Inquiry Into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States

by Martin Van Buren

The same message contained also the following suggestions:—

"From attempts to appropriate the national funds to objects which are confessedly of a local character, we cannot I trust have any thing further to apprehend. My views in regard to the expediency of making appropriations for works which are claimed to be of a national character, and prosecuted under State authority, assuming that Congress have the right to do so, were stated in my annual message to Congress in 1830, and also in that containing my objections to the Maysville Road Bill.

"So thoroughly convinced am I that no such appropriations ought to be made by Congress, until a suitable constitutional provision is made upon the subject, and so essential do I regard the point to the highest interests of our country, that I could not consider myself as discharging my duty to my constituents in giving the executive sanction to any bill containing such an appropriation. If the people of the United States desire that the public treasury shall be resorted to for the means to prosecute such works, they will concur in an amendment of the Constitution prescribing a rule by which the national character of the works is to be tested, and by which the greatest practicable equality of benefits may be secured to each member of the Confederacy. The effects of such a regulation would be most salutary in preventing unprofitable expenditures, in securing our legislation from the pernicious consequences of a scramble for the favors of Government, and in repressing the spirit of discontent which must inevitably arise from an unequal distribution of treasures which belong alike to all."

These declarations of President Jackson that he would approve no bill containing appropriations even for objects of a national character, until an amendment of the Constitution was adopted placing such expenditures upon an equal footing towards all the States, were reiterated in his Maysville veto. My election to the Presidency, and the knowledge that I cordially approved, and was determined to sustain, the ground taken in those two state papers upon the subject of internal improvements, with the large Democratic vote in Congress, always opposed upon principle to such grants, effectually closed the doors of the national treasury against them for seven years.

All similar applications, save for harbor and river appropriations, were thus driven, as was anticipated, to the State legislatures. The money expended for such improvements, when authorized by the States, were chargeable upon the treasuries of the States, to be collected by direct taxation. When made by incorporated companies under authority derived from the States they were at the expense of their stockholders. All must be sensible of the salutary check which these circumstances are calculated to exert by increasing the circumspection and prudence with which such expenses are incurred; and yet what immense amounts of money have been irrecoverably sunk upon such works, and what widespread embarrassments have they at times created in the financial affairs of the country, through the headlong enterprise and adventurous spirit of our people!

We have only to imagine a transfer of the seat of these operations to the halls of Congress to estimate the sums that would have been drawn out of the National Treasury and carried to the States to be, for the most part, expended upon local objects,—the scenes of log-rolling and intrigue to which such scrambles would have given rise, and the utter unscrupulousness of the applications that would thus have been produced. What millions upon millions of the public funds would have been worse than uselessly expended during the twenty-seven years that have elapsed since the Democratic party, through their venerable and fearless President, took the first effectual step to break up the practice! The one hundred millions for which bills had been reported, and the other hundred millions of applications pending before Congress when the Maysville veto was interposed, according to the President's message, furnish ample data upon which to found our calculations. No sum would seem to be too large at which to place the probable amount of our national debt if the plans of their political opponents had in this regard been crowned with complete success. In view of such an event who will be bold enough, with the subsequent experience of the country before him, to place even a conjectural estimate upon that amount or upon the extent to which valuable improvements, through individual enterprise or under State authority, would have been postponed or arrested forever by a further prosecution of the policy into which such persevering efforts were made to lead the Federal Government. For preservation from such prodigality and debt, and from the corruptions that would have followed in their train, we are plainly and undeniably indebted to the successful enforcement of the principles of the Democratic party.

[A space was here reserved in the original Manuscript for an intended notice of the advantages derived to the country from the establishment of the Independent Treasury; a measure proposed by Mr. Van Buren in the first year of his Presidency and in his first communication to Congress, and supported by the Democratic party.

In consequence, however, of the interruptions to which this work was subjected (and which are referred to in the Introduction), the contemplated addition to it was never supplied.—Editors.]

The measures of which I have spoken as the cherished policy of the old Federal party and its successors taken as a whole were justly described by Jefferson, in his much-abused letter to Mazzei, as "a contrivance invented for the purpose of corruption and for assimilating us in all respects to the rotten as well as the sound parts of the British Constitution." A persuasion of their practical usefulness in some respects entered more or less into the motives of the leaders on the occasions both of their creation and of their attempted resuscitation; but that they were by both regarded principally as elements of political strength, and adopted as means by which to build up and sustain an overshadowing money power in the country, through which the Democratic spirit of the people might be kept in check, is at least equally certain. Doubtless both of those political leaders honestly believed such a check to be necessary to the public good. With Hamilton this faith had from the beginning constituted an integral part of his political system. Clay had been, in his youth, too much a man of the people to avow such a belief, but that he became a convert to it in after-life I have no doubt. But the Democratic spirit of the country did not stand in need of any such restraint as that which they designed to place upon its course.

I have thus adverted to some of the advantages the country has derived from the action of the Democratic party, to which must be added the benefits conferred on the States by an extension of kindred principles to the administration of the local governments. If its opponents are asked for a statement of their contributions to the public welfare when in power and by their efforts to defeat the measures of the Democratic party, or to name a great measure of which they were the authors and which has stood the test of experience, or one in the establishment of which they have been prevented by factious or partisan opposition, but which would now be received with favor by the people, or a principle advocated by them for the administration of the Government, in which they have been defeated but which would now be so received, or an unsound one set up by their opponents which they have successfully resisted,—what must be the replies to questions so simple yet so comprehensive and important! Can it, on the other hand, be now denied that notwithstanding the conceded capacities of their leaders, and their possession of superior facilities for the acquisition and favorable exercise of political power, their time and their resources have been mainly employed in efforts to establish principles and build up systems which have been to all appearance irrevocably condemned by the people, and in unavailing efforts to defeat measures and principles which, after a full experience, have proved acceptable to them, and through the influence and operation of which the country has been gradually raised to great power and unexampled prosperity.

The course of events to which I have referred has had the effect of breaking up as a national organization the party so long opposed to the Democratic party, leaving the latter the only political association co-extensive in its power and influence with the Union,—and the sole survivor of all its national competitors. Of the eleven Presidents elected since its accession to power in the Federal Government, including the one in whose election it achieved its first national triumph, nine were avowed supporters of the cause it sustained, and eight its exclusive candidates. During the sixty years which will, at the end of the present Presidential term, have passed away since the occurrence of that great event, the chief magistracy of this country has been in the hands of professed supporters of its principles, with the exception only of four years and one month.