In January, 1824, Van Buren proposed to solve these difficulties by a constitutional amendment. Congress was to have power to make roads and canals, but the money appropriated was to be apportioned among the States according to population. No road or canal was to be made within any State without the consent of its legislature; and the money was to be expended in each State under the direction of its legislature. This proposal seems to have fallen still-born and deservedly. It illustrated Van Buren's jealousy of interference with the rights of States. But the right of each State to be protected, he seemed to forget, involved its right not to be taxed for improvements in other States which it neither controlled nor promoted. Van Buren's speech in support of the proposal would to-day seem very heretical to his party. A dozen years later he himself would probably have admitted it to be so. He then believed in the abstract proposition that such funds of the nation as could be raised without oppression, and as were not necessary to the discharge of indispensable demands upon the government, should be expended upon internal improvements under restrictions guarding the sovereignty and equal interests of theStates. Henry Clay would not in theory have gone much further. But to this subject in its national aspect Van Buren had probably given but slight attention. The success of the Erie Canal, with him doubtless as with others, made adverse theories of government seem less impressive. But Van Buren and his school quickly became doubtful and soon hostile to the federal promotion of internal improvements. The opposition became popular on the broader reasoning that great expenditures for internal improvements within the States were not only, as the statesmen at first argued, violations of the letter of the Constitution, whose sanctity could, however, be saved by proper amendment, but were intrinsically dangerous, and an unwholesome extension of the federal power which ought not to take place whether within the Constitution or by amending it. Aided by Jackson's powerful vetoes, this sentiment gained a strength with the people which has come down to our day. We have river and harbor bills, but they are supposed to touch directly or indirectly our foreign commerce, which, under the Constitution and upon the essential theory of our confederation, is a subject proper to the care of the Union.
In the same session Van Buren spoke at length in favor of the bill to abolish imprisonment for debt, and drew with precision the distinction wisely established by modern jurisprudence, that the property only, and not the body of the debtor, should be at the mercy of his creditor, where the debt involved no fraud or breach of trust.
The session of 1823-1824 was seriously influenced by the coming presidential election. The protective tariff of 1824 was christened with the absurd name of the "American system," though it was American in no other or better sense than foreign war to protect fancied national rights is an American system, and though the system had come from the middle ages in the company of other restrictions upon the intercourse of nations. It was carried by the factitious help of this designation and the fine leadership of Clay. With Jackson and Benton, Van Buren voted for it, against men differing as widely from each other as his associate, the venerable Federalist Rufus King, differed from Hayne, the brilliant orator of South Carolina. Upon the tariff Van Buren then had views clearer, at least, than upon internal improvements. In 1824 he was unmistakably a protectionist. The moderation of his views and the pressure from his own State were afterwards set up as defenses for this early attitude of his. But he declared himself with sufficient plainness not only to believe in the constitutionality of a protective tariff, but that 1824 was a fit year in which to extend its protective features. He acted, too, with the amplest light upon the subject. The dislike of the Holy Alliance, the hated recollections of the Orders in Council and the Napoleonic decrees, the idea that, for self-defense in times of war, the country must be forced to produce many goods not already produced,—these considerations had great weight, as very wellappears in the speech for the bill delivered by Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, afterwards Van Buren's associate on the presidential ticket. "When the monarchs of Europe are assembled together, do you think," he asked, "that we are not a subject of their holy consultations?" But the support of the bill was upon broader considerations. The debates upon the tariff in the House of Representatives in February, March, and April, and in the Senate in April, 1824, were admirable presentations of the subject. Webster in the House and Hayne in the Senate put the free trade side. The former, still speaking his own sentiments, declared that "the best apology for laws of prohibition and laws of monopoly will be found in that state of society, not only unenlightened but sluggish, in which they are most generally established." But now, he said, "competition comes in place of monopoly, and intelligence and industry ask only for fair play and an open field." He repudiated the principle of protection. "On the contrary," said he, "I think freedom of trade to be the general principle, and restriction the exception."
Nor was Van Buren then left without the light which afterwards reached him on the constitutional question. Rufus King said that, if gentlemen wished to encourage the production of hemp and iron, they ought to bring in a bill to give bounties on those articles; for there was the same constitutional right to grant bounties as to levy restrictiveduties upon foreign products. Hayne made the really eloquent and masterly speech for which he ought to stand in the first rank of orators, and which summed up as well for free-traders now as then the most telling arguments against artificial restrictions. He skillfully closed with Washington's words: "Our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand, neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing." Hayne did not confine himself to the doctrines of Adam Smith, or the hardships which protection meant to a planting region like his own. For the chief interest of the South was in cotton; and the price of cotton was largely determined by the ability of foreigners to import it from America,—an ability in its turn dependent upon the willingness of America to take her pay, directly or indirectly, in foreign commodities. Hayne, however, went further. He clearly raised the question, whether the encouragement of manufactures could constitutionally be made a Federal object.
