Martin Van Buren Part 1

Martin Van Buren.

by Edward M. Shepard.

CHAPTER I

AMERICAN POLITICS WHEN VAN BUREN'S CAREER BEGAN.--JEFFERSON'S INFLUENCE

It sometimes happened during the anxious years when the terrors of civil war, though still smouldering, were nearly aflame, that on Wall Street or Na.s.sau Street, busy men of New York saw Martin Van Buren and his son walking arm in arm. "Prince John," tall, striking in appearance, his hair divided at the middle in a fashion then novel for Americans, was in the prime of life, resolute and aggressive in bearing. His father was a white-haired, bright-eyed old man, erect but short in figure, of precise though easy and kindly politeness, and with a touch of deference in his manner. His presence did not peremptorily command the attention of strangers; but to those who looked attentively there was plain distinction in the refined and venerable face. Pa.s.sers-by might well turn back to see more of the two men thus affectionately and picturesquely together. For they were famous characters,--the one in the newer, the other in the older politics of America. John Van Buren, fresh from his Free Soil battle and the tussles of the Hards and Softs, was striving, as a Democrat, to serve the cause of the Union, though conscious that he rested under the suspicion of the party to whose service, its divisions in New York now seemingly ended, he had reluctantly returned. But he still faced the slave power with an independence only partially abated before the exigencies of party loyalty. The ex-President, definitely withdrawn from the same Free Soil battle, a struggle into which he had entered when the years were already heavy upon him, had survived to be once more a worthy in the Democratic party, again to receive its formal veneration, but never again its old affection. In their timid manoeuvres with slavery it was perhaps with the least possible awkwardness that the northern Democrats sought to treat him as a great Democratic leader; but they did not let it be forgotten that the leader was forever retired from leadership. While the younger man was in the thick of political encounters which the party carried on in blind futility, the older man was hardly more than an historical personage. He was no longer, his friends strove to think, the schismatic candidate of 1848, but rather the ally and friend of Jackson, or, better still and further away, the disciple of Jefferson.

For, more than any other American, Martin Van Buren had succeeded to the preaching of Jefferson's political doctrines, and to his political power as well, that curious and potent mingling of philosophy, statesmanship, and electioneering. The Whigs' distrust towards Van Buren was still bitter; the hot anger of his own party over the blow he had dealt in 1848 was still far from subsided; the grat.i.tude of most Free Soil men had completely disappeared with his apparent acquiescence in the politics of Pierce and Buchanan. Save in a narrow circle of anti-slavery Democrats, Van Buren, in these last days of his, was judged at best with coldness, and most commonly with dislike or even contempt.

Not much of any other temper has yet gone into political history; its writers have frequently been content to accept the harshness of partisan opinion, or even the scurrility and mendacity visited upon him during his many political campaigns, and to ignore the positive records of his career and public service. The present writer confesses to have begun this Life, not indeed sharing any of the hatred or contempt so commonly felt towards Van Buren, but still given to many serious depreciations of him, which a better examination has shown to have had their ultimate source in the mere dislike of personal or political enemies,--a dislike to whose expression, often powerful and vivid, many writers have extended a welcome seriously inconsistent with the fairness of history.

When Abraham Lincoln was chosen president in 1860, this predecessor of his by a quarter century was a true historical figure. The bright, genial old man connected, visibly and really, those stirring and dangerous modern days with the first political struggles under the American Const.i.tution, struggles then long pa.s.sed into the quiet of history, to leave him almost their only living reminiscence. Martin Van Buren was a man fully grown and already a politician when in 1801 the triumph of Thomas Jefferson completed the political foundation of the United States. Its profound inspiration still remained with him on this eve of Lincoln's election. Under its influence his political career had begun and had ended.

At Jefferson's election the aspiration and fervor which attended the first, the new-born sense of American national life, had largely worn away. The ideal visions of human liberty had long before grown dim during seven years of revolutionary war, with its practical hardships, its vicissitudes of meanness and glory, and during the four years of languor and political incompetence which followed. In the agitation for better union, political theories filled the minds of our forefathers.

