Martin Van Buren Part 3

It has been the tradition, carefully and doubtless sincerely begun by John Quincy Adams, and adopted by most writers dealing with this period, that Adams met his first Congress in a spirit which should have commanded universal support; and that it was a factious opposition, cunningly led by Van Buren, which thwarted his patriotic purposes. But this is an untrue account of the second great party division in the United States. The younger Adams succeeded to an administration which had represented no party, or rather which had represented a party now become so dominant as to practically include the whole country. As president he found himself able to promote opinions with a weighty authority which he had not enjoyed while secretary of state in an era of good feeling, and under a president who was firm, even if gentle. Nor was it likely that Adams, with his unrivaled experience, his resolute self-reliance, and his aggressively patriotic feeling, would fail to impress his own views upon the public service, lest he might disturb a supposit.i.tious unanimity of sentiment. His first message boldly sounded the notes of party division. The second war with England was well out of the public mind; and his old Federalist a.s.sociations, his belief in a strong, active, beneficent federal government, his traditional dislike of what seemed to him extreme democratic tendencies and const.i.tutional refinings away of necessary federal power,--all these made him promptly and ably take an att.i.tude very different from that of his predecessors.

The compliment was perfectly sincere which, in his inaugural address, he had paid the Republican and Federalist parties, saying of them that both had "contributed splendid talents, spotless integrity, ardent patriotism, and disinterested sacrifices to the formation and administration" of the government. But it was idle for him to suppose that the successors of these parties, although from both had come his own supporters, and although, as in his offer of the treasury to Crawford, he showed his desire, even in the chief offices, to ignore political differences, would remain united under him, if he espoused causes upon which they widely differed. After recapitulating the tenets of American political faith, and showing that most discordant elements of public opinion were now blended into harmony, he was again perfectly sincere in saying that only an effort of magnanimity needed to be made, that individuals should discard every remnant of rancor against each other. This advice he was himself unable to follow; and so were other men. In his inaugural he distinctly adopted as his own the policy of internal improvements by the federal government, although he knew how wide and determined had been the opposition to it. His own late chief, Monroe, had p.r.o.nounced the policy unconst.i.tutional. But he now told the people that the magnificence and splendor of the public works, the roads and aqueducts, of Rome, were among the imperishable splendors of the ancient republic. He asked to what single individual our first national road had proved an injury. Of the const.i.tutional doubts which were raised, he said, with a touch of the contempt of a practical administrator: "Every speculative scruple will be solved by a practical blessing." To the self-consecrated guardians of the Const.i.tution this was as corrupt as offers of largesses to plebeians at Rome. In his first message he recommended again the policy of internal improvements, and proposed the establishment of a national university. Although he admitted the Const.i.tution to be "a charter of limited powers," he still intimated his opinion that its powers might "be effectually brought into action by laws promoting the improvement of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures, the cultivation and encouragement of the mechanic and of the elegant arts, the advancement of literature, and the progress of the sciences, ornamental and profound;" and that to refrain from exercising these powers for the benefit of the people themselves, would be to hide the talent in the earth, and a "treachery to the most sacred of trusts."

Further, he now broached the novel project of the congress at Panama,--a project surely doubtful enough to permit conscientious opposition.

All this was widely different from the messages of content from President Monroe. There was in these new utterances a clear political diversion, marked not less by the brilliant and restless genius of Henry Clay, now the secretary of state, than by the President's consciousness of his own strong and disciplined ability. Here was a new policy formally presented by a new administration; and a formal and organized resistance was as sure to follow as effect to follow cause. Van Buren was soon at the head of this inevitable opposition. It is difficult, at least in the records of Congress, to find any evidence justifying the long tradition that the opposition was factious or unworthy. It was doubtless a warfare, with its surprises, its skirmishes, and its pitched battles. Mistakes of the adversary were promptly used. Debates were not had simply to promote the formal business before the House, but rather to reach the listening voters. But all this belongs to parliamentary warfare. Nor is it inconsistent with most exalted aims and an admirable performance of public business in a free country. Gladstone, the greatest living master in the work of political reform, has described himself as an "old parliamentary hand." Nor in the motions, the resolutions, the debates, led by Van Buren during his three years of opposition, can one find any device which Palmerston or Derby or Gladstone in one forum, and Seward and even Adams himself in his last and best years in another, have not used with little punishment from disinterested and enduring criticism.

Immediately after Adams's inauguration Van Buren voted for Clay's confirmation as secretary of state, while Jackson and fourteen other senators, including Hayne, voted to reject him, upon the unfounded story of Clay's sale of the presidency to Adams for the office to which he was now nominated. Van Buren's language and demeanor towards the new administration were uniformly becoming. He charged political but not personal wrong-doing; he made no insinuation of base motives; and his opposition throughout was the more forcible for its very decorum.

The first great battle between the rapidly dividing forces was over the Panama mission, a creation of Clay's exuberant imagination. The president nominated to the Senate two envoys to an American congress called by the new South American republics of Columbia, Mexico, and Central America, and in which it was proposed that Peru and Chile also should partic.i.p.ate. The congress was to be held at Panama, which, in the extravagant rhetoric of some of the Republicans of the South, would, if the world had to elect a capital, be pointed out for that august destiny, placed as it was "in the centre of the globe." Spain had not yet acknowledged the independence of her revolted colonies; and it was clear that the discussions of the congress must be largely concerned with a mutual protection of American nations which implied an att.i.tude hostile to Spain. Adams, in his message nominating the envoys, declared that they were not to take part in deliberations of belligerent character, or to contract alliances or to engage in any project importing hostility to any other nation. But referring to the Monroe doctrine, Adams said that the mission looked to an agreement between the nations represented, that each would guard by its own means against the establishment of any future European colony within its borders; and it looked also to an effort on the part of the United States to promote religious liberty among those intolerant republics. The decisive inducement, he added, to join in the congress was to lay the foundation of future intercourse with those states "in the broadest principles of reciprocity and the most cordial feelings of fraternal friendship."

