Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 / From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860

by James Gillespie Blaine

The prompt result of Mr. Calhoun's efforts was a treaty of annexation which had been discussed but not concluded under Mr. Upshur. It was communicated to the Senate by the President on the 12th of April, 1844. The effect which this treaty produced on the political fortunes of two leading statesmen, one in each party, was extraordinary. Prior to its negotiation, the Democrats throughout the Union were apparently well united in support of Mr. Van Buren as their Presidential candidate. Mr. Clay was universally accepted by the Whigs,—his nomination by a national convention being indeed but a matter of form. Relations of personal courtesy and confidence, if not of intimate friendship, had always subsisted between Mr. Clay and Mr. Van Buren during their prolonged public service. It was now believed that they had come to an understanding, through the negotiation of friends, to eliminate the Texas question from the campaign of 1844 by defeating the Tyler-Calhoun treaty, and agreeing to a general postponement of the subject, on the ground that immediate annexation would plunge the country into war. Very soon after the treaty was sent to the Senate by the President, Mr. Clay published in the "National Intelligencer" his famous Raleigh letter against annexation. The "Globe" of the same day contained a more guarded communication from Mr. Van Buren, practically taking the same ground. Considering the widely different characteristics of the two men, the letters were singularly alike in argument and inference. This fact, in connection with the identical time of publication, strengthened the suspicion, if not the conclusion, that there was a pre-arranged understanding between the eminent authors.

The letter of Mr. Van Buren was fatal to his prospects. He was caught in the toils prepared by Mr. Calhoun's diplomacy. His disastrous defeat four years before by General Harrison had not injured him within the lines of his own party, or shorn him of his prestige in the nation. He still retained the undiminished confidence of his old adherents in the North, and a large support from the Southern Democracy outside of the States in which Mr. Calhoun's influence was dominant. But the leading Democrats of the South, now inflamed with the fever of annexation, determined upon Van Buren's defeat as soon as his letter opposing the acquisition of Texas appeared. They went to work industriously and skillfully to compass that end. It was not a light task. The force of New York, as has been so frequently and so signally demonstrated, is difficult to overcome in a Democratic National Convention; and New York was not only unanimously, but enthusiastically, for Mr. Van Buren. Hitherto New York and the South had been in alliance, and their joint decrees were the rule of action inside the Democratic party. They were now separated and hostile, and the trial of strength that ensued was one of the most interesting political contests ever witnessed in the country. The Democratic masses had so long followed Southern lead that they were bewildered by this new and unexpected development. From the organization of the Federal Government to that hour, a period of fifty-six years, Mr. Van Buren was the only Northern man whom the Democracy had supported for the Presidency; and Mr. Van Buren had been forced upon the party by General Jackson. His title to his political estate, therefore, came from the South. It remained strong because his supporters believed that Jackson was still behind him. One word from the great chief at the Hermitage would have compelled Mr. Van Buren to retire from the field. But the name of Jackson was powerful with the Democratic masses. Against all the deep plots laid for Van Buren's overthrow, he was still able, when the national convention assembled at Baltimore in May, 1844, to count a majority of the delegates in favor of his nomination.

VAN BUREN AND THE TWO-THIRDS RULE.

The Texas treaty of annexation was still pending in the Senate with a decided majority committed against its confirmation, both upon public and partisan grounds. The Whig senators and the friends of Van Buren had coalesced for its defeat after their respective chiefs had pronounced against it. Mr. Crittenden of Kentucky and Colonel Benton were the leaders under whose joint efforts the work of Calhoun was to be set at naught. But, in fact, the work of Calhoun had already been effectually done and he could afford to disregard the fate of the treaty. He had consolidated the Democratic delegates from the slave-holding States against Mr. Van Buren, and the decree had gone forth for his political destruction. Mr. Van Buren, with the aid of the more populous North, had indeed secured a majority of the convention, but an instrumentality was at hand to overcome this apparent advantage. In the two preceding national conventions of the Democratic party, the rule requiring a two-thirds vote of all the delegates to make a nomination had been adopted at the instance of Mr. Van Buren's friends in order to insure his victory. It was now to be used for his defeat. Forseeing the result, the same zealous and devoted friends of Mr. Van Buren resisted its adoption. Romulus M. Sanders of North Carolina introduced the rule, and was sustained with great vigor by Robert J. Walker of Mississippi, and George W. Hopkins of Virginia. The leading opponents of the rule were Marcus Morton of Massachusetts, Nathan Clifford of Maine, and Daniel S. Dickinson of New York. The discussion was conducted by Southern men on one side and by Northern men on the other,—the first division of the kind in the Democratic party. Slavery was the ominous cause! The South triumphed and the rule was fastened upon the convention.

Immediately after this action Mr. Van Buren received a majority of the votes on the first ballot, and it was not unnaturally charged that many of those supporting him must have been insincere, inasmuch as they had the full right, until self-restrained by the two-thirds rule, to declare him the nominee. But this conclusion does not necessarily follow. Mr. Van Buren had been nominated in the National Democratic Conventions of 1835 and 1839 with the two-thirds rule in operation; and now to force his nomination for a third time by a mere slender majority was, in the judgment of wise and considerate party leaders among his own friends, a dangerous experiment. They instinctively feared to disregard a powerful and aggressive minority stubbornly demanding that Mr. Van Buren should be subjected to the same test which his friends had enforced in previous conventions. Their argument was not satisfactorily answered, the rule was adopted, and Mr. Van Buren's fate was sealed.

