Martin Van Buren Part 11

Charles Francis Adams, the son of John Quincy Adams, presided at the Buffalo convention; and in it Joshua R. Giddings, the famous abolitionist, and Salmon P. Chase were conspicuous. To the unspeakable horror of every Hunker there partic.i.p.ated in the deliberations a negro, the Rev. Mr. Ward. Butler reported the resolutions in words whose inspiration is still fresh and ringing. They were a.s.sembled, it was said, "to secure free soil for a free people;" the Democratic and Whig organizations had been dissolved, the one by stifling the voice of a great const.i.tuency, the other by abandoning its principles for mere availability. Remembering the example of their fathers in the first declaration of independence, they now, putting their trust in G.o.d, planted themselves on the national platform of freedom in opposition to the sectional platform of slavery; they proposed no interference with slavery in any State, but its prohibition in the Territories then free; for Congress, they said, had "no more power to make a slave than to make a king." There must be no more compromises with slavery. They accepted the issue forced upon them by the slave power; and to its demand for more slave States and more slave Territories, their calm and final answer was, "no more slave States and no more slave territory." At the close were the stirring and memorable words: "We inscribe on our banner, Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men; and under it we will fight on and fight ever, until a triumphant victory shall reward our exertions."

Joshua Leavitt of Ma.s.sachusetts, one of the "blackest" of abolitionists, reported to the convention the name of Martin Van Buren for president.

After the convention was over, even Gerrit Smith, the ultra-abolitionist candidate, declared that, of all the candidates whom there was the least reason to believe the convention would nominate, Van Buren was his preference. The nomination was enthusiastically made by acclamation, after Van Buren had on an informal ballot received 159 votes to 129 cast for John P. Hale. A brief letter from Van Buren was read, declaring that his nomination at Utica had been against his earnest wishes; that he had yielded because his obligation to the friends, who had now gone so far, required him to abide by their decision that his name was necessary to enable "the ever faithful Democracy of New York to sustain themselves in the extraordinary position into which they have been driven by the injustice of others;" but that the abandonment at Buffalo of his Utica nomination would be most satisfactory to his feelings and wishes. The exclusion of slavery from the Territories was an object, he said, "sacred in the sight of heaven, the accomplishment of which is due to the memories of the great and just men long since, we trust, made perfect in its courts." Charles Francis Adams was nominated for vice-president; and dazzled and incredulous eyes beheld on a presidential ticket with Martin Van Buren the son of one of his oldest and bitterest adversaries. That adversary had died a few months before, the best of his honors being his latest, those won in a querulous but valiant old age, in a fiery fight for freedom.

In September, John A. Dix, then a Democratic senator, accepted the Free-soil nomination for governor of New York. The Democratic party was aghast. The schismatics had suddenly gained great dignity and importance. Martin Van Buren, the venerable leader of the party, its most famous and distinguished member, this courtly, cautious statesman,--could it be he rus.h.i.+ng from that "honorable retirement," to whose safe retreat his party had committed him with so deep an affection, to consort with long-haired and wild-eyed abolitionists! He was the arch "apostate," leading fiends of disunion who would rather rule in h.e.l.l than serve in heaven. Where now was his boasted loyalty to the party? Rage struggled with loathing. All the ancient stories told of him by Whig enemies were revived, and believed by those who had long treated them with contempt. It is clear, however, that Van Buren's att.i.tude was in no wise inconsistent with his record. His party had never p.r.o.nounced for the extension of slavery; nor had he. The Buffalo convention was silent upon abolition in the District of Columbia. There was for the time in politics but one question, and that was born of the annexation of Texas,--Shall slavery go into free territory? As amid the clash of arms the laws are stilled, so in the great fight for human freedom, the independent treasury, the tariff, and internal improvements could no longer divide Americans.

The Whigs had in June nominated Taylor, one of the two heroes of the Mexican war. It is a curious fact that Taylor had been authoritatively sounded by the Free-soil leaders as to an acceptance of their nomination. Clay and Webster were now discarded by their party for this bluff soldier, a Louisiana slaveholder of unknown politics; and with entire propriety and perfect caution the Whigs made no platform. A declaration against the extension of slavery was voted down. Webster said at Marshfield, after indignation at Taylor's nomination had a little worn away, that for "the leader of the Free-_spoil_ party" to "become the leader of the Free-soil party would be a joke to shake his sides and mine." The anti-slavery Whigs hesitated for a time; but Seward of New York and Horace Greeley in the New York "Tribune" finally led most of them to Taylor rather than, as Seward said, engage in "guerrilla warfare" under Van Buren. Whigs must not, he added, leave the ranks because of the Whig affront to Clay and Webster. "Is it not," he finely, though for the occasion sophistically, said, "by popular injustice that greatness is burnished?" This launching of the modern Republican party was, strangely enough, to include in New York few besides Democrats. In November, 1847, the Liberty or Abolition party nominated John P. Hale for president; but upon Van Buren's nomination he was withdrawn.

Upon the popular vote in November, 1848, Van Buren received 291,263 votes, while there were 1,220,544 for Ca.s.s and 1,360,099 for Taylor. Van Buren had no electoral votes. In no State did he receive as many votes as Taylor; but in New York, Ma.s.sachusetts, and Vermont he had more than Ca.s.s. The vote of New York was an extraordinary tribute to his personal power; he had 120,510 votes to 114,318 for Ca.s.s; and it was clear that nearly all the former came from the Democratic party. In Ohio he had 35,354 votes, most of which were probably drawn from the Whig abolitionists. In Ma.s.sachusetts he had 38,058 votes, in no small part owing to the early splendor, the moral austerity and elevation of Charles Sumner's eloquence. "It is not," he said, "for the Van Buren of 1838 that we are to vote; but for the Van Buren of to-day,--the veteran statesman, sagacious, determined, experienced, who, at an age when most men are rejoicing to put off their armor, girds himself anew and enters the lists as champion of Freedom." Taylor had 163 electoral votes and Ca.s.s 127.