This was vague enough. But when the diplomatic papers were exhibited, it was plain that the southern republics proposed a congress looking to a close defensive alliance, a sort of confederacy or Amphictyonic council as Benton described it; and that it was highly improbable that the representatives from one country could responsibly partic.i.p.ate in the congress without most serious danger of incurring obligations, or falling into precisely the embarra.s.sments which the well settled policy of the United States had avoided. It was perfectly agreeable to Adams, resolute and aggressive American that he was, that his country should look indulgently upon the smaller American powers, should stand at their head, should counsel them in their difficulties with European nations, and jealously take their side in those difficulties. Clay's eager, enthusiastic mind delighted in the picture of a great leadership of America by the United States, an American system of nations, breathing the air of republicanism, a.s.serting a young and haughty independence of monarchical Europe, and ready for opposition to its schemes. In all this there has been fascination to many American minds, which even in our own day we have seen influence American diplomacy. But it was a step into the entangling alliances against which American public opinion had from Washington's day been set. When Adams asked an appropriation for the expenses of the mission, he told the House of Representatives that he was hardly sanguine enough to promise "all or even any of the transcendent benefits to the human race which warmed the conceptions of its first proposer," but that it looked "to the melioration of the condition of man;" that it was congenial with the spirit which prompted our own declaration of independence, which dictated our first treaty with Prussia, and "which filled the hearts and fired the souls of the immortal founders of our revolution."

Such fanciful speculation the Republicans, led by Van Buren, opposed with strong and heated protests, in tone not unlike the Liberal protests of 1878 in England against Disraeli's Jingo policy. In the secret session of the Senate Van Buren proposed resolutions against the const.i.tutionality of the mission, reciting that it was a departure from our wise and settled policy; that, for the conference and discussion contemplated, our envoys already accredited to the new republics were competent, without becoming involved as members of the congress. These resolutions, so the President at once wrote in his opulent and invaluable diary, "are the fruit of the ingenuity of Martin Van Buren and bear the impress of his character." The mission was, the opposition thus insisted, unconst.i.tutional; a step enlarging the sphere of the federal government; a meddlesome and dangerous interference with foreign nations; and if it lay in the course of a strong and splendid policy, it was also part of a policy full of warlike possibilities almost sure to drag us into old-world quarrels. Clay's "American system," Hayne said in the senatorial debate, meant restriction and monopoly when applied to our domestic policy, and "entangling alliances" when applied to our foreign policy.

Van Buren's speech was very able. He did not touch upon the liberality of the Spanish Americans towards races other than the Caucasian, which peered out of Hayne's speech as one of the Southern objections. After using the wise and seemingly pertinent language of Washington against such foreign involvements, Van Buren skillfully referred to the very Prussian treaty which the President had cited in his message to the House. The elder Adams, the Senate was reminded, had departed from the rule commended by his great predecessor. He had told his first Congress that we were indeed to keep ourselves distinct and separate from the political system of Europe "if we can," but that we needed early and continual information of political projects in contemplation; that however we might consider ourselves, others would consider us a weight in the balance of power in Europe, which never could be forgotten or neglected; and that it was natural for us, studying to be neutral, to consult with other nations engaged in the same study. The younger Adams had been, Van Buren pointed out, appointed upon the Berlin mission to carry out these heretical suggestions of his father. The Republicans of that day had vigorously opposed the mission; and for their opposition were denounced as a faction, and lampooned and vilified "by all the presses supporting and supported by the government, and a host of malicious parasites generaled by its patronage." But, covered with Washington's mantle, the Republicans of '98 had sought to strangle at its birth this political hydra, this first attempt since the establishment of the government to subject our political affairs to the terms and conditions of political connection with a foreign nation.

Probably antic.i.p.ating the success of the administration senators by a majority of five, Van Buren ingeniously reminded the Senate that those early Republicans had failed with a majority of four against them. But it was to be remembered, he continued, that after a few more such Federalist victories the ruin of Federalism had been complete. Its doctrines had speedily received popular condemnation. The new administration under the presidency of that early minister to Prussia had returned to the practices of the Federalist party, to which Van Buren with courteous indirection let it be remembered that the president had originally belonged. Except a guaranty to Spain of its dominions beyond the Mississippi, which Jefferson had offered as part of the price of a cession of the territory between that river and the Mobile, the administrations of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe had strictly followed the admonition of Washington: "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." If we were asked to form a connection with European states, such as was proposed with the southern republics, Van Buren argued, no American would approve it; and there was no sound reason, there was nothing but fanciful sentiment, to induce us to distinguish between the states of Europe and those of South America. Grant that there was a Holy Alliance in monarchical Europe, was it not a hollow glory, inconsistent with a sober view of American interests, to create a holy alliance in republican America? It might indeed be easy to agree upon speculative opinions with our younger neighbors at the south; but we should be humiliated in their eyes, and difficulties would at once arise, when means of promoting those opinions were proposed, and we were then to say we could talk but not fight. The Monroe doctrine was not to be withdrawn; but we ought to be left free to act upon it without the burden of promises, express or implied. The proposed congress was a specious and disguised step towards an American confederacy, full of embarra.s.sment, full of danger; and the first step should be firmly resisted. Such was the outline of Van Buren's argument; and its wisdom has commanded a general a.s.sent from that day.

d.i.c.kerson of New Jersey very well phrased sound American sentiment when he said in the debate that, next to a pa.s.sion for war, he dreaded a pa.s.sion for diplomacy. The majestic declamation of Webster, his pathetic picture of a South America once oppressed but now emanc.i.p.ated, his eloquent cry that if it were weak to feel that he was an American it was a weakness from which he claimed no exemption,--all this met a good deal of exuberant response through the country. But it failed, as in our history most such efforts have failed, to convince the practical judgment of Americans, a judgment never long dazzled or inspired by the picture of an America wielding enormous or dominant international power.

The Panama congress met in the absence of the American representatives, who had been delayed. It made a treaty of friendship and perpetual confederation to which all other American powers might accede within a year. The congress was to meet annually in time of common war, and biennially in times of peace. But it never met again. The "centre of the world" was too far away from its very neighbors. Even South American republics could not be kept together by effusions of republican glory and international love.

In spite of its victory in Congress, Adams's administration had plainly opened with a serious mistake. The opposition was perfectly legitimate; and although in the debate it was spoken of as unorganized, it certainly came out of the debate a pretty definite party. Before the debate Adams had written in his diary, and truly, that it was the first subject upon which a great effort had been made "to combine the discordant elements of the Crawford and Jackson and Calhoun men into a united opposition against the administration." Although some of the Southern opposition was heated by a dislike of States in which negroes were to be administrators, the division was not at all upon a North and South line.