Sitting day after day under this long debate in the little senate chamber then in use, where men listened to speeches, if for no other reason, because they were easily heard, Van Buren could not, with his ability and readiness, have misunderstood the general principles involved. Early in the debate, upon a motion to strike out the duty on hemp, hebriefly but explicitly said that "he was in favor of increasing the duty on hemp, with a view of affording protection to its cultivation in this country." He voted against limiting the duty on wool to twenty-five per cent., but voted against a duty of twenty-five per cent. on India silks,—a revenue rather than a protective duty. He voted for duties on wheat and wheat flour and potatoes. He voted against striking out the duty on books, in spite of Hayne's grotesque but forcible argument that they were to be considered "a raw material, essential to the formation of the mind, the morals, and the character of the people." It is difficult to understand the significance of all Van Buren's votes on the items of the bill; but the record shows them to have been, on the whole, protectionist, with a preference for moderate rates, but a firm assertion of the wool interests of New York. Benton tells us that Van Buren was one of the main speakers for the bill; but the assertion is not borne out by the record. He delivered no general speech upon the subject, as did most of the senators, but seems to have spoken only upon some of the details as they were considered in committee of the whole. The best to be said in Van Buren's behalf is, that his judgment was not yet so ripe upon the matter as not to be still open to great change. He was in his third session, and still new to national politics, and there was before him the plain and strong argument that his State wanted protection. In 1835 Butler, speaking for him as a presidentialcandidate, said that his personal feelings had been "at all times adverse to the high tariff policy." But "high tariff" was then, as now, a merely relative term. His votes placed him in that year very near Henry Clay. That from 1824 he grew more and more averse to the necessary details and results of a protective policy is probably true. Nor ought it to be, even from the standpoint of free-traders, serious accusation that a public man varies his political utterances upon the tariff question, if the variation be progressive and steadily towards what they deem a greater liberality. To Van Buren, however, the tariff question never had a capital importance. Even thirty-two years later, while rehearsing from his retirement the achievements of his party in excuse of the support he reluctantly gave Buchanan, he did not name among its services its insistence upon merely revenue duties, although he had then for years been himself committed to that doctrine.
Van Buren's vote for the tariff of 1824 had no very direct relation to his political situation. His own successor was not to be chosen for nearly three years. Crawford, whom he supported for the presidency, was the only one of the four candidates opposed to the bill. Adams was consistently a protectionist; he believed in actively promoting the welfare of men, though chiefly if not exclusively American men, even when they resisted their own welfare. He, like his father, was perfectly ready to use the power of government where itseemingly promised to be effective, without caring much for economical theories or constitutional restrictions. Jackson himself was far enough away from the ranks of strict constructionists on the tariff. In April, 1824, in the midst of the debate, and while a presidential candidate, he wrote from the Senate what free-traders, who afterwards supported him, would have deemed the worst of heresies. Like most candidates, ancient and modern, he was "in favor of a judicious examination and revision of" the tariff. He would advocate a tariff so far as it enabled the country to provide itself with the means of defense in war. But he would go further. The tariff ought to "draw from agriculture the superabundant labor, and employ it in mechanism and manufactures;" it ought to "give a proper distribution to our labor, to take from agriculture in the United States 600,000 men, women, and children." It is time, he cried, and quite as extravagantly as Clay, that "we should become a little more Americanized." How slight a connection the tariff had with the election of 1824 is further seen in the fact that Jackson, who thus supported the bill, received the vote of several of the States which strongly opposed the tariff.
In March, 1824, Van Buren urged the Senate to act upon a constitutional amendment touching the election of president. As the amendment could not be adopted in time to affect the pending canvass, there was, he said, no room for partisan feeling. He insisted that if there were no majoritychoice by the electors, the choice should not rest with the house of representatives voting by States, but that the electors should be reconvened, and themselves choose between the highest two candidates. The debate soon became thoroughly partisan. Rufus King, with but thinly veiled reference to Crawford's nomination, denounced the practice by which a caucus at Washington deprived the constitutional electors of any free choice; members of Congress were attending to president-making rather than to their duties. He thought that the course of events had "led near observers to suspect a connection existing between a central power of this description at the seat of the general government and the legislatures of Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, and New York, and perhaps of other States." To this it was pointed out with much force that such a caucus had chosen Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe without scandal or injury; that members of Congress were distinguished and representative persons familiar with national affairs, who might with great advantage respectfully suggest a course of action to their fellow-citizens. Van Buren went keenly to the real point of the belated objection to the system; it lay in the particular action of the recent caucus. He did not think it worth while to consider "those nice distinctions which challenged respect for the proceedings of conventions of one description and denied it to others; or to detect those still more subtle refinements which regarded meetings of thesame character as sometimes proper, and at others destructive of the purity of elections and dangerous to the liberties of the people." After much talk about the will of the people, the Senate by a vote of 30 to 13 postponed the consideration of the amendments until after the election. Benton joined Van Buren in the minority, although they did not agree upon the form of amendment; but Jackson, perhaps because he was a candidate, did not vote.
It was highly probable that there would be embarrassment in choosing the next president. It was already nearly certain that neither candidate would have a majority of the electoral votes. The decision was then, as in our own time, supposed to rest with New York; and naturally therefore Van Buren's prestige was great, gained, as it had been, in that difficult and opulent political field. His attachment to Crawford was proof against the signs of the latter's decaying strength. Crawford was to him the Republican candidate regularly chosen, and one agreeable to his party by the vigorous democracy of his sentiments. His opposition to Jefferson's embargo, and his vote for a renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States, had been forgotten since his warm advocacy of the late war with England. His formal claims to the nomination were great. For he had been in the Senate as early as 1807, and its president upon the death of Vice-President Clinton in 1812; afterwards he had been minister to France, and was now secretaryof the treasury. In the caucus of 1816 he had nearly as many votes as Monroe; and those votes were cast for him, it was said, though without much probability, in spite of his peremptory refusal to compete with Monroe. Moreover, Crawford had a majesty and grace of personal appearance which, with undoubtedly good though not great abilities, had, apart from these details of his career, made him conspicuous in the Republican ranks; and in its chief service he was, after the retirement of Monroe, the senior, except Adams, whose candidacy was far more recent. Crawford's claim to the succession was therefore very justifiable; he was the most obvious, the most "regular," of the candidates.