The political career of Van Buren was now ended. It is mere speculation whether he had thought his election a possible thing. That he should think so was very unlikely. Few men had a cooler judgment of political probabilities; few knew better how powerful was party discipline in the Democratic ranks, for no one had done more to create it; few could have appreciated more truly the Whig hatred of himself. Still the wakening rush of moral sentiment was so strong, the bitterness of Van Buren's Ohio and New York supporters had been so great at his defeat in 1844, that it seemed not utterly absurd that those two States might vote for him. If they did, that dream of every third party in America might come true,--the failure of either of the two great parties to obtain a majority in the electoral college, and the consequent choice of president in the House, where each of them might prefer the third party to its greater rival. Ambition to reenter the White House could indeed have had but the slightest influence with him when he accepted the Free-soil nomination. Nor was his acceptance an act of revenge, as has very commonly been said. The motives of a public man in such a case are subtle and recondite even to himself. No distinguished political leader with strong and publicly declared opinions, however exalted his temper, can help uniting in his mind the cause for which he has fought with his own political fortunes. If he be attacked, he is certain to honestly believe the attack made upon the cause as well as upon himself. When his party drives him from a leaders.h.i.+p already occupied by him, he may submit without a murmur; but he will surely harbor the belief that his party is playing false with its principles. In 1848 there was a great and new cause for which Van Buren stood, and upon which his party took the wrong side; but doubtless his zeal burned somewhat hotter, the edge of his temper was somewhat keener, for what he thought the indignities to himself and his immediate political friends. To say this is simply to p.r.o.nounce him human. His acceptance of the nomination was given largely out of loyalty to those friends whose advice was strong and urgent. It was the mistake which any old leader of a political party, who has enjoyed its honors, makes in the seeming effort--and every such political candidacy at least seems to be such an effort--to gratify his personal ambition at its expense. Van Buren and his friends should have made another take the nomination, to which his support, however vigorous, should have gone sorrowfully and reluctantly; and the form as well as the substance of his relations to the canva.s.s should have been without personal interest.

Had Van Buren died just after the election of 1848 his reputation to-day would be far higher. He had stood firmly, he had suffered politically, for a clear, practical, and philosophical method and limitation of government; he had adhered with strict loyalty to the party committed to this method, until there had arisen the cause of human freedom, which far transcended any question still open upon the method or limits of government. With this cause newly risen, a cause surely not to leave the political field except in victory, he was now closely united. He might therefore have safely trusted to the judgment of later days and of wiser and truer-sighted men, growing in number and influence every year. His offense could never be pardoned by his former a.s.sociates at the South and their allies at the North. No confession of error, though it were full of humiliation, no new and affectionate return to party allegiance, could make them forget what they sincerely deemed astounding treason and disastrous sacrilege. Loyal remembrance of his incomparable party services had irretrievably gone, to be brought back by no reasoning and by no persuasion. If he were to live, he should not have wavered from his last position. Its righteousness was to be plainer and plainer with the pa.s.sing years.

Van Buren did live, however, long after his honorable battle and defeat; and lived to dim its honor by the faltering of mistaken patriotism. In 1849, John Van Buren, during the efforts to unite the Democratic party in New York, declared it his wish to make it "the great anti-slavery party of the Union." Early in 1850 and when the compromise was threatened at Was.h.i.+ngton, he wrote to the Free-soil convention of Connecticut that there had never been a time when the opponents of slavery extension were more urgently called to act with energy and decision or to hold their representatives to a rigid responsibility, if they faltered or betrayed their trust. With little doubt his father approved these utterances. A year later, however, the ex-President, with nearly all Northern men, yielded to the soporific which Clay in his old age administered to the American people. In their support of the great compromise between slavery and freedom, Webster and Clay forfeited much of their fame, and justly. For though the cause of humanity gained a vast political advantage in the admission of California as a free State, the advantage, it was plain, could not have been long delayed had there been no compromise. But the rest of the new territory was thrown into a struggle among its settlers, although the power of Congress over the Territories was not yet denied; and a fugitive-slave law of singular atrocity was pa.s.sed. All the famous Northern Whigs were now true "doughfaces." Fillmore, president through Taylor's death, one of the most dignified and timid of their number, signed the compromise bills.

The compromise being pa.s.sed, Van Buren with almost the entire North submissively sought to believe slavery at last expelled from politics.

It would have been a wise heroism, it would have given Van Buren a clearer, a far higher place with posterity, if after 1848 he had even done no more than remain completely aloof from the timid politics of the time, if he had at least refused acquiescence in any compromise by which concessions were made to slavery. But he was an old man. He shared with his ancient and famous Whig rivals that intense love and almost adoration of the Union, upon which the arrogant leaders of the South so long and so successfully played. The compromise was accomplished. It would perhaps be the last concession to the furious advance of the cruel barbarism. The free settlers in the new Territories would, he hoped, by their number and hardihood, defeat the incoming slave-owners, and even under "squatter sovereignty" save their homes from slavery. If the Union should now stand without further disturbance, all might still come right without civil war. Economic laws, the inexorable and beneficent progress of civilization, would perhaps begin, slowly indeed but surely, to press to its death this remnant of ancient savagery. But if the Union were to be broken by a violation of the compromise, a vast and irremediable catastrophe and ruin would undo all the patriotic labors of sixty years, would dismiss to lasting unreality the dreams of three generations of great men who had loved their country. It seemed too appalling a responsibility.