Lessons were learned from the Achaean League, as well as from the Swiss Confederation, the German Empire, and the British Const.i.tution. Both history and speculation, however, were firmly subordinated to an extraordinary common sense, in part flowing from, as it was most finely exhibited in, the luminous and powerful, if unexalted, genius of Franklin. From the open beginning of const.i.tution-making at Annapolis in 1786 until the inauguration of John Adams, the American people, under the masterful governing of Washington, were concerned with the framework upon which the fabric of their political life was to be wrought. The framework was doubtless in itself of a vast and enduring importance. If the consolidating and aristocratic schemes of Hamilton had not met defeat in the federal convention, or if the separatist jealousies of Patrick Henry and George Clinton had not met defeat in Virginia and New York after the work of the convention was done, there would to-day be a different American people. Nor would our history be the amazing story of the hundred years past. But upon the governmental framework thus set up could be woven political fabrics widely and essentially different in their material, their use, and their enduring virtue. For quite apart from the framework of government were the temper and traditions of popular politics out of which comes, and must always come, the essential and dominant nature of public inst.i.tutions. In this creative and deeper work Jefferson was engaged during his struggle for political power after returning from France in 1789, during his presidential career from 1801 to 1809, and during the more extraordinary, and in American history the unparalleled, supremacy of his political genius after he had left office. In the circ.u.mstances of our colonial life, in our race extractions, in our race fusion upon the Atlantic seaboard, and in the moral effect of forcible and embittered separation from the parent country, arose indeed, to go no further back, the political instincts of American men. It is, however, fatal to adequate conception of our political development to ignore the enormous formative influence which the twenty years of Jefferson's rule had upon American political character. But so partial and sometimes so partisan have been the historians of our early national politics in their treatment of that great man, that a just appreciation of the political atmosphere in which Van Buren began his career is exceedingly difficult.

There was an American government, an American nation, when Washington gladly escaped to Mt. Vernon from the bitterly factional quarrels of the politicians at Philadelphia. The government was well ordered; the nation was respectable and dignified. But most of the people were either still colonial and provincial, or were rushing, in turbulence and bad temper, to crude speculations and theories. Twenty-five years later, Jefferson had become the political idol of the American people, a people completely and forever saturated with democratic aspirations, democratic ideals, what John Marshall called "political metaphysics," a people with strong and lasting characteristics, no longer either colonial or provincial, but profoundly national. The skill, the industry, the arts of the politician, had been used by a man gifted with the genius and not free from the faults of a philosopher, to plant in American usages, prejudices, and traditions,--in the very fibre of American political life, a cardinal and fruitful idea. The work was done for all time. For Americans, government was thenceforth to be a mere instrument. No longer a symbol, or an ornament or crown of national life, however n.o.ble and august, it was a simple means to a plain end; to be always, and if need be rudely, tested and measured by its practical working, by its service to popular rights and needs. In those earlier days, too, there had been "cla.s.ses and ma.s.ses," the former of whom held public service and public policy as matters of dignity and order and high a.s.sertion of national right and power, requiring in their ministers peculiar and esoteric light, and an equipment of which common men ought not to judge, because they could not judge aright. Afterward, in Monroe's era of good feeling, the personal rivalries of presidential candidates were in bad temper enough; but Americans were at last all democrats. Whether for better or worse, the nation had ceased to be either British or colonial, or provincial, in its character. In the delightful Rip Van Winkle of a later Jefferson, during the twenty years' sleep, the old Dutch house has gone, the peasant's dress, the quaint inn with its village tapster, all the old scene of loyal provincial life. Rip returns to a noisy, boastful, self-a.s.sertive town full of American "push" and "drive," and profane disregard of superiors and everything ancient. It was hardly a less change which spread through the United States in the twenty years of Jefferson's unrivaled and fruitful leadership. Superst.i.tious regard for the "well-born," for inst.i.tutions of government as images of veneration apart from their immediate and practical use; the faith in government as essentially a financial establishment which ought to be on peculiarly friendly relations with banks and bankers; the treatment and consideration of our democratic organization as an experiment to be administered with deprecatory deference to European opinion; the idea that upon the great, simple elements of political belief and practice, the ma.s.s of men could not judge as wisely and safely as the opulent, the cultivated, the educated; the idea that it was a capital feature of political art to thwart the rashness and incompetence of the lower people,--all these theories and traditions, which had firmly held most of the disciplined thought of Europe and America, and to which the lurid horrors of the French Revolution had brought apparent consecration,--all these had now gone; all had been fatally wounded, or were sullenly and apologetically cherished in the aging bitterness of the Federalists.

There was an American people with as distinct, as powerful, as characteristic a polity as belonged to the British islanders. In 1776 a youthful genius had seized upon a colonial revolt against taxation as the occasion to make solemn declaration of a seeming abstraction about human rights. He had submitted, however, to subordinate his theory during the organization of national defense and the strengthening of the framework of government. Nor did he shine in either of those works.

But with the nation established, with a union secured so that its people could safely attend to the simpler elements of human rights, Jefferson and his disciples were able to lead Americans to the temper, the aspirations, and the very prejudices of essential democracy. The Declaration of Independence, the ten amendments to the Const.i.tution theoretically formulating the rights of men or of the States, sank deep into the sources of American political life. So completely indeed was the work done, that in 1820 there was but one political party in America; all were Jeffersonian Republicans; and when the Republican party was broken up in 1824, the only dispute was whether Adams or Jackson or Crawford or Clay or Calhoun best represented the political beliefs now almost universal. It seemed to Americans as if they had never known any other beliefs, as if these doctrines of their democracy were truisms to which the rest of the world was marvelously blind.