With Van Buren voted Findlay of Pennsylvania, Chandler and Holmes of Maine, Woodbury of New Hampshire, d.i.c.kerson of New Jersey, Kane of Illinois, making seven Northern with twelve Southern senators. Against Van Buren were eight senators from slave States, Barton of Missouri, Bouligny and Johnston of Louisiana, Chambers of Alabama, Clayton and Van d.y.k.e of Delaware, Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, and Smith of Maryland.

It was an incipient but a true party division.

Throughout this session of 1824-25 Van Buren was very industrious in the Senate, and nearly, if not quite, its most conspicuous member, if account be not taken of Randolph's furious and blazing talents. Calhoun was only in the chair as vice-president; the great duel between him and Van Buren not yet begun. Clay was at the head of the cabinet, and Webster in the lower House. Jackson was in Tennessee, watching with angry confidence, and aiding, the rising tide with the political dexterity in which he was by no means a novice. Having only a minority with him, and with Benton frequently against him, Van Buren gradually drilled his party into opposition on internal improvements,--a most legitimate and important issue. In December, 1825, he threw down the gauntlet to the administration, or rather took up its gauntlet. He proposed a resolution "that Congress does not possess the power to make roads and ca.n.a.ls within the respective States." At the same time he asked for a committee to prepare a const.i.tutional amendment on the subject like his earlier proposal, saying with a touch of very polite partisanship that though the President's recent declaration, that the power clearly existed in the Const.i.tution, might diminish, it did not obviate the necessity of an amendment. In March, April, and May, 1826, he opposed appropriations of $110,000 to continue the c.u.mberland road, and of $50,000 for surveys preparatory to roads and ca.n.a.ls, and subscriptions to stock of the Louisville and Portland Ca.n.a.l Company and of the Dismal Swamp Ca.n.a.l Company. All these were distinctly administration measures.

Although the principles advanced by Van Buren in this part of his opposition have not since obtained complete and unanimous affirmance, they have at least commanded so large, honorable, and prolonged support, that his att.i.tude can with little good sense be considered one of factious difference. Especially wise was he on the question of government subscriptions to private ca.n.a.l companies. Upon one of these bills he said, in May, 1826, that he did not believe that the government had the const.i.tutional power to make ca.n.a.ls or to grant money for them; but he added that, if he believed otherwise, the grant of money should, he thought, be made directly, and not by forming a partnership between the government and a private corporation. In 1824 he had voted for the road from Missouri to New Mexico; but this stood, as the Pacific railway later stood, upon a different principle, the former as a road entirely without state limits and a means of international commerce, and the latter a road chiefly through federal territories, and of obvious national importance in the war between the North and the South.

The proposed amendment of the Const.i.tution to prevent the election of president by a vote of States in the House of Representatives, upon which Van Buren had spoken in 1824, had now acquired new interest. Van Buren seized Adams's election in the House as a good subject for political warfare; and it was clearly a legitimate topic for party discussion and division. Van Buren would have been far more exalted in his notions of political agitation than the greatest of political leaders, had he not sought to use the popular feeling, that the American will had been subverted by the decision of the House, to promote his plan of const.i.tutional reform. He told the Senate in May, 1826, that he was satisfied that there was no one point on which the people of the United States were more perfectly united than upon the propriety of taking the choice of president from the House. But Congress was not ready for the change; however much in theory was to be said against the clumsy system which nearly made Burr president in 1801,[3] and which produced in 1825 a choice which Adams himself declared that he would vacate if the Const.i.tution provided a mode of doing it.

As chairman of the judiciary committee, Van Buren partic.i.p.ated in a most laborious effort to enlarge the federal judiciary. Upon the question whether the judges of the Supreme Court should be relieved from circuit duty, he made an elaborate and very able speech upon the negative side.

The opportunity arose for a disquisition on the danger of centralized government, and for a renewal of the criticisms he had made in the New York Const.i.tutional Convention upon the common and absurd picture of judges as dwellers in an atmosphere above all human infirmity, and beyond the reach of popular impression. Van Buren said, what all sensible men know, that in spite of every effort, incompetent men will sometimes reach the judicial bench. If always sitting among a.s.sociates _in banc_, their incompetence would be shielded, he said, by their abler brethren. But if regularly compelled to perform their great duties alone and in the direct face of the people, and not in the isolation of Washington, there was another constraint, Van Buren said very democratically and with substantial truth. "There is a power in public opinion in this country," he declared, "and I thank G.o.d for it, for it is the most honest and best of all powers, which will not tolerate an incompetent or unworthy man to hold in his weak or wicked hands the lives and fortunes of his fellow citizens." He added an expression to which he would afterwards have given most narrow interpretation. The Supreme Court stood, he said, "as the umpire between the conflicting powers of the general and state governments." There was in the speech very plain though courteous intimation of that jealousy with which Van Buren's party examined the political utterances of the court from Jefferson's time until, years after Van Buren's retirement, the party found it convenient to receive from the court, with a sanctimonious air of veneration, the most odious and demoralizing of all its expressions of political opinion. In arguing for a close and democratic relation between the judges and the different parts of the country, and against their dignified and exalted seclusion at Washington which was so agreeable to many patriotic Americans, Van Buren said, in a pa.s.sage which is fairly characteristic of his oratorical manner:--

"A sentiment I had almost said of idolatry for the Supreme Court has grown up, which claims for its members an almost entire exemption from the fallibilities of our nature, and arraigns with unsparing bitterness the motives of all who have the temerity to look with inquisitive eyes into this consecrated sanctuary of the law. So powerful has this sentiment become, such strong hold has it taken upon the press of this country, that it requires not a little share of firmness in a public man, however imperious may be his duty, to express sentiments that conflict with it. It is nevertheless correct, sir, that in this, as in almost every other case, the truth is to be found in a just medium of the subject. To so much of the high-wrought eulogies (which the fashion of the times has recently produced in such great abundance) as allows to the distinguished men who now hold in their hands that portion of the administration of public affairs, talents of the highest order, and spotless integrity, I cheerfully add the very humble testimony of my unqualified a.s.sent. That the uncommon man who now presides over the court, and who I hope may long continue to do so, is, in all human probability, the ablest judge now sitting upon any judicial bench in the world, I sincerely believe. But to the sentiment which claims for the judges so great a share of exemption from the feelings that govern the conduct of other men, and for the court the character of being the safest depository of political power, I do not subscribe. I have been brought up in an opposite faith, and all my experience has confirmed me in its correctness.

