Martin Van Buren. Edward Morse Shepard
wealth, they have been none the less popular; but in England a lifetime of vast public service and the finest personal attainments have failed to overcome the distrust of a landless man as a sort of adventurer.
When Van Buren's career began, the men who were making money in trade or manufactures were generally too busy for the anxious and busy cares of public life; the tradesmen and manufacturers who had already made money were past the time of life when men can vigorously and skillfully turn to a new and strange calling. There was no leisure class except land-owners or retired men of business. Lawyers, far more than those of any other calling, became public men, and naturally enough. Their experience of life and their knowledge of men were large. The popular interest in their art of advocacy; their travels from county seat to county seat; their speeches to juries in towns where no other secular public speaking was to be heard; the varieties of human life which lawyers came to know—varieties far greater where the same men acted as attorneys and advocates than in England where they acted in only one of these fields—these and the like, combined with the equipment for the forms of political and governmental work which was naturally gained in legal practice and the systematic study of law, gave to distinguished lawyers in America their large place in its political life. For this place the liberality of their lives helped, besides, to fit them. They had ceased to be disqualified for it by their former close alliance, as in England, with the landed aristocracy; and they had not yet begun to suffer a disqualification, frequently unjust, for their close relations with corporate interests, between which and the public there often arises an antagonism of interests. De Tocqueville, after his visit in 1832, said that lawyers formed in America its highest political class and the most cultivated circle of society; that the American aristocracy was not composed of the rich, but that it occupied the judicial bench and the bar. And the descriptions of the liberal and acute though theoretical Frenchman are generally trustworthy, however often his striking generalizations are at fault. Such, then, was the intimacy of relations between the professions of law and politics when Van Buren shone in both. And when, in his early prime, he gave up the law, neither forensic habits nor those of the attorney were yet too strongly set to permit the easy and complete diversion of his powers to the more generous and exalted activity of public life.
It is simpler thus separately to treat Van Buren's life as a lawyer, because in a just view of the man it must be subordinate to his life as a politician. It is to be remembered, however, that in his earlier years his progress in politics closely attended in time, and in much more than time, his professional progress. When, at thirty, he sat as an appellate judge in the court of errors, he was already powerful in politics; when, at thirty-two, he was attorney-general, he was the leader of his party in the state senate; when, at forty-five, he had perhaps the most lucrative professional practice in New York, he was the leader of his party in the United States Senate. But it will be easier to follow his political career without interruption from his work as a lawyer, honorable and distinguished as it was, and much of his political ability as he owed to its fine discipline.
Van Buren's domestic life was broken up by the death of his wife at Albany, in February, 1819, leaving him four sons. To her memory Van Buren remained scrupulously loyal until his own death forty-three years afterwards. We may safely believe political enemies when, after saying of him many dastardly things, they admitted that he had been an affectionate husband. Nor were accusations ever made against the uprightness and purity of his private life.
CHAPTER III
STATE SENATOR.—ATTORNEY-GENERAL.—MEMBER OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION
The politics of New York State were never more bitter, never more personal, than when Van Buren entered the field in 1803. The Federalists were sheltered by the unique and noble prestige of Washington's name; and were conscious that in wealth, education, refinement, they far excelled the Republicans. They were contemptuously suspicious of the unlettered ignorance, the intense and exuberant vanity, of the masses of American men. It was by that contempt and suspicion that they invited the defeat which, protected though they were by the property qualifications required of voters in New York, they met in 1800 at the hands of a people in whom the instincts of democracy were strong and unsubmissive. This was in our history the one complete and final defeat of a great national party while in power. The Federalists themselves made it final—by their silly and unworthy anger at a political reverse; by their profoundly immoral efforts to thwart the popular will and make Burr president; by their fatal and ingrained disbelief in common men, who, they thought, foolishly and impiously refused to accept wisdom and guidance from the possessors of learning and great estates; and finally by their unpatriotic opposition to Jefferson and Madison in the assertion of American rights on the seas during the Napoleonic wars. All these drove the party, in spite of its large services in the past and its eminent capacity for service in the future, forever from the confidence of the American people. The Federalists maintained, it is true, a party organization in New York until after the second war with England; but their efforts were rather directed to the division and embarrassment of their adversaries than to victories of their own strength or upon their own policy. They carried the lower house of the legislature in 1809, 1812, and 1813. There were among them men of the first rank, who retained a strong hold on popular respect, among whom John Jay and Rufus King were deservedly shining figures. But never after 1799 did the Federalists elect in New York a governor, or control both legislative houses, or secure any solid power, except by coalition with one branch or another of the Republicans.
Van Buren's fondness for politics was soon developed. His father was firmly attached to the Jeffersonians or Republicans—a rather discredited minority among the Federalists of Columbia county and the estates of the Hudson River aristocracy. Inheriting his political preferences, Van Buren, with a great body of other young Americans, caught the half-doctrinaire enthusiasm which Jefferson then inspired, an enthusiasm which in Van Buren was to be so enduring a force, and to which sixty years later he was still as loyal as he had been in the hot disputes on the sanded floors of the village store or tavern. During these boyish years he wrote and spoke for his party; and before he was eighteen he was formally appointed a delegate to a Republican convention for Columbia and Rensselaer counties.
Van Buren returned from New York to Columbia county late in 1803, just twenty-one years old. At once he became active in politics. The Republican party, though not strong in his county, was dominant in the State; and the game of politics was played between its different factions, the Federalists aiding one or the other as they saw their advantage. The Republicans were Clintonians, Livingstonians, or Burrites. George Clinton, in whose career lay the great origin of party politics of New York, was the Republican leader. The son of an Irish immigrant, he had, without the aid of wealth or influential connections, made himself the most popular man in the State. He was the first governor after colonial days were over, and was repeatedly reëlected. It was his opposition which most seriously endangered New York's adoption of the Federal Constitution. But in spite of the wide enthusiasm which the completed Union promptly aroused, this opposition did not prevent his reëlection in 1789 and 1792. The majorities were small, however, it being even doubtful whether in the latter year the majority were fairly given him. In 1795 he declined to be a candidate, and Robert R. Livingston, the Republican in his place, was defeated. In 1801 Clinton was again elected. Later he was vice-president in Jefferson's second term and Madison's first term; and his aspiration to the presidency in 1808 was by no means unreasonable. He was a strong party leader and a sincerely patriotic man. The Livingston family interest in New York was very great. The chancellor, Robert R. Livingston, who nowadays is popularly associated with the ceremony of Washington's inauguration, had been secretary for foreign affairs under the Articles of Confederation, and had left the Federalists in 1790. After his sixty years had under the law disqualified him for judicial office, he became Jefferson's minister to France and negotiated with Bonaparte the Louisiana treaty. Brockholst Livingston was a judge of the Supreme Court of New York in 1801. In 1807 Jefferson promoted him to the federal Supreme Court. Edward Livingston, younger than his brother, the chancellor, by seventeen years, was long after to be one of the finest characters in our politics. Early in Washington's administration he had become a strong pro-French Republican, and had opposed Jay's treaty with Great