Nothing in American public life has, in prolonged anger and even savage desperation, equaled the attacks upon Jefferson during the steady growth of his stupendous influence. The hatred of him personally, and the belief in the wickedness of his private and public life, survive in our time. Nine tenths of the Americans who then read books sincerely thought him an enemy of mankind and of all that was sacred. Nine tenths of the authors of American books on history or politics have to this day written under the influence which ninety years ago controlled their predecessors. And for this there is no little reason. As the American people grew conscious of their own peculiar and intensely active political force, there came to them a period of national and popular life in which much was unlovely, much was crude, much was disagreeably vulgar. Books upon America written by foreign travelers, from the days of Jefferson down to our civil war, superficial and offensive as they often were, told a great deal of truth. We do not now need to wince at criticisms upon a rawness, an insolent condescension towards the political ignorance of foreigners and the unhappy subjects of kings, a harshness in the a.s.sertion of the equality of Caucasian men, and a restless, boastful manner. The criticisms were in great measure just.

But the critics were stupid and blind not to see the vast and vital work and change going on before their eyes, to chiefly regard the trifling and incidental things which disgusted them. Their eyes were open to all our faults of taste and manner, but closed to the self-dependent and self-a.s.sertive energy the disorder of whose exhibition would surely pa.s.s away. In every democratic experiment, in every experiment of popular or national freedom, there is almost inevitable a vulgarizing of public manners, a lack of dignity in details, which disturbs men who find restful delight in orderly and decorous public life; and their disgust is too often directed against beneficent political changes or reforms.

If one were to judge the political temper of the American people from many of our own writers, and still more if he were to judge it from the observations even of intelligent and friendly foreigners prior to 1861, he would believe that temper to be sordid, mean, noisy, boastful, and even cruel. But from the war of 1812 with England to the election of Buchanan in 1856, the American people had been doing a profound, organic, democratic work. Meantime many had seen no more than the unsightly, the mean and trivial, the malodorous details, which were mere incidents and blemishes of hidden and dynamic operations. Unimaginative minds usually fail to see the greater and deeper movements of politics as well as those of science. In the public virtues then maturing there lay the ability long and strenuously to conduct an enterprise the greatest which modern times have known, and an extraordinary popular capacity for restraint and discipline. In those virtues was sleeping a tremendously national spirit which, with cost and sacrifice not to be measured by the vast figures of the statistician, on one side sought independence, and on the other saved the Union,--an exalted love of men and truth and liberty, which, after all the enervations of pecuniary prosperity, endured with patience hardships and losses, and the less heroic but often more dangerous distresses of taxation,--at the North a magnanimity in victory unequaled in the traditions of men, and at the South a composure and dignity and absence of either bitterness or meanness which brought out of defeat far larger treasures than could have come with victory. But these were not effects without a cause. In them all was only the fruit, the normal fruit, of the political habits, ideals, traditions, whose early and unattractive disorders had chagrined many of the best of Americans, and had seemed so natural to foreigners who feared or distrusted a democracy. There had been forming, during forty or fifty years of a certain raw unloveliness, the peculiar and powerful self-reliance of a people whose political independence meant far more than a mere separate government.

In these years Van Buren was one of the chief men in American public life. He and his political a.s.sociates 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 d.y.k.ed 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 sh.o.r.es 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 pa.s.sed 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 Ma.s.sachusetts. 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 a.s.sistance. 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 unsurpa.s.sed 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.

Van Buren's political opinions were strong and clear from the beginning of his law practice; but he was in a professional minority among the rich Federalists of the county. The adverse discipline was invaluable.

Through zeal and skill and large industry, he soon led the Republicans as their ablest lawyer, and the lawyers of Columbia county were famous.

William W. Van Ness, afterwards a judge of the supreme court of the State, Grosvenor, Elisha Williams, and Jacob R. Van Rensselaer were active at the bar. Williams, although his very name is nowadays hardly known, we cannot doubt from the universal testimony of contemporaries, had extraordinary forensic talents. He was a Federalist; and the most decisive proof of Van Buren's rapid professional growth was his promotion to be Williams's chief compet.i.tor and adversary. Van Buren's extraordinary application and intellectual clearness soon established him as the better and the more successful lawyer, though not the more powerful advocate. Williams at last said to his rival, "I get all the verdicts, and you get all the judgments." A famous pupil of Van Buren both in law and in politics, Benjamin F. Butler, afterwards attorney-general in his cabinet, finely contrasted them from his own recollection of their conflicts when he was a law student. "Never," he said, "were two men more dissimilar. Both were eloquent; but the eloquence of Williams was declamatory and exciting, that of Van Buren insinuating and delightful. Williams had the livelier imagination, Van Buren the sounder judgment. The former presented the strong points of his case in bolder relief, invested them in a more brilliant coloring, indulged a more unlicensed and magnificent invective, and gave more life and variety to his arguments by his peculiar wit and inimitable humor.