It has been said that Van Buren was at first inclined to Adams. The latter's unequaled public experience and discipline of intellect doubtless seemed, to Van Buren's precise and orderly mind, eminent qualifications for the first office in the land. Adams at this time, by a coincidence not inexplicable, thought highly of Van Buren. He entered in his diary a remark of his own, in February, 1825, that Van Buren was "a man of great talents and of good principles; but he had suffered them to be too much warped by party spirit." This from an Adams may be taken as extreme praise. It is pretty certain that if Van Buren had reprehensibly shifted his position from Adams to Crawford, we should find a record of it in the vast treasure-house of damnations which Adams left.Nor is there good reason to suppose that Van Buren was influenced by the nomination which Crawford's friends in Georgia gave him in 1824 for the vice-presidency. This showed that New York had already surrendered her favorite "son to the nation;" he was now definitely to be counted a power in national politics, where he was known as the "Albany director." Crawford's enemies in Georgia, the Clarkites, ridiculed this nomination with the coarse and silly abuse which active politicians to this day are always ready to use in their cynical under-estimate of popular intelligence,—abuse which they are by and by pretty sure to be glad to forget. Van Buren was pictured as half man and half cat, half fox and half monkey, half snake and half mink. He was dubbed "Blue Whiskey Van" and "Little Van." The Clarkites, being only a minority in the Georgia Assembly, delighted to vote for him as their standing candidate for doorkeeper and the like humbler positions.
New York was greatly disturbed through 1824 over the presidency. Its politics were in the position described by Senator Cobb, one of Crawford's Georgia supporters. "Could we hit upon a few great principles," he wrote home from Washington in January, 1825, "and unite their support with that of Crawford, we should succeed beyond doubt." But the great principles were hard to find. The people and the greater politicians were therefore swayed by personal preferences, without strong reason for either choice; and the lesserpoliticians were simply watching to see how the tide ran. Adams was the most natural choice of the New York Republicans. The South had had the presidency for six terms. His early secession from the Federalists; his aid in solidifying the Republican sentiment at the North; his support of Jefferson in the patriotic embargo struggle; his long, eminent, and fruitful services; and his place of secretary of state, from which Madison and Monroe had in turn been promoted to the presidency,—all these commended him to Northern Republicans as a proper candidate.
De Witt Clinton admired and supported General Jackson. In 1819 the latter had at a dinner in Tammany Hall amazed and affronted the former's Bucktail enemies by giving as his toast, "De Witt Clinton, the enlightened statesman and governor of the great and patriotic State of New York." In January, 1824, Clinton was the victim of a political outrage which illustrated the harsh partisanship then ruling in New York politics, and may well have determined the choice of president. Clinton had retired from the governor's chair; but he still held the honorary and unpaid office of canal commissioner, to which he brought distinguished honor but which brought none to him, and whose importance he more than any other man had created. The Crawford men in the legislature feared a combination of the men of the new People's party with the Clintonians on the presidential question. Clinton seemed at the time an unpopular character.To embarrass the People's party, Clinton's enemies suddenly, and just before the rising of the legislature, offered a resolution removing him from the canal commissionership. The People's party, it was thought, by opposing the resolution, would incur popular dislike through their alliance with the few and unpopular Clintonians; while by supporting the resolution they would forfeit the support of the latter upon which they relied. In either case the Crawford men would apparently profit by the trick. The People's party men, including those favoring Adams for president, at once seized the wrong horn of the dilemma, and voted for Clinton's removal, which was thus carried by an almost unanimous vote. But the people themselves were underrated; the outrage promptly restored Clinton to popular favor. In spite of the resistance of the politicians, he was, in the fall of 1824, elected by a large majority to the governor's seat, to which, or to any great office, it had been supposed he could never return; and this, although at the same time and upon the same ticket one of those who had voted for his removal was chosen lieutenant-governor. Van Buren was no party to this removal, although his political friends at Albany were the first movers in the scheme. He himself was far-sighted enough to see the probable effect of so gross and indecent a use of political power. Nor was he so relentless a partisan as to remember in unfruitful vengeance Clinton's own prescriptive conduct, or to remove the latter from an honoraryseat which belonged to him above all other men. By this silly blunder Clinton was again raised to deserved power, which he held until his death.