Upon all this reasoning there is much unfair modern judgment. The small number of resolute abolitionists, who cared little for the Union in comparison with the one cause of human rights, and whose moral fervor found in the compromises of the Const.i.tution, so dear and sacred to all American statesmen, only a covenant with h.e.l.l, may for the moment be ignored. Among them there was not a public man occupying politically responsible or widely influential place. The vast body of Northern sentiment was in two great cla.s.ses. The one was led by men like Seward, and even Benton, who considered the South a great bully. They believed that to a firm front against the extension of slavery the South would, after many fire-eating words, surrender in peace. The other cla.s.s included most of the influential men of the day, some of them greater men, some lesser, and some little men. Webster, Clay, Ca.s.s, Buchanan, Marcy, Douglas, Fillmore, d.i.c.kinson, were now joined by Van Buren and by many Free-soil men of 1848 daunted at the seeming slowness with which the divine mills were grinding. They believed that the South, to a.s.sert the fancied "rights" of their monstrous wrong, would accept disunion and even more, that in this cause it would fiercely accept all the terrors of a civil war and its limitless devastation. The event proved the first men utterly in the wrong; and it was fortunate that their mistake was not visible until in 1861 the battle was irreversibly joined. The second and more numerous cla.s.s were right. There had to be yielding, unless such evils were to be let loose, unless Webster's "ideas, so full of all that is horrid and horrible," were to come true. The anxiety not to offend the South was perhaps most strikingly shown after the election of Lincoln. A distinguished statesman of the modern Republican party has recently pointed out[19] that in February, 1861, the Republican members of Congress, and among them Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, acquiesced in the organization of the new Territories of Colorado, Dakota, and Nevada, without any prohibition of slavery, thus ignoring the very principle and the only principle upon which their great battle had been fought and their great victory won.

Complete truth dwelt only with the small and hated abolitionist minority. Without honored and influential leaders in political life they alone saw that war with all these horrors was better, or even a successful secession was better, than further surrender of human rights, a surrender whose corruption and barbarism would cloud all the glories, and destroy all the beneficence of the Union. No historical judgment has been more unjust and partial than the implied condemnation of Van Buren for his acquiescence in Clay's compromise, while only gentle words have chided the great statesmen whose eloquence was more splendid and inspiring but whose devotion to the Union was never more supreme than Van Buren's,--statesmen who had made no sacrifice like his in 1844, who in their whitening years had taken no bold step like his in 1848, and who had in 1850 actively promoted the surrender to which Van Buren did no more than submit after it was accomplished.

In 1852 the overwhelming agreement to the compromise brought on a colorless presidential campaign, fought in a sort of fool's paradise.

Its character was well represented by Franklin Pierce, the second Democratic mediocrity raised to the first place in the party and the land, and by the absurd political figure of General Scott, fitly enough the last candidate of the decayed Whig party. Both parties heartily approved the compromise, but it mattered little which of the two candidates were chosen. The votes cast for John P. Hale, the Free-soil candidate, were as much more significant and honorable as they were fewer than those cast for Pierce or Scott. Van Buren, in a note to a meeting in New York, declared that time and circ.u.mstances had issued edicts against his attendance, but that he earnestly wished for Pierce's election. He attempted no argument in this, perhaps the shortest political letter he ever wrote. But John Van Buren, in a speech at Albany, gave some reasons which prevent much condemnation of his father's perfunctory acquiescence in the action of his party. The movement of 1848, he said, had been intended to prevent the extension of slavery. Since then, California had come in, a Free State, and not, as the South had desired, a slave State; and "the abolition of the slave market in the District of Columbia was another great point gained." The poverty of reasons was shown in the eager insistence that every member of Congress from New Hamps.h.i.+re had voted against slavery extension, and that the Democratic party now took its candidate from that State "without any pledges whatever."

After this election Van Buren spent two years in Europe. President Pierce tendered him the position of the American arbitrator upon the British-American claims commission established under the treaty of February 8, 1853, but he declined. During his absence the South secured the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the practical opening to slavery of the new Territories north of the line of 36 30'. If the settlers of Kansas, which lay wholly on the free side of that compromise line, desired slavery, they were to have it. But even this was not sufficient. The hardy settlers of this frontier, separated though they were by the slave State of Missouri from free soil and free influences, would, it now seemed, pretty certainly favor freedom. The ermine of the Supreme Court had, therefore, to be used to sanctify with the Dred Scott decision the last demand of slavery, inconsistent though it was with the claims of the South from the time when it secured the Missouri Compromise until Calhoun grimly advanced his monstrous propositions. Slavery was to be decreed a const.i.tutional right in all Territories, whose exercise in them Congress was without power to prohibit, and which could not be prevented even by the majority of their settlers until they were admitted as States.

Van Buren came back to America when there was still secret within the judicial breast the momentous decision that the American flag carried human slavery with it to conquered territory as a necessary incident of its stars and stripes, and that Congress could not, if it would, save the land to freedom. Van Buren voted for Buchanan; a vote essentially inconsistent with his Free-soil position, a vote deeply to be regretted.