But Van Buren was his superior in a.n.a.lyzing, arranging, and combining the insulated materials, in comparing and weighing testimony, in unraveling the web of intricate affairs, in eviscerating truth from the ma.s.s of diversified and conflicting evidence, in softening the heart and moulding it to his purpose, and in working into the judgments of his hearers the conclusions of his own perspicuous and persuasive reasonings." Most of this is applicable to Van Buren's career on the wider field of politics; and much here said of his early adversary on the tobacco-stained floors of country court-houses might have been as truly said of a later adversary of his, the splendid leader who, rather than Harrison, ought to have been victor over Van Buren in 1840, and over whom Van Buren rather than Polk ought to have been victor in 1844.

In a few years Van Buren outgrew the professional limitations of Kinderhook. In February, 1807, he had been admitted as a counsellor of the supreme court; and this promotion he most happily celebrated by marrying Hannah Hoes, a young lady of his own age, and also of Dutch descent, a kinswoman of his mother, and with whom he had been intimate from his childhood. In 1808, the council of appointment becoming Republican, he was made surrogate of Columbia county, succeeding his partner and half-brother Van Alen, a Federalist in politics, who was, however, returned to the place in 1815, when the Federalists regained the council. The office was a respectable one, concerned with the probate of wills, and the ordering of estates of deceased persons.

Within a year after this appointment, Van Buren removed to the new and bustling little city of Hudson, directly on the river banks. Here he practiced law with rapidly increasing success for seven years. His pecuniary thrift now enabled him to purchase what was called "a very extensive and well-selected library." With this advantage he applied himself to "a systematic and extended course of reading," which left him a well, even an amply, educated man. His severity in study did not, however, exclude him from the social pleasures of which he was fond, and for which he was perfectly fitted. He learned men quite as fast as he learned books. A country surrogate, though then enjoying fees, since commuted to a salary, had only a meagre compensation. But the duties of Van Buren's office did not interfere with his activity in the private practice of the law. On the contrary, the office enabled him to make acquaintances, a process which, even without advent.i.tious aid, he always found easy and delightful.

In 1813, having been elected a member of the Senate of the State, he became as such a member of the court for the correction of errors. This was the court of last resort, composed, until 1847, of the chancellor, the judges of the supreme court, the lieutenant-governor, and the thirty-two senators. The latter, though often laymen, were members of the court, partly through a curious imitation of the theoretical function of the British House of Lords, and partly under the idea, even now feebly surviving in some States, that some besides lawyers ought to sit upon the bench in law courts to contribute the common sense which it was fancied might be absent from their more learned a.s.sociates. It was not found unsuitable for members of this, the highest court, to be active legal pract.i.tioners. While Van Buren held his place as a member he was, in February, 1815, made attorney-general, succeeding Abraham Van Vechten, one of the famous lawyers of the State. Van Buren was then but thirty-two years old, and the professional eminence accorded to the station was greater than now. Among near predecessors in it had been Aaron Burr, Ambrose Spencer and Thomas Addis Emmett; among his near successors were Thomas J. Oakley, Samuel A. Talcott, Greene C. Bronson and Samuel Beardsley,--all names of the first distinction in the professional life of New York. The office was of course political, as it has always been, both in the United States and the mother country. But Van Buren's appointment, if it were made because he was an active and influential Republican in politics, would still not have been made unless his professional reputation had been high. The salary was $5.50 a day, with some costs,--not an unsuitable salary in days when the chancellor was paid but $3000 a year. He held the office until July, 1819, when, upon the capture of the council of appointment by a coalition of Clintonian Republicans and Federalists, he was removed to give place to Oakley, the Federalist leader in the State a.s.sembly.

In 1816 Van Buren, now rapidly reaching professional eminence, removed to Albany, the capital of New York. Though then a petty city of mean buildings and about 10,000 inhabitants, it had a far larger relative importance in the professional and social life of the State than has the later city of ten times the population, with its costly and enormous state-house, its beautiful public buildings, and its steep and numerous streets of fine residences. In 1820 he purposed removing to New York; but, for some reason altering his plans, continued to reside at Albany until appointed secretary of state in 1829. His professional career was there crowned with most important and lucrative work. Soon after moving to Albany, he took into partnership Butler, just admitted to the bar.

Between the two men there were close and life-long relations. The younger of them, also a son of Columbia county, reached great professional distinction, became a politician of the highest type, and remained steadfast in his attachment to Van Buren's political fortunes, and to the robust and distinctly marked political doctrines and practices of the Albany Regency.