De Witt Clinton
The popular outburst consequent upon Clinton's removal in January, 1824, made it very dangerous for the Bucktails to leave to the people in the fall the choice of presidential electors. The rise of the People's party for a time seriously threatened Van Buren's influence. Until 1824 the presidential electors of New York had been chosen by its legislature. The opponents of Crawford and Van Buren, fearing that the latter's superior political skill would more easily capture the legislature in November, 1824, raised at the legislative elections of 1823 a cry against the Albany Regency, and demanded that presidential electors should be chosen directly by the people. The Regency, popularly believed to have been founded by Van Buren, consisted of a few able followers of his, residing or in office at Albany. They were also called the "conspirators." Chief among them were William L. Marcy, the comptroller; Samuel A. Talcott, the attorney-general; Benjamin F. Butler, then district attorney of Albany county; Edwin Croswell, the state printer; Roger Skinner, the United States district judge; and Benjamin Knower, the state treasurer. Later there joined the Regency, Silas Wright, Azariah C. Flagg, Thomas W. Olcott, and Charles E. Dudley. Its members were active, skillful, shrewd politicians; and they were much more. They were men of strong political convictions, holding and observing a high standard for the public service, and of undoubted personal integrity. In 1830 John A. Dix gave as a chief reason for accepting office at Albany that he should there be "one of the Regency." His son, Dr. Morgan Dix, describes their aggressive honesty, their refusal "to tolerate in those whom they could control what their own fine sense of honor did not approve;" and he quotes a remark made to him by Thurlow Weed, their long and most formidable enemy, "that he had never known a body of men who possessed so much power and used it so well." In his Memoirs, Weed describes their "great ability, great industry, indomitable courage." Two at least of the original members, Marcy and Butler, afterwards justly rose to national distinction. Even to our own day, the Albany Regency has been a strong and generally a sagacious influence in its party. John A. Dix, Horatio Seymour, Dean Richmond, and Samuel J. Tilden long directed its policy; and from the chief seat in its councils the late secretary of the treasury, Daniel Manning, was chosen in 1885.
In November, 1823, the People's party elected only a minority of the legislature; but many of the Democrats were committed to the support of an electoral law, and the movement was clearly popular. A just, though possibly an insufficient objection to the law was its proposal of a great change in anticipation of a particular election whose candidates were already before the public. But therewas no resort to frank argument. Its indirect defeat was proposed by the Democratic managers, and accomplished with the coöperation of many supporters of Adams and Clay. A bill was reported in the Assembly, where the Regency was in a minority, giving the choice of the electors to the people directly, but cunningly requiring a majority instead of a plurality vote to elect. If there were no majority, then the choice was to be left to the legislature. The Adams and Clay men were unwilling to let a plurality elect, lest in the uncertain state of public feeling some other candidate might be at the head of the poll; and they were probably now quite as confident as the Bucktails, and with more reason, of their strength upon joint ballot in the legislature. Divided as the people of New York were between the four presidential candidates, it was well known that this device would really give them no choice. The consideration of the electoral law was postponed in the Senate upon a pretense of objection to the form of the bill, and with insincere protestations of a desire to pass it. The outcome of all this was that in the election of November, 1824, the Democrats were punished at the polls both for the wanton attack on Clinton and for their unprincipled treatment of the electoral bill. The Regency got no more than a small minority in the legislature; and De Witt Clinton, as has been said, was chosen governor by a great majority.
Crawford's supporters at Washington believedthat in a congressional caucus he would have a larger vote than any other candidate. His opponents, in the same belief, refused to join in a caucus, in spite of the cry that their refusal was a treason to old party usage. The Republicans at Albany, probably upon Van Buren's advice, had in April, 1823, declared in favor of a caucus, but without effect. Two thirds of Congress would not assent. At last, in February, 1824, a caucus was called, doubtless in the hope that many who had refused their assent would, finding the caucus inevitable, attend through force of party habit. But of the 261 members of Congress, only 66 attended; and they were chiefly from New York, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia. In the caucus 62 voted for Crawford for president and 57 for Albert Gallatin for vice-president. A cry was soon raised against the latter as a foreigner; so that in spite of his American residence of forty-five years, and his invaluable services to the country and to the Republican party through nearly all this period, he felt compelled to withdraw.
The failure of the caucus almost destroyed Crawford's chances, though Van Buren steadily kept up courage. A few days later he wrote a confidential letter complaining of the subserviency and ingratitude of the non-attendants, who had "partaken largely of the favor of the party;" but despondency, he said, was a weakness with which he was but little annoyed, and if New York should be firm and promptly explicit, the election would besubstantially settled. But New York was neither firm nor promptly explicit. Its electoral vote was in doubt until the meeting of the legislature in November. The Adams and Clay forces then united, securing 31 out of the 36 electors, although one of the 31 seems finally to have voted for Jackson. Five Crawford electors were chosen with the help of the Adams men, who wished to keep Clay at the foot of the poll of presidential electors, and thus prevent his eligibility as one of the highest three in the House of Representatives. This device of the Adams men may have deprived Clay of the presidency. Thus Van Buren's New York campaign met defeat even in the legislature, where his friends had incurred odium rather than surrender the choice of electors to the people, while his forces were being thoroughly beaten by the people at the polls. In the electoral college Crawford received only 41 votes; Adams had 84 and Jackson 99; while Clay with only 37 was fourth in the race, and could not therefore enter the contest in the House. Georgia cast 9 electoral votes for Van Buren as vice-president.
Van Buren did not figure in the choice of Adams in the House by the coalition of Adams and Clay forces. Nor does his name appear in the traditions of the manœuvering at Washington in the winter of 1824-25, except in a vague and improbable story that he wished, by dividing the New York delegation in the House on the first vote by States, to prevent a choice, and then to throw the votes ofthe Crawford members for Adams, and thus secure the glory and political profit of apparently electing him. He did not join in the cry that Adams's election over Jackson was a violation of the democratic principle. Nor was it a violation of that principle. Jackson had but a minority of the popular vote. Clay was in political principles and habits nearer to Adams than Jackson. It was clearly Clay's duty to take his strength to the candidate whose administration was most likely to be agreeable to those opinions of his own which had made him a candidate. The coalition was perfectly natural and legitimate; and it was wholesome in its consequences. It established the Whig party; it at least helped to establish the modern Democratic party. That the acceptance of office by Clay would injure him was probable enough. Coalitions have always been unpopular in America and England, when there has seemed to follow a division of offices. They offend the strong belief in party government which lies deep in the political conscience of the two countries.