In my legislation upon this subject I will act in conformity to those opinions. I believe the judges of the Supreme Court (great and good men as I cheerfully concede them to be) are subject to the same infirmities, influenced by the same pa.s.sions, and operated upon by the same causes, that good and great men are in other situations. I believe they have as much of the _esprit de corps_ as other men. Those who think[4] otherwise form an erroneous estimate of human nature; and if they act upon that estimate, will, soon or late, become sensible of their delusion."

At this session, upon the election by the Senate of their temporary president, Van Buren received the compliment of four votes. In May, 1826, he partic.i.p.ated in Benton's report on the reduction of executive patronage, a subject important enough, but there crudely treated. The report strongly exhibited the jealousy of executive power which had long been characteristic of American political thought. By describing the offices within the president's appointment, their numbers and salaries, and the expense of the civil list, a striking picture was drawn--and in that way a striking picture can always be drawn--of the power of any great executive. By imagining serious abuses of power, the picture was darkened with the dangers of patronage, as it could be darkened to-day.

The country was urged to look forward to the time when public revenue would be doubled, when the number of public officers would be quadrupled, when the president's nomination would carry any man through the Senate, and his recommendation any measure through Congress. Names, the report said, were nothing. The first Roman emperor was styled Emperor of the Republic; and the late French emperor had taken a like t.i.tle. The American president, it was hinted, might by his enormous patronage and by subsidies to the press, nominally for official advertis.e.m.e.nts, subject us to a like danger. But the usefulness of such pictures as these of Benton and Van Buren depends upon the practical lesson taught by the artists. If there were disadvantages and dangers which our ancestors rightly feared, in placing the federal patronage under the sole control of the president, so there are disadvantages and dangers in scattering it by laws into various hands, or in its subjection to the traditions of "senatorial courtesy."

Six bills accompanied the report. Two of them proposed the appointment of military cadets and midshipmen, one of each from every congressional district; and this was afterwards done, giving a petty patronage to national legislators which public sentiment has but recently begun to compel them to use upon ascertained merit rather than in sheer favoritism. A third bill proposed that military and naval commissions should run "during good behavior" and not "during the pleasure of the president." A fourth sought with extraordinary unwisdom to correct the old but ever new abuse of government advertising, by depriving the responsible executive of its distribution and by placing it in the hands of congressmen, perhaps the very worst to hold it. Another required senatorial confirmation for postmasters whose emoluments exceeded an amount to be fixed. The remaining bill was very wise, and a natural sequence of Benton's not untruthful though too highly colored picture.

The law of 1820, which fixed at four years the terms of many subordinate officers, was to be modified so as to limit the terms only for officers who had not satisfactorily accounted for public moneys. It has been commonly said that this act was a device of Crawford, when secretary of the treasury, more easily to use federal patronage for his presidential canva.s.s. But there seems to be no sufficient reason to doubt that Benton's and Van Buren's committee correctly stated the intent of the authors of the law to have been no more than that the officer should be definitely compelled by the expiration of his term to render his accounts and have them completely audited; that it was not intended that some other person should succeed an officer not found in fault; and that the practice of refusing re-commissions to deserving officers was an unexpected perversion of the law. The committee simply proposed to accomplish the true intent of the law. The same bill required the president to state his reasons for removals of officers when he nominated their successors. The proposals in the last two bills were very creditable to Benton and Van Buren and their coadjutors. It is greatly to be lamented that they were not safely made laws while patronage was dispensed conscientiously and with sincere public spirit by the younger Adams, so far as he could control it. The biographer has more particularly to lament that during the twelve years of Van Buren's executive influence he seemed daunted by the difficulties of voluntarily putting in practice the admirable rules which as a senator he would have imposed by law upon those in executive stations. It was only three years after this report, that the great chieftain, whom Benton and Van Buren helped to the presidency, discredited all its reasoning by proposing "a general extension" of the law whose operation they would have thus limited. The committee also proposed by const.i.tutional amendment to forbid the appointment to office of any senator or representative until the end of the presidential term in which he had held his seat. This was also one of the reforms whose necessity seems plain enough to the reformer, until in office he discovers the conveniences and perhaps the public uses of the practice he has wished to abolish.

In the short session of 1826-1827, little of any importance was done.

Van Buren refused to vote with Benton to abolish the duty on salt, a vote doubtless influenced by the apparent interest of New York, which itself taxed the production of salt to aid the State in its internal improvements, and which probably could not maintain the tax if foreign salt were admitted free. Van Buren did not, indeed, avow, nor did he disavow this reason. He was content to point out that the great ca.n.a.ls of New York were of national use, though their expense was borne by his State alone. He voted at this session for lower duties on teas, coffees, and wines. He did not join Benton and others in their narrow unwillingness to establish a naval academy. Van Buren's temper was eminently free from raw prejudices against disciplined education. The death of one of the envoys to the Panama congress enabled him again at this session to renew his opposition by a vote against filling the vacancy. Another attempt was made to pa.s.s a bankruptcy bill; but again it failed through the natural and wholesome dislike of increasing the powers of the federal judiciary, and the preference that state courts and laws should perform all the work to which they were reasonably competent. The bill did not even pa.s.s the Senate, until by Van Buren's opposition it had been reduced to a bill establishing a summary and speedy remedy for creditors against fraudulent or failing traders, instead of a general system of bankruptcy, voluntary and involuntary, for all persons. Van Buren's speech against the insolvency features of the bill was made on January 23, 1827, only a few days before his successor as senator was to be chosen. But the thoughtless popularity which often accompanies sweeping propositions of relief to insolvents did not move him from resolute and successful opposition to what he called (and later experience has most abundantly justified him) "an injurious extension of the patronage of the federal government, and an insupportable enlargement of the range of its judicial power." On February 24, 1827, a few days after his reelection, he delivered a lucid and elaborate speech on the long-perplexing topic of the restrictions upon American trade with the British colonies, a subject to be afterwards closely connected with his political fortunes.