He still thought that free settlers would defeat the intention of the Kansas-Nebraska act, and bring in, as they afterwards did, a free though bleeding Kansas. There was something crude and menacing in this new Republican party, and in its enormous and growing enthusiasm. It was hard to believe that its candidate had been seriously selected for chief magistrate of the United States. Fremont probably seemed to Van Buren a picturesque sentimentalist leading the way to civil war, which, if it were to come, ought, so it seemed to this former senator and minister and president, to be led in by serious and disciplined statesmen. The new party was repulsive to him as a body chiefly of Whigs; old and bitter adversaries whom he distrusted, with hosts of camp-followers smelling the coming spoils. All this a young man might endure, when he saw the clear fact that the Republican convention, ignoring for the time all former differences, had p.r.o.nounced not a word inconsistent with the Democratic platform of 1840, and had made only the one declaration essential to American freedom and right, that slavery should not go into the Territories. Van Buren was not, however, a young man, or one of the few old men in whom a fiery sense of morality, and an eager and buoyant resolution, are unchilled by thinner and slower blood, and indomitably overcome the conservative influences of age. A bold outcry from him, even now, would have placed him for posterity in one of the few niches set apart to the very greatest Americans. But since 1848 Van Buren had come to seventy-four years.

Invited to the Tammany Hall celebration of Independence Day, he wrote, on June 28, 1856, a letter in behalf of Buchanan. There was no diminution in explicit clearness; but hope was nearly gone; the peril of the Union obscured every other danger; the South was so threatening that patriotism seemed to him to require at the least a surrender to all that had pa.s.sed; and for the future our best reliance would be upon a fair vote in Kansas between freedom and slavery. He could not come to its meeting, he told Tammany Hall, because of his age. He had left one invitation unanswered; and if he were so to leave another, he might be suspected of a desire to conceal his sentiments. But this letter should be his last, as it was his first, appearance in the canva.s.s. He was glad of the Democratic reunion; for although not always perfectly right, in no other party had there been "such exclusive regard and devotion to the maintenance of human rights and the happiness and welfare of the ma.s.ses of the people." There was a touch of age in his fond recitals of the long services of that party since, in Jefferson's days, it had its origin with "the root-and-branch friends of the Republican system;" of its support of the war of 1812; of its destruction of the national bank; of its establishment of an independent treasury. But slavery, he admitted, was now the living issue. Upon that he had no regrets for his course. He had always preferred the method of dealing with that inst.i.tution practiced by the founders of the government. He lamented the recent departure from that method; no one was more sincerely opposed than himself to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. He had heard of it, and condemned it in a foreign land; he had there foreseen the disastrous reopening of the slavery agitation. But the measure was now accomplished; there was no more left than to decide what was the best now to do. The Kansas-Nebraska act had, he said, gradually become less obnoxious to him; though this impression, he admitted, might result from the unanimous acquiescence in it of the party in which he had been reared. Its operation, he trusted, would be beneficial; and he had now come to believe that the feelings and opinions of the free States would be more respected under its provisions than by specific congressional interference. He did not doubt the power of Congress to enable the people of a Territory to exclude slavery. Buchanan's pledge to use the presidential power to restore harmony among the sister States could be redeemed in but one way; and that was, to secure to the actual settlers of the Territory a "full, free, and practical enjoyment" of the rights of suffrage on the slavery question conferred by the act. He praised Buchanan, if not exuberantly, still sufficiently. He must, Van Buren thought, be solicitous for his reputation in the near "evening of his life." He believed that Buchanan would redeem his pledge, and should therefore cheerfully support him. If Buchanan were elected, there were "good grounds for hope" that the Union might be saved. Such was this saddening and despondent letter. It was a defense of a vote which it was rather sorry work that he should have needed to make. But the tramp of armies and the conflagration of American inst.i.tutions were heard and seen in the sky with terrifying vividness. The letter secured, however, no forgiveness from the angry South. The "Richmond Whig" said: "If there is a man within the limits of the Republic who is cordially abhorred and detested by intelligent and patriotic men of all parties at the South, that man is Martin Van Buren."

Many of the best Americans shared Van Buren's distrust of Fremont and of those who supported Fremont; they shared his love of peace and his fear of that bloodshed, North and South, which seemed the dismal El Dorado to which the "pathfinder's" feet were surely tending. So the majority of the Northern voters thought; for those north of Mason and Dixon's line who divided themselves between Buchanan and Fillmore, the candidate of the "Silver Gray" Whigs, considerably outnumbered the voters for Fremont.

In 1860 Van Buren voted for the union electoral ticket which represented in New York the combined opposition to Lincoln. Every motive which had influenced him in 1856 had now increased even more than his years. The Republican party was not only now come bringing, it seemed, the torch in full flame to light an awful conflagration; but in its second national convention there became obvious upon the tariff question the preponderance of the Whig elements, which made up the larger though not the more earnest or efficient body of its supporters.

After Van Buren's return from Europe in 1855, he lived in dignified and gracious repose. This complete and final escape from the rush about him had often seemed in his busy strenuous years full of delight. But doubtless now in the peaceful pleasures of Lindenwald and in the occasional glimpses of the more crowded social life of New York which was glad to honor him, there were the regrets and slowly dying impatience, the sense of isolation, which must at the best touch with some sadness the later and well-earned and even the best-crowned years.

At this time he began writing memoirs of his life and times, which were brought down to the years 1833-1834; but they were never revised by him and have not been published. Out of this work grew a sketch of the early growth of American parties, which was edited by his sons and printed in 1867. Its pages do not exhibit the firm and logical order which was so characteristic of Van Buren's political compositions. It was rather the reminiscence of the political philosophy which had completely governed him. With some repet.i.tions, but in an easy and interesting way, he recalled the far-reaching political differences between Jefferson and Hamilton. In these chapters of his old age are plain the profound and varied influences which had been exercised over him by the great founder of his party, and his unquenchable animosity towards "the money power"

from the days of the first secretary of the treasury to its victory of "buffoonery" in 1840. In one chapter, with words rather courtly but still not to be mistaken, he condemns Buchanan for a violation of the principles of Jefferson and Jackson in accepting the Dred Scott decision as a rule of political action; and this the more because its main conclusion was unnecessary to adjudge Dred Scott's rights in that suit, and because its announcement was part of a political scheme. Chief Justice Taney and Buchanan, Van Buren pointed out, though raised to power by the Democratic party, had joined it late in life, "with opinions formed and matured in an antagonist school." Both had come from the Federalist ranks, whose political heresy Van Buren believed to be hopelessly incurable.