The law reports give ill.u.s.trations of Van Buren's precision, his clear and forcible common-sense, and his apt.i.tude for that learning of the law in which the great counsel of the time excelled. In 1813, soon after his service began as state senator, he delivered an opinion in a case of "escape;" and in very courteous words exhibited a bit of his dislike for Kent, then chief justice of the supreme court, whose judgment he helped to reverse, as well as his antipathy to imprisonment for debt, which he afterwards helped to abolish. It was a petty suit against the sureties upon the bond given by a debtor. Under a relaxation of the imprisonment for debt recently permitted, the debtor was, on giving the bond, released from jail, but upon the condition that he should keep within the "jail liberties," which in the country counties was a prescribed area around the jail. His bond was to be forfeit if he pa.s.sed the "liberties." While the debtor was driving a cow to or from pasture, the latter contemptuously deviated "four, six, or ten feet" from the liberties. The driver, yielding to inevitable bucolic impulse and forgetting his bond, leaped over the imaginary line to bring back the cow. He was without the liberties but a moment, and afterwards duly kept within them. But the creditor was watchful, and for the technical "escape" sued the sureties. Although the debtor was within the limits when suit was brought, the lower court refused to pardon the debtor's technical and unintentional fault. At common law the creditor was ent.i.tled to satisfaction of the debtor's body; and the milder statute establishing jail liberties was, the court said, to be strictly construed against the debtor; it was not enough that the creditor had the debtor's body when he called for it. The supreme court, headed by Kent, affirmed this curiously harsh decision. In the court of errors, Van Buren joined Chancellor Lansing in reversing the rule upon an elaborate review of the law, which to this day is important authority, and which could not have been more carefully done had something greater seemed at stake than a bovine vagary and a few dollars. The young lawyer, wearing for a time the judicial robes, now sat in a review, by no means unpleasant, of the utterances of magistrates before whom he had until then stood in considerable awe; and seized the opportunity, doubtless with a keen perception of the drift of popular sentiment on matters of personal liberty, to enlarge the mild policy of the later law. When it was urged that, if the law were not technically administered, imprisoned debtors would of a Sunday wander beyond the "limits," securely able to return before Monday, when the creditor could sue,--Van Buren, with a contemptuous fling at the supreme court, confessed in Johnsonian sentences his lenient temper towards these "stolen pleasures,"--his willingness that debtors should s.n.a.t.c.h the "few moments of liberty which, although soured by constant perturbation and alarm, are, notwithstanding, deemed fit subjects for judicial animadversion." His rhetoric was rather agreeably florid when he declared the law establishing "jail liberties" to be a concession for humane purposes made by the inflexible spirit which authorized imprisonment for debt. He strongly intimated his sympathy to be with "the exertions of men of intelligence, reflection, and philanthropy to mitigate its rigor; of men who viewed it as a practice fundamentally wrong, a practice which forces their fellow-creatures from society, from their friends, and their agonized families into the dreary walls of a prison; which compels them to leave all those fascinating endearments to become an inmate with vermin;" and all this, not for crime or frauds, "but for the misfortune of being poor, of being unable to satisfy the all-digesting stomach of some ravenous creditor." The practice was one "confounding virtue and vice, and destroying the distinction between guilt and innocence which should unceasingly be cherished in every well-regulated government." Democrats rejoiced over this pa.s.sage when Van Buren was a candidate for the presidency. Richard M. Johnson, then his a.s.sociate upon the Democratic ticket, had successfully led an agitation for the abolition of such imprisonment upon judgments rendered in the federal courts.

Van Buren's professional life terminated with his election as governor in 1828. In 1830, while secretary of state at Washington, he is said to have appeared before the federal supreme court in the great litigation between Astor and the Sailors' Snug Harbor, in which he had been counsel below; but no record is preserved of his argument there. His last well-known argument was before the court of errors at Albany in Varick v. Jackson, a branch of the famous Medcef Eden litigation. This long and highly technical battle was lighted up by the fame and compet.i.tions of the counsel. It arose upon the question whether a will of Eden which gave a landed estate to his son Joseph, but if Joseph died without children, then to his surviving brother, Medcef Eden the younger, created for Joseph the old lawyers' delight of an "estate tail." If it were an "estate tail," then the law of 1782, which, in the general tendency of American legislation after the Revolution, was directed against the entailing of property, would have made the first brother, Joseph, the absolute owner, and have defeated the later claim of Medcef.

Joseph had failed while in possession of the property. His creditors, accepting the opinion of Alexander Hamilton, then the head of the bar, insisted that he had been the absolute owner, that the provision for his brother Medcef's accession to the property was nugatory as an attempt to entail the estate; and upon this view the creditors sold the lands, which by the rapid growth of the city soon became of large value.