The agitation of the coming presidential election left little of its turbulence upon the records of the long session from December, 1827, to May, 1828. Van Buren was doubtless busy enough out of the senate chamber. But he was still a very busy legislator. He spoke at least twice in favor of the bill to abolish imprisonment under judgments rendered by federal courts for debts not fraudulently incurred, the bill which Richard M. Johnson had pressed so long and so honorably; and at last he saw the bill pa.s.s in January, 1828. He spoke often upon the technical bill to regulate federal judicial process. Again he voted, and again in a minority and in opposition to Benton and other political friends, against bills to extend the c.u.mberland road and for other internal improvements. Besides the usual bills to appropriate lands for roads and ca.n.a.ls, and to subscribe to the stock of private ca.n.a.l companies, a step further was now taken in the const.i.tutional change led by Adams and Clay. Public land was voted for the benefit of Kenyon College, in the State of Ohio. There was plainly intended to be no limit to federal beneficence. In this session Van Buren again rushed to defend the salt duty so dear to New York.

At the same session was pa.s.sed the "tariff of abominations," a measure so called from the oppressive provisions loaded on it by its enemies, but in spite of which it pa.s.sed. Van Buren, though he sat still during the debate, cast for the bill a protectionist vote, with Benton and several others whose convictions were against it, but who yielded to the supposed public sentiment or the peremptory instructions of their States, or who did not yet dare to make upon the tariff a presidential issue. The votes of the senators were sectionally thus distributed: For the tariff,--New England, 6; Middle States, 8; Louisiana, 1; and the Western States, 11; in all 26. Against it,--New England, 5; Maryland, 2; Southern States, 13; and Tennessee, 1. It was a victory of neither political party, but of the Middle and Western over the Southern States.

Only three negative votes were cast by senators who had voted against the administration on the Panama question in 1826; while of the votes for the tariff, fourteen were cast by senators who had then opposed the administration. Of the senators in favor of the tariff, six, Van Buren, Benton, d.i.c.kerson of New Jersey, Eaton of Tennessee (Jackson's close friend), Kane of Illinois, and Rowan of Kentucky, had in 1826 been in opposition, while ten of those voting against the tariff had then been with them.[5] The greater number of the opposition senators were therefore against the tariff, though very certainly the votes of Van Buren, Benton, and Eaton prevented the opposition from taking strong ground or suffering injury on the tariff in the election. Van Buren's silence in this debate of 1828 indicated at least a temper now hesitant.

But he and his colleague, Sanford, according to the theory then popular that senators were simply delegated agents of their States, were constrained, whatever were their opinions, by a resolution of the legislature of New York pa.s.sed almost unanimously in January, 1828. It stated a sort of _ultima ratio_ of protection, commanding the senators "to make every proper exertion to effect such a revision of the tariff as will afford a sufficient protection to the growers of wool, hemp, and flax, and the manufacturers of iron, woolens, and every other article, so far as the same may be connected with the interest of manufactures, agriculture, and commerce." The senators might perhaps have said to this that, if they were to protect not only iron and woolens but also every other article, they ought not to levy prohibitory duties on some and not on other articles; that if they were equally to protect manufactures, agriculture, and commerce, they could do no better than to let natural laws alone. But the silly instruction said what no intelligent protectionist means; his system disappears with an equality of privilege; that equality must, he argues, at some point yield to practical necessities. Van Buren took the resolution, however, in its intended meaning, and not literally. Hayne concluded his fine struggle against the bill by a solemn protest upon its pa.s.sage that it was a partial, unjust, and unconst.i.tutional measure.

At this session Van Buren, upon the consideration of a rule giving the Vice-President power to call to order for words spoken in debate, made perhaps the most elaborate of his purely political speeches. It was a skillful and not unsuccessful effort to give philosophical significance to the coming struggle at the polls. He spoke of "that collision, which seems to be inseparable from the nature of man, between the rights of the few and the many," of "those never-ceasing conflicts between the advocates of the enlargement and concentration of power on the one hand, and its limitation and distribution on the other." The one party, he said, had "grown out of a deep and settled distrust of the people and of the States:" the other, out of "a jealousy of power justified by all human experience." The advocates of "a strong government," having been defeated in much that they sought in the federal convention, had since, he said, "been at work to obtain by construction what was not included or intended to be included in the grant." He declared the incorporation of the United States Bank to be the "great pioneer of const.i.tutional encroachments." Thence had followed those famous usurpations, the alien and sedition laws of the older Adams's administration. Then came the doctrine that the House of Representatives was bound to make all appropriations necessary to carry out a treaty made by the President and Senate; and then "the bold avowal that it belonged to the President alone to decide upon the propriety" of a foreign mission, and that it was for the Senate only "to pa.s.s on the fitness of the individuals selected as ministers." He lamented the single lapse of Madison, "one of the most, if not the most, accomplished statesman that our country has produced," in signing the bill to incorporate the new bank. The younger Adams, Van Buren declared, had "gone far beyond the utmost lat.i.tude of construction" therefore claimed; and he added a reference, decorous enough but neither fair nor gracious, to Adams's own early entrance in the public service upon a mission unauthorized by Congress.

It was now demonstrated, he said, that the result of the presidential choice of 1825 "was not only the restoration of the men of 1798, but of the principles of that day." The spirit of encroachment had, it was true, become more wary; but it was no more honest. The system had then been coercion; now it was seduction. Then unconst.i.tutional powers had been exercised to force submission; now they were a.s.sumed to purchase golden opinions from the people with their own means. Isolated acts of the Federalists had not produced an unyielding exclusion from the confidence of a majority of the people, for more than a quarter of a century, of large ma.s.ses of men distinguished for talent and private worth. The great and glorious struggle had proceeded from something deeper, an opposition to the principle of an extension of the constructive powers of the government. Without harsh denunciation, and by suggestion rather than a.s.sertion, the administration of John Quincy Adams was grouped with the administration of his father. The earlier administration had deserved and met the retribution of a Republican victory. The later one now deserved and ought soon to meet a like fate.