In the congressional session of 1824-25 president-making in the House stood in the way of everything else of importance. Van Buren, with increasing experience, was taking a greater and greater part in congressional work. He joined far more frequently in the debates. Again he spoke for the abolition of imprisonment for debt, his colleague, Rufus King, differing from him on this as he now seemed to differ from him on most disputedquestions. King had not been reëlected senator, having declined to be a candidate, because, as he said, of his advancing years. But doubtless Van Buren was correct in telling John Quincy Adams, and the latter was correct in believing, as his diary records, that King could not have been re-chosen.
At this session Van Buren took definite stand against the schemes of internal improvement. On February 11, 1825, differing even from Benton, he voted against topographical surveys in anticipation of public works by the Federal government. On February 23 he voted against an appropriation of $150,000 to extend the Cumberland road, while Jackson and Benton both voted for it. So, also, the next day, when Jackson voted for federal subscriptions to help construct the Delaware and Chesapeake Canal and the Dismal Swamp Canal, Van Buren was against him. Two days before the session closed he voted against the bill for the occupation of Oregon, Benton and Jackson voting in the affirmative. Van Buren was one of the senatorial committee to receive the new president upon his inauguration. It was doubtless with the easy courtesy which was genuine with him that he welcomed John Quincy Adams to the political battle so disastrous to the latter.
When Congress met again, in December, 1825, Van Buren took a more important place than ever before in national politics. He now became a true parliamentary leader; for he, like Clay, had the really parliamentary career which has rarely beenseen in this country. Dealing with amorphous political elements, Van Buren created out of them a party to promote his policy, and seized upon the vigor and popular strength of Jackson to lead both party and policy to supreme power. While, before 1825, Van Buren had not represented in the Senate a party distinctly constituted, from 1825 to 1828 he definitely led the formation of the modern Democratic party. In this work he was clearly chief. From the floor of the Senate he addressed those of its members inclined to his creed, and the sympathetic elements throughout the country, and firmly guided and disciplined them after that fashion which in very modern days is best familiar to us in the parliamentary conflicts of Great Britain. Since Van Buren wielded this organizing power, there has been in America no equally authoritative and decisive leadership from the Senate; although he has since been surpassed there, not only as an orator, but in other kinds of senatorial work. Seward seemed to exercise a like leadership in the six years or more preceding Lincoln's election; but he was far more the creature of the stupendous movement of the time than he was its creator. So, in the two years before General Grant's renomination in 1872, Charles Sumner and Carl Schurz, speaking from the Senate, created a new party sentiment; but the sentiment died in a "midsummer madness" but for which our later political history might have been materially different. In the interesting and fruitful three years of Van Buren'ssenatorial opposition, he showed the same qualities of firmness, supple tact, and distinct political aims which had given him his power in New York; but all now upon a higher plane.
In December, 1825, Jackson was no longer in the Senate. His Tennessee friends had placed him there as in a fitting vestibule to the White House; but it seemed as hard then as it has been since, to go from the Senate over the apparently broad and easy mile to the west on Pennsylvania Avenue. So Jackson returned to the Hermitage, to await, in the favorite American character of Cincinnatus, the popular summons which he believed to be only delayed. Van Buren, now thoroughly acquainted with the general, saw in him the strongest titular leader of the opposition. It is pretty certain, however, that Van Buren's preference was recent. The "Albany Argus," a Van Buren paper, had but lately declared that "Jackson has not a single feeling in common with the Republican party, and makes the merit of desiring the total extinction of it;" while Jackson papers had ridiculed Crawford's
"Shallow knaves with forms to mock us,Straggling, one by one, to caucus."
