Martin Van Buren. Edward Morse Shepard
on Van Buren's or Clinton's side, as well as of the remaining Federalists.
Van Buren's direct interest in national politics had already begun. In 1816 he was present in Washington (then a pretty serious journey from Albany) when the Republican congressional caucus was held to nominate a president. Governor Tompkins, after a brief canvass, retired; and Crawford, then secretary of war, became the candidate against Monroe, and was supported by most of the Republicans from New York. Van Buren's preference was not certainly known, though it is supposed he preferred Monroe. In 1820 he was chosen a presidential elector in place of an absentee from the electoral college, and participated in the all but unanimous vote for Monroe. He voted with the other New York electors for Tompkins for the vice-presidency. In April, 1820, he wrote to Henry Meigs, a Bucktail congressman then at Washington, that the rascality of some of the deputy postmasters in the State was intolerable, and cried aloud for relief; that it was impossible to penetrate the interior of the State with friendly papers; and that two or three prompt removals were necessary. The postmaster-general was to be asked "to do an act of justice and render us a partial service" by the removal of the postmasters at Bath, Little Falls, and Oxford, and to appoint successors whom Van Buren named. In January, 1821, Governor Clinton sent this letter to the legislature, with a message and other papers so numerous as to be carried in a green bag, which gave the name to the message, in support of a charge that the national administration had interfered in the state election. But the "green-bag message" did Van Buren little harm, for Clinton's own proscriptive rigor had been great, and it was only two years before that Van Buren himself had been removed from the attorney-generalship. In 1821 the political division of the New York Republicans was carried to national politics. When a speaker was to be chosen in place of Clay, Taylor of New York, the Republican candidate, was opposed by the Bucktail congressmen, because he had supported Clinton.
In February, 1821, Van Buren gained the then dignified promotion to the federal Senate. He was elected by the Bucktails against Nathan Sanford, the sitting senator, who was supported by the Clintonians and Federalists. Van Buren was now thirty-eight years old, and in the early prime of his powers. He had run the gauntlet of two popular elections; he had been easily first among the Republicans of the state Senate; he had there shown extraordinary political skill and an intelligent and public spirit; he had ably administered the chief law office of the State which was not judicial. Though not yet keenly interested in any federal question—for his activity and thought had been sufficiently engaged in affairs of his own State—he turned to the new field with an easy confidence, amply justified by his mastery of the problems with which he had so far grappled. He reached Washington the undoubted leader of his party in the State. The prestige of Governor Tompkins, although just reëlected vice-president, had suffered from his recent defeat for the governorship, and from his pecuniary and other difficulties; and besides, he obviously had not Van Buren's unrivaled equipment for political leadership.
Before Van Buren attended his first session in the federal capital he performed for the public most honorable service in the state constitutional convention which sat in the autumn of 1821. This body illustrated the earnest and wholesome temper in which the most powerful public men of the State, after many exhibitions of partisan, personal, and even petty animosities, could treat so serious and abiding a matter as its fundamental law. The Democrats sent Vice-President Tompkins, both the United States senators, King and Van Buren, the late senator, Sanford, and Samuel Nelson, then beginning a long and honorable career. The Clintonians and Federalists sent Chancellor Kent and Ambrose Spencer, the chief justice. Van Buren was chosen from Otsego, and not from his own county, probably because the latter was politically unfavorable to him.
This convention was one of the steps in the democratic march. It was called to broaden the suffrage, to break up the central source of patronage at Albany, and to enlarge local self-administration. The government of New York had so far been a freeholders' government, with those great virtues, and those greater and more enduring vices, which were characteristic of a government controlled exclusively by the owners of land. The painful apprehension aroused by the democratic resolution to reduce, if not altogether to destroy, the exclusive privileges of land-owners, was expressed in the convention by Chancellor Kent. He would not "bow before the idol of universal suffrage;" this extreme democratic principle, he said, had "been regarded with terror by the wise men of every age;" wherever tried, it had brought "corruption, injustice, violence, and tyranny;" if adopted, posterity would "deplore in sackcloth and ashes the delusion of the day." He wished no laws to pass without the free consent of the owners of the soil. He did not foresee English parliaments elected in 1885 and 1886 by a suffrage not very far from universal, or a royal jubilee celebrated by democratic masses, or the prudent conservatism in matters of property of the enfranchised French democracy—he foresaw none of these when he declared that England and France could not sustain the weight of universal suffrage; that "the radicals of England, with the force of that mighty engine, would at once sweep away the property, the laws, and the liberty of that island like a deluge." Van Buren distinguished himself in the debate. Upon this exciting and paramount topic he did not share the temper which possessed most of his party. His speech was clear, explicit, philosophical, and really statesmanlike. It so impressed even his adversaries; and Hammond, one of them, declared that he ought for it to be ranked "among the most shining orators and able statesmen of the age."
In reading this, or indeed any of the utterances of Van Buren where the occasion required distinctness, it is difficult to find the ground of the charge of "noncommittalism" so incessantly made against him. He doubtless refrained from taking sides on questions not yet ripe for decision, however clear, and whatever may have been his speculative opinions. But this is the duty of every statesman; it has been the practice of every politician who has promoted reform. Van Buren now pointed out how completely the events of the forty years past had discredited the grave speculative fears of Franklin, Hamilton, and Madison as to the result of some provisions of the Federal Constitution. With Burke he believed experience to be the only unerring touchstone. He conclusively showed that property had been as safe in those American communities which had universal suffrage as in the few which retained a property qualification; that venality in voting, apprehended from the change, already existed in the grossest forms at the parliamentary elections of England. Going to the truth which is at the dynamic source of democratic institutions, he told the chancellor that when among the masses of America the principles of order and good government should yield to principles of anarchy and violence and permit attacks on private property or an agrarian law, all constitutional provisions would be idle and unavailing, because they would have lost all their force and influence. With a true instinct, however, Van Buren wished the steps to be taken gradually. He was not yet ready, he said, to admit to the suffrage the shifting population of cities, held to the government by no other ties than the mere right to vote. He was not ready for a really universal suffrage. The voter ought, if he did not participate in the government by paying taxes or performing militia duty, to be a man who was a householder with some of the elements of stability, with something at stake in the community. Although they had reached "the verge of universal suffrage," he could not with his Democratic friends take the "one step beyond;" he would not cheapen the invaluable right by conferring it with indiscriminating hand "on every one, black or white, who would be kind enough to condescend to accept it." Though a Democrat he was opposed, he said, to a "precipitate and unexpected prostration of all qualifications;" he looked with dread upon increasing the voters in New York city from thirteen or fourteen thousand to twenty-five thousand, believing (curious prediction for a father of the Democratic party!) that the increase "would render their elections rather a curse than a blessing," and "would drive from the polls all sober-minded people."
The universal suffrage then postponed was wisely adopted a few years later. Democracy marched steadily on; and Van Buren was willing, probably very willing, to be guided by experience. He opposed in the convention a proposal supported by most of his party to restrict suffrage to white citizens, but favored a property qualification for black men, the $250 freehold ownership until then required of white voters. He would not, he said, draw from them a revenue and yet deny them the right of suffrage. Twenty-five years later, in 1846, nearly three-fourths of the voters of the State refused equal suffrage to the blacks; and even in 1869, six years after the emancipation proclamation, a majority still refused to give them the same rights as white men.
The question of appointments to office