed; John V. Henry, a distinguished Federalist lawyer, was removed from the comptrollership; the district attorney, the clerk and the recorder of New York were removed; William Coleman, the founder of the "Evening Post," and a strong adherent of Hamilton, was turned out of the clerkship of the Circuit Court. And so the work went on through minor offices. New commissions were required by the Constitution to be issued to the puisne judges of the county courts and to justices of the peace throughout the State once in three years. Instead of renewing the commissions and preserving continuity in the administration of justice, the council struck out the names of Federalists and inserted those of Republicans. The proceedings of this council of 1801 have profoundly affected the politics of New York to this day. Few political bodies in America have exercised as serious and lasting an influence upon the political habits of the nation. The tradition that Van Buren and the Albany Regency began political proscription is untrue. The system of removals was thus established several years before Van Buren held his first office. Its founders, De Witt Clinton and Ambrose Spencer, were long his political enemies. Governor Clinton, whose honorable record it was that during the eighteen years of his governorship he had never consented to a political removal, entered his protest—not a very hearty one, it is to be feared—in the journal of the council; but in vain. In the next year the two chief offenders were promoted,—De Witt Clinton to be United States senator in the place of General Armstrong, a brother-in-law of Chancellor Livingston, and Ambrose Spencer to be attorney-general; and two years later Spencer became a judge of the Supreme Court.

After the removals there began a disintegration of the party hitherto successfully led by Burr, the Clintons, and the Livingstons. Colonel Swartwout, Burr's friend, was called by De Witt Clinton a liar, scoundrel and villain; although, after receiving two bullets from Clinton's pistol in a duel, he was assured by the latter, with the courtesy of our grandfathers, that there was no personal animosity. Burr's friends had of course to be removed. But in 1805, after the Clintons and the Livingstons had united in the election of Lewis as governor over Burr, they too quarreled,—and naturally enough, for the offices would not go around. So, after the Clintonians on the meeting of the legislature early in 1806 had captured the council, they turned upon their recent allies. Maturin Livingston was removed from the New York recordership, and Tillotson from his place as secretary of state. The work was now done most thoroughly. Sheriffs, clerks, surrogates, county judges, justices of the peace, had to go. But at the corporation election in New York in the same year, the Livingstonians and Federalists, with a majority of the common council, in their fashion righted the wrong, and, with a vigor not excelled by their successors a half century later, removed at once all the subordinate municipal officers subject to their control who were Clintonians. In 1807 the Livingstonian Republicans, or, as they were now called from the governor, the Lewisites, with the Federalists and Burrites, secured control of the state council; and proceeded promptly to the work of removals, defending it as a legitimate return for the proscriptive course of their predecessors. In 1808 the Clintonians returned to the council, and, through its now familiar labors, to the offices from which the Lewisites were in their turn driven. In 1810 the Federalists controlled the Assembly which chose the council; and they enjoyed a "clean sweep" as keenly as had the contending Republican factions. But the election of this year, the political record tells us, taught a lesson which politicians have ever since refused to learn, perhaps because it has not always been taught. The removal of the Republicans from office "had the natural tendency to call out all their forces." The Clintonians in 1811, therefore, were enabled by the people to reverse the Federalist proscription of 1810. The Federalists, again in power in 1813, again followed the uniform usage then twelve years old. Political removals had become part of the unwritten law.

At this time Van Buren suffered the loss of his office as surrogate, but doubtless without any sense of private or public wrong. It was the customary fate of war. In 1812 he was nominated for state senator from the middle district, composed of Columbia, Dutchess, Orange, Ulster, Delaware, Chenango, Greene, and Sullivan counties, as the candidate of the Clintonian Republicans against Edward P. Livingston, the candidate of the Lewisites or Livingstonians and Burrites as well as the Federalists. Livingston was the sitting member, and a Republican of powerful family and political connections. Van Buren, not yet thirty, defeated him by a majority of less than two hundred out of twenty thousand votes. In November, 1812, he took his seat at Albany, and easily and within a few months reached a conspicuous and powerful place in state politics.

These details of the establishment of the "spoils system" in New York politics seem necessary to be told, that Van Buren's own participation in the wrong may be fairly judged. It is a common historical vice to judge the conduct of men of earlier times by standards which they did not know. Van Buren found thoroughly and universally established at Albany, when he entered its life, the rule that, upon a change in the executive, there should be a change in the offices, without reference to their political functions. He had in his own person experienced its operation both to his advantage and to his disadvantage. Federalists and Republicans were alike committed to the rule. The most distinguished and the most useful men in active public life, whatever their earlier opinion might have been, had acquiesced and joined in the practice. Nor was the practice changed or extended after Van Buren came into state politics. It continued as it had thus begun, until he became a national figure. Success in it required an ability and skill of which he was an easy master; nor does he seem to have shrunk from it. But he was neither more nor less reprehensible than the universal public sense about him. For it must be remembered that the "spoils system" was not then offensive to the more enlightened citizens of New York. The system was no excess of democracy or universal suffrage. It had arisen amidst a suffrage for governor and senators limited to those who held in freehold land worth at least £100, and for assemblymen limited to those who held in freehold land worth £20, or paid a yearly rent of forty shillings, and who were rated and actually paid taxes. It was practiced by men of aristocratic habits chosen by the well-to-do classes. It grew in the disputes of great family interests, and in the bitterness of popular elements met in a new country, still strange or even foreign to one another, and permitted by their release from the dangers of war and the fear of British oppression to indulge their mutual dislikes.