At the opening of the civil war Van Buren's animosity to Buchanan's behavior became more and more marked. He strongly sympathized with the uprising of the North; and sustained the early measures of Lincoln's administration. But he was not to see the dreadful but lasting and benign solution of the problem of American slavery. His life ended when the fortunes of the nation were at their darkest; when McClellan's seven days' battle from the Chickahominy to the James was just over, and the North was waiting in terror lest his troops might not return in time to save the capital. For several months he suffered from an asthmatic attack, which finally became a malignant catarrh, causing him much anguish. In the latter days of his sickness his mind wandered; but when sensible and collected he still showed a keen interest in public affairs, expressed his confidence in President Lincoln and General McClellan, and declared his faith that the rebellion would end without lasting damage to the Union.

On July 24, 1862, he died, nearly eighty years old, in the quiet summer air at Lindenwald, the noise of battle far away from his green lawns and clumps of trees. In the ancient Dutch church at Kinderhook the simple funeral was performed; and a great rustic gathering paid the last and best honor of honest and respectful grief to their old friend and neighbor. For his fame had brought its chief honor to this village of his birth, the village to which in happy ending of his earthly career he returned, and where through years of well-ordered thrift, of a gentle and friendly hospitality, and of interesting and not embittered reminiscence, he had been permitted

"To husband out life's taper at the close, And keep the flame from wasting by repose."

CHAPTER XII

VAN BUREN'S CHARACTER AND PLACE IN HISTORY

In the engraved portrait of Van Buren in old age, prefixed to his "History of Parties," are plainly to be seen some of his traits,--the alert outlooking upon men, the bright, easy good-humor, the firm, self-reliant judgment. Inman's painting, now in the City Hall of New York,[20] gives the face in the prime of life,--the same shrewd, kindly expression, but more positively touched with that half cynical doubt of men which almost inevitably belongs to those in great places. The deep wrinkles of the old and retired ex-president were hardly yet incipient in the smooth, prosperous, almost complacent countenance of the governor. In the earlier picture the locks flared outwards from the face, as they did later; as yet, however, they were dark and a bit curling. His form was always slender and erect, but hardly reached the middle height, so that to his political enemies it was endless delight to call him "Little Van."

In the older picture one sees a scrupulous daintiness about the ruffled s.h.i.+rt and immaculate neckerchief; for Van Buren was fond of the elegance of life. The Whigs used to declare him an aristocrat, given to un-American, to positively British splendor. Very certainly he never affected contempt for the gracious and stately refinement suited to his long held place of public honor, that contempt which a silly underrating of American good sense has occasionally commended to our statesmen. At Lindenwald, among books and guests and rural cares, he led what in the best and truest sense was the life of a country gentleman, not set like an urban exotic among the farmers, but fond of his neighbors as they were fond of him, and unaffectedly sharing without loss of distinction or elegance their thrifty and homely cares. When he retired to this home he was able, without undignified or humiliating s.h.i.+fts, to live in ease and even affluence. For in 1841 his fortune of perhaps $200,000 was a generous one. His last days were not, like those of Jefferson and Monroe and Jackson, embittered by money anxieties, the penalty of the careless profusion the temptation to which, felt even by men wise in the affairs of others, is often greater than the certain danger and unwisdom of its indulgence. But no suggestion was breathed against his pecuniary integrity, public or private. Nor was there heard of him any story of wrong or oppression or ungenerous dealing.

Van Buren's extraordinary command of himself was apparent in his manners. They are finely described from intimate acquaintance by William Allen Butler, the son of Van Buren's long-time friend, in his charming and appreciative sketch printed just after Van Buren's death.

They had, Mr. Butler said, a neatness and polish which served every turn of domestic, social, and public intercourse. "As you saw him once, you saw him always--always punctilious, always polite, always cheerful, always self-possessed. It seemed to anyone who studied this phase of his character as if, in some early moment of destiny, his whole nature had been bathed in a cool, clear, and unruffled depth, from which it drew this life-long serenity and self-control." An accomplished English traveler, "the author of 'Cyril Thornton,'" who saw him while secretary of state, and before he had been abroad, said that he had more of "the manner of the world" than any other of the distinguished men at Was.h.i.+ngton; that in conversation he was "full of anecdote and vivacity."

Chevalier, one of our French critics, in his letters from America described him as setting up "for the American Talleyrand." John Quincy Adams, as has been said, sourly mistook all this, and even the especial courtesy Van Buren paid him after his political downfall, as mere proof of insincerity; and he more than once compared Van Buren to Aaron Burr, a comparison of which many Democrats were fond after 1848. In his better-natured moments, however, Adams saw in his adversary a resemblance to the conciliatory and philosophic Madison. For his "extreme caution in avoiding and averting personal collisions," he called him another Sosie of Moliere's "Amphitryon," "ami de tout le monde."