It has been the tradition, carefully and doubtless sincerely begun by John Quincy Adams, and adopted by most writers dealing with this period, that Adams met his first Congress in a spirit which should have commanded universal support; and that it was a factious opposition, cunningly led byVan Buren, which thwarted his patriotic purposes. But this is an untrue account of the second great party division in the United States. The younger Adams succeeded to an administration which had represented no party, or rather which had represented a party now become so dominant as to practically include the whole country. As president he found himself able to promote opinions with a weighty authority which he had not enjoyed while secretary of state in an era of good feeling, and under a president who was firm, even if gentle. Nor was it likely that Adams, with his unrivaled experience, his resolute self-reliance, and his aggressively patriotic feeling, would fail to impress his own views upon the public service, lest he might disturb a supposititious unanimity of sentiment. His first message boldly sounded the notes of party division. The second war with England was well out of the public mind; and his old Federalist associations, his belief in a strong, active, beneficent federal government, his traditional dislike of what seemed to him extreme democratic tendencies and constitutional refinings away of necessary federal power,—all these made him promptly and ably take an attitude very different from that of his predecessors. The compliment was perfectly sincere which, in his inaugural address, he had paid the Republican and Federalist parties, saying of them that both had "contributed splendid talents, spotless integrity, ardent patriotism, and disinterested sacrifices to the formation and administration" of the government. But it was idle for him to suppose that the successors of these parties, although from both had come his own supporters, and although, as in his offer of the treasury to Crawford, he showed his desire, even in the chief offices, to ignore political differences, would remain united under him, if he espoused causes upon which they widely differed. After recapitulating the tenets of American political faith, and showing that most discordant elements of public opinion were now blended into harmony, he was again perfectly sincere in saying that only an effort of magnanimity needed to be made, that individuals should discard every remnant of rancor against each other. This advice he was himself unable to follow; and so were other men. In his inaugural he distinctly adopted as his own the policy of internal improvements by the federal government, although he knew how wide and determined had been the opposition to it. His own late chief, Monroe, had pronounced the policy unconstitutional. But he now told the people that the magnificence and splendor of the public works, the roads and aqueducts, of Rome, were among the imperishable splendors of the ancient republic. He asked to what single individual our first national road had proved an injury. Of the constitutional doubts which were raised, he said, with a touch of the contempt of a practical administrator: "Every speculative scruple will be solved by a practical blessing." To the self-consecrated guardians of the Constitution thiswas as corrupt as offers of largesses to plebeians at Rome. In his first message he recommended again the policy of internal improvements, and proposed the establishment of a national university. Although he admitted the Constitution to be "a charter of limited powers," he still intimated his opinion that its powers might "be effectually brought into action by laws promoting the improvement of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures, the cultivation and encouragement of the mechanic and of the elegant arts, the advancement of literature, and the progress of the sciences, ornamental and profound;" and that to refrain from exercising these powers for the benefit of the people themselves, would be to hide the talent in the earth, and a "treachery to the most sacred of trusts." Further, he now broached the novel project of the congress at Panama,—a project surely doubtful enough to permit conscientious opposition.
All this was widely different from the messages of content from President Monroe. There was in these new utterances a clear political diversion, marked not less by the brilliant and restless genius of Henry Clay, now the secretary of state, than by the President's consciousness of his own strong and disciplined ability. Here was a new policy formally presented by a new administration; and a formal and organized resistance was as sure to follow as effect to follow cause. Van Buren was soon at the head of this inevitable opposition. It is difficult, at least in the records of Congress, tofind any evidence justifying the long tradition that the opposition was factious or unworthy. It was doubtless a warfare, with its surprises, its skirmishes, and its pitched battles. Mistakes of the adversary were promptly used. Debates were not had simply to promote the formal business before the House, but rather to reach the listening voters. But all this belongs to parliamentary warfare. Nor is it inconsistent with most exalted aims and an admirable performance of public business in a free country. Gladstone, the greatest living master in the work of political reform, has described himself as an "old parliamentary hand." Nor in the motions, the resolutions, the debates, led by Van Buren during his three years of opposition, can one find any device which Palmerston or Derby or Gladstone in one forum, and Seward and even Adams himself in his last and best years in another, have not used with little punishment from disinterested and enduring criticism.
Immediately after Adams's inauguration Van Buren voted for Clay's confirmation as secretary of state, while Jackson and fourteen other senators, including Hayne, voted to reject him, upon the unfounded story of Clay's sale of the presidency to Adams for the office to which he was now nominated. Van Buren's language and demeanor towards the new administration were uniformly becoming. He charged political but not personal wrong-doing; he made no insinuation of base motives; and his opposition throughout was the more forcible for its very decorum.
The first great battle between the rapidly dividing forces was over the Panama mission, a creation of Clay's exuberant imagination. The president nominated to the Senate two envoys to an American congress called by the new South American republics of Columbia, Mexico, and Central America, and in which it was proposed that Peru and Chile also should participate. The congress was to be held at Panama, which, in the extravagant rhetoric of some of the Republicans of the South, would, if the world had to elect a capital, be pointed out for that august destiny, placed as it was "in the centre of the globe." Spain had not yet acknowledged the independence of her revolted colonies; and it was clear that the discussions of the congress must be largely concerned with a mutual protection of American nations which implied an attitude hostile to Spain. Adams, in his message nominating the envoys, declared that they were not to take part in deliberations of belligerent character, or to contract alliances or to engage in any project importing hostility to any other nation. But referring to the Monroe doctrine, Adams said that the mission looked to an agreement between the nations represented, that each would guard by its own means against the establishment of any future European colony within its borders; and it looked also to an effort on the part of the United States to promote religious liberty among those intolerant republics. The decisive inducement, he added, to join in the congress was to lay the foundation of future intercourse with those states "in the broadest principles of reciprocity and the most cordial feelings of fraternal friendship."
This was vague enough. But when the diplomatic papers were exhibited, it was plain that the southern republics proposed a congress looking to a close defensive alliance, a sort of confederacy or Amphictyonic council as Benton described it; and that it was highly improbable that the representatives from one country could responsibly participate in the congress without most serious danger of incurring obligations, or falling into precisely the embarrassments which the well settled policy of the United States had avoided. It was perfectly agreeable to Adams, resolute and aggressive American that he was, that his country should look indulgently upon the smaller American powers, should stand at their head, should counsel them in their difficulties with European nations, and jealously take their side in those difficulties. Clay's eager, enthusiastic mind delighted in the picture of a great leadership of America by the United States, an American system of nations, breathing the air of republicanism, asserting a young and haughty independence of monarchical Europe, and ready for opposition to its schemes. In all this there has been fascination to many American minds, which even in our own day we have seen influence American diplomacy. But it was a step into the entangling alliances against which American public opinion had from Washington's day been set.When Adams asked an appropriation for the expenses of the mission, he told the House of Representatives that he was hardly sanguine enough to promise "all or even any of the transcendent benefits to the human race which warmed the conceptions of its first proposer," but that it looked "to the melioration of the condition of man;" that it was congenial with the spirit which prompted our own declaration of independence, which dictated our first treaty with Prussia, and "which filled the hearts and fired the souls of the immortal founders of our revolution."