The issue was clearly made. The parties were formed. The result rested with the people. On February 6, 1827, Van Buren had been reelected senator by a large majority in both houses of the New York legislature.

In his brief letter of acceptance he said no more on public questions than that it should be his "constant and zealous endeavor to protect the remaining rights reserved to the States by the federal Const.i.tution,"

and "to restore those of which they have been divested by construction."

This had been the main burden of his political oratory from the inauguration of Adams. There are many references in books to doubts of Van Buren's position until 1827; but such doubts are not justified in the face of his prompt and perfectly explicit utterances in the session of 1825-1826, and from that time steadily on.

De Witt Clinton's death on February 11, 1828, removed from the politics of New York one of its most ill.u.s.trious men, a statesman of the first rank, able and pa.s.sionate, and of the n.o.blest aspirations. The understanding reached between him and Van Buren in 1826, for the support of Jackson, had not produced a complete coalition. In spite of the union on Jackson, the Bucktails nominated and Van Buren loyally supported for governor against Clinton in 1826, William B. Rochester, a warm friend and supporter of Adams and Clay, and one of the members of the very Panama mission against which so strenuous a fight had been made. Clinton was reelected by a small majority. In a meeting at Washington after his death, Van Buren declared the triumph of his talents and patriotism to be monuments of high and enduring fame. He was glad that, though in their public careers there had been "collisions of opinions and action at once extensive, earnest, and enduring," they had still been "wholly free from that most venomous and corroding of all poisons, personal hatred." These collisions were now "turned to nothing and less than nothing." Speaking of his respect for Clinton's name and grat.i.tude for his signal services, Van Buren concluded with this striking tribute: "For myself, so strong, so sincere, and so engrossing is that feeling, that I, who whilst living, never--no, never, envied him anything, now that he has fallen, am greatly tempted to envy him his grave with its honors."

With this session of 1827-1828 ended Van Buren's senatorial career and his parliamentary leadership. From 1821 to 1828 the Senate was not indeed at its greatest glory. Webster entered it only in December, 1827.

Hayne and Benton with Van Buren are to us its most distinguished members, if Randolph's rather indescribable and useless personality may be excepted. But to neither of them has the opinion of later times a.s.signed a place in the first rank of orators, although Hayne's tariff speech in 1824 deserves to be set with the greatest of American political orations. The records and speeches of the Senate in which Van Buren sat have come to us with fine print and narrow margins; they have not contributed to the collected works of great men. But the Senate was then an able body. The principles of American politics were never more clearly stated. When the books are well dusted, and one has broken through the starched formality in which the speakers' phrases were set, he finds a copious fund of political instruction. The federal Senate was more truly a parliamentary body in those formative days than perhaps at any other period. Several at least of its members were in doubt as to the political course they should follow; they were in doubt where they should find their party a.s.sociations. To them, debates had therefore a real and present significance. There were some votes to be affected, there were converts to be gained, by speeches even on purely political questions; there were some senators whose votes were not inexorably determined for them by the will of their parties or their const.i.tuents.

Much that was said had therefore a genuine parliamentary ring. The orators really sought to convince and persuade those who heard them within the easy and almost conversational limits of the old senate chamber. There was little of the mere p.r.o.nouncing of essays or declamations intended to have their real and only effect elsewhere. In this art of true parliamentary speaking rather than oratory, Van Buren was a master such as Lord Palmerston afterwards became. He was not eloquent. His speeches, so far as they are preserved, interest the student of political history and not of literature. They are sensible, clear, practical arguments made in rather finished sentences. One does not find quotations from them in books of school declamation. But they served far more effectively the primary end of parliamentary speaking than did the elaborate and powerful disquisitions of Calhoun, or the more splendid flood of Webster's eloquence. Van Buren's speeches were intended to convince, and they did convince some of the men in the seats about him. They were meant to persuade, and they did persuade. They were lucid exhibitions of political principles, generally practical, and touched sufficiently but not morbidly with the theoretical fears so common to our earlier politics. Some of those fears have since been shown to be groundless; but out of many of them has come much that is best in the modern temper of American political inst.i.tutions. Van Buren's speeches did not rise beyond the reach of popular understanding, although they never warmly touched popular sympathy. They were intended to formulate and spread a political faith in which he plainly saw that there was the material of a party,--a faith founded upon the jealousy of federal activity, however beneficent, which sought to avoid state control or encourage state dependence. The prolixity which was a grave fault of his state papers and political letters was far less exhibited in his oratorical efforts. His style was generally easy and vigorous, with little of the turgid learning which loaded down many sensible speeches of the time. Now and then, however, he resorted to the sentences of stilted formality which sometimes overtake a good public speaker, as a good actor sometimes lapses into the stage strut.

In Van Buren's senatorial speeches there is nothing to justify the charge of "non-committalism" so much made against him. When he spoke at all he spoke explicitly; and he plainly, though without acerbity, exhibited his likes and dislikes. Jackson was struck with this when he sat in the Senate with him. "I had heard a great deal about Mr. Van Buren," he said, "especially about his non-committalism. I made up my mind that I would take an early opportunity to hear him and judge for myself. One day an important subject was under debate in the Senate. I noticed that Mr. Van Buren was taking notes while one of the senators was speaking. I judged from this that he intended to reply, and I determined to be in my seat when he spoke. His turn came; and he rose and made a clear, straightforward argument, which, to my mind, disposed of the whole subject. I turned to my colleague, Major Eaton, who sat next to me. 'Major,' said I, 'is there anything non-committal about that?' 'No, sir,' said the major." Van Buren scrupulously observed the amenities of debate. He was uniformly courteous towards adversaries; and the calm self-control saved him, as some greater orators were not saved, from a descent to the aspersion of motive so common and so futile in political debate. He could not, indeed, help now and then an allusion to the venality and monarchical tendency of the Federalists and their successors; but this was an old formula which strong haters had years before made very popular in the Republican phrase-book, and which, as to the venality, meant n.o.body in particular.