Van Buren's skill in dealing with men was indeed extraordinary. It doubtless came from this temper of amity, and from an inborn genius for society; but it had been wonderfully sharpened in the unrivaled school of New York's early politics. When he was minister at London, he wrote that he was making it his business to be cordial with prominent men on both sides; a branch of duty, he said, in which he was not at home, because he had all his life been "wholly on one side." But he was jocosely unjust to himself. He was, for the politics of his day, abundantly fair to his adversaries. Sometimes indeed he saw too much of what might be said on the other side. Had he seen less, he would sometimes have been briefer, less indulgent in formal caution. Nor did he fail to avoid the unnecessary misery caused to many public men, the obstacles needlessly raised in their way, by personal disputes, or by letting into negotiations matters of controversy irrelevant to the thing to be done. Patience in listening, a steady and singularly acute observance of the real end he sought, and a quick, keen reading of men, saved him this wearing unhappiness so widespread in public life. Once he thus criticised his friend Cambreleng: "There is more in small matters than he is always aware of, although he is a really sensible and useful man." In this maxim of lesser things Van Buren was carefully practiced.

During the Jackson-Adams campaign, the younger Hamilton was about sending to some important person an account of the general. Van Buren, knowing of this, wrote to Hamilton, and, after signing his letter, added: "P. S.--Does the old gentleman have prayers in his own house? If so, mention it modestly."

His self-command was not stilted or unduly precise or correct. He was very human. A candidate for governor of New York would to-day hardly write to another public man, however friendly to him, as Van Buren in August and September, 1828, wrote to Hamilton. "Bet on Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois," he said, "jointly if you can, or any two of them; don't forget to bet all you can." But this was the fas.h.i.+on of the day.[21] His life was entirely free from the charges of dissipation or of irregular habits, then so commonly, and often truly, made against great men. This very correctness was part of the offense he gave his rivals and their followers. It would hardly be accurate to describe him, even in younger years, as jovial with his friends; but he was perfectly companionable. Of a social and cheerful temper, he not only liked the decorous gaiety of receptions and public entertainment, but was delighted and delightful in closer and easier conversation and in the chat of familiar friends. His reminiscences of men are said to have been full of the charm which flows from a strong natural sense of humor, and a correct and vivid memory of human action and character.

There are many apocryphal stories of Van Buren's craft or cunning or selfishness in politics. It is a curious appreciation with which reputable historians have received such stories from irresponsible or anonymous sources; for they deserve as little credence as those told of Lincoln's frivolity or indecency. To them all may not only be pleaded the absence of any proof deserving respect, but they are refuted by positive proof, such as from earliest times has been deemed the best which private character can in its own behalf offer to history. In politics Van Buren enjoyed as much strong and constant friends.h.i.+p as he encountered strong and constant hatred. Nothing points more surely to the essential soundness of life and the generosity of a public man than the near and long-continued friends.h.i.+p of other able, upright, and honorably ambitious men. It was an extraordinary measure in which Van Buren enjoyed friends.h.i.+p of this quality. With all the light upon his character, Jackson was too shrewd to suffer long from imposition. His intimacy with Van Buren for twenty years and more was really affectionate; his admiration for the younger statesman was profound.

The explanation is both unnecessary and unworthy, which ascribes to hatred of Clay all Jackson's ardor in the canva.s.s of 1840 or his almost pathetic anxiety for Van Buren's nomination in 1844. Their peculiar and continuous a.s.sociation for six years at Was.h.i.+ngton had so powerfully established Van Buren in his love and respect, that neither distant separation nor disease nor the nearer intrigues and devices of rivals could abate them. Those who were especially known as Van Buren men, those who not only stood with him in the party but who went with him out of it, were men of great talents and of the highest character. Butler's career closely accompanied Van Buren's. Both were born at Kinderhook; they were together in Hudson, in Albany, in Was.h.i.+ngton; they were together as Bucktails, as Jacksonian Democrats, as Free-soil men; they were close to one another from Butler's boyhood until, more than a half-century later, they were parted by death. To this strong-headed and sound-hearted statesman, we are told by William Allen Butler, in a fine and wellnigh sufficient eulogy, that Van Buren was the object of an affection true and steadfast, faithful through good report and evil report, loyal to its own high sense of duty and affection, tender and generous. Benton, liberal and sane a slaveholder though he was, did not approve the Wilmot Proviso, or join the Free-soil revolt. But in retirement and old age, reviewing his "Thirty Years," during twenty of which he and Van Buren had, spite of many differences, remained on closely intimate terms, he showed a deep liking for the man. Silas Wright, Azariah C. Flagg, and John A. Dix, all strong and famous characters in the public life of New York, were among the others of those steadily faithful in loyal and unwavering regard for this political and personal chief. Nor were they deceived. Jackson and Butler, Wright and Flagg and Dix, st.u.r.dy, upright, skillful, experienced men of affairs, were not held in true and lifelong friends.h.i.+p and admiration by the insinuating manners, the clever management, the selfish and timid aims, which make the Machiavellian caricature of Van Buren so often drawn. No American in public life has shown firmer and longer devotion to his friends. His reputation for statesmans.h.i.+p must doubtless rest upon the indisputable facts of his career. But for his integrity of life, for his sincerity, for his fidelity to those obligations of political, party, and personal friends.h.i.+p, within which lies so much of the usefulness as well as of the singular charm of public life, his relations with these men make a proof not to be questioned, and surely not to be weakened by the malicious or anonymous stories of political warfare.

For the absurdly sinister touch which his political enemies gave to his character, it is difficult now to find any just reason. It may be that the cool and imperturbable appearance of good-nature, with which he received the savage and malevolent attacks so continually made upon him, to many seemed so impossible to be real as to be sheer hypocrisy;[22] and from the fancy of such hypocrisy it was easy for the imagination to infer all the arts and characteristics of deceit.

