Martin Van Buren. Edward Morse Shepard
council with the nominating power vested in every one of its five members. This council acted under distinguished auspices, and it deserves to be long remembered. Governor Clinton presided, and his famous nephew, De Witt Clinton, was below him in the board. The latter represented the Clintonian Republicans.[2] Ambrose Spencer, a man of great parts and destined to a notable career, represented the Livingstons, of whom he was a family connection. Roseboom, the other Republican, was easily led by his two abler party associates. The fifth member did not count, for he was a Federalist. Two of the three really distinguished men of this council, De Witt Clinton and Ambrose Spencer, it is not unjust to say, first openly and responsibly established in New York the "spoils system" by removals, for political reasons, of officers not political. The term of office of the four senatorial members of this council had commenced while the illustrious Federalist John Jay was governor; but they rejected his nominations until he was tired of making them, and refused to call them together. When Clinton took the governor's seat, he promptly summoned the board, and in August, 1801, the work began. De Witt Clinton publicly formulated the doctrine, but it did not yet reach its extreme form. He said that the principal executive offices in the State ought to be filled by the friends of the administration, and the more unimportant offices ought to be proportionately distributed between the two parties. The council rapidly divided the chief appointments among the Clintons and Livingstons and their personal supporters. Officers were selected whom Jay had refused to appoint. Edward Livingston, the chancellor's brother, was given the mayoralty of New York, a very profitable as well as important station; Thomas Tillotson, a brother-in-law of Chancellor Livingston, was made secretary of state, in place of Daniel Hale, removed; John V. Henry, a distinguished Federalist lawyer, was removed from the comptrollership; the district attorney, the clerk and the recorder of New York were removed; William Coleman, the founder of the "Evening Post," and a strong adherent of Hamilton, was turned out of the clerkship of the Circuit Court. And so the work went on through minor offices. New commissions were required by the Constitution to be issued to the puisne judges of the county courts and to justices of the peace throughout the State once in three years. Instead of renewing the commissions and preserving continuity in the administration of justice, the council struck out the names of Federalists and inserted those of Republicans. The proceedings of this council of 1801 have profoundly affected the politics of New York to this day. Few political bodies in America have exercised as serious and lasting an influence upon the political habits of the nation. The tradition that Van Buren and the Albany Regency began political proscription is untrue. The system of removals was thus established several years before Van Buren held his first office. Its founders, De Witt Clinton and Ambrose Spencer, were long his political enemies. Governor Clinton, whose honorable record it was that during the eighteen years of his governorship he had never consented to a political removal, entered his protest—not a very hearty one, it is to be feared—in the journal of the council; but in vain. In the next year the two chief offenders were promoted—De Witt Clinton to be United States senator in the place of General Armstrong, a brother-in-law of Chancellor Livingston, and Ambrose Spencer to be attorney-general; and two years later Spencer became a judge of the Supreme Court.
After the removals there began a disintegration of the party hitherto successfully led by Burr, the Clintons, and the Livingstons. Colonel Swartwout, Burr's friend, was called by De Witt Clinton a liar, scoundrel and villain; although, after receiving two bullets from Clinton's pistol in a duel, he was assured by the latter, with the courtesy of our grandfathers, that there was no personal animosity. Burr's friends had of course to be removed. But in 1805, after the Clintons and the Livingstons had united in the election of Lewis as governor over Burr, they too quarreled—and naturally enough, for the offices would not go around. So, after the Clintonians on the meeting of the legislature early in 1806 had captured the council, they turned upon their recent allies. Maturin Livingston was removed from the New York recordership, and Tillotson from his place as secretary of state. The work was now done most thoroughly. Sheriffs, clerks, surrogates, county judges, justices of the peace, had to go. But at the corporation election in New York in the same year, the Livingstonians and Federalists, with a majority of the common council, in their fashion righted the wrong, and, with a vigor not excelled by their successors a half century later, removed at once all the subordinate municipal officers subject to their control who were Clintonians. In 1807 the Livingstonian Republicans, or, as they were now called from the governor, the Lewisites, with the Federalists and Burrites, secured control of the state council; and proceeded promptly to the work of removals, defending it as a legitimate return for the proscriptive course of their predecessors. In 1808 the Clintonians returned to the council, and, through its now familiar labors, to the offices from which the Lewisites were in their turn driven. In 1810 the Federalists controlled the Assembly which chose the council; and they enjoyed a "clean sweep" as keenly as had the contending Republican factions. But the election of this year, the political record tells us, taught a lesson which politicians have ever since refused to learn, perhaps because it has not always been taught. The removal of the Republicans from office "had the natural tendency to call out all their forces." The Clintonians in 1811, therefore, were enabled by the people to reverse the Federalist proscription of 1810. The Federalists, again in power in 1813, again followed the uniform usage then twelve years old. Political removals had become part of the unwritten law.
At this time Van Buren suffered the loss of his office as surrogate, but doubtless without any sense of private or public wrong. It was the customary fate of war. In 1812 he was nominated for state senator from the middle district, composed of Columbia, Dutchess, Orange, Ulster, Delaware, Chenango, Greene, and Sullivan counties, as the candidate of the Clintonian Republicans against Edward P. Livingston, the candidate of the Lewisites or Livingstonians and Burrites as well as the Federalists. Livingston was the sitting member, and a Republican of powerful family and political connections. Van Buren, not yet thirty, defeated him by a majority of less than two hundred out of twenty thousand votes. In November, 1812, he took his seat at Albany, and easily and within a few months reached a conspicuous and powerful place in state politics.
These details of the establishment of the "spoils system" in New York politics seem necessary to be told, that Van Buren's own participation in the wrong may be fairly judged. It is a common historical vice to judge the conduct of men of earlier times by standards which they did not know. Van Buren found thoroughly and universally established at Albany, when he entered its life, the rule that, upon a change in the executive, there should be a change in the offices, without reference to their political functions. He had in his own person experienced its operation both to his advantage and to his disadvantage. Federalists and Republicans were alike committed to the rule. The most distinguished and the most useful men in active public life, whatever their earlier opinion might have been, had acquiesced and joined in the practice. Nor was the practice changed or extended after Van Buren came into state politics. It continued as it had thus begun, until he became a national figure. Success in it required an ability and skill of which he was an easy master; nor does he seem to have shrunk from it. But he was neither more nor less reprehensible than the universal public sense about him. For it must be remembered that the "spoils system" was not then offensive to the more enlightened citizens of New York. The system was no excess of democracy or universal suffrage. It had arisen amidst a suffrage for governor and senators limited to those who held in freehold land worth at least £100, and for assemblymen limited to those who held in freehold land worth £20, or paid a yearly rent of forty shillings, and who were rated and actually paid taxes. It was practiced by men of aristocratic habits chosen by the well-to-do classes. It grew in the disputes of great family interests, and in the bitterness of popular elements met in a new country, still strange or even foreign to one another, and permitted by their release from the dangers of war and the fear of British oppression to indulge their mutual dislikes.
The frequent "rotation" in office which was soon to be pronounced a safeguard of republican institutions, and which Jackson in December, 1829, told Congress was a "leading principle in the Republicans' creed," was by no means an unnatural step towards an improvement of the civil service of the State. Reformers of our day lay great stress upon the fundamental rule of democratic government, that a public office is simply a trust for the people; and they justly find the chief argument against the abuses of patronage in the notorious use of office for the benefit of small portions of the people, to the detriment of the rest. In England, however, for centuries (and to some extent the idea survives there in our