Hamilton's opinion for years daunted the younger Medcef and his children from a.s.serting the right which it was morally plain his father had intended for him. Aaron Burr, not less Hamilton's rival at the bar than in the politics of New York, gave a contrary opinion; but after killing Hamilton in 1804 and yielding up the vice-presidency in 1805, his brilliant professional gifts were exiled from New York. On his return in 1812 from years of conspiracy, adventure, and romance, he took up the discredited Medcef Eden claim; and in the judicial test of the question he, and not Hamilton, proved to have been correct. The struggle went on in a number of suits; and when in 1823 the question was to be finally settled in the court of last resort, Burr, fearing, as he himself intimated to the court, lest the profound suspicion under which he rested might obscure and break the force of his legal arguments, or conscious that his past twenty years had dimmed his faculties, called to his aid Van Buren, then United States senator and a chief of the profession. As Van Buren and Burr attended together before the court of errors, they doubtless recalled their meetings in Van Ness's office twenty years before, when Burr, still a splendid though clouded figure in American life, hoped, by Federalist votes added to the Republican secession which he led, to reach the governorship and recover his prestige; those days in which the unknown but promising young countryman had interested a vice-president and enjoyed the latter's skillful and not always insincere flattery. The firm and orderly procedure of Van Buren's life was now well contrasted with the discredited and profligate ability of the returned wanderer. Against this earlier but long deposed, and against this later and regnant chief in the Republican politics of New York, were ranged in these cases David B. Ogden, the famous lawyer of the Federalist ranks, Samuel A. Talcott, and Samuel Jones. In Van Buren's long, masterly, and successful argument there was again an edge to the zeal with which he attacked the opinion of Kent, the Federalist chancellor, who asked the court of errors to overrule its earlier decisions, and the chancellor's own decision as well, and defeat the intention of the elder Medcef Eden.

Van Buren's professional career was most enviable. It lasted twenty-five years. It ended before he was forty-six, when he was in the early ripeness of his powers, but not until a larger and more shining career seemed surely opened before him. He left the bar with a competence fairly earned, which his prudence and skill made grow into an ample fortune, without even malicious suggestion in the scurrility of politics that he had profited out of public offices. In money matters he was more thrifty and cautious than most Americans in public places. His enemies accused him of meanness and parsimony, but apparently without other reason than that he did not practice the careless and useless profusion and luxury which many of his countrymen in political life have thought necessary to indulge even when their own tastes were far simpler. In the course of professional employment he acquired an important estate near Oswego, whose value rapidly enhanced with the rapid growth of western New York and the development of the lake commerce from that port.

The chief interest now found in Van Buren's professional career lies in its relation to his political life. He was the only lawyer of conspicuous and practical and really great professional success who has reached the White House. In the long preparation for the bar, in the many hours of leisure at Kinderhook and Hudson and even Albany permitted by the methods of practice in vogue before there were railways or telegraphs, and when travel was costly and slow and postage a shilling or more, he gained the liberal education more difficult of access to the busier young attorney and counsel of these crowded days. Great lawyers were then fond of ill.u.s.trations from polite literature; they loved to set off their speeches with quotations from the cla.s.sics, and to give their style finish and ornament not practicable to the precise, prompt methods which their successors learn in the driving routine of modern American cities. Van Buren did not, however, become a great orator at the bar. His admirer, Butler, upon returning to partnership with him in 1820, wrote indeed to an intimate friend, Jesse Hoyt (destined afterwards to bring grief and scandal upon both the partners), that if he were Van Buren he "would let politics alone," and become, as Van Buren might, the "Erskine of the State." But though his success, had he continued in the profession, would doubtless have been of the very first order, his oratory would never have reached the warm and virile splendor of Erskine, or the weighty magnificence of Webster. Van Buren's work as a lawyer brought him, however, something besides wealth and the education and refinement of books, and something which neither Erskine nor Webster gained. The profession afforded him an admirable discipline in the conduct of affairs; and affairs, in the law as out of it, are largely decided by human nature and its varying peculiarities. The preparation of details; the keen and far-sighted arrangement of the best, because the most practicable, plan; the refusal to fire off ammunition for the popular applause to be roused by its noise and flame; the clear, steady bearing in mind of the end to be accomplished, rather than the prolonged enjoyment or systematic working out of intermediate processes beyond a utilitarian necessity,--all these elements Van Buren mastered in a signal degree, and made invaluable in legal practice. To men more superbly equipped for _tours de force_, who ignored the uses of long, attentive, varied, painstaking work, there was nothing admirable in the methods which Van Buren brought into political life out of his experience in the law. He was, to undisciplined or envious opponents, a "little magician," a trickster. The same thing appears, in every department of human activity, in the anger which failure often flings at success.