Doubtless the caution of Van Buren's political papers irritated impatient and angry opponents. They found them full of elaborate and subtle reservations, as they fancied, against future political contingencies; a charge, it ought to be remembered, which is continually made against the ripest, bravest, and greatest character in English politics of to-day or of the century.[23] Van Buren's reasoning was perfectly clear, and his style highly finished. But he had not the sort of genius which in a few phrases states and lights up a political problem. The complexity of human affairs, the danger of short and sweeping a.s.sertions, pressed upon him as he wrote; and the amplitude of his arguments, sometimes tending to prolixity, seemed timid and lawyer-like to those who disliked his conclusions.

Van Buren was not, however, an unpopular man, except as toward the last his politics were unpopular as politics out of sympathy with those of either of the great parties, and except also at the South, where he was soon suspected and afterwards hated as an anti-slavery man. He was on the whole a strong candidate at the polls. In his own State and at the Northeast his strength with the people grew more and more until his defeat by the slaveholders in 1844. Perhaps the most striking proof of this strength was the canva.s.s of 1848, when in New York he was able to take fully half of his party with him into irregular opposition, a feat with hardly a precedent in our political history. And there was complete reciprocity. Van Buren was profoundly democratic in his convictions. He thoroughly, honestly, and without demagogy believed in the common people and in their competence to deal wisely with political difficulties. Even when his faith was tried by what he deemed the mistakes of popular elections, he still trusted to what in a famous phrase of his he called "the sober second thought of the people."[24]

However widely the student of history may differ from the politics of Van Buren's a.s.sociates, the politics of Benton, Wright, Butler, and Dix, and in a later rank of his New York disciples, of Samuel J. Tilden and Sanford E. Church, it is impossible not to see that their political purpose was at the least as long and steady as their friends.h.i.+p for Van Buren. Love for the Union, a belief in a simple, economical, and even unheroic government, a jealousy of taking money from the people, and a scrupulous restriction upon the use of public moneys for any but public purposes, a strict limitation of federal powers, a dislike of slavery and an opposition to its extension,--these made up one of the great and fruitful political creeds of America, a creed which had ardent and hopeful apostles a half century ago, and which, save in the articles which touched slavery and are now happily obsolete, will doubtless find apostles no less ardent and hopeful a half century hence. Each of its a.s.sertions has been found in other creeds; but the entire creed with all its articles made the peculiar and powerful faith only of the Van Buren men. As history gradually sets reputations aright, the leader of these men must justly wear the laurel of a statesman who, apart from his personal and party relations and ambitions, has stood clearly for a powerful and largely triumphant cause.

No vague, no thoughtless rush of popular sentiment touched or shook this faith of Van Buren. Had there been indeed a readier emphasis about him, a heartier and quicker sympathy with the temper of the day, he would perhaps have aroused a popular enthusiasm, he might perhaps have been the hero which in fact he never was. But his intellectual perceptions did not permit the subtle self-deceit, the enthusiastic surrender to current sentiment, to which the striking figures that delight the ma.s.ses of men are so apt to yield. Van Buren was steadfast from the beginning to the end, save when the war threats of slavery alarmed his old age and the sober second thought of a really patient and resolute people seemed a long time coming. Two years before his death Jefferson wrote to Van Buren an elaborate sketch of his relations with Hamilton and of our first party division. Two years before his own death Van Buren was finis.h.i.+ng a history of the same political division written upon the theory and in the tone running through Jefferson's writings. It was composed by Van Buren in the very same temper in which he had respectfully read the weighty epistle from the great apostle of Democracy. Between the ending life at Monticello and that at Lindenwald, the political faith of the older man had been steadily followed by the younger.

The rise of the "spoils" system, and the late coming, but steadily increasing perception of its corruptions and dangers, have seriously and justly dimmed Van Buren's fame. But history should be not less indulgent to him than to other great Americans. The practical politics which he first knew had been saturated with the abuse. He did no more than adopt accustomed means of political warfare. Neither he nor other men of his time perceived the kind of evil which political proscription of men in unpolitical places must yield. They saw the undoubted rightfulness of shattering the ancient idea that in offices there was a property right.

They saw but too clearly the apparent help which the powerful love of holding office brings to any political cause, and which has been used by every great minister of state the world over. Van Buren had, however, no love of patronage in itself. The use of a party as a mere agency to distribute offices would have seemed to him contemptible. In neither of the great executive places which he held, as governor, secretary of state, or president, did he put into an extreme practice the proscriptive rules which were far more rigorously adopted about him. To his personal temper not less than to his conceptions of public duty the inevitable meanness and wrong of the system were distasteful.

Chief among the elements of Van Buren's public character ought to be ranked his moral courage and the explicitness of his political utterances,--the two qualities which, curiously enough, were most angrily denied him by his enemies. His well-known Shocco Springs letter of 1832 on the tariff was indeed lacking in these qualities; but he was then not chiefly interested. There was only a secondary responsibility upon him. But it is not too much to say that no American in responsible and public station, since the days when Was.h.i.+ngton returned from his walk among the miserable huts at Valley Forge to write to the Continental Congress, or to face the petty imbecilities of the jealous colonists, has shown so complete a political courage as that with which Van Buren faced the crisis of 1837, or in which he wrote his famous Texas letter. Nor did any American, stirred with ambition, conscious of great powers, as was this captain of politicians, and bringing all his political fortunes, as he must do, to the risks of universal suffrage, ever meet living issues dangerously dividing men ready to vote for him if he would but remain quiet, with clearer or more decided answers than did Van Buren in his Sherrod Williams letter of 1836 and in most of his chief public utterances from that year until 1844. The courtesies of his manner, his failure in trenchant brevity, and even the almost complete absence of invective or extravagance from his papers or speeches, have obscured these capital virtues of his character. He saw too many dangers; and he sometimes made it too clear that he saw them. But upon legitimate issues he was among the least timid and the most explicit of great Americans. No president of ours has in office been more courageous or more direct.

