Martin Van Buren. Edward Morse Shepard
splendid leader who, rather than Harrison, ought to have been victor over Van Buren in 1840, and over whom Van Buren rather than Polk ought to have been victor in 1844.
In a few years Van Buren outgrew the professional limitations of Kinderhook. In February, 1807, he had been admitted as a counsellor of the supreme court; and this promotion he most happily celebrated by marrying Hannah Hoes, a young lady of his own age, and also of Dutch descent, a kinswoman of his mother, and with whom he had been intimate from his childhood. In 1808, the council of appointment becoming Republican, he was made surrogate of Columbia county, succeeding his partner and half-brother Van Alen, a Federalist in politics, who was, however, returned to the place in 1815, when the Federalists regained the council. The office was a respectable one, concerned with the probate of wills, and the ordering of estates of deceased persons. Within a year after this appointment, Van Buren removed to the new and bustling little city of Hudson, directly on the river banks. Here he practiced law with rapidly increasing success for seven years. His pecuniary thrift now enabled him to purchase what was called "a very extensive and well-selected library." With this advantage he applied himself to "a systematic and extended course of reading," which left him a well, even an amply, educated man. His severity in study did not, however, exclude him from the social pleasures of which he was fond, and for which he was perfectly fitted. He learned men quite as fast as he learned books. A country surrogate, though then enjoying fees, since commuted to a salary, had only a meagre compensation. But the duties of Van Buren's office did not interfere with his activity in the private practice of the law. On the contrary, the office enabled him to make acquaintances, a process which, even without adventitious aid, he always found easy and delightful.
In 1813, having been elected a member of the Senate of the State, he became as such a member of the court for the correction of errors. This was the court of last resort, composed, until 1847, of the chancellor, the judges of the supreme court, the lieutenant-governor, and the thirty-two senators. The latter, though often laymen, were members of the court, partly through a curious imitation of the theoretical function of the British House of Lords, and partly under the idea, even now feebly surviving in some States, that some besides lawyers ought to sit upon the bench in law courts to contribute the common sense which it was fancied might be absent from their more learned associates. It was not found unsuitable for members of this, the highest court, to be active legal practitioners. While Van Buren held his place as a member he was, in February, 1815, made attorney-general, succeeding Abraham Van Vechten, one of the famous lawyers of the State. Van Buren was then but thirty-two years old, and the professional eminence accorded to the station was greater than now. Among near predecessors in it had been Aaron Burr, Ambrose Spencer and Thomas Addis Emmett; among his near successors were Thomas J. Oakley, Samuel A. Talcott, Greene C. Bronson and Samuel Beardsley—all names of the first distinction in the professional life of New York. The office was of course political, as it has always been, both in the United States and the mother country. But Van Buren's appointment, if it were made because he was an active and influential Republican in politics, would still not have been made unless his professional reputation had been high. The salary was $5.50 a day, with some costs—not an unsuitable salary in days when the chancellor was paid but $3000 a year. He held the office until July, 1819, when, upon the capture of the council of appointment by a coalition of Clintonian Republicans and Federalists, he was removed to give place to Oakley, the Federalist leader in the State Assembly.
In 1816 Van Buren, now rapidly reaching professional eminence, removed to Albany, the capital of New York. Though then a petty city of mean buildings and about 10,000 inhabitants, it had a far larger relative importance in the professional and social life of the State than has the later city of ten times the population, with its costly and enormous state-house, its beautiful public buildings, and its steep and numerous streets of fine residences. In 1820 he purposed removing to New York; but, for some reason altering his plans, continued to reside at Albany until appointed secretary of state in 1829. His professional career was there crowned with most important and lucrative work. Soon after moving to Albany, he took into partnership Butler, just admitted to the bar. Between the two men there were close and life-long relations. The younger of them, also a son of Columbia county, reached great professional distinction, became a politician of the highest type, and remained steadfast in his attachment to Van Buren's political fortunes, and to the robust and distinctly marked political doctrines and practices of the Albany Regency.
The law reports give illustrations of Van Buren's precision, his clear and forcible common-sense, and his aptitude for that learning of the law in which the great counsel of the time excelled. In 1813, soon after his service began as state senator, he delivered an opinion in a case of "escape;" and in very courteous words exhibited a bit of his dislike for Kent, then chief justice of the supreme court, whose judgment he helped to reverse, as well as his antipathy to imprisonment for debt, which he afterwards helped to abolish. It was a petty suit against the sureties upon the bond given by a debtor. Under a relaxation of the imprisonment for debt recently permitted, the debtor was, on giving the bond, released from jail, but upon the condition that he should keep within the "jail liberties," which in the country counties was a prescribed area around the jail. His bond was to be forfeit if he passed the "liberties." While the debtor was driving a cow to or from pasture, the latter contemptuously deviated "four, six, or ten feet" from the liberties. The driver, yielding to inevitable bucolic impulse and forgetting his bond, leaped over the imaginary line to bring back the cow. He was without the liberties but a moment, and afterwards duly kept within them. But the creditor was watchful, and for the technical "escape" sued the sureties. Although the debtor was within the limits when suit was brought, the lower court refused to pardon the debtor's technical and unintentional fault. At common law the creditor was entitled to satisfaction of the debtor's body; and the milder statute establishing jail liberties was, the court said, to be strictly construed against the debtor; it was not enough that the creditor had the debtor's body when he called for it. The supreme court, headed by Kent, affirmed this curiously harsh decision. In the court of errors, Van Buren joined Chancellor Lansing in reversing the rule upon an elaborate review of the law, which to this day is important authority, and which could not have been more carefully done had something greater seemed at stake than a bovine vagary and a few dollars. The young lawyer, wearing for a time the judicial robes, now sat in a review, by no means unpleasant, of the utterances of magistrates before whom he had until then stood in considerable awe; and seized the opportunity, doubtless with a keen perception of the drift of popular sentiment on matters of personal liberty, to enlarge the mild policy of the later law. When it was urged that, if the law were not technically administered, imprisoned debtors would of a Sunday wander beyond the "limits," securely able to return before Monday, when the creditor could sue—Van Buren, with a contemptuous fling at the supreme court, confessed in Johnsonian sentences his lenient temper towards these "stolen pleasures,"—his willingness that debtors should snatch the "few moments of liberty which, although soured by constant perturbation and alarm, are, notwithstanding, deemed fit subjects for judicial animadversion." His rhetoric was rather agreeably florid when he declared the law establishing "jail liberties" to be a concession for humane purposes made by the inflexible spirit which authorized imprisonment for debt. He strongly intimated his sympathy to be with "the exertions of men of intelligence, reflection, and philanthropy to mitigate its rigor; of men who viewed it as a practice fundamentally wrong, a practice which forces their fellow-creatures from society, from their friends, and their agonized families into the dreary walls of a prison; which compels them to leave all those fascinating endearments to become an inmate with vermin;" and all this, not for crime or frauds, "but for the misfortune of being poor, of being unable to satisfy the all-digesting stomach of some ravenous creditor." The practice was one "confounding virtue and vice, and destroying the distinction between guilt and innocence which should unceasingly be cherished in every well-regulated government." Democrats rejoiced over this passage when Van Buren was a candidate for the presidency. Richard M. Johnson, then his associate upon the Democratic ticket, had successfully led an agitation for the abolition of such imprisonment upon judgments rendered in the federal courts.
Van Buren's professional life terminated with his election as governor in 1828. In 1830, while secretary of state at Washington, he is said to have appeared before the federal supreme court in the great litigation between Astor and the Sailors' Snug Harbor, in which he had been counsel below; but no record is preserved of his argument