Such fanciful speculation the Republicans, led by Van Buren, opposed with strong and heated protests, in tone not unlike the Liberal protests of 1878 in England against Disraeli's Jingo policy. In the secret session of the Senate Van Buren proposed resolutions against the constitutionality of the mission, reciting that it was a departure from our wise and settled policy; that, for the conference and discussion contemplated, our envoys already accredited to the new republics were competent, without becoming involved as members of the congress. These resolutions, so the President at once wrote in his opulent and invaluable diary, "are the fruit of the ingenuity of Martin Van Buren and bear the impress of his character." The mission was, the opposition thus insisted, unconstitutional; a step enlarging the sphere of the federal government; a meddlesome and dangerous interference with foreign nations; and if it lay in thecourse of a strong and splendid policy, it was also part of a policy full of warlike possibilities almost sure to drag us into old-world quarrels. Clay's "American system," Hayne said in the senatorial debate, meant restriction and monopoly when applied to our domestic policy, and "entangling alliances" when applied to our foreign policy.
Van Buren's speech was very able. He did not touch upon the liberality of the Spanish Americans towards races other than the Caucasian, which peered out of Hayne's speech as one of the Southern objections. After using the wise and seemingly pertinent language of Washington against such foreign involvements, Van Buren skillfully referred to the very Prussian treaty which the President had cited in his message to the House. The elder Adams, the Senate was reminded, had departed from the rule commended by his great predecessor. He had told his first Congress that we were indeed to keep ourselves distinct and separate from the political system of Europe "if we can," but that we needed early and continual information of political projects in contemplation; that however we might consider ourselves, others would consider us a weight in the balance of power in Europe, which never could be forgotten or neglected; and that it was natural for us, studying to be neutral, to consult with other nations engaged in the same study. The younger Adams had been, Van Buren pointed out, appointed upon the Berlin mission to carry out these heretical suggestions of his father. TheRepublicans of that day had vigorously opposed the mission; and for their opposition were denounced as a faction, and lampooned and vilified "by all the presses supporting and supported by the government, and a host of malicious parasites generaled by its patronage." But, covered with Washington's mantle, the Republicans of '98 had sought to strangle at its birth this political hydra, this first attempt since the establishment of the government to subject our political affairs to the terms and conditions of political connection with a foreign nation. Probably anticipating the success of the administration senators by a majority of five, Van Buren ingeniously reminded the Senate that those early Republicans had failed with a majority of four against them. But it was to be remembered, he continued, that after a few more such Federalist victories the ruin of Federalism had been complete. Its doctrines had speedily received popular condemnation. The new administration under the presidency of that early minister to Prussia had returned to the practices of the Federalist party, to which Van Buren with courteous indirection let it be remembered that the president had originally belonged. Except a guaranty to Spain of its dominions beyond the Mississippi, which Jefferson had offered as part of the price of a cession of the territory between that river and the Mobile, the administrations of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe had strictly followed the admonition of Washington: "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." If we were asked to form a connection with European states, such as was proposed with the southern republics, Van Buren argued, no American would approve it; and there was no sound reason, there was nothing but fanciful sentiment, to induce us to distinguish between the states of Europe and those of South America. Grant that there was a Holy Alliance in monarchical Europe, was it not a hollow glory, inconsistent with a sober view of American interests, to create a holy alliance in republican America? It might indeed be easy to agree upon speculative opinions with our younger neighbors at the south; but we should be humiliated in their eyes, and difficulties would at once arise, when means of promoting those opinions were proposed, and we were then to say we could talk but not fight. The Monroe doctrine was not to be withdrawn; but we ought to be left free to act upon it without the burden of promises, express or implied. The proposed congress was a specious and disguised step towards an American confederacy, full of embarrassment, full of danger; and the first step should be firmly resisted. Such was the outline of Van Buren's argument; and its wisdom has commanded a general assent from that day.
Dickerson of New Jersey very well phrased sound American sentiment when he said in the debate that, next to a passion for war, he dreaded a passion for diplomacy. The majestic declamation of Webster, his pathetic picture of a South America once oppressed but now emancipated, his eloquent cry that if it were weak to feel that he was an American it was a weakness from which he claimed no exemption,—all this met a good deal of exuberant response through the country. But it failed, as in our history most such efforts have failed, to convince the practical judgment of Americans, a judgment never long dazzled or inspired by the picture of an America wielding enormous or dominant international power. The Panama congress met in the absence of the American representatives, who had been delayed. It made a treaty of friendship and perpetual confederation to which all other American powers might accede within a year. The congress was to meet annually in time of common war, and biennially in times of peace. But it never met again. The "centre of the world" was too far away from its very neighbors. Even South American republics could not be kept together by effusions of republican glory and international love.