The frequent "rotation" in office which was soon to be pronounced a safeguard of republican institutions, and which Jackson in December, 1829, told Congress was a "leading principle in the Republicans' creed," was by no means an unnatural step towards an improvement of the civil service of the State. Reformers of our day lay great stress upon the fundamental rule of democratic government, that a public office is simply a trust for the people; and they justly find the chief argument against the abuses of patronage in the notorious use of office for the benefit of small portions of the people, to the detriment of the rest. In England, however, for centuries (and to some extent the idea survives there in our own time), there was in an office a quality of property having about it the same kind of sacred immunity which belongs to real or personal estate. There were reversions to offices after the deaths of their occupants, like vested remainders in lands. It was offensive to the ordinary sense of decency and justice that the right of a public officer to appropriate so much of the public revenue should be attacked. It did not offend the public conscience that great perquisites should belong to officers performing work of the most trifling value or none at all. The same practices and traditions, weakened by distance from England and by the simpler life and smaller wealth of the colonists, came to our forefathers. They existed when the democratic movement, stayed during the necessities of war and civil reconstruction, returned at the end of the last century and became all-powerful in 1801. To break this idea of property and right in office, to make it clear that every office was a mere means of service of the people at the wish of the people, there seemed, to very patriotic and generally very wise men, no simpler way than that the people by their elections should take away and distribute offices in utter disregard of the interests of those who held them. The odious result to which this afterwards led, of making offices the mere property of influential politicians, was but imperfectly foreseen. Nor did that result, inevitable as it was, follow for many years. There seems no reason to believe that the incessant and extensive changes in office which began in 1801, seriously lowered the standard of actual public service until years after Van Buren was a powerful and conspicuous politician. Political parties were pretty generally in the hands of honest men. The prostituted and venal disposition of "spoils," though a natural sequence, was to come long after. Rotation was practiced, or its fruits were accepted and enjoyed with satisfaction, by public men of the State who were really statesmen, who had high standards of public honor and duty, whose minds were directed towards great and exalted public ends. If it seemed right to De Witt Clinton, Edward Livingston, Robert R. Livingston, and Ambrose Spencer, surely lesser gods of our early political Olympus could not be expected to refuse its advantages or murmur at its hardships. Nor was the change distasteful to the people, if we may judge by their political behavior. No faction or party seems to have been punished by public sentiment for the practice except in conspicuous cases like those of De Witt Clinton and Van Buren, where sometimes blows aimed at single men roused popular and often an undeserved sympathy. The idea that a public officer should easily and naturally go from the ranks of the people without special equipment, and as easily return to those ranks, has been popularly agreeable wherever the story of Cincinnatus has been told. Early in this century the closeness of offices to ordinary life, and the absence of an organized bureaucracy controlling or patronizing the masses of men, seemed proper elements of the great democratic reform. There had not yet arisen the very modern and utilitarian and the vastly better conception of a service, the responsible directors of whose policy should be changed with popular sentiment, but whose subordinates should be treated by the public as any other employer would treat them, upon simple and unsentimental rules of business. Another practical consideration makes more intelligible the failure of our ancestors to perceive the dangers of the great change they permitted. Offices were not nearly as technical, their duties not nearly as uniform, as they have grown to be in the more complex procedures of our enormously richer and more populous time. Every officer did a multitude of things. Intelligent and active men in unofficial life shifted with amazing readiness and success from one calling to another. A general became a judge, or a judge became a general,—as, indeed, we have seen in later days. A merchant could learn to survey; a farmer could keep or could learn to keep fair records.

In the art of making of the lesser offices ammunition with which to fight great battles over great questions, Van Buren became a master. His imperturbable temper and patience, his keen reading of the motives and uses of men, gave him so firm a hold upon politicians that it has been common to forget the undoubted hold he long had upon the people. In April, 1816, he was reëlected senator for a second term of four years. His eight years of service in the senate expired in 1820.

In November, 1812, the first session of the new legislature was held to choose presidential electors. Not until sixteen years later were electors chosen directly by the people. Van Buren voted for the candidates favorable to De Witt Clinton for president as against Madison. In the successful struggle of the Clintonians for these electors, he is said in this, his first session, to have shown the address and activity which at once made him a Republican leader. For his vote against Madison Van Buren's friends afterwards made many apologies; his adversaries declared it unpardonable treachery to one of the revered Democratic fathers. But the young politician was not open to much condemnation. De Witt Clinton, though he had but just reached the beginning of middle life, was a very able and even an illustrious man. He had been unanimously nominated in an orderly way by a caucus of the Republican members of the legislature of 1811 and 1812 of which Van Buren was not a member. He had accepted the nomination and had declined to withdraw from it. There was a strong Republican opposition to the declaration of war at that time, because preparation for it had not been adequately made. Most of the Republican members of Congress from New York had voted against the declaration. The virtues and abilities of Madison were not those likely to make a successful war, as the event amply proved. There was natural and deserved discontent with the treatment by Jefferson's administration, in which Madison had charge of foreign relations, and by Madison's own administration, of the difficulties caused by the British Orders in Council, the Berlin and Milan decrees of Napoleon, and the unprincipled depredations of both the great belligerents. Van Buren is said by Butler, then an inmate of his family, to have been an open and decided advocate of the embargo, and of all the strong measures proposed against Great Britain and of the war itself. Nor was this very inconsistent with his vote for Clinton. He had a stronger sense of allegiance to his party in the State than to his party at Washington; and the Republican party of New York had regularly declared for Clinton. For once at least Van Buren found himself voting with the great body of the Federalists, men who had not, like John Quincy Adams, become reconciled to the strong and obvious, though sometimes ineffective, patriotism of Jefferson's and Madison's administrations. But whatever had been the motives which induced Van Buren to support Clinton, they soon ceased to operate. Within a few months after this the political relations between the two men were dissolved; and they were politically hostile, until Clinton's death fourteen years afterwards called from Van Buren a pathetic tribute.