CHAPTER V

DEMOCRATIC VICTORY IN 1828.--GOVERNOR

When in May, 1828, Van Buren left Washington, the country universally recognized him as the chief organizer of the new party and its congressional leader. As such he turned all his skill and industry to win a victory for Jackson and Calhoun. There was never in the history of the United States a more legitimate presidential canva.s.s than that of 1828. The rival candidates distinctly stood for conflicting principles of federal administration. On the one side, under Van Buren's shrewd management, with the theoretical cooperation of Calhoun,--the natural bent of whose mind was now aided and not thwarted by the exigencies of his personal career,--was the party inclined to strict limitation of federal powers, jealous for local powers, hostile to internal improvements by the federal government, inclined to a lower rather than a higher tariff. On the other side was the party strongly national in temper, with splendid conceptions of a powerful and multifariously useful central administration, impatient of the poverties and meannesses of many of the States. The latter party was led by a president with ampler training in public life than any American of his time, who sincerely and intelligently believed the principles of his party; and his party held those principles firmly, explicitly, and with practical unanimity. Jefferson, in almost his last letter, written in December, 1825, to William B. Giles, a venerable leader of the Democracy, the "Charles James Fox of Congress," Benton's "statesman of head and tongue," recalled indeed Adams's superiority over all ordinary considerations when the safety of his country had been questioned; but Jefferson declared himself in "the deepest affliction" at the usurpations by which the federal branch, through the decisions of the federal court, the doctrines of the President, and the misconstructions of Congress, was stripping its "colleagues, the state authorities, of the powers reserved to them." The voice from Monticello, feeble with its eighty-three years, and secretly uttered though it was, sounded the summons to a new Democratic battle.

Van Buren and his coadjutors, however, led a party as yet of inclination to principles rather than of principles. It was out of power. There was neither warmth nor striking exaltation in its programme. Its philosophical and political wisdom needed the aid of one of those simple cries for justice which are so potent in political warfare, and a leader to interest and fire the popular temper. Both were at hand. The late defeat of the popular will by the Adams-Clay coalition was the cry; the hero of the military victory most grateful to Americans was the leader.

To this cry and this leader Van Buren skillfully harnessed an intelligible, and at the least a reasonable, political creed. There were thus united nearly all the elements of political strength. Not indeed all, for the record of the leader was weak upon several articles of faith. Jackson had voted in the Senate for internal improvement bills, and among them bills of the most obnoxious character, those authorizing subscriptions to the stocks of private corporations. He had voted against reductions of the tariff. But the votes, it was hoped, exhibited only his inexpertness in applying general principles to actual legislation, or a good-natured willingness to please his const.i.tuents by single votes comparatively unimportant. In truth these mistakes were really inconsistencies of the politician, and no more. There had been a long inclination on Jackson's part to the Jeffersonian policy. Over thirty years before, he had in Congress been a strict constructionist and an anti-federalist. In 1801 he had required a candidate desiring his support to be "an admirer of state authority, agreeable to the true literal meaning" of the Const.i.tution, and "banishing the dangerous doctrine of implication." If he were now to have undivided responsibility, this old Democratic trend of his would, it was hoped, be strong enough under Democratic advice. As a candidate, the inconsistencies of a soldier politician were far outweighed by his picturesque and powerful personality. It is commonly thought of Jackson that he was a headstrong, pa.s.sionate, illiterate man, used and pulled about by a few intriguers. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was himself a politician of a high order. His letters are full of shrewd, vigorous, and even managing suggestions of partisan manoeuvres. Their political utterances show a highly active and generally sensible though not disciplined mind. He had had long and important experience of civil affairs, in the lower house of Congress, in the federal Senate when he was only thirty years old, in the const.i.tutional convention of his State, in its Supreme Court, later again in the Senate; he had been for eight years before the country as a candidate for its first office, and for many years in public business of large importance. There were two of the most distinguished Americans, men of the ripest abilities and amplest experience, and far removed from rashness, who from 1824 or before had steadily preferred Jackson for the presidency. These were Edward Livingston of Louisiana and De Witt Clinton of New York. Daniel Webster described his manners as "more presidential than those of any of the candidates." Jackson was, he wrote, "grave, mild, and reserved." Unless in Jackson's case there were effects without adequate causes, it is very certain that, with faults of most serious character, he still had the ability, the dignity, and the wisdom of a ruler of a high rank. He was, as very few men are, born to rule.

After Crawford's defeat, Van Buren is credited with a skillful management of the alliance of his forces with those of Jackson. There is not yet public, if it exist, any original evidence as to the details of this work. Van Buren's enemies were fond of describing it as full of cunning and trickery, the work of "the little magician;" and later and fairer writers have adopted from these enemies this characterization.

But all this seems entirely without proof. Nor is the story probable.

The union of the Crawford and Jackson men was perfectly natural.

Crawford was a physical wreck, out of public life. Numerous as were the exceptions, his followers and Jackson's included the great majority of the strict constructionists; and but a minority of either of the two bodies held the opposite views. Neither of the two men had, at the last election, been defeated by the other. That Van Buren used at Washington his unrivaled skill in a.s.suaging animosities and composing differences there can be no doubt. After the end of the session in March, 1827, together with Churchill C. Cambreleng, a member of Congress from New York and a close political friend of his, he made upon this mission a tour through Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. They visited Crawford, and were authorized to declare that he should support Jackson, but did not wish to aid Calhoun. At Raleigh Van Buren told the citizens that the spirit of encroachment had a.s.sumed a new and far more seductive aspect, and could only be resisted by the exercise of uncommon virtues.

Pa.s.sing through Washington on his way north, he paid a polite visit to Adams, talking with him placidly about Rufus King, Monroe, and the Petersburg horse-races. The President, regarding him as "the great electioneering manager for General Jackson," promptly noted in his diary, when the interview was over, that Van Buren was now acting the part Burr had performed in 1799 and 1800; and he found "much resemblance of character, manners, and even person, between the two men."

As early as 1826 the Van Buren Republicans of New York, and an important part of the Clintonians with the great governor at their head, had determined to support Jackson. Van Buren is said to have concealed his att.i.tude until after his reelection to the Senate in 1827. But this is a complete error, except as to his public choice of a candidate. His opposition to the Adams-Clay administration, it has already appeared, had been outspoken from 1825. The Jackson candidacy was not indeed definitely announced in New York until 1827. The cry for "Old Hickory"

then went up with a sudden unanimity which seemed to the Adams men a bit of devilish magic, but which was the patient prearrangement of a skillful politician appreciating his responsibility, and waiting, as the greatest of living politicians[6] recently told England a statesman ought to wait, until the time was really ripe, until the popular inclination was sufficiently formed to justify action by men in responsible public station.