In spite of its victory in Congress, Adams's administration had plainly opened with a serious mistake. The opposition was perfectly legitimate; and although in the debate it was spoken of as unorganized, it certainly came out of the debate a pretty definite party. Before the debate Adams had written in his diary, and truly, that it was the first subject upon which a great effort had been made "to combine the discordant elements of theCrawford and Jackson and Calhoun men into a united opposition against the administration." Although some of the Southern opposition was heated by a dislike of States in which negroes were to be administrators, the division was not at all upon a North and South line. With Van Buren voted Findlay of Pennsylvania, Chandler and Holmes of Maine, Woodbury of New Hampshire, Dickerson of New Jersey, Kane of Illinois, making seven Northern with twelve Southern senators. Against Van Buren were eight senators from slave States, Barton of Missouri, Bouligny and Johnston of Louisiana, Chambers of Alabama, Clayton and Van Dyke of Delaware, Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, and Smith of Maryland. It was an incipient but a true party division.
Throughout this session of 1824-25 Van Buren was very industrious in the Senate, and nearly, if not quite, its most conspicuous member, if account be not taken of Randolph's furious and blazing talents. Calhoun was only in the chair as vice-president; the great duel between him and Van Buren not yet begun. Clay was at the head of the cabinet, and Webster in the lower House. Jackson was in Tennessee, watching with angry confidence, and aiding, the rising tide with the political dexterity in which he was by no means a novice. Having only a minority with him, and with Benton frequently against him, Van Buren gradually drilled his party into opposition on internal improvements,—a most legitimate and important issue. In December, 1825, he threw down the gauntlet to the administration, or rather took up its gauntlet. He proposed a resolution "that Congress does not possess the power to make roads and canals within the respective States." At the same time he asked for a committee to prepare a constitutional amendment on the subject like his earlier proposal, saying with a touch of very polite partisanship that though the President's recent declaration, that the power clearly existed in the Constitution, might diminish, it did not obviate the necessity of an amendment. In March, April, and May, 1826, he opposed appropriations of $110,000 to continue the Cumberland road, and of $50,000 for surveys preparatory to roads and canals, and subscriptions to stock of the Louisville and Portland Canal Company and of the Dismal Swamp Canal Company. All these were distinctly administration measures.
Although the principles advanced by Van Buren in this part of his opposition have not since obtained complete and unanimous affirmance, they have at least commanded so large, honorable, and prolonged support, that his attitude can with little good sense be considered one of factious difference. Especially wise was he on the question of government subscriptions to private canal companies. Upon one of these bills he said, in May, 1826, that he did not believe that the government had the constitutional power to make canals or to grant money for them; but he added that, if he believedotherwise, the grant of money should, he thought, be made directly, and not by forming a partnership between the government and a private corporation. In 1824 he had voted for the road from Missouri to New Mexico; but this stood, as the Pacific railway later stood, upon a different principle, the former as a road entirely without state limits and a means of international commerce, and the latter a road chiefly through federal territories, and of obvious national importance in the war between the North and the South.
The proposed amendment of the Constitution to prevent the election of president by a vote of States in the House of Representatives, upon which Van Buren had spoken in 1824, had now acquired new interest. Van Buren seized Adams's election in the House as a good subject for political warfare; and it was clearly a legitimate topic for party discussion and division. Van Buren would have been far more exalted in his notions of political agitation than the greatest of political leaders, had he not sought to use the popular feeling, that the American will had been subverted by the decision of the House, to promote his plan of constitutional reform. He told the Senate in May, 1826, that he was satisfied that there was no one point on which the people of the United States were more perfectly united than upon the propriety of taking the choice of president from the House. But Congress was not ready for the change; however much in theory was to be said against the clumsy systemwhich nearly made Burr president in 1801,[3]and which produced in 1825 a choice which Adams himself declared that he would vacate if the Constitution provided a mode of doing it.
As chairman of the judiciary committee, Van Buren participated in a most laborious effort to enlarge the federal judiciary. Upon the question whether the judges of the Supreme Court should be relieved from circuit duty, he made an elaborate and very able speech upon the negative side. The opportunity arose for a disquisition on the danger of centralized government, and for a renewal of the criticisms he had made in the New York Constitutional Convention upon the common and absurd picture of judges as dwellers in an atmosphere above all human infirmity, and beyond the reach of popular impression. Van Buren said, what all sensible men know, that in spite of every effort, incompetent men will sometimes reach the judicial bench. If always sitting among associatesin banc, their incompetence would be shielded, he said, by their abler brethren. But if regularly compelled to perform their great duties alone and in the direct face of the people, and not in the isolation of Washington, there was another constraint, Van Buren said very democratically and with substantial truth. "There is a power in public opinion in this country," he declared, "and I thank God for it, for it is the most honest and best of all powers, which will not tolerate an incompetent or unworthy man to hold in his weak or wicked hands the lives and fortunes of his fellow citizens." He added an expression to which he would afterwards have given most narrow interpretation. The Supreme Court stood, he said, "as the umpire between the conflicting powers of the general and state governments." There was in the speech very plain though courteous intimation of that jealousy with which Van Buren's party examined the political utterances of the court from Jefferson's time until, years after Van Buren's retirement, the party found it convenient to receive from the court, with a sanctimonious air of veneration, the most odious and demoralizing of all its expressions of political opinion. In arguing for a close and democratic relation between the judges and the different parts of the country, and against their dignified and exalted seclusion at Washington which was so agreeable to many patriotic Americans, Van Buren said, in a passage which is fairly characteristic of his oratorical manner:—