Martin Van Buren. Edward Morse Shepard
quaint inn with its village tapster, all the old scene of loyal provincial life. Rip returns to a noisy, boastful, self-assertive town full of American "push" and "drive," and profane disregard of superiors and everything ancient. It was hardly a less change which spread through the United States in the twenty years of Jefferson's unrivaled and fruitful leadership. Superstitious regard for the "well-born," for institutions of government as images of veneration apart from their immediate and practical use; the faith in government as essentially a financial establishment which ought to be on peculiarly friendly relations with banks and bankers; the treatment and consideration of our democratic organization as an experiment to be administered with deprecatory deference to European opinion; the idea that upon the great, simple elements of political belief and practice, the mass of men could not judge as wisely and safely as the opulent, the cultivated, the educated; the idea that it was a capital feature of political art to thwart the rashness and incompetence of the lower people—all these theories and traditions, which had firmly held most of the disciplined thought of Europe and America, and to which the lurid horrors of the French Revolution had brought apparent consecration—all these had now gone; all had been fatally wounded, or were sullenly and apologetically cherished in the aging bitterness of the Federalists. There was an American people with as distinct, as powerful, as characteristic a polity as belonged to the British islanders. In 1776 a youthful genius had seized upon a colonial revolt against taxation as the occasion to make solemn declaration of a seeming abstraction about human rights. He had submitted, however, to subordinate his theory during the organization of national defense and the strengthening of the framework of government. Nor did he shine in either of those works. But with the nation established, with a union secured so that its people could safely attend to the simpler elements of human rights, Jefferson and his disciples were able to lead Americans to the temper, the aspirations, and the very prejudices of essential democracy. The Declaration of Independence, the ten amendments to the Constitution theoretically formulating the rights of men or of the States, sank deep into the sources of American political life. So completely indeed was the work done, that in 1820 there was but one political party in America; all were Jeffersonian Republicans; and when the Republican party was broken up in 1824, the only dispute was whether Adams or Jackson or Crawford or Clay or Calhoun best represented the political beliefs now almost universal. It seemed to Americans as if they had never known any other beliefs, as if these doctrines of their democracy were truisms to which the rest of the world was marvelously blind.
Nothing in American public life has, in prolonged anger and even savage desperation, equaled the attacks upon Jefferson during the steady growth of his stupendous influence. The hatred of him personally, and the belief in the wickedness of his private and public life, survive in our time. Nine tenths of the Americans who then read books sincerely thought him an enemy of mankind and of all that was sacred. Nine tenths of the authors of American books on history or politics have to this day written under the influence which ninety years ago controlled their predecessors. And for this there is no little reason. As the American people grew conscious of their own peculiar and intensely active political force, there came to them a period of national and popular life in which much was unlovely, much was crude, much was disagreeably vulgar. Books upon America written by foreign travelers, from the days of Jefferson down to our civil war, superficial and offensive as they often were, told a great deal of truth. We do not now need to wince at criticisms upon a rawness, an insolent condescension towards the political ignorance of foreigners and the unhappy subjects of kings, a harshness in the assertion of the equality of Caucasian men, and a restless, boastful manner. The criticisms were in great measure just. But the critics were stupid and blind not to see the vast and vital work and change going on before their eyes, to chiefly regard the trifling and incidental things which disgusted them. Their eyes were open to all our faults of taste and manner, but closed to the self-dependent and self-assertive energy the disorder of whose exhibition would surely pass away. In every democratic experiment, in every experiment of popular or national freedom, there is almost inevitable a vulgarizing of public manners, a lack of dignity in details, which disturbs men who find restful delight in orderly and decorous public life; and their disgust is too often directed against beneficent political changes or reforms. If one were to judge the political temper of the American people from many of our own writers, and still more if he were to judge it from the observations even of intelligent and friendly foreigners prior to 1861, he would believe that temper to be sordid, mean, noisy, boastful, and even cruel. But from the war of 1812 with England to the election of Buchanan in 1856, the American people had been doing a profound, organic, democratic work. Meantime many had seen no more than the unsightly, the mean and trivial, the malodorous details, which were mere incidents and blemishes of hidden and dynamic operations. Unimaginative minds usually fail to see the greater and deeper movements of politics as well as those of science. In the public virtues then maturing there lay the ability long and strenuously to conduct an enterprise the greatest which modern times have known, and an extraordinary popular capacity for restraint and discipline. In those virtues was sleeping a tremendously national spirit which, with cost and sacrifice not to be measured by the vast figures of the statistician, on one side sought independence, and on the other saved the Union—an exalted love of men and truth and liberty, which, after all the enervations of pecuniary prosperity, endured with patience hardships and losses, and the less heroic but often more dangerous distresses of taxation—at the North a magnanimity in victory unequaled in the traditions of men, and at the South a composure and dignity and absence of either bitterness or meanness which brought out of defeat far larger treasures than could have come with victory. But these were not effects without a cause. In them all was only the fruit, the normal fruit, of the political habits, ideals, traditions, whose early and unattractive disorders had chagrined many of the best of Americans, and had seemed so natural to foreigners who feared or distrusted a democracy. There had been forming, during forty or fifty years of a certain raw unloveliness, the peculiar and powerful self-reliance of a people whose political independence meant far more than a mere separate government.
In these years Van Buren was one of the chief men in American public life. He and his political associates had been profoundly affected by the Jeffersonian philosophy of government. They robustly held its tenets until the flame and vengeance of the slavery conflict drove them from political power. In our own day we have, in the able speeches with which Samuel J. Tilden fatigued respectful though often unsympathetic hearers at Democratic meetings, heard something of the same robust political philosophy, brought directly from intercourse with his famous neighbor and political master. Van Buren himself breathed it as the very atmosphere of American public life, during his early career which had just begun when Jefferson, his robes of office dropped and his faults of administration forgotten, seemed the serene, wise old man presiding over a land completely won to his ideals of democracy. Under this extraordinary influence and in this political light, there opened with the first years of the century the public life to be narrated in this volume.
CHAPTER II
EARLY YEARS.—PROFESSIONAL LIFE
At the close of the American Revolution, Abraham Van Buren was a farmer on the east bank of the Hudson River, New York. He was of Dutch descent, as was his wife, whose maiden name Hoes, corrupted from Goes, is said to have had distinction in Holland. But it would be mere fancy to find in the statesman particular traits brought from the dyked swamp lands whence some of his ancestors came. Those who farmed the rich fields of Columbia county were pretty thorough Americans; their characteristics were more immediately drawn from the soil they cultivated and from the necessary habits of their life than from the lands, Dutch or English, from which their forefathers had emigrated. Late in the eighteenth century they were no longer frontiersmen. For a century and more this eastern Hudson River country had been peacefully and prosperously cultivated. There was no lack of high spirit; but it was shown in lawsuits and political feuds rather than in skirmishes with red men. It was close to the old town of Albany with its official and not undignified life, and had comparatively easy access to New York by sloop or the post-road. It had been an early settlement of the colony. Within its borders were now the estates and mansions of large landed proprietors, who inherited or acquired from a more varied and affluent life some of the qualities,