Martin Van Buren. Edward Morse Shepard
his seat in the United States Senate. The "era of good feeling" was then at its height. It was with perfect sincerity that Monroe in his message of the preceding year had said: "I see much cause to rejoice in the felicity of our situation." He had just been reëlected president with but a single vote against him. The country was in profound peace. The burdens of the war with England were no longer felt; and its few victories were remembered with exuberant good-nature. Two years before, Florida had been acquired by the strong and persisting hand of the younger Adams. Wealth and comfort were in rapid increase. The moans and rage of the defeated and disgraced Federalists were suppressed, or, if now and then feebly heard, were complacently treated as outbursts of senility and impotence. People were not only well-to-do in fact, but, what was far more extraordinary, they believed themselves to be so. In his great tariff speech but three or four years later, Hayne called it the "period of general jubilee." Every great public paper and speech, described the "felicity" of America. The president pointed out to his fellow-citizens "the prosperous and happy condition of our country in all the great circumstances which constitute the felicity of a nation;" he told them that they were "a free, virtuous, and enlightened people;" the unanimity of public sentiment in favor of his "humble pretensions" indicated, he thought, "the great strength and stability of our Union." And all was reciprocated by the people. This modest, gentle ruler was in his very mediocrity agreeable to them. He symbolized the comfort and order, the supreme respectability of which they were proud. When in 1817 he made a tour through New England, which had seen neither Jefferson nor Madison as visitors during their terms of office, and in his military coat of domestic manufacture, his light small-clothes and cocked hat, met processions and orators without end, it was obvious that this was not the radical minister whom Washington had recalled from Jacobin Paris for effusively pledging eternal friendship and submitting to fraternal embraces in the National Convention. Such youthful frenzy was now long past. America was enjoying a great national idyl. Even the Federalists, except of course those who had been too violent or who were still unrepentant, were not utterly shut out from the light of the placid high noon. Jackson had urged Monroe in 1816 "to exterminate that monster called party spirit," and to let some Federalists come to the board. Monroe thought, however, "that the administration should rest strongly on the Republican party," though meaning to bring all citizens "into the Republican fold as quietly as possible." Party, he declared, was unnecessary to free government; all should be Republicans. And when Van Buren reached the sprawling, slatternly American capital in 1821, all were Republicans.
There were of course personal feuds in this great political family. Those of New York were the most notorious; but there were many others. But such rivalries and quarrels were only a proof of the political calm. When families are smugly prosperous they indulge petty dislikes, which disappear before storm or tragedy. The halcyon days could not last. Monroe's dream of a country with but one party, and that basking in perpetual "felicity," was, in spite of what seemed for the moment a close realization, as far from the truth as the dreams of later reformers who would in politics organize all the honest, respectable folk together against all the dishonest.
The heat of the Missouri question was ended at the session before Van Buren's senatorial term began. It seemed only a thunder-storm passing across a rich, warm day in harvest time, angry and agitating for the moment, but quickly forgotten by dwellers in the pastoral scene when the rainbow of compromise appeared in the delightful hues of Henry Clay's eloquence. The elements of the tremendous struggle yet to come were in the atmosphere, but they were not visible. The slavery question had no political importance to Van Buren until fourteen years afterwards. In judging the men of that day we shall seriously mistake if we set up our own standards among their ideas. The moral growth in the twenty-five years since the emancipation makes it irksome to be fair to the views of the past generation, or indeed to the former views of half of our present generation. Slavery has come to seem intrinsically wicked, hideous, to be hated everywhere. But sixty-five years ago it still lingered in several of the Northern States. It was wrong indeed; but the temper of condemnation towards it was Platonic, full of the unavailing and unpoignant regret with which men hear of poverty and starvation and disease and crime which they do not see and which they cannot help. Nor did slavery then seem to the best of men so very great a wrong even to the blacks; there were, it was thought, many ameliorations and compensations. Men were glad to believe and did believe that the human chattels were better and happier than they would have been in Africa. The economic waste of slavery, its corrupting and enervating effect upon the whites, were thought to be objections quite as serious. Besides, it was widely fancied to be at worst but a temporary evil. Jefferson's dislike of it was shared by many throughout the South as well as the North. The advantages of a free soil were becoming so apparent in the strides by which the North was passing the South in every material advantage, that the latter, it seemed, must surely learn the lesson. For the institution within States already admitted to the Union, anti-slavery men felt no responsibility. Forty years later the great leader of the modern Republican party would not, he solemnly declared in the very midst of a pro-slavery rebellion, interfere with slavery in the States if the Union could be saved without disturbing it. If men in South Carolina cared to maintain a ruinous and corrupting domestic institution, even if it were a greater wrong against the slaves than it was believed to be, or even if it were an injury to the whites themselves, still men of Massachusetts and New York ought, it seemed to them, to be no more disturbed over it than we feel bound to be over polygamy in Turkey.
But as to the territory west of the Mississippi not yet formed into States, there was a different sentiment held by a great majority at the North and by many at the South. Slavery was not established there. The land was national domain, whose forms of political and social life were yet to be set up. Why not, before the embarrassments of slave settlement arose, devote this new land to freedom—not so much to freedom as that shining goddess of mercy and right and justice who rose clear and obvious to our purged vision out of the civil war, as to the less noble deities of economic well-being, thrift, and industrial comfort? Democrats at the North, therefore, were almost unanimous that Missouri should come in free or not at all; and so with the rest of the territory beyond the Mississippi, except the old slave settlement of Louisiana, already admitted as a State. The resolution in the legislature of New York in January, 1820, supported by Van Buren, that freedom be "an indispensable condition of admission" of new States, was but one of many exhibitions of feeling at the North. Monroe and the very best of Americans did not, however, think the principle so sacred or necessary as to justify a struggle. John Quincy Adams, hating slavery as did but few Americans, distinctly favored the compromise by which Missouri came in with slavery, and by which the other new territory north of the present southern line of Missouri extended westward was to be free, and the territory south of it slave. With no shame he acquiesced in the very thing about which forty years later the nation plunged into war. "For the present," he wrote, "this contest is laid asleep." So the stream of peaceful sunshine and prosperity returned over the land.
Van Buren's views at this time were doubtless clear against the extension of slavery. He disliked the institution; and in part saw how inconsistent were its odious practices with the best civic growth, how debasing to whites and blacks alike. In March, 1822, he voted in the Senate, with Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts and Rufus King, for a proviso in the bill creating the new Territory of Florida by which the introduction of slaves was forbidden except by citizens removing there for actual settlement, and by which slaves introduced in violation of the law were to be freed. But he was in a minority. Northern senators from Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Indiana refused to interfere with free trade in slaves between the Southern States and this southernmost territory.
Among the forty-eight members of the Senate which met in December, 1821, neither Clay nor Calhoun nor Webster had a seat. The first was restless in one of his brief absences from official life; the second was secretary of war; and Webster, out of Congress, was making great law arguments and greater orations. Benton was there from the new State of Missouri, just beginning his thirty years. The warm friendship and political alliance between him and Van Buren must have soon begun. During all or nearly all Van Buren's senatorship the two occupied adjoining seats. Two years later Andrew Jackson was sent to the Senate by Tennessee, as a suitable preliminary to his presidential canvass. During the next two sessions Van Buren, Benton, and Jackson were thrown together; and without doubt the foundations were laid of their lifelong intimacy and political affection. Benton and Jackson, personal enemies years before,