Martin Van Buren. Edward Morse Shepard
His last well-known argument was before the court of errors at Albany in Varick v. Jackson, a branch of the famous Medcef Eden litigation. This long and highly technical battle was lighted up by the fame and competitions of the counsel. It arose upon the question whether a will of Eden which gave a landed estate to his son Joseph, but if Joseph died without children, then to his surviving brother, Medcef Eden the younger, created for Joseph the old lawyers' delight of an "estate tail." If it were an "estate tail," then the law of 1782, which, in the general tendency of American legislation after the Revolution, was directed against the entailing of property, would have made the first brother, Joseph, the absolute owner, and have defeated the later claim of Medcef. Joseph had failed while in possession of the property. His creditors, accepting the opinion of Alexander Hamilton, then the head of the bar, insisted that he had been the absolute owner, that the provision for his brother Medcef's accession to the property was nugatory as an attempt to entail the estate; and upon this view the creditors sold the lands, which by the rapid growth of the city soon became of large value. Hamilton's opinion for years daunted the younger Medcef and his children from asserting the right which it was morally plain his father had intended for him. Aaron Burr, not less Hamilton's rival at the bar than in the politics of New York, gave a contrary opinion; but after killing Hamilton in 1804 and yielding up the vice-presidency in 1805, his brilliant professional gifts were exiled from New York. On his return in 1812 from years of conspiracy, adventure, and romance, he took up the discredited Medcef Eden claim; and in the judicial test of the question he, and not Hamilton, proved to have been correct. The struggle went on in a number of suits; and when in 1823 the question was to be finally settled in the court of last resort, Burr, fearing, as he himself intimated to the court, lest the profound suspicion under which he rested might obscure and break the force of his legal arguments, or conscious that his past twenty years had dimmed his faculties, called to his aid Van Buren, then United States senator and a chief of the profession. As Van Buren and Burr attended together before the court of errors, they doubtless recalled their meetings in Van Ness's office twenty years before, when Burr, still a splendid though clouded figure in American life, hoped, by Federalist votes added to the Republican secession which he led, to reach the governorship and recover his prestige; those days in which the unknown but promising young countryman had interested a vice-president and enjoyed the latter's skillful and not always insincere flattery. The firm and orderly procedure of Van Buren's life was now well contrasted with the discredited and profligate ability of the returned wanderer. Against this earlier but long deposed, and against this later and regnant chief in the Republican politics of New York, were ranged in these cases David B. Ogden, the famous lawyer of the Federalist ranks, Samuel A. Talcott, and Samuel Jones. In Van Buren's long, masterly, and successful argument there was again an edge to the zeal with which he attacked the opinion of Kent, the Federalist chancellor, who asked the court of errors to overrule its earlier decisions, and the chancellor's own decision as well, and defeat the intention of the elder Medcef Eden.
Van Buren's professional career was most enviable. It lasted twenty-five years. It ended before he was forty-six, when he was in the early ripeness of his powers, but not until a larger and more shining career seemed surely opened before him. He left the bar with a competence fairly earned, which his prudence and skill made grow into an ample fortune, without even malicious suggestion in the scurrility of politics that he had profited out of public offices. In money matters he was more thrifty and cautious than most Americans in public places. His enemies accused him of meanness and parsimony, but apparently without other reason than that he did not practice the careless and useless profusion and luxury which many of his countrymen in political life have thought necessary to indulge even when their own tastes were far simpler. In the course of professional employment he acquired an important estate near Oswego, whose value rapidly enhanced with the rapid growth of western New York and the development of the lake commerce from that port.
The chief interest now found in Van Buren's professional career lies in its relation to his political life. He was the only lawyer of conspicuous and practical and really great professional success who has reached the White House. In the long preparation for the bar, in the many hours of leisure at Kinderhook and Hudson and even Albany permitted by the methods of practice in vogue before there were railways or telegraphs, and when travel was costly and slow and postage a shilling or more, he gained the liberal education more difficult of access to the busier young attorney and counsel of these crowded days. Great lawyers were then fond of illustrations from polite literature; they loved to set off their speeches with quotations from the classics, and to give their style finish and ornament not practicable to the precise, prompt methods which their successors learn in the driving routine of modern American cities. Van Buren did not, however, become a great orator at the bar. His admirer, Butler, upon returning to partnership with him in 1820, wrote indeed to an intimate friend, Jesse Hoyt (destined afterwards to bring grief and scandal upon both the partners), that if he were Van Buren he "would let politics alone," and become, as Van Buren might, the "Erskine of the State." But though his success, had he continued in the profession, would doubtless have been of the very first order, his oratory would never have reached the warm and virile splendor of Erskine, or the weighty magnificence of Webster. Van Buren's work as a lawyer brought him, however, something besides wealth and the education and refinement of books, and something which neither Erskine nor Webster gained. The profession afforded him an admirable discipline in the conduct of affairs; and affairs, in the law as out of it, are largely decided by human nature and its varying peculiarities. The preparation of details; the keen and far-sighted arrangement of the best, because the most practicable, plan; the refusal to fire off ammunition for the popular applause to be roused by its noise and flame; the clear, steady bearing in mind of the end to be accomplished, rather than the prolonged enjoyment or systematic working out of intermediate processes beyond a utilitarian necessity—all these elements Van Buren mastered in a signal degree, and made invaluable in legal practice. To men more superbly equipped for tours de force, who ignored the uses of long, attentive, varied, painstaking work, there was nothing admirable in the methods which Van Buren brought into political life out of his experience in the law. He was, to undisciplined or envious opponents, a "little magician," a trickster. The same thing appears, in every department of human activity, in the anger which failure often flings at success.
The predominance of lawyers in our politics was very early established, and has been a characteristic distinction between politics in England and politics in America. Conspicuous as lawyers have been in the politics of the older country, they have rarely been figures of the first rank. They have served in all its modern ministries, and sometimes in other than professional stations; but, with the unimportant exception of Perceval, not as the chief. English opinion has not unjustly believed its greater landed proprietors to be animated with a strong and peculiar desire for English greatness and renown; nor has the belief been destroyed by their frequent opposition to the most beneficent popular movements. Among these proprietors and those allied with them, even when not strictly in their ranks, England has found her statesmen. To this day, the speech of a lawyer in the British House of Commons is fancied to show the narrowness of technical training, or is treated as a bid for promotion to some of the splendid seats open to the English bar. In America, the great landed proprietor very early lost the direction of public affairs. All the members of the "Virginian dynasty" were, it is true, large land-owners, and in the politics of New York there were several of them. But land-ownership was to Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe simply a means of support while they attended to public affairs; it was not one of their chief recommendations to the landed interest throughout the country. For a time in the early politics of New York the landed wealth of the Schuylers, Van Rensselaers, and Livingstons was of itself a source of strength; but in the spread of democratic sentiment it was found that to be a great landlord was entirely consistent with dullness, narrowness, and timid selfishness. Among the landlords there soon and inevitably decayed that sense of public obligation belonging to exalted position and leadership which sometimes brings courage, high public spirit, and even a sound and active political imagination, to those who preside over bodies of tenants. The laws were changed which facilitated family accumulations of land. Since these early years of the century a great land-owner has been in politics little more than any other rich man. Both have had advantages in that as in any other field of activity. Certain easy graces not uncommon to inherited wealth have often been popular—not, however, for the wealth, but for themselves. Where these graces have existed in America