It is perhaps an interesting, it is at least a harmless speculation, to look for Van Buren's place of honor in the varied succession of men who have reached the first office, though not always the first place, in American public life. Every student will be powerfully, even when unconsciously, influenced in this judgment by the measure of strength or beneficence he accords to different political tendencies. With this warning the present writer will, however, venture upon an opinion.

Van Buren very clearly does not belong among the mediocrities or accidents of the White House,--among Monroe, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, and Pierce, not to meddle with the years since the civil war whose party disputes are still part of contemporary politics.

Van Buren reached the presidency by political abilities and public services of the first order, as the most distinguished active member of his party, and with a universal popular recognition for years before his promotion that he was among the three or four Americans from whom a president would be naturally chosen. Buchanan's experience in public life was perhaps as great as Van Buren's, and his political skill and distinction made his accession to the presidency by no means unworthy.

But he never led, he never stood for a cause; he never led men; he was never chief in his party; and in his great office he sank with timidity before the slaveholding aggressors, as they strove with vengeance to suppress freedom in Kansas, and before the menaces and open plunderings of disunion. Van Buren showed no such timidity in a place of equal difficulty.

Jackson stands in a rank by himself. He had a stronger and more vivid personality than Van Buren. But useful as he was to the creation of a powerful sentiment for union and of a hostility to the schemes of a paternal government, it is clear that in those qualities of steady wisdom, foresight, patience, which of right belong to the chief magistracy of a republic, he was far inferior to his less picturesque and less forceful successor. The first Adams, a man of very superior parts, competent and singularly patriotic, was deep in too many personal collisions within and without his party, and his presidency incurred too complete and lasting, and it must be added, too just a popular condemnation, to permit it high rank, though very certainly he belonged among neither the mediocrities nor the accidents of the White House.

If to the highest rank of American presidents be a.s.signed Was.h.i.+ngton, and if after him in it come Jefferson and perhaps Lincoln (though more than a quarter of a century must go to make the enduring measure of his fame), the second rank would seem to include Madison, the younger Adams, and Van Buren. Between the first and the last of these, the second of them, as has been said, saw much resemblance. But if Madison had a mellower mind, more obedient to the exigencies of the time and of a wider scholars.h.i.+p, Van Buren had a firmer and more direct courage, a steadier loyalty to his political creed, and far greater resolution and efficiency in the performance of executive duties. If one were to imitate Plutarch in behalf of John Quincy Adams and Van Buren, he would need largely to compare their rival political creeds. But leaving these, it will not be unjust to say that in virile and indomitable continuance of moral purpose after official power had let go its trammels, and when the hara.s.sments and feebleness of age were inexorable, and though the heavens were to fall, the younger Adams was the greater; that in executive success they were closely together in a high rank; but that in skill and power of political leaders.h.i.+p, in breadth of political purpose, in freedom from political vagaries, in personal generosity and political loyalty, Van Buren was easily the greater man.

Van Buren did not have the ma.s.sive and forcible eloquence of Webster, or the more captivating though fleeting speech of Clay, or the delightful warmth of the latter's leaders.h.i.+p, or the strength and glory which their very persons and careers gave to American nationality. But in the persistent and fruitful adherence to a political creed fitted to the time and to the genius of the American people, in that n.o.ble art which gathers and binds to one another and to a creed the elements of a political party, the art which disciplines and guides the party, when formed, to clear and definite purposes, without wavering and without weakness or demagogy, Van Buren was a greater master than either of those men, in many things more interesting as they were. In this exalted art of the politician, this consummate art of the statesman, Van Buren was close to the greatest of American party leaders, close to Jefferson and to Hamilton.

In his very last years the stir and rumbling of war left Van Buren in quiet recollection and anxious loyalty at Lindenwald. As his growing illness now and then spared him moments of ease, his mind must sometimes have turned back to the steps of his career, senator of his State, senator of the United States, governor, first cabinet minister, foreign envoy, vice-president, and president. There must again have sounded in his ears the hardly remembered jargon of Lewisites and Burrites, Clintonians and Livingstonians, Republicans and Federalists, Bucktails and Jacksonians and National Republicans, Democrats and Whigs, Loco-focos and Conservatives, Barnburners and Hunkers. There must rapidly though dimly have s.h.i.+fted before him the long series of his struggles,--struggles over the second war with England, over internal improvements, the Bank, nullification, the divorce of bank and state, the resistance to slavery extension. Through them all there had run, and this at least his memory clearly recalled, the one strong faith of his politics and statesmans.h.i.+p. In all his labors of office, in all his multifarious strifes, he never faltered in upholding the Union. But not less firmly would this true disciple of Jefferson restrain the activities of the federal government. Whatever wisdom, whatever integrity of purpose might belong to ministers and legislators at Was.h.i.+ngton,--though the strength of the United States might be theirs, and though they were panoplied in the august prestige rightly ascribed by American patriotism to that sovereign t.i.tle of our nation,--still Van Buren was resolute that they should not do for the people what the States or the people themselves could do as well. To his eyes there was clear and undimmed from the beginning to the close of his career, the idea of government as an instrument of useful public service, rather than an object of superst.i.tious veneration, the idea but two years after his death clothed with memorable words by a master in brief speech, the democratic idea of a "government of the people, by the people, for the people."