The predominance of lawyers in our politics was very early established, and has been a characteristic distinction between politics in England and politics in America. Conspicuous as lawyers have been in the politics of the older country, they have rarely been figures of the first rank. They have served in all its modern ministries, and sometimes in other than professional stations; but, with the unimportant exception of Perceval, not as the chief. English opinion has not unjustly believed its greater landed proprietors to be animated with a strong and peculiar desire for English greatness and renown; nor has the belief been destroyed by their frequent opposition to the most beneficent popular movements. Among these proprietors and those allied with them, even when not strictly in their ranks, England has found her statesmen. To this day, the speech of a lawyer in the British House of Commons is fancied to show the narrowness of technical training, or is treated as a bid for promotion to some of the splendid seats open to the English bar. In America, the great landed proprietor very early lost the direction of public affairs. All the members of the "Virginian dynasty" were, it is true, large land-owners, and in the politics of New York there were several of them. But land-ownership was to Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe simply a means of support while they attended to public affairs; it was not one of their chief recommendations to the landed interest throughout the country. For a time in the early politics of New York the landed wealth of the Schuylers, Van Rensselaers, and Livingstons was of itself a source of strength; but in the spread of democratic sentiment it was found that to be a great landlord was entirely consistent with dullness, narrowness, and timid selfishness. Among the landlords there soon and inevitably decayed that sense of public obligation belonging to exalted position and leadership which sometimes brings courage, high public spirit, and even a sound and active political imagination, to those who preside over bodies of tenants. The laws were changed which facilitated family acc.u.mulations of land. Since these early years of the century a great land-owner has been in politics little more than any other rich man. Both have had advantages in that as in any other field of activity. Certain easy graces not uncommon to inherited wealth have often been popular,--not, however, for the wealth, but for themselves.

Where these graces have existed in America without such wealth, they have been none the less popular; but in England a lifetime of vast public service and the finest personal attainments have failed to overcome the distrust of a landless man as a sort of adventurer.

When Van Buren's career began, the men who were making money in trade or manufactures were generally too busy for the anxious and busy cares of public life; the tradesmen and manufacturers who had already made money were past the time of life when men can vigorously and skillfully turn to a new and strange calling. There was no leisure cla.s.s except land-owners or retired men of business. Lawyers, far more than those of any other calling, became public men, and naturally enough. Their experience of life and their knowledge of men were large. The popular interest in their art of advocacy; their travels from county seat to county seat; their speeches to juries in towns where no other secular public speaking was to be heard; the varieties of human life which lawyers came to know,--varieties far greater where the same men acted as attorneys and advocates than in England where they acted in only one of these fields,--these and the like, combined with the equipment for the forms of political and governmental work which was naturally gained in legal practice and the systematic study of law, gave to distinguished lawyers in America their large place in its political life. For this place the liberality of their lives helped, besides, to fit them. They had ceased to be disqualified for it by their former close alliance, as in England, with the landed aristocracy; and they had not yet begun to suffer a disqualification, frequently unjust, for their close relations with corporate interests, between which and the public there often arises an antagonism of interests. De Tocqueville, after his visit in 1832, said that lawyers formed in America its highest political cla.s.s and the most cultivated circle of society; that the American aristocracy was not composed of the rich, but that it occupied the judicial bench and the bar. And the descriptions of the liberal and acute though theoretical Frenchman are generally trustworthy, however often his striking generalizations are at fault. Such, then, was the intimacy of relations between the professions of law and politics when Van Buren shone in both. And when, in his early prime, he gave up the law, neither forensic habits nor those of the attorney were yet too strongly set to permit the easy and complete diversion of his powers to the more generous and exalted activity of public life.

It is simpler thus separately to treat Van Buren's life as a lawyer, because in a just view of the man it must be subordinate to his life as a politician. It is to be remembered, however, that in his earlier years his progress in politics closely attended in time, and in much more than time, his professional progress. When, at thirty, he sat as an appellate judge in the court of errors, he was already powerful in politics; when, at thirty-two, he was attorney-general, he was the leader of his party in the state senate; when, at forty-five, he had perhaps the most lucrative professional practice in New York, he was the leader of his party in the United States Senate. But it will be easier to follow his political career without interruption from his work as a lawyer, honorable and distinguished as it was, and much of his political ability as he owed to its fine discipline.

Van Buren's domestic life was broken up by the death of his wife at Albany, in February, 1819, leaving him four sons. To her memory Van Buren remained scrupulously loyal until his own death forty-three years afterwards. We may safely believe political enemies when, after saying of him many dastardly things, they admitted that he had been an affectionate husband. Nor were accusations ever made against the uprightness and purity of his private life.

