Martin Van Buren

“ Jackson had sown the wind, and Van Buren was to reap the whirlwind; nor can there be much doubt that, so far as the civil service is concerned, he deserved the harvest that he garnered. Martin Van Buren is a man with a recently rehabilitated reputation: we find in him now a force and an ability unacknowledged by his contemporaries, and the temptation is to go to the extreme and to sink the politician in the statesman. It is true that in 1829 he did not directly meddle in minor politics to any considerable extent, and that as president he made but eighty removals. ”

“ 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 noble 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. ”

“ 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." [Pg 445]
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 ”

“ Jackson and Butler, Wright and Flagg and Dix, sturdy, upright, skillful, experienced men of affairs, were not held in true and lifelong friendship 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. ”

“ At the close of the American Revolution, Abraham Van Buren was a farmer on the east bank of the Hudson River, New York. He was of Dutch descent, as was his wife, whose maiden name Hoes, corrupted from Goes, is said to have had distinction in Holland. But it would be mere fancy to find in the statesman particular traits brought from the dyked swamp lands whence some of his ancestors came. Those who farmed the rich fields of Columbia county were pretty thorough Americans ”

“ In politics Van Buren enjoyed as much strong and constant friendship 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 friendship of other able, upright, and honorably ambitious men. It was an extraordinary measure in which Van Buren enjoyed friendship 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 ”

“ The profoundly thrilling and hidden delight which comes with the first taste of supreme power, even to the experienced and battered man of affairs, had been enjoyed by Van Buren only a few days, when the air grew heavy about him, and then perturbed, and then violently agitated, until in two months broke fiercely and beyond all restraint the most terrific of commercial convulsions in the United States. ”

“ 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 pronounced 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. ”

“ Van Buren made his acquaintance, and was treated with the distinguished and flattering attention which the wisest of public men often show to young men of promise. Van Buren's enemies were absurdly fond of the fancy that in this [Pg 18] slight intercourse he had acquired the skill and grace of his manner, and the easy principles and love of intrigue which they ascribe to him. ”

“ Perhaps the most striking proof of this strength was the canvass 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 460] intellectual perceptions did not permit the subtle self-deceit, the enthusiastic surrender to current sentiment, to which the striking figures that delight the masses of men are so apt to yield. ”

“ Finally, back of all, was the ability that soon made him the peer of Elisha Williams, the ablest lawyer in a county famous for its brilliant men, enabling him quickly to outgrow the professional limitations of Kinderhook, and to extend his practice far beyond the limits of the busy city of Hudson.
Martin Van Buren cannot be ranked as a great orator. He spoke too rapidly, and he was wanting in imagination, without which eloquence of the highest character is impossible. ”

“ During the same years there began an extension into federal politics of the "spoils system," which has been an evil second only to slavery, and from which we are only now recovering. To Van Buren more than to any man of his time must be awarded the credit of forming the creed of the Jacksonian Democracy. And in the shame of the abuse, which has so greatly tended to neutralize the soundest articles of political faith, Van Buren must participate with other and inferior men of his own time, and with the very greatest of the men who followed him. ”

“ Martin Van Buren HE latest work that we have from the hand of Browere, is the bust from the life mask of “the Little Magician,” as Martin Van Buren was called, made in 1833, the year before Browere’s death. Van Buren was then in his fifty-first year, and he lived until July 24, 1862. His life covered a longer era and his career witnessed greater changes in national life than those of any other man who has occupied the presidential chair. He was born and died in Kinderhook, Columbia county, New York ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For surely here, if anywhere, the essential fibre of the man would be discovered. I must also express my regret that this writer, to whom Americans owe very much, should have been content (although in this he has but joined some other historians of American politics) to accept mere campaign or partisan rumors which when directed against other men, have gone unnoticed, but against Van Buren have become the basis for emphatic disparagement and contumely. ”

“ Farming and tavern-keeping then were fairly interchangeable; and the gracious manner, the tact with men, which the younger Van Buren developed to a marked degree, it is easy to believe came rather from the social and varied life of an inn than from the harsher isolation of a farm. The statesman's boyish days were at any rate spent among poor neighbors. He was born at Kinderhook, an old village of New York, on the 5th of December, 1782. ”

“ The Whigs' distrust towards Van Buren was still bitter; the hot anger of his own party over the blow he had dealt in 1848 was still far from subsided; the gratitude of most Free Soil men had completely disappeared with his apparent acquiescence in the politics of Pierce and Buchanan. Save in a narrow circle of anti-slavery Democrats, Van Buren, in these last days of his, was judged at best with coldness, and most commonly with dislike or even contempt. Not much of any other temper has yet gone into political history ”

“ 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. ”

“ As no other vice-president has been, he was the chief adviser of the President, and as much the second officer of the government in power as in the dignity of his station. His only chance of promotion did not lie in the President's death. That the President should live until after the election of 1836 was safely over, Van Buren had every selfish motive as well as many generous motives to desire. His ambition was no-wise disagreeable to his chief. To see that ambition satisfied would gratify both patriotic and personal wishes of the tempestuous but not erratic old man in the White House. ”

“ At an early age, however, it is certain that Van Buren, like many other Americans of original force and with instinctive fondness for written pictures of human history and conduct, acquired an education which, though not that of a professional scholar, was entirely appropriate to the skillful man of affairs or the statesman to be set in conspicuous places. This work must have been largely done during the comparative leisure of his legal apprenticeship.
It was in 1796 that he entered the law office of Francis Sylvester at Kinderhook, where he remained until his twentieth year. ”

“ It is not to be forgotten, however, that a like atmosphere has surrounded even those political struggles in America, only three or four in number, which have been greater and deeper than that in which Jackson and Van Buren were the chief figures. From this temper of personal controversy and ambition the greatest political benefactors of history have not been free, so inevitable is the mingling with large affairs of the varied personal motives, conscious and unconscious, of those who transact them. ”

“ Van Buren gladly seized the opportunity. He would leave the field of political [Pg 224] management. Three thousand miles in distance and a month in time away from Washington or New York, there could, he thought, be little pretense of personal manœuvres on his part. He would thus plainly submit his candidacy to popular judgment upon his public career, without interference from himself. He would escape the many embarrassments of every politician upon whom demands are continually made,—demands whose rejection or allowance alike brings offense. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 leadership 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. ”

“ 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 without such 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 ”