The opposition to the reelection of John Quincy Adams in 1828 was sincerely considered by him, and has been often described by others, as singularly causeless, unworthy, and even monstrous. But in truth it led to one of the most necessary, one of the truest, political revolutions which our country has known. Both Adams and Clay were positive and able men. They were resolute that the rather tepid democracy of Monroe should be succeeded by a highly national, a federally active administration.

Prior to the election of 1824 Clay had been as nearly in opposition as the era of good feeling permitted. Early in Monroe's administration he had attacked the President's declaration that Congress had no right to construct roads and ca.n.a.ls. His criticism, Mr. Schurz tells us in his brilliant and impartial account of the time, "had a strong flavor of bitterness in it;" it was in part made up of "oratorical flings," by which Clay unnecessarily sought to attack and humiliate Monroe. Adams's diary states Clay's opposition to have been "violent, systematic," his course to have been "angry, acrimonious." Late in 1819 Monroe's friends had even consulted over the wisdom of defeating Clay's reelection to the speakership; and still later Clay had, as Mr. Schurz says, fiercely castigated the administration for truckling to foreigners. When Clay came into power, it would have been unreasonable for him to suppose that there must not arise vigorous parliamentary opposition on the part of those who consider themselves the true Republican successors of Monroe, seeking to stop the diversion into strange ways which Clay and Adams had now begun. Richard Rush of Pennsylvania, Adams's secretary of the treasury, and now the Adams candidate for vice-president, had, in one of his annual reports, declared it to be the duty of government "to augment the number and variety of occupations for its inhabitants; to hold out to every degree of labor, and to every modification of skill, its appropriate object and inducement; to organize the whole labor of a country; to entice into the widest ranges its mechanical and intellectual capacities, instead of suffering them to slumber; to call forth, wherever hidden, latent ingenuity, giving to effort activity and to emulation ardor; to create employment for the greater amount of numbers by adapting it to the diversified faculties, propensities, and situations of men, so that every particle of ability, every shade of genius, may come into requisition." Nor did this glowing picture of a useful and beneficent government go far beyond the utterances of Rush's senior a.s.sociate on the presidential ticket. It is certain that it was highly agreeable to Clay.

Surely there could be no clearer political issue presented, on the one side by Van Buren's speeches in the Senate, and on the other by authoritative and solemn declarations of the three chief persons of the administration. Whatever the better side of the issue may have been, no issue was ever a more legitimate subject of a political campaign. It is true that the accusations were unfounded, which were directed against Adams for treachery to the Republican principles he professed after, on adhering to Jefferson, he had resigned his seat in the Senate. He had joined Jefferson on questions of foreign policy and domestic defense, and had, until his election to the presidency, been chiefly concerned with diplomacy. But though the accusations were false, it is true enough that Adams himself had made the issue of the campaign. Nor was it creditable to him that he saw in the opposition something merely personal to himself. If he were wrong upon the issue, as Van Buren and a majority of the people thought, his long public service, his utter integrity, his exalted sense of the obligations of office, ought not to have saved him from the battle or from defeat. How true and deep was this political contest of 1828 one sees in the fact that from it, almost as much as from the triumph of Jefferson, flow the traditions of one of the great American parties, traditions which survived the corruptions of slavery, and are still powerful in party administration.[7] If John Quincy Adams had been elected, and if, as might naturally have been the case, there had followed, at this commencement of railway building, a firm establishment of the doctrine that the national government could properly build roads within the States, it is more than mere speculation to say that the later history of the United States would, whether for the better or the worse, have been very different from what it has been.

The dangers to which American inst.i.tutions would be exposed, if the federal government had become a great power levying taxes upon the whole country to be used in constructing railways, or, what was worse, purchasing stock in railway corporations, and doing this, as it would inevitably have done, according to the amount of pressure here or there,--such dangers, it is easy to understand, seem, whether rightly or wrongly, appalling to a large cla.s.s of political thinkers. To realize this sense of danger dissipates the aspect of _doctrinaire_ extravagance in the speeches of Adams's opponents against lat.i.tudinarian construction.

In the canva.s.s of 1828 there was on both sides more wicked and despicable exhibition of slander than had been known since Jefferson and John Adams were pitted against each other. Jackson was a military butcher and utterly illiterate; the chast.i.ty of his wife was doubtful.

Adams had corruptly bargained away offices; his accounts of public moneys received by him needed serious scrutiny; and, that the charges might be precisely balanced, he had when minister at St. Petersburg acted as procurer to the Czar of Russia. These lies doubtless defeated themselves; but in each election since 1828 there have been politicians low enough and silly enough to imitate them. To nothing of this kind did Van Buren descend. Nor does it seem that even then he used the cry of a corrupt bargain between Adams and Clay, in which Jackson believed as long as he lived. The coalition of 1825, defeating, as it had, a candidate chosen by a larger number of voters than any other, was the most used, and probably the most successfully used, of any of the campaign issues. Nor was this clearly illegitimate, although Adams and many for him have hotly condemned its immorality. Every political coalition between men lately in opposition political and personal, by which both get office, is fairly open to criticism. In experience it has always been full of political danger, although since the prejudice of the times has worn away, the defense of Adams and Clay is seen to be amply sufficient. Whatever had been their mutual dislikes political or personal, each of them was politically and in his practical statesmanship far nearer to the other than to any other of the compet.i.tors. But we have yet to see a political campaign against a coalition whose members have been rewarded with office, in which this form of attack is not made by men very intelligent and most honest. Nor is there any reason to hold the followers of Jackson to a higher standard. In our own time we have seen two coalitions whose parties wisely recognized this danger. The chief leaders of the Republican revolt in 1884 neither sought nor took office from the former adversaries with whom for once they then acted. The Dissenting Liberals in England did not take office in the Conservative ministry formed in 1886; and the odium which, in the change later made in it, followed Mr.

Goschen into its second place, ill.u.s.trated very well the truth that, however honorable the course may be, it is inevitably dangerous.