CALHOUN DEFEATS VAN BUREN.

The Southern men who insisted upon the rule had the courage to use it. They had absolute control of more than one-third of the convention; and, whatever might come, they were determined that Mr. Van Buren should not be nominated. As the most effective mode of assailing his strength, they supported a Northern candidate against him, and gave a large vote for General Cass. This wrought the intended result. It demoralized the friends of Mr. Van Buren and prepared the way for a final concentration upon Mr. Polk, which from the first had been the secret design of the Southern managers. It was skillfully done, and was the direct result of the Texas policy which Mr. Calhoun had forced the Democratic party to adopt. To Mr. Van Buren it was a great blow, and some of his friends were indisposed to submit to a result which they considered unfair. For the first time in history of any convention, of either party, a candidate supported by a majority of the delegates failed to be nominated. The two-thirds rule, as Colonel Benton declared, had been originally framed, "not to thwart a majority, but to strengthen it." But it was remorselessly used to defeat the majority by men who intended, not only to force a Southern policy on the government, but to intrust that policy to the hands of a Southern President. The support of Cass was not sincere, but it served for the moment to embarrass the friends of Van Buren, to make the triumph of what Benton called the Texas conspiracy more easy and more sure, and in the end to lay up wrath against the day of wrath for General Cass himself. Calhoun's triumph was complete. Politically he had gained a great victory for the South. Personally he had inflicted upon Mr. Van Buren a most humiliating defeat, literally destroying him as a factor in the Democratic party, of which he had so long and so successfully been the leader.

The details of Mr. Van Buren's defeat are presented because of its large influence on the subsequent development of anti-slavery strength in the North. He was sacrificed because he was opposed to the immediate annexation of Texas. Had he taken ground in favor of annexation, he would in all probability have been nominated with a fair prospect of election; though the general judgment at that time was that Mr. Clay would have defeated him. The overthrow of Mr. Van Buren was a crisis in the history of the Democratic party, and implanted dissensions which rapidly ripened into disaster. The one leading feature, the forerunner of important political changes, was the division of delegates on the geographical line of North and South. Though receiving a clear majority of the entire convention on the first ballot, Mr. Van Buren had but nine votes from the slave States; and these votes, singularly enough, came from the northern side of the line of the Missouri Compromise. This division in a Democratic National Convention was, in many of its relations and aspects, more significant than a similar division in the two Houses of Congress.

Though cruelly wronged by the convention, as many of his supporters thought, Mr. Van Buren did not himself show resentment, but effectively sustained his successful competitor. His confidential friend, Silas Wright, had refused to go on the ticket with Mr. Polk, and George M. Dallas was substituted by the quick and competent management of Mr. Robert J. Walker. The refusal of Mr. Wright led the Whigs to hope for distraction in the ranks of the New-York Democracy; but that delusion was soon dispelled by Wright's acceptance of the nomination for governor, and his entrance into the canvass with unusual energy and spirit. It was widely believed that Jackson's great influence with Van Buren was actively exerted in aid of Polk's election. It would have cruelly embittered the few remaining days of the venerable ex-president to witness Clay's triumph, and Van Buren owed so much to Jackson that he could not be indifferent to Polk's success without showing ingratitude to the great benefactor who had made him his successor in the Executive chair. Motives of this kind evidently influenced Mr. Van Buren; for his course in after years showed how keenly he felt his defeat, and how unreconciled he was to the men chiefly engaged in compassing it. The cooler temperament which he inherited from his Dutch ancestry enabled him to bide his time more patiently than men of Scotch-Irish blood, like Calhoun; but subsequent events plainly showed that he was capable of nursing his anger, and of inflicting a revenge as significant and as fatal as that of which he had been made the victim,—a revenge which would have been perfect in its gratification had it included Mr. Calhoun personally, as it did politically, with General Cass.

Mr. Clay's letter opposing the annexation of Texas, unlike the letter of Mr. Van Buren, brought its author strength and prestige in the section upon which he chiefly relied for support in the election. He was nominated with unbounded manifestations of enthusiasm at Baltimore, on the first of May, with no platform except a brief extract from one of his own letters embraced in a single resolution, and containing no reference whatever to the Texas question. His prospects were considered most brilliant, and his supporters throughout the Union were absolutely confident of his election. But the nomination of Mr. Polk, four weeks later, surprised and disquieted Mr. Clay. More quickly than his ardent and blinded advocates, he perceived the danger to himself which the candidacy of Mr. Polk inevitably involved; and he at once became restless and dissatisfied with the drift and tendency of the campaign. The convention which nominated Mr. Polk took bold ground for the immediate re-annexation of Texas and re-occupation of Oregon. This peculiar form of expression was used to indicate that Texas had already belonged to us under the Louisiana purchase, and that Oregon had been wholly ours prior to the treaty of joint occupancy with Great Britain. It further declared, that our title to the whole of Oregon, up to 54° 40´ north latitude, was "clear and indisputable"; thus carrying our claim to the borders of the Russian possessions, and utterly denying and defying the pretension of Great Britain to the ownership of any territory bordering on the Pacific.