CHAPTER III

STATE SENATOR.--ATTORNEY-GENERAL.--MEMBER OF THE CONSt.i.tUTIONAL CONVENTION

The politics of New York State were never more bitter, never more personal, than when Van Buren entered the field in 1803. The Federalists were sheltered by the unique and n.o.ble prestige of Washington's name; and were conscious that in wealth, education, refinement, they far excelled the Republicans. They were contemptuously suspicious of the unlettered ignorance, the intense and exuberant vanity, of the ma.s.ses of American men. It was by that contempt and suspicion that they invited the defeat which, protected though they were by the property qualifications required of voters in New York, they met in 1800 at the hands of a people in whom the instincts of democracy were strong and unsubmissive. This was in our history the one complete and final defeat of a great national party while in power. The Federalists themselves made it final,--by their silly and unworthy anger at a political reverse; by their profoundly immoral efforts to thwart the popular will and make Burr president; by their fatal and ingrained disbelief in common men, who, they thought, foolishly and impiously refused to accept wisdom and guidance from the possessors of learning and great estates; and finally by their unpatriotic opposition to Jefferson and Madison in the a.s.sertion of American rights on the seas during the Napoleonic wars. All these drove the party, in spite of its large services in the past and its eminent capacity for service in the future, forever from the confidence of the American people. The Federalists maintained, it is true, a party organization in New York until after the second war with England; but their efforts were rather directed to the division and embarra.s.sment of their adversaries than to victories of their own strength or upon their own policy. They carried the lower house of the legislature in 1809, 1812, and 1813. There were among them men of the first rank, who retained a strong hold on popular respect, among whom John Jay and Rufus King were deservedly shining figures. But never after 1799 did the Federalists elect in New York a governor, or control both legislative houses, or secure any solid power, except by coalition with one branch or another of the Republicans.

Van Buren's fondness for politics was soon developed. His father was firmly attached to the Jeffersonians or Republicans,--a rather discredited minority among the Federalists of Columbia county and the estates of the Hudson River aristocracy. Inheriting his political preferences, Van Buren, with a great body of other young Americans, caught the half-doctrinaire enthusiasm which Jefferson then inspired, an enthusiasm which in Van Buren was to be so enduring a force, and to which sixty years later he was still as loyal as he had been in the hot disputes on the sanded floors of the village store or tavern. During these boyish years he wrote and spoke for his party; and before he was eighteen he was formally appointed a delegate to a Republican convention for Columbia and Rensselaer counties.

Van Buren returned from New York to Columbia county late in 1803, just twenty-one years old. At once he became active in politics. The Republican party, though not strong in his county, was dominant in the State; and the game of politics was played between its different factions, the Federalists aiding one or the other as they saw their advantage. The Republicans were Clintonians, Livingstonians, or Burrites. George Clinton, in whose career lay the great origin of party politics of New York, was the Republican leader. The son of an Irish immigrant, he had, without the aid of wealth or influential connections, made himself the most popular man in the State. He was the first governor after colonial days were over, and was repeatedly reelected. It was his opposition which most seriously endangered New York's adoption of the Federal Const.i.tution. But in spite of the wide enthusiasm which the completed Union promptly aroused, this opposition did not prevent his reelection in 1789 and 1792. The majorities were small, however, it being even doubtful whether in the latter year the majority were fairly given him. In 1795 he declined to be a candidate, and Robert R.

Livingston, the Republican in his place, was defeated. In 1801 Clinton was again elected. Later he was vice-president in Jefferson's second term and Madison's first term; and his aspiration to the presidency in 1808 was by no means unreasonable. He was a strong party leader and a sincerely patriotic man. The Livingston family interest in New York was very great. The chancellor, Robert R. Livingston, who nowadays is popularly a.s.sociated with the ceremony of Washington's inauguration, had been secretary for foreign affairs under the Articles of Confederation, and had left the Federalists in 1790. After his sixty years had under the law disqualified him for judicial office, he became Jefferson's minister to France and negotiated with Bonaparte the Louisiana treaty.

Brockholst Livingston was a judge of the Supreme Court of New York in 1801. In 1807 Jefferson promoted him to the federal Supreme Court.

Edward Livingston, younger than his brother, the chancellor, by seventeen years, was long after to be one of the finest characters in our politics. Early in Washington's administration he had become a strong pro-French Republican, and had opposed Jay's treaty with Great Britain; though forty years later, when Jackson brought him from Louisiana to be secretary of state, he was sometimes reminded of his still earlier Federalism. Morgan Lewis, judge of the Supreme Court and afterwards chief justice, and still later governor, was a brother-in-law of the chancellor. Smith Thompson, also a judge and chief justice, and later secretary of the navy under Monroe and a judge of the federal Supreme Court, and Van Buren's compet.i.tor for governor in 1828, was a connection of the family. There were sneers at the Livingston conversion to Democracy as there always are at political conversions. But whether or not Chancellor Livingston's Democracy came from jealousy of Hamilton in 1790, it is at least certain that he and his family connections rendered political services of the first importance during a half century. The drafting of Jackson's nullification proclamation in 1833 by Edward Livingston was one of the n.o.blest and most signal services which Americans have had the fortune to render to their country.