Martin Van Buren. Edward Morse Shepard
there was in an office a quality of property having about it the same kind of sacred immunity which belongs to real or personal estate. There were reversions to offices after the deaths of their occupants, like vested remainders in lands. It was offensive to the ordinary sense of decency and justice that the right of a public officer to appropriate so much of the public revenue should be attacked. It did not offend the public conscience that great perquisites should belong to officers performing work of the most trifling value or none at all. The same practices and traditions, weakened by distance from England and by the simpler life and smaller wealth of the colonists, came to our forefathers. They existed when the democratic movement, stayed during the necessities of war and civil reconstruction, returned at the end of the last century and became all-powerful in 1801. To break this idea of property and right in office, to make it clear that every office was a mere means of service of the people at the wish of the people, there seemed, to very patriotic and generally very wise men, no simpler way than that the people by their elections should take away and distribute offices in utter disregard of the interests of those who held them. The odious result to which this afterwards led, of making offices the mere property of influential politicians, was but imperfectly foreseen. Nor did that result, inevitable as it was, follow for many years. There seems no reason to believe that the incessant and extensive changes in office which began in 1801, seriously lowered the standard of actual public service until years after Van Buren was a powerful and conspicuous politician. Political parties were pretty generally in the hands of honest men. The prostituted and venal disposition of "spoils," though a natural sequence, was to come long after. Rotation was practiced, or its fruits were accepted and enjoyed with satisfaction, by public men of the State who were really statesmen, who had high standards of public honor and duty, whose minds were directed towards great and exalted public ends. If it seemed right to De Witt Clinton, Edward Livingston, Robert R. Livingston, and Ambrose Spencer, surely lesser gods of our early political Olympus could not be expected to refuse its advantages or murmur at its hardships. Nor was the change distasteful to the people, if we may judge by their political behavior. No faction or party seems to have been punished by public sentiment for the practice except in conspicuous cases like those of De Witt Clinton and Van Buren, where sometimes blows aimed at single men roused popular and often an undeserved sympathy. The idea that a public officer should easily and naturally go from the ranks of the people without special equipment, and as easily return to those ranks, has been popularly agreeable wherever the story of Cincinnatus has been told. Early in this century the closeness of offices to ordinary life, and the absence of an organized bureaucracy controlling or patronizing the masses of men, seemed proper elements of the great democratic reform. There had not yet arisen the very modern and utilitarian and the vastly better conception of a service, the responsible directors of whose policy should be changed with popular sentiment, but whose subordinates should be treated by the public as any other employer would treat them, upon simple and unsentimental rules of business. Another practical consideration makes more intelligible the failure of our ancestors to perceive the dangers of the great change they permitted. Offices were not nearly as technical, their duties not nearly as uniform, as they have grown to be in the more complex procedures of our enormously richer and more populous time. Every officer did a multitude of things. Intelligent and active men in unofficial life shifted with amazing readiness and success from one calling to another. A general became a judge, or a judge became a general—as, indeed, we have seen in later days. A merchant could learn to survey; a farmer could keep or could learn to keep fair records.
In the art of making of the lesser offices ammunition with which to fight great battles over great questions, Van Buren became a master. His imperturbable temper and patience, his keen reading of the motives and uses of men, gave him so firm a hold upon politicians that it has been common to forget the undoubted hold he long had upon the people. In April, 1816, he was reëlected senator for a second term of four years. His eight years of service in the senate expired in 1820.
In November, 1812, the first session of the new legislature was held to choose presidential electors. Not until sixteen years later were electors chosen directly by the people. Van Buren voted for the candidates favorable to De Witt Clinton for president as against Madison. In the successful struggle of the Clintonians for these electors, he is said in this, his first session, to have shown the address and activity which at once made him a Republican leader. For his vote against Madison Van Buren's friends afterwards made many apologies; his adversaries declared it unpardonable treachery to one of the revered Democratic fathers. But the young politician was not open to much condemnation. De Witt Clinton, though he had but just reached the beginning of middle life, was a very able and even an illustrious man. He had been unanimously nominated in an orderly way by a caucus of the Republican members of the legislature of 1811 and 1812 of which Van Buren was not a member. He had accepted the nomination and had declined to withdraw from it. There was a strong Republican opposition to the declaration of war at that time, because preparation for it had not been adequately made. Most of the Republican members of Congress from New York had voted against the declaration. The virtues and abilities of Madison were not those likely to make a successful war, as the event amply proved. There was natural and deserved discontent with the treatment by Jefferson's administration, in which Madison had charge of foreign relations, and by Madison's own administration, of the difficulties caused by the British Orders in Council, the Berlin and Milan decrees of Napoleon, and the unprincipled depredations of both the great belligerents. Van Buren is said by Butler, then an inmate of his family, to have been an open and decided advocate of the embargo, and of all the strong measures proposed against Great Britain and of the war itself. Nor was this very inconsistent with his vote for Clinton. He had a stronger sense of allegiance to his party in the State than to his party at Washington; and the Republican party of New York had regularly declared for Clinton. For once at least Van Buren found himself voting with the great body of the Federalists, men who had not, like John Quincy Adams, become reconciled to the strong and obvious, though sometimes ineffective, patriotism of Jefferson's and Madison's administrations. But whatever had been the motives which induced Van Buren to support Clinton, they soon ceased to operate. Within a few months after this the political relations between the two men were dissolved; and they were politically hostile, until Clinton's death fourteen years afterwards called from Van Buren a pathetic tribute.
Although the youngest man but one, it was said, until that time elected to the state senate, Van Buren was in January, 1814, chosen to prepare the answer then customarily made to the speech of the governor. In it he defended the war, which had been bitterly assailed in the address to the governor made by the Federalist Assembly. Political divisions even when carried to excess were, he said, inseparable from the blessings of freedom; but such divisions were unfit in their resistance of a foreign enemy. The great body of the New York Republicans, with Governor Tompkins at their head, now gave Madison vigorous support; although their defection in 1812 had probably made possible the Federalist success at the election for the Assembly in 1813, which embarrassed the national administration. Van Buren warmly supported Tompkins for his reëlection in April, 1813, and prepared for the legislative caucus a highly declamatory, but clear and forcible, address to Republican electors in his behalf. The provocations to war were strongly set out. It was declared that "war and war alone was our only refuge from national degradation;" the "two great and crying grievances" were "the destruction of our commerce, and the impressment of our seamen;" for Americans did not anticipate the surrender at Ghent two years later to the second wrong. While American sailors' "deeds of heroic valor make old Ocean smile at the humiliations of her ancient tyrant," the address urged Americans to mark the man, meaning the trading Federalist, who believed "in commuting our sailors' rights for the safety of our merchants' goods." In the sophomoric and solemn rhetoric of which Americans, and Englishmen too, were then fond, it pointed out that the favor of citizens was not sought "by the seductive wiles and artful blandishments of the corrupt minions of aristocracy," who of course were Federalists, but that citizens were now addressed "in the language which alone becomes freemen to use—the language to which alone it becomes freemen to listen."
In the legislative sessions of 1813 and 1814 Van Buren gave a practical and skillful support to administration measures. But many of them were balked by the Federalists, until in the election of April, 1814, the rising patriotism of the country, undaunted by the unskillful and unfortunate conduct of the war, pronounced definitely in favor of a strong war policy. The Republicans recovered