Martin Van Buren. Edward Morse Shepard
Table of Contents
It sometimes happened during the anxious years when the terrors of civil war, though still smouldering, were nearly aflame, that on Wall Street or Nassau Street, busy men of New York saw Martin Van Buren and his son walking arm in arm. "Prince John," tall, striking in appearance, his hair divided at the middle in a fashion then novel for Americans, was in the prime of life, resolute and aggressive in bearing. His father was a white-haired, bright-eyed old man, erect but short in figure, of precise though easy and kindly politeness, and with a touch of deference in his manner. His presence did not peremptorily command the attention of strangers; but to those who looked attentively there was plain distinction in the refined and venerable face. Passers-by might well turn back to see more of the two men thus affectionately and picturesquely together. For they were famous characters—the one in the newer, the other in the older politics of America. John Van Buren, fresh from his Free Soil battle and the tussles of the Hards and Softs, was striving, as a Democrat, to serve the cause of the Union, though conscious that he rested under the suspicion of the party to whose service, its divisions in New York now seemingly ended, he had reluctantly returned. But he still faced the slave power with an independence only partially abated before the exigencies of party loyalty. The ex-President, definitely withdrawn from the same Free Soil battle, a struggle into which he had entered when the years were already heavy upon him, had survived to be once more a worthy in the Democratic party, again to receive its formal veneration, but never again its old affection. In their timid manœuvres with slavery it was perhaps with the least possible awkwardness that the northern Democrats sought to treat him as a great Democratic leader; but they did not let it be forgotten that the leader was forever retired from leadership. While the younger man was in the thick of political encounters which the party carried on in blind futility, the older man was hardly more than an historical personage. He was no longer, his friends strove to think, the schismatic candidate of 1848, but rather the ally and friend of Jackson, or, better still and further away, the disciple of Jefferson.
For, more than any other American, Martin Van Buren had succeeded to the preaching of Jefferson's political doctrines, and to his political power as well, that curious and potent mingling of philosophy, statesmanship, and electioneering. The Whigs' distrust towards Van Buren was still bitter; the hot anger of his own party over the blow he had dealt in 1848 was still far from subsided; the gratitude of most Free Soil men had completely disappeared with his apparent acquiescence in the politics of Pierce and Buchanan. Save in a narrow circle of anti-slavery Democrats, Van Buren, in these last days of his, was judged at best with coldness, and most commonly with dislike or even contempt. Not much of any other temper has yet gone into political history; its writers have frequently been content to accept the harshness of partisan opinion, or even the scurrility and mendacity visited upon him during his many political campaigns, and to ignore the positive records of his career and public service. The present writer confesses to have begun this Life, not indeed sharing any of the hatred or contempt so commonly felt towards Van Buren, but still given to many serious depreciations of him, which a better examination has shown to have had their ultimate source in the mere dislike of personal or political enemies—a dislike to whose expression, often powerful and vivid, many writers have extended a welcome seriously inconsistent with the fairness of history.
When Abraham Lincoln was chosen president in 1860, this predecessor of his by a quarter century was a true historical figure. The bright, genial old man connected, visibly and really, those stirring and dangerous modern days with the first political struggles under the American Constitution, struggles then long passed into the quiet of history, to leave him almost their only living reminiscence. Martin Van Buren was a man fully grown and already a politician when in 1801 the triumph of Thomas Jefferson completed the political foundation of the United States. Its profound inspiration still remained with him on this eve of Lincoln's election. Under its influence his political career had begun and had ended.
At Jefferson's election the aspiration and fervor which attended the first, the new-born sense of American national life, had largely worn away. The ideal visions of human liberty had long before grown dim during seven years of revolutionary war, with its practical hardships, its vicissitudes of meanness and glory, and during the four years of languor and political incompetence which followed. In the agitation for better union, political theories filled the minds of our forefathers. Lessons were learned from the Achæan League, as well as from the Swiss Confederation, the German Empire, and the British Constitution. Both history and speculation, however, were firmly subordinated to an extraordinary common sense, in part flowing from, as it was most finely exhibited in, the luminous and powerful, if unexalted, genius of Franklin. From the open beginning of constitution-making at Annapolis in 1786 until the inauguration of John Adams, the American people, under the masterful governing of Washington, were concerned with the framework upon which the fabric of their political life was to be wrought. The framework was doubtless in itself of a vast and enduring importance. If the consolidating and aristocratic schemes of Hamilton had not met defeat in the federal convention, or if the separatist jealousies of Patrick Henry and George Clinton had not met defeat in Virginia and New York after the work of the convention was done, there would to-day be a different American people. Nor would our history be the amazing story of the hundred years past. But upon the governmental framework thus set up could be woven political fabrics widely and essentially different in their material, their use, and their enduring virtue. For quite apart from the framework of government were the temper and traditions of popular politics out of which comes, and must always come, the essential and dominant nature of public institutions. In this creative and deeper work Jefferson was engaged during his struggle for political power after returning from France in 1789, during his presidential career from 1801 to 1809, and during the more extraordinary, and in American history the unparalleled, supremacy of his political genius after he had left office. In the circumstances of our colonial life, in our race extractions, in our race fusion upon the Atlantic seaboard, and in the moral effect of forcible and embittered separation from the parent country, arose indeed, to go no further back, the political instincts of American men. It is, however, fatal to adequate conception of our political development to ignore the enormous formative influence which the twenty years of Jefferson's rule had upon American political character. But so partial and sometimes so partisan have been the historians of our early national politics in their treatment of that great man, that a just appreciation of the political atmosphere in which Van Buren began his career is exceedingly difficult.
There was an American government, an American nation, when Washington gladly escaped to Mt. Vernon from the bitterly factional quarrels of the politicians at Philadelphia. The government was well ordered; the nation was respectable and dignified. But most of the people were either still colonial and provincial, or were rushing, in turbulence and bad temper, to crude speculations and theories. Twenty-five years later, Jefferson had become the political idol of the American people, a people completely and forever saturated with democratic aspirations, democratic ideals, what John Marshall called "political metaphysics," a people with strong and lasting characteristics, no longer either colonial or provincial, but profoundly national. The skill, the industry, the arts of the politician, had been used by a man gifted with the genius and not free from the faults of a philosopher, to plant in American usages, prejudices, and traditions—in the very fibre of American political life, a cardinal and fruitful idea. The work was done for all time. For Americans, government was thenceforth to be a mere instrument. No longer a symbol, or an ornament or crown of national life, however noble and august, it was a simple means to a plain end; to be always, and if need be rudely, tested and measured by its practical working, by its service to popular rights and needs. In those earlier days, too, there had been "classes and masses," the former of whom held public service and public policy as matters of dignity and order and high assertion of national right and power, requiring in their ministers peculiar and esoteric light, and an equipment of which common men ought not to judge, because they could not judge aright. Afterward, in Monroe's era of good feeling, the personal rivalries of presidential candidates were in bad temper enough; but Americans were at last all democrats. Whether for better or worse, the nation had ceased to be either British or colonial, or provincial, in its character. In the delightful Rip Van Winkle of a later Jefferson, during the twenty years' sleep, the old Dutch house